Part 9

Learn about Hades dash boons like Thunder Dash and Tidal Dash, and Call boons from Ares and Dionysus, to enhance your builds.

Thunder Dash

Thunder Dash offers utility by occasionally striking enemies in front of you, even if no enemies are behind you, providing some benefit to melee builds. Its most useful attribute is staggering non-armored enemies as you approach, potentially saving melee builds from taking damage. For significant direct damage, Thunder Dash requires heavy investment in Zeus boons, specifically the Splitting Bolt Legendary boon, which also enhances other Zeus boons.

Tidal Dash

Tidal Dash deals 35 damage and applies Knockback at the end of the dash. It is a reasonable choice for ranged builds when other dash boons are generally pointless, especially for dealing damage against foes in the Satyr Tunnels by utilizing wall slam damage. However, this strategy is very damage-prone. Tidal Dash is largely pointless in boss encounters and can be detrimental to melee builds by scattering enemies. For speed running, Tidal Dash can be the basis of a rapid-clear strategy for standard encounters when stacked with the Zeus Duo boon Sea Storm, wall slam enhancing boons (Typhoon’s Fury, Breaking Wave, Second Wave), and the Rupture effect (from the Razor Shoals boon).

Hunter Dash

Hunter Dash provides a +50% damage bonus to dash strikes. It is generally not recommended for ranged builds, as dash-striking from a distance is dangerous and contradicts the goal of dealing damage from safety. While it can benefit melee weapons by helping to activate Privileged Status, the damage boost to dash-strike is often not enough to justify altering your weapon strategy. Hunter Dash also fails to unlock several Artemis Duo boons, including Mirage Shot, Deadly Reversal, Heart Rend, Crystal Clarity, and Splitting Headache. It can be useful for melee builds like Stygius or those using the Varatha Aspect of Guan Yu for dash-strike spamming, provided Deflection, Weak, or Chill are not needed or available. Other dash effects, like Dionysus’s Drunken Dash, can offer comparable utility for ranged weapons without requiring dash-strike focus.

Call Boons

Ares

Ares's Call transforms you into an invulnerable blade rift for 1.2 seconds, dealing 30 damage every 0.1 seconds to all enemies in the radius, with a maximum duration of 5 seconds. It is the best pure-damaging Call boon due to the invulnerability and the potential for high damage rates with the Vicious Cycle boon. Even without Vicious Cycle, it is viable, and upgrades like Black Metal (area of effect increase) can boost effectiveness. Without Vicious Cycle, Ares's Aid is less effective than the Calls of Dionysus, Athena, and Aphrodite. Crucially, this blade rift damage does not require a Duo boon to be viable, making it more self-sufficient than Slicing Shot.

Dionysus

Dionysus's Call continuously inflicts Hangover (15 damage / 0.5 seconds, for 4 seconds) around you for 1.5 seconds, with a maximum gauge duration of 9 seconds. This Call is unique as it is often better used partially within the God Gauge rather than waiting for the Greater Call. The 1.5-second duration is sufficient to build 5 stacks of Hangover, and a full Greater Call wastes duration by not adding additional stacks and preventing successive individual Calls. Each individual Call yields debuffs from Hangover and significant damage over the four-second Hangover period (600 damage per affected opponent with five stacks from a level 1 Common boon).