Soulstone Survivors – Scent of Blood Explanatory Guide

The combination of Scent of Blood with Shockwave Totem is game breakingly busted. The only thing that will kill you is lagging into enemy AoE.

How to Use Scent of Blood Combination

All credit goes to Poknok!

Bloody Totem

Scent of Blood gives ‘extra cast frequency’ which basically cuts the cooldown time of your other abilities. You get a flat bonus, plus an extra bonus for every stack of Bleed or Hemorrhage on nearby opponents.

Shockwave Totem applies Hemorrage stacks in an AoE.

Totem seems to double-dip on Scent of Blood. The extra cast frequency lets Totem cast Hemorrhage more often, AND lets you cast Totem more often. You’ll notice 0.9s is not the normal Cooldown for this ability. Scent of Blood and Totem are the core two active abilities of the combo.

In addition to the two core abilities, Flurry is good especially early on for generating Bleed stacks. Later in the game your other skills will generate enough Bleed and Hemo without it so if you want another skill that’s fine.

I went with the default Whirlwind, Body Slam, Golems because I like them, Totem, Stomp, and Scent of Blood.

Use Power to Get More Power

You really want Brutal Strikes, and any other power that gives you a percent chance to apply stacks of bleed. Earlier in the run it’s easier to use another ability that applies bleeds. At some point it stops mattering.

Because your attack speeds will be through the roof, and the Totems do seem to apply debuffs, the powers that give a chance at Doom and Poison and whatever else generate stacks of those pretty fast.

Anything that increases the duration or cast frequency of Scent of Blood is also a priority. At a certain point you can keep a huge speed bonus active pretty much constantly.

Otherwise, grabbing whatever the best DPS upgrade you have available seems best. Once you’re comfortable with how fast things on the screen are melting, grab defense.

Only Lag Will Kill You

Here I am at lvl 213, with some freshly respawned Golems and a forest of Totems. Having a high multi-cast chance seems to get around the Totem spawn limit.

After a while this combo seemed to break the game. The attack speed of the totems goes through the roof. Even your basic attack, the one you start the game with, will be going off 4 or 5 times per second.

At some point, you’re gonna start to feel the lag. My machine isn’t great, but it’s no slouch, and I had to turn the graphics way down and make the ability effects totally transparent just so I could keep playing. I finally died by lagging into a couple of boss AoEs.

At some point I wanted to turn the effects volume down because it was deafening and found that I’d racked up so many abilities and powers that I couldn’t click the “Audio” option in the menu any more. It thought I was mousing over ‘Leviathan’.

Also, if you look at the Character Attributes, the one you really want to look at is ‘Cast frequency modifier’.

Conclusion

900% cast frequency is degenerate and broken. No idea if the devs will nerf this, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Probably better to try it now if you want to try it at all.