632 monsters slain, 248844 gold, 19933 ore, 15827 aether, 400 souls
With the second difficulty finished on another lengthy full clear, I had lots of resources to spend before jumping into NG+2 difficulty. I started out by spending 250 souls on the second level of Embroidered Investments so that the +2 items could begin appearing in the dungeon. Next I spent 7500 ore/aether on the third Strange Transaction in order to buy the fifth rank of Unbreakable Will, which immediately allowed 90k gold to be spent on the next two Gold Gain levels. This brought me up to 60% total along with the one Bounty Rune that I'd found, plus this character would be getting another 25% gold gain from the Masochism trait. I hadn't found any new runes worth noting but I did spot that I could trade out the Ammonite Trinket without losing the Ammonite set bonus, instead picking up the Warden +1 Trinket for the Warden set's 10 Dexterity bonus. That wouldn't be useful for most characters but it was quite nice for the Barbarian class. With the remaining money, I made sure to hit 76 Strength for the next break point on lifesteal value and then dumped more points into Vitality and Dexterity, with the latter levels being cheap and adding to the damage of the Barbarian axe swing. Finally, I took one more rank in Meditation Studies for 80% HP restored when entering boss doors; I figured I could use Lamech for a near-full heal on this upcoming dungeon trip.
Once again I cranked up the burdens for NG+2 difficulty. Following the same pattern as my Knight Legacy earlier, I chose to take 14 burdens (instead of the required 4) to make things harder. I was taking max ranks in Burden of Evolution (50% chance for monsters to upgrade to the next tier) and Burden of Adaptation (15% chance for monsters to gain a commander buff) along with all three points in Burden of Scale to make the dungeon 30% larger. For my last burden, I also took the NG+2 option to face the prime version of the Axis Mundi Void Beasts. I knew from my previous experience that having tier 3 monsters everywhere would made things noticeably harder as far as clearing the dungeon.
Barbarian #9: 98 Vitality, 76 Strength, 90 Armor, 40 Dexterity, 29 Intelligence
This character had the Masochism trait: gain 50% of mana when hit but can't gain back mana from auto attacks. That was perfectly fine with me since these Barbarians basically never cast spells and Masochism was worth an additional 25% gold generation. The main axe swing was now dealing 302 damage thanks to all of that additional Dexterity, an increase of nearly 50% over what I had been dishing out with my previous Barbarian character. This was the first trip into the NG+2 dungeon and yikes, it was tough going. I found that damage wasn't an issue since the main axe swing could still kill almost any monster in two hits, even finishing some of the weaker enemies in the Citadel in a single blow. No, the problem was surviving the incoming strikes from the monsters when I would inevitably mess up and take hits. I was operating with 90 Armor and that wasn't very much given the damage output on this difficulty. Basically I could hold my own in the Citadel which I did full clear but the Study was pretty brutal with all of the tier 3 opponents that kept appearing. I dropped low on health, fought Lamech for the HP refill and defeated him flawlessly, then took enough damage that I had to retreat from the Study once again. It felt as though I was one step away from death the whole time and barely managing to keep the run going.
Everything changed when I finally came across an excellent relic in Axis Mundu: Lachesis' Measure. This relic costs a whopping 55 resolve and causes enemies defeated with a critical hit to restore 6% of your max health. Needless to say, every ground swing with the big axe counts as a skill crit and the Barbarian has an awful lot of health to take advantage of that 6% heal. This was the perfect relic for the initial Barbarian in NG+2 difficulty and I immediately found that each monster killed was restoring a massive 71 HP (!) with the base 9 HP from lifesteal included. This obviously flipped the math of encounters on its head and made it trivially easy to progress through the dungeon. Now I could clear out the whole Study without fear even though some of the rooms were incredibly tough with tier 3 monsters everywhere and multiple commander buffs showing up. The giant heals from Lachesis' Measure were a true game-changer. The one downside was a lack of Blessings of Life appearing: it would have been trivially easy to heal from the damage taken but there was only the single guaranteed-to-be-there Blessing of Life in all of the Citadel, Study, and Axis Mundi - sheesh!
