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No Wave posted:This thing Ranzear quoted sums it up: I had heard that it was only the first three turns where you got a guaranteed banner unit?
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Jul 17, 2020 18:15
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That's probably the case. Idk if there's a real statement about this incredibly important thing. EDIT: Revised thoughts on factions after finishing cov25: 1.) Umbra primary gets better and better because the early game gets so scary (covenants tend to affect the early game much more than the late game) and penumbra just carries through daedalus. 2.) Awoken is I think by far the best secondary faction. 3.) Similar to how Umbra gets better, Stygian gets worse because Tethys is such a little turd at the start. 4.) As tempting as starting with multistrike hellhorned prince is he's so much weaker than the other two in the first few battles. 5.) Hellhorned is in general a very good primary or secondary. 6.) Architect Penumbra is amazing. 7.) Harvest rector is very real now, still don't like Melting secondary. 8.) I was wrong about legion of wax but you really want to loop intent on death with it. If you do it's an easy win. No Wave fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jul 18, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 18:16
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Melting secondary is great with Umbra; lots of microsynergies with cleanses+emberdrain, reform+morsels, etc. And pretty much any secondary works fine with Awoken because you'll always have a big boy to put stuff behind so you can work out whatever tickly synergy. Agree that Melting secondary can be pretty annoying with the Hellhorned and Stygian primaries.
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Jul 18, 2020 02:27
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Extremely important: devs have announced they're going to release an update (probs next week) which allows you to unlock things while googly eyes is active.
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Jul 18, 2020 05:58
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That's nice, but they need to change that one drat card to come more often. I've got a hundred hours clocked in it, and have beaten covenant 25, but I'm still missing Bone Dog's Favor from my compendium.
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Jul 18, 2020 06:10
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Chairchucker posted:Extremely important: devs have announced they're going to release an update (probs next week) which allows you to unlock things while googly eyes is active. 
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Jul 18, 2020 07:09
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Did Stygian get nerfs? It feels ... even more garbage than before, tonight. I stopped playing Stygian primary a long while back now because Tethys is just so loving bad compared to any other champ. I can't get a Stygian/Awoken win for my codex. I finally understand how spell weakness works at least. Edit: Found the notes Looks like mostly ember cost increases. Fitting since I'm playing the combo without a single ember gain card. Also doesn't help I ran into those sweep emberdrain assholes in consecutive runs. They can indeed appear in Pyrewings, the battle before Seraph. Ranzear fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Jul 18, 2020 |
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Jul 18, 2020 07:16
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Stygian champion is very strong, but also painfully fragile. Some combination of frostbite+sweep or frostbite+cost reduction tends to work best in my experience, same with taking cards that are normally mediocre like fortify just to help keep Tethys alive. The sap totem got nerfed to ember 3 because it was quite probably the strongest card in the game, and is still extremely strong at 3, while frostbite totem got nerfed to 2 cost for reasons beyond me.
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Jul 18, 2020 08:41
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Yeah tethys is extremely good and lodestone totem was the best card in the game by some distance, probably still top tier after having its cost tripled
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Jul 18, 2020 11:19
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Nice, they fixed Hell Rush not counting your wins. Really enjoying the game mode while getting the 5 wins for a card border.
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Jul 19, 2020 01:24
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I don't understand hell rush. It seems like everyone else does every single challenge but somehow they take zero pyre damage even four or five rings in. I start to think I'm missing an entire mechanic of the game or something, or just doing something so insanely obviously wrong like putting my units at the bottom instead of the top.
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Jul 19, 2020 02:00
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It's kinda hard to judge without seeing some of your gameplay, but there's a lot of optimal things you should be doing. Are you properly evaluating the cards? Are you checking the world map and planning your future path? Are you doing dumb stuff like picking up a bad card because you haven't mastered it yet? Are you only going for first floor wins to maximize your points instead of doing whatever you can to minimize damage taken? I'm guilty of the last one because I always go ultimate greed. Score doesn't really matter except when you're trying to get the 50k hell rum achievement, so vOv
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Jul 19, 2020 04:00
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TastyLemonDrops posted:It's kinda hard to judge without seeing some of your gameplay, but there's a lot of optimal things you should be doing. Are you properly evaluating the cards? Are you checking the world map and planning your future path? Are you doing dumb stuff like picking up a bad card because you haven't mastered it yet? Are you only going for first floor wins to maximize your points instead of doing whatever you can to minimize damage taken? I'm guilty of the last one because I always go ultimate greed. Score doesn't really matter except when you're trying to get the 50k hell rum achievement, so vOv ... you can see the whole path?
