Tainted Eve

What you start with

The mechanics that actually govern this character.

• The gimmick in plain language: holding the fire button for 2 seconds converts half a heart into a blood clot familiar that shoots for you. Her own fire rate is the worst in the game (Tears -0.5 and x0.66, slower than most familiars), so the clots ARE your damage. Sumptorium in the pocket slot pulls clots back into health, damaging anything they pass through for 3x her damage.
• Clot creation eats health in a fixed priority: Golden, Eternal, Rotten, Red, Soul, Black, Bone. Clot type follows the heart used - red/soul/rotten/gold clots do 35% damage, black clots 43% with Dark Matter tears, eternal clots 52% with Sacred Heart tears, gold clots apply Midas' Touch, bone clots apply Compound Fracture.
• Clots spawn with 15 HP and decay to 1 HP (5 for non-red), getting darker and smaller with age. Recalling and respawning them refreshes them to full. Hard cap of 64 clots, shared with blue flies and blue spiders, and she can only reabsorb as many red clots as she has heart containers - the surplus stays on the field un-refreshed.
• At half a red heart with no clots left she enters the Bloody Babylon state: a Whore of Babylon buff plus a Mom's Knife-style Sumptorium melee. It lasts until she heals or makes a clot, and it does NOT synergise with C Section, Berserk!, Mom's Knife, Epic Fetus, Spirit Sword or Found Soul.

How to play them

• Tap-fire, do not hold. Holding for 2 seconds is what spawns a clot, so tapping lets you shoot without bleeding, at no cost to fire rate. This is the single biggest thing separating a bad Tainted Eve player from a good one.
• Health is ammunition. Backtrack across a cleared floor and convert every remaining heart drop into clots before taking the stairs, and bomb Blood Donation Machines for extra hearts. Heal AFTER creating clots, never before, or the healing is wasted.
• Refresh clots on purpose. Old clots die to a single bullet, so periodically use Sumptorium and immediately respawn them at full 15 HP, ideally between rooms, because rebuilding a big army takes real time.
• If you are about to eat something that will wipe your clots - a Brimstone beam, an Ipecac shot - use Sumptorium first. Absorbing them saves them.
• Her hard counters are chasing contact enemies (Trites walk through clots and jump on you), piercing and AoE attacks, and cluttered rooms that split the formation. Fight in open space and keep the wall between you and the threat.
• Her clot control is the Drop/Swap button: hold it and clots stay put instead of following you, which is how you keep a wall in front of a boss while repositioning.
• Careful in the abandoned Mines section for Knife Piece 2 - you can still make clots there but Sumptorium is unavailable, so you cannot take them back.

Items to hunt for

Strong on this character specifically, not just strong.

• Any Health Up at all. Empty Heart is almost a free heart container every floor for her because she reliably ends floors at low red health, and Binge Eater turns junk items into large health.
• BFFS!, the Forgotten Lullaby and Baby-Bender trinkets: massive multipliers on a damage source that is entirely familiars.
• Lost Contact: with enough clots the wall of shots in your firing direction becomes literally impenetrable. This is the answer to Hush and Mega Satan.
• Homing tears and any status-effect tear: with dozens of clots firing, even a low-percentage effect procs constantly, so The Common Cold, Little Horn, Magic Scab and Lucky Foot are all much better on her.
• Scapular: drop to a heart and a half, make a clot, self-damage in a Sacrifice Room, Scapular heals you back - effectively infinite clots. Glyph of Balance is the other ramp: drain your containers with Sumptorium to force red heart room drops, or keep soul hearts at 1.5 with no red containers to force soul hearts.
• Maggy's Bow: doubled healing means one half heart makes two clots and a double heart makes eight. Adrenaline also stacks fast because clot creation eats red hearts first.
• Tractor Beam funnels every clot's shot along one line; Lachryphagy lets clot tears feed each other into bursts; Empty Vessel and Whore of Babylon are permanently active on her because she controls her own health precisely.

Traps to refuse

Picks that are neutral or good elsewhere and bad here.

• My Little Unicorn, Unicorn Stump, Taurus and Book of Shadows: invincibility covers only HER, not the clots, so your damage still gets deleted.
• Guppy transformation, The Mulligan and Parasitoid: their flies and spiders count against the 64 cap and push clots out of existence. Sacrificial Altar is worse still - it sacrifices every clot for one coin each.
• Rotten hearts and Yuck Heart: active rotten clots overwrite existing red health every time you use Sumptorium, which slowly bleeds off your red clot count and your DPS.
• Epiphora, Kidney Stone and Marked all take control of when you fire, which means unwanted clot creation or an inability to stop it. Brimstone and Monstro's Lung on top of her fire rate often finish charging after a clot has already spawned, so only take them with Chocolate Milk.
• Sacred Orb strips most Health Ups out of the boss pool, and Health Ups are her core resource. Abaddon and A Pound of Flesh also cut off her health supply.

Cheese and techniques

Verified against 1.7.9 on console — anything patched, PC-only or Repentance+ only is called out rather than listed.

• Glowing Hourglass clot duplication: the wiki documents a bug where teleporting back with Glowing Hourglass and then using it again duplicates clots. Present on 1.7.9 with no DLC marker restricting it.
• Sacrifice Room plus Scapular is the cleanest infinite loop - one clot per cycle, no other items required.
• Challenge Rooms both work for her, because she can set her health to whatever the door demands and convert the surplus into clots first.
• Spirit Shackles plus 2 or more soul/black clots negates a fatal hit and can be re-armed instantly with Sumptorium at the cost of two clots. It eats enough time that it can blow a Boss Rush or Hush timer.
• Eye of Greed on clots looks like a disaster but is not: they fire so many golden tears that enemies stay frozen and money piles up on the floor - just do not collect the coins until you want to shop. Also note soul and black clots charge the Alabaster Box instead of returning to your health bar, and that on 1.7.9 boss rooms that reposition you (Mom, Gurdy) leave the clots behind for a moment, which was fixed in Repentance+.

Getting the marks

• 7 secrets, not 14. No unlock for Mom's Heart, none for normal Greed Mode, and no Hard-mode-sheet co-op baby.
• Her 7: any one of Isaac / ??? / Satan / The Lamb gives Strange Key (which you already have); either Boss Rush OR Hush gives Soul of Eve; Mega Satan gives Horse Pill; Ultra Greedier gives III - The Empress?; Delirium gives Sumptorium for other characters; Mother gives Lil Clot; The Beast gives Heartbreak.
• Delirium and Hush are her worst marks by design - she starts strong and ends helpless once the clots are gone. Do them on a run with Lost Contact or a genuine tears build, not on a pure clot run.
• Greed Mode is her hardest mode. Prioritise raw clot count over stat items in the first Silver Treasure Rooms (Raw Liver over a small damage up), and buy red hearts from the shop before the boss waves.