Minecraft Dungeons Default Through Apocalypse+ MEGA Guide | Gear, Builds, Enchants, & MORE

Minecraft Dungeons: you either love it or you hate it, or you just don't care. Which is probably the most common sentiment, since Mojang is so slow to address and fix problems, issues, and concerns. But a fair chunk of us still love the game, or have a love-hate relationship with it, due to it being so much fun. And new players are constantly joining the scene, only to get overwhelmed by the options and choices, and lack of helpful in-game info. And oh my god, why did the creepers speed up as they're about to explode instead of stopping? It can actually be even more confusing for people coming from the original Minecraft, just because how different some things can be.

But luckily, I'm one of those players who knows this game and still has fun with it. And this is my crash course guide on how to make this game less stressful and much easier to enjoy, no matter what difficulty you're starting this video on. And strap yourself in, you're in for a long video.

So obviously, we have to start with default. You just got the game, you got a sword, you think it's awesome. You sweet summer child, you're thinking things can't possibly go wrong. But then you start going through other levels, collecting gear, meeting new mobs, and you're taking more damage than you know how to deal with. Suddenly, your Power Level 1 sword is starting to look like it may as well be a Level 1 feather, which actually isn't that bad for its use anyway. So now you're stuck on your own, forced to make your own educated decisions on what to do to upgrade yourself, all while counter-intuitively at the whims of good old RNG. To give you something good for you to even know what's good to begin with, I'm talking, of course, about the enchantments. The things that make or break a piece of gear. And since melee is the easiest and most comfortable play style to get into with the limited choices of default mode, that's where I'm going to start.

Now, there are a lot of melee weapon options out there, and I mean a lot more than you can count on three friends' fingers and toes, and more than you should, since that would just be weird. But on default, you don't have access to all of them just yet. And you can apply this info to any weapon you get on default for the most part. You only have access to one enchantment slot on any piece of gear on default mode. You might get lucky and see something with two every now and then, but we'll focus on the likelihood of just having one.

So, what type of enchantment should you be looking for? Well, for the most part, the best standalone melee enchant of all time is Leeching. An enchantment that heals you by nine percent of every defeated mob's max HP when you kill them with your weapon. Why is it the best? Because the only way to fail in this game is to get a game over, which requires you to die up to four times in any level, which requires you to lose all of your HP each time you die. So if you have an enchantment that heals you passively by simply fighting enemies, that's pretty nice. In fact, it's so nice that you can go a full level with only 100 max health while having healed 2000 HP from Leeching during the whole run. That's enough damage to have killed you 20 times over, meaning Leeching extended your life that much, and that could be without having used a single potion.

Now, I did say that it's the best enchantment as a standalone enchantment. That's because there are armors that offer you six percent Lifesteal healing, which is basically the same as Leeching, only you regain the health equal to six percent of the damage that you deal with every hit. The upsides to this are that this works with some artifact damage, as well as damage that you deal with your ranged weapon too. And this can save you against a tough enemy who's about to kill you before you can kill it to get your Leeching healing. The downside being that it heals on hit. So if you damage an enemy down to say, 10 percent of their health, and then they hit you before you kill them, Leeching will heal all of that off. If you're using Lifesteal instead, you will only heal six percent of that remaining 10 HP that they had left, which is barely anything. But you can just use Lifesteal healing from the next enemy, so it's still good. And you can even combine Leeching with Lifesteal armor, just to have all the healing, making default mode a complete breeze, especially with Corrupted Beacon. It's amazing.

However, if you have Lifesteal armor instead, or if you happen to get a weapon with two enchantment slots, the absolute best enchantment that you have access to, aside from Leeching, is Guarding Strike. This grants you a nifty little shield after every kill you get with your weapon, which lasts for four seconds and it cuts all incoming damage in half. The reason that this is amazing is because, for one thing, this essentially doubles your HP value because enemies are taking twice as long to kill you. But it's even better because it's not actually doubling your HP. So if a mob is doing 100 damage per second, and you're only healing 70 HP per second, you're still eventually gonna die, no matter how much HP you have. It would just take a little longer. Doubling your HP would not solve that. But when you cut enemy damage in half, you're also essentially adding extra healing value. A hit that would normally do 100 damage is being cut down to 50 damage, which would be the same as taking that under damage initially, and then healing off 50 of it immediately. So your HP value doubles, and your healing value essentially doubles as well. So if you're taking say, 100 damage and healing 70 of it, you will eventually die. Doubling your HP, you'll live twice as long, but you still eventually die. But cutting that damage instead in half to 50, and healing 70, you never die.

So, should you be lucky enough to get a weapon with both Leeching and Guarding Strike, or just get a Guarding Strike weapon with Lifesteal armor, you can say goodbye to your health potion button for the remainder of your time in default mode.

Now, let's say that you have armor with Lifesteal and a weapon with two enchantment slots, one having Guarding Strike. What would you want to focus on next? Well, you could do Leeching and just make yourself completely immortal. Or you could start looking at damage options. On default, this isn't really something you need to worry about, but it's worth going over briefly anyway. You don't have access to many solid damage options just yet, so your choices are very limited. For general melee use, those options are Sharpness and Committed. Committed being the better of the two. What Committed does is it boosts your damage by however much percentage of mob's health is missing when you hit them. So if they're missing say, 50 percent of their health, your attack will do 50 percent more damage. Very straightforward. Calculating what this comes out to in terms of DPS (damage per second) is much more difficult, but I made a video going over that. For brevity's sake, it's an average of 36.8 percent more DPS, with 34 being the average on harder-hitting weapons, and about 39 being the average for faster, lighter-hitting weapons.

Next, we have Sharpness, which is a 33 percent damage multiplier. What the game doesn't tell you, though, is that Sharpness is hiding a dark secret. The secret that it's actually a flat buff that doesn't stack with other flat buffs, aside from itself. What I mean by that is, say you have a weapon that does 100 damage. If you pick up a Strength Potion, your weapon skyrockets to 200 damage a hit, because Strength Potion is a 100 damage increase. So with Sharpness being a 33 percent damage increase, you would think that you would go from 200 damage a hit to 266, since 66 is 33 percent of 200, right? Well, welcome to the sad world of flat buffs. They only affect the base stat. So both Strength Potion and Sharpness are only affecting the original 100 damage, meaning that instead of 266 total damage for both combined, it's 233. Meaning Sharpness has essentially dropped to a 16.5 percent damage buff, just with the addition of Strength Potion alone. Other common damage buffs are flat too, those being ones you find on your armor or on armor enchantments like Cowardice.

So while Committed doesn't work unless the enemy already has damage on them, it comes out to a good chunk more damage in the long run, especially since it is a full damage multiplier. This pretty much covers melee weapon enchanting for default mode. Nothing too complicated yet, though. It is worth mentioning that there are some exceptions to these rules, should you get your hands on a Rapier or a Bee Stinger, which you can find from certain daily trials like Arkhaven, or if you're lucky enough to find them in shops. Thundering is a whopping 65.9 percent more DPS on them because their average damage per hit is so low. With Lightning Focus enchanted on your armor, that's 115.3 percent extra and very satisfying DPS for your Rapier. Also worth mentioning is Weakening as a defensive enchantment for some weapons. Like Guarding Strike, it lowers the damage that you take. However, it's 40 percent instead of 50 percent, and is limited to direct damage from mobs, meaning that damage from enchantments like Fire Trail, Burning, or Electrified don't count. On top of that, it only applies to the enemies that you hit with your weapon, so the ones that your weapon doesn't touch will still do full damage to you. But it's still very nice in multiplayer, since it means those mobs do less damage to your friends as well.

On top of all this, there is one weapon-specific enchantment that trumps Committed and Sharpness for damage. Should you happen to have a Soul Knife, Eternal Knife, or Truth Seeker, all obtained from Desert Temple, they are one of a few weapons that have access to special soul enchantments. One of which is called Enigma Resonator, which gives you up to a 25 percent chance with a full soul meter to land a triple damage critical hit. And this is especially worth noting, since Critical Hit is an enchantment you don't get access to until Adventure difficulty. So the Soul Knife weapon line has early access to its own form of crit, which comes out to a 50 percent DPS increase if you have a full soul meter, which you get from gathering souls by having soul gear equipped when you kill enemies.

As for what weapon I would recommend, that would easily be a Glaive. Even on Apocalypse 25, spears are solid weapons due to their long reach and their ability to hold mobs away with Gravity. And Glaives are almost as good as spears at doing this. While Gravity isn't an option on default mode, mobs also aren't all that fast on default either, and Glaives don't need Gravity as much as spears do. Their long reach and wide combo finisher makes them very good at dishing out damage while playing crowd control, due to their long reach keeping mobs away. What's better is that not only can you get a Glaive from Desert Temple as well, but that's also where you can get both Lifesteal armors from, which is why I ran the level non-stop when I first got the game.

Speaking of which, for armor enchantments, you have quite a few options to choose from on default. If you only have access to one enchant slot, the two best that I could recommend at this stage is either Cooldown or Snowball. Cooldown is an absolute staple for melee builds on Apocalypse 25 because it means being able to infinitely use Ironhide Amulet for cutting incoming damage in half, while using infinite Deathcap Mushroom for constant double bass attack speed. On default mode, your artifacts won't have nearly enough duration to make them infinite, but still, reducing their cooldown time by 38 percent makes a pretty big difference, saving you up to almost 12 seconds on artifacts with 30-second cooldowns.

For Snowball, it has a little block-shaped snow moon orbiting you that fires at nearby mobs every 5 seconds at level 1, every 3 seconds at level 2, and every second at level 3. When it hits a mob, that mob gets stunned for at least 2 seconds, if not more on lower difficulties. Meaning you can stun-lock at least one mob. And now, while this doesn't make a huge difference on Apocalypse 25, since it'll often result in it stunning a mob you were midway through chopping the head off of, on default, where mobs are slower, this preemptive stunning actually does a lot of work, especially since it stunlocks creepers too, which are the PTSD bane of pretty much any new player's nightmares. Aside from the aforementioned Lightning Focus, which boosts Thundering and other electric damage by 75 percent, there's also Paradise, which boosts your melee and range damage by 40 percent when you're at full health. And while that sounds hard to maintain with Leeching and our Lifesteal on top of proper damage reduction, this isn't all that difficult, even on Apocalypse 25, and is much easier on default mode. But like I said, at this point, extra damage doesn't matter as much, and reducing damage goes a much longer way. If you're cutting damage by 50 percent, it's the same advantage as doubling your own damage against the enemy. Instead, either way, you're still killing them twice as fast compared to them killing you. On top of that, as I mentioned, Cowardice is also a flat boost as well. Despite that, it's still solid even for Apocalypse 25. But comparatively, Snowball will make your default mode life a lot smoother.

Now, at this point, veteran players may be noticing a distinct lack of me mentioning Deflect. While it is an amazing enchant for making you immune to 45 percent of ranged attacks, the reason that it's so overly useful is because of the many nasty ranged mob enchantments that this blocks, which isn't something that players need to worry about on default mode.

