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So I've been following Voyix and Cranberry's videos of this game for a while now, starting from a little before the DLC dropped. It's really interesting to me seeing how they play the game compared to how Jorbs used to play the game, which felt a lot closer to what I would have assumed was normal myself (thinking of what I could do with each floor, trying to actually make use of a large number of units for incremental advantage). It makes me wonder how close their way of playing the game is to the actual optimal strategy at the highest level. Generally speaking, the way they approach runs is to figure out what extremely overpowered floor/unit they want to build pretty early on, and then not tend to deviate from that. The Last Divinity seems to encourage that even more with infusions, as it both becomes even easier to build up the floor you want and also it's harder to build up multiple floors well now, especially considering the hugely increased difficulty of enemy waves. It also feels like high level Monster Train now is balanced in a way where it's not actually that difficult to win streak if you really want to in a way that Slay the Spire is, making it much more of a gently caress around and experiment with things game. The number of problems you need to solve is generally smaller, and as Voyix will say, boils down to 3 questions: How do you deal with multiple heavies, how do you deal with back line, and how do you deal with relentless. Balance wise there are a few things that are pretty overpowered in a way where if you want to win you just take them when you see them and they railroad you into a free win. Like Cranberry had a recent run where he killed Divinity on like turn 4 dealing ~4000 a turn at that point using a duplicated Apex Imp, where the only armor source in his entire deck was basically just a Steelworker infusion on Apex Imp. Or how both of them complain about how much clicking it is to play Morsel-made or Sirens, and they don't make for good videos because they're free wins that play themselves.
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Jun 15, 2021 01:17
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:23 |
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Hellhorned has some of the worst overall creatures in the game, as well as some of the weaker champions. The prince is honestly very likely the weakest or second weakest champion in the game, while Shardtail Queen can be strong but is also somewhat situational, and just the fact that she starts with a set of creatures rather than spells already fucks up quite a few synergies with other clan combos. On the other hand, what Hellhorned DOES have is some really solid burn spells, rage generation, and armor. It also has Apex Imp, as well as the general imp package. Multistrike Apex Imp with a holdover March of Shields and one or two other big armor cards is a really easy win. Endless Transcendimp with another Imp essence on him is also an easy win, especially if you have 1 or 2 Welder Helpers. The burn spells can be expected to carry you through a lot of a run, and Ritual of Battle in its current state is one of the best ways to scale up a creature's attack stat.
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Aug 11, 2021 00:50
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The bad clan combos are bad and often don't work coherently but the game is definitely not overwhelmingly difficult no matter what. Rising Dusk was on a few of Voyix's tier list videos and he's mentioned he had like a 500 win streak or something. Something like that would be pretty unheard of in Slay the Spire, though this night have been before the DLC. Honestly the best way to play a lot of the bad clan combos is to just ignore one of the clans outside of picking up a few standalone good cards. Every clan has a path to victory with only their own cards, and with the exception of Incant you don't really need to play a lot of cards per turn to reach that (which is not to say incant decks don't work with Alt Hellhorn or Default Melting, it's just weaker). I'll repeat the analysis I've heard about beating this game, which is that there are 3 questions you need to answer in this game: how to kill heavies, how to kill backline, and how to kill the bosses. Heavies tend to be the hardest thing to answer, and are usually only really answered by high damage multistrike units. Backline has a lot of spell answers as well as having enough multistrike, things like vapor funnel, or sweep carries. Bosses need a bulky frontline and at least a moderate amount of damage. A big thing to call out with the DLC is that you shouldn't be married to your champion any more for a lot of the weaker champions because they will never be strong enough to compete with the enemy stats. Because of this, things like Slay Prince and Gorge Umbra are basically completely worthless now, due to not having the baseline strength to do anything in the DLC and not having Multistrike.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:23
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As an addendum I'll point out that some of the mechanics in this game do need a look over because of certain boss mechanics. Frostbite and Reap are both very hard to work with because they don't work well against Divinity. Rage and Regen getting removed by one Seraph variant really fucks a lot of strategies as well. Also there's just some straight up awful cards. Consumer of Crowns is up there as arguably the worst unit in the game. It really needs trample or built in multistrike or an actual health pool given how conditional playing him is. He doesn't have enough attack to kill heavies, can only hit 1 thing at a time by default, and doesn't survive poo poo on the front line. Also even post morsel buff most gorge cards still aren't very good and morsels aren't great at buffing your units without gorge.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:42
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SettingSun posted:I play via GamePass which to my knowledge does not include the dlc so I have no familiarity with its mechanics. I'm having a blast with the base stuff but is the dlc worth picking up? I guess I'd buy the game outright too if I were to do that. The big thing with the DLC, and why people talk about pre/post DLC difficulty, is that DLC adds a thing which is optional buildings you can visit at each layer that adds to a counter called pact shards for interacting with them. Getting pact shards causes random enemies to get massive stat buffs in fights. The strongest monsters you'll see without the DLC are at a very different range of numbers you'll see with the DLC, meaning whether X amount of attack power or Y amount of life is good enough to fight enemies pre/post DLC changes a lot. The other thing is that if you finish a run with 100 Pact Shards, you'll fight the true final boss, which is its own can of worms you have to know how to fight effectively. If you don't take any pact shards at all, a run with DLC and without DLC is mostly identical, outside of a few DLC exclusive cards and of course the 6th clan being available. But since the DLC is a thing, most people don't consider a run really "won" unless you also beat the true last boss, so any discussion around DLC gameplay revolves around dealing with shard buffed enemies and the true last boss.
