Version 9.0 of the Steam Early Access hit Vampire Survivors introduced a new stage, which in the finest Castlevania tradition, was made entirely to challenge you with a fusillade of old and unused sprites. Welcome to Boss Rash.
In this 15-minute sprint, you’ll be put up against every miniboss and actual boss that VS has thrown at you so far, leading up to a panicked run where you’ll have to contend with the Ender and Drowner simultaneously. Here’s what you need to know.
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The Devil in the Details: Vampire Survivors’ Boss Rash
Boss Rash is initially unlocked by getting to the point where Hyper Mode is available for all 5 normal stages: Mad Forest, Inlaid Library, Dairy Plant, Gallo Tower, and Cappella Magna. That, in turn, is unlocked by reaching the 25:00 mark in each stage and defeating the boss that spawns at that time.
If you already fulfilled all the unlock conditions for Boss Rash in patch 8.0 or earlier and you don’t see Boss Rash after the update, it may show up after you complete a stage in 9.0. I managed to get Boss Rash to pop after I finished an easy-mode Moongolow run.
You’re Trapped In Here With Me
Boss Rash is a 15:00 challenge stage where you’re stuck in a relatively small arena. There are 5 set spawn points for torches on the nearby tiles, so you’ve got some space for items, but otherwise you’ve only got a little bit of room to move.
Like Moongolow, you can find one copy of every passive item in the game except Torrona’s Box in Boss Rash. Unlike Moongolow, these appear to be initially inaccessible; at time of writing, the only way to get to the items outside the arena is to take the Mad Groove Arcana. This will also attract two chickens, one stopwatch, one Nduja Fritta flamethrower cake, and a Rosary to you from fixed spawn points in the audience.
You can grab all the passives if you like, but they’re something of a trap. The trick to Boss Rash is that most of the enemies that will come after you at any given time are bosses and minibosses. These start with a 0.1% health multiplier and a 25% bonus to movement speed, and will receive another 0.1% bonus to their maximum health for every minute that passes. The largest bosses in a wave will drop treasure chests as usual, while the rest drop red experience orbs.
That makes it difficult to level efficiently in Boss Rash by comparison to other stages in VS, because you’ll end up with a much lower kill count overall. While it does send the occasional wave of disposable bats or skulls at you, most of the fighting in Boss Rash is against enemies with a relatively high time to kill. As such, unless you’re playing a character with substantial Growth bonuses, you’ll do well to hit level 25 by the 15:00 mark.
That gives you a flexible but limited pool of upgrades to work with. You’ll be lucky to get even one evolved weapon unless your character starts with one. The time limit plus the low amount of XP also serves to cripple the utility of characters who are relatively slow to develop, such as Zi’Assunta.
As such, loading up on every passive at once, the way you can in Moongolow, can sink your character build, since you’ve only got so many upgrade slots ahead of you. If you do grab Mad Groove at some point, you’re better off grabbing the passives you need and discarding the rest.
A final stage hazard can be found on the left and right sides of the arena. Two pressure plate traps spawn every 30 seconds. The one on the left, with the hourglass symbol (above), causes the next wave of enemies to spawn, as if you’d reached the next minute mark; the one on the right, with the skull, instantly respawns every monster in the current wave. Once you’ve got your sea legs, these can be a useful way to boost your experience gain.
The Gang’s All Here
Every minute, a new wave of bosses and enemies spawns into the arena, and can come from any given direction. This begins with minibosses and bosses from Mad Forest, then progresses through the other normal stages until the 10:00 mark.
At 10:00, our old buddy the Ender appears and the stage immediately gets more difficult. He has 2550 HP per level you’ve earned, which makes it really difficult to burst him down unless you have a very specific game plan (below), and his hazard zones can further limit the already cramped space in the arena. Even under the most ideal possible circumstances, you’ll often end up taking some damage from the Ender as he forces you to run through his hazards.
In practice, this means that whatever you’ve got for a build at the 10:00 mark is what you’ll have until the end of Boss Rash. You’ll have a lot less freedom to run around grabbing experience orbs and chests once the Ender is all up in your business.
At the 11:00 mark, the Ender is joined by his four reaper buddies, which happens to include the Drowner. While it’s easier to kill the Drowner in Boss Rash than it is in other stages, as you can bully him a bit with the right weapons, his appearance means you’ll have at least a short period in which he’s flooded part of the arena. Between him and the Ender, you’ll have even less space to work with, and will end up taking more hits.
The easy way out is to save a Rosary, whether it’s a random drop from the torches or attracted from outside the arena with Mad Groove, and use it to blast Drowner and his pals out of existence the moment they appear.
The 12:00 mark adds the additional complication of a huge wave of the large golems from the Dairy Plant, which is likely to further complicate your life if you’re already dodging Ender’s maze and Drowner’s flooding. You can sort of brute-force your way to the 15:00 mark at this point with a huge number of Revives, but it’s more likely that you’ll get cornered and killed here.
If you make it to the 15:00 mark in Boss Rash, it’s notable that Death will simply dive at you from outside the arena. There’s no preceding moment where everything else dies, which means you can’t (at time of writing) do something like kite him with Laurel/Clock Lancet.
At Their Own Game
Since you’ve got a constrained supply of experience in Boss Rash, one of the easiest ways to get through it is to make it a single-weapon run. (This is also how you unlock a new secret character.) With Mindbender to constrain your weapon slots to 1, you can spend your first six levels on useful passives, then Limit Break your way through the later waves.
The perfect choice here is Gains Boros, who’s unlocked in the Bone Zone. It gets +1% Growth per level, which helps with Boss Rash’s constrained enemy supply, and begins with the Heaven Sword, which features some of the highest base damage of any evolved weapon. With the Silent Old Sanctuary Arcana, you can enter Boss Rash with a 200% Might behind the Heaven Sword, which utterly dismantles most of what you’ll run into for the first few minutes.
If you then back it up with useful passives, you’ll get enough damage on tap to, if not trivialize Boss Rash, at least hold your own. Slam picks here include Spinach, Empty Tome, Candelabra, Bracer, and Duplicator, all of which directly influence Heaven Sword’s damage output, which leaves you a final slot for whatever utility pick you might want. With a build like this and a couple of lucky drops, I was able to actually kill Ender, which made the rest of Boss Rash a relative breeze.
