Game Breaker / Hades

Why, indeed?

Breaking your way out of the Underworld gets significantly easier once you learn what may break the game itself.

Boons and Boon Combinations

Most of the highest-tier/Legendary boons are designed to be this, being very rare and difficult to get but somewhat annihilating the game's difficulty, assuming you can get them before the final boss. Several Duo boons also apply, but are similarly difficult to find.

Duo Boons

• Calculated Risk (Athena/Dionysus) slows enemy projectiles by 50%. Suddenly, faraway attacks are much easier to react to. Additionally, if you have a way to deflect projectiles, which you likely do since you need some of Athena's boons to have a chance at this, the projectiles become a source of extra damage.
• Cold Fusion (Demeter/Zeus). Normally, Zeus' Jolted condition expires once an enemy attacks. With Cold Fusion, it will continuously damage an enemy every time they attack for ten seconds. For certain enemies, this means they will effectively kill themselves trying to kill you. It can also be combined with Sea Storm, which boosts an already-ridiculous damage output per attack even further.
• Crystal Clarity (Artemis/Demeter). While not quite as insanely damaging as other examples, it allows Zagreus to play an almost entirely defensive playstyle while having his crystal turrets kill enemies for him, since it makes the Crystal Beam cast track enemies much quicker. Just throw out a few of these, and play keep-away until everything is dead. Even better if you get Artemis' Legendary boon, which will give you additional casts to abuse this with, and/or other Demeter boons that add Chill to your cast, slowing enemies a lot and thus making them stand in the path much longer.
• Deadly Reversal (Artemis/Athena) gives the player a 20% crit chance for 2 seconds anytime they deflect an enemy attack. Much like with Merciful End, while you will need Athena's attack or special to unlock it, once you do you can still use her Dash to abuse this, giving you a constant crit chance buff. Particularly noteworthy in that any of your attacks can crit ^note Attack, Special, Cast, Zeus' Lightning, Ares' Doom effect, any revenge boon.
• Exclusive Access (Dionysus/Poseidon) makes it so any future boons you're offered is guaranteed to at least be an epic rarity. This will make all your boons stronger than normal and guarantee an easier time unlocking Legendary boons. Bonus points if you manage to get this duo boon as early as Tartarus.
• Heart Rend (Aphrodite/Artemis) offers an additional 150% critical hit damage to any foe already inflicted with the Weak Status-effect. Critical Hits on their own already offer x2 damage, and Heart Rend stacks with this, now offering a very generous x3.5 damage hit rate. All attack types benefit from this multiplier ^note Attacks, Specials, Casts, Calls, Dash Damage, and even Zeus' Lightning so this tends to be a preferred boon for stacking up some of the heaviest hitting attacks.
• Hunting Blades (Ares/Artemis). It's been nerfed several times, and yet still remains broken. It adds a homing effect and a 100% speed increase to Ares' Slicing Blades, turning an Awesome, but Impractical cast that does huge damage but is slow and hard to hit with into a homing monstrosity that will easily deal 500 damage on its own. It's incredibly fire-and-forget, allowing Zagreus to focus on avoiding attacks, and since both gods have several Boons that upgrade Cast, it has incredible growth potential.
• Ice Wine (Demeter/Dionysus). Trippy Shot is already the highest-damaging spell in the game as far as straight damage goes, but it's tricky to aim due to being a lobbed shot with travel time. Ice Wine not only removes this weakness, it increases the damage by 50% and inflicts Chill. This turns an already-Difficult, but Awesome spell into an immediate AoE nuke capable of obliterating the health bars of most anything in the game, even if you're not running a cast build. What's even more broken is that Ice Wine can stack with Scintillating Feast (unlike Hunting Blades, which can't stack with Freezing Vortex) which is also a game breaker, making for a truly insane cast.
• Lightning Rod (Artemis/Zeus) makes enemies near your on-the-field bloodstones (provided you have Infernal Soul active) get struck by lightning every second for 70 damage, for each bloodstone present. Already sounds good, but the range of effect is very gracious, so the enemy can be standing twenty to thirty feet away from your bloodstones and still be pelted for 210 damage every second. You can stay safely far away and be running from your foes and still be destroying them without lifting a finger. Just like with Crystal Clarity, this gets even better if you have Artemis' Legendary boon, pumping out 350 lightning damage (which can trigger Jolted, if you have it) per second.