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Aug 17, 2021 00:14
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ErIog posted:This isn't true because it's just not how the game is balanced. The game is balanced such that covenant 25 is slightly difficult with even the best clan combinations. For those clan combinations a majority of runs are winnable. However, this naturally leads to the situation where certain bottom tier clan combos have a much harder time to the point where most runs are not winnable for those clan combinations. As previously mentioned, RisingDusk has done a several hundred run random clan combo win streak on Cov 25 pre-Divinity, and he does an entire Youtube series where he will take any seed you give him no matter how bad and try to play through a Divinity kill without any prior knowledge. I don't watch his channel myself, but know him as a guest on other videos and he's a beta tester/modder on the game and probably the best overall player.
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Aug 17, 2021 02:05
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Seedge posted:How am I supposed to make this Martyr Stygian champion work? They seem absolutely terrible. The damage per stack happens when they would normally attack, so it's really just a different way to show their attack strength, and frost on revenge seems bad on something with no health. Titanchannel is the "good" one but it can be really hard to take it online. Direchannel is just kind of meh, and Coldchannel gets hosed by Divinity purging frostbite but up until Divinity it's not bad. Realistically he's only decent by virtue of the alternative Stygian champ being the worst champion in the game by far. In a vacuum Titanchannel is quite good if you have the right deck and the other two paths are meh.
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Aug 23, 2021 18:50
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GodFish posted:He's good but the single hit/no trample really holds him back compared to the units you can get going with abyssals. Space is always at a premium for me with his clan too, dunno. I mean that's kind of a problem with champions as a whole, and why champions are probably more well balanced relative to the rest of the clan in the DLC compared to before where a lot of the time your run was just setting up for your champion to beat everything. With the DLC most of the champions are just sort of a supporting unit that keeps you afloat early on but can often just be thrown on a suicide floor later on as they become fairly worthless. Most champion stats are nowhere near good enough to survive endgame and they don't have the offensive scaling actual upgradeable cards do. Of course there's an exception for Fade and Primordium because those two champions are just obscenely overpowered.
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Aug 24, 2021 00:50
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Every new TLD rare card for the old clans is a potential run-carrying card. They vary between heinously broken and merely a very good card. Steelsinger is on the latter end of things, but it's still very good. Compared to Overgorger, Steelsinger doesn't need any help to survive attacks and non-Hunger Gorge is just a weaker mechanic than triggering on heal because of space restrictions and sweep. That said Awoken has some of the best units in the game and also is one of the best clans in the game so Steelsinger is definitely more overall balanced within the clan than some of the new rares in other clans.
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Aug 30, 2021 19:30
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I don't think I've seen a real Fire Light run but I've seen both Little Icarus and Eternal Flame runs. Fade in general is one of the two easy run carrying champions alongside Primordium. One of the keys with Fade is that her early game is quite weak, so you'll really want to hold off on taking trials/Pact Shards early on, but she scales out of control later.
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Sep 1, 2021 23:16
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Acerbatus posted:Give him Superfood and Stalwart Snack, then pile as many buffs as you can onto him. if you ever see a chance to get Retch, take it. The trick to Primordium is getting extra buffs on him to transfer to a carry unit yeah. Note that Superfood is situational since it is run losing against the Seraph that applies Sap and also can be quite bad against the Seraph that removes buffs. Awoken and Wurmkin both have strong non-situational buffs you can just toss on Primordium to turbo charge his buffing, Melting needs a little finagling but if you can set up a situation where Primordium dies and gets continually reformed it gets broken very fast, and Hellhorned has very powerful armor/rage granting cards that get broken with Superfood.
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Sep 2, 2021 01:12
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:23 |
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Eason the Fifth posted:Speaking of echowright, any pro combos with that guy? Repeater in general is broken. If you get Repeater 3 you're not only drawing 2 free cards a turn, they're cards tuned at a power level that the game didn't intend for you to play them more than once per fight. Armorsmith is also really strong. Marshlord is weird because it's made like it wants you to hatch a lot of eggs but the actual eggs in the game aren't really designed in a way where hatching a lot of them is actually useful, and if you're just hatching 1 or 2 eggs Marshlord doesn't give a ton of consistent value. With both Repeater and Armorsmith though you probably just want to build up a carry unit that has Etch and go hog wild on Consume spells.
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Sep 7, 2021 20:24
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