The purpose of this Quasimorph Guide 2024 is to educate players attempting to play the new “Unfair” difficulty. Strategies that work in normal difficulty will struggle to find success here, given that enemies have more AP, vision and damage. In addition to covering basic strategies, we will also touch on more nuanced strategies, so beginners will probably not find this guide helpful because I’m going to assume you already know all of the game’s systems.
Quasimorph Guide 2024 – Unchained Belt 0.8 Update
The .8 update reworked many systems in the game but the most notable are the following:
Unfair Difficulty
The reason you clicked on this guide, Unfair gives all enemies 1 additional action, additional vision range and deal 20% more damage.
You start with 2 random classes and a few random mercs. Francis is always given to you if you choose to do the tutorial mission and he is always a Scout of Hades.
If a merc dies, you cannot reprint them for free, you will need to secure another mind chip, which is a pain considering the trading changes. Effectively, this adds a true “game over” to Quasimorph
You’re starting equipment is also randomized, and yes, this means you will start the game without a welder, which means you cannot craft things. Prioritize getting this ASAP. Trading changes made them easier to come by.
You are given the AnCom Data in addition to your starting gear, which you can trade to any faction.
Unfair also gives factions a bigger power budget, particularly at the beginning of the game. Missions will instantly spawn in mid tier units and it will spawn a lot of them, I’ve seen 30 enemies per floor on my first mission of my new save after I skipped the tutorial. You can make the early game smoother by selecting the “difficulty curve” option when customizing your difficulty settings.
You cannot evacuate from any mission early, you must complete the mission objective.
Armor Rework
In the previous patch, armor applied a flat reduction to all damage taken. This meant that as long as you geared properly for the mission, the player was very unlikely to die because attacks would only deal like 2 damage tops. That is still semi achievable this patch but not without some class modification.
Armor now provides percent resistance on a logarithmic curve where the x-axis is the amount of armor you have and the y-axis is the amount of resistance it provides. Below is a generic logarithmic curve.
This means that the first couple dozen points armor are the most impactful. You can a solid 50% damage reduction at around 28 armor points.
On Paper, 50% seems fantastic but I can assure you that it isn’t as strong as it seems.
Trading
As of right now, we can no longer trade for item chips or merc USBs. In fact, you can’t get any faction specific items from trading anymore. The only source for these items are mission rewards. Highly recommend that when you start your save, you increase mission rewards to the max the slider allows.
Instead, we can now trade for other barter items, or some select guns/armor. Obviously, what a station has to offer depends on what it is producing.
Prioritize trading at stations that have resources for ship upgrades. Conveyors, phones, research stations. I’d prioritize getting the recycling upgrades and capsule upgrades.
Faction Elimination
Factions can be eliminated from the game.
New Fundamentals
Quasimorphs normal gameplay loop involves breaching into rooms by opening doors, but because enemies have so many action points and deal so much damage we need to rethink our strategy. Sprint peaking still works very well, but opening a door against an enemy with four AP almost guarantees massive damage. Against an enemy with an assault rifle, it nearly certain death due to their armor penetrating qualities.
Avoid Opening Doors
As I stated before, walking up to doors is virtually a death sentence. Even if you don’t open it, someone with 4 AP on the other side might. Get far away from it, then just blast it down. Make sure you have a corner to sprint peak around or be behind cover.
We can expand upon this strategy by also blasting down walls even if they are out of vision. If you can aggro enemies in other rooms that gives you a huge advantage because you can easily funnel them.
Always Get Behind Cover
Get behind big boxes or barricades that you can fire over the top of. Both provide massive benefits to dodge. This strategy is so good I’ll often dig into the wall next to boxes to improve my firing arc. In fact, I’d rather be behind one of these than sprint peaking corners, because enemies won’t actually walk towards you, they just shoot and miss.
Vision is a Luxury
Following up on my previous point, you should be shooting at enemies even if you can’t see them. Make educated guesses on whether or not you think there are enemies down a hallway you can’t see the end of. Spoiler, it’s almost all the time. Hold shift and shoot, combine this with cover or sprint peaking to ensure your safety. You don’t want some prick with a rifle to blast you just as he runs on screen.
We can also expand this point to clone vision. Some clones only have vision range 7 which means that most enemies will actually shoot you from out of your sight range, prioritize getting vision range on your clones to 8 or 9.
Pain is the Game
Losing an action on your turn due to painshock is absolutely devastating, especially if you have some sort of bleeding wound. You must find a way to mitigate this. The most obvious solution is getting Max’s “Feel No Pain” character perk, but you can also increase your pain threshold (not very resource efficient) or stack loads of dodge.
