- how 2 fiend;
- how 2 folio;
- how 2 not fiend (special guest: tainted fiend);
- a surprise tier list no-one asked for
I’m not finished with Fiend Folio yet. The last time we took a look, I finished things off by looking at Golem, before the post got out of hand:
https://brologue.net/2024/04/09/isaac-mods-that-rock
But Golem is not the star of Fiend Folio. He’s just some rock collecting rocks, you know? He’s not even on the front cover:
My last post has a Fiend-shaped hole in it, so let’s fill it in. Fiend is what we’d informally call a ‘challenge character,’ like ???, the Lost, or the Keeper1. He can only pick up black and immoral hearts, and has a positive damage multiplier offset by a negative tears multiplier:
As your damage is concentrated into less tears, you really don’t want to miss your shots. Trying to rush the early floors is a double-edged sword – when you take damage, most of your hearts will turn into minions for the duration of the room:
Fortunately – if you’re willing to take the risk – health is easy to come by. Whenever Fiend deals a cumulative 50 damage to enemies, he gets a fireball. They can be shot by double-tapping the fire button and deal 3x your regular damage. If you kill an enemy with a fireball, there’s a 50% chance for them to drop a half-heart pickup that disappears after two seconds. The Fiend experience is a constant back and forth between pelting enemies from afar and bum-rushing them for health:
Why Fiend starts with a free Stars card, I don’t know, but I’m not complaining. Finding the treasure room on the first floor can be a slog sometimes. Tell me I’m not the only one who feels all the serotonin in his body leak out whenever it’s a double room full of spiders. A free Stars card isn’t just good for skipping rooms, though – if a planetarium is on the floor when you use it, you’ll be teleported there instead.
My Mega Satan run started on a high with My Reflection. Obviously you want to increase your tears at some point, but damage is more important to focus on because it means more fireballs, and thus more chances of getting your health back. Because you can gain a lot of health through careful play, devil deals seem like the way to go. Although, since I was going Mega Satan, I kinda felt my hand was forced:
With all this firepower, you might forget that Fiend is a challenge character. Here’s Delirium to correct the record:
Even when you lose a run to Delirium because of a legitimate Skill Issue™, it always comes with a caveat: it could’ve chose, at any time, to telefrag you (epilepsy warning):
https://twitter.com/pikuoriparadise/status/1774150468056351017?s=20
The journey of that run – for reasons related and unrelated to Fiend – was much more interesting. FF adds a lot of challenging crawlspace layouts. Look at the parkour I had to do here just to get C Section:
Later on, when I got to Hush – pay close attention to his health bar:
I don’t think Hush is supposed to die instantly like that. Then I killed ANOTHER boss instantly in the Void:
Turns out that once your tear rate hits a certain threshold – like when you get Soy Milk – Randy the Snail over here just oneshots everything. I could’ve killed Delirium instantly and didn’t even know…
T. Fiend is a great idea, but I didn’t enjoy playing as him as much as I did T. Eve. His pocket item, Malice, splits you up into a group of smaller minions. You can have up to 6 minions at most, which also means your health maxes out at six heart containers. Did I mention he can only pick up black hearts? Malice helps with that, sure, but when you’re split up, your minions also die in one hit. What you get with T. Fiend is an experience that’s hard to not compare with T. Eve.
There’s some areas, however, where T. Fiend has an edge. Clots are familiars – T. Fiend’s minions are considered separate characters. This means they can be affected by item effects beyond just tear changes. I got Saturnus one run and instantly became a lacerating aura of death (recreated below):
Anything that changes the character directly seems to count. So, Monstrance and Saturnus are fair game, but the Cube of Meat isn’t.
For what it’s worth, even though his minions are frail, T. Fiend tends to survive longer in the early game (provided you don’t start a T. Eve run and find something like Guppy’s Paw in a curse room). He’s also got a higher tear rate on his side. The damage reduction applied when split up is quickly overcome by maxing out your minions and a couple of good tear effects – hence the ‘STRENGTH IN NUMBERS.’
But the most striking difference is how T. Fiend’s clones can be used to exploit sacrifice rooms. Killing a minion counts as a sacrifice, and even when you’re on half a heart, Malice will always split you in two. Get lucky on a sac room, and you can get two Angel items for free:
Given the choice, I definitely wouldn’t play T. Fiend every time I open the game. Nevertheless, he’s a well-designed character, and if you have more fun with him than me, that’s great.
Some time ago, I made a post about the importance of tier lists in fighting game culture. They’re a popular heuristic for describing character viability in as few words as possible:
https://brologue.net/2024/02/02/tiers-r-4-peerz
If you read all the way through, however, you may remember my brief end note on tier lists in roguelikes. I’ve talked about the FF crew a fair bit recently, so I thought I’d go out of my way to create my own tier list ranking the characters that I find fun:
I made this and then immediately realised I’d forgotten to add T. Fiend. He’s in the ‘Not a Shit of Piece’ tier. Honestly, the only characters I’ve found mind-numbingly boring are the Apollyons. If I want a character who can take advantage of item rolls, I’ll play any one of the Isaacs.
I always say this when talking about Isaac, but the game’s got so much to offer that you’ve gotta stop somewhere. Fiend and Golem on their own are wonderful additions to the roster, and they make the Fiend Folio experience feel more complete. If I woke up tomorrow to find that most of Fiend Folio was incorporated into a final FINAL DLC, I wouldn’t even bat an eyelid. Because everyone who worked on it has COOKED.
- I mean, yes, Repentance DID add 18 characters that you could also consider to be ‘challenge’ characters, but pre-Repentance, these guys stood apart from the rest of the roster. ↩︎