the best part of knuckle bones is hearing odysseus' laugh when the boss takes the damage from it

Of course the update that adds visuals for the keepsakes drops 24 hours after this video 😂 masterful gambit, Supergiant sir

Silver Wheel, Evil Eye and Ghost Onion are early game keepsakes that are used when you don’t have Arkane cards to give you rerolls to get that Magick regen boon, or boost your health regen, or damage, or magick regen. There’s a reason they are available almost immediately when you start getting nectars. I know for a fact that I personally used Ghost Onion a lot in my first like 5-10 runs. And Evil Eye certainly helped me get my first Cerberus clear and then my first Chronos clear, and I think that’s exactly their purpose.

Skill issue, it is actually very easy to take 250 damage to use blackened fleece

One of the worst things about silver wheel is that it does not regen magic if you haven't used magic, so if you have that one fear where you don't have any magic (vow of panic?) this keepsake just does nothing. Another bad thing about it is that if you do have magic regen going on, maybe through the unseen, maybe an arcana, and you use silver wheel it'd almost overtake the magic regen and get used up way earlier than you'd think, having all that magic regen. So even in niche scenarios where you'd think it'd be great, it isn't, which is particularly disappointing.

Luckier Tooth deserves better. Its easily an A tier. Once you get REALLY good at the game, yeah you dont use it as much. But for most players imo its used on every run as the last keepsake you put on.

The delayed damage on bosses is because they won't want it to be consumed by the blue heart shields. Would be lame as hell to equip a trinket to do a grand total of zero damage. Probably why the Hades Boon against Chronos also has delayed damage

i was over 100 hours in when i realized that there are two N keepsakes

Nothing better than having Echo offering me the Hestia/Apollo duo in Tartarus, putting me at 60 health.

I wonder if Scelly likes Melenoe more then zag, and that’s why he gave her the luckier tooth

aromatic phial is *so* consistent for me that when i go back and play hades, i'm sad that there's nothing equivilent. in hades 2, it is soooo easy to get just one common boon you want in erebus. make sure you have the arcana that gives you a 20% chance for an epic and have a bunch of rolls and nearly every single time you will get what you want or good enough to make heroic. probably my most abused and favorite keepsake *hey laurel*

I think the evil eye is not meant to be set up, it's supposed to just give you a boost if you're having difficulty with a boss, but you can make it to them fairly easily, that way it's accidentally set up whenever you reach the final area.

I actually did not understand at first what the Circe's keepsake did and got Judgement on the first try. It was quite a fun run, but as you said is not ver likely to occur again soon.

The Experimental Hammer is also great because if you put it on at the start of Mourning Fields, even if you get a hammer that doesn't work for your build it removes that hammer from the pool, so when you get the hammer from the fields you have a higher chance of seeing a hammer for your build. Not a major thing, but nice that there is upside even if it hits a 'bad' hammer for you.

The thumbnail is hilarious omg

I love that 1 day after this was uploaded all the keepsakes got art

I'm willing to bet the reason why Knuckle Bones doesn't trigger automatically is to avoid it from going to waste if you have the 1/2 extra hearts vow on.

one thing that I've found with the experimental hammer is that if you use an anvil, there's a chance that it will remove the experimental hammer and give you two additional hammer. When I found that out i ended my run with 4 hammers active

On Hecate's keepsake - it has its place, but it's seldom needed. I had an absolutely busted dagger omega special build that, due to running on high fear (16 at the time) I ended up low on magick (due to the magick priming on boon rarity fear) and on magick regen (due to the fear that locks other options). Going on Tartarus, the extra magick regen was very much needed and welcome, and helped me get the fastest chronos win yet. I'd rate it at C, if only because that combo of fears can create scenarios where the regen is needed. EDIT: Just saw that you bumped it up to C later on the vid lol

I'm always going to have a soft spot for Evil Eye since it contributed to my first win against Chronos, after throwing myself at him a bunch of times but never quite winning it felt very satisfying to have that finally come through.

