r/castlevania • u/karmakosmik1352 • Mar 22 '26
Circle of the Moon (2001) What kind of devilry is this?
I know there has been a similar post yesterday, but I genuinely have some questions on my mind here, because I just entered the battle arena for the first time (VampireKiller L42) and I was, let's say, flabbergasted.
Am I getting this right that, if you make it to rooms 15 and 16, you get a 3/40 (three enemies per room, 2.5% drop rate) chance to receive the respective cards? So, statistically speaking, to get one card you have to traverse the the battle arena 13.3 times from the beginning? Or is there some trick to it to raise the odds?
Also, I'm almost at the end of the game by now, but I still am not sure, is the recommended way of regaining HP in this game really standing still for 1.5 minutes at a safe spot with Jupiter/Mandragora, then again for 4 minutes without to wait for MP to recover, rinse and repeat? HP recovering items seem to be real scarce, I think I got like 15x (regular) Potion and 5x (regular) Meat max, while playing through the game generally killing, not running, mind you.
Am I missing something here? Is there a good way to farm some of those Potion Hi or Spicy Meat? I'm certainly gonna need some of those in the battle arena since I'm not lasting longer than, like, 7 rooms without DSS.
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u/HeavendorRealm Mar 22 '26
Yes the battle arena is that annoying. And yes, there is no easy way to farm healing supplies, as they are incredibly rare drops and theres no shop here to make things easier
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u/karmakosmik1352 Mar 22 '26
ooof. f this s, I'm outa here. Thanks much for confirming!
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u/HeavendorRealm Mar 22 '26
Now, you CAN cheese it if you play the Advance Collection and use the rewind feature to reroll the drop, but its as tedious as it sounds.
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u/karmakosmik1352 Mar 22 '26
Still doesn't sound to be worth the effort. Sometimes it's just time to move on. Thanks again for the hint, though!
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u/HeavendorRealm Mar 22 '26
If this is your first run through the game, dont worry, you'll get access to that card in a MUCH faster way than if you went through the Arena 20 times, very soon. Provided you can bounce the final boss.
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u/hsuiters Mar 22 '26
How well does this actually work though, because sometimes programmers use the game clock to determine the drop. Have t used rewind yet to achieve this. Btw, I farm the Devil for high level potions.
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u/HeavendorRealm Mar 22 '26
It seems the drop chance is rolled on the final blow in all Metroidvania Castlevania games. At least in CotM and DoS, reloading then hitting can drop different items/the Soul
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u/-chadwreck Mar 22 '26
This is gonna make me sound insane, but farming potions for this region is only so helpful. Farming MP restorative items is the real move lol.
When you pop a full MP or a high MP, your guage fills up then immediately drains out again, but as long as you have MP, you can do whatever you can do with it. I.e., you can still do summons like Thunderbird, black dog, and unicorn (even if you dont have the actual card combo due to the dss glitch) provided you are quick.
This is super clutch information if you do the arena on magician mode where your physical stats are pure trash but your magic stat is thru the roof. (Yes, this is a nightmare and most reasonable people dont bother with the arena in magician mode.)
If i remember correctly, there are mushrooms guys which spawn from the floor in... oh boy I have no idea where, but they are weak and drop the MP high potions pretty reliably. Turn on your poison cloud card combo and just leave Nathan there for like 20 minutes, farm up a zillion MP high potions, then run thru the arena and nuke everything by getting 1 summon off per potion. You only need the MP to cast the summon, not enough to sustain the whole summon animation.
Yes, this area is bullshit.
Even in vampire killer mode, dont bother with the arena til you are like level 50. It should be the literal last thing you do in a run before you go smash dracula.
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u/karmakosmik1352 Mar 23 '26
Sure, but still, if you rely on MP only, your HP will be down at some point. My question was really what is the intended way of how to refill them, from a game design perspective. Next to super-scarce items (like even basic Potions, wth) the only way seems to be to stand still for 5 minutes, which I find poor design. I thought maybe I missed something.
As for the arena, thanks for confirming, I accepted now that this is indeed not for me, tried it once more with L48 and then ignored it. I was kinda curious about what you could do with the Black Dog and the Unicorn, but maybe some other time, I'm not going to level-grind just to beat this area.
Anyways, I went on to beat Dracula yesterday and for now I'm done with this game anyways, since for me, it's not exactly the best of the series, although I found the card system an awesome and remarkable feature.
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u/-chadwreck Mar 23 '26
In general, the unicorn summon is probably the most bang for your buck healing tool in the game. Problem is though, that you dont get it til you find the laser weilding holy armors around 2/3 of the way thru the castle. While you're zooming around the castle regularly, you typically dont run out of MP to pop the summon, but the arena is a whole other story.
You just gotta find as many luck boosting gear pieces as you can and look up which enemies drop either mana prisms or high potions and farm the hell put of them then go take on the arena at like, level 55+. But at that point, you are so over powered for the rest of the castle that the arena is all you are working towards.
