This guide will help show how to play Tainted Judas, general tips against the game’s toughest fights, and how to break the game as this character.
 
 

General Advice

Tainted Judas, based on his stats alone, doesn’t seem all too amazing. 2 Black Hearts with an inability to take red hearts at all, base damage, tears, and lower stock range doesn’t seem like a recipe for one of the most fun characters in the game.
 
 
That just simply is not correct.
 
 
Where Tainted Judas’s true strength lies is in his starting item, Dark Arts.
 
 
Dark Arts is an active item that goes in your consumable slot, after use it takes six seconds to recharge. When used it will turn you transparent and invincible for 1 second, touching an enemy or projectile in this state will stop the object in question in its place. After 1 second has passed, a shadow blade will run over every enemy and projectile touched, dealing damage or deleting the projectile in question. It will also increase your damage temporarily for every enemy or projectile touched, not necessarily killed. This also includes enemies that cannot be killed, while it doesn’t do any damage, it still counts as a hit. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to the number of enemies or projectiles that can be hit, afterwards, you stay completely still as the blade goes through.
 
 
As for items to take or not to take, damaged items are good, however, stuff like Libra is bad considering that it takes the raw damage boost away from your dark arts. Any item that applies to the blue baby will work the same way with one exception, which we’ll cover later.
 
 
 

Advanced Tips

Now with the basics out of the way, onto some tactics that can help min-max this character.
 
 
Firstly, Dark Arts will also allow you to enter cursed rooms for free, simply use the item before you enter the cursed room, and then use it to leave it. This also extends to the button in greed mode as well as any spike in the game. Side note you cannot pick up items while using Dark Arts.
 
 
The reason why I said that damaged items are good is for two reasons. First, this affects how much damage Dark Arts gives you, and second is that you can transition Dark Arts into a utility to get yourself out of danger when there are too many projectiles on screen.
 
 
Something important to note as well is that while Dark Arts works on almost every single projectile in the game, it does not work on brimstone beams.
 
 
 

Routing for bosses

Now I would have made a section for each individual boss IF I had anything to say specifically on each boss that wouldn’t take more than one sentence. The only thing I have to say on each boss is to fight them normally and use Dark Arts whenever it is available.
 
 
So instead of that, I’ll dedicate this section to how to most efficiently(at least in my experience) get all of the completion marks.
 
 
Greedier is usually my first mark but this one can be done at any point, as well as this it HAS to be greedier mode and not greed mode.
 
 
Then I would go for the boss rush, it lives, hush, isaac, blue baby, and then if I had the key pieces I would fight mega satan, if delirium shows up on mega satan then go for him.
 
 
Afterwards I would take down satan and the lamb, and delirium if he didn’t show up on the cathedral path.
 
 
Then I would go for the alt path and then the beast. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything specific for each of the bosses aside from how you would normally fight them.
 
 
 

Game Breaks

This is the section that is most likely going to change, but for now here are two different ways to completely break the game with Tainted Judas.
 
 
The first way is with the item “Converter”. Now if you saw earlier that I had specifically mentioned that all health items work identically with how they work on blue baby except for one, this is the one I was talking about. The converter can be found in the shop and it has a broken interaction with Tainted Judas. Normally how the item works is that it will convert whatever soul hearts you have into red hearts, but with a blue baby, it would just convert the heart back into a soul’s heart. With Tainted Judas, however, that soul heart would instead convert into a black heart, and it will convert black hearts into more black hearts. Upon losing a black heart every enemy in the room will take 40 damage, the converter also has no cooldown. That leads to an infinite use of Necronomicon which can completely shred bosses in half without much hassle, you get this item, you win.
 
 
The second way isn’t as broken because you still have to try. This time it involves the item “Pause” Now for most rooms, this completely pauses all enemies in the room while allowing you to move. All enemies remained paused until you fire a tear. However, this does not apply to Dark Arts, you can use the item while paused. For most rooms its a room clear, however for bosses it just gives you a chance for free hits. If you also get the item “4.5 volts” this will make the synergy much better as you can continuously use pause for free hits.
 
 
This section was written before the upcoming patch that is going to fix some things, if one or both of these game breaks are removed, then they will be removed from the guide as well.
 
 
 

Conclusion

Tainted Judas is one of the most fun characters to play in Repentance. His gimmick is well thought out, he isn’t too difficult while not being an instant win button, and it forces the player to completely rethink their whole strategy as a character.
 
 
Thank you so much for reading this guide, hopefully, this helps anyone who has yet to understand how to play this character get those completion marks. And who knows, if this guide turns out to be successful I may just write another one about a different character.
 
 
If I missed anything please let me know and I’ll update the guide.
 
 

 
 
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