The Most Dangerous Weapon Class and Damage Type
The award for most deadly weapon this patch goes to the assault rifle. All assault rifles have innate 20% armor piercing so long as the weapon is not out of range. This calculates before damage is done, so if you have 60 armor you will be getting your armor reduced by 12 to 48. And because you are taking more damage you are taking more wounds (3.5% chance to take a wound per point of damage) and weapons that build status effects will stack them faster (Radiation Poisoning, Shock, etc). Most assault rifles also have a 4 or 5 round burst. The damage adds up quick.
The award for most deadly damage type goes to shock, and it’s not even close. An AnCom AEV assault rifle will shred you, even if you have 80% shock resistance, and then it will stun you if you somehow survive. If that happens, prepare to eat another 3 four-round burst, which will probably shock you again.
Class Perks Strategies
Because we are playing on a harder difficulty, some class perks that already shined in normal will shine brighter here. We are going to be prioritizing defensive options. We can get kill power by upgrading our guns. First I’ll be listing 4 perks I think are “meta” then I’ll give some options for your flex slots.
Meta Perks/Required
Marauder remains king. In addition to giving you good sustain, it provide incredible amounts of loot to progress your metagame (ship upgrades, class upgrades, etc).
Combat Focus is the pinnacle defensive perk. Provides 100% dodge at max rank allowing you to survive scenarios that would be unsurvivable otherwise.
Hardened is probably a controversial pick in most people eyes, but I believe that it is the best-in-slot defensive perk after Combat Focus. At max rank it provides 50% increased resistances which, considering how deadly armor penetrating weapons like rifles are, makes the perk almost necessary. In late game gear, this will make you very tanky. Hardened plus Combat focus and Warlord Armor makes you incredibly hard to kill.
Athletics improves survivabilty by making you more reliable. The penalty from sprinting is nasty and with how much you are going to be sprint peaking Athletics becomes the best way to “increase” accuracy. Spending points clone modification points on accuracy is very expensive considering the clone modification is the best place we can get survivability (dodge, health, pain threshold).
Flex slots
Personal choice leads me to selecting Achilies’ Heel as my next perk. 25% additional penetrations on assault rifles goes hard. And giving penetration to LMGs and Snipers is also crazy strong. Additionally, it doesn’t appear to be affected by weapon range. So no matter the distance you will always have armor pen, which is great for our “killing enemies out of sight” strategy. I’d slot this into meta perks if it didn’t limit the types of weapon you would want to use.
Caution gives a crazy amount of kill power for taking up only 1 perk slot. You will shred high HP enemies via wounds or raw damage. This is my personal choice for my final perk slot.
Insanity is an option. I personally didn’t like using it but some people swear by it. You no longer get regen from it and you’ll only get like 10 resistances. Increased damage and health are good but forcing your Q meter to like 200 by using a pact to start benefiting from Insanity can cause your floor to spiral pretty quickly and if you haven’t cleared that many enemies, things can get bad. Carry morphine or alcohol to control the Q meter.
Pain immunity is a great class perk if you aren’t using Max’s “Feel No Pain” character perk. NOTE: THE PAIN IMMUNITY CLASS PERK DOES NOT GRANT IMMUNITY TO PAIN. You can instantly staunch bleeding, which stops you from taking additional damage that might throw you over the pain threshold.
Pocket Artillery is a great perk if you find yourself using 7.97 a lot. It’s even better if you are using a 7.97 sniper rifle with two round burst. Sniper rifles always inflict a wound if they pierce, and they have a bonus chance to pierce. This means that you pretty much deal 2 wounds every time you shoot someone, and both of those wounds have minimum 8 bleed on top of all their other negatives. Because enemies in Unfair have minimum 2 AP, they will take at least 32 damage per round that is unaffected by resistances. Unfortunately, this perk virtually locks you into using 7.97, otherwise it would definitely be meta.
Clone Modification
When we are modifying clones, we are mostly looking for ways to increase our survivabilty. This is because the value for the cost is insanely high, and its the only place you can upgrade some of these stats.
HP
By far the most useful and most cost efficient stat you can upgrade. You get 10 HP every time you upgrade and you cant really increase HP outside of one or two perks.
Dodge
There are arguments to be made for dodge stacking, particularly if the clone has high base dodge already, only problem is how much you need before you start feeling its effects, and also weight really ♥♥♥♥♥ dodge. If you are going to play a dodge build, consider siding with Sunlight Coven for their new backpack. It’s a Helper backpack but it has another row.
Accuracy
Although I haven’t personally added to this stat due to lack of resource, I can imagine that it can really alleviate the cost of upgrading weapons. I add accuracy to almost every single one of the guns I can craft on because I value reliability, but that eats into how much damage you can add to the gun. By the way, weapon and armor mods have a cap to them now, but I don’t think that clone modding has one. So this is something to consider.
Vision
8 or 9 is good. 10 if you’re extra.
Character Perks
Outside of “Feel No Pain” and “Evasion Master” I struggle to see the value in most other perk options. I think that there is an argument to made for increased weapon range but all the other ones are pretty limp. The cost effectiveness of the former two outweigh pretty much any other option.
