Gunfire Reborn – FAQS, Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Given a number of streamers have picked up the game recently, which will hopefully see a large influx of new players joining – I have consolidated a number of tips and tricks from various posts and my own playthroughs.

Comprehensive Guide for Newbies

Note: Credit goes to KungFusion

Damage

Elemental Damage (Corrosive, Fire, Lightning) is different from the Elemental Effects that they have a chance to proc (Decay, Burning, Shock). Make sure you read scrolls properly to understand which of the two they impact

Lightning has bonus damage against shields (blue health bar), Corrosive against armor (yellow health bar) and Fire against normal HP (red health bar)

The fusion system lets you proc additional damage types when enemies are under the effects of 2 elemental effects.

• Decay + Shock = Miasma – A very strong DOT that can shred enemies, and can have multiple stacks.
• Decay + Burning = Explosion – Causes an AOE effect on proc.
• Shock + Burning = Manipulation – Confuses enemies and makes them fight their allies. AI for this is a bit wonky, e.g Archers hitting as melee instead of ranged.

Fusion damage types and elemental effects are procced by a variety of mechanics

• Weapons – Can apply Decay, Burning, and Shock.
• Weapons – Can also directly trigger Miasma, Explosion, and Manipulation through the “Shared Weapon Damage” Gemini inscription.
• Weapons (Launchers) – Triggers Explosion.
• Cat Grenade – Triggers Decay.
• Cat Energy Orb – Triggers Burning when Fire Elemental Damage is leveled to Tier 3.
• Dog Grenade – Triggers Explosion.

• Scrolls – Can modify the chance/ability to proc certain effects and damage types.
• Critical Strike – In this game, a critical strike only procs whenever you hit the weak spot on an enemy. Usually the head but on some enemies, it may be elsewhere (e.g the x mark on the back of Dark-faced bandit or the mouth in phase 1 of the 2nd boss).
• Lucky Shot – This is calculated separately to Crit and can proc on any enemy hit. This can be stacked over 100% resulting in additional procs which you see as different coloured damage numbers (Tier 1 <100%, x2= Orange, Tier 2 >100%, x3 = Purple, Tier 3 >200%, x4 = Red). Lucky Shot can proc on the same hit as a Crit as well.

Scrolls & Interactions

• Advanced Depot + Aura of Venom – The weapon’s secondary skill with this scroll essentially means you can empty your reserved ammo with one right-click.
• Preemptive Strike + Prism / Golden Bow / One-shot snipers.
• Snow Boots + scrolls with negative movement impacts (e.g. Decay Enthusiast or Heavy Shield).
• Triple Comeback – The shield and HP reduction are removed once all 3 stacks have procced.
• Dual edge – Increases Damage dealt and Damage taken by 1% and 0.2% respectively (i.e. if you kill 50 enemies you will deal 50% more damage but also take 10% more damage)
• Brutal Gloves – Usually an instant drop unless you have a build that can use it (Launchers or Lucky Shot). Crit damage is a huge DPS boost and shouldn’t be sacrificed for a flat damage increase
• Air Bag + HP loss scrolls – Air Bag constantly drains your HP to 1, meaning scrolls like Berserk Soul and Persistant will very often be at maximum potential even while you have full shields. This build pairs well with Paranormaility
• Elemental Cube + No-reload weapons / infinite ammo scrolls – The game doesn’t consider weapons like Prism and Golden Bow to technically ever reload, meaning they will never reset the element chosen by the Cube. You can re-roll the Cube to the correct element with the pistol (you can see which element is currently active based on the small buff icon), and then it will keep that element forever if you use one of these weapons. This also applies to infinite ammo builds like Laser Gloves + Genesis/Bloody Ammo/Advanced Depot.
• Improved Clip + low magazine weapons – Because the ammo is added directly into your magazine, if your magazine is full or just very small in general you will get almost no ammo back when you pick up an ammo box, causing you to run out of ammo fairly quickly. This also applies to Against the Flow, since 10% of a small magazine is often 0 ammo return.
• On The House – If you buy On The House from a peddler, your next purchase from that peddler will be free.
• Elemental Shards – Shards are good in certain situations like Fire Shard + Fire Enthusiast or if you are able to get all 3 through shared drops from teammates.
• You can drop scrolls by holding right-click hovering over the scroll icon in the tab menus.