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Jul 19, 2020 07:27
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Captain Foo posted:... you can see the whole path? There's a button in the top right that brings it up.
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Jul 19, 2020 08:43
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TastyLemonDrops posted:There's a button in the top right that brings it up. You can also mousewheel scroll between the regions
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Jul 19, 2020 11:19
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Is there a way to skip all of the dead time in dialogues, scene stuff, and when your train guy moves out of game? I know clicking anywhere helps with some things. I noticed in the speedrun videos that they are doing something to go faster, but I don't get what. On map chat, m is the map hotkey and it's real good. You can add an additional to bind somewhere else if you want. I'd like switching between regions more if it were instant and had no transition animation. In addition to mousewheel they have w,s keys, but the animation between regions annoys me because I tend to go too far then over correct going back. It feels like there's a big delay and it queues up the region switches weird.
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Jul 19, 2020 18:14
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TastyLemonDrops posted:There's a button in the top right that brings it up. 30+ hours in and I didn't notice, lol
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Jul 19, 2020 18:39
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Really feels garbage when I go through the whole run fine, and then a bad starting hand keeps me from doing jack poo poo against Seraph.
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Jul 19, 2020 19:12
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Microcline posted:You can also mousewheel scroll between the regions Does that now show the composition of non-boss fights? I don't recall it doing so before.
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Jul 19, 2020 19:15
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If you know what the symbols for Daedalus/Fel mean you can tell which types they are, though that's only really useful for preempting blight Fel and taking energy.
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Jul 19, 2020 19:17
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Einwand posted:If you know what the symbols for Daedalus/Fel mean you can tell which types they are, though that's only really useful for preempting blight Fel and taking energy. Yeah, I know that Daedalus and Fel show, but they're also bosses. I'm talking about the other five fights. A lot of runs would go much smoother if you knew you were going to get a specific flavour of bastardry like Crystalcloak or the sweep/Emberdrain guys in advance.
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Jul 19, 2020 19:20
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Jedit posted:Yeah, I know that Daedalus and Fel show, but they're also bosses. I'm talking about the other five fights. A lot of runs would go much smoother if you knew you were going to get a specific flavour of bastardry like Crystalcloak or the sweep/Emberdrain guys in advance. Yes, but it's the same sort of thing as elites in Slay the Spire. You don't know if you're fighting reptomancer or the gremlin leader, so you need some AOE to deal with them. The cards and abilities you need to deal with those two are very different than the cards you need for book of stabbing or giant head, for instance. You need to have a deck capable of dealing with the emberdrain guys the same way that you need to have a deck in Slay the Spire that's capable of dealing with reptomancer even if you never end up fighting her. Generally for the emberdrain guys, you're looking at one big unit with multiattack or trample, while lots of little units fare very poorly. If you have to have more little units, then they need to be okay without you spending ember on some turns, or you need to get some 0 cost cards that can be used on turns where you're out of ember. Emberdrain also only triggers after the turn starts, so energy generation that occurs after that is also useful. You can also sap the emberdrain guys, as any unit with 0 attack doesn't actually attack at all, which means they don't actually emberdrain you. Crystalcloak just needs you to waste 8 of its turns, and then you can kill it. 8 morsels can do the job, or 8 imps, as it only has one attack. The relic that gives morsels damage shield 1 can let you tank all 8 stealth turns with just 4 morsels. Awakened thorns/regen strategies don't attack anyway, and completely ignore the boss's gimmick. Strategies that rely on exploding enemies with spells also work well, as the boss has less than 600 health, which makes it very vulnerable to decent amounts of attack magic. Part of the trick of these games is making sure your deck isn't hyper-focused on one very specific thing. You need to be able to be flexible and change up your play based on the boss and the enemies your are fighting. In some cases you might deploy your floors differently, or even not deploy a minion until much later in a fight, if at all. Every single clan has a few things that can deal with both of those threats, and the trick is assembling the right balance of abilities such that you can deal with all of the possible threats that are thrown at you. You don't have to deal with them perfectly, by the way. Pyre health exists for a reason and helps make up for any deficiencies in your deck. Just for fun - ways of dealing with them broken down by clan (not exhaustive): Crystalcloak (8 Stealth, 