But now, as for what armors that you might want to go for, the best melee options you have available are Spider Armor (the unique of Thief Armor), Wither Armor (the unique of Grim Armor), Renegade Armor (the unique of Mercenary Armor), Highland Armor (the unique of Scale Mail), and Stellar Armor (which is the unique of Reinforced Mail). Other options are either locked behind Adventure and Apocalypse difficulty or behind certain DLC. And right off the bat, Wither Armor and Spider Armor have Lifesteal built in, meaning that you can get away with not using Leeching. And both of them can be found from Desert Temple, along with Glaives. And even if your luck is worse than a man squashed under 50 ladders in front of a hundred black cats. Grim Armor also has Lifesteal built in, it just doesn't have the 35 percent damage reduction that Wither Armor has, which when you're stacking a lot of damage reduction buffs, they kind of diminish a bit, so it doesn't matter as much if you can't find Wither Armor right away. However, if it's by itself, this 35 percent damage reduction essentially boosts your HP and healing value by over 50 percent. They both have built-in soul gathering as well, but a proper soul build is something you should be pursuing on higher difficulties with more enchantment and gear options. Meanwhile, Spider Armor has 25 percent more attack speed, so it's even more offensive than the two. It just doesn't add as much offense as Wither Armor adds defense. Of the other three, Highland Armor, Renegade Armor, and Stalwart Armor all have 35 percent damage reduction. On top of this, Renegade Armor has 25 percent more attack speed and a 20 percent weapon damage boost aura that applies a flat damage increase for both your melee and ranged weapons, which also applies to nearby pets and your online teammates as well. This means that you have to run Leeching on your melee weapons for healing, but the armor is incredibly solid for both offense and defense, on top of adding more stopping power to your weapon's knockback with the extra hit speed. Then you have Highland Armor, which offers a 30 percent flat melee damage boost on top of a Level 1 Swift Footed enchantment, giving you a small speed boost when rolling to counter the slowdown that you get during roll cooldown. While it lacks 25 percent more attack speed and its damage boost doesn't affect ranged weapons, it's good for weapons to have an attack speed cap, as well as certain other weapons that benefit from extra raw damage.

Now, on the opposite side of the spectrum, Stalwart Armor is much more defensive. Instead, adding a 30 percent chance to negate damage from any hits that you take, as well as having Level 1 Potion Barrier built in, which gives you five seconds of 90 percent damage reduction after every health potion that you use. It also gives you twice the roll cooldown, but people don't usually care about that, since rolling is only useful on rolling builds, and even then, they don't typically use the actual roll button.

Now, some may be noticing I didn't mention Potion Barrier as an enchant option, despite it being available on default. That's because it's really not needed on default. But yeah, it is an option. It lasts 9 seconds at Level 3, but I would save that for Apocalypse Plus difficulty myself.

Now, as for where to get both Renegade Armor and Stalwart Armor, Fiery Forge has both of them in its loot pool. While Arkhaven, which is the secret level found in Pumpkin Pastures, has a small loot pool for Renegade Armor. It only has four items in default mode, so it's not much RNG competition.

Now, this leaves the question of what should I do for ranged? And I'll be honest and say that I'm not the main person to be asking for that. However, for default use, the ranged enchantments that I would recommend most are Wild Rage, Multi-shot, Looting, and Cooldown Shot. Wild Rage gives each shot you land a 40 percent chance to enrage mobs, and much like my drunken uncle's Christmas parties, this makes them hostile to anything nearby, dividing enemy aggro, and even making creepers explode on other mobs. Very handy for taking some of the focus off of you. Multi-shot has a 40 percent chance to shoot out five additional arrows with each shot, which can be decent on groups, as well as for dispatching particularly tough enemies. There's Looting, which gives you an extra chance for defeated mobs to drop Strength Potions, Shadow Brews, Swiftness Potions, or TNT. Now, while that last one is an utter disappointment after Mojang butchered TNT damage about as much as The Last of Us 2 butchered Joel, this effect will trigger from melee and other kills as well, making it a great passive enchantment. Then you have Cooldown Shot, which is a bow-only enchantment that sees your artifacts recharging one and a half seconds faster with every charged arrow you fire. This can be especially useful on default, where your artifacts don't have the duration for infinite use with just one Cooldown enchantment alone. And if you're fortunate enough to get a Soul Crossbow, or its unique Feral Soul Crossbow, or a Void Caller from Arkhaven or Obsidian Pinnacle, an extra and very handy enchantment that you can use is Anima Conduit, which heals you by six percent of your max HP for every soul orb you collect, which equals one soul per defeated enemy, as long as you have a weapon, armor, or artifact equipped that has Soul Gathering. This weapon included. The healing does depreciate as you get close to full health, but it's still an extra enchant worth noting, even if on higher difficulties the healing won't be noticed alongside Leeching, Radiance, or Lifesteal. Other solid options like Ricochet, Rapid Fire, Power, Growing, and Supercharge exist too, and there's no shortage of other good ranged enchants, but for default, these are about all you'll need to complement your build for now.

But as for what ranged weapons to pick on default, your options are limited. The aforementioned Soul Crossbow and its uniques are solid choices, as well as Harp Crossbow, which is the unique of Scatter Crossbow that you can find on Soggy Swamp and Obsidian Pinnacle, because it shoots five arrows with each shot. Or there's Lightning Heart Crossbow, which is another unique of the Scatter Crossbow, because it shoots three arrows per shot and has Level 1 Ricochet built in, which is an enchantment that when you shoot an enemy, there's a chance that the arrow will bounce off the enemy and into another enemy, and this can trigger three times per shot. Aside from them and a few others, at this point, you won't notice too big of a difference on the ranged weapons, so just try them all out and see which ones you like. The main goal of this video guide is not to tell you what to use, and I have weapon and armor tier lists to help with that already. It's to inform you on how to best use the things that you want to use, and to give some recommendations as well, because given that they have good synergistic enchantments, you can use anything on Apocalypse 25. I do without needing the potion. Are some things better than others? Absolutely. But nothing is unplayable, as long as you know what enchantments you want to support yourself with. Use whatever your heart desires.

Now, for the artifacts, the one I cannot recommend enough is Deathcap Mushroom. When you use it, it doubles your base attack speed, on top of boosting your base movement speed by 20 percent. This is incredibly significant, since it essentially doubles your DPS and your weapon's knockback value. By doubling your DPS, you're killing enemies twice as fast, to effectively cut the time that they're hitting you in half. Therefore, you're halving the damage you take from them too, while doubling the speed in which you get your Leeching and or Lifesteal healing from as well. To say that Deathcap Mushroom is good for melee use is like saying that water is kinda good to have on our planet. Understatement of the century. Melee builds do not breathe without Deathcap Mushroom, unless they're running something very bizarre and specific. I was lucky enough to get it as my first artifact ever, and it's worth running Creeper Woods early just to get one.

After that, we have Ironhide Amulet. If Deathcap Mushroom was the king of melee builds, then this artifact would be the queen. It cuts incoming damage in half. And while it doesn't always scale to its full amount when combined with other damage reduction effects, it's still a significant effect to have. When combined with 35 percent damage reduction armor, that's 60.6 percent damage reduction, and 80.3 percent damage reduction with Guarding Strike on top. That makes mobs take two and a half times longer to kill you with just Ironhide Amulet and 35 percent reduction armor, and more than five times longer to kill you with Guarding Strike on top of it.

Aside from that, other artifacts worth giving a try while on default are Corrupted Beacon, Fishing Rod, Fireworks Arrow, Buzzy Nest, Wonderful Wheat, and Boots of Swiftness. And if you have access to the Hidden Depths DLC, Satchel of Elixirs is great too. While Corrupted Beacon is best on a dedicated soul build, the Kamehameha-style beam it fires out is devastatingly useful in situations that you might need it for, provided use sparingly due to not having much soul gathering yet. While it doesn't have much use on Apocalypse Plus, Fishing Rod is not a bad choice for reeling in the slow mobs of default to bring them to you, while stunning them in the process, allowing you to single out certain threats and pick them off easily. Then you have Fireworks Arrow, which adds more bang to your range shots by making them fire actual rockets that do massive splash damage explosions. Even better is when this is combined with Multi-shot to let you completely wipe a small mob colony off the face of the planet. Meanwhile, Wonderful Wheat summons a llama pet that shoots damaging spit at foes, which is surprisingly useful on default mode for support damage. While Buzzy Nest places a bee nest down that continuously spawns bees for a set period of time, helping attack and distract mobs. The limit of bees you can have out at a time is three per nest, but the fact that it works on a timer makes it incredibly good in hairy situations, and it even works incredibly well in Apocalypse Plus, where other summons fall flat. Considering that mobs on default are fairly slow, the 60 percent base speed boost from Boots of Swiftness actually lets you run literal circles around the mobs, especially when combined with Deathcap Mushroom's speed boost as well. As for Satchel of Elixirs, when used, it will drop out two random consumable potions, which can be any pair of Strength Potion, Shadow Brew, Swiftness Potion, or sometimes two of the same. And if you're running any DLC levels that have special potions like Oakwood Brew for the Jungle, Sweet Brew for the Winter, Dense Brew for Howling Peaks, Potion of Water Breathing for Hidden Depths, and Birding Brew for Echoing Void, those potions are added to the mix as well.

That about wraps up the enchanting build advice I can say for default mode. Though if you really want to try a soul build early on and can't wait for Adventure mode, you could try getting a Soul Knife or Truth Seeker with Soul Siphon, or get Enigma Resonator on them, or Eternal Knife. Get Wither Armor with Bag of Souls, since you won't be needing Soul Focus at this early point in the game. And either a Feral Soul Crossbow or Void Caller with Anima Conduit. And use Deathcap Mushroom with Corrupted Beacon and Harvester, depending on the weapon and enchants you use. This would give you 11 to 14 soul gathering per kill, after getting the 50 percent gathering boost from Wither Armor, on top of access to two of the main soul artifacts and Lifesteal. Should you have access to two enchantment slots on any of your gear, you would want Soul Siphon and Enigma Resonator on your Soul Knife or Truth Seeker, Anima Conduit and Enigma Resonator on your Eternal Knife, since Soul Siphon is built into it. Bag of Souls and Snowball on your Wither Armor, and Anima Conduit and Soul Siphon for your Void Caller or Feral Soul Crossbow. This would bump your soul gathering up to 14 to 17 per kill, not including Soul Stipend triggers. While it's lacking many supporting enchant options for default mode, this would be a very OP and breezy build to play with. Also worth mentioning is Soul Lantern for a third soul artifact instead of Deathcap Mushroom. It would not only give you a bit of extra soul gathering that the mushroom does not, but it also summons a little soul wisp that does quite a bit of work for you, aggressively firing projectiles to mow down any mobs in your way. It's also the only soul artifact that gives you souls when it kills a mob where you'd normally have to kill the mobs with your melee or ranged weapon to get souls instead. So this actually makes it worth the 50 souls it costs to summon one, even when you take into account that it only lasts for about a minute before disappearing. Considering I've done this myself, I can say with full confidence that you can run a soul build with three Soul Lanterns and pretty much just waltz through levels until you reach Apocalypse Plus. It's an experience I think every player should have at least once before it gets ruined by Apocalypse Plus, because it just doesn't work there.

