Everywhere you go – you see it’s face. Yep, Puffer Fish – the true face of despair in The Bazaar. Here, we go into a bit of a deep dive on Puffer Fish, and how to maximize this card in Vanessa Poison Builds
What does Puffer Fish do exactly? It’s a Medium Vanessa card with the tags Aquatic, and Friend. It has the ability: “Whenever you Haste, Poison 1/2/4/8”. I would consider this a heavy “build around” card, meaning it gets a lot better if you focus your build on it with a lot of support. With this in mind, Puffer Fish builds need a couple things to shine.
- A source of Haste – Puffer Fish does absolutely NOTHING by itself. You need to haste another item for it to trigger the poison.
- Survivability – Poison Builds aren’t known for their quick victories, so you need some means to stall the game out to stack poison through the roof.
- Poison Scaling – Lastly, but not really least, a way to increase the actual poison damage dealt. Winning faster is preferred, but not exactly optional.
After these main points, there are other notes as well.
Haste Enablers
Like I mentioned earlier, Puffer Fish does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING without Haste triggering the poison ability. It’s literally a dead card on its own. So, what are the best options for haste? If we focus on Vanessa cards…
- Astrolabe – When you use a non-weapon item, haste that and this for X seconds. This seems to be the best bet for Haste sources for Puffer Fish. Each item you trigger gives two Haste / Puffer Fish poison procs. Limited to non-weapons, though – which is fine since typical poison builds usually avoid basic weaponry.
- Beach Ball – Haste 1/2/3/4 Aquatic Items. This one is also great. As long as you have enough (or close to) Aquatic cards to buff with each of its triggers. It’s a basic but good choice, but it does limit your Haste targets to Aquatics. It’s a great all around choice.
- Captain’s Wheel – Haste adjacent items. When you use a Large Item, use this. This can also get pretty silly. Make sure you have a large item to maximize this (Typically a giga stacked Cove). This works wonders when you have 2 very powerful items that you want to consistently Haste – typically powerful defensive cards like Cove, Coral, Coral Armor and Seaweed.
- Water Wheel – Haste ALL OTHER ITEMS for X seconds. When you use another Aquatic item, Haste this for 1s. This large property seems really good, but honestly performed the worst on average – it requires extra setup to truly shine. Since it places haste on all items, it would outperform other items if you have almost all others items being SMALL – to maximize the amount of triggers. Gets better if you’re packing a lot of Aquatics.
From my experience you’d only want 1 source of haste – but depending on your build you may go for 2 (but this can get dicey). I really feel you need to dedicate other slots to survivability – which we talk about next.
Survivability
Poison builds are slow – and you WILL EVENTUALLY WIN most of the time. The trick is reaching this eventuality. How? Defenses. This is a pretty broad topic so lets focus on defensive setups which Puffer Fish builds might synergize more with.
The Aquatic defensive items are pretty crazy, thankfully. As seen above, having a lot of Aquatic items really does benefit the typical Puffer Fish build so that’s a great place to start.
Cove (Shield X equal to its value multiplied by 1/2/3/4. +1 value for each item sold). Man I love COVE. Takes long to scale but the shielding amount and speed puts even Dooley to shame. It’s a long investment – but keep in mind its value does increase and you can sell it in a pinch if you find a better solution. Stacking cove is a mini-game on its own, though – it benefits from selling Gumballs, Chocolate, and Spare Change!
Seaweed (Heal X. +X this fight for each Aquatic item used). An absolutely degenerate healing item in heavy Aquatic builds that quickly scales into the hundreds. Godly.
Coral (Heal X. Increases per Aquatic item bought) / Coral Armor (Shield X. Increases per Aquatic item bought): Both of these are great, especially if you get them early and scale them up real high.
Ambergris (Heal X equal to its value. +1 Value per Aquatic item bought) / Sea Shell (Shield X for each Aquatic Item you have) – Typically the worst of the bunch, but they’re small items that you can use to fill out the build.
There are other options here, but these are the most common. Turtle Shell, or Pearl comes to mind. I’ll try experimenting with other more uhh, exotic (meme) effects.
Poison Scaling
Finally, scaling its poison damage. Since Puffer Fish is typically used alone as a sole source of Poison (you can use multiple, but your build might suffer. One OTHER at most is my rule) in these build, it’s quite easy to scale it. Since the initial Poison values on Puffer Fish aren’t that great, any buff is MASSIVE to its output.
Any + Poison works wonder for Puffer Fish. If it’s alone, you can double up on “Leftmost” and “Rightmost” Poison buffs (Initial Dose, Final Dose). Of course “Medium items gain + Poison” (Standardized Toxins) is amazing.
You do lose value on “all Poison items get +x” skills and buffs, but it’s not the end of the world. That’s how powerful streamlined Puffer Fish builds are. It’s not optimal but I would never hesitate taking these kinds of buffs.
Leveling up a Puffer Fish feels a little bad since it scales like 1/2/4/8. The first upgrade isn’t that meaningful, but the jump from 2, to 4, to 8 is huge.
Basically – you get massive returns for each + Poison you tack onto Puffer Fish, so don’t be shy to even get +1’s.
Summary, Outro, Related Links
- (VIDEO) GIGASHIELD Cove, Puffer Fish, Captains Wheel [Vanessa Poison] The Bazaar
- (VIDEO) TURBO POISON Puffer Fish, Toxic Pearl, Astrolabe [Vanessa Poison] The Bazaar
- The Brothers Play The Bazaar PLAYLIST
- TeamBRG Brothers YOUTUBE
Well that’s about it on our (no pun intended) deep dive guide on Puffer Fish from The Bazaar! Hope you learned a thing or two! Enjoy your deep sea poison destruction runs!