• Merciful End (Ares/Athena) does for Doom what Hunting Blades does for Slicing Shot: if you hit an enemy with a deflecting move, any Doom effects on that enemy occur instantly. So what used to be a strong curse that triggered after a time delay can now be triggered at will. The only issue is that it specifically requires Attack and Special Boons from Athena and Ares (Divine Dash used to be an eligible prerequisite). Still, once you have the Duo and Divine Dash in your arsenal, Merciful End's full ass-kicking ability blossoms, especially if you have a dash-heavy weapon like the Sword or the Fists equipped.
• Mirage Shot (Artemis/Poseidon) adds a second projectile to your cast, which deals 35% damage of the original. While fine on its own, this effect can be added to any cast in the game, like the aforementioned broken Hunting Blades. Even leaving aside Hunting Blades, stacking this boon with Artemis' (which has an increased critical chance) or Poseidon's (which offers knockback damage) makes for a deadly combo.
• Scintillating Feast (Dionysus/Zeus) adds lightning strikes to Dionysus' Trippy Shot cast, so any enemy that is inside the Festive Fog will be struck with lightning. Zeus' various lightning boons such as Double Strike and Static Discharge's Jolted status can also be stacked on top, making this one of the deadliest casts in the game.
• Sea Storm (Poseidon/Zeus). Provided you can acquire it, it's an instant recipe for huge damage output, as it is the only ability in the game that allows you to stack two effects onto one attack (knockback + lightning), and furthermore can trigger Privileged Status if their additional status effects (Jolted and Rupture) are added. To really sweeten the deal, if you go that far, you're on a fast track to getting both gods' Legendary Boons… and with them added, you're basically achieving an overkill level of damage. Not surprisingly, Tidal Dash by itself cannot be a prerequisite for this to prevent snapping the game in half... but if you have it and manage to get Sea Storm from other prerequisite Boons, virtually all enemies will die in the blink of an eye.
• Smoldering Air (Aphrodite/Zeus) caps your God Gauge at only one segment, so you can't use a Greater Call, which is unfortunate if you have Artemis's or Aphrodite's Call. But in exchange, the gauge charges up absurdly quickly on its own, at five points per second. If you've got a Call from the likes of Athena, Ares, or Poseidon, that means becoming briefly invulnerable once every five seconds flat, allowing you to get through the most brutal of segments with relative ease. Even better if you've got Billowing Strength and/or Second Wind on you as well, at which point their respective damage/speed boosts can basically always be active for the remainder of an encounter.
• Stubborn Roots (Athena/Demeter) is powerful for defensive players. If you're out of Death Defiance at any point, your health will slowly tick back up during fights. Coupled with Athena's dash or any damage reduction boon, this can easily turn bosses into a simple numbers game where you just need to dodge around whenever you're low to completely refill your health. If you happen to be using the Shield? Sit in a corner, hold it up and charge (but not use) Bull's Rush, and you're basically invulnerable. About the only thing that can kill you at this stage is impatience, or the Tight Deadline condition of the Pact of Punishment, which consistently damages you after you run out of time.
• Sweet Nectar (Aphrodite/Poseidon) buffs up any Poms of Power effects by 2, meaning any future Poms you acquire will increase your boons by 3 levels, instead of 1 - and any already-buffed Poms (like those won from Erebus, bought from Charon's late-game shop for 300 Obols, etc) go up by 4 levels. Needless to say, this can lead to incredibly powerful runs, particularly if you manage to get this duo while you're still in Tartarus - and if combined with the Pom Blossom Keepsake, you're all-but-guaranteed to have every possible Boon you can acquire be leveled up considerably by the end.
• Vengeful Mood (Ares/Zeus) allows any revenge boons that the player's acquired to automatically trigger every 3 seconds, in addition to when Zagreus is damaged. There are 5 potential revenge boons in the game and they can all be stacked with this duo, along with further boosted by other passive boons from the Olympians. If built right, the player can literally let the "Revenge Damage" do all the work for them, even in boss fights.