And now, with all this knowledge under your belt, you've carved your way through Obsidian Pinnacle and cleaved the final boss, and have to unlock Adventure mode. And boy, do things open up. Not only do you have more gear options, but you've unlocked an extra enchantment slot, and now you have access to powerful enchantments too, among which are Critical Hit and Void Strike, which change the game a lot. From this point on, Critical Hit gives every hit you land a 20 percent chance to do triple damage. Sparing you the math, this comes out to a 40 percent DPS boost on average. Void Strike meanwhile applies a Voided debuff to mobs that you hit, which gives them an invisible rising damage multiplier that causes them to take more damage the longer the multiplier increases, up to 7 times the normal damage. The catch with Void Strike being that every melee and range hit you land resets or removes this debuff. So this damage buff is more potent the slower that a weapon is, because it gives more time for the multiplier to rise in between each hit. If you are using armor with 25 percent more attack speed and a Deathcap Mushroom, Void Strike is at least a 40 percent DPS boost or more on anything that's not Gauntlets, Maulers, Soulfists, Fighter's Bindings, Rapiers, Bee Stingers, Freezing Foils, Daggers, Bangs of Frost, Sheer Daggers, Moon Daggers, Sickles, The Last Laughs, Nightmare's Bites, Coral Blades, or Sponge Strikers. Basically, Crit is better on those weapons that I just listed, and Void Strike is the best damage enchant on literally everything else. So, essentially, with Adventure mode, you get an extra enchantment slot, and these new damage enchants, meaning that you can just add them to whatever setup you're already using, if you get lucky enough for it. On top of this, you also get access to Radiance, a healing enchant that has a 20 percent chance to trigger with every hit you land. Weapons that are incredibly fast and or have incredibly low DPS benefit a lot from this, giving weapons like Gauntlets and especially Rapiers a more solid healing option than Lifesteal or Leeching. It's also nice for Daggers, Circles, and Coral Blades as well. And while useful only on some weapons, you also now have the option of using Shockwave and Swirling. Both trigger at the end of your weapon's combo, with Shockwave firing a piercing wave of energy out in front of you for a good amount of distance, while Swirling hits in a small area all around you. Shockwave does less damage but has more reach, while Swirling also needs the last hit of your combo to actually hit the enemy for it to trigger. Two downsides, though, for Shockwave and Swirling that are worth mentioning are that this damage doesn't count towards Lifesteal, and it can block Leeching if they kill the enemy instead of the weapon itself killing the enemy.

Now, while this is the case that Shockwave and Swirling can block Leeching and reduce Lifesteal healing, what's also worth mentioning is that Shockwave and Swirling are respectively a non-multiplicative 60 percent and 80 percent DPS boost on Fighter's Bindings and the entire Cutlass weapon line, which also means its uniques too. This is especially good for Fighter's Bindings, since they have 15.1 hits a second with a mushroom, meaning that it uses Radiance insanely well, so it doesn't even need Leeching or Lifesteal. You can just pair Radiance with Shockwave and Swirling and not care.

In terms of utility, you also get access to Gravity, which is an enchantment that pulls mobs into the point where your weapon hits them. This is especially good for weapons with a narrow hitbox, as it helps do the work for them instead of having to hit each individual mob. They get pulled into the hits instead. And if you use this on a weapon with long reach, you can hold mobs at the tip of the weapon's reach so they can't even come close to hitting you. And for weapons with both a narrow hitbox and long reach, this is worth using over Guarding Strike if you had to make a choice. So essentially, you'd want to use either Leeching or Radiance for healing, on top of Guarding Strike for defense. But if you're using Lifesteal armor, you can use Guarding Strike and either Void Strike or Critical Hit. Or you can use Gravity along with either damage enchant. And if you're lucky enough to get something with all three enchant slots open, running Void Strike and Crit on top of Guarding Strike, Gravity, and Leeching or Radiance tears through Adventure. Even better with Lifesteal, since then you can run Void Strike and Crit together. Also, if you want more detailed info on which is better between Leeching or Radiance, and Void Strike or Critical Hit, I'll provide links to those info sheets in the description down below as well.

And now, I know some of you might be saying, "Where is Exploding?" It's a powerful enchant, and you're right, but it's kind of difficult to place. It does add damage, and it can be effective. It's just not strictly a better option to the ones that I've already mentioned. What Exploding does is, when you kill a mob with your weapon, it explodes and deals damage to surrounding mobs equal to 60 percent of the exploding mob's max health. The weapon it benefits most are ones with naturally low DPS, because it scales with mob health instead of your own damage, and it works well with Gravity to keep mobs grouped into the explosions. For this reason, Rapiers and Coral Blades make pretty good use of it. But Rapiers benefit massively from Thundering, getting a potential 115.3 percent DPS boost from it, and Coral Blades benefit from Swirling with a 95.2 percent DPS boost instead. So it can be difficult to find a place for Exploding outside of personal preference, but it's by no means bad.

As for what weapons you now have access to that would be ideal for Adventure, you have Spears, especially Whispering Spear, and Fighter's Bindings, which at this point would be the most effective base game weapon. Radiance and Swirling alone give you a massive DPS and healing boost, and since the weapon hits its attack speed cap with just a Deathcap Mushroom, you don't need to use armor with 25 percent more attack speed, so you can run say, Stellar Armor or Wither Armor for more tanking ability. And speaking of armor, now that you're on Adventure, you now have access to Full Metal Armor, the unique of Plate Armor, which can also be found on Fiery Forge conveniently enough. And it makes you look like what you might have looked like the first time your overprotective mom let you sit on a bike. Or was that just me? I love you, Mom. Well, dorky looks aside, it is absolutely one of the best armors in the game, having the exact same bonuses as Stellar Armor, only trading Level 1 Potion Barrier for the same 30 percent melee damage bonus that Highland Armor has. While again, this is a flat damage buff, it does act essentially as free constant Cowardice, albeit just for melee, and just the 30 percent melee damage. The 35 percent damage reduction and the 30 percent chance to negate hits combined gives you a 185.5 percent damage advantage to enemies just for putting the armor on by itself, which in multiplier terms is almost three times an advantage. And I think it goes without saying that this pairs really well with Fighter's Bindings. But running any Spear weapon with Gravity on top of either Spider Armor or Renegade Armor to keep mobs away is incredibly useful too.

Now, as for when enchantments to run on your armor, not much actually changes. You do gain one enchantment that you would want to run on your armor for any melee build, which is Chilling. It slows mobs down by 60 percent for one second every two seconds, which equates to mobs being all around slowed down by 30 percent. It's not bad, since it means that mobs overall are doing about 30 percent less damage to you over the span of whatever level that you're playing. So with your extra enchantment slot, you could easily run Cooldown and Snowball, or Cooldown and Chilling if you want. The difference is that Chilling can slow down all mobs around you, while Snowball only affects one mob at a time. But Snowball can stunlock enemies, and Chilling can't. However, if you get any armor with three enchantment slots, then you can just run all three of them and make your life much easier.

Now, should you be running any weapons with elemental damage that you feel like using, like Fire Aspect and Void Strike (which actually is a decent damage over time combo), or should you get your hands on a Vine Whip or Encrusted Anchor, or if you're using any speedy weapon with Thundering, especially Rapier, then going with Cooldown plus either of the appropriate Elemental Focus enchants is perfectly valid too, along with Snowball or Chilling if you have three slots. And with the same mindset, using three enchantment slots to go with Cooldown, Cowardice, and either Chilling or Snowball isn't a bad choice either.

Now, once again, we move on to ranged, and this one I'm actually excited for, because you've unlocked my favorite crossbow in the entire game. Now, I say this quite literally, that out of all the runs and all the builds and all the videos I've uploaded, this is the absolute best piece of gear that I have and have ever had. You know that feeling of joy you get when you wake up on Christmas morning, heart pounding with anticipation for the long-awaited unwrapping of the Christmas list you've been reciting for months, as you approach the tree riddled with gifts that have your name on it? Yeah, that's the same feeling you'll get every time you fire the Imploding Crossbow. The trigger may as well be the Alt+F4 button for mobs' HP bars. Every shot you fire explodes on impact, dealing splash damage that will hurt mobs whether you actually hit them or not. And what makes this really good is that one of the main weaknesses of ranged weapons is that they're all woefully single-target weapons. Even the shortest reach melee weapon can hit multiple mobs at the same time. But with Imploding Crossbow, this splash damage means that if you fire into a group, every mob in that group is sharing in on the pain. That's right, you heard it. Imploding Crossbow did shared pain before the Starless Knight even tried to make it look cool. This also means that if you trigger Multi-shot to fire five additional life-seeking rockets of doom, they will all damage every enemy in that group. Should it be a group of 10 enemies, that's essentially 60 shots worth of damage you've done with just a single press of a button. Does your controller feel heavy now?

And as if that wasn't already amazing enough, this crossbow absolutely carries later on when mobs start getting enchantments like Deflect and Thorns, which Imploding Crossbow doesn't even take the time to bother to laugh at because it just ignores them. That's right, Imploding Crossbow shots cannot be deflected, and you take no Thorns damage for them. Now, while this sounds absurdly amazing, I do have to be fair and say the one downside of this weapon is that it has abysmally low ammo. But this is where Infinity comes in. It's not used much, but giving you a 48 percent chance to regain any arrow you shoot goes a long way for practically doubling Imploding Crossbow's ammo. And it's the one ranged weapon I cannot recommend Multi-shot on enough. If you happen to get an Imploding Crossbow from Fiery Forge or Redstone Mines, or from the mushroom level that you now have the ability to unlock by collecting a rune from each of the main game levels and placing them in the church in the camp after you visit the church for the first time when you unlock Adventure mode, and that Imploding Crossbow has both Multi-shot and Infinity, or hell, even if it's just a Firebolt Thrower, which is the other unique, or the Exploding Crossbow, which is the base version of the weapon with those enchantments, then you can say goodbye to needing any other ranged weapon for a long time. And by a long time, I mean forever. And if you do happen upon one that has three enchantment slots, look for Wild Rage or Tempo Theft. Either enrage mobs that happen to survive, or get a 50 percent running speed boost with every shot you land. You absolutely cannot go wrong with that.

Now, sadly, for the most part, there aren't really any new artifact additions I could strongly recommend adding at this point in the game. Though if you have the Hidden Depths DLC, Satchel of Elixirs is probably your most potent option for now. The chance for a Strength Potion to double your base damage pretty vastly outshines other artifact options. However, if you want to run a soul build, you do have an extra helpful addition in the form of a new weapon. Pumpkin Pastures and Arkhaven, as well as the mushroom level, can drop a Soul Scythe as a soul support weapon. Soul Scythes not only look cooler, especially the Jailer Scythe unique, but they support soul builds better too. For one thing, Soul Scythes attack faster. This lets you get more hits in, so you can trigger Soul Siphon more often while you're hacking away at a mob that's locked by Snowball. The weapon also does less damage per hit than a Soul Knife too, so you can get even more hits in on a stun-locked mob for farming souls. Soul Siphons also have an incredibly wide swing area, both making it hard to miss your attacks while also letting you hit more mobs per swing, so you have a higher chance of triggering Soul Siphon on at least one of them. And in case I haven't mentioned it before, Soul Siphon gives you a 5 percent chance per hit to cause 6 soul orbs to spawn for you to collect, each worth whatever your soul gathering is. You really want this to trigger. There are other uses for Soul Scythes aside from this, but for now, these are the upsides that matter. And should you happen upon any soul weapon with three enchant slots, you would want to make sure that it has Anima Conduit, Soul Siphon, and Enigma Resonator for maximum soul gathering. After that, if you happen to find a Wither Armor with three enchant slots as well, adding Soul Focus to Snowball and Bag of Souls will increase the damage of your soul artifacts by 30 percent, allowing you to take out Archie and Heart of Ender even faster, so you can speed onto the quote-unquote final difficulty mode. As for the Void Caller or Feral Soul Crossbow, going for Anima Conduit, Soul Siphon, and Tempo Theft if you have three enchant slots would definitely help. Or you can go with Wild Rage if you think that your Deathcap Mushroom speed is enough. Speaking of the mushroom, Adventure mode adds the Lightning Rod artifact to your soul build arsenal. It targets a mob before dropping a powerful lightning bolt for massive precision damage, not unlike a nuclear warhead. Should you shoot them up with your Gravity-imbued Void Caller just before the devastation happens, it will pull in all nearby surrounding mobs that you fry them all together. It also adds plus one soul gathering, so it's very worth dropping your mushroom for it, if you're doing a soul build. That is, if you're not still just running a Soul Lantern or three, because they're pretty hilarious until you get to Apocalypse Plus, when the joke gets turned on you.

And speaking of which, you do get access to the Love Medallion on Adventure, which is easily a team from Arkhaven, which turns three enemies nearby into your allies with increased health. It can be fun to toy around with, and I would suggest you get all that out of your system now before the artifact becomes completely useless later on, due to enchanted mobs being completely immune to your advances and being able to trample over the mobs that you do convert in a second.