White Antler really does just remind me of Fury of the Fallen in Hollow Knight, love those kinds of high risk high reward mechanics

The thing I'm obsessing over at the moment is predicting new characters by where they'll slot into the keepsake cabinet. So if we get Athena, Ares, and Dio making their return as full gods, the middle row would literally be the god tier. The layout just makes this seem the most probable outcome. Which would mean we'd be getting another 30 dual boons btw! The top row feels complete as is, the first 7 are Crossroads compadres, and the next 4 are your closest allies. So then Heracles, Medea, Circe would shift down to the bottom row, which would still have 3 potential open slots. Currently there are two roaming surface allies (Icarus & Heracles) and one slot for a stationary ally for each biome except Tartarus and the two upcoming ones. Hades already has a heart path laid out in the Book of Shadows, so let's assume we'll get a keepsake from him eventually with a father/daughter bonding storyline attached. That means we can expect 2 more stationary allies, one per new biome. But we have 3 unaccounted-for names in the weapons aspects (who as per dialog with Hecate are related to Mel's quest): Pan, Momus & Eos, so they are definitely prime candidates. That would fill out the bottom row, plus Chaos at the end, which seems appropriate.

"Taking 250 damage on a run is kinda hard" Speak for yourself I'm usually there before fields of mourning & it's probably my most used offensive keepsake. Imo evil eye and ghost onion are also good for casual players

It’s truly unfortunate that this dropped JUST before the big UI overhaul

Silken Sash is great with the Hephaistois boon that gives you some temp armor every chamber. The temp armor gets reset, the regenerated armor from the sash stays.

I find the take on Moroes's pin interesting because I took one look at it and wrote it off as terrible. What tends to kill me is either swarms of enemies in the fields or Chronos so it's unlikely I find myself in situations where the pin really saves me. Intentionally triggering it when there's few enemies left is interesting and something I never thought to do but I'd never feel confident I'm on the last enemies to do that. Ones that decay or have a time limit I find very offputting because I hate the idea that I'm getting weaker over time. Even if I can make that last a good stretch that still feels undesirable to me. I never want to be getting weaker over time. I tried the Antler for a while too since it was the first keepsake I got and it was too early for me to build specifically for that and I take way too much damage against Chronos to ever build for it long term. I find overall there's a lot more interesting keepsakes this time but only slightly more that I actually want to use. In both games I like the god keepsakes and the tooth and in Hades 1 the only other ones I liked after that were Hermes and the Acorn while in Hades 2 I also use Chaos, Knuckle Bones, Phial, and Sash. I find the other keepsakes interesting but I'd rather not incur the risk that comes with them accidentally shutting off what I'm trying to do or getting weaker over time

I recon youre pretty well spot on for those of us that are playing 100 hours plus but I think the usefulness of a lot of them changes dramatically for more casual players

Aromatic phial is S-tier. You can put it on before drinking from a fountain after a boss

I like the Ghost Onion for my first couple runs where I was Still learning the enemy timing and I was getting Bopped a lot

My favorite is definitely the experimental hammer. If you don’t get a good hammer than just put it on in Tartarus

We really need icons for these lol Hopefully we get them in the next update

Another thing about White Antler is that it's only based on Health, so Armor doesn't count towards the upper limit. Get to 30 health, grab Hephaestus' boon that refreshes your Armor every room in exchange for primed Magic, and go wild.

I’m so glad Engraved Pin got S. it was one of the first keepsakes I unlocked and was really surprised at how powerful it was, even at rank 1. It’s also the first keepsake I got to rank 3. A stubborn defiance that lets you deal more damage before you die, AND if you manage to kill everything, it heals you without using a DD? So cool. I’ve actually been watching through your twitch streams and was surprised that you kept picking the luckier tooth for the final zone when the pin just seemed objectively better. (Though, I’m only on like day 5 of the streams so I’m sure that changes at some point)

respect the vid this does feel very biased from the speedrunner brain but I still find it interesting and thoughtful regardless

Discordant Bell could be a lot more interesting if modeled after the Eris boss fight where she gains 100% damage after her health drops a certain threshold. The reimagined keepsake might be (excuse the numbers): The first time you reach 75% of your hp, you gain X% more damage. This repeats when you reach 50%, and 25% hp. - Level 1:You gain 40% more damage at each threshold, capping at 120% when at 25% or less health. - Level 2:You gain 50% more damage at each threshold, capping at 150% when at 25% or less health. - Level 3:You gain 60% more damage at each threshold, capping at 180% when at 25% or less health.