13 attack, 590 health - need to tank 8 hits of 13 damage for a total of 104 damage to one unit): Hellhorned: Imps to take hits and waste stealth turns by dying, stacking armor to take hits, ascending your units to make one giant floor, tiresome climb to add daze stacks, high spell damage Awoken: spikes/regen straight up ignore the stealth gimmick entirely, beefy awoken can tank all the hits pretty easily Stygian Guard: spell damage to kill it outright, sap to reduce its attack to almost nothing, stacking armor with incant to tank hits, dazing to waste turns Umbra: morsels to take hits (you might want to leave the bottom floor empty so that you can dump morsels there and not have them eaten), damage shield to block hits, stacking space on the bottom floor to stuff a bunch of units there, shadowsiege can tank the damage Melting Remnant: stealth, reforming units that die to fight again and again, lady of the reformed to deal with burnout, wickless recruitment to deal with burnout, dazing, resin removal to remove stealth entirely, legion of wax to put enough units in the way to wait out all stealth, memento mori to do a ton of damage, mortal entrapment to cause daze to waste turns Pyrewings (4 damage, 150 health, sweep, emberdrain one, come in packs with tanks in front): All clans: reduce spell costs to 0 or otherwise sort out energy such that emberdrain isn't an issue Hellhorned: use one big unit with multiattack, like demon fiend or consumer of crowns; railbeater can knock the guards back to let you smash the pyrewings in the face if you have enough quick units, a lot of armor spells are cheap and let you kill enemies without using much ember, keep the bottom floor open and use holdover inferno to wipe out most of the waves Awoken: enhance units with quick, use single big spikes units, make healing spells cheaper so that you can ignore emberdrain, railspike to enhance spells with -2 cost, pyre-gro for more ember, cheap holdover engraft for energy during the turn Stygian Guard: sap - two stacks = no attacks, blow them up with spells, daze them, get cheap spells, etc. Umbra: you already inflict emberdrain on yourself, and perils of production with holdover = 3 energy per turn; ember forges, engine upgrade for more ember, morsels for ember, use one big unit instead of lots of small ones, etc. Melting Remnant: cards are already super cheap, reformed units cost 0, stealth = no enemy attacks, dazed to prevent attacks Dirk the Average fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 19:44
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I did the three consecutive daily challenges for the card art, and they’ve been really fun. I had forgotten what it’s like to not have your guys become dazed the first turn you place them on the top floor
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Jul 19, 2020 20:35
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I think the big difference when comparing this to StS is that you get a lot more chances to shape your deck in StS. At least for me, I feel like when I get trashed by an encounter like that it's more often just a feeling of 'welp I didn't see a single card/upgrade that would have let me deal with that'
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Jul 19, 2020 20:45
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dyzzy posted:I think the big difference when comparing this to StS is that you get a lot more chances to shape your deck in StS. At least for me, I feel like when I get trashed by an encounter like that it's more often just a feeling of 'welp I didn't see a single card/upgrade that would have let me deal with that' My point with the list is that there are a lot of ways to hard counter enemies, and even more ways to soft counter enemies in a way that means you take pyre damage. Relics also modify things massively, and can make certain strategies more appealing. It's the same with slay the spire - you just need a way to deal with certain enemies, and be aware that you will have to deal with them. Yes, sometimes you don't get what you need, and sometimes that does just mean that you die, but overall you'll be able to pick something up. The other cool thing about Monster Train is that we have so many ways to upgrade units that decks can be tailored in different directions more easily. You might not have an ideal tank, but you can slap +50 health on a unit and support it with your clan spells to make it able to take hits for you.
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Jul 19, 2020 20:54
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The only time I felt particularly “hard countered” was vs. any of the Harvest enemies while playing as Umbra. And they changed how eating morsels works in the patch. Now my losses are because of the deck being unsynchronized or because I activated an ill-advised bonus challenge, rather than facing The One Enemy Who Defeats My Strategy
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Jul 19, 2020 21:25
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At higher covenants it seems like you just have to lean into the most broken combo your covenants have. Extra starter cards, beefier tanks, a couple others are real punishing. As was said before, you don't have much opportunity to upgrade as StS (like they stop offering you new units after daedelus) and you're on a clock every fight. Holdover/permafrost are the three two best things in the game imo because they let you use something on the turn you'll need it. Also you're punished for drafting okay units instead of the good ones because of the guaranteed draw. Much more than in StS I think it's important to have a slim deck in monster train. You need to make sure you get your broken combo off before it's too late.