Single Boons

• Artemis:
  • Support Fire boon adds a 10-damage Always Accurate Attack that fires every time Zagreus attacks, uses his special, or casts. With a rapid-fire weapon like Exagryph or the Twin fists, this Boon practically doubles your damage. It is also very simple to obtain, being a tier 2 boon (you just need one of several other boons from Artemis first).
  • Fully Loaded, Artemis' Legendary Boon, much like Hunting Blades, received a massive nerf coming out of Early Access, but even after, it is still considered a must for cast builds. It grants the player two additional cast stones. Artemis' Legendary is also unique in the fact that while it requires two out of three of her Tier 2 boons, two of them (Pressure Points and Exit Wounds) don't require any of her other boons while the third, the aforementioned Support Fire, is also incredibly useful, so her Legendary is still one of the easiest to get.
  • Artemis' Aid is a textbook Magikarp Power. It can be used at 20% rather than the typical 25% offered by the other gods' aids, but the catch is her normal call offers rather lackluster damage. Her Greater Call, on the other hand, has the potential to be the single strongest attack in the game, capable of eliminating an entire phase of a boss fight. This is all due to it having a 35% crit chance and being able to take advantage of other boons you may have acquired like Heart Rend or Clean Kill.
• Athena:
  • Her dash boon, Divine Dash, is the one mentioned in the page picture. While it only deals minimal damage, it surrounds Zagreus with an Attack Reflector for the duration of the dash that sends any projectiles back at the attacker, and also blocks most melee attacks. Suddenly, a huge amount of incidental damage that whittles down any given playthrough is being erased, taking a lot of pressure to play perfectly off the player. This boon is so absurdly useful that it's worth taking over almost any other option, including some Duo Boons.
  • Her legendary boon, Divine Protection, stands out even among legendary boons for breaking the game in two — it provides a Single-Use Shield which completely negates the next hit that Zagreus takes. And 20 seconds after it's used, it comes back. All Zagreus needs to know is when to play it safe and defensive (and given that you need at least one boon that can deflect attacks to get Divine Protection, anyone with the boon is already well equipped to do so), and it's more than reasonable to never take another point of damage in the entire rest of the run.
  • Athena's Aid makes you invulnerable and capable of deflecting any attack for a brief window of time. Her fully charged Greater Call makes the effect last for at least 9 seconds.
• Hermes:
  • Hermes' various Cast Boons, Quick Reload & Greater Recall for Infernal Soul, and Auto Reload & Bad News for Stygian Soul. Greater Recall in particular will have the Cast Stones automatically return to you once they have dislodged from the enemy, which is invaluable for cast builds. Meanwhile, due to either a poor choice of words or a bug, Bad News buffs all sources of damage instead of just cast as stated in the description by 50% if the enemy in question doesn't have a bloodstone in them. This also includes the miscellaneous damage like Zeus' lighting bolts, Artemis' Support Fire arrows and any damage over time status effects, as demonstrated in this post.
  • Normally, his dash-boosting boons aren't necessary, but they can make life a lot easier when fighting the Minotaur and the Final Boss when they are buffed by Extreme Measures and Forced Overtime. With Hyper Sprint, in particular, it's possible to avoid the spin attack even when it starts right next to you, and it gives you the speed that is usually required to avoid the Minotaur's charging attacks, which is particularly important when he is fought in a small room as a mini-boss.
  • Rush Delivery, when combined with Hyper Sprint, grants anything between 50%-125% bonus (depending on rarity) to all damage dealt for almost a whole second after you dash. The end result is an almost practical doubling of the damage you deal, and when combined with high-damage dashes or sources of damage over time (like Ares and Dionysus, or Demeter's cast) can rack up insane amounts of damage very quickly.
  • "Quick Favor" adds 1% to your God Gauge every 2 seconds (or less on higher rarities). This is incredibly practical when you have a strong Call, as it means you no longer have to think about doing damage to charge your Limit Break. When combined with some of the Athena boons, it enables a totally defensive playstyle in which you simply outlast the enemy and close in on your inevitable victory.
• Poseidon:
  • Poseidon's Tidal Dash is the next best thing to Athena's Divine Dash: it has a very generous radius in which it knocks back enemies, and its damage is extremely high for a dash boon at 35 when Common (compare to Zeus at 10). It also stacks well with Poseidon's other boons that can debuff and damage enemies even more. You can easily speed around a room and reliably clear it of Numbskulls, Flame Wheels, or Vermin when employing this dash, and a lot of pressure is taken off of tense rooms containing such things as Nemean Chariots or Snakestones.
  • Typhoon's Fury and Breaking Wave. Creating a playstyle based around knocking foes into walls would seem overly challenging, but it works so much better than one would think. Typhoon's Fury, at minimum, triples the amount of damage a wall slam will do, while Breaking Wave will cause a wall slam to trigger a water blast with a decent range and very high damage. Any boon or weapon enabling knockback spam (like the above Tidal Dash) turns either of these boons into nukes, never mind having both of them. And then if you manage to get Poseidon's Legendary Boon, Second Wave, both of their effects will trigger twice, causing enough damage that will kill virtually any non-boss enemy in the game.