With the massive assistance of Lachesis' Measure, my Barbarian made his way to the halfway point of Axis Mundi and then started climbing the Sun Tower. There were a few times where health dropped low due to a particularly nasty clustering of monsters, however every time I was able to heal back up to full thanks to the insane rate of sustain that came from the relic. Once the Sun Tower was cleared, I headed off to the Dry Lake and repeated the same pattern there. The basement is absolutely enormous with the Burden of Scale turned up to the maximum 30% additional size and it took about an hour to make my way through the full Dry Lake. My Barbarian definitely did not have sufficient stats to achieve a full clear without the help of Lachesis' Measure so this was a truly rare opportunity to clean up a vast sum of gold which would otherwise be unavailable. The higher difficulty also unlocked a treasure trove of more advanced runes and equipment: the second Bounty Rune and Folded Rune along with the Kin Sword, Kin Cape, and the Drowned Trinket +1. By the time that I'd finished clearing out everything, I had discovered all but one of the tier 2 runes (23 out of the total 24) which was perfect timing to open up the tier 3 runes with the next character. About the only thing that I hadn't managed to find in terms of equipment was any of the Ammonite +2 items which would have to wait for the next run.
Once the full basement was done, I returned to Axis Mundi to get the second half of the bridge and then moved into the Kerguelen Plateau. The dungeon finally offered up some Blessings of Life with one of them at the very end of Axis Mundi and two more in the Plateau - those would have been nice to have earlier! Obviously these areas were a lot easier than the Sun Tower and the Dry Lake, and I prioritized full clearing everything until the entire dungeon was complete. Now I belatedly went back and started facing some of the bosses from elsewhere in the dungeon: first I cleared the Gonghead Twins in the Study with a flawless victory that took no damage at all. Next was estuary Namaah so that I could remove the HP penalty associated with taking the Lillies of the Valley to open the boss doors. I was immensely pleased to find that I had learned from my past fights against her with Barbarian characters and nearly pulled off another perfect fight, only taking a single hit over the course of the combat. Much like I had done earlier with estuary Irad, the trick was to work around the slow windup time of the Barbarian axe swing and only attack when it was safe to do so. I took my time and cut down the boss over several minutes of extended fighting.
Out of the remaining opponents in the dungeon, I tried to sequence the fights to take advantage of the free healing associated with entering the boss chambers. Knowing how difficult the automaton minibosses had been in the Dry Lake, I fought the axe/shield pair while I was still sitting at near-perfect health from the Naamah battle. I can report that I definitely did better this time around against these minibosses while still taking a lot of damage in the process. The Barbarian simply struggles against these enemies due to the inability to stand and swing with the axe along with the spiked pit in the middle of the miniboss room. I took about a thousand damage in the course of killing this first pair, then teleported over to estuary Enoch's room for the heal back to full again. Enoch's fight went very similarly to how it had gone back in NG+1 difficulty: a handful of hits taken against the mage form and then another flawless victory against the mimic chest form. The Barbarian really kicks butt against the bouncing chest due to the mammoth hit box on the big axe swing. You should basically never get hit against the second form when playing correctly.
I repeated the same pattern a second time: fighting the other dagger/hammer miniboss pair down in the basement and then healing up the damage taken from them against estuary Irad. The dagger/hammer pair were pretty similar to the other two automatons, just no good place for the Barbarian to stand which forced a lot of the jumping axe spin at much lower damage. Against estuary Irad, I felt as though I had mastered the pattern for the boss with this being the third time around. I knew when I could get in some big hits with the axe and when I needed to prioritize avoiding damage. Although I didn't pull off a flawless victory or anything like that, the fight was never close and I emerged victorious with more than 1000 HP remaining. I was starting to wonder if I'd be able to run the table on all of the bosses and decided to go for the prime version of the Axis Mundi Void Beasts next, hoping to take advantage of the big heal from killing their various minions over the course of the fight. That didn't go as expected; I think that a clean battle would have been enough to win but I simply made too many mistakes along the way and died after defeating only one of the two main Void Beasts. I could hardly complain though with this being an unbelievably successful first character on the difficulty. I could only hope that I'd achieve as much with the remaining Barbarian heirs.