If I have a good hex, I'll use the Path of Stars keepsake at Mourning Fields, since you're almost guaranteed to see either a major or minor Path of Stars there.

The Crystal Figurine is REALLY fun on a Judgement run. I take the reroll cluster which gives all four and satisfies the requirements for Judgement and the Duos then start the run with Crystal Figurine. After beating Hecate, you have 12 cards, and by the time you beat Cerberus you have 22/25 of the Arcana active. It's a very high-risk/high-reward run

Moon beam only really makes sense when you're in the fields because it triggers off of bonus reward 1lvl path of stars too, and only with OP hexes (cough cough moon water). Otherwise it's totally skipable, but when I have moon water I always take it when going to the fields. It's a no brainer, moon water is so busted you can't go wrong with it.

bro really did a tier list video one day before they got the icons :D

i love the thumbnail 😂 great tier list haebae

I've taken the silver wheel a few times in Oceanus on medium fear (~20) Aspect of Pan runs where the game just really didn't want to give me magic regen and I was going to die to timer without a way to use the omega special. Pretty niche, but the use does exist

I've had so many runs that relied on that level 3 Moon Beam. S tier

I usually goes for God keepsake for Erebus, Nasisus or Chaos in Oceanus, Experimental Hammer in field, Knuckle bone or Pin in tartarus. Recently I’ve been playing around with White antler and I LOVE it so much. Only down side is I need to change acana card every time I change weapon lol

White Antler, Poseidon dash, Hermes Dash, Hephaestus armor and invincibility boons. So fun to play

Evileye needs a buff. If it's going to retain it's current effect, it needs effective for the one thing it's at least modestly good for right now: extra damage versus Chronos (or any boss that you're stuck on.) One good thing about it is that if you use it to win a run, Chronos still counts as the last thing that killed you, so you can use it in consequtive runs as long as you don't die to anything other than Chronos. This thing could comfortably deal between 50 - 100% extra damage at max rank without breaking the game.

Engraved Pin is amazing if you can time Moros’s countdown to coincide with Chronos’s death animation, just had it trigger by accident and it was almost cinematic lol

Lucky tooth being B is a crime. I dont use it alot after the early game, but its still literally the ol' reliable for me

Harlian: You can’t go the entire run without getting a magic regen boon if you need the magic Me: You underestimate my power

Silken Sash is weird. The better you are at the game, the more you can use it (since you'll be able to keep the armor for longer) but at the same time, the less you need it (since you can already dodge and reduce damage) so you'd want another keepsake instead of it

even before the buffs, moon beam is my favrite keeepsake by far just becasue of how fun it is to get like +10 path of stars upgrades at once and having a stupidly good hex, the direct buff to it and the buffs to hexes all across the board make me love it even more

I think Crystal Figurine is fun to put on at the start of the run if you know exactly which god you're getting first or aren't looking for any one god/build in particular. I put it on when I just wanna see what the game gives me, and the fact that it only works for one biome makes it significantly less of a "gamble your entire run on this keepsake" situation since you have no reason to keep it on for the whole run. Just put it on, beat Hecate, and then switch to god or offensive keepsakes to flesh out your build with something synergetic w/ what you got in erebus. The only downside of it, really, is that it's a filler keepsake more than anything, so if you have a plan you're going for, you absolutely should be using the keepsake slot for something else, but if not, it at least has more potential than some other filler keepsakes you'd put on for the first biome.

