It's annoying at the start but really it's not as annoying as all that because there are heaps of weapons/shields which respawn every blood moon. You can get to the next blood moon just by resting until you get there - every few days. I don't know if there are that many items that don't respawn with the blood moon.
It definitely ceases to be an issue.
Can I make a few general suggestions. I've beat it about 25 times (out of total 70), albeit only up to around 7 heat - so not exactly an expert, but I can hold my own.
1. Get nectar and give it to every god and every NPC once. This will get you their keepsakes, and in the case of many gods, allow you some level of control over which weapons you start with. Very important for most situations.
2. Unlock all of the mirror upgrades - grind as much as you need, but it shouldn't take too many runs to get all but the last set. Put your points into the extra starting health, death defiance, the extra dash and the one where you get health every time you get darkness crystals to begin with. Starting with 100 health, 3 death defiances (4 with the lucky tooth keepsake) and will make it a lot easier for you to get to the last boss, no trouble. Once you have all those, 3 cast stones also makes a very big difference and opens up some new options for builds. There's also one which can increase your damage by up to 40 per cent if enemies have two status effects - again - huge, but less of an issue for now.
3. Particularly at the start, get divine dash as often as you can. It will save you way more than you know.
4. Getting a high damaging call is always helpful. I'm sure others have their uses, but the best for me are Poseidon and Aphrodite, followed by Ares. The good thing about each of these is they more or less guarantee huge damage to a boss - somewhere over the 2,000-3,000 damage mark depending on how leveled up your boons are. Poseidon and Ares also make you invulnerable for a little bit, which has its uses as well. I can't overstate how important this is when you're getting a boss's health down but you're running out yourself. For context, 2,000 damage takes the hydra's health down to zero from the start of its final phase, or about 50% (!!) of Meg's health. The absolutely key thing here is to charge up your call bar all the way to the max, because anything less is fairly pointless.
5. Cast stones are useless at the start when you only have one, but once you have 3, some of them are very helpful for cleaning out a room. Specifically, Dionysus's cast is an excellent crowd control option. They also become very much viable as a focus for a build - won't get into it here though.
Builds
Having unlocked all the keepsakes (1), use one of the really easy builds.
My suggestion is:
Rail gun special build.
With the rail gun (aspect doesn't matter, but Eris is best), get cluster bomb, triple bomb or hazard bomb, and if you can, rocket bomb and just let loose with your special. I can't overstate how overpowered this weapon is. You can clear whole rooms incredibly quickly with minimal risk. I got to the last boss the first time on my 14th run without even really knowing what I was doing. If I knew I would have beat him too.
For boons, go with ones which increase the damage percentage of your special. Aphrodite is best, but Demeter is a good second option. Divine dash or Tidal Dash to protect yourself. Where you can choose to get pomegranates (for your Aphrodite special) or centaur hearts (to increase survivability).
Tidal dash build.
Once you're a little bit more confident, I reckon this is the simplest build to pull off. The heart of it is that tidal dash does a heap of damage and protects you very well. It also synthesises incredibly well with some other Poseidon boons and Zeus boons. With the Sea Storm duo boon, your tidal dashes will also hit enemies with lightning. The damage is huge - first time I used this I knocked about 10 minutes off my best time (finished in about 25 minutes)
Weapon: Anything that involves a lot of rapid attacking. Fist, rail gun and spear are best.
God:
* To begin with, Poseidon for tidal dash obviously. The other key ones are, in order of importance, Wave Pounding, Razor Shoals, Poseidon's Aid and Flood Shot (the latter isn't that important until you get 3 cast stones via the mirror)
* To synthesise with Poseidon, get from Zeus: Thunder strike, and static discharge. There are a few others which multiply the lightning effects which are nice to have but not must haves.
At this point, you should be able to get Sea Storm, a duo boon which makes enemies hit by your tidal dash also get hit by lightning.
Exploding Spear
This could be build 2 to be honest because it's so simple. But it's also very overpowered and you can beat the game almost with your eyes closed. But you do need the right pieces to it.
Like the Rail Gun bomb build, this has a minimal reliance on complex boon combinations or aspects. What it does rely on is a very specific combination of hammers, those being:
1. Charged skewer
2. Exploding launcher.
The combination of these two should be a solid base on which your special will do huge damage to anything in front of you. Get the Aphrodite special once again for the same reasons. Get divine dash to protect yourself. That's pretty much literally all you need.
I did it! After heaven knows how many runs, I managed to beat Hades, only to get transported back there and start all over again
I did try the Rail Gun but wasn't entirely comfortable using it, partly because it seems so anachronistic I guess.
But not being a comfortable with melee weapons, my favoured weapon initially was the Spear (having read up on, it seems like everyone else hates it for some reason) but you're right about getting the Exploding Spear, I tried to get that as soon as I could. I started to beat Elysium regularly with it but then kept getting killed by Hades so I started using the Shield instead - which to be honest, I should have done before, I mean it's the only weapon that block attacks which is wonderfully helpful when you're getting attacked by powerful enemies and bosses who can kill you in a few swipes.
Like you say, getting Athena's boons to deflect is basically a necessity, I got it as my Special for my Shield. I also worked out that Athena's Deflect boon is basically a necessity and I think I got luck as well as the first time I got to and was killed by Hades, I started to get Demeter's boons. The one I beat Hades with was her Cast which did a lot of the legwork in draining enemies, Athena's Deflect and Artemis' Aid and Hammer of Daedalus (which basically powered up my Bull Rush) and a lot of Pom Power (which I wasn't using before in favour of boons but I worked out getting a few boons and basically powering them up is much better).
Like Zlen said, basically there's still a lot left in the game but I just wanted to beat Hades once because I'm usually rubbish at finishing games and now that I have, it's the type of game I can pick up and put down regularly. There's still so much to do in terms of beating it with different weapons and power ups to get and I still need to use all the Titan Blood, Diamonds, Nectar and Ambrosia I've collected.
Also I have the Bioshock Collection which I really wanted to get started on soon. Looking forward to that, I played the first one ages ago and it was terrific but haven't played the other two.