752 monsters slain, 519956 gold, 30278 ore, 16196 aether, 400 souls
Before trying to spend all of that money, I had to take my best shot at the last scar challenge. This was "Spreading Poison" which pits the player against three of the Gonghead Twins (instead of the usual two) followed by a pair of Murmurs in the second half of the encounter. I didn't find the Gonghead Twins to be that difficult, partly because I was able to deal a lot of damage to the first of the three when it was alone on screen, partly because their most dangerous attack (sending out three Cursed ghosts) is easy to nullify with the Barbarian spinning jump. With some practice, I was able to get past this first half of the scar with either one hit or zero hits taken. The second half of the encounter was vastly harder, with the double Murmurs shooting their projectiles from both directions at one. After some trial and error, I figured out that the best tactic was to rush down one of the two Murmurs as quickly as possible, using the Barbarian shout aggressively to clear the screen while accepting that I would take some hits in the process. Trying to dodge the projectiles was a waste of time and only led to more hits. Anyway, I burst down the first Murmur ASAP, then ignored the fourth Gonghead Twin while killing the second Murmur, and only then defeated the final opponent. This scar proved to be easier than Automatons and I managed to score the S+ rating in fewer than a dozen attempts, better than I was expecting.
Now I had a massive haul of 500k gold to spend along with 1100 souls. First I picked up the second rank of Runic Horizons so that the tier 3 runes could start appearing in the dungeon, followed by a rank apiece of Unbreakable Will, Absolute Strength, and Master Smith. This was exactly enough to clean out all of those souls and they were souls well spent. For the Enchantress, I wanted to the second Bounty and Folded Runes which surprisingly only required three rune weight upgrades; they are both cheap runes at only 20 weight apiece. Since I couldn't reach the second tier of Ammonite set unity, I held off on the very expensive second Reinforced Rune for the moment. Speaking of equipment, I made the big jump from the Drowned Sword to the Kin Sword, worth +8 Strength at the cost of three equipment weight levels. I continued to stick with the Obsidian Helm and the Ammonite +1 gear in the Chest and Cape slots, but this opened up the Trinket slot for me to take the Drowned +1 option which was enough for the Drowned set unity bonus of 15 additional Strength. This forced another five equipment weight purchases and I was very happy to have all those ranks in Master Smith to cheapen the cost.
Even after these purchases, I still had 425k gold available for spending. The next two Gold Gain levels cost 110k and that didn't seem like a worthwhile investment; I'd have to bring back 1.1 million gold to pay for those two levels which probably wasn't going to happen before the end of NG+2 difficulty. Instead, I went to town on the "real" stats and dumped level after level after level into Vitality, Strength, Armor, and the cheaper Dexterity. I took Strength up to 113 points to hit the next breakpoint on lifesteal value and even took some of the cheaper ranks in "The Laundromat" which increases skill crit damage scaling. All told, I picked up almost 70 levels in what was one of my biggest spending sprees ever. My hope was that this would be sufficient to polish off the game with the next character.
Barbarian #10: 131 Vitality, 113 Strength, 101 Armor, 45 Dexterity, 29 Intelligence
This Barbarian had no traits and no starting relics. She was dealing 412 damage on her main axe swing which was sufficient to one-shot most monsters in the Citadel and two-shot almost anything else. I passed through the Study first as usual and found that my Barbarian was basically stable up there, with the 12 HP of lifesteal on monster kills essentially canceling out the damage taken from hits along the way. This was a good sign since I no longer had the immense crutch of Lachesis' Measure to fall back upon. I was able to make it the whole way through the Study and find several Blessings of Life along with a Demeter's Trial relic which was easily cleansed using the breakables back in the Citadel. From there I headed down into the Dry Lake and soon came across another highly useful relic: Coeus' Shell. This relic blocks the next source of damage after defeating six enemies and then begins stacking up all over again in repeatable fashion. It's an expensive choice at 45 resolve but incredibly useful at sustaining a long run through the dungeon. It even works to block the damage from Blessings of Life, and let me tell you, avoiding the 500 or 600 damage from taking one of them was a very big deal indeed.
With Coeus' Shell in hand, it was once again easy to travel through the entire (massive) Dry Lake and clear everything out. In most cases after taking a hit, I was able to kill six monsters and restack the damage block benefit before getting hit a second time. This relic transformed the most dangerous part of the dungeon into something pretty routine. Now the big weakness of Coeus' Shell is that it doesn't do much of anything against bosses after blocking one initial hit but I was confident that I could defeat the remaining estuaries so long as I could clear the full dungeon and keep stacking up more maximum health along the way. I actually had pretty bad luck in this regard after the Study, only finding one more Blessing of Life apiece in Axis Mundi and the Sun Tower. At least I did come across a second Demeter's Trial which was worth a good bit of additional HP. I also picked up ten additional tier 3 runes including the third Folding and Quenching Runes along with the Kin Helmet. All of that stuff would be useful if I needed to run another Barbarian to clear the difficulty.