  • Normally, certain attacks and weapons remove Zag's ability to flinch enemies, such as Exagryph's normal shots. Poseidon's knockback on attacks, however, activates flinch even when it otherwise wouldn't exist, even on Armored elite enemies. Consequently, Poseidon and Exagryph can easily enable Zag to stunlock and keep at a distance an entire room with minimal effort.
• Zeus:
  • Zeus has a couple of boons that synergize with each other. Double Strike gives every single lightning bolt effect a second hit ignoring the internal cooldown on lightning bolts. Static Discharge applies Jolted which punishes enemies when they attack with a lighting bolt that can activate Double Strike. Splitting Bolt further enchances Zeus boons by adding an extra instance of Lightning Bolt. All of these are applied to almost every activation of Zeus boons as a flat damage, which lets them scale with global damage multipliers, one of which are native to Zeus boon in the form of Billowing Strength. With the right luck, it is possible to stack a bunch of Zeus boons to the point where even the normally weak Zeus Dash is capable of doing massive damage.
  • Zeus' Call is commonly considered one of the strongest Call boons in the game. On its own, the call is pretty good, with the lightning bolts doing plenty of damage in quick succession. Within the context of being a Zeus boon, it is well positioned to snowball into some of the most powerful boon in the game, being able to take advantage of Double Strike and Splitting Bolt, continuously applying Static Discharge, unlocking access to Billowing Strength, and qualifies as a requirement to unlock Smoldering Air. The combination between Smoldering Air, Zeus Call, and Zeus support boons are extremely powerful, and can be achieved on most builds by simply getting a Zeus Call and a core Aphrodite Boon.
  • Clouded Judgement makes your God Gauge charge faster as you deal and take damage. This allows you to use the God's Aid attack, which summons support from one of the Olympians. Some of these calls are game-breakers in their own right, like Athena's and Artemis'.
  • Billowing Strength gives a buff of at least 20% to all damage Zagreus can do after using a call. This buff lasts for 15 seconds. With the right setup, your God Gauge will charge faster than the duration of the buff lasts, making this boon easily spammable and effectively permanent.
  • Zeus's legendary boon, Splitting Bolt, shoots a spark that deals forty damage every time you damage someone with a lightning boon. What makes this ridiculously powerful is that by the time you get it, you probably have a whole suite of lightning boons it can synergize with, and Splitting Bolt is enough to turn your build from something merely powerful into something that will kill Theseus and the Minotaur in mere seconds when they are unbuffed by the Pact of Punishment, and its crushing power will tear through the Final Boss even if buffed by the Pact. This boon is particularly overpowered with a swift weapon and if you also have Lighting Rod.
• Others:
  • Aphrodite's Unhealthy Fixation makes any Weak effects have a 15% chance of charming an enemy, which causes them to fight for you. Not only is this fantastic for neutralizing the threat of large mobs, there is no enemy immune to this effect. Not even the Final Boss has Contractual Boss Immunity to it, so it can turn the game's hardest fight into a joke.
  • Ares's ability to cause your Basic and Special Attacks inflict Doom — time-delayed bonus damage with an animation of a sword balancing above an enemy's head and then falling — and Dionysus's to make them cause Hangover (poison Damage Over Time) are huge, well, boons to Hit-and-Run Tactics. The former provides much better bonus damage, but both of them free up more time for dodging. When combined with ranged or long-distance attacks, which are available with every weapon except the Sword and the Fists, Zagreus is able to deal significant damage from very safe distances.
  • Chaos offers Flourish, Strike, and Lunge boons which tend to give flat bonuses to your basic attacks that often exceed the damage bonuses of other Boons and stack with those Boons. This can let you hit insane damage when paired with high-rarity Boons, especially Aphrodite's.
  • Dionysus' Strong Drink is immensely powerful early on to aggressive playstyles; it always guarantees 100% health recovery from fountains (thus ensuring you meet each new level at full power) and grants Zagreus a permanent damage buff to everything each time he drinks from one. The game has four guaranteed fountains (one behind each boss plus one in the Satyr Sack room in the Temple of Styx), and three optional ones that admittedly are luck-based to find — yet because it has no prerequisites, with a few Poms of Power and getting it early on in Tartarus, it can easily see Zagreus with a permanent 20-30% damage bonus by the endgame.
  • Demeter's Winter Harvest instantly kills any Chill-affected enemies whose health drops down to 10%, inflicting Chill on the others nearby. If you also happen to have Killing Freeze — which you most likely do, since it is one of the few boons that grant you the chance at getting Winter Harvest — you can simply afflict everyone in the room with Chill and take cover until Decay kills them on its own. And, just like in the case with Aphrodite's Unhealthy Fixation, no enemy is immune to this, not even the final boss.
    • Lapses into hilarious territory when you figure out it's possible to kill Asterius during his mini-boss fight before he has a chance to yield with this boon. Granted he still appears in the region's boss fight along Theseus, but it's hilarious to see the Bull of Minos disintegrate instead of simply storming off.

