Tainted Eve is a character added in The Binding of Isaac: Repentance. She is the alternate version of 
Eve with ragged hair, no bird, and ruined mascara as if crying. Tainted Eve is unlocked by reaching 
Home and using either the 
Red Key or the 
Cracked Key to access a special room in one of the walls while playing as Eve.
Tainted Eve starts with 2 red hearts and 1 key, and possesses a very low base fire rate compared to other characters. Unlike her normal counterpart, Tainted Eve does not start with 
Dead Bird or 
Whore of Babylon. Instead, Tainted Eve starts with 
Sumptorium in her consumable slot. After holding down the fire button for 2 seconds, a blood clot familiar that shoots tears will spawn alongside her. Each time a blood clot is spawned, half a heart is drained, and this process can be repeated as long as Tainted Eve has at least half a heart remaining. Using Sumptorium will destroy all blood clots, returning the health used to create them, and damaging enemies they pass through as they travel.
Another effect of Sumptorium is that if every remaining clot is killed and Tainted Eve only has half a heart left, she is granted a Whore of Babylon-like effect and begins to use Sumptorium as a weapon that functions similar to 
Mom's Knife. The effect persists until Tainted Eve either gains health or summons a clot, though the effect will persist until the next room is entered. This effect can also be triggered if Tainted Eve summons a blood clot while having no others and is left with half a heart. While under this effect, any summoned blood clots will use a small Mom's Knife for the rest of the room.
Blood Clots
Blood clots are familiars intrinsic to Tainted Eve due to her starting item, Sumptorium. Its basic effects are shown below, but can be read in further detail on its respective page.
- While holding the Drop/Swap Item button, Tainted Eve's clots will remain where they are instead of following her, similar to
Esau. - Tainted Eve's clot creation follow this priority: Golden > Eternal > Rotten > Red > Soul > Black > Bone Hearts.
- Each type of heart generates a different type of blood clot:
- Red Hearts: A red familiar with tears that deal 33% of Tainted Eve's damage.
- Soul Hearts: A blue ???-like familiar with tears that deal 33% of Tainted Eve's damage.
- Black Hearts: A black devil-like familiar with tears that deal 40% of Tainted Eve's damage and have a Dark Matter effect.
- Eternal Hearts: A white familiar with tears that deal 50% of Tainted Eve's damage and have a Sacred Heart homing effect.
- Golden Hearts: A golden familiar with tears that deal 33% of Tainted Eve's damage and have a Midas' Touch effect.
- Bone Hearts: A skeletal familiar with tears that deal 33% of Tainted Eve's damage and have a Compound Fracture effect.
- Rotten Heart: A green familiar with tears that deal 33% of Tainted Eve's damage and have a The Common Cold effect.
- Upon activation, Sumptorium destroys any remaining blood clots and heals Tainted Eve for the same type of hearts that were used
- If Tainted Eve uses Sumptorium while there are enemies between her and the blood clots, they will deal damage on their way back.
- Turning an Eternal Heart into a clot will prevent it from turning it into a heart container if Tainted Eve goes down a floor with it as a clot.
- Blood clots are not affected by environmental hazards such as spikes, cobwebs or fireplaces. Cobwebs can cause the blood clots to move out of sync with Tainted Eve while she is slowed.
- Blood clots move on the ground by default; whenever Tainted Eve gains flight, her blood clots will gain flight too.
- In Co-Op, when Tainted Eve dies and becomes a ghost baby, her clots will remain on screen and can be controlled in the normal way, but will receive the same damage debuff. If all of them die, Tainted Eve's ghost will receive Sumptorium for the rest of the time she is dead, making her a decently damaging ghost.
- If you are about to be hit by an attack which will kill many of your blood clots, you can save them by using Sumptorium.
- If you take in more clots than you have space for, Eve's health will fill, and any excess health from clots will persist inside of her for 3 seconds before disappearing.
- During this time, clots can effectively be created for free, as well as the contact damage from the traveled clots remaining active.
Unlockable Items
Strategy
- Tainted Eve's strength is proportional to how many blood clots she has: she is required to keep them around for protection, while at the same time protecting them from harm in order to keep her offense going. Because of this, her runs can go hot and cold depending on her items and drops.
- As she is heavily geared towards turning health into familiars, an abundance of heart drops of any sort can easily grant Tainted Eve impressive room-clearing abilities. The sheer amount of blood clots will cause her to have extreme damage (due to the amount of tears being fired) and multiple "bodyguards" to block her from enemy tears.
- Tainted Eve loses a significant amount of staying power if she has low health and few clots: she will be forced to either use her horrendous base tears, or create a small number of blood clots that may end up dying anyway, which is usually the case during the start of a run.
- To make the most use of hearts, backtrack and use every remaining heart drop to create new clots once a floor is clear, and bomb objects that can potentially drop hearts, such as Blood Donation Machines.
- If you are at full health, keep in mind to pick up/use any health-restoring items like Blood Bag or Full Health pills after you create clots, as it will make use of any potentially wasted heals.
- Enemies with piercing/area of effect abilities (such as enemy Brimstone beams or Ipecac shots) are usually her biggest weakness, as they can instantly vaporize a large group of her clots or hit her when she is at half a heart. Similarly, bullet hell enemies will slowly chip away at her clots if she is careless. Thus, endgame bosses such as Delirium and Hush will usually be her hardest challenge, since Tainted Eve will start out strong, but may become completely helpless at the end without any clots.
