Welcome to my third guide - this time covering Supergiant's fantastic Hades.

Be warned, there are some spoilers ahead in the videos.

From the story, visuals, dialogue, characters, soundtrack and gameplay, Hades truly excels at bringing you an immersive experience. Here we're going to be discussing the latter, specifically how boons from various gods can change and make or break an escape attempt (as a rogue-like, the player begins each run with nothing, and works their way up. Although, later on your character (Zagreus) can be strengthened with different perks to give you more of an edge at the beginning).



There are nine gods and goddesses who will offer you their strength during a run. The rest of the guide will run through them all briefly, and discuss which are the most interesting, impactful, or game-changing. The gods(esses) are:

• Zeus
  
• Poseidon
  
• Athena
  
• Ares
  
• Demeter
  
• Artemis
  
• Dionysus
  
• Hermes
  
• Aphrodite
  
  

The gods will offer you their boons specifically based on what you have already chosen (if any) and up to a max of four per run, not including Hermes, who can always show up - probably because he enjoys chatting with you so much. I also didn't include Chaos here because I wanted to finish writing this guide at some point! But they can dramatically influence the play-style and abilities you have.

Lets take a look at the Tier List. Afterwards I'll break down some of the choices I've made from S to D:

Trippy Shot - Ice Wine - Scintillating Feast



These three are an S Tier combo piece - and what a combo they make. TS is a Dionysus cast boon, that functions like an artillery blast, doing high damage and stunning enemies caught in its area of effect. With poms and bonuses to cast damage the damage is dramatically increased.

Ice Wine is a Dionysus / Demeter rare duo boon. If you can pick it up, it speeds up the cast animation and freezes enemies in the blast. This works even better with Hermes' Flurry Cast, letting you dump ridiculous damage extremely quickly in a reasonable AOE.

Scintillating Feast is even better, dropping lightning bolts around the cloud. This will utterly decimate foes in all arenas, even more so when the room is small, with tightly packed enemies. SF and the Artemis/Zeus Duo Lightning Rod have a similar effect, SF zaps enemies during the cast and LR once it's over, and the cast souls are sitting uncollected. They both provide very respectable passive damage and ramp up really quickly with more/multiple cast ammo.

In general Zeus boons are very strong, so Splitting Bolt doubles down on the raw damage.

Crystal Clarity might seem odd in S Tier, but if you've ever played a meme laser (Crystal Beam) build you know that it's a must. It dramatically improves the speed and tracking of the beam, enabling it to actually hit enemies that are moving. It's not really enough on it's own, but the more cast boons you get, the more devastating it becomes. I put this in S Tier because Demeter Cast can define a run, and CC is the rug that ties the whole room together.

Merciful End is a classic 'OP' boon, triggering powerful doom damage every time you deflect, which is easiest to do with Divine Dash, another S tier boon that some players can't do without. However you do need the Athena attack or special boon in order to obtain Merciful End, a fact I always forget! Divine Dash gives you a moment of invulnerability and attack/projectile deflection during dashing, which is so useful it makes the runs where you don't have it feel much harder.

Zeus and Dionysus Aids both deal high damage AOE, I rank Zeus slightly higher since the combo potential with Static Discharge and Splitting Bolt/ B Tier Double Strike is quite strong.

Tidal Dash is another dash boon I think is rather good - it does a lot of damage and quick knockback which combos well with other Poseidon boons like Razor Shoals, Second Wave, Breaking Wave...etc. The Poseidon/Zeus Duo Sea Storm adds lightning (you can see I rate adding more lightning quite highly) to your knockbacks, and Tidal Dash is the easiest way to do this.

Here's a video of an EM4 fight against [Redacted] - you can see how much chip damage both Scintillating Feast and Lightning Rod is doing, alongside my Artemis attack boon. The radius in which the lightning strikes is pretty large. Even though I'm playing recklessly and my huge buffs to speed from Hermes keep making me run into attacks, I do pretty well against our most fearsome foe.

In A Tier we have the combo pieces that offer huge bonuses to your existing boons, or those that are run defining - boons that you can build a strategy around or want to boost up as much as possible.

You'll probably want to pick these in most cases unless there is a duo or legendary that you need.

