Two more Jack Cleavers (one for the end of the chain, and one to replace the Queen on the right-middle) and this build is finished, I think. I’m pretty sure that another cleaver is better than the Chef’s Hat.
I think I might stop here. This grind isn’t particularly interesting or fun, and waiting for the animations to stop is very tedious since the game pauses if I change tabs. I think two more Jacks to replace 2 Queens is the most damage this setup can do. It would be better if the middle-bottom Queen were a Jack, but I ended up putting a fair amount of buttery rage on it
In this sort of setup, Jacks are the best cleaver for the middle slots since they do 1 extra damage. Queens fill in the corners since the Kings can trigger them which triggers all of the taped cleavers again. I think it’s best to use butter (golden whetstones) on the King on the left since it gets the most benefit from Bag of Knives. Ideally you’ll never put rage on a Queen. You know what they say about a woman scorned.
Gemstone Heart might be better than Vampiric Crystal. It seems that vampirism doesn’t trigger spikes on King (the boss, not the cleaver), but it does on Repexcutioners? I could swear that my health wasn’t going down at some point but maybe that was when I was using gemstone hearts. It seems so very long ago… With a Heart (or Healing Whetstone) adjacent to any tape, you’d only end up losing 2 life for each of the Corner Queens since they aren’t getting the benefit.
All of that said, this build gets very boring very quickly. The worst part is that the animations have a seemingly exponential increase in duration with each activation.
It might become interesting again once I am not able to one-activation kill the normal mobs on a 3-mob fight, leading to a second turn, but that seems to be literal months of playtime away and not worth the slog.
I’d recommend that you avoid this build if your goal is to have fun. If you want to hit high dungeon levels, you’re probably better off with the Hercule the Assassin build. (multiple Hercule’s Pavise and other shields duct taped to an assassin’s blade with lots of rage and golden whetstone buffs). It’s still kind of a cookie-clicker build, but at least you won’t waste several minutes every fight waiting for animations to end.
To be fair, you can get pretty far with a single row of duct tape. I have tested it and the animations don’t quite get to the ridiculous trudge that they do with the tape extension. (thus making Chef’s Hat a better QoL item, even though it’s probably significantly less damage)