Now, with default and Adventure neatly tucked out of the way, you're finally ready to move on to the game's final difficulty, Apocalypse mode. And this is where you finally get to the good presents that you've been waiting for under your Christmas tree, because this mode opens every option up to you. Not only are three enchantment slots the norm for Apocalypse, but you get even more gear options than before. Two of them being Double Axes and Katanas, as well as their uniques, which are amazing weapon additions to the game. Still, for the most part, you'll probably find Fighter's Bindings to be the game's easy mode, but the dynamic does shift later down the line.

As for enchantments, not much really changes because no new enchants are added. Instead, one of the existing enchants, ever since default mode, starts becoming a lot more useful. Apocalypse mode starts introducing a noticeably larger amount of enchanted mobs than before. Mobs that have inherently about 2.5 times more HP, on top of also having deadly buffs such as Double Damage, Protection, Regeneration, Thorns, Burning, Chilling, Electrified, etc. The list goes on, and often will have a combination of up to three of those enchantments. But that's where Unchanting comes in. An amazing melee enchant that straight up doubles your total physical damage against any enchanted mob, killing them in half the time it would normally take, so that you can hurry up and insta-die to a piece of falling ceiling later in the level. Definitely not salty about that one, Mojang.

Now, while this sounds like a slice of pure heaven, the question is, is this more useful than Void Strike or Crit, which does extra damage to all mobs? And yes, Unchanting doesn't affect normal enemies. So maybe not. It's your gaming experience, and if normal enemies aren't a problem for you, while the enchanted ones are beginning to shove a stick up your rear, then Unchanting is probably the damage enchant for you. However, if you're using armor with Lifesteal, you could just do Crit or Void Strike along with Unchanting and Guarding Strike to cover yourself against absolutely everything the game has to offer. Otherwise, the typical combination of Crit or Void Strike along with Guarding Strike and either Leeching or Radiance will pretty much carry you through Apocalypse, aside from weapons that benefit more from things like Gravity, Thundering, Shockwave, or Swirling, of course. Worth noting, though, is that Heart of Ender does count as an enchanted mob. So if you do get access to a decent weapon with Unchanting on any difficulty, enjoy making short work of the game's unironically hardest boss.

Now, for the weapons themselves, while you will probably

Find fighters bindings with combos like shockwaves, swirling, and radiance to deal with mobs the easiest. You might find a whispering spears keep away game with void strike, gravity, and leeching or enchanting to be a bit more comfortable.

Then you have cursed axe and whirlwind, or even just a double axe. They have almost as much base DPS as fighters bindings and get a nice minimum 55 DPS boost from void strike on top of that. Every attack is a full swing around your entire body, hitting mobs all around you every time you attack. This makes them not only great for lazily cutting through large groups, but also amazing at spreading weakening to drop the damage of every mob around you by 40%.

If you have lifesteal armor and combine Iron Height Amulet alongside void strike with guarding strike and weakening on any double axe or its uniques, you'd need a magnifying glass to see your HP bar actually move from the hits you're taking. Aside from that, void strike, guarding strike, and leeching works fine. Same for katana, especially Master's Katana, which actually not only has more base DPS than fighters bindings thanks to the built-in crit, but void strike adds more than 60 more DPS to it minimum. Plus, katanas have good reach, fair knockback, and 180-degree swings, which means that it hits the entire area in front of you. So you can run the exact same enchant combo that I just mentioned for double axe and its uniques. Void strike, guarding strike, and leeching will carry you well, no matter what armor you're using.

Now, admittedly, you don't get many new armors for the purpose of your current build, but you do get Champion's Armor. And no, that's not the unique version; the unique is actually Hero's Armor. It's just that the extra perk of Hero's Armor only adds having your health potions heal nearby allies, which isn't really useful for a melee build in single player. And it's a lot easier to just farm Champion's Armor instead.

With Champion's Armor, what we're looking at is 35 damage reduction and 40% reduced potion cooldown. This is especially good at this point in the game. Normally, I would suggest you to use your three armor and enchant slots for cooldown, either snowball or chilling, and then deflect. And we'll get to why later. But you can combine this reduced potion cooldown with refreshment and potion barrier to make the most broken melee build in the entire game.

Like I said, potion barrier reduces the damage you take by 90% for nine seconds after you use a health potion. That's dividing the damage you take by ten. With 40% reduced potion cooldown, it means your potions recharge every 27 seconds, 9 of which would be potion barrier. So this means that you have 18 seconds of no potion barrier. While refreshment reduces your potion cooldown by 3 seconds for every mob you kill with your weapon. See where this is going? If you kill just 6 mobs in the 9 seconds that your potion barrier is active, you can use it again and again and again and again and again. Constant 90% damage reduction.

Pair this with cooldown on your armor and surprise gift to give you between 1 and 2 different potions or arrow bundles every time you use a health potion. So you can have constant strength potion boosts. You have yourself the most effective melee build of all time.

Aside from that though, the reason that I mentioned deflect for your general armor and enchant now isn't for the 45% chance to avoid projectile damage from ranged mobs. No, no, no. It's their enchantments. Through sheer negligence on Mojang's part, ranged mobs have the most overpowered enchantments on them out of any mobs in the game. They have gravity to infinitely hold you in place. They have fire aspect to deal massive damage to you with just a single shot. They have poison cloud, which does insane damage. They have critical hit, which lets them do insane damage. They have weakening, which cuts your own damage down nearly in half. And they have levitation shot, which may as well be the "take your life count and reduce it by one" button, since it lifts you in the air for a few seconds, disabling all of your controls in the process. Mind you, which leaves you open to free hits from all mobs around you, and then drops you down for a good chunk of fall damage on top of all of that. So yeah, I'll take the 45% chance to not deal with all of that, please and thank you.

And now, speaking of ranged, Apocalypse does add some more ranged options, but for brevity's sake, I'll just say that aside from Imploding Crossbow, you might get some use from a Void Collar or Soul Hunter Crossbow for melee. The added caveat being that they can have Anima Conduit for extra healing. But from lots of experience, I can say that if you have Leeching, Radiance, or Lifesteal with the appropriate weapon, the extra 6% of your max HP per mob kill isn't going to make a live or die difference at all. Plus, you lose out on the combination of safety and raw destructive power from Imploding Crossbow.

The bonus to Soul Hunter Crossbow is that the triple shots give Wild Rage more than a 78% chance to trigger per shot. The downside is it only drops during daily trials that add Burst Crossbow to the loot pool, like Fiery Forge or Underhalls, which is the secret level from Highblock Halls. The thing with ranged weapons is there's a lot of combos that you can run depending on your build. Bows can use a combination of Burst Bowstring, Cooldown Shot, and Tempo Theft or Void Strike to support with more artifact cooldown. While ones with multiple shots like Heart Crossbow make great use of Multishot, Chain Reaction, and Gravity or Infinity with multiple fireworks arrows.

For right now, if following the guide for solid melee builds, the best support you could get would be the Imploding Crossbow that I mentioned with Multishot for mass group destruction, Infinity to counter the low ammo count, and either Wild Rage or Tempo Theft to either split up mob aggro or give yourself a speed boost to run circles around your imminent victims.

And now, while I don't have much different to say about ranged weaponry for Apocalypse, by far the biggest change comes from the artifacts. And oh boy, is it a change. Maybe not a change in number, but definitely a huge change in potency. Likely, if you've been following this and using a melee build, or if you're still listening to this and want to use a melee build, you're thinking about going with Ironhide Amulet, Deathcap Mushroom, and Satchel of Elixirs, because strength potions sound pretty nice, right? Well, how about an artifact that not only reduces the damage of all nearby mobs by 25%, but also triples the damage of everything that hits them? Because my friend, that is what Gong of Weakening does. Found in Desert Temple. Did I pick a good level to farm or what?

This artifact is the absolute best "get out of a bad situation free" card in the game. You can be a second from death and be saved by this artifact, just for the sheer damage boost it gives alone. Not only does it make mobs deal reduced damage, but killing them three times faster also divides the remaining damage they could have done to you as well, while also speeding up your Leeching and/or Lifesteal recovery three times faster too. And like I said, it's not just the physical damage that's tripled; all damage that the enemy takes gets tripled as well. And this triple damage does not affect the recoil damage that you take from Thorns mobs; you still just take the normal recoil damage you would have without Gong's influence.

Now compare that to Satchel of Elixir's strength potions, which are just a two times base damage multiplier, are a flat damage buff, only affect your physical damage, do not have added damage reduction, and make you take increased Thorns damage on top of that. If you're using Gong of Weakening, you can still get strength potions to drop normally, or from looting or Surprise Gift, and then you have that boost on top of your Gong. There's simply no comparison. If you're in a jam and need some mobs dead, or if you just want a mob dead, Gong of Weakening is the absolute best artifact for the job. In its momentary duration, it is more of a damage boost than Deathcap Mushroom or Strength Potion. And if your armor has a damage buff and you have Void Strike, Gong of Weakening could be more of a DPS boost than both Deathcap Mushroom and Strength Potion combined.

Now, there is actually another artifact that I want to briefly talk about, and it's one that you've had access to since starting the game, but now is when it's the most potent. Satchel of Elements is an artifact that anyone can obtain from the added Gauntlet of Gale's level from the Windswept Peaks mountain, which does not require owning the DLC to play. And now, what it does is it targets up to seven mobs in a wide area around you, either freezing them to slow their movements, setting them on fire to deal massive damage over time, or strike them with high damage lightning bolts that are each close in power to a Lightning Rod. And its cooldown is only 10 seconds.

And I can hear you all asking yourselves, "Why hasn't Shin mentioned this artifact until now?" Well, if you're a new player who's still watching this video, then it's not too late to go get it. But for a melee build, it doesn't serve it as well as Ironhide Amulet, Deathcap Mushroom, and Gong of Weakening do. It's better for a mage build, and that's something you can do now.

Apocalypse gives access to Splendid Robe. It's the unique of a Battle Robe, which you can find in Redstone Mines and Creepy Crypt, which is the secret level of Creeper Woods. On top of 30% more melee damage, the armor gives you 40% reduced artifact cooldown and 50% more artifact damage. If you couple this with Cooldown, Fire Focus, and Lightning Focus, you have a very powerful mage build with just two sets of elements for offense, and then a Wind Horn to blow mobs away in case RNG decides that it's funny to give you the useless freezing effect five times in a row. And no, I'm not joking, that happens a lot more often than you'd think.

And after that, a soul melee weapon with Anima Conduit, Void Strike, and Looting, along with a soul ranged weapon with Anima Conduit, Looting, and either Wild Rage or Tempo Theft will help round out the rest of the build. Though if you're still going the pure soul build route, the recommendation still remains a Jailer's Scythe or any Scythe really, with Anima Conduit, Void Strike, and Soul Siphon, then Wither Armor with Soul Focus, Snowball, and Bag of Souls, Void Collar with Anima Conduit, Soul Siphon, and Wild Rage, and finally your artifacts being Corrupted Beacon, Harvester, and Lightning Rod. And if you want to have fun with Soul Lantern, still, this is your last chance, because Apocalypse is the final difficulty mode that will let you do that without violently kicking your teeth in.

Speaking of which, there's just one actual final difficulty mode left for you to conquer in this game. Something so hard it'll make you wish Mojang had just stayed in bed the day they'd even thought of it. A difficulty mode spawned from the bowels of the devil himself. One so frustrating and so unfair that you will find it impossible imagining that the devs actually playtested it. I'm talking, of course, about Apocalypse Plus. But lucky for you, I'm talking about the first original version of it, where the mobs were twice as strong, twice as tanky, nearly three times the speed, and had a 25% chance to revive over and over and over and over again every time you killed them. Safe to say that pretty much every fan complained about it, so eventually Mojang completely reworked and rebalanced it. So now it's a lot easier to conquer, and in this guide, I'll tell you how.