Weapons

• Some weapons have a secondary skill that are extremely useful (e.g. The Porcupine secondary skill can be spammed along with primary fire)
• Elemental weapons usually have a fixed elemental type (e.g Prism = Corrosive, Fire Dragon = Fire) but normal weapons have a small chance to drop with an elemental type as well.
• A low damage high fire rate weapon can be used with Bounty Hunter to amass large amounts of copper (e.g. lasers). You can then go for a 15+ level weapon through Enhancements. This strategy pair’s well with an early Devil’s Covenant.
• There are maybe 1-2 weapons that are “bad” but most weapons are useable given the right inscriptions. I have seen people skip over some really good weapons and it is hard to make a tier list as it is very roll/character/scroll dependant. Experiment and have a play with all the weapons – this is a roguelite – you’re going to die a lot anyway!
• Once you have decent levels and can progress comfortably to the third stage, the craftsman is usually saved for later given the better drops with Gemini inscriptions. However, if you have a decent starting weapon drop with good modifiers feel free to upgrade early.

Weapon Inscriptions

• Weapon Inscriptions have tiers. Tier 1 / Normal = Green text, Tier 2 / Rare = Blue Text = Tier 3 / Legendary = Orange text.
• When a chest offers to upgrade a Normal inscription, it will only upgrade a Normal inscription. If you have no Normal inscriptions on the weapon, it will do nothing. The inscription it replaces is random. When it offers to replace all inscriptions, this does have a chance to roll for higher level inscriptions as well. Additionally, if you re-roll all inscriptions after upgrading a weapon to +5 or higher, it will always give it a Gemini inscription as one of the replacements (if you have Gemini inscriptions unlocked).
• +0.2 projective translates to a guaranteed extra projective every 5 shots.
• You need to have Gemini inscriptions on both weapons to activate the inscription. The inscription text will turn purple when activated.
• Shared Crit Gemini – Adds the crit between the 2 weapons. Lets you crit with launchers that usually have 1x base critical damage.
• Shared Weapon Damage Gemini – Lets you proc Fusion elemental effects with a single weapon.

Movement

Weapons enable different movement speeds. Example – Prism lets you have a faster movement speed compared to a Tiger Cannon. You can use your starter pistol during jumping puzzles in vaults to hit those tricky long jumps.

Dash has some i-frames so you can skip through traps with it.

The boulder vaults actually have an initial pattern than you can make through in one go. The 2nd (or is it third?) set of boulders in the first path of the Act 1 vaults can be slipped through in the gap between them.

Cat

• Elemental Build – Centred around Elemental Damage. Tier 3 +x% elemental damage is great but usually getting 1-2 tiers for 2 elemental types is fine late game when you are looking for the shared damage Gemini inscription to proc Fusion effects.
• Sniper Build – Centered around Energy Blade.
• Hot Stuff Build – Fire Enthusiast + Flesh and Bones + Resolute + Advanced Depot. Fire Dragon can carry you through the game but will be useless for the final boss.
• You can proc the Miasma fusion effect with a lightning weapon and the Decay effect from the corrosion grenades.
• “ROF” in the Wildfire ascension refer to “Rate of Fire.
• Hex smoke is really powerful, it’s a great defensive and offensive ascension skill.
• Acidic Explosion is also great for speed-clearing out enemies in the 1st stage where they are often grouped up (is it fixed damage or enemy HP based?).

Dog

• Iron Man Build – Using double laser gloves + Lucky Ammo ascension.
• Launcher Explosion Build – Dual-wielding 2 launchers, having one as a bone dragon helps group up enemies. One of the few builds that can utilise Brutal Gloves as launchers usually have a 1x Crit Damage stat.
• Elemental Explosion Build – Using a combination of a Decay and Burning procs.
• Double Hippo Build – Dual-wielding 2 Hippos.
• You can’t use secondary skills when dual-wielding so weapons like Justice and Rainbow Arch don’t work as well.
• Prism works well with the Last Shot ascension.

