Kripp's Regal Bees Pygmalien Build

How to Activate Plan Bee

"Regal Bees" combines the synergy between Regal Blade and Beehive. This combo allows you to take advantage of Beehive's ability to repeatedly generate more Busy Bees.

Each extra Busy Bee can be sold to continue scaling the Regal Blade. This essentially creates an endless supply of sale fodder while simultaneously scaling your active Busy Bees with the Beehive.

Beehive

Beehive is a really strong counter to Weapon-based strategies, particularly in matchups that have multiple fast Weapons. It's essentially Caltrops against Weapon builds, except it can hit way harder and has its own built-in scaling.

Upgrading the Beehive makes a pretty big difference to its rate of scaling. However, you'll likely want to continue using your previous Busy Bees over their newer Gold/Diamond ones, as they will actually deal higher Damage from past scaling.

Regal Blade

Beehive restructures the way you handle your Economy during the run. While purchasing Weapons is generally the favorable option alongside Regal Blade, instead the focus should be on Properties.

This allows you to kill two birds with one stone and scale both items together. With a strong enough Economy you can still purchase any affordable Weapons, but overall the priority should be on Properties in order to get the most bang for your buck.

Bootstraps

Bootstraps is a fantastic item that works especially well when you're routinely buying and selling items. If acquired early enough, it's actually worth upgrading the Bootstraps via level-up over your other more important items.

With a strong enough Economy you can eventually use it to upgrade everything else so it's definitely worth the wait. The same applies to enchantments as they will also get passed on from the Bootstraps. This gives you extraordinary value from your level 10 enchant.

There's definitely some RNG involved, so be sure not to hold onto excess items that may waste your upgrade/enchantment. Knowing that you can only upgrade items of lower tier allows you to better navigate your inventory.

Kripp enchanted the Bootstraps with Restorative, allowing him to pass on the enchant to a couple of the Busy Bees. Towards the end he swapped it to Radiant, eventually landing it on the Regal Blade and keeping it protected from disruption.

Dragon Tooth

Dragon Tooth is a reliable form of Damage scaling that works excellently alongside the Busy Bees. You get a lot more value when it's applied to multiple Small Weapons, which isn't too common with most Pyg builds.

The fact that it spends gold every time is actually beneficial. This counts towards the 50 gold requirement of Bootstraps, giving an additional method outside of vendors.

A word of warning, as of writing this, the Bootstraps may be bugged to not apply the upgrade/enchant if the Dragon Tooth trigger is what would activate it. Keep that in mind so it doesn't accidentally go to waste.

Gumball Machine

Gumball Machine, along with the Gumball event, is a worthwhile way to help scale the Busy Bees. Since they can't be upgraded through normal means, all of their power needs to come from scaling.

Gumballs may be minimal, but when stacked in multiples it can really make a difference. Plus, since this build requires only three purchasable items, it's a lot easier to have enough spare gold to justify their purchase.

Noisy Cricket

Noisy Cricket is a solid board-wide Damage buff for wider boards that can take advantage of it. It's essentially just a slightly better Strength, but only applicable to builds with seven or more items.

Having multiple options of Weapon skills is great because you'll generally get much better value from a new skill over upgrading an old one. Just pick whatever gives you the most overall Damage.

Sharpened Steel

Sharpened Steel is insanely strong with this particular setup. By having multiple fast-acting Weapons that are all adjacent to each other makes it super easy to hit 100% Crit.

It's worth pursuing the Bouncertron PvE Encounter if you see it. Otherwise just try and pickup whatever common Crit Chance skills that are available to you.

Arms Dealer

Arms Dealer isn't quite as effective when Properties are the priorty, but with a strong enough Economy you can still make good use of it. At the very least it will gradually increase your Health as random Weapons are acquired.

You'll get a lot more mileage out of this skill during the early game when items are generally cheaper. If it's later in the day it's probably not worth it since Gold/Diamond items become far more prevalent (and expensive to continuously buy).