Weapon Upgrades and Aspects

Hammer Upgrades

General

• Any hammer upgrade that says "Charged". While the bow and shield both provide charging bonuses, their default power isn't high. A Charging upgrade to the bow or spear will make that weapon's respective special deal up to 300% damage, which on top of boon modifiers, means you've just been given a One-Hit Kill to most enemies, two hits at most.

Sword

• Cursed Slash causes Zagreus' maximum health to drop by sixty percent (which also affects any Centaur Hearts you pick up afterwards), but also causes each of his normal attacks to recover two HP per hit. While description implies Zagreus becomes a Glass Cannon, in practice it makes him much more durable. When you can recover from all damage with just a few basic combo strings, getting back to maximum health becomes trivial. Lose some health? Just play defensively for a bit with dashes and hit-and-run tactics, and you'll be back to full in no time. Combined with Darkness upgrades, a few Hearts, and Cerberus' Collar, and Zag will still have about 100 HP or so, giving him a solid health pool that he can recover with ease.
• Hoarding Slash, giving you 5% damage per the amount of Charon's Obols you have, can easily be this if you play your cards right. On it's own with some frugality it's pretty good, but it only gets significantly better if you can defeat Charon early on (no easy task mind you) after taking the 300 gold, get the Chaos Boon Affluence, and/or get Hermes' Side Hustle Boon, while still seeking gold every chance you get, watch as enemies and even bosses start dropping like flies. While this is a bit luck-based to say the least (though there are numerous ways to get a similar result), to put it into perspective, assuming you get it first and Side Hustle 2nd (or vice versa, with Side Hustle ), get Chaos Boon Affluence (boosting your obols collected by between 30 to 100 percent), and fight Charon for 300 (390-600 due to the boon), with 71 (out of 73) chambers of Side Hustle netting between 710 to 1349 extra Obols (10-19 per chamber), this strategy, assuming you somehow find no additional obols through enemy drops, vases, or chamber rewards, will give your basic 20-25-30 attacks a boost of between 55 and 97, enough to kill even the tankiest enemies in the game in a matter of seconds without any additional boons, and take the Final Boss apart with (or taking this strategy even further, without) them.
• Flurry Slash allows you to hit enemies indefinitely as long as the button is held down (at a faster rate than the normal 3-hit combo as well), which not only boosts the action's base damage to 25, but also allows your Attack to reliably rack up status effects like Chill and Hangover, along with spam the others much faster.

Spear

• Flurry Jab removes its charged attack, but instead lets you hold the attack button to stab furiously in front of you. Since most ranged attacks can be blocked, you can just get up close enough to hit the foe and stand still while stabbing them without any danger of getting hit. It also staggers enemies, so unless the enemy is armored, you risk almost nothing by using this upgrade (unless there are other enemies around, which can be solved via some good positioning or simply dashing from time to time). Even Meg's bullet hell attack and the Hydra's spit attacks can be blocked with this, letting you get in a lot of free damage while the attack plays out.
• Serrated Point, at the cost of reducing your dash distance by 25%, turns Varatha into the strongest dash attack weapon in the game. Serrated Point buffs the dash attack by increasing the number of hits to 3. Unlike most upgrades of this nature, the damage between the three hits isn't lowered either.

Shield

• Charged Shot turns Aegis into a better version of Coronacht, replacing its bull rush with a powerful ranged attack that requires charging. However, unlike Coronacht, Aegis' damage-nullifying guard is kept while the attack charges, which removes the bow's main drawback. The Power Shot also pierces shields (like Theseus and Greatshields), still counts as a bull rush for the purpose of other upgrades and aspects, and the charged shot can be fired for full damage immediately allowing the shield to quickly rack up damage.

Bow

• Concentrated Volley, specifically for Aspect of Chiron, is deadly as the special will be boosted by +3 for each consecutive hit. Because Chiron's special effect is adding a homing buff to the special, this is effectively a guaranteed buff to an already powerful special.
• Flurry Shot upgrade eliminates the need to charge up your shots, and while you don't have access to Power Shot, you can launch arrows and do damage a lot faster, especially if you also take Twin Shot or Triple Shot and some good damage boons for the attack.
• Perfect Shot makes the Power Shot mechanic, in which the tip of the arrow will briefly flash before you shoot, easier to pull off. Doing so normally grants a x3.5 damage multiplier to your attack, but with Perfect Shot, this increases the multipler to x5.

Twin Fists

• Breaching Cross causes the dash strike for Zagreus to pierce enemies, and it also causes each such attack to deal ten times its damage to armor. With this, breaking through enemy armor becomes a joke.
• Explosive Upper: tweaks your dash-special to expand the range in which it can damage enemies, changing it from a single target attack to a close-range blast, along with giving it a 100% boost to the attack. This is particularly useful for both Aspect of Demeter and Gilgamesh.
• Rush Kick changes your uppercut special to a vaulting kick that not only does more damage, but will launch you a fair distance to the target. You can bounce around the battlefield kicking foes left and right, dealing huge damage and while not having to worry about closing in first.
• Draining Cutter allows the Twin Fists to restore 2% of your health every time you kill something with the uppercut special. It's not especially overpowered in most areas of the Underworld, but it becomes a whole other story in the Temple of Styx thanks to the Vermin. Any solid hit will kill the small rats, and with how many fling themselves at you at a time, clearing a room of them using just your special will typically restore a very generous amount of your health.

