it just become that brutal, because other than health, you also got more enemy variation, the best way to do it is learning their whole structure, spawn point, attack pattern, etc, also, based on someone on youtube, higher dark mirror makes less build viable, and only a few could make it through first hero, few that i know is revenge with some antique/fortress, courage, wisdom, treasure because of their resources, and thief's black steel dagger with gunpowder, not that other build can't get through it, but it takes more skill to use them for me

forgot to mention about the dark ability, depends on how far you are, collective desire is always good for that power boost if you have multiple inscryption active, silent cries for skill cd, even kingslayer could help with the bosses because they're that thick, amplification based dark abilities also helps with damage output, super baby and reckless posture helps with tanking you up for that revenge and antique

Yeah I just managed to get to the first hero thanks to the dark ability, don't remember its name but basically it created a ticking time bomb every time something died, so St Juan went down in under a minute, and I genuinely have no idea what to do during the First hero's 2nd phase, kinda sucks that you basically have to go for a specific build or else you can't do anything, oh well.

I always do magic builds with crit and a bunch of cool down reduction. Works every time. I usually use balance skulls or speed skulls. I think the game gives us a lot of ways to build skulls and it does get a bit harder in the higher DMs, but practice is all it boils down. Keep trying and eventually you'll wipe the floor with everything.

as someone who cleared DM10 a long time ago the best advice I can give is

1. If possible you should try to dodge through attacks instead of away
2. Stronger enemies have very long and obvious tells before they attack, spend more time looking at your enemies than you do at skul himself
3. Focus on killing zoners and healers 1st, then strong foes 2nd, with everything else coming afterword
4. Enemies that can teleport will always use a teleport as their next attack if they are far away from you and have spotted you, use this information to bait out the attack and get in some damage
5. Revenge 2 is great for increasing survivability, Id also recommend breaking unique and legendary quintessences regularly to increase your max health. Common and rare quintessences can also be broken in situations where they are free and you don't need any of the other boss/adventurer rewards offered to you.
6: Characters with stat boosting passive abilities generally have low base damage attacks to compensate, use them with item attacks or status effects to deal the most damage.
7. inscriptions are good but aren't everything, you can still have amazing builds with nothing maxed out so don't pick up anything just to fill out an inscription.

Good luck and have fun!

1. I've pretty much perfected dodging, the only thing that damages me is The First Hero's 2nd phase, since the tells are invisible and I can't see ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
2. Strong enemies are the easiest part, the problem is those clowns who stand around quietly dealing damage without me even noticing, I don't think I ever look at Skul when playing.
3. Healers are dead as soon as they try to stand.
4. Teleporting "assassin" enemies are super easy, honestly my main problem outside of bosses are those archers who give mere milliseconds to react
5. Breaking down quintessences usually leaves me with nothing more, its very hard to balance enough items, enough skull upgrades and enough quitessence break downs, so I try but its much worse than sounds
6. I don't really use characters with that to begin with, my main skulls are the reaper, werewolf and gargoyle.
7. I never really focus on inscriptions, I'd prefer having 2 items I like over having 2 items I don't need at all to have an inscription.

Originally posted by Toothless:

1. I've pretty much perfected dodging, the only thing that damages me is The First Hero's 2nd phase, since the tells are invisible and I can't see ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

this comes with experience, would suggest try fight him again on lower difficulty, but try to not kill him too fast for learning his attack pattern

Originally posted by Toothless:

5. Breaking down quintessences usually leaves me with nothing more, its very hard to balance enough items, enough skull upgrades and enough quitessence break downs, so I try but its much worse than sounds

it's important, but not mandatory, personaly, i would go skuls>items>quintessence, or healing first if i'm too low, this is where treasure inscryption will really helpful, as they guarantee that additional income in each encounter, and the reason i usually start with carleon insignia, don't spend too much in early shops, as most of their goods gonna be common anyway, i usually start trying to complete my items in 3rd stage, and do 1/2 reroll on shop before that, that's also usually where i decided to break quintessences

