Hades 2: Guide to Builds

[Jubal]

Hades 2: A Builds Guide

Introduction
Hades 2 is a roguelike: every "run" (20-50 mins gameplay) you go through up to four levels of increasing difficulty and different things that you can pick up. This is just a little space where I've written down some thoughts on how I approach the game in case they're useful to anyone.

Types of Challenge
This is a useful starting point to think about what you're doing with this kind of game: not every enemy is the same, and different rooms and bosses will give you subtly different types of challenge. A good build is one that can meet every type of challenge, though some aspects will be inevitably down to player skill.

The core challenge types in my view are:

• DPS (Damage Per Second): This is the thing that is most tied to your build, and least to your skill: if given a more or less static target, how fast can you reduce its health?
• Crowd Control: Can you damage enough opponents simultaneously to clear an area? Even if your build is very good at delivering fast damage to a single, static point, you might struggle if you've not got any good ways of hitting surrounding enemies.
• Positioning: Can you get to the right spot at the right time and keep moving in the right way to not get hit? This is most tied to your skill, but an important part of builds can be working out how you compensate for being imperfect at it (unless you're good enough to never get hit, but if you're that good you do not need this guide).

There's a few things that don't fit into this list, but this is most of them. What you need for these is also dependent on learning opponents' attack patterns: usually expect your first three fights with any new opponent to go badly, not because they're impossible but because they're new and you won't know where to stand to avoid things or how to time running away yet.

Tools
Hades II gives you a whole bunch of tools to try and meet these challenges. There are three "core" ways to deal damage, your Attack, Special, and Cast. You also have an effect tied to your Dash, and some sort of system for Regenerating magic. There's also the Hex, a powerful ability that charges up as you use magic, which you generally use to make "powered up" versions of the three core damage options.

All of these can be upgraded through the gods' Boons, which are the core advancement mechanic. Which gods you get on a particular run varies, what you'll get from them varies. What your Attack and Special look like varies depending on the Weapon: the things to think about here are speed and area. A slower, heavier attack or special that you'll use less often is going to be better for an effect that you need to apply less often: a faster attack is often good for stacking more damage.

The ideal is to be able to use this pretty wide toolkit effectively for different situations. Whilst you should play with all the boon options to see what you like, some are definitely more effective attached to particular systems. Another important question to always ask is what you need to think about: in general, you want your focus in a fight to be on where hits are coming in, and on your movement, so a good build should let you fight fluidly without having to suddenly think "oh I need to pick up X/do Y in strict ordered combination".

For DPS, I personally tend to like Hephaestus for regular, heavy hits plus something that will give me a good regular damage output, Hestia is my favourite because her stacking damage effect is great but Aphrodite, Demeter, Ares, or Apollo will also do fine. Zeus is also good instead of Hephaestus for a slower-heavier part of the arsenal. Upgrading level is more important on Hephaestus than other because every level cuts a second off the recharge time and getting it down to two to four seconds by endgame makes his blasts very powerful.

In general, crowd control is helped a lot by things like freezing or hitching enemies, the benefits from Demeter and Hera, or by giving yourself a lot of area-effect with a deity like Apollo. Your cast is always useful for tying enemies up and slowing them down - cast early, cast often. Poseidon also has quite a few crowd control benefits, though I personally find that his most valuable stuff is in the additional bonuses section.

Positioning is mostly helped by staying alive when you mess up from a build perspective. Speed isn't always key: anything that gives you Dodge chance (Hestia, Hermes) should be seized with open arms. Hephaestus' 20ish armour every room boon is also really good, and anything that gives you Death Defiance effects is hugely your friend.

In Practice
I'll start by assuming we're using either Descura, the staff, or Lim and Oros, the blades. These weapons both have a quickish main attack and a slower special.

Keepsakes are also important: good early game ones to get are those from Charon (gets you money), Odysseus (damages one boss for you and gives you damage reduction against bosses), Schelemachus (gives you a Death Defiance), Arachne (gives you armour), and Selene (bonus upgrades for your Hex). My general strategy once I'd unlocked the keepsake-swapping mechanism was Charon, Arachne, Odysseus, Skelly in the underworld runs, swapping out Arachne for Selene in the overworld runs.