My Few ideas, for few keepsakes. They might be broken, or not that great, but this is just some "alternatives effects" to think about : - Silver Wheel : Prime cost 50% less, regen 3/4/5 mana when you strike a foe. - Ghost Onion : Restore 10/15/20 HP each time you pick a minor reward - Evil Eyes : Deals and Takes 30% / 40% / 50% more damage against the last foe that vanquished you. - Discordant Bell : -3/4/5% damage every 10 health. +3/4/5% damage every 10 mana. - Gold Purse : The next Gardian double your gold - Moon Beam : Unlock 1 bonus anywhere from your Path of star. - Lion Fang : +30/40/50% damage and prevent 1 hit by encounter, broke if you get hit. - Lion Fang (broken) : you deal -20% less damage, the first hit by encounter deals -50% damage. - Blackened Fleece : Omega Moves deals 6 / 8 / 10% more damage per 50 damage taken this night (cap: 50%) - Crystal Figurine : get 3/4/5 max health and mana per Arcana Card equipped. - Concave Stone : After choosing a Boon, 50% of the time take 1 more. 1/2/3 per night.

I kinda wish the gods' keepsakes didn't return so we saw how the game developed without them this time around because they're still the most important thing in the game.

I feel like for discordant bell, maybe it would be better if it was exactly the same, but it was for seconds per encounter, and resets every new encounter. Edit: or instead of resetting completely, it halves after every encounter. That way it can really get out of hand really quickly

Knuckle Bones + the Hades boon that takes out 20% of Chronos' health were what helped me beat him for the first time 😂

Honestly, there’s something to be said for getting the Lion Fang bonus damage earlier rather than later - it puts you ahead of the curve on your scaling. It might not carry you on its own, but it can really smooth out the early stages of an area, giving you a leg up against the now-tougher enemies until you can get more upgrades.

I feel like lion fang/eris’ bell could be combined in a way to make them better, like start at 2.5% damage and increase by 2.5% up to 50% after every chamber, but you lose it if you take it off, which means you could put it on before Tartarus but then wouldn’t get the full effect, you’d really want it on right after Oceanus, but then you are pretty much locked into a keepsake for half the run, if you wanted it to be the bell then you can keep the whole effect of you take more damage, and then for the lion fang hell you could keep it as losing the damage, but I think the damage boost should either be increased or the % decreased should be lowered, just my thoughts, personally I don’t mind them but like Dan says there are just better boons for offense like the white antler, so either these boobs need buffs or the antler needs a nerf, idrk which would be preferable

I love reaching 130 health and getting Apollo + Hestia's health regen at 30 with antler.

I think the evil eye take is wrong tbh, early on I would basically hitless the entire game then die instantly to chronos. Because of this the evil eye was basically always on chronos. To me killing chronos that little bit faster was really important because it gave me less times to get randomly chunked down. Is it the best? No. Other keepsakes overtake it even when it IS on the target you want. But is it pretty damn solid early game when one boss is giving you a lot of trouble? I would say so.

Aww, was hoping you'd manage to even the tier list out again!

note on silken sash. you keep getting additional armor, if you can get armor back after losing the first layer from the sash.

I love that you posted this yesterday and we got an update today and they all have icons now isnt that always the way

There's a delay because if you have this game's version of Damage Control on, it hits the heart rather than the actual HP. So you have a few seconds to scratch off those hearts before your keepsake is wasted.

I think gold purse is sneakily underrated when you're really early in meta progression but then becomes steadily almost useless once you're starting runs with a decent amount of strength anyway

Engraved Pin is SSS tier in the fields, every main pick up wave counts as an encounter so it can trigger many times per room. If you are struggling there highly recommend a try.

From my experience, damage is more important against chronos than health. The defensive keepsake just don't feel like adding more than one or two hits while the evil eye adds damage to every attack. Chronos is also the name that keepsake shows most often for me.

Th idea of egraved pin is that Moros (the incarnation of inevitable death as opposed to peaceful death, which is Thanatos) is just there intentionally loitering on his way over and, if you manage to make it look like you'd walked the lethal blow off before he's finished taking his sweet time, he looks the other way and you get to live.

