Slay the Spire tips?

[Man_Over_Game]

Gaining inspiration from a recent thread, I decided to ask about Slay the Spire for some specific tips and suggestions to kill that stupid tower.

For each of the 3 characters:

The Defiant: Once I figured out the value of blocking, the game got a bit easier. Was a little hard early on as I was learning the ropes, but I feel comfortable with him. I generally resorted to using that one power that gave him Strength every turn, then just mowing people away with attack spams. Iron Tide was a favorite of mine, as the low damage with block did great with maintaining lethality while getting some defense. Not sure where the synergies in the builds are, though, as I feel he's a lot less specialized than the other two.

The Silent: Man, did I love this class. This one was my first (and only) clear, once I started doing the random events to collect relics/gold for curses, then using discard effects on the curses to reduce how powerful they were. Also, 2 Adrenalines and an upgraded Backstab didn't hurt either. I think I understand fully how the Silent is supposed to be played, using combos, discard effects, and high block values appropriately. A lot of it is about pacing yourself, and improving your next turn when you can afford it. If you guys have any suggestions for high level play, please let me know.

The Defect: Easily my hardest character to play. I can't get halfway to the second boss without getting creamed, as I usually am having to resort to healing at every campfire and end up with a deck of fairly useless cards. The Defect just seems to have so many branches of ways to play, between focusing on one of his 4 orbs, focusing on attacks, focusing on powers, focusing on blocking. With the fact that the cards you get are randomized, it seems like an uphill battle trying to make a coherent deck. The furthest I've gotten is 2/3 to the second boss, using a Lightning/Power build that regularly used the X-Block card to block big attacks while my powers and Lightnings put in work. But it feels like a slow burn, watching my life drop by 4 or so each round as I pelt the enemy with fairly negligible damage. How do you combo this guy? How do you build a deck when the character has so many options that don't play off one another that seem to force you to focus on one (but randomization may decide you can't)?

Also, when I got to the heart in my Silent playthrough, it mentioned I dealt 700 some-odd damage, but then it said I dealt 0 damage. What was that about?


I'm not very familiar with card names, so if you guys do reference a card or relic, please give some brief insight on what it does.

[Zalabim]

Let's see what I remember and what is still relevant of what I remember.
As a general principle: While you can usually find a card you want in every pack, you aren't ever obligated to take any cards. If nothing you're offered this time makes your deck better, skip them all. Removing weaker cards is every bit as effective as upgrading good cards. Curate your deck.

Each time you play and especially when you beat the last boss you'll unlock more material for the game, so some of the cards that support any given style aren't available right off the bat.

As you encounter each new enemy, try to learn its pattern. Most of them aren't random.

The Defiant has strength as synergies, yes, but they also have Exhaust as a positive mechanic.You use the selective Exhaust cards to burn the bad or less good cards from your deck and make each shuffle through in combat stronger than the last. Later on there's some serious block build with cards that let you gain block every turn or maintain block for many turns, and cards that deal damage for blocking.

The Silent has what you've been using but also has poison, throwing daggers, and setup cards (cards that give you a boost next turn). I haven't gotten good with the setup, but poison and throwing daggers have some strong synergies in the card pool.

The Defect has orbs/slots/focus, but they also have this thing with 0 cost cards and the card All For One. It's basically recursive. It can do some wild damage by generating a lot of lighting, or tank out with frost orbs and build up massive dark orb damage. This busted robot takes the idea of doing the same thing over and over again and turns it into a powerful tactic.

The damage you do the heart at the end is your score for that run. You don't actually fight the heart (so far as I know).

[Narkis]

Defense is king. For all three characters, the decks I had the most success with were full of defense cards and card draw and only a winning condition or two. More specifically:

Defiant: The power that makes block not expire at end of turn is essential. The ones that give you some block every turn are great. So is the card that gives you block and upgrades all cards in hand. These make you pretty much unkillable. My winning condition was the attack that deals damage equal to your block, which almost one-shotted everything after a point. Alternatively the power that gives you strength each turn works too, but it's slower on its own. You should, of course, have cards that draw cards, especially if they also give block or draw more than one. You should also keep the card that scraps a card, it lets you slowly sculpt the perfect hand in longer battles. I found this the easiest class, as its free heal makes the game fairly forgiving.

The Silent. Focusing on improving the next turn is how I did it too. The card that gives block this turn and the next and the one that lets you keep the block for one turn were essential. I used a good mix of drawing extra cards and getting extra energy, and as many 0 cost draw 2 discard 2 cards as I could grab. The winning condition could be either the power that gives you free shivs each turn, or the power that constantly increases the opponents poison. Both are slow but allow you to focus all your energy and draws on defense.

