Easy Mode (DEF stacking build)

Boomer friendly MOG 2.0 build

This alternative build was written by Arch.

An alternative DEF stacking build for people with skill issues (like myself). Players need to focus on several points when making a build:

• early game damage: if you’re at any point forced to run away, you’re missing out on experience, getting less upgrades, fall back and eventually lose, but at the same time, you only need enough damage to deal with early raptures
• late game damage: higher your damage > less time you spend on defeating the boss > less chances you have to fuck up and wipe
• survivability: you need to live through your mistakes. It may be of no concern for touhou gods, but, fortunately, there are options for mere mortals like us

Character used for this build, Exia.

As we all could expect – Exia has it all: one of the best skill trees; starting weapon, that has no blind spots; A nifty little trick for early game is: her drones do damage even while hovering, so you can bash raptures with them even before they fly out and explode.

Red Hood vs Exia skills

RH skill has much higher damage on paper, but it requires you to face the target for its entire duration, which leads to two options: either you save your CD for a breathing room between boss attacks, or you lose damage while dodging boss projectiles.

Both options lead to loss of its damage over the course of the fight, while Exia allows you to push a button and focus on dodging, which directly adds to survivability.

Everything listed above are just advantages, and while they do make your play through easier, they are by no means mandatory. So if you have another character you simp for, you can apply this build for them as well.

Talent choices

• DEF takes priority over any other pick, as there are no other damage mitigation options in the game.
  • DEF being a flat decrease in damage taken was a garbage tier stat in original MoG, but MoG 2.0 gives us an option to stack it up to ridiculous values, reducing most damage sources to nominal 1
• Attack Speed scales both early game and late game damage, so it comes as a second priority
• Flat ATK falls off quickly, so you only need to get enough of it to deal with early game

If you notice yourself struggling to oneshot early enemies, consider swapping some of those attack speed lines for ATK.

What about EX Upgrades?

• Attack Speed. This stat is the absolute pinnacle of MoG, not only it scales well with high base damage weapons. This increases both your early and late game damage, and mitigates idle times of some weapons, it’s also calculated multiplicative with attack speed from talents:
• ATK. Although ATK shines most in early game, every little bit of damage helps later as well. Picking up ATK in EX_UPGRADES also frees up those talent rows to pick more desirable options.
• DEF. As was mentioned previously, stacking up DEF from upgrades, ex upgrades and its module allows us to reduce most damage sources to 1. Although there are still some projectiles you will have to be careful about, damage balancing in this game mode follows a pretty simple rule: the more difficult avoiding the attack pattern is, the less damage every single projectile deals.
• Maximum HP. Fourth stat is more of a personal preference. Flat increase in HP can act as a buffer, allowing you to survive through several mistakes in a row.

Honorable mention to Max Revives. Player favorite, but, in my opinion, highly overrated. Maxed out, it gives 3 revives, boosting your Effective HP to 400%, or 250% if you manage to pick an Emergency Repair Module.

Maxed out Maximum HP increases your Effective HP to 367%, while it is a smaller increase without the module, there is another advantage to consider: you can recover from half HP, but you can’t recover a used Revive charge.

Upgrades I would avoid

• Projectile Speed – convenience stat, that does not offer any substantial gain
• Movement Speed – you get fast enough with a module on any base speed character
• Projectile Size – inconsistent DPS increase by reducing blind spots on some projectile weapons. Affects range of some weapons nobody would ever consider a “projectile”, like Re: The Hood base weapon, Energy Field etc.
• Item Acquisition Radius – an utter joke unless you’re farming for coins
• Reroll Chances – you’re better off rerolling your whole run than wasting 25% of your stat slots on this

Why do you consider projectile size a bad upgrade?

• First: there are four health pickups on the screen you can’t even see
• Second, and the most important: all this clutter obstructs the view of your hitbox. Avoiding a stray bullet by a mile may not pose a problem, but weaving between projectiles during boss bullet hell attacks becomes incomparably more difficult.

Weapons

EX. Hyper Homing Laser is the best weapon in the game and should be your priority when picking up upgrades.

Apart from it being the only EX weapon without any blind spots in its base from, it also has fewer problems dealing with encirclement by projectile blocking raptures:

While it still gets severely crippled, other EX weapons (and most of the basic ones) get nullified in their entirety. Although its base damage numbers are comparable to other EX weapons, it’s so severely overtuned, every run should aim to get this weapon.

Modules

Instant Repair. An extremely rare module that grants passive health regeneration. You can’t realistically “aim” to get it, as you won’t see it in every run, but if you do see it pop – prioritize it over literally anything else. Although, with how rare it is, you’ll be stuck with level 1 module for a while, once you upgrade everything, the game won’t have any other options to give you.

Emergency Repair. Another rare module granting you a revive charge, basically doubling your EHP. It still occupies your module slot even after you use it, but it’s well worth it. Rapunzel starts with this module as a baseline.

DEF Enhancement. Mandatory DEF module in a DEF stacking build. With this module being common, you can always skip it for anything else, and pick it up later.

Rapid Movement. Increasing movement speed can be seen as a convenience pick, but that extra speed can be the difference between outrunning some boss pursuit attacks and weaving between projectiles, or eating the damage. I wouldn’t call this module mandatory, as you can play around having less movement speed by distancing yourself from an attack in advance.

When choosing between upgrades on level up you can follow an easy priority list:

1. Instant Repair
2. Emergency Repair
3. Homing Laser lv.1
4. Rocket Launcher lv.1
5. Other EX weapon parts lv.1
6. Homing Laser upgrade
7. Rocket Launcher upgrade
8. DEF Enhancement
9. Rapid Movement

The reason for prioritizing other EX weapon parts over upgrading your Homing Laser and Rocket Launcher is to fill up 6 weapon slots as fast as you can, as that will free you to pick up boss drops without the risk of them shafting your entire run with garbage weapons locking you out of getting EX ones.

P.S.: Never reroll your pick, if you have something you can take w/o locking yourself out, be it a weapon upgrade or even an undesirable module. It’s best to save those rerolls for times when the game doesn’t give you the privilege of such a choice.