- Similarly, rooms with lots of obstacles can prove to be detrimental, as it will likely cause the clots to separate and make them more likely to take damage, as well as reducing Tainted Eve's damage output.
- Tainted Eve can "reserve" heart drops by turning them into clots, and then heal herself back up afterwards. This can allow her to use self-harm sources such as Sacrifice Rooms, Curse Rooms and Blood Donation Machines more frequently. However, note that her clots will only heal however many heart containers she possesses: if she has more clots than necessary, the excess clots will be wasted and not returned. In such a case, it is usually wiser to keep her blood clots around if she has a large number of them.
- As she is able to control how many hearts she possesses in her health, Tainted Eve can easily make use of both types of Challenge Rooms.
Favored Items
- Because of Tainted Eve's pitiful rate of fire, she will greatly appreciate any item which can boost said stat. Squeezy and Mr. Dolly are particularly good items for her, as they grant a tears up plus spare hearts to turn into clots.
- Since Tainted Eve's clots are treated as familiars, trinkets such as Forgotten Lullaby and Baby-Bender work to great effect. Similarly, BFFS! increases the damage of the clots, increasing Tainted Eves damage output immensely.
- Special effect tears which scale on luck (The Common Cold) are particularly effective on Tainted Eve, especially with a large amount of clots since they use her own tears to fire. With such items, she'll also benefit from anything which boosts her Luck such as Magic Scab and Lucky Foot.
- Health Up items allow for better clot resource management and the ability to produce more at one time. Even better are items which grant both a health up and heal such as Blood Bag, as she can turn all spare red hearts into clots while getting a full heal.
- Items that grant increased tear knockback (such as Pisces) work immensely when Tainted Eve has many clots, as they already possess high knockback when stacked.
- Adrenaline: Since clot generation favors Red hearts over all other types, Tainted Eve can obtain a large damage bonus with every 2 clots she generates out of her red health.
- Book of Revelations: Allows Tainted Eve to generate 2 extra blue clots every 6 rooms.
- Bloody Penny: Each penny has a chance of dropping half red hearts for clot creation.
- Charm of the Vampire: Every 13 kills allows Tainted Eve to create one blood clot.
- Child's Heart: Increases the drop rate of red hearts, and thus increases the ability to make clots.
- D1: Allows duplicating any spare pickups on the floor, including red hearts.
- Error: The given collectible ("Glowing Hour Glass") does not exist.: Can be used to prevent the loss of clots, or to avoid especially dangerous rooms.
- Isaac's Fork: Has a chance to heal for half a heart with every cleared room, which can be used to create a clot.
- Leech: Can be used to kill weak enemies and give health for more red clots.
- Lost Contact: With a sufficient amount of clots and/or a high enough Fire Rate, Tainted Eve and her clots can create an impenetrable wall of defense in the direction they are firing, protecting them from any and all enemy shots. This is particularly critical against bosses such as Mega Satan or Hush, who use bullet-intensive attacks.
- Libra: Balances out Tainted Eve's stats and constantly remedies her extremely low tears when picking up stat upgrades.
- Mom's Locket: Using a key heals for half a heart. It additionally has the far more useful perk of turning all half heart drops into full hearts, making every heart drop more efficient.
- Sharp Straw: Gives Tainted Eve a consistent method of harming an entire room of enemies. It also gives the additional benefit of potential half heart drops, which gives her some extra sustain.
- Spirit Sword can be swung as fast as the button can be mashed, negating the downside of Tainted Eve's low Tears.
- Tear Detonator: Detonates all of the clots' tears as well, filling the room with tears and potentially dealing massive damage.
- Tractor Beam: Causes all tears fired by blood clots to follow the beam, making it significantly easier to hit all of their shots consistently.
- Yum Heart/Yuck Heart/Little C.H.A.D.: Allows Tainted Eve to generate extra red/green clots every few rooms.
- Placenta: Given enough patience, allows Tainted Eve to generate theoretically infinite blood clots.
- Maggy's Bow: Thanks to the doubled red heart healing effect, you can generate double the clots for less red hearts needed.
Disfavored Items
- Clots cannot benefit from any items that prevent taking damage, potentially making items such as Book of Shadows, Host Hat, or My Little Unicorn worse defensive options than normal.
- Abaddon: Replaces all red heart containers with black hearts, making it much harder to consistently generate clots without soul heart generation or more health upgrades after pickup.
- Birthright: Currently has no effect.
- Crown Of Light: Rarely active, since firing will automatically drain red hearts.
- Marked: Tainted Eve will constantly fire unless the player presses the drop trinket button, which can unintentionally cause her to create clots even if the player does not wish to.
- Satanic Bible: While the extra Black Heart is tempting for more special clots, the Boss Room item will be replaced by a Devil Deal, putting a dent on Tainted Eve's total ability to create clots on the long term.
- Technology 2: The laser will apply to Tainted Eve but not her clots. She will also suffer a loss to her already pathetic rate of fire, which can be more palpable with more familiars.
- Maw Of The Void/Revelation: Due to their fixed 2.5 second activation times, their effects cannot be activated without draining at least half a heart.
- Be wary of any items that replace normal tears with a charged attack. If Tainted Eve’s fire rate is high, it may require the loss of a significant amount of damage to summon a blood clot during a fight. If it is low, she may be forced to summon one or more blood clots in order to attack.
Trivia
- The achievement for unlocking Tainted Eve is "The Curdled", a possible title for the character.
 Characters
| ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
 The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
|
|---|