Bosses

1st Boss

• If you’re just starting off – having a lightning weapon is useful to remove the shields and fire damage helps shred the red hp. Once you’ve leveled up a bit, you’ll find it easy to beat him with any weapon. Miasma procs with a lightning weapon and your corrosive grenades as Cat are also very useful.
• You can use the 2 pillars to absorb some of his attacks, but don’t stand too close as some of his attacks will AOE you or he’ll explode the barrels near them.
• Depending on your position, some of his attacks can only be dodged with a backward dash, especially his flying smash.

2nd Boss

• The mouth is the weak spot in the first phase and the so is the tail in the second phase.
• To dodge the laser, you should dash in the opposite direction after it starts Kamehameha-ing.
• It doesn’t do damage while traveling through sand and is targetable.
• You can shoot its green globules out the air in the 2nd phase. With the right timing, you can also burst all of them right as it shoots them out. You can also do this with Energy Orb, or even a grenade toss. It’s also quite easy to do with an extremely high fire-rate weapon, especially the gauntlets or a Fire Dragon.

3rd Boss

• Defensive scrolls are very useful here. Spirit Feline and Deflection Shield are a bit too OP and there are many situations where I and other people have soloed with these skills after 3 teammates have died.
• Just like the 2nd boss, you can actually shoot his projectiles in the second phase. And just like the second boss, if you target the tip of his nose with a gauntlet they will all be destroyed instantly as he shoots them.
• Eyes are the weak spot in the 2nd phase.

Vaults

Vault Portals are random, unconfirmed if they are Pseudo-RNG (i.e higher chance when you have several rooms without vaults).

There are 4 types of vaults:

• Enemy clearout – Clear basic enemies which contains 1 chest (Act 1 only).
• Boulders – Dodge boulders which contains 2 chests. The hidden chest is in a slightly hidden spot. Near the fire trap at the end of the Act 1 vault and near the penultimate boulder spawn in Act 2 (Act 1 and 2 only).
• Timed Parkour – Platforming challenge which contains 2 chests. 1 of the chests is only available when the vault is completed in the time limit (Act 2 and 3 only).
• Elite clearout – Clear basic + Elite enemies which contains 1 chest but the elite can drop items/scrolls.

Multiplayer

• Enemy HP scales to the number of players in the game. It’s 7x when there are 4 players present.
• High projectile weapons sometimes lead to de-sync and “lag” for multiplayer games. Prism is a prime candidate for this. It’s not the only cause as the net-code is not super optimised but all those prisms bouncing around will sometimes spike your teammates to 999 ping
• All drops (Scrolls and Weapons) are initially for yourself only. You need to “flip” them (pick-up and drop) for other co-op players to see them.
• You need to be level 10 to use the game auto-match to play with random teammates, but can party-up with friends at any level.
• If you are assigned host for random matchmaking the game will end for other players when you quit.
• You should drop scrolls for teammates when they can really accentuate the builds they are going for. E.g. no point holding on to Fire Enthusiast if you are going corrosive and someone else is going for a Fire Dragon build.

Other

• This is a roguelite so ascension skills and scrolls are not persistent for the next playthrough. Talents are persistent however and can only be leveled at the end of a playthrough and not from the main menu even if you have reserved souls with the Dimeson Pouch talent.
• You may be going into runs with a set build or OP setup you’ve seen elsewhere. As with many other roguelites, the best way to play the game is to go with the flow and slowly flesh a build out depending on the drops.
• There is an option in the Game Setting to remove the default weapon from mouse-wheel scrolling selection, helpful for those weapon swapping Scrolls.
• Elite mode is unlocked once you beat the final boss in normal.
• In terms of Talents, each point increases your Level by 1. Focussing on Tyrant Leader and Heavenly Essence helps boost your levels quickly but you need to spend points elsewhere to meet the level requirement. You can aim to spend on the cheapest talents to help achieve this but will of course be initially sacrificing other talents that may make progression easier.
• Yes, the English in this game is translated weirdly – Devs have already said this will be fixed in the future.