The difficulty mode itself is pretty straightforward. For all intents and purposes, it's just Apocalypse mode, but it gets harder as you climb from Apocalypse 1, 2, plus 2, plus 3, and so on and so forth. And the way you do this is by clearing designated boss missions on the minimum required difficulty that the game tells you. If you do the same mission twice, it won't register unless you've unlocked the next set of plus difficulties. And aside from mobs getting increasingly stronger and your loot also getting stronger, the mobs and you are given special modifiers that make the game harder than normal. By the time you reach Apocalypse 25, mobs will have 50% more health, do 50% more damage, have 80% more movement speed, be almost completely resistant to all natural forms of hit stun (aside from a few weapons), there will be 3.3 times the amount of enchanted mobs than normal Apocalypse mode, and on top of all that, all forms of healing will be reduced by 30% for you. Sounds fun, right?

Well, it's actually not as bad as it sounds. You have access to all the tools you need to deal with this. But first off, you need to get to Apocalypse 25 in the first place. If you've gotten a good set of gear and enchantments that are working well for you so far, you want to upgrade them so you can keep using them as the mobs get stronger. Because of this, it's good to have two sets of gear so you could have one upgrading with the blacksmith while you use the other one to complete levels.

I'm also going to tell you a little trick that'll make it take less time for you to upgrade your stuff to higher power. What power your stuff is when you get it back from the blacksmith depends entirely on what your equipped power level is when you load up camp. So as you're doing the three runs on whatever difficulty the blacksmith tells you to, you want to keep all the highest power gear you find in those levels – the highest power melee, armor, and artifacts – before you finish the third and final run for the blacksmith. Equip them all to get your player power as high as possible, and then finish the level to load up camp. Or you can finish the level, equip all of the gear at camp, and then exit to the main menu before going back into the camp. Either works, as long as you haven't picked up your gear yet and you're loading the camp with that power level.

Now, money might be an issue for you. So the best advice that I can give is running Creepy Crypt and killing all the mobs and opening all the chests. Between emerald drops and loot drops, you can get around a good two to three thousand emeralds from one run. I sometimes will get four to five thousand myself. If you keep doing this, you'll be able to climb Apocalypse Plus pretty efficiently.

Now, while that's all well and good, what do you actually do to combat the stronger mobs with their new nasty enchants and extra modifiers? Well, this isn't too difficult. Mobs might have 50% more HP than they normally would have, but you've had experience dealing with mobs without any damage buffs on your weapons. So adding Crit or Void Strike helps to cancel out their HP buff. And similarly, you never really need Ironhide Amulet for default through Apocalypse mode. I never used it, and that was back when Guarding Strike wasn't even a thing. With those two combined, it more than counters their 50% damage increase on Apocalypse 25.

The speed increase also doesn't matter that much, since usually it speeds them up running towards you, so you can kill them faster. It's only really annoying when chasing ranged mobs. The healing nerf, though, is a bit more noticeable, even if Mojang hid the modifier from view like the scumbags that they often are. I still haven't forgotten the whole "let's add invisible mobs to the game without telling players in patch notes" thing. If you think I'm still salty about that, you're damn right I am. But even with the player healing nerf on top of the mob damage buff, adding Ironhide Amulet and/or Guarding Strike cancels out the healing nerf by reducing the damage that you take by a lot. As long as you're using Leeching, Lifesteal, or Radiance appropriately, you should have more than enough healing to not need to worry about even having to potion for the most part.

Honestly, the thing that you'll notice the most is the fact that mobs are no longer getting hits done by your normal attacks anymore. And aside from certain weapons, they never will. On top of that, a lot more mobs are enchanted too, giving them more than 2.5 times more health and adding all sorts of nasty abilities. But because of these things, Unchanting and Stunning get a lot more use now, way more than they ever did in default through Apocalypse mode.

And now, Unchanting is already nice to have for Apocalypse, but with the sheer amount of enchanted mobs in Apocalypse Plus, and the fact that they'll be the ones more likely kicking your teeth in, it can give Void Strike and Crit a serious run for their money as your weapons' soul damage enchant, just from the trouble you save yourself on enchanted mobs alone. Though, of course, weapons like Fighters Bindings that get 80% more DPS from Swirling, Rapiers that get over 115% more DPS from Thundering and Lightning Focus, and weapons like Claymore that get a minimum 76.7% DPS boost from Void Strike – those are better off with those instead of Unchanting for their main damage enchant. Even Soul Knives and Hammers, which get a minimum 70% DPS boost from Void Strike.

As for Stunning, this is your answer to mobs being nigh immune to natural stun lock. Each hit has a 15% chance to stun the enemy for about two seconds naturally. This means that the faster the weapon, the more likely you are to unlock the enemy. With weapons like Sickles and Gauntlets, you have over a 91% chance to keep enemies stun-locked. With Daggers, you have over a 95% chance. With Rapiers, you have up to a 97.7% chance. With the added reach, and with Fighters Bindings, you have a whopping 99.3% chance to keep enemies stun-locked, meaning it'll be your next birthday before the next time you see a mob try to attack you again.

For a quick and easy frame of reference, if the weapon is Growing Staff speeder faster (that being 4.3 hits per second), you have over a 75% chance to keep mobs stun-locked with Stunning, assuming that you're using Deathcap Mushroom with plus 25% attack speed armor. That is the minimum stun lock that I go with. But boy, does it really help. With a 75% or higher chance to keep mobs unlocked, you could look at that as reducing the average hits that you're taking from them by about 75% or more, which is the same as a 75% DPS reduction. It's mainly for this reason that Rapiers are among the best weapons in the game. And if you're still having a hard time believing that a Rapier or Stunning could be that good, just check out my vids using a Bee Stinger or my Soggy Cave daily trial run of Fighters Bindings, and it'll show you the power of Stunning for yourself. Stunning is comfy enough to use a Bee Stinger on a build without Ironhide Amulet, Gong of Weakening, or Guarding Strike, and still not need a potion.

Now, as for armor, because of the increasingly tough and even more increasingly enchanted mobs, Potion Barrier becomes a lot more of a useful lifeline if the rest of your build can't cut it. On top of that, having Deflect save you from the throws of nasty ranged mob enchants will save you the most trouble in the long run. As an added aside, at least when your Ironhead Amulet reaches around power 170 and your Deathcap Mushroom reaches power 200, they become infinitely sustainable with just one Cooldown enchant.

If you wanted a truly solid build for tackling Apocalypse Plus all the way to plus 25, my suggestion would be Wither Armor or Spider Armor with Potion Barrier, Cooldown, and Deflect. While using either a fast weapon with Crit, Unchanting, and Guarding Strike, or a slower weapon with Void Strike instead of Crit. And then the Imploding Crossbow combination that I mentioned, along with Ironhide Amulet, Deathcap Mushroom, and Gong of Weakening. However, running a Rapier or Fighter's Bindings with Gravity, Stunning, and Radiance on any armor that you can find with those useful enchants I mentioned would be more than enough as well. Pretty much any mob that comes after you will get sucked into that black hole of stun lock that it can't escape from until its inevitable demise.

Now, while this is nice for helping to deal with the challenge that Apocalypse Plus throws at us, Mojang didn't leave us high and dry with nothing extra to show for it. While this has been something you could go for since starting the game on default, they're the most useful now. I'm talking about Gilded Items. Items that, on top of their set number of enchantment slots, come with an extra enchantment built-in that can be any enchantment that the piece of gear could normally get. But unlike with unique built-in enchants, gilded enchants can be level 3.

I should preface this by saying that they don't start showing up as level 3 enchants until you're around Apocalypse 21 difficulty, so you shouldn't be seriously farming for an endgame gilded piece of gear too early. But an extra enchant is still useful nonetheless. As for the gilded items themselves, you get them by doing Ancient Hunts, which you can find in a cave under the camp and access by offering up different combinations of gear that has a rune combination that aligns with different ancient mobs. If you have a rune combination that aligns with any ancient, you can start the Ancient Hunt, which takes you to a level that's comprised of three random sections you find throughout the game. Each hunt is littered with any mob that you can find throughout the game, but most commonly you'll find Piglins, Wither Skeletons, and Blazes. Since you enter Ancient Hunts through Nether Portals in the first place.

These hunts are filled with what are called Gold Rooms, which are filled with chests that give gold instead of emeralds, or some giving both sometimes. Though these rooms are special and house an ancient mob inside. They're stronger versions of normal mobs with different enchants on them and are accompanied by enchanted minions. These minions can be anything, including even mini-bosses. Every ancient mob has its own drop pool, and when you kill it, it'll give you a gilded piece of gear based on that drop pool. But we don't care about that. The RNG luck that you need to get a gilded unique to drop with good enchants and a good gilded enchant built-in at level 3 is abysmally low. Instead, you want to do enough Ancient Hunt runs to unlock all three inventory slots in the Piglin Merchant shop. So it doesn't matter what gear you offer for the hunt, as long as it lets you start a hunt in the first place.

Once you have all three merchant slots unlocked and you've gotten a pretty large amount of gold, you want to back up your save, either online, on a flash drive, on another PC folder, or just by uploading your hero to your game's hero storage. Then you simply just go into the game and restock the merchant over and over to look for something that has the god roll and chance that you want. If you get nil after running out of gold, you just restore your backed-up save and try again. Rinse and repeat until you finally get a gilded piece of gear worth buying.

Now, skipping past all of that, assuming that you have the luck of a god or access to a way to make whatever you wanted, or know someone else who does, this is generally what you would want to run for the best balance on your build. Generally, if it's a fast weapon that doesn't use Void Strike, well, you'd want to run Crit, Unchanting, Guarding Strike, and Radiance. Or if you're using Lifesteal armor, you can run Committed or Gravity instead of Radiance.

Now, if it's a slower weapon that does use Void Strike, its bread and butter would be Void Strike, Unchanting, Guarding Strike, and Leeching. Or if using Lifesteal armor, you can use Gravity, Weakening, or even Crit instead of Leeching, depending on what the weapon benefits most from. Whether you use Weakening or Gravity depends on the weapon. Weakening benefits weapons out of a wide hit area because you're able to affect more mobs per swing, and Gravity is good for weapons that have a narrow hit area because it pulls mobs in so you can hit more mobs at a time. It's also good for weapons with long reach because you're able to hold mobs at that distance so they can't hit you. And if the weapon has both a narrow hit area and has long reach, Gravity is just one of the best options for it.

And for any of these weapons, be they fast or slow, you can always use Refreshment in place of Guarding Strike if you want to spam Potion Barrier and Surprise Gift. Aside from that, Fighter's Bindings and Coral Blade can run a fun combo of Gravity, Stunning, Swirling, and Radiance, while other fast weapons would usually prefer Crit or Ambush instead of Swirling. While Rapiers do better with either Exploding or the combination of Thundering and Lightning Focus for damage instead.

As for your armor, Potion Barrier, Cooldown, Deflect, and Chilling would be your best overall choices. If the armor you're using already has any of these built-in, you can always just throw in Cowardice or Snowball instead, or any of Lightning or Poison Focus if the weapon that you're using has Thundering or as Jungle Poison (which is different from Poison Cloud, and I'll talk about that in a bit). And for a ranged weapon like the bombastic Imploding Crossbow, Multishot, Wild Rage, Infinity, and Tempo Theft is the combination mine has, and it's the one piece of gear I have that's done by far the most work. I cannot stress that enough.