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Jul 19, 2020 21:35
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Hell's Banners + Morselmarker interaction is sick. It triggers it at end of turn and gives you the ember next turn with an 0/2 banner. I've been picking up and duplicating prismal dusts & shroud spikes because perils is pretty good too. The buffed Crucible Warden is extremely good. So is the damage shield 2 minor upgrade. Hackan Slash posted:Much more than in StS I think it's important to have a slim deck in monster train. You need to make sure you get your broken combo off before it's too late. 5x event can also give you the ability to draft big decks with lots of units in them. Volatile Gauge can make it work too with the +3 draw, but it depends. I aggressively tried to keep deck size down when I started playing. Now I've branched out a bit more and allow a bit of creep if it adds utility and won't be dead later on in the run. I still try to keep it down, but due to draw mechanics and the limited turns you can get away with a bit of bloat. Khorne fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 00:13
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One warning - I was doing the 10 card cheevo, and it was my first time really trimming a deck. In a way, it felt great because once I got my monsters out, I was drawing the same cards each turn. On the downside, it was consume seraph, which meant I had to not only yeet one of my 5 spells if I wanted to play, but I also kept drawing Seraphs retain 1-dmg cards instead of spells.
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Jul 20, 2020 00:46
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Just got through a couple of runs of awakened + stygian guard, and going heavy into regeneration. I paired up the awakened unit that gains +1/+1 on heal with incant sirens that get stronger with every spellcast. I basically just spammed out as many healing spells as possible every round on the floor with both of them to quickly get a couple of absolutely insanely strong units. The first time through I used the card draw awakened champion with the summon 4 units on middle floor at start of combat; the champion basically ensured I drew what I needed on the first few turns before dying, and the units in the middle floor would be repositioned with vine grasp and quickly buffed into the stratosphere. I did a more traditional run later with a quick sweeper + spikes awakened champion on the bottom floor, and the aforementioned siren + powering up awakened on the middle floor. I copied the +5 regen consume card 6 times and had 7 copies to quickly get a massive amount of regen up on whatever unit was important. It's pretty hilarious how strong those incant sirens get now; I was routinely clearing +100 or so damage after a few turns of casting spells, and since you're constantly casting spells, your tank never dies due to the constant healing, and your spells can wipe out the enemies on that floor up until your units scale to the point where they kill everything. It also makes bosses hilariously easy if you can stack regen above their damage, as at that point your units will almost never die before the boss does. Edit: Two sap totems with the double incantation relic might be overkill. Hellhorned/Stygian with rage synergies got a couple of rage sirens up to ~1,000 damage each with around 100 stacks of rage (with a deranged brute for +3 attack per stack) and a multistrike. 40 stacks of sap on Seraph is a little excessive if you have that kind of damage output, it turns out. I have 35 turns of free hits, and only need two. Dirk the Average fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 02:47
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I'm at covenant rank 13 and I haven't managed a run with awoken primary since covenant rank 0, how do I get any of their champions working?
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Jul 20, 2020 10:40
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Depends what cards you find yourself with and the covenant level of course, but generally what I like to do with each: Spikes: very good against the early 1 hp enemies and as a wall for the boss, early on. You will need to put a lot of heals in to stack regen if you don't have another way to win. Transition into good healing spells and/or better frontline restore synergy units and use her as a sacrificial bottom floor to kill low hp units if she doesn't have a place in your main roster anymore. Explosive: good against the bigger 45 hp enemies, likewise you will want to be putting in a decent amount of restore spells on her. Can kill a boss if you stack enough regen. Other units can take her place up front if you find aoe healing, otherwise the plan is the same as spikes Draw: don't pick unless you have a way to play all the cards you're going to draw. You should have a good reason to pick this at the start, ie a lot of zero cost cards or some combo you need to get fast. Will do nothing for you on her own aside from eating damage.
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Jul 20, 2020 14:28
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GodFish posted:I'm at covenant rank 13 and I haven't managed a run with awoken primary since covenant rank 0, how do I get any of their champions working? Spike champion is the easiest to use - what you do is draft every wildwood sap you see and whatever other rejuvenation cards you see and try to get her rejuvenation above 40. Then you try to get an animus of will with a largestone and put it behind her. This will beat every boss in the game and every small unit. You may want to hellvent your DPS creature and buy another tank just to make sure you can finish everyone else as well. The big creature that gains spikes on heal is almost as good as the champion for this and is imo the best banner unit in the game, but you generally only want to stack rejuvenation on a single unit because the effect gets stronger the higher it stacks. If you get the x5 event you will usually want to quintuplicate wildwood sap if you're playing awoken. No Wave fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 14:38
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Yes, the thing to understand about rejuvination is that as long as you currently have enough to heal to full hp, each additional point of rejuvenation means an entire extra turns worth of damage. That's a lot of damage to get for as cheap as you can get regen stacks.