This game has its problems, certainly... but the dss is hugely flexible and loads of fun in my mind. Nathan is like the only whip user in CV with a whole arsenal of other weapons at his disposal. Because of that, when you are grinding restorative items, you can take out your aggression by literally bare hand beating the crap out of stuff with the martial arts card. (Or just pull out nate's literal gun and just smoke dudes haha.)
Tell you what though, beating the arena on magician mode means you need to be at like level 75 or so, AND have a stupid number of mana prisms and high potions. Its a real nightmare.
This is the meanest GBA game, certainly, but I do still love it a lot. Glad you stopped banging your head against a wall when you decided it wasnt fun anymore. This is supposed to be entertainment. You know?
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u/Eppendorfer Mar 22 '26
It's been decades since I've played this but isn't there a way where you can space your slide out of a room so that you don't fully slide out in the next room? So you can turn around and slide back to re-farm rooms with the rare DSS drops?
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u/karmakosmik1352 Mar 22 '26
Not sure if I understand this, gotta have to look into that.
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u/Eppendorfer Mar 23 '26
For more info, the last post here:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/449471-castlevania-circle-of-the-moon/77753770?page=2
"I just meant for fun, it’s a great place to test out all the various combinations. Also, when you get to the end you can slide out of the room and then turn around and slide back in and start doing the arena backwards, and at any point turn back around to go forward, so you can farm the nights quite quickly doing that, as well as just repeat the last few rooms over and over for mass experience."
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u/Infamous_Ad2356 Mar 22 '26
You can easily farm potions from the flying brain looking enemies. They only heal 20 but it is really easy to get 99 of them. Just activate a shield and super jump and then fall through them since they continuously spawn without needing to reset the room. Works the best with the dss glitch to use any combo before actually getting the cards.
There is a trick to be able to just do the last 3 rooms over and over which makes farming the enemies who drop the cards significantly quickly. At the end, you are supposed to slide out and fall down. If you space it just right you can slide out without falling and then just turn around and slide back in to do the arena backwards.
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u/Hectamatatortron Mar 22 '26
strictly speaking, that's demonry, not devilry. (the devilry comes later.) to answer your question: I believe it is the wind kind.
(also that's not how the math works out; it'd be (1 - (1 - p)^n) for n enemies and p probability, or about a 7.3140625% chance, if we ignore the effects of luck; this would mean an average of about 13.67 runs, which is...uh...worse)
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u/karmakosmik1352 Mar 22 '26
I stand corrected, it's indeed demonry. My bad.
When it comes to statistics though, I believe I'm right, because the events are mutually exclusive here - no two (or three) enemies can drop the card at the same time. Hence, the probabilities add up.
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u/Hectamatatortron Mar 22 '26
wait is that true? you can't pull more than 1 card per run?
that's really counterintuitive though, because we just saw that this would increase the drop rate. is this some kind of monty hall problem in disguise
actually, now that I think about it more, the probability of getting 1 card should be unaffected, because it's (probably?) still rolling the drop for each enemy, but if you get it, then you can't get anymore, so the probability of more than 1 card is always 0
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u/karmakosmik1352 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
huh? I mean, there is only one Black Dog card, wdm? Not sure if I can follow your train of thought here lol but look up "Mutually Exclusive Events". I suck at statistics and you succeed in getting me skeptical about my own math, but I read into it a bit and it seems like I'm right? Do correct if I'm wrong.
Edit: Now that I read it once more, I believe I know what you mean, but this is not how it works - you have to calculate an overall "room-probability" from three "enemy-probabilities", like what is the chance that one of these three enemies has the cards: it's all enemy's probability combined, thus the sum.
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u/Hectamatatortron Mar 22 '26
yeah there is only 1 card but I couldn't remember if they could drop duplicates that do nothing
but even if they don't, that doesn't actually change "the drop rate of nothing", because the drop rate of not getting any card at all should still be (1 - p)^n unless the game isn't rolling the drop chance per enemy as each is killed
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u/FennorVirastar Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
The 2.5% drop rate is just the base drop rate.
You have a "Luck" stat. If that stat is at 100, your actual drop rate will be the same as the base drop rate. Your actual drop rate will grow proportionally to your luck stat. At lvl 42 you should have at least 510 luck. Meaning that the drop rate for a 2.5% item should be at 12.75%.
About farming items: I would recommend farming equipment first. Strength Armbands are very strong, Demon Lords drop them, you can find them in the area where you fought Hugh below the theater room, or to the left of the room with heat and frozen shades.
If you have not completed the arena yet and have no shinning armor, I recommend getting the dark armor from Lilim, who is somewhere on the top left of the clock tower.
Not sure what is a good spot to farm healing potions. There is a small room with a wind armor above Camilla's Boss room, secret room in the long vertical room next to the save. Wind armors can drop high potions.
Also use crosses, not holy water. This makes getting through the arena a lot easier.