Inkbound – General Tips (for Solo Players)

General Solo Tips

Foreword

There’s apparently an unintentional design relic from a prior build of the game that is causing those purple energy-rock dudes in the combat areas just prior to the end boss Villain to output significantly more damage than they’re intended to be dealing currently. That consideration aside, you can still push past that combat section if you’ve hit a point where your build is mostly-complete by the time you finish Book 2.

Tips

More generally, you want to be investing in some form of synergistic damage source and a way to scale that output, some minor defensive measures to weather any turns that you can’t address every enemy targeting you that turn, and most importantly an engine to multiply your available actions-per-turn.

The balance between defense and offense on your bindings, augments, and vestiges can be effective in either direction, but you will only find success consistently if your build incorporates one of the various +Will / -Cooldown set bonuses. You can sometimes get away without those elements if you have SO MUCH dmg that you can OHKO any enemy with minimal actions taken, but that’s a path with much more variance and should be the high-roll fun-times outcome and not the goal from the beginning.

Direct vs non-direct attacks

Part of that will just be pattern recognition and learning which enemies use which types of attacks and how they go about cycling through each phase. As a mostly-accurate heuristic, if an enemy is telegraphing an area attack on the current turn they will usually alternate to a targeted attack on the following turn. If an enemy was summoned on the current turn, like when some enemies spawn the little green critters upon death, those enemies will not attack until the following turn but pretty much always present a targeted attack on that following turn.

So from a priority sequencing perspective, you can ignore any secondary spawns while dealing with more immediate threats, but have a plan to position for them next turn. Get enough shielding, regen, or other dmg mitigation to be able to handle 1-2 hits per turn if needed, and get in extra damage where you can on enemies that you suspect will be alternating their targeting type on subsequent turns. Try to squeeze as much dmg into each of your targeting angles as you can, which sometimes means you’re gonna sit there and make tiny micro-adjustments to your cursor until you can find a way to line up that attack to hit 3 baddies instead of 2, etc etc.

Especially early on in Book 1, those small optimizations can result in huge deltas between possible HP totals as you go into the Book 1 boss.

Bonus tip

When you have several treasures like 2 vaults, first look in both vaults before deciding what items to take. As noted above, synergy is crucial, and in this way you increase your chance to build it.