Adamant Rail

• Triple Bomb allows you to fire out three bombs in quick succession, which is roughly the same as having a guaranteed critical on every use of an already strong attack with a wide radius. And if you actually can apply critical to it – and even better, turn the bombs into missiles with increased base damage, which is made even more powerful with boons that increase Special damage – kiss the challenge of the game goodbye. Getting this hammer upgrade early makes it a straight-up Disc-One Nuke.
• Cluster Bomb launches five reduced-damage bombs in a single attack in a parabola pattern. While it's finicky to get all five shots to hit the same target (they only overlap at point blank), the upgrade will clear out rooms of mooks and is invaluable against large mobs and mobile bosses who can dodge a single bomb (but not so easily a spread of five). It's more broken paired with Rocket Launcher upgrade, where due to an actual bug in the game, the rocket damage isn't reduced. The combined effect is akin to a rocket shotgun with a base damage of 400 (five shots at 80 damage each) that will annihilate practically anything at close range. If you get the right boons on your Special, this could easily add up to over 1000 damage per shot, which can be done every two seconds, at no cost.
• Spread Fire effect, which at the cost of lowering your ammo count by 6, effectively turns your rail into a rapid-fire shotgun. While you sacrifice both the ammo size and the range at which you can attack, each shot increases to a base-40 damage per shot. This combined with the pure attacking speed turns this into a favorite upgrade in the speed-running community.
• Delta Chamber turns your attack into a 3-round burst while also making your ammo infinite, meaning you never have to reload. This is especially deadly when you are using gods such as Zeus, Demeter, or Dionysus on your attack, as you can abuse their status effects while never having to worry about reloading.
• Rocket Bomb turns your special from a slow moving launcher to a quick projectile that deals 80 base damage. It can also pair with Cluster Bomb so that you send out five rockets at once (at a reduced damage). Even without Cluster, there are still plenty of ways (through Boon or Aspect) to make this an "I win" button.

Weapon Aspects

The hidden aspects of the Infernal Arms also apply, as they are quite powerful, but take a while to unlock, even if you know exactly what you need to do to get them, and thus serve as something of a reward for players who have invested a lot of time in the game.

Sword

• Poseidon's aspect of Stygius boosts your cast damage, and its special (which is identical to the baseline special attack) automatically dislodges any blood crystals stuck in your foes. Artemis has a boon called Exit Wounds (requires any cast boon that isn't Ares', Dionysus', or Demeter's), which deals a minimum of 50 damage whenever a blood crystal dislodges from a foe — which includes dislodgings from the aspect of Poseidon. As long as you don't subsequently re-pick to a cast that doesn't lodge in foes (i.e. Ares, Dionysus, or Demeter), the aspect of Poseidon/Exit Wounds combo allows Zagreus to repeatedly cast at foes and dislodge them again, racking up a lot of damage quickly.
• The Aspect of Arthur has the slowest attack of any weapon, but consequently has the highest base damage. Combine this with certain boons, such as Athena's Blinding Flash, which boosts backstab damage when combined with any Deflect boon or, even better, Daedalus Hammer's Shadow Slash upgrade (+200% backstab damage), or Artemis' critical chance boons, and you can easily decimate enemies and bosses alike if all three swings connect (with the last hit dealing much more damage than the first two). You can easily deal over 1000 damage in a single hit under the right conditions. Furthermore, the Aspect changes Stygius' special to an area of effect that slows down projectiles and gives you damage resistance while you're standing in it, and it also increases your maximum HP by fifty points. All of this turns Zagreus into a massive Mighty Glacier that can deal a few big hits for a ton of damage, even more so if you use Aphrodite's boons to further reduce the damage received. The only downside is that you'll have to train yourself to stay within the defensive aura.

Spear

• The Achilles aspect changes the Special mechanic of your spear where rather than summoning your spear back, you instead charge towards where it lands. The benefit is, once the Spear has been fully upgraded, you will be granted a 150% boost to the next 4 attacks or casts after this is done. This makes Achilles Aspect into one of the go-to weapons for a cast build. Oh, and you can still recall the spear normally by using the attack button rather than the special button, though you won't get buffed by doing so.
• The Guan Yu aspect of the Eternal Spear, when fully upgraded, halves your health and any health upgrades for the duration of the run (without upgrades, it's a 70% Max Health reduction), but in exchange gives the spear's spin attack health-restoring properties for each hit. It only heals for one point per hit, but the spin attack will hit several times at least and has decent range. It gets even more broken when combined with hammer upgrades that increase its size and decrease charge time. This was so broken, in fact, that the spin attack got nerfed so it would bounce off walls instead of passing through them, as prior to that, you could hide behind the plentiful barriers and attack with impunity.