I cleared out everything other than the Plateau (which I left in case there was a need for health recovery) and then turned my attention to the remaining estuaries. I still had to deal with the prime version of the Axis Mundi Void Beasts which is a much, much more difficult fight than the default version. I came extremely close to defeating these opponents with the previous Barbarian and hoped that the additional stats on this character would be enough to put me over the top. As always, I concentrated on defeating one Void Beast at a time to minimize the number of minions on the screen at any point in time. The Barbarian class has a big advantage here in being able to clear the Cursed ghost projectiles in two different ways: with the shout or alternatively with the jumping spinning slash. I was diligent about removing them whenever the Void Beasts summoned them and in keeping down the number of total opponents. Normally this is a tough boss fight but I honestly crushed it with the Barbarian this time around, winning with well above 2000 HP remaining in what was never remotely close. It was a combination of having the correct strategy as well as pumping up the Barbarian's stats with all those additional levels.
Tubal was next as I headed straight to the Dry Lake boss room afterwards. I'd had good luck against Tubal in both of the first two difficulties and managed to execute the fight decently well here in NG+2 difficulty. I wasn't quite as good at dodging the flying automatons when Tubal summoned them and took more hits than I would have liked. Nevertheless, this character had nearly 3000 HP to play around with and this fight was once again never particularly close, with the victory arriving with about 1400 HP remaining. Afterwards, I cleared out the whole Kerguelen Plateau without finding any additional Blessings of Life or useful relics. What I had on hand already was going to have to be enough to clear the final bosses.
So you know the drill with Jonah by now, this is one of the easiest boss fights in Rogue Legacy 2, blah blah blah. Except that this time around I honestly had way more trouble than normal with Jonah for no clear reason. Sloppy play on my part is the only explanation since Jonah didn't do anything different this time around. He actually knocked my Barbarian character down to about half health by the end of the combat... which still left me with about 1500 HP remaining, heh. Not exactly a nailbiter even though I played this fight pretty badly. Then Cain was the final opponent left to be cleared and I followed the normal patterns to dodge his attacks. Cain has a ton of health and it always takes a while to cut through his massive lifebar. I dodged as best I could and did well enough to get the job done even if I really should have used the Barbarian shout more often. That would have been handy to avoid some of the damage that I took. It was another boss confrontation that could have, should have been cleaner on my part. Again though, that's why I take the time to clear the full dungeon: to stack up all those Blessings of Life and Demeter's Trials and whatnot to provide the grace period for less-than-perfect boss fights. This was all old hat by now and once again the result was never in doubt as I emerged with another victory:
796 monsters slain, 534633 gold, 28925 ore, 23599 aether, 400 souls
Much to my own surprise, I was able to complete NG+2 difficulty with only two total Barbarian characters. This was heavily due to making use of Lachesis' Measure on the first character to achieve a full clear of the entire dungeon and bring back 500k gold for use in purchasing about 70 levels worth of stats. Normally it would take more heirs to collect that much gold and advance the overall build of the various Barbarian characters to the point where the whole difficulty could be finished. Along with the four Barbarians needed for each of the first two difficulties, that was a grand total of only ten characters to finish NG+2 difficulty which was significantly better than any of the other classes I've tried thus far in the Class Legacy series. I'm not sure if this means that the Barbarian class is stronger than the Knight class which was the best performer out of the classes I've tried thus far. I think that I'd compare them this way: the Barbarian is the easier of the classes to play while the Knight arguably caps out at a higher point with perfect play thanks to having the invincibility on the shield block. I would evaluate them at roughly the same power level overall; remember that I played the Knight class first and I've gotten better at Rogue Legacy 2 over time, especially against the final bosses which weren't part of the Early Access builds.
Anyway, thanks as always for following along with these character. I don't know that anyone actually reads these reports on my website, I mostly put them together for my own benefit. If you derived any entertainment from them, that's an awesome side benefit. 