And finally, for artifacts, Ironhide Amulet for defense, Deathcap Mushroom for offense, and Gong of Weakening for both. And to get you out of pinch situations, by far serves you the best. With this build, you have at least 50% to 60.6% damage reduction at all times. With Guarding Strike on top, it goes up to either 75% or 80.3% damage reduction, depending if your armor already has 35% reduction built-in or not. For general DPS, you'll be doing anywhere from plus 40% to more than a 100% damage boost, while doubling all of that against enchanted enemies, and boosting your DPS further by 75% to 100% with Deathcap Mushroom.

To put this into perspective, compared to your character without any enchants or artifacts, offensively, you'll be multiplying your DPS by up to over four times. Defensively, you're dividing incoming damage by either two times, two and a half times, four times, or over five times the normal damage, increasing your base advantage by up to over 20 times from normal. And that's not even including Gong of Weakening. In dangerous situations that somehow manage to threaten a build like this, you could just use Gong for 25% more damage reduction on top of tripling your total DPS against the enemies that you want to Alt+F4 out of existence. Meanwhile, on other builds, you can have between 85% to 88.2% damage reduction with Weakening, or divide the overall damage you're taking by between 4 to 100 by stun-locking mobs to death with Stunning.

In short, Apocalypse 25 shouldn't give you any trouble at all with this setup. In fact, in comparison, it would actually seem harder to start the game all over again on default with a fresh character by that point. While this technically concludes this guide for default through Apocalypse 25, I want to take some time to go over the weapons themselves. I mentioned a few, but there's a lot of amazing weapons here. And as you can see, I've divided them up by tiers based on their potential, their ease of use, their performance on Apocalypse Plus, and their performance compared to each other. I ranked them that way because if it was just for how they handled Apocalypse Plus, then the lowest tier here would be a even for the lonely old Coral Blade down there at the bottom on its own.

As for the weapons themselves, first off, we've got the OG of OGs, the king of fisticuffs, and prevailer of Jojo memes itself, the tried and true Fighters Bindings. With 15.1 hits per second, their overall speed is rivaled by none. Able to fill up over one third of your health bar per second with just Radiance alone, has over a 99% chance to keep mob stun lock with Stunning, and gets a massive DPS boost from Shockwave, Swirling, and even Thundering. The pushback of each machine gun punch can push mobs out of reach of attacking you, no problem. They don't fear Thorns mobs at all, and there's not a single other weapon that can run as many enchant combos as them. And as if that wasn't enough, they even have incredibly high DPS on top of all that. Not the highest, but it's pretty far up there. The one meta enchant they can't run very well is Void Strike, and even then, it's not the worst thing in the world on them. And to top it all off, they hit their attack speed cap of 15.1 hits a second with just a Deathcap Mushroom alone, so it doesn't even matter what armor you use with them. In short, is there even a question why these fists are so overused? It doesn't take a scientist to notice how these things feel like you're wearing double Infinity Gauntlets, just snapping mobs out of existence left and right.

Next, you have Double Axes, and I'm just going to include the whole family line here because Whirlwind's added Shockwave and Cursed Axe's added Exploding don't make the biggest difference in the world, especially at level 1, but they don't need to. These weapons have a base DPS almost as high as Fighters Bindings and they get a nice 55% damage boost minimum from Void Strike. Now, unlike Fighters Bindings, you do need to have armor with 25% more attack speed to get this base DPS, but it's still amazing and they can easily surpass Fighters Bindings. On top of that, each attack is a full spin that hits all around you all the time. This massively multiplies the total damage that you do to groups, allowing you to very recklessly move through them as you're cleaving everything in half. It also serves as the best Refreshment weapon because of how many mobs it can kill per second in groups. And Weakening works amazingly well on it since you're hitting everything around you all the time. These weapons basically embody the perfect balance of offense and defense. Pokemon Sword and Shield? Nah, how about both then?

Next, you've got Moon Daggers. And I know that they're not S+ tier according to my list, but there's a reason that I'm mentioning them now. They might have a lot of the same issues that daggers have, such as short reach, small hit area, no pushback, but the built-in Enigma Resonator gives them a 30% DPS boost at a full soul meter, which skyrockets them up the DPS totem pole well beyond Fighter's Bindings. And to top it off, they can use Stunning really well too. But do they still have problems reaching mobs even with Gravity? Yes. But can they make you invincible with Guarding Strike? Well, every weapon can, but the higher the DPS, the better it does it. And it makes an okay soul weapon too, even if Scythes do it better.

Then we have Nameless Bleed, another S+ tier entry. It does lack in raw DPS, but it has better reach and much better hit area than Moon Daggers. It also gets the same 60% DPS boost from Shockwave and 80% DPS boost from Swirling that Fighters Bindings do, but it's the built-in Weakening that matters here. That 20% damage reduction alone really helps the weapon stand out, since it gives you a free 25% damage advantage against any mobs that you're hitting. But due to how Weakening and Void Strike interact, it also means Void Strike goes from a 40% DPS boost to a 52% boost for free. As if the weapon even needs the damage to be awesome. And you want to know what the best part is? As long as you're on Apocalypse, all of these weapons that I just mentioned can be found from Soggy Cave, so you can rest easy knowing that farming it over and over and over and over is not an active idiocy.

Next up, we have the entire Battle Staff line. They have a long and dare I say stylish combo that has decent speed and knockback on top of DPS that surpasses even Moon Daggers, and they get more than a 50% DPS boost from Void Strike on top of that. It's also worth mentioning Battle Staff of Terror and Growing Staff separately because they're actually a bit slower than the base Battle Staff. This does hurt Battle Staff of Terror's DPS a bit since the built-in Exploding isn't consistent damage, but Growing Staff has Committed built-in, so it not only has more DPS than Battle Staff (over 3.4 million at base with top speed), but it gets a bigger DPS boost from Void Strike on top of that. To say that Battle Staves don't hit like a goddamn truck, even without any damage enchants, would be a bolt-based lie.

Up next, we have Master's Katana, and to be fair, this extends to Dark Katana and even normal Katana as well. It's just that Master's Katana has built-in Critical Hit that boosts its base DPS to over 2.9 million, on top of it having good reach, a 180-degree hit area, good knockback, and over a 60% DPS boost minimum from Void Strike. This gives them very nice stopping power on top of just their normal killing power. And the best part is that on Apocalypse, you can get both Battle Staves and Katanas from Lower Temple. Cheers.

Next, we have Whispering Spear, which in fairness includes Spear and Fortune Spear as well. They have middling speed and DPS along with abysmal hit area and just a moderate DPS boost from Void Strike, but they make up for it with their absurd reach. The final hit in their combo can hit from eight and a half blocks away. Eight and a half blocks! Oh, what's that? You want to get your friend's attention and he lives on the complete opposite side of the country from you and just poke him with a spear? Not this sharp end. Now, just poke him with the blunt hand. So if you combine this long reach with Gravity, you can potentially hold mobs at the end of your weapon's reach so they can't hit you at all, ever. For this purpose, the built-in Echo of Whispering Spear is actually really good, adding extra hit now and then to add to the weapon's pushback and killing speed so that mobs don't reach you before they're dead. This does require a bit of positioning, but the weapon's very easy to abuse from behind objects or around corners, or even just out in the open. It's one of two weapon types that you could run fairly comfortably without Guarding Strike or Iron Knight Amulet. The other being the Rapier line.

In terms of potential DPS, these weapons are abysmal. It's barely over 1.5 million, and they can't even use Void Strike whatsoever. It's so low that even with all the physical damage boosts you could give it, neither Lifesteal nor Leeching can beat the healing per second that Radiance gives them. And to top it all off, their hit area basically doesn't exist. But if you're using these weapons for damage, you're using them wrong. For one thing, they have pretty long reach, allowing you to use Gravity with them to hold a lot of mobs out of reach of hitting you. It's real easy to pull mobs into this black hole of little jabs of slow death. But on top of all this is their speed. As I mentioned before, Stunning gives them a 97.7% chance to keep mobs stun-locked until they die. So good luck to anything ever hitting you again, let alone killing you before Radiance heals you right back up. On top of that, the combination of their reach, Gravity, and initial low DPS makes Exploding not just a good damage enchant on them, but a really good damage enchant on them. Or you can just slap on Thundering with Lightning Focus and watch everything disintegrate in front of you with over double your original DPS, including the fact that the lightning spreads to other mobs as well. And to top all this off, Bee Stinger has a built-in chance to spawn bees with every mob you kill, which only helps you when the mobs are so busy becoming ping cushions as they fight off your little army that they don't even care about you coming up to stab them in the back, absolutely for free. I do not say this lightly: on Apocalypse 25, this weapon can legitimately carry you through a level without Ironhide Amulet, Gong of Weakening, or Guarding Strike. Really, the only downside to these weapons is their scarcity. They only appear during daily trials for Highblock Halls, Arch Haven, Nether Fortress, and Frosted Fjord, as well as from the Solemn Giant Ancient, a possible reward from the Tower. And if you're lucky, you can find them in shops too. So yeah, they're very rare.

Now, the next entry is actually two weapons because they're both very similar: the Pickaxe line and Truth Seeker. Both are narrow-hitting weapons that have high damage per hit and are a little bit on the slow side, but their raw DPS is incredible, both breaking 3 million. Pickaxe gets a 55% DPS boost from Void Strike, while Truth Seeker's is a whopping 70% boost. And on top of that, it also has more reach than a Pickaxe, but still, both are very solid weapons. And now, because of the lacking reach and lower damage per hit than a Truth Seeker, you can also run Shockwave and Swirling on a Pickaxe since they trigger every hit and add decent damage. But you might prefer Gravity for both of them instead, since you can funnel mobs into the multiplied damage hits of Void Strike and Unchanting, as well as any other physical damage buffs that you have going on too. 20% weapon damage boost aura, 30% more melee damage, Cowardice, Strength Potion, Reckless – all of those get multiplied by Void Strike and Unchanting. Shockwave and Swirling do not. And while Pickaxes and Truth Seekers are mainly single-target weapons that you would want to use Gravity with, their high DPS makes them really good at maintaining Guarding Strike if you want to use that instead, since they can absolutely massacre a mob in less than 4 seconds flat.

And then next up, we have Heartstealer. It's one of the Claymore uniques, set apart by the built-in Leeching. This lets you run it on any armor that you want to without having to use an enchantment slot for healing. This allows you to run another damage enchant if you want instead, like Crit, to help give it monstrous potential DPS. On top of that, Void Strike gives the weapon a whopping minimum 76.7% DPS boost. Couple that with its reach, hit area, and knockback, and you have a really strong weapon that I might have one-shot Hard to Vendor with. Oh, and speaking of Claymores, the Echoing Void DLC gives us Obsidian Claymore and its unique, the Starless Knight. Think of Claymores only without the middle combo hit and somehow even slower, on top of looking big and hulking and absolutely gorgeous. The weapon not only has pretty far reach in a 360-degree hit area around the combo finisher, but it also has a monstrous 3.1 million base DPS and change, which also gets a whopping 100% DPS boost from Void Strike minimum. So to put this into perspective, since the second hit of the combo is twice as strong as the first, and since that second hit would hit twice as hard with Void Strike, the first hit only needs to do 20% of an enemy's health in order for the second hit to completely annihilate what's left of it. On top of all that, it is an absolute beast with Unchanting, able to one-shot a lot of enchanted mobs with just the second hit alone without Void Strike, and it can make amazing use of both Guarding Strike and Weakening as well.

