Death Must Die – Merris Infinite Power Guide

In Short:

Merris + Mort + Time + Leigong (Lightning) = Good, Enjoy!

Gem High + EXP shard on hit + EXP shard on Kill + Infinite Pickup Range = Infinite Attack/Move speed

Chain Lightning = best payoff for high attackspeed
Soulstealers + Mayhem = Infinite Permanent Damage to everything

Hello reader!

In this guide I will include my findings of a build that is easy to engage, nearly guarantees success and will make you finish the game repeatably!

All you need to do to unlock all content in this build is
1. Have Merris
2. Beat Necromancer with Merris once
3. Have a couple equipment pieces with Alteration Dice (more on that later)

In Death must Die, you can have 3 main Deities, as well as the Moirai (The 3 Fates)

I will describe the Deities and Blessings that will be required to make this build function.

This build will expect you to use Alteration dice from Equipment to hit Time and Mort as your deities reliably.

The third one is more flexible. Thunder is best for DPS, Justice is best for absolute safety, Winter is a hybrid due to freeze being a reliable CC that deals damage.

Winter has the drawback of having many useless Blessings that would require banishing dice to keep a reasonably coherent levelup-schedule without filling up with filler that we didnt want. If your equipment has an overabundance of EXP bonuses, this might be the pick, just to be able to put those leftover levelups somewhere useful.

Justice has the drawback of having the lowest offensive potential. Less filler than Winter though. Justice can provide Invincibility and Heals in large quantities, so it is useful if you are less comfortable with dodging and decision-making. Pick this is you facetank bosses.

Thunder can actually die if you facetank bosses for 5 seconds straight. It has 3 separate useable blessings that help us with damage output. Dead enemies cant kill us, so this is the optimal choice once you are comfortable to use your dodge skill wisely.

Time is the first cornerpiece for this build. You will NEED the following:

• Gem High
  This will enable us to become faster, whenever we pick up an experience shard.This applies to attacks, as well as movement speed.
• Warped Strike Level 1
  Dont need more than level 1. All we care about is the experience shards.

  the following blessings can be banished to improve chances for upgrades on relevant blessings:

  • Force
    We have infinite Pull-Range thanks to the “Sign of Timespace[dmd.fandom.com]“
  • Time Field
    Enemies will die too fast to be afflicted by the slow
  • Vortex
    Enemies will die too fast to be afflicted by the pull
  • The Summoner[/b]
    We do not benefit from Summon-Damage in a meaningful way, due to moving too fast for our resulting minions to engage with enemies spawning 2 screens over once we get going.
    
  • Warped Strike Level 2 or higher
    We only need the property to spawn EXP-shards.

  All other Blessings in Time’s list are optional and can be picked, albeit with a lower priority than Gem High and your first level of Warped Strike

Mort, or death, is the second cornerpiece for this build. I will use Death and Mort synonimously in this guide.

You will NEED the following:

• Execution
  Provides us with more EXP-shards, which fuels Gem-High and makes us level, move and attack faster
• Soulstealers
  This will spawn phantoms on hit. These phantoms apply the “Cursed status”. You can reliably curse the entire screen once all mandatory Blessings are selected.
• Mayhem
  This Blessing will grant a permanent bonus to damage for every enemy that dies with the curse status effect. This scales infinitely. This Blessing alone will grant upwards of 180% bonus to all damage, making a basic attack able to oneshot all non-boss enemies at difficulty 30 (highest as of Dec 2023)

You will banish the following:

• Necromancy
  This is not a summoner build. Too many skeletons would take space on the screen, thus preventing enemies to move in. This passive can actually hinder your progress if you scale too far. Try it once or twice. It’s not the most efficient though. You have been warned.
• Ravens of Pestilence
  Compared to our main way of dealing damage (infinite attackspeed + dmg autoattacks) this is too slow. Banish it to see more good stuff.
• Lifelink Rank 2 or higher
  Grab 1 rank to block all other dash-skills and then banish it. Not worth the effort.

All other Blessings in Mort’s List have a Priority that is lower than NEED. Serendipity has good synergy with the rest of the build, but is not a hard requirement.

The third deity is quite flexible.

• Leigong – Thunder and Storm

  The god of Thunder will provide us with the best DPS upgrade possible: Chain Lightning. Chain Lightning can happen when we attack. Coupled with the Luck stat, which multiplies chance based attack triggers, we can reliably hit a dozen or more enemies per proc for MASSIVE lightning damage.

  Lightning Bolt will provide us with more lightning damage whenever we move a certain distance. Since Gem-High will boost us to tremendous speeds, we can expect to get a high payoff from the skill.

  An important thing to note on these Lightning spells is that they automatically aim. They just hit targets. It will not attempt to shoot the ground.

  Be careful of choosing Ball Lightning though. This dash skill will disable your ability to auto-attack, which will interrupt the creation of exp shards via Warped strike. If you break the Gem-High loop, you have to restart the stacking, resulting in less levelups.

• Lady Justice – Holy & Healing

  There are many good things here to provide defensive Capabilities. Divine Shield is great. Since it scales with physical defense instead of cooldown reduction, it alters your decisionmaking when taking multiple-choice options from Shrines. Prioritize Armor whenever possible while being aligned with Lady Justice.

  Inner Peace is passive Life regeneration. This is good.

  Celestial Wings removes the movement penalty after a dash. This is the best dash ability you could have. More mobility equals more chance to open chests and shrines, which boosts not only current, but all future runs as well.

  All other Blessings depend on getting hit, which is something we avoid, thus making the Blessings less valuable.

• Winter – Ice & Frost

  You want 3 things from Frost: Frost Ring, Icebound and Thaw.

  Frost Ring, with enough ranks and investment in spell area will reliably freeze the entire screen more than once per second. Prior to this investment, its effectiveness is limited to melee range. Merris is not a melee Hero, so there will be times that this blessing completely misses its targets, despite being successfully cast.

  Thaw will amplify all damage for each of these frozen enemies.

  Icebound will amplify damage against immobilized enemies. So everyone thats hit by Frost Ring.

  I tried Frozen treasure and could not make it work in any reliable capacity.

I recommend the following Stat Priority for Items

Weapons:
Range > Velocity > additional Projectiles > Alteration Dice > DPS > Banishment Dice

Since we can scale all speed and damage based offensive Properties infinitely, all we need from a weapon would be target-aquisition properties and reliability in our build-assembly process.

I tried and finished this build on Difficulty 30 with a blue wand with barely 300 dps.

All the other Equipments:

Alteration Dice > Banishment Dice > Reroll Dice > Higher Chance for higher Rarity > Experience Bonus > Movement Speed > everything else

All we want from our gear is reliability on our build-assembly. Our blessings will outscale all gear into irrelevancy. Beyond 2:30, your combo should be active and your Gem-High should be stacking.