u/terrynmuse

Firstly, I've been doing Lost Void runs on a daily basis for the last several months just to get more gameplay that isn't DA or Shiyu timer bull, so I super appreciate having something new to sink my teeth into. I like making my gear coin number go up. Managing the timer feels like it's in my control here. Very fun gamemode, but also pretty scuffed and can be very frustrating, and not for the right reasons.

What did you use?

M3W1 Miyabi, M0W1 Nangong Yu, M0W1 Yuzuha. I'm far from a good Miyabi player so if you're competent you can probably match or beat me with M0W1.

What I had - all S inventory, all Z rank gears, skill tree fully unlocked. You do want to use character specific gears because their personal gears give stats suited to them - e.g. the generic Z stun has better passives, but Yu's personal grants Anom Mastery.

I had every Janus card including the Z card; getting one in a random drop is what prompted me to buy the other cards and try this run.

About getting S blueprints for blade/defense/inventory, there are guides out there for how to grind Janus for them e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4xT9J3LxCo

Consumables:

• 3 S healing
• 3 S corruption reduction
• 3 Primordial Nightmare
• 3 Thracian
• The rest all Bangboo skills for faster looting

I took the healing for safety but I only spent 1 of each that mattered. You could go for more Bangboo instead to nab more loot.

3 Primordials combined is a net 105% max HP % damage to the final boss. This is my insurance to make sure I can clear any run in case Miyabi somehow dies; disengage, go straight to the boss fight, pop 3 Primordials and it's free. In practice, I usually only use 1 Primordial and then 1 more or a Thracian to kill the final boss.

Thracians are my preferred for breaking shields, which bosses love to throw up and waste your time with. Between using Powerful Slash to start a fight, damage & energy for breaking shield, and the Powerful Slash opportunity you get when you break a shield, it makes them a lot easier. I don't use it on Haytor since he vaporizes his own shield for you, but the raptors and especially doppelgangers are worth using it on. I might also use a Thracian to make hound go away faster if he spawns very inconveniently e.g. while I'm mid-looting.

How to score big number?

Play Janus. Suburbs sucks. Maybe you can also score well there but it's a big mess of a circle with timed one-use one-way portals; Janus is a straight line from beginning to end, much easier to route and traverse. Memorize where the electronic lockboxes usually spawn, especially where they spawn in groups, and hit them. Ignore everything else. Grab Mechanical Lockboxes when they're convenient, but don't go out of your way just for one.

Normally I take every fight but to get this run I skipped a few. My criteria was, "is there 2 or more big loots to get here?" Big loot as in A) the loot dropped by killed bosses, B) Electronic Lockbox, C) Mechanical Lockbox. If there's not at least 2, I skipped to save time. You don't want every single lootbox, there's always more lootboxes than you have time to grab. Similarly, I used my Bangboo when there were 3 or more big loots in one place.

Doppelgangers (and by that I mostly mean Jane) are time wasters unless they're directly in your way, don't bother with them otherwise.

Keep an eye out for the phantom hound and instakill it with your S sword Powerful Slash, you don't want to waste time on it. If it notices you, speed kill it with Miyabi charged slash or EXs, maybe an Ult if you must; you don't want to waste time with an unnecessary hound spawn.

That said, get used to fighting the hound, he is NOT all that. If you can get away and be productive doing other things while he's following, that's ideal because his bar will drain on its own; then when you do fight, you have a lot less bar to reduce before he leaves. Most of the time though he'll run straight up to you or spawn directly on you so you have to fight him. He's inconvenient but not really a threat, except for that one drill attack that multi hits and probably eats most of your health.

When the hound is chasing, you can save time by angering him and other enemies at the same time. If you fight a boss while hound is nearby, his meter will go down a lot by virtue of being caught in the crossfire. The game seems to slow his stalk mode to a crawl while you're in combat, probably as an anti frustration thing for players who don't want to fight him, so it might take some wrangling to get him in the fight. But it'll save you a lot of time if you can do it. If you're feeling frisky, you can quickly open and close a lootbox mid-fight to make him immediately warp at you but that might get you hit, and you may not be able to afford that on max investment.

The "Hound has entered Nightfall" notification triggers when you have enough loot, I think 3 million is the threshold. If it doesn't trigger immediately, it should trigger next time you see him. Once he's in Nightfall, he will never go away so it makes looting a lot harder until you kill him.

When hound teleports a short distance away and charges up for a long time, that's the attack that will take you to the hound dimension. If you're not familiar, it looks like a control skill startup, honestly. You want to get hit by this, it does no damage and it's the only way to start the real hound fight. You want to kill hound for the red loot and also so he won't bother you anymore.

