Okay, I'm going to have to ask: did you use the man in Homeland 11N3E to "
hack"
the Machines? I'm not sure this achievement is possible without, and I certainly don't think the stats you posted in "
Beat the Archivist the hard way"
are possible without. I'll give my reasoning: in my latest playthrough,
* I used the Machine in The Goblin Tribe twice (which is unavoidable) and got all the remaining boosts at the final altar.
* I managed to get the twentieth (3820 GR) upgrade, with only 230 GR over (and two more keys I could sell). The next upgrades would be 4220 and 4640.
* I finished with 328 base ATK, after taking the 3% boost after the final upgrade.
* My REP when I obtained the Lucky Blade was 5669. After obtaining it, the
only things I killed with the RBS were five Aumtlich (100 GR each).
* At the end, there were
no monsters left alive except the Wubba, the Slayer, the Archivist, one Seep, and some insignificant monsters behind doors on the first two levels.
* I didn't waste any money on keys in Pirate Lair 2S4W or 7S3W.
You managed to get 5 more base ATK, so, if you didn't hack the Machines, you must have got the 4220 upgrade. Okay, you would also have got a couple of upgrades at earlier Machines, which would allow you to save more keys than I did (they sell for 150 each), but I was very careful with my keys and the difference wouldn't be that much. You also claim to have done this with
2610 GR left over (1000 of which was from the Slayer), which really takes this out of the realm of possibility.
What really seals the deal is that you say "
you'll notice that I have quite a lot of greckles left, and am about 200 or so short of getting another upgrade"
(but the difference between 4220 and 2610 is 1610), and "
Are two more attack upgrades possible? 4000 extra greckles is a huge ask, so I'm not sure."
(I haven't played a hacked-Machines run enough to know what the costs are like in the endgame, but in a normal run, you'd be talking about the 4640 upgrade plus that 1610 difference, which is 6250. Anyway, I had
nothing left alive in my endgame, so if you were playing the same run you wouldn't be unsure, you would know for certain that an additional upgrade is out of the question.)
I'm sorry to be a pain, but I want to know for certain so that I can know whether I've reached the best possible stats (for a normal run), or whether somehow you really did manage to optimise beyond this and I need to rethink the entire game.
Anyway, as I said, I've reached 328 base ATK (338 with the Lucky Blade), so the Slayer does 31878 damage. I have 21861 HP. That's enough to make me think the achievement
might be possible in a normal run, by killing slightly fewer things with the Lucky Blade to preserve my HP a bit better. However, getting every possible upgrade is essential for this as the Slayer's DEF is so high, so there really isn't much wiggle room. One to come back to later, I think
____________________________
50th Skywatcher