If you're past the main plot (Spoiler)

If you're past the first roll-credits, you should look for Charon's infernal contracts to meet Zagreus, and look for Hades in Tartarus: both will give you excellent boons that can also be core early-game options: I usually use Hades' boon as my starter at this point.

Attack: This is going to be my DPS core, I'd like to have Hestia on it ideally to stack scorch, but Aphrodite is probably my second choice, Demeter my third, and Apollo and Ares are pretty good too.

Special: This is my heavy hit: Hephaestus if I can get it, Demeter will give me crowd control if I don't have it otherwise, Zeus is OK for his extra damage bursts, Ares will do at a pinch.

Cast: Most casts are pretty even, you just want to load damage in there as best you can and several deities will give you extra damage on an existing cast (Demeter, Apollo, Ares all have cast boosting boons that can be applied whoever the main cast boon was from). I tend to avoid Hera and Hephaestus' casts, but any other deity is fine. I'd often pick some deity I didn't use for Attack or Special, to increase the range of effects I can slap onto enemies.

Rush: Hera is the gold-standard here because Hitch is amazingly good for crowd control: once you've got it and got it levelled you can sort of just run through a group of enemies and watch them fall over. Hephaestus gives a bit of extra heavy DPS if used here, Demeter slows enemies down so is a good second for crowd control.

Regeneration: I like Apollo here because I'm using cast a lot and that means I'm regenerating a lot without having to think about it. Aphrodite is also great - again, the requirement is just "be near enemies" which I was already planning on so I can hit them. Ares and Zeus are mid tier options here, they're good but you need to actively think about them. I think Demeter and Hera's are weak options, as is Hephaestus, because they drain resources or require you to stand/take hits.

Hex: Hexes are much more important for DPS than for crowd control: they can help in all fights but they're a boss fight weapon most of all. A basic hex usually isn't that great and this can lead some people to think they're not that important: an upgraded hex can however get wildly powerful, especially when some of them get added Godsent powers. I always try and have a heavily or totally upgraded Hex in overworld runs, I care about them a bit less for the underworld.

I personally like big damage hexes, and those are again especially vital in overworld runs where the end challenge is really a DPS challenge. Total Eclipse and Lunar Ray are great when upgraded. I'd also put Night Bloom, which raises a dead enemy to fight for you, as high tier when upgraded properly: there's a couple of fights you can't use it in or where it does less good, though. Moon Water is very solid for giving you tons of extra healing, Wolf Howl gives some mobility but unless Godsent its damage is a bit weak, and the time slowing Hex is fine but not much to write home about. The morphing hex is probably the worst, it doesn't work on bosses and you don't need hexes much for crowd control.

The other stuff: Anything with dodge. Early in the run, bonuses to money and finds are fantastic, so Poseidon and Hermes in particular (Sea Star is very powerful especially if found early). Late in the run there may be Infusion boons, check these carefully as if you fulfil the requirements they can be really good (Hera has some great effects here). Zeus' chain lightning is a good power-up to a regular fast attack too. In general I don't go for speed bonuses very much except for on my main attack/whatever I'm doing fast attacks with: there's cases where they're useful and some builds require regularly hitting heavy charged stuff, but unless I know that's my plan, I'd prefer to have something else.

Dealing with RNG
The RNG (that is, Random Number Generation) is not always going to give you the perfect set of tools: the good news is that you have enough different tools that in just about any run you can afford one or two duds and things that don't work.

Because of this, thinking on the scale of a whole run matters. It's totally okay to not get the first option you find for any given "slot" in the core boons. You usually really need one solid DPS option for the first boss fight of a run. By the end of the second area you should probably have the build more or less mapped and then it's about pumping it up and gilding it where possible in the later stages.

It's also important to think what you're using a part of the system for. Even if you get what looks like a good attack benefit for example, think - are you spamming the attack to make use of it? Or is your Attack a system for delivering freeze effects or occasional blasts? If the latter, then a percent change in its damage might not be as helpful as a smaller benefit to whatever is doing the damage. Most of the effects in this game are stacking percentages, and it's often better to stack them all in one place for the damage system and then use your other tools for other things.


~Practical Examples & Enemies/Challenge Types lists To Be Written~