My constant chronos start is Concave stone for the extra boon which is seriously strong for the first area, Tracendent embryo at oceanus because depending on your path you can keep the boon once finished and switch it at 3rd area, or run the path so you get the extra room that make your embryo roll again, experimental hammer at the fields because maxed out it will last until after chronos and if you dont get something you want atleast it pulls that boon out of the rotation because you always get 1-2 boons in the fields, then for 4th area you get a freebie and can swap to whatever you need at that point based on the run. This keepsake rotation has helped me clear up to heat 36 on all weapons.

A bonus to the engraved pin that you didn't mention helping to solidify it as the best keepsake in the game is that even though it can still use up a death defiance, 10 seconds of full invulnerability can let you get massive amounts of damage in against bosses by just facetanking them while ignoring all of their mechanics.

If all the keepsakes are rings, why can't we have 10 of them on 🤔

My main issue with Engraved Pin is how the game spawns enemy waves... too precarius trying to trigger it manually when the game just decides to spawn in 1-3 extra waves randomly, eith a few seconds between each. Might be a game knowledge issue, bit I really only feel comfortable using it in Mourning Fields

I would not have tried a white antler run if not for your encouragement. It was a blast and I managed to take down Cronus with the aspect of Artemis.

The best thing about Aromatic Phial is that you can first change your keepsake and then use the fountain to get the bonus immediately.

What i really really like about keepsakes in hades 2 is that most of them encourage swapping every region, opposite to hades 1 where most keepsakes you kept for the whole run Downside is most of them feel bad compared to the ones zagreus had access to

Selene's keepsake is interesting. You don't want to equip it if your hex or path options suck so it is bad in the first biome. For the final biome you usually wants something to help you in the boss fight, not a set-up keepsake. So out of 6 current biomes, this keepsake is only an option in 2. Due to sometimes finding path of stars upgrades lying arround, the Fields of Mourning is the best option. I love hex strats, but this keepsake will not allow them to become live faster, just better once live (appart from some dark side screen freeze exploits).

Haelian talking about crystal figurine *giving* you judgment when the real chads are running it WITH judgment 😎

"what if it activates judgement and gives you a bunch of cards, but what are the odds of that" I thought that was a very interesting question, the answer is 1 in 9 if you optimize your card setup for it, but note that this isn't something you'll usually be doing as that setup sacrifices the "eternity" card, which is the one that gives you death defiance, but you can put it back on and only get 1 in 10 odds, which is still not great

Magick regen. Sometimes I'll use Silver Wheel when I don't want to use The Unseen arcana card and want to prioritize attack/special/cast boons. After filling those, then I'll take whatever magick regen boon is offered and change keepsakes after the first region. Doesn't always work out that way, but that's the ideal. I've found Silver Wheel very useful to tide you over until you can get a good build established.

The engraved pin is great if you know when the last wave of enemies is, if theres a way to figure out when that last enemy is actually the last enemy and another wave wont spawn, I'd have it at S too.

One more thing that you didn't factor into the ranking is the usability until the keepsake is 3stars, for example "Discordant Bell" from Eris is way too bad for me cuz the damage percentage early on is so negligible!

Another way to improve Evil Eye is to give it 30% damage _and_ plus 10% crit chance (or a different amount of crit chance depending on playtesting.) Now _that_ would make a difference against Chronos and would make thematic sense because the aspect of Nemesis buffed your crit chance in Hades one.

White antler went from D tier on Beta to S tier and there it is with everyone using it on how good the crit is

Evil Eye is definitely a "win more" trinket. I dont think that it's going to be the difference between clearing and not all that often.

This video releasing a day before the patch where keepsakes get their visual updates is peak comedy lol

If Evil Eye had its own Curse associated with it like "Favored Foe" or something and had a damage increase to 50%, it would be pretty cool Concave Stone (Echo keepsake) screwed my entire run by replacing my big chop build attack to Hephaestus attack once. That was kinda funny

Should've moved Silver Wheel back down to D once you got all those higher tiered keepsakes LMAO Might wanna go and rewatch the original keepsake video too, just to see how much has changed haha

Lucky Tooth in B tier is just insanity. It's 100% a go to on the Rift of Thessaly and most of the time in Tartarus too. By far the best. Engraved Pin is ok but 10 seconds is not much time, I don't see how it can compare remotely to an entire extra Death Defiance. I know we're considered weak or pussy or whatever for using Lucky Tooth but it was an absolute necessity for winning 32 Fear every time I have won that

Discordant bell doesn't scale fast enough to be meaningful. I think it would be more interesting if it gave a flat increase to the amount of damage you take -- like a meaty +50 - 100% damage, but it scales fast enough that you're tempted to hold onto it. I'd say about 2% per encounter plus 15% each time you beat a gurdian for plus 95% by the time you reach Chronos.