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Jul 20, 2020 17:13
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dyzzy posted:Depends what cards you find yourself with and the covenant level of course, but generally what I like to do with each: Going to slightly disagree on this. There are two awakened creatures that benefit from healing, either getting more stats or more spikes each time healed. I generally prefer to make them the thing that I am healing, which means that the champion is basically on her own and not getting regen stacks. If I get a strong healing card, I might toss one on her from time to time, but generally speaking, after the first couple of floors the champion is entirely disposable and she will die after a few turns. Because I tend to like doing that, I actually really like the draw version of the champion. She has the highest health, and will provide you with extra card draw for the first 5 or so turns of the fight, which means then that you accelerate your ability to set your deck up (every deck needs this, honestly), and that you can skip card draw upgrades entirely. Putting a quick sweeper behind her takes care of the low health chaff, and then on the middle or top floor I usually set up an awoken that I heal repeatedly. I also tend to use the secondary creatures as my offense; while awoken has some neat stuff where they can get multiattack or quick creatures with high damage, they tend to end up inferior to whatever secondary you end up cultivating. Awakened also has access to a descend card and a card that pulls a unit to the front (you can target your own units even though it does damage), so putting stuff on the top floor and descending it down to the middle for boss fights can work well. As I posted a little while ago, I really like green/purple because the constant healing on an awoken triggers incant on sirens, which means you're beefing up your damage immensely at the same time as you're pumping up your tank's ability to take hits.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:30
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My main complaint with the draw champion is that it does absolutely nothing in the first fight, and on cov 25 with the trial that can sometimes literally kill you on its own, your 4 stewards aren't going to kill anything. My preference is the explosive variant, it solves an issue that awoken tends to have in that it has no good way to kill beefy enemies outside of relentless, it's got lots of sweep or spike sources and very little to kill those 190 hp gilded wings, or the emberdrain Pyrewings with their 150 hp.
Einwand fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 22:32
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I like spikes because I won't always get spike hollow and spike champion is basically as good. The daily today (stygian/hellhorned with awoken champ - ie, zero healing available) very much encourages you to use the revenge variant as fodder and stack spell damage behind a siren. For normal awoken runs I think Animus of Will is crazy strong especially if you find that spell that swaps attack and health and you generally have a long time to beef her up before big non-boss units start threatening your pyre late in the run. Like the biggest thing you see by far until round 7 is 2x95 on Fel and it's not a big deal if a few of those get through if it's not rage fel and you're not playing for high score. No Wave fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 20, 2020 22:39
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Yeah it was my first time using the Revenge variant, and it owned. I think if I ever get the Seraphim that halves buff stacks on an Awoken primary run, I might actually prefer it over Spikes or Explosive.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:43
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Einwand posted:My main complaint with the draw champion is that it does absolutely nothing in the first fight, and on cov 25 with the trial that can sometimes literally kill you on its own, your 4 stewards aren't going to kill anything. My preference is the explosive variant, it solves an issue that awoken tends to have in that it has no good way to kill beefy enemies outside of relentless, it's got lots of sweep or spike sources and very little to kill those 190 hp gilded wings, or the emberdrain Pyrewings with their 150 hp. Fair. I just cleared covenant 21, and I can see how taking extra pyre damage on the first fight could be far more brutal on covenant 25. Spikes are also great for dealing with mark of invasion trials on the first couple of fights. It's definitely possible to go spikes first and revenge second (if it's offered). I just really, really value the card draw. Your second point is why I generally rely on literally anything other than awoken for those types of enemies. Awoken is fantastic at setting up a great tank, and fantastic at sweeping out low health enemies, but yeah, they cannot passively deal with high health enemies in waves.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:45
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Awoken might not be the best at passively clearing out tanks (that honor likely goes to hellhorned), but they're pretty close. The animus are two of the best DPS chasis (either largestone on will or multistrike on speed), they've got Restoring Retreat for stacking them behind tanks, and Bramble Lash does 100+ damage right out of the gate with the thorns champion or a decently buffed thorny hollow (and unlike a lot of Stygian tankbusters doesn't need +power to be effective so both slots can go into things like -cost and holdover).
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Jul 21, 2020 02:36
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