The Defect: Frost, extra slots and extra orb strength. Enough of them and you can block anything. The ideal winning condition in this deck was Blizzard, the card that deals more damage for every frost orb you've channeled in the battle, or alternatively dark orb shenanigans. A repair is very useful if you can get it early enough. Workhorse of the deck was the card that gave block and two frost. Powers are really important, and I focused my upgrades on cost lowering before anything else. It was the hardest class to make a working deck, but the one I had the most fun with when I finally could.

Some more general tips: Avoid elites like the plague, unless you've already made a kick-ass deck or you started with the relic that makes enemies have 1 health and you can reach an elite before it runs out. Events are generally better than battles when tracing your path, though you'll get a better feel for them as you play the game. In battle my priorities for playing cards each turn were, in order, A) win if possible, B) take no damage, C) setup later turns by playing powers etc, and only then D) attack. For battle rewards, it's better not to pick a card at all than pick one that doesn't fit into your deck. Prioritize removing the basic strikes from your deck, and as many basic blocks as you can. Curses are really bad. Your deck should be as small and as focused on what you want it to do as humanly possible. And you haven't fought the true heart yet, you need to finish the game with all three characters at least once before you do.

[Rodin]

I'm gonna quote myself from the other thread to try and keep the info together, and also respond to your question from that thread here as well.

Frost orbs are supposedly the most consistently powerful way to win at high Ascension with the Defect, but like yourselves I've never managed to get that to work. Well, except for once or twice when the stars aligned, but you can say that about any build.

My most consistent way to victory with Defect is lightning spam. Upgrade Zap and Dualcast early (because 0 cost = good), then I go looking for Storm, Tempest, Biased Cognition, and importantly Electrodynamics to help with AoE. A Thunder Strike is nice if you can get it for finishing bosses. The rest is all defensive cards like Leap.

Another build I will try to go for is the "infinite 0 cost" build, using cards like Scrape and All For One. It's very dangerous to go for though - it's immensely powerful if you can trim your deck enough for it to work, but if you don't get the key cards your deck will collapse very quickly.

My most powerful build ever was a really weird one - I got a Hyperbeam from Neow at the start, then got the duplicator event to give myself a second one. I spent the rest of the run grinding my other cards into dust and then the deck went bonkers when I found the Necronomicon (play the first 2+ cost card you play per turn a second time for free). I had an Echo Form too if I ever needed it, bringing me up to 75 damage AoE.

Still, I definitely find the Defect to be the weakest of the 3, at least for me. Ironclad is most consistent to get a decent (but not fantastic) deck and win the game, Silent is harder to survive early but can grow significantly more powerful late game, and Defect has a pretty easy early game but is far more difficult than the other two to put together a winning deck. I feel like he relies on combos more than the other two, and if you don't get the right cards it just ain't happening.

On Slay the Spire, do the permanent card unlocks generally make the game easier, or do they just add more complications to the game (to artificially maintain the difficulty curve)?

A little of column A, a bit of column B. For instance, the first unlock for Ironclad is Heavy Blade, Spot Weakness, and Limit Break - all key cards in a strength-based build. His 4th set of unlocks are Havoc, Sentinel, and Exhume - cards designed for an Exhaust build. I find Exhaust builds to be terrible, although I understand some players swear by them.

The relics tend to be pretty generic, but somehow related to the character you are unlocking them with. For instance, you unlock the Blue Candle with the Ironclad, which lets you Exhaust curses at the cost of HP. That's a very Ironclad thing to do, but all classes can use it.

There are also only 5 rounds of unlocks for each character, meaning that you only unlock 9 cards per class. So most of the cards are already in play from the start. Part of the reason the Defect is so difficult is that all of his "builds" are available from the start - the cards you unlock are more supporting than the Silent or Ironclad, where key cards to some of their builds are locked away when you first start.

between focusing on one of his 4 orbs

This stood out to me as a mistake. Yes, focusing Frost or Lightning can be solid strategies, but it's erroneous to think that you MUST do so. Focusing Dark in particular is generally not advisable, as generating a lot of Dark orbs is actively anti-synergistic. If you're generating a ton of Dark Orbs, they aren't sitting in your orb slots and building up power. Where you want Dark Orbs is a build that isn't cycling through the orbs quickly - so either you have a lot of Orb slots, or you aren't generating that many. You let them sit there for a few turns and try and line up a Dualcast or a Recursion (or even a Multi-cast if you're feeling fancy). Oh, and you pretty much never focus on Plasma. You're happy to see Plasma from other sources, but if it's just AP you want it's easier to acquire in other ways.