The problem with the Crystal Figurine is that if I wanted an Arcana Card that badly, I would have just taken it to begin with

I think Silver Wheel and Evil Eye are really good, in certain cases. SW can save a run. Like, if you have too much Magick primed, don't have any good regen boons, or you're just using huge amounts amounts of Magick. SW helped me win many doomed runs. EE doesn't need to be set up. It's really helpful early, when you're stuck on a boss. Using EE, I was able to beat every Guardian for the first time.

I feel like crystal figurine should be A tier simply because if you REALLY want to optimise it, you could theoretically have a save where you upgrade only judgement and certain set arcana that you always have equipped anyway to the max level, guaranteeing that after Hecate/Polyphemus you get judgement. The trade off is that all arcana you don't start with are limited to level 2, but that's honestly kinda worth it

seeing one of my fav keepsakes put in C ow i actually use crystal figurine alongside judgement, gives me an extra card boost after the first region i like that roll of the dice

Evil Eye has a really good sweet spot: when you're good enough to get to Chronos/Eris consistently but not always beat them. It's good when you're into low fear runs, but I can see how it would become meh once you're doing high heat runs and there's a great chance you die from a random baddie instead of the final boss

Start with silken sash and hunt for Arachne. Get whatever bonus you want but you have built up a bunch of armor from Erebus + Arachne (then don’t get hit by Hecate). I’ve ended Erebus with 120 armor + my Arachne bonus. It feels safer if you don’t want to leave it on for later biomes, you won’t break it right at the beginning lol.

White Antler i gave the white antler a try on a run yesterday with the axe, and man i got so lucky with my boons and hammers that i just kept stacking attack damage and i was melting everything in my wake, IT WAS AWESOME. Of course i lost in the end, but i dont care it was so fun Moon Beam Shockingly enough this carried me really hard on my first Cronos kill, i got really lucky with path of stars finds and was able to heal myself constantly with Moon Water, i think i had like 14 uses saved up. This was post Hex buff, so keep that in mind.

I use the moon beam quite often on biome 3, you will always find a path there. I always do anyways. I only go this way if I have the invulnerable transformation, I can get that to just about 100% up time. Makes dealing with chronos a breeze

I heavily disagree on the Evil Eye. If you put Knuckle Bones in B, which gives you 15% more survivability against a Guardian + a 15% HP hit in advance, then a correctly set up Evil Eye is mostly better than Knuckle Bones could possibly be, because the extra damage you do shortens the fight by ~25%. On paper they are equal, but because Knuckle Bones only depletes 15% of Chronos' first phase and not of his second, the 30% dmg increase nets you more DMG reduction (through a faster clear) than Knuckle Bones probably does. And if the "setup" is what urks you; I've had this thing sit on Eris for the past 20 runs, because more often than not it IS the hardest part of a run that last killed you, and exactly what you are gonna wanna use this on the next time.

Luckier Tooth is S tier IMO. It's specifically used for Tartarus, because your existing Death Defiances will be used before Luckier Tooth. This makes potentially 5 Death Defiances for Chronos, basically guaranteeing your run.

The fact we have 2 N keepsakes kept bugging me a lot, specially because its poseidons keepsake, arguably the best keepsake.

I think Heracles' keepsake should start at zero and go up by 5% each encounter until you beat a guardian, THEN go down by 5% each encounter (or just expire after the guardian). Then you can use it in tartarus and take some extra chambers for the extra damage, at the risk of losing health/DDs.