Also, ngl just get lucky. I still don't have a golden shit

That's my input on how I scored, the rest is jumbled thoughts on the gamemode.

I hate this mode

There's so much wrong with it.

Input priority. I play on keyboard but if you use controller you probably already know exactly what I mean. If you have interact and parry on the same input, and you're standing near an item while an enemy attacks, you will not parry them. You will open the box and instantly get hit. I work around it by using reverse swap to parry in those situations but it absolutely shouldn't be like this.

The camera. You can tell this game wasn't made for this because the camera really does not appreciate half the fights you get in and ESPECIALLY hound fights. Too many times I'm in a fight when my camera swings around into a corner and I'm effectively fighting blind. God help you if the hound jumps you in an enclosed space and blocks the door. There's options to disable the game moving your camera for you but again, shouldn't be like that in the first place.

The bugged rail. There is one specific rail in Janus that when you ride it in one specific direction, bugs out and makes you traverse it twice before it works. If you do the blueprint grind, you will experience this.

Synchronized enemies? Sometimes if you provoke an enemy, it'll provoke another from super far away. Again, you'll notice this during the blueprint grind because the worst offender is when you're at the very start of Janus Illusion, you attack the enemy there, and then a Marionette suddenly teleports in and ambushes you from the next street over.

Powerful Slash teleporting me across the map to enemies I didn't target. Powerful Slash moving me through the ceiling to a combat area I already cleared. There's a lot of slash jank that's mostly disorienting and kind of funny until it throws you into a fight you really weren't planning to take.

Double shields. If an enemy starts with a shield, they can put up a second immediately after the first is broken. Even worse, they can refresh their shield when it was just about to break, effectively making you go through two whole shields while losing out on the benefits of one shield break. Convenant Guardian, Raptor, Jane, Isolde, and that fat frog I hate are really bad about this.

On top of that, if the boss has a fancy setpiece attack to go with their shield, there's good odds their shield is unbreakable until they finish it. The fat frog is the worst offender here. So many time wasters to slow you down, there's serious thought to skip these fights just because of all their bull.

Of course, bosses with invincible attacks can also invincible those boss skills. So if Jane or Isolde decides now isn't a good time, they can dodge that big chunky % HP reduction and drag the fight out even longer.

Can't use Z skills against doppelgangers for some reason??? Normally skills like Primordial are disabled while you're walking around but it seems like the game sometimes doesn't properly register you as in combat against doppelgangers, so those skills remain locked. Out of all possible enemies, of course it's the doppelgangers who do this...

BILLY BILLY BILLY BILLY BILLY BILLY BILLY BILLY I hate Billy so much. So much obnoxious iframes. He's frustrating enough normally but it's ultra bad here. This is the only fight in the entirety of Enigma that locks you into it with no escape and isn't either an end stage boss or the fucking hound himself. Why can Billy do this? On top of that, guess how I learned the above point that Z skills don't work on doppelgangers. Answer: in Billy fight. The Billy fight you can't leave until you kill him, the only fight like that in the entire game mode. And just to add insult to injury, he doesn't even have the basic decency to drop anything when you kill him. You get locked in a cage match with him with your skills disabled and no escape and when you finally put him down, you get nothing. Wonderful.

There's so much unappealing about Suburbs it's honestly impressive how unattractive it is. Awkward to route, huge open spaces, takes forever to get anywhere. Plus the Billy fight on the elevator that wastes your time with zero reward. If he spawns, you might as well treat Suburbs as having a shorter timer than Janus on top of all its other problems. It's wild how imbalanced the maps are.

Hound time wasting. Huge source of my frustration is waiting for him to do the one attack that lets me kill him. It's not timer based, I've had him do it with over seven minutes on the clock left. I've also had him stall for over three minutes before finally doing it. If someone knows how to force his "send you to the hound dimension" attack I'd appreciate it.

High risk investment isn't worth it enough. Unless you omega sweat it, you sink 2.5M up front and make back, let's say, 5 or 6 million on your run. Sounds like a nice big number, until you remember you paid 2.5 million in the first place. Your net profit was 2.5 to 3 million. If you ran level 60 no investment you could comfortably make 3 to 4 million. You make more per run on the lower difficulty. Playing with the same equipment, same playstyle, and same level of skill, you take higher risk for lower reward. I haven't tried a sweat run on 0 investment yet so jury's out on that, but I'd bet the profit wouldn't be that far off from what I make on max investment.

It's a fun mode, mostly, but there's some serious lack of polish and the addiction to time wasters is such a mood killer. I'm sure they'll never do anything about the time wasting shields and enemies with invincible attacks but I hope they clean up the jank that's flying around all over this gamemode.