Lucid Dreaming: Maximizing Profit with Twinightmare

By Jacksnipe

The Shepherd section is first in order to discuss and name some mechanics people may not be familiar with, and to help people understand things when choosing whether or not to pull for Shepherd.

Shepherd (The Season Pactspirit):

We’re discussing the pactspirit first because there are some mechanics it introduces that we need to give names to, and because knowing what to use your pulls on is the highest impact decision you can make. At the time of writing this, dream is still profitable in Deep Space and Profound regardless of your pactspirits.

There are three mechanics that Shepherd gives access to that we need to give names to, and which are all quite powerful:

Bubble Duplication/Duping: Shepherd – as well as the purple pactspirit “Lettice - Frost” and the blue pactspirit “Shocket - Dark Night” give access to the outer ring affix “#% chance that all Dream Bubbles you have obtained will drop 1 additional time”. What this actually means is that for each root you kill in the nightmare (there are 4), each bubble rolls this chance independently and can drop again.

Kindly, the expected value calculation here works out such that x% to dupe translates to a 4x increase in the EV from bubbles. E.g. a 10% chance to dupe = 40% increased EV of bubbles.

Bonus Round: Shepherd2 and Shepherd4 give a 50%/100% chance of what I call a Bonus Round. A Bonus Round is an additional sweet dream selection before the Nightmare, with no downsides. Access to this Bonus Round is especially important for the Dream Within a Dream sweet dream.

Rerolls: Shepherd3 and Shepherd5 each give access to 1 reroll per nightmare. These rerolls reroll the 3 sweet dreams and their downsides, and should be used sparingly. You should only use a reroll when you have a compelling reason to, not just because no good sweet dreams are available. Rerolls are especially strong when used in the Bonus Round, because we have access to the most high rolls there.

Bubble Value:

To have any sort of coherent strategy for approaching the nightmare, we need to understand which bubbles are actually valuable. From my experience, the approximate ranking of the bubbles is as follows:

Updated for Overrealm, in Profound+ only*
S+ Tier: Whim

S Tier: Commodity

A Tier: Fluorescent

B Tier: Netherrealm

C Tier: Cube

D Tier: Blacksail

F Tier: Gear**

* Commodity bubbles are straight up bad before t8, and don’t seem great until profound

** Theoretically, the EV from gear bubbles would come from infrequent, super high value drops. I didn’t test enough to witness any good rolls.

Bubble value scales exponentially: The exact value is hard to pin down, but I believe that upgrading a bubble approximately triples its value – maybe more in the case of rainbow commodity, fluoro, and gear bubbles. Wrapping your head around the implications of this is the most important part of making money with nightmare. This means that upgrading an orange bubble to a red bubble is just as good as adding two orange bubbles. It also means that upgrading makes future upgrades better. Quality over quantity!

Bubble value mostly comes from dream talking: Whim and commodity bubbles seem to drop the most Dream Talking - Trinket, making them the best bubbles by far.

Omen Selection:

With the bubble values in mind, we can decide which omens to select. The omen you have selected dramatically influences your strategy until the nightmare. Always pay attention to the omen you have selected during sweet dream selection.

I believe this is the priority in which good omens should be selected. If X = Gear, then don’t pick the omen unless it’s the omen that deletes low quality bubbles.

1. Adds four rainbow bubbles. The lowest quality bubble will be removed every omen selection. (This is the “jackpot” omen. In 2000 maps I saw this 3 times.)
2. Adds a rainbow X bubble for every 6 X bubbles.
3. Adds a red X bubble for every 3 X bubbles.
4. X bubbles have a 45% chance to be upgraded at the start of the nightmare (rainbow included)
5. Upgrades all bubbles by 2 tiers. -10% chance for this to happen for each empty initial slot when the nightmare begins. (This cannot upgrade to rainbows, but opening 6+ orange bubbles reliably is still very good.)
6. Sweet Dreams you select are repeated again
7. Any previously removed bubble is added at the beginning of the nightmare.
8. For every 3 X with lower than purple quality, replace them with 1 orange or better Whim Bubble. (Don’t pick this with commodity.)