And now, to continue with the Echoing Void weapons, we have Backstabber and its unique, Swift Striker. Now, since both weapons are very fast, the built-in Echo of Swift Striker is only adding little over 1% more DPS, so it's negligible. Rather, while they have very short reach and almost no hit area, they more than make up for it by having over 3 million base DPS on top of getting a decent damage boost from Void Strike as well. They're also fairly fast, so they can use Stunning with more than an 80% chance to stun-lock mobs. On top of this, since they have Ambush built-in as well, they do a free 15% more damage to those stun-locked mobs, or if you blind them with Income Glow Squid Armor, which is always fun too.

And to finish the Echoing Void weapons, we have Void Touch Blades and Bacon and Eggs, I mean Beginning and the End. Anyway, it's about time we finally got some dual wield swords in here. Anyone who's been with my channel from the beginning knows that I originally started out as a Sword Art Online game channel. Well, technically it was actually Super Smash Bros. Brawl hacks, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Pokémon stuff, but my channel only really picked up when I started playing Sword Online. So yeah, dual wield kind of my jam. And now, while these two weapons are slower than Backstabber and have about the same reach, these weapons have massive base DPS, literally just 149 short of 3.5 million. And this is partly due to the built-in Void Strike that they have, as well as Beginning and the End having Leeching built-in too, so you can focus more on running damage and chance. When fully enchanted, Beginning and the End easily has the second highest legit DPS in the entire game. And yes, that means that there is a weapon that's stronger, and we'll be talking about it shortly. And on top of this massive DPS, the weapon also has a full 360-degree spin move that hits all around you, making it great for spreading Void Strike and Weakening as well. The spin does have a blind spot directly behind you, but the mobs have to be right up against you to be in that blind spot to begin with. Beginning and the End can also run Refreshment really well too. The only downside is their short reach, but just like Kitty Toe, they excel in close quarters combat anyway and make you look damn cool while doing it too. And in the end, doesn't that really matter most?

After that, we have Sponge Striker, the unique of Coral Blade from the Hidden Depths DLC. And I know what you're thinking, "Shin, how can a unique of the worst-ranked weapon on your list be S+ tier?" Well, my understandably confused friend, that's because of one simple thing you've forgotten, and that is Mojang's programming incompetency. You see, the weapon is supposed to absorb the damage that you take while attacking and dish it back at the end of the combo, but due to a coding oversight, this damage skyrockets into such a high number that it's even Scrooge McDuck's bank vault looking at it with envy. Well, okay, it's not that high, but still, it's a big number. Because of this, it's not uncommon to see occasional damage numbers in the billions with this weapon. Now, until somewhat recently, you used to be able to force this damage to trigger with the damage that you took from Pain Cycle 2, but Mojang patched that out. Still, the weapon is ridiculously strong without it. With Gravity and Swirling, you can do a good amount of area damage to the mobs around you, while Weakening allows you to tank hits easily while triggering the weapon's massive damage from those hits you're taking, while Radiance and Lifesteal from Spider Armor keep you healed up. That would currently be the best combo for Sponge Striker because it has the most synergy. You've got Gravity grouping mobs together so they're all getting hit by Swirling and all being affected by Weakening, so you can easily tank their hits and deal that insane damage back to them while just as easily healing it all off. Or at least, that was the best combo I could come up with for them. The one downside, aside from the weapon's small region hit area, is that any kill that happens from this absurd damage spike will not trigger things like Refreshment, Leeching, Guarding Strike, Exploding, or anything else that requires a melee kill to trigger. So, as a result, the only enchants that really matter are Gravity, Radiance, and Weakening. The reason why I mentioned Swirling in my combo is because even with Gravity, you can only affect one mob with these insane damage hits at a time. All of these things combined are what keep Sponge Striker from being an S+ tier weapon, though it's still an absolutely amazing weapon regardless, especially for taking out strong individual mobs. Either way, I strongly recommend at least one Radiance and Lifesteal armor for added healing because ultimately, the only thing that matters with this weapon is survival, since its effect will take care of the damage for you.

And now, remember when I mentioned Jungle Poison earlier? Well, take whatever you know about Poison Cloud and just toss it out the

window like Jeff from accounting, because that's not what we're talking about here. A whip with poison cloud isn't going to be doing you much good. A vine whip on the other hand, that's a completely different story.

Just like with Coral Blade and Sponge Striker, you see again that whip and vine whip is another case of the unique version of a weapon being on almost the entire other side of the planet in terms of a weapon tier list. While a whip has okay 2.1 million DPS and decent reach, the hit area is almost non-existent. And even if you use gravity to group mobs into one spot so you can hit more than one with each attack, you can only do 100 percent of the weapon's damage to one mob at a time. The other is only taking 10 percent of the full damage. So what you have here is an okay weapon with some defensive capability with gravity and a decent 70 DPS boost from Void Strike.

But Vine Lift is where things get extra spicy. See, unlike Poison Cloud, which has just a 30% chance to spawn a 345,000 DPS cloud of poison in one spot when you hit an enemy, Jungle Poison is quite a bit stronger. Not only does it always trigger with every hit and it sticks onto the enemy that you hit, but it adds even more poison DPS to start with, over 400,000 at the same power. And the poison damage scales up with most damage buffs as well. So if you use say, Unchanting, the poison DPS completely doubles against enchanted enemies. And with Void Strike, it's also about 70% more. However, since Void Strike is a rising damage multiplier that will increase up to plus 600% as long as you don't hit the enemy again, this allows the poison damage to climb and climb and climb and climb. After just one hit, it is no joke. When I say that this weapon can quite literally one-shot any enemy in the game, including bosses.

Now, for some of the bosses, you might need the help of Poison Focus and Gong with Strength Potion. Some might need Shadow Form's damage boost, and some might need both Strength Potion and Shadow Form. But still, this is a feat that not many weapons can claim to be able to come close to pulling off. And while this poison damage can also only deal full damage to one mob at a time when you're hitting multiple mobs at once, the defensive power of gravity and the speed of the hits, allowing you to hit any mob and move on as the poison kills it, makes this a very solid weapon to run in careful hands.

And finally, last but not least, we have the king weapon line of Minecraft Dungeons: the Anchor. And its unique, the one and only, the Alpha and Omega, the almighty and Crusted Anchor. If you needed a reason to play Hidden Depths, this was it. Anchors have a massive seven-block reach with every swing that also hits all around you. On top of that, the weapon does a whopping 2.1 million damage and change per hit, while actually having decent natural stun on enemies, as well as built-in gravity. The one downside is that its actual DPS is only a bit over 1.9 million because its swing speed is even slower than trying to drag fly paper against melting molasses.

But at the same time, that's what makes the weapon so strong. Because aside from the fact that it can still one-shot or at least two-shot most mobs in the game with just Unchanting alone, Void Strike gives the weapon a minimum 175% DPS boost, absolutely assuring that you're going to be two-shotting most things that you hit. For scale, that means that the second hit is almost three times as strong as the first hit. So when you land those two hits, you are doing almost four hits' worth of damage right there. Now, the massive hit area and high damage does make it incredibly dangerous to attack thorns mobs. But with just 35% reduction armor and Iron Hide Amulet, you can run Unchanting and still hit eight thorns mobs at the same time without getting yourself killed. 16 if you have Guarding Strike active. Do keep in mind, though, that if you have a Strength Potion or other buffs active, and that safe number of thorns mobs that you can hit is gonna be less, especially on the second hit when Void Strike takes effect.

On top of everything that I've mentioned, this weapon can also spread Weakening really effectively to cover any mobs that don't outright die to your Herculean hits. With the 2.75 times damage from Void Strike and 40% damage reduction from Weakening, it's like you're attacking with a literal melee gong of Weakening at all times. And now I know what you're thinking: how can a weapon as godly as this possibly get any better? Well, naturally, you just add Jungle Poison to it. Because that's not broken at all, is it? Well, actually, yes it is. And that's exactly what Encrusted Anchor has. With its slow speed and high base damage, the poison alone takes it from 1.9 million base DPS to over 3.4 million. Top that off with Void Strike increasing this monstrous poison damage the same way that it does with Vine Whip, and you have a weapon that can one-shot Notch himself. If Vine Whip can one-shot any boss in existence, Encrusted Anchor can do it even easier, on top of having an even more massive hit area to spread the poison. Its one downside is its slow speed, leaving you open to taking more hits. But at that point, does it really matter? This weapon can even one-shot a theoretical Mushu Monstrosity on a Tier 3 Daily Trial with 3 Threat Banners, a 200% mob health increase banner, and a 60% player damage decrease banner. It is that strong.

Now, both Anchors do have a blind spot if a mob is directly in front of you, which causes the weapon to sometimes swing harmlessly through its skull. But isn't that the safest place to be when you're up against a weapon that can hit you from anywhere on the planet? Mojang seems to think so. Anyway, while that covers up the top two melee weapon tiers, honorable mentions include Bone Club and its unique Bone Cudgel, both found in the Nether DLC. They have fairly decent 2.4 million base DPS with equally decent-ish hit area and nice reach, as well as pretty good knockback with each hit. The thing is, they're almost as slow as an Obsidian Claymore. But that also means that Void Strike gives them a hefty 85% DPS boost. One downside, though, is that while they do have a decent hit area, their animation shows an amazing 210-degree swing with a hitbox that's actually about 150 degrees. This can cause the edges of your swings to seemingly pass harmlessly through mobs, and the hit area is so narrow up close that you won't hit anything that's not directly in front of you if they're up close. If you get swarmed by creepers outside of your hit area, cheers.

Other honorable mentions include the entire Glaive weapon line, which includes Venom Glaive and my personal favorite, Grave Bane. They're very similar to Spears, only with less overall reach and a much wider hit area on the final hit. Their swing speed is also slower, giving their 2.1 million base DPS more than a 60% boost with Void Strike and pushing their DPS past the Spears. Their long reach does let them use the same gravity strategy as Spears, but the Spears have more reach, so they use it better. But this also means that while Glaives can't use gravity as well, their wider combo finishers means that they don't need gravity as much either, and they can run Guarding Strike more comfortably than Spears, too.

And now, lastly for honorable mentions is Resolute Tempest Knife, a unique of Tempest Knight found in Howling Peaks. They're similar to Swords, except their attack animation is in reverse. They have more speed and they have more base DPS with 2.7 million compared to a Sword's 2.3 million. They also get a respectable minimum 40% DPS boost from Void Strike on top of a massive one-second speed boost after every mob they kill. To add to this, Resolute Tempest Knife has Committed built-in to take its already amazing DPS up to over 3.2 million. So why is Resolute Tempest Knife the best of the three Tempest Knives only in a tier? It's because the weapon, for some reason, has really short reach and much more ridiculous knockback per hit than it should have, making it hard to actually keep any mobs inside the combo to use all that glorious DPS in the first place. Because of that, they practically need an enchantment slot for gravity to help hold mobs in place, which still doesn't fully help them. This not only means having to sacrifice an enchant slot, but their DPS is still a bit gimped compared to a Pickaxe, which often runs the same enchant combo. But I'd be lying if I said they still weren't fun to use. While Chill Gale Knife is an utter waste of a unique because it has freezing built-in, which literally does nothing, it's still one of my top 10 favorite Minecraft Dungeons weapons of all time.

Now, this isn't at all to say that none of the other weapons can be used, because I use them all and many of my favorites are farther down the tier list. But if I said that all weapons were created equally, well, I'd be a right out liar, wouldn't I? However, it does also depend on the build you're using. Some weapons can be the only choice for your build because it fits exactly what you need. Speaking of which, I want to take this time to go over some of the other builds that at least I've used myself besides melee.

