Tainted Lilith

What you start with

The mechanics that actually govern this character.

• 1 red heart container plus 2 black hearts, speed 0.85, no starting collectibles, permanently blindfolded like normal Lilith.
• Instead of tears she launches a Gello familiar out of her stomach on an umbilical cord. The launch deals 3x damage on contact, pierces, passes through obstacles and auto-aims at nearby enemies. It returns when you release the fire button.
• While the fire button is held, Gello also shoots ordinary tears at 1x damage and moves in the direction you are firing. It deals no contact damage while it is firing tears.
• This attack is a character property, not an item, so it cannot be rerolled or removed. Also unusual: Incubus is NOT reduced by the normal 25% familiar damage penalty on her, exactly as with regular Lilith.

How to play them

• The gimmick in plain language: this is a whip, not a gun. Tap fire to punch Gello out for triple damage, release to snap it back. Hold fire and Gello becomes a remote turret firing weak 1x tears instead.
• Early floors, the whip one-shots or two-shots basically everything. Stop trying to shoot and treat the first three chapters as melee.
• Fire rate is whip speed, so tears ups are great - but too much fire rate causes Gello to snap back before it lands, so there is an actual sweet spot rather than a monotonic upgrade.
• Prioritise speed on early floors. 0.85 speed on a melee character means chasers overwhelm you and there is nothing you can do at range. Actively refuse items that lower speed further.
• Prioritise tears and range on late floors. Bosses that constantly teleport, Delirium especially, cannot be reliably whipped, and you have to fall back on Gello's tears for those.
• Gello's hitbox persists between rooms - launch it just before walking through a door and it can connect with whatever is waiting on the other side.
• Gello cannot pick up pickups but it CAN shove them, so use it to knock items and consumables off spike beds and out of awkward corners.

Items to hunt for

Strong on this character specifically, not just strong.

• Mom's Knife (you have it unlocked): Gello holds and auto-fires the knife and stops automatically returning. Piercing plus the knife's high base damage makes this one of the strongest possible outcomes on the character.
• Incubus: takes no familiar damage penalty on her, and it fires her exact tears, which also fixes the Epic Fetus crosshair problem.
• Lost Contact: Gello's body destroys projectiles. On a character whose weapon is constantly out in front of her, that is a huge defensive upgrade rather than a small one.
• Proptosis: the whip gets the full 3x with no distance falloff, because the contact hit sidesteps the damage ramp entirely. Gello's tears still behave normally and hit hard at mid range.
• Guillotine: normally the drawback is aiming tears from the floating head, but Gello still fires from Lilith's body, so you keep the damage and lose the downside.
• Technology, ideally with spectral tears: Gello's shots hit the nearest enemy instantly regardless of distance, and with spectral they cannot miss as long as an enemy is in the room.
• Birthright: every familiar you own stacks onto Gello, each adding a flat +3 to the melee attack regardless of damage multipliers, and Gello gains King Baby style auto-aim. Strange Attractor, Baby-Bender, Dead Eye and Uranus are all strong secondary picks.

Traps to refuse

Picks that are neutral or good elsewhere and bad here.

• Tractor Beam: Gello loses the ability to fire and move in all directions, and a dead gap opens between her and Gello where nothing is being hit. Actively bad.
• The Wiz: Gello fires diagonally to either side of whatever it is aiming at, so it misses almost constantly.
• Epic Fetus: the crosshair disappears whenever Gello retracts and it aims poorly, trying to seek enemies while also drifting with your fire input. Only workable if you have Incubus or another familiar firing her tears.
• The Inner Eye: lowers her fire rate without tripling the familiar - the triple shot lands on Gello's tears instead of the whip. Usually a net DPS loss.
• Jar of Flies gains nothing from whip kills, Monstro's Lung adds a long delay between launches, Child Leash only makes Gello bigger without extending its reach, and Forgotten Lullaby does not improve Gello's fire rate.

Cheese and techniques

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

• Gello passes through obstacles. Stand behind a full rock formation and whip through it - you take zero return fire in a lot of rooms that would otherwise be dangerous.
• Door pre-launch: whip Gello out as you walk through a door and it can land a free hit on the first enemy in the new room before the fight starts.
• Tap-fire discipline with Ipecac: a very brief press launches Gello without firing an Ipecac tear at all, giving you enormously boosted launch damage with zero self-explosion risk. The same technique keeps Dead Eye's stacks alive - build stacks with tears, then whip only.
• Spirit Sword on Gello: the sword swing can collect pickups and open chests, which means Lilith can loot from across the room despite Gello itself being unable to pick anything up.
• Marked keeps Gello permanently deployed and chasing the mark instead of returning; press the drop button to cancel it and recall Gello.

Getting the marks

• 7 secrets. Isaac, ???, Satan and The Lamb collectively unlock The Twins. Mega Satan gives Fool's Gold, Boss Rush OR Hush gives Soul of Lilith, Greedier gives the II - The High Priestess? card, Delirium gives Gello, Mother gives Adoption Papers, The Beast gives Twisted Pair.
• Greedier is the awkward one here because wave-based rooms punish a short-range melee character with 0.85 speed. Anima-style crowd control is unavailable, so treat any speed or fire-rate item as a Greedier enabler.
• Mom's Heart and normal Greed give no secret for tainted characters but both marks still need filling for the note and for Death Certificate.