Crab Champions: true ultra chaos (sniper/voltaic/pickaxe)

My first TRUC win of the beta :)

I think UC got slightly more difficult with the most recent balance changes, but I also got worse due to time off so it's impossible to be unbiased lol. I've been having a hell of a time with the island 32/33 gauntlet. My last like 5 out of 6 runs have faceplanted to the nightmare difficulty spike that occurs on those specific islands, and if I haven't gotten lucky to secure enough damage to burst through it, I burn through HP/armor so quickly and die. I've found that to be the critical point that decides the run: if I make it past those islands without too much attrition from them, that means my build is strong enough to win.

Unfortunately for me, I'm not good enough to get unlucky and win true ultra chaos if I don't have a build that has popped up enough to handle the island 32/33 tight map projectile spam elite heavy shenanigans. I'm semi consistent in getting to the gauntlet, but once I reach it I usually will just melt. I'm at a weird spot of my crab career where true nightmare is solved and uninteresting, but true ultra chaos is too hard and definitely outside my skill level without a fair bit of luck. I could dial back some of the modifiers to play regular ultra chaos, but that feels counter to my goal of getting good at TRUC and will likely reinforce all my bad habits further.

To force myself to improve, I've self imposed a few limitations in the last few weeks:
* No grapple hook (flying around on every map is ridiculously OP)
* No hammer (the extra mobility feels far too strong)
* No "cheat ring" aka low gravity relic
* Be more willing to aggressively trade HP for money on the floor

Those specific flight enabling tools have taught me really bad habits that are tough to break and like 80% of my wins on ultra chaos are just from flying above everything and essentially cheesing it. My floor movement is definitely sluggish and messy, but it's improving slowly. This run marks the first time I actually pulled off a win without just spamming jump pads (or making my own jump pads via grapple etc.), and I'm quite proud of that.

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The run itself boils down to a few select high points that carry things:

* Early big chests. The most broken busted OP perk you can see, and I eventually dream of a world where I'm good enough to add this to my banned list to see if I can win without it, because the power spike from seeing more things in every chest is just straight up absurd.

* Early econ. I've had loads of losses where I didn't see any economy chests at any point before the 32/33 gauntlet. And that is BAD because econ is essentially the best chest in the game (though relic chests are extremely tempting). Here I popped off several times and got a nice windfall of cash to buy out early shops to get ahead on my scaling, and the difference between being able to do that and not is pretty outrageous. I even found a few stacks of crystal divies which secured my late game.

* The classic poison/arcane/sniper synergy for single target. Getting a poison ring meant I didn't need toxic to be effective (though I would have taken them if I had seen any), and could lean into arcane magic to really stack up those damage over time chunky effects. Arcane and poison synergize really well with each other (especially with a bit of crit tossed in too), and just chew through elites and bosses, but you have to be able to apply the stacks in enough quantity for it to happen. Here I got it online extremely early and was able to scale off of those.

* Drill shot and explosive enemies. These were my general wave clear tools, and they really helped out. Explosive did most of the heavy lifting but definitely don't sleep on drills. Their impact can be hard to measure but they zoom around and eat things without needing to aim past the first shot, and that is quite useful. Wish I could have enhanced drill shot a bit more at the enhancement totem in the shop, but I was always finding nice things to buy instead.

* Leaning into health chests more than I used to. It took me far too long to appreciate the importance of max HP instead of just blindly picking armor, but these days I'm a bit of a HP addict and will click those hearts a hell of a lot more. Getting a few large influxes of max HP was quite impactful for this run, and I've found myself delaying armor pickups and doing all the better for it.