For this Tier's combo piece I give you the 'Stop hitting yourself':



Vengeful Mood - Curse of Vengeance - Heaven's Vengeance

Do you like the idea of roleplaying as Skelly? Well then this build is for you. You can put all of your efforts into evading attacks (Hermes evasion boons help a lot here, as well as Athena's Dash) as if you have VM, your revenge boons activate automatically every few seconds. That's free damage! You can stack as many revenge boons as you like, and pom them up for more damage.

There is a legendary Haelian vid on YouTube, where he takes his hands off the keyboard for the final boss battle.

- Dionysus and Ares Aids are very strong - the former is similar to Zeus' - good, simple AoE damage. It's not as easy to get raw damage as high as Zeus though, so this is why it's in A tier. Ares on the other hand is also a good source of damage, but even better, it makes you invulnerable for the duration.

- I'm a fan of the Hermes boons. More speed usually equals more damage and general survivability. Flurry Cast is especially nice for cast focused builds, as reduces the animation time quite significantly, especially at higher rarities. Evasion can also be stacked quite high with certain weapons and talismans, becoming a strat in its own right.

- Billowing Strength is really good, especially if you have an aid you will be spamming a lot (i.e. not Aphrodite or Artemis, which work best with full charge).

- Lightning Strikemakes the Adamant Rail both fun and deadly, especially if you combo with Lightning Phalanx for extra bounces.

Tempest Flourish and Curse of Pain are two of the better Q/Alternate attacks in my opinion, especially with the sword, spear and certain bow variants.

Exit Wounds is amazing with Poseidon's Sword - you don't even need more than the basic cast. You can combo with Hermes B Greater Recall to get the Shards back from dangerous areas. Since it has good damage you can focus on building up your special boons and leave it as a strong source of secondary damage.

Drunken Strike and Support Fire in action.

With the right setup or weapon, these B Tier boons are generally pretty strong. They'll probably won't be standing out too much on their own though, or they need a few prerequisites to get going.

There are also a lot of Artemis boons in this tier, as I find she needs either high rarity or lots of poms to really rack up the damage percentages. Big Crits can be amazing though, as shown in the first video, where I was hitting [Redacted] for up to 2.2K with a final strike from behind.

I've also placed a lot of the Ares Slicing Shot casts here, as they aren't that spectacular unless you're focusing on building up that cast. And to make Ares cast truly good, you need them all, as well as Duo boons like Mirage Shot and Hunting Blades. But it's another great cast build that rivals the mighty meme beams.

Most of the Flourish Skills make their home in B as well - they're all quite good but I value the push-back or curse effects more. Although, you could make a case for Drunken Flourish being in A Tier when using Chiron's Bow, as it's super easy to rack up Hangover with the homing arrows. Drunken Strike and Support Fire also become S Tier when used with the Adamant Rail, specifically the hidden aspect.

I've also added a lot of the Strike skills here, because you're always going to want one to boost your standard attacks. However I think that only Lightning Strike, Deadly Strike or possibly Drunken Strike (as seen above) can be the mainstay of a build, the rest are a little more flexible.

I've also got a lot of Ares Duo boons here, as things like Mirage Shot and Freezing Vortex can be really strong and fun, but you're not going to see them unless you have some pre-requisite cast boons.

In C Tier we have a lot of the mediocre boons, those that I generally wouldn't pick up or aim towards unless the rest of the options were trash.

The mighty Crystal Beam is here, as without its other boon friends it's really mediocre.

I also have a lot of Dionysus boons here. Perhaps it's just my playstyle, but I don't find a lot of the curse effects from the party god that useful. I'd rather have more damage to kill things faster rather than them being slightly slowed with Hangover stacks or taking marginally less damage when my health is already low. There are definitely some amazing combo pieces, especially with Trippy Shot, but even then High Tolerance's damage reduction requires you to stand inside a pretty small cloud. And standing still in Hades usually = death.

I also have some Aphrodite boons here, even the legendary one, Unhealthy Fixation. I don't think the charm effect lasts long enough to really do anything, especially against bosses, where it seems the duration is even shorter. Perhaps if you have a weapon with a fast attack rate it could be better.

TFW you are [Redacted] and got beat by Zag with D Tier boons:



And now we come to lowly D Tier, where I wouldn't necessarily be happy even if I got these boons for free. Would probably purge and sell most of these as soon as I could.