Shield

• Chaos' aspect of Aegis adds an additional thrown shield to your special whenever you bull rush, and can be upgraded to five additional shields. With the right special-boosting boons (anything that adds flat damage like Zeus, Ares, or Dionysus is good, as is Artemis for the critical chance or Athena since every single thrown shield now reflects missiles) or upgrades, the Chaos Aspect supports a bull rush -> special -> bull rush playstyle that will clear rooms in seconds, deals tons of burst damage to bosses, and renders Zagreus extremely difficult to damage because he never stands still.
• The Beowulf aspect of Aegis is incredibly powerful. While it removes the normal Cast mechanic, Zag is instead allowed to load the Cast directly into the weapon and deploy it using Bull Rush, striking the enemy with a huge burst of damage. While it does give an extra damage penalty, the fact that the Bull Rush still allows you to No-Sell damage makes it not as bad as it sounds. With the right build, you can pretty much annihilate most enemies and bosses in a flash. Unsurprisingly, it is a favourite of the Speed Running community, who typically use it in conjunction with Poseidon's Cast; Artemis on Attack, Special or Call; and their resulting Duo Boon, which adds on a free, if weaker, second Cast — which would be just fine on its own even if there wasn't a Good Bad Bug on Beowulf where the second Cast does full damage.

Bow

• The Aspect of Chiron makes Coronacht's Volley Fire shoot fewer arrows, but these arrows home in on an enemy you just hit with a normal attack for up-to-4-seconds. It can put out ludicrous amounts of consistent, single target damage at a very long range, and it starts to become nasty if you upgrade the Volley Fire with Relentless Assault, which boosts the number of arrows considerably. With defensive boons such as Demeter's slowing attacks and Hermes's speed, you become a vicious sniper that's very hard to touch.
• Hera's aspect of Coronacht does for the Bow what Beowulf does for the Shield: let Zagreus load the Cast into his next Attack. This is, arguably, even stronger on the Bow, since the Cast is often redundant on this weapon anyway. Combined with casts that are powerful but hard to hit with, like Dionysus' Trippy Shot or Poseidon's Flood Shot (both can be gotten in the first room with the proper keepsake), the aspect of Hera provides an Alpha Strike build that will deal 400+ damage in a single attack. The only downside to it is that you have to hide for a while (5 seconds at max level) while waiting for your Cast to come out... Unless you just wiped the room right off the bat. Like Beowulf, this Aspect's high damage makes it a common Speed Running tool.
• The Aspect of Rama gives the bow a slower-charging but much wider and stronger main attack. Instead of a large spread fire, its special instead rapidly fires a volley of three quick arrows that apply the Shared Suffering effect, causing any enemy under the effect to take up-to-60% of the damage of your main attack whenever the latter hits any enemy. This attack bounces off walls and bounces between enemies, allowing you to inflict the effect on entire groups really quickly, which makes it the equivalent of an Exagryph with the Delta Chamber and Ricochet Fire hammer upgrades. This stacks on top of your main attack, so even against a single enemy it's a 60% damage boost. The wider hitbox of the Aspect of Rama indirectly buffed Twin Shot and Triple Shot allowing the attack to overlap for double to triple its damage output. As an icing on the cake, due to the special's multi-hit nature, Aspect of Rama is notably one of few burst damage heavy aspect that have a built in way to nulify the Damage Control Pact of Punishment. Rama's combination of insane damage output, strong baseline power, and utility of its special turns it into one of the most consistent weapon to challenge an extremely high Heat runs.
  • An alternative way to use Aspect of Rama is to build around its Special since on-hit effects trigger for each arrow in the special attack, allowing you to build absurd stacks of damage with a special-focused build. If you get Zeus's Thunder Flourish, which adds chain lightning to your Special, you have a rapid-fire attack that inflicts Shared Suffering and can do a substantial amount of damage on its own. This can be spammed for an absolutely obscene damage output and renders the bow's Attack redundant for most enemies – outside of those in high-Heat runs – due to how slow it is. It's also a swift attack, which allows for the bow to be an extremely nimble weapon with an excellent range. This can be made even more powerful with Zeus's Legendary Boon, which deals forty additional damage each time you damage a foe with lightning, which gives you a build that can tear through Asterius and Theseus. If you are feeling lucky, you can pick Poseidon's Tempest Flourish instead, get the Sea Storm Duo boon along with Static Discharge and Razor Shoals. The result is being able to trigger Privileged status with just one click/button.