The first is obviously a Soul Build, because I've talked about them throughout this guide. But now, with a gilded mindset, what you want to be using is a Jailer's Sight or any sight, really, with Void Strike to multiply your soul damage, Anima Conduit for extra healing and soul gathering, Enigma Resonator for soul gathering, or Weakening for defensive support, and Soul Siphon for lots of soul gathering. The fast, weak, and wide attacks help for Soul Siphon farming and for spreading Void Strike and Weakening. For the armor, you would generally want Wither Armor for its life steal healing you with all the artifact damage you're doing. But Soul Dancer Robe with its 50% extra artifact damage works too, albeit more challenging to use. You would want Soul Focus for more soul damage, Snowball to save yourself against certain enemies since your melee combat will be dog water, and it helps you to farm souls off of stun-lock mobs with Soul Sight too. Then you would want Bag of Souls to give you both more soul gathering and 599 max souls in your soul meter in case you need to really let loose. And finally, Lightning Focused to make Lightning Rod even stronger.

Next, you want Void Collar for its gravity to pull mobs together so they all get struck by Lightning Rod in one shot. Anima Conduit and Soul Siphon provide more healing and soul gathering, while Wild Rage helps split up mob aggro. And finally, Tempo Theft makes up for the build's complete lack of speed. And of course, the three classic soul artifacts of Corrupted Beacon for groups at range and narrow hallways, Harvester for less packed groups and mobs surrounding you, and Lightning Rod for mobs behind walls or in other rooms, especially powerful single targets you want to nuke or small pack groups you want to vaporize at once. All in all, this build would give you 15 to 17 soul gathering per soul orb and 102 souls per Soul Siphon trigger. And if you wanted to tweak this build slightly, you could go with Cooldown instead of Snowball on your Wither Armor, swapping Jailer's Sight for Moon Daggers with Stunning, Soul Siphon, Guarding Strike, and Void Strike. The Moon Daggers would have solid DPS on their own without even factoring Void Strike in, healing you with life steal while triggering major Soul Siphon with their mushroom hit speed. And naturally, you would also have Anima Conduit on your ranged weapon to add extra healing as well. If you are using a Lightning Rod, the same Void Collar mentioned before is fine. Otherwise, Saw Hunter Crossbow with those same enchants works wonders. You wouldn't need gravity, and the triple shots would give you nearly an 80% chance to trigger Wild Rage while also giving you a higher chance for Soul Siphon. You could also try Soul Fists, replacing Guarding Strike with Gravity to help them, but Moon Daggers still do this better in every way.

Now, related closely to Soul Builds will be Mage Builds, and these mean serious business. Among one of the best builds in the game, they use Satchel of Elements, or rather, they abuse it. For these builds, the melee weapon doesn't matter as much, as long as it's a soul weapon with Anima Conduit and Void Strike. Scythes are usually the better choice for their wide swings. A standard Mage Build can make use of any scythe with Void Strike, Anima Conduit, and either two Looting or two Prospectors.

Now, for the armor, you would want Splendid Robe, the unique Battle Robe that you can find on levels like Redstone Mines or Creepy Crypt. Apocalypse, which on top of 30% more melee damage, has the ultimate synergistic mage combination of 40% reduced artifact cooldown and 50% more artifact damage. Talk about busting! As for the enchants, you would first want Fire Focus and Lightning Focus for the satchels, then Cooldown to help recharge them quicker, and then either Snowball for defense, another Cooldown for defense and offense, Potion Barrier for the occasional super defense, or Death Barter if you're going with Prospector. For the ranged weapon, I would go with Void Collar using Anima Conduit, Wild Rage, and either Tempo Theft with Looting or Prospector, or two Looting or two Prospector. Looting being for the chance of Swiftness Potions and Shadow Brews being all over the place, and artifact-wise, you would want to use two Satchels of Elements in case you get stuck with a bunch of freezing effects which do bug all, or if you're not killing mobs fast enough. Wind Horn to blow mobs back and massively slow them down does wonders for helping recharge your satchel safely, or you can use Corrupted Seeds for this purpose. In which case, using Cooldown with Fire Focus, Lightning Focus, and Poison Focus on your Splendid Robe would let you run a full elemental mage build. I've done both, and they're both very fun.

Now, if you want to sacrifice that potential fun to make yourself an efficient-based murder machine, we can tweak this build just slightly. The melee would be the same, only 100% using two Prospector instead of Looting. For the Splendid Robe, you could do Lightning Focus, Cooldown, Electrified, and Death Barter. Your ranged weapon, on the other hand, would change quite a bit, being a Bow of Lost Souls with Anima Conduit, Burst Bowstring, Cooldown Shot, and either Tempo Theft, Void Strike, or another Prospector. And instead of Wind Horn or Corrupted Seeds, you would want to run Light Feather. The idea here is to spam your satchels while also spamming Light Feather. Each time you roll with it, Bowstring triggers, which then triggers Cooldown Shot, allowing you to use all of your artifacts again immediately, and then rinse and repeat. And since you're rolling a lot, Electrified isn't a bad option, while Death Barter and Prospector help you in general and against Deflector Thorns mobs specifically. You are essentially just spamming the artifact buttons and clearing the screen of mobs without feeling like you're really fighting anything. But it is by far the best way to mix both a speed run with a 100% clear run. I fully cleared Mushroom Island in six minutes without a scratch. It is seriously no joke.

Another Mage Build would be a Shadow Mage Build. This one is my design and is by far the cheesiest. Not too much actually changes with the build. You still run Cooldown, Fire Focus, and Lightning Focus on your Splendid Robe, but you also throw in Shadow Surge as well. The melee weapon doesn't really change either. You still want to run a scythe with Anima Conduit and Void Strike, but now you definitely want to run two Looting. And for the ranged weapon, you still want to run Void Collar with Anima Conduit. The difference is that you can either run Wild Rage with two Looting, or you can run three Looting. And for the artifacts, you'd only change the last one, running two Satchels of Elements with a Shadow Shifter. The idea here is to get a bunch of kills with your satchels early on so that you have enough souls for Shadow Shifter. Once in Shadow Form, no mobs will attack you, leaving you free to nuke them at your leisure. And while in Shadow Form, Shadow Surge will trigger with each kill you get, giving you an instant 16 additional souls per kill. You see what's going on here? This build allows you to easily stay in Shadow Form for the entire level, freely obliterating mobs with your satchels as if you weren't even there. And in case you somehow run out of both souls and Shadow Form, or when you're just starting off the level, I have Looting included to help make Shadow Brews drop really easily so you can enter a brief Shadow Form to start triggering Shadow Surge for your Shadow Shifter, which lasts well over 20 seconds in comparison to Shadow Brew, which only lasts 10. And let's just say that this build is so incredibly brokenly cheesy that I can do Tier 3, six-banner daily trials without taking a single hit.

Now, for a Shadow Build that's not as broken, I came up with a Shadow Rolling Build too. And I mean, this build can do levels hitless as well, but it kills slower and is much more difficult to use. And now, the melee weapon is kind of similar to a Mage Build, only the scythe instead uses Unchanting and Ambush on top of Anima Conduit and Looting. The idea here is Anima Conduit and Looting for the same reasons as the Shadow Mage Build, while Unchanting and Ambush is to deal the most single-hit damage to a tough enchanted mob group as your Shadow Form is about to run out, for a whopping 23.2 times a scythe's original damage. Just don't try doing this to any thorns mobs, because you will die. Now, again, this is only for when your Shadow Form is about to run out, because your main source of damage is going to come from your armor itself. That armor being Unstable Robes for the explosive teleporting rolls and soul gathering, which you can find from the Echoing Void DLC. Using Cooldown, Electrified, Lightning Focus, and Shadow Surge. The idea here is to enter Shadow Form and just start rolling around mobs, dealing both explosion damage and boosted Electrified damage to them, since those don't break your Shadow Form. For that purpose, we're gonna be using Shadow Shifter on top of two Light Feathers so you can constantly keep rolling. And finally, the ranged weapon is a Veiled Crossbow, which both has the chance for you to enter Shadow Form when killing a mob with it, and the first shot that you fire while in Shadow Form will not break you out of Shadow Form. The enchants on it are Gravity, Void Strike, Exploding, and Looting. Void Strike is to help kill mobs faster, or for you to tag a tough mob with it while in Shadow Form so that it multiplies the lightning and explosion damage that they take. Next, you have Exploding. If the Veiled Crossbow kills a mob and triggers your Shadow Form, that Shadow Form only lasts for three seconds. So Exploding is for that mob to potentially kill another mob within those three seconds, first Shadow Surge to trigger and give you more souls. Then you have Gravity, which is to defensively hold mobs away from you if you need it, while also grouping mobs into those explosions. And finally, Looting is for the chance of Shadow Brews dropping, the same reason as the Shadow Mage Build.

The next build is probably one that you wouldn't expect, especially coming from me, because I would be the first to say that pets are complete trash on Apocalypse Plus. Their AI is just awful. I have seen them standing still next to a Hoglin that was about to charge me, or watching them take hits while their back is turned. They will force you to take point when exploring, even though you are built to make them stronger and can't defend yourself. And even then, pets often get steamrolled by enchanted groups, wasting your artifact slot. You would need to fully build yourself for one pet by using Life Steal, Iron Hide Amulet, and Enchanter's Tome just to power one pet up, and even then, they're still not that good. However, while pets are absolutely awful on Apocalypse Plus, these are not only good, but they are downright busted. Already, you can see here that I have a normal melee build that uses a Bee Stinger with Bee Hive Armor. The build is comfortable enough that I can get by with just a Death Cap Mushroom while running two Buzzy Nests, no Iron Hide Amulet or Gong needed. Is this partly due to the Bee Stinger having Stunning a little, but the bees themselves are so good that I have a build that allows me to go through an entire level without taking a hit or launching a single attack. I just use three Buzzy Nests with Mystery Armor that has both reduced potion cooldown and reduced artifact cooldown, using Cooldown, Beast Burst, Beast Boss, and Tumblebee. Even though the bees don't last long due to dying after three stings and also not having that much health to begin with, the fact that Buzzy Nest works on a timer alone makes it ridiculously overpowered. If I cycle the nests, I can keep a group of mobs busy infinitely while their numbers whittle down, especially with Beast Burst now and then. And for the melee and ranged weapons, I just use the same Jailer's Strength and Boycott that I do for my normal Mage Build. It's not like I need them.

And now, the last build that I can think of is the Explosive Range Build that I like to use, which includes Archer's Armor, a Jailer's Scythe, and a Harp Crossbow with three Fireworks Arrows. Probably unsurprisingly, the scythe isn't really used at all. Instead, it has Anima Conduit for healing and any choice of Void Strike and two Looting, Blade Strike, Looting, and Prospector if using Death Barter, or just three Looting. For the armor, we definitely want at least two Cooldown. After that, Chilling is incredibly helpful. For the last slot, you can either go Cowardice for more range damage, which admittedly doesn't stack so well on this build, or Cooldown for even more reliable Fireworks Arrow spam, Death Barter for a pinch last-minute save, or Snowball for an additional defense along with Chilling. Finally, we have the crux of the build, the Harp Crossbow itself. For the most destructive Fireworks Arrow potential, we want Multi-Shot, so that each of the five arrows it shoots has a chance to fire five more. Then we want Chain Reaction. This is so that upon impact with mobs, each of those original five arrows has a chance to split off into five more arrows to create even more widespread explosions. And after that, we want Gravity to pull mob groups together so that they take more of the concentrated explosion damage. And finally, Infinity is to help spam more fireworks, because if Infinity triggers while you have a Firework primed, it will shoot the Firework without actually using it. This not only lets you shoot the Firework again immediately, but it also triggers the artifact's cooldown to start, even when you still have it primed. For fire, suffice to say that this build can not only do runs hitless, but it can do them without mobs even getting close to you.

Anyway, this concludes my enchant guide and my brief weapon and build guide for Default through Apocalypse Plus. I hope you all enjoyed, or at least found it somewhat useful, and especially that you even made it this far. And I'll see you all again in the next video. [Music]