This isn’t hard and fast, and in the case of tier list discrepancies between options, you can be more flexible. In particular, rows 3 and 4 are close – rainbow S and A tier bubbles are so good that I would pick this option more heavily for them.

I may have missed some of the good omens, so please use your head. The general idea is that since we can usually get at least one orange commo or NR bubble when executing the generic strategy, omens that focus on worse types of bubbles are rarely worth focusing too much on.

How to change your strategy for the good omens should be obvious. If you have rainbow bubbles and a low quality bubble will be removed every round, we want to add bubbles and replicate bubbles. If you need 6 commodity bubbles to get a rainbow commodity bubble, we just want to add as many commodity bubbles as possible. And so on.

Getting Rainbow Bubbles

There are three sweet dreams which can introduce rainbow bubbles:

1. Dream Within A Dream: Dream within a dream is the most frequent source of rainbow commodity bubbles. To activate it, you must get 3 sweet dreams before your nightmare next opens. If you have access to a Bonus Round, that bonus selection can be the third sweet dream.

The probability that you will see all 3 rounds of Dream Within a Dream is based on the probability of next nightmare when you see the first Dream Within a Dream. It is highly dependent on whether or not you have access to a Bonus Round. (These are the percentages with no points in the mechanic from the tree.)

2. “Adds a rainbow bubble. It is removed/downgraded after the next omen selection.” This sweet dream is better the later you get it. If you have a Bonus Round (or just a 50% chance for it!), it is super important to swap off of Shepherd when opening the Nightmare if you have already selected this sweet dream.

If it’s the remove version, unfortunately, this bubble gets removed BEFORE the sweet dream you select is applied, so you cannot replicate it, lock it, or even add a bubble of the same quality as it. As a result, it just sucks unless you trigger the nightmare right after getting it.

If it’s the downgrade version, it’s not so bad, but be wary that replicated and locked versions of this bubble are still downgraded. But of course red bubbles are still pretty good.

3. “Adds a white bubble. It is upgraded during each sweet dream selection.” This requires 6 additional rounds to fully upgrade. It is fairly difficult to actually get a rainbow out of this unless you get it at 0 or 15%.

Other Sweet Dreams:

Besides those fantastic sweet dreams, there are several categories of sweet dreams:

• Add bubbles
• Remove a bubble, add bubbles
• Change type of bubbles
• Improve quality of bubble
• Replicating bubbles
• Lock bubbles
• Adding bubbles with quality equal to the quality of your highest bubble.
• Some other stuff that you should use at your discretion, like “remove all but one bubbles, upgrade it to red, replicate it” – obviously strong sometimes and obviously bad at other times

Additionally, you can click the arrow icon in sweet dream selection to access the default sweet dream: Improve the Quality of 1 Bubble by 1. This always comes with a very easy downside, like armor reduction or max res reduction (easy compared to, say, energy shield on mobs).

Secretly the best sweet dream, always there for you

The Generic Strategy (Do This Unless Your Omen Is Good):

1. Spend early rounds increasing quality of existing bubbles to get at least one high-quality bubble in the pool. DO NOT add bubbles that are below purple quality. Use the default sweet dream frequently.
2. At any round, if our highest quality bubbles are not good (S or A tier), take sweet dreams that convert multiple bubbles to good types.
3. Once we have a high quality bubble of a good type, prioritize taking Replicate sweet dreams and sweet dreams that “Add a bubble of the highest quality you own”.

In order to get a good nightmare almost every time, we need to take advantage of the fact that when you have high quality bubbles in your pool, most options offered are good. In order to maximize this situation, we simply spend early rounds focusing mostly on the quality of our bubbles.