Twin Fists

• The Aspect of Demeter offers an additional 5 hits to your Special after you've landed 12 hits with your attack. Due to the quick pace in which you stack up hits, this leads to an especially devastating Special Attack you can abuse frequently. Particularly if you pair it with Artemis' Deadly Flourish (which adds a 20% crit chance) and aforementioned Rush Kick hammer upgrade.
• The Aspect of Gilgamesh offers a Maim mechanic to your dash-special, which grants a simultaneous Debuff and Buff to your enemies, making them take 25% extra damage while dealing an additional 50% damage while the effect is active. This aspect also offers an additional passive via giving Zagreus an additional 2 dashes. This passive to the Dash allows the player to utilize the Ruthless Reflex mirror upgrade to its fullest potential, which offers a 50% dodge chance & attack bonus if you can dash right before getting hit, while still having additional dashes. Aspect of Gilgamesh is pound for pound one of the strongest hitting weapons in the game, and with good reflexes on the player's end through Shadow Reflect, they can make the absolute most out of the Maim feature.

Gun

• Lucifer's aspect of Exagryph replaces the normal fire with a fast-hitting laser that has a 20-round magazine. This synergizes insanely well with Zeus's attack aspect, chewing through mooks and bosses like a hot knife through butter while sending lightning bolts at nearby opponents at an astounding rate. With the right setup, the only thing that will kill you is carelessness.
• Exagryph's Aspect of Eris is generally considered to be either the best weapon or in the top tier by Speed Runners: It provides a scaling (up to +75%) bonus to all damage you deal for a solid 4 seconds after Zagreus absorbs his own special. This turns the somewhat finicky special into an always-useful and very solid damage buff, and since it's not specific to just the main firing mode, it synergizes excellently with sources of flat damage (Zeus in particular, but also Dionysus) that lets you chew through the game at incredible speed.

Mirror Upgrades and Keepsakes

• The "Ruthless Reflex" upgrade to the Mirror of Night offers Zagreus a 2-second 50% dodge chance and damage bonus whenever he dodges an attack by dashing. On its own, it's Difficult, but Awesome because it denies Zagreus his second dash (which helps a lot with Asphodel and dodging certain attacks like the Final Boss' Spin Attack). There are, however, two ways to break the game with this: One, Zagreus' aspect of the Twin Fists of Malphon can be upgraded with a flat 15% dodge bonus using Titan Blood, and the Lambent Plume can add 1-1.2% dodge chance every time you Speed Run a room (fairly easy in Tartarus and Asphodel, and still doable in Elysium), which can see Zagreus hit a ~90% dodge chance for three seconds by the endgame with a well-timed dash. Second, Hermes's "Greatest Reflex" boon just straight-up adds dashes. Normally, having more than two dashes is overkill. With Ruthless Reflex, however (which can trigger on each of the multiple dashes), you have just eliminated the only drawback and can use a Dash Attack style with Stygius, the Twin Fists (especially Gilgamesh, as it baseline provides additional dashes), or Varatha to be plain-old untouchable most of the time. It gets even better if you can make the extra dash boon rare or epic, so it grants two or three extra dashes, respectively.
• The Pom Blossom keepsake is Post-End Game Content and thus Purposefully Overpowered. The Final Boss will even openly acknowledge its power if you fight them while wearing it. The Blossom has the effect of upgrading a random boon by one level every six, five, or four encounters (depending on the keepsake's level). Over an entire run, you can accumulate about 12 random levels this way, or 9 if you use a god trinket in Tartarus to force a certain build. That's effectively an entire floor's worth of nothing but Pom fruit. The best part is that unlike the Pierced Butterfly and Lambent Plume, the Pom Blossom also counts the small Styx rooms as well. So if you want to, you can get 4-6 levels in Styx alone.
• The fully upgraded Evergreen Acorn keepsake, given to you by Eurydice, allows you to be impervious for up to 5 hits in a final encounter in each region. This keepsake is a favorite for high-level heat runs, particularly for Styx, because the final boss' damage is so powerful, they can strip away your health in the blink of an eye. Giving the player 5 free hits against bosses, especially with the Pact of Punishment on, can pay in dividends for allowing them to bypass their particularly-hard early phases easier.

Other

• Due to how the game's autosave system works, you can actually fish twice in the same room and both catches will be counted. Considering how low the spawn rate is on the surface, it is a godsend for those who want to fill up the codex and obtain valuable rewards. To explain, the autosave triggers whenever Zagreus enters a new room/zone or collects the room reward. However, the fishing spot is independently spawned in the room itself. So if you fish -> collect reward -> quit, you can fish again at the same spot for a second time while keeping the first catch. However, it will not work in the starting areas of Asphodel, Elysium, or in Styx's hub, as there are no room rewards to trigger the autosave. This exploit also doesn't work in areas like Chaos' realm or Charon's shop, as the autosave doesn't trigger after obtaining their rewards.