How do I fight the first hero on lower difficulty? We're talking magic mirror here, like 90% of the time I can beat a full run without even dying and "respawning"
Also how do you make sure you start with something like carleon insignia? Can you reroll the troll giving you stuff? Or is that something else? Sorry I'm bad with name remembering

oh ship, i was assuming that you have beat dark dad (first hero) at least once, my apologies, once you defeated dad a couple of times, you will have an item roll that let you select starting common items and skulls, basically a better version of the fox and ogre in the normal mode, while also unlocks another difficulty to choose, if you haven't got it yet, i guess it all back to route planning, for starting items, check if you could find carleon insignia, sword or staff depend on your skul, rejuvenating root, and/or discolored dark quartz

discolored dark quartz may seem trivial, but 25 more hp means you could take 5 more hits from those normal enemy, and if you got that revenge and antique going, you get a total of 60 max hp, which is around 30% hp increase which will be also healed from revenge's effect giving you a lot of survivability with just 3 items, 2 items if you could find another item with same inscryption, from this, you'll have more leeway to either take more skul room to build your skull, or take item room to try looking for another inscryption

if you found the carleon insignia, you could try to find another carleon item to have that spoil going, while also adding to carleon insignia's gold generation, also giving you leeway to pick skul room while still getting some gold from carleon insignia, and more if you got the treasure going, from these 2, you could start building your damage to which you choose, like arms, courage, wisdom, artifact, etc

also, have you maxed the witch's trait from the witch in normal mode? it helps a lot since it carries to the dark mirror mode

Originally posted by Toothless:

I just managed to get to the first hero thanks to the dark ability, don't remember its name but basically it created a ticking time bomb every time something died, so St Juan went down in under a minute, and I genuinely have no idea what to do during the First hero's 2nd phase, kinda sucks that you basically have to go for a specific build or else you can't do anything, oh well.

i thought you have gone quite far on dark mirror because of this, because there's similar kind of dark ability unlocked on the deeper level of dark mirror, so you could choose lower difficulty dark mirror from it, after checking it, turns out it was a cursed dark ability, which is randomly shown each time you got into that room, cursed dark ability shown by their red color, while normal dark abiity have their normal purple color, cursed dark abilities is usually powerful, but with drawbacks, this one, the bomb is also hurting you

Originally posted by Toothless:

1. I've pretty much perfected dodging, the only thing that damages me is The First Hero's 2nd phase, since the tells are invisible and I can't see ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

since you have perfected dodging, dark ability counter attack could be good for you, or reckless posture to reduce the damage you take in the dad fight, super baby could also be good to increase max hp you got from antique and quintessence break if you choose that build path, that is for survivability option, since you only struggling with survival at this time, once you're more comfortable with the fight, you could take more offensive ability like weakness exposure for multi hitting skul, innate power for the wolf, etc

Yes, I've maxed out everything in the castle except the 100,000 dark quartz to fully repair the place, I guess I will be trying that, and I realised that some cursed dark mirror abilities are literally the carry thing. For every boss apart from dad

good luck -w-)b

Originally posted by Toothless:

How do I fight the first hero on lower difficulty? We're talking magic mirror here, like 90% of the time I can beat a full run without even dying and "respawning"
Also how do you make sure you start with something like carleon insignia? Can you reroll the troll giving you stuff? Or is that something else? Sorry I'm bad with name remembering

A quick run down for the dark hero

His first attack is always going to be clinging to the wall and dashing to your current location, he will do this up to 3 times before momentarily stopping giving you a brief moment to get some damage in.

When he clings to the wall and performs the full screen slash flurry the trick to dodging is to double jump just as hes starting only to land and run to any corner of the screen. The slashes aim where your player is to some extent so the jump will guarantee he will choose a variation that has an opening at the sides

The attack where he shouts before performing a bunch of lingering slashes chasing the player is best dodged by moving slowly toward one side of the map and dashing to turn around when you see an opening to do so. this attack is kind of RNG at times and will sometimes try to screw you over with a horizontal slash on the ground so avoid using any attacks or skulls that obscure your vision during this attack so you can see his BS coming and mitigate as much damage as possible.

his vacuum attack has a tell (though not a very obvious one), if he stops moving on the ground for an extended period of time (either standing in his idle animation or freezing still in the last frame of an attack animation on the ground) he's about to suck so get moving

his big claw swipe attack and wall slam attack have obvious but very quick tells before he performs them, if you see him moving in a funny way that's probably your cue to dash, don't bother thinking to hard about it because you don't have time to do so.

his other attack are tricky to dodge at times but should be self explanatory.