I digress a bit though from the point I wanted to make - I just completed a run on Ascension 2. I would describe it as Lightning-focused, as that was my primary form of damage. However, I was using a mix of Ball Lightnings, Glacier, Doom and Gloom, plus a Rainbow and a Chaos, as well two different sources of additional Orb Slots to give me room to fit all that nonsense. My Orb wheel typically had 3-5 Lightnings on it along with a Frost and a couple of Darks. I had a Lightning Storm for bosses, but mostly the run was all about balancing what was on the wheel and timing my Evokes so that I got what I needed, when I needed. I had minor Power synergy going that I picked up late because I found the Mummy Hand relic, which helped me reduce the cost of my high-cost cards.

From a "build a deck" standpoint, the deck was pretty awful. The synergy was all over the place and if I were to construct a deck I would never do it like that. However, it fit the relics and the cards that I found and I wound up comfortably crushing the Awakened One.

The best piece of advice I can give is to not pigeonhole yourself - especially with the Defect. Look at what your cards are telling you to do, and don't be afraid to skip card rewards. Don't be afraid to avoid Elite fights if you aren't confident in your deck, or if you ARE confident that your deck can beat the final boss and you aren't willing to risk it. I find the Act 3 elites in particular to be worth avoiding a lot of the time. It sucks to run up against the stone head as a Defect that is relying on Orb damage and can't take advantage of the stacking damage bonus against him.

Also, when I got to the heart in my Silent playthrough, it mentioned I dealt 700 some-odd damage, but then it said I dealt 0 damage. What was that about?

That sounds like a bug. The first number is your score for that run. The second is your cumulative score across all successful runs. I dunno why it said 0 damage there.

[D-naras]

Slay the Spire has become my go-to game lately so I feel I can share some advice.

Generally:
Upgrade cards if you can afford to on campsites (Bash, Neutralize and Zap are all great upgrades). Prioritize upgrading cards that gain more than just damage or block on upgrade. For instance, Inflame goes from 2 Strength to 3 Strength, making it a 50% increase. Neutralize goes from 1 turn Weak to 2 turns, doubling in effectiveness.

On shops, always check to see if they offer the relic that grants 50% discount and grab that first. Always remove a Strike or Block (in that order) when able.

Don't hoard potions. Use them on elite fights. Try to have 1 potion slot empty at all times, because some times you get a potion that increases your HP by 5 and it sucks to discard potions.

Card selection depends a lot on the situation at hand so I can't offer solid advice on that, beyond not picking a card at all is better than picking a bad card.

First Act:

During the first Act, you must prioritize damage cards because you must fight elites in order to grab relics to power up. Therefore, pick damage cards and go after 2 or more Elites if you can.

The first Act has 2 of the toughest elite fights in the game. Goblin Knob and Lagavulin. Goblin Knob forces you to use attacks because he gains 2 Strength whenever you use a Skill, so blocking is very tricky against him. That's why you must prioritize damaging cards on the first Act. Lagavulin gives you 3 turns to set up before starting to attack, so make use of them. If you have a Power in your deck, dig for it. If you don't, then a hand with many attacks will do. After it wakes up, it attacks twice and then debuffs you so it's a race to beat him before he wears you down. The 3rd elite fight with the 3 pyramid things is less complex. First you must kill the one on the left or the right, whichever has fewer HP, because they attack together, so killing 1 will make it much easier to defend.

Good cards that you should pick during the first Act:

2-4 Solid damage cards, then it depends. For the Ironclad (why do you call him Defiant?) this means Perfected Strike, Uppercut, Clothesline, Anger, Twin Strike and such. Any card that deals more damage than a Strike works, except Clash. Clash is a 0 cost card that you can only use if you hold Attack cards. It looks good but many enemies will add statuses to your deck later, making it a bad pick.
For the Silent, Dash and Poison Stab are great, as is All-out Attack. Cloak and Dagger is a great card generally, just be careful using it vs Goblin Knob.
For the Defect, any Attack that generates an Orb is golden.

The first Act's bosses are all straightforward fights. The trickiest one is the Slime boss. I won't go into strategies for them because that spoils the fun. If you want to, PM for those.

Second act:

You need AOE cards and a mix of scaling and defense for the boss. You should be wary of Elites here because they are really unforgiving: Book of Stabbing deals immense hurt so you need lots of defense and damage to outpace it; Goblin leader swarms you with goblins so you should constantly clean them up; 3 Slavers start the fight with 30 damage right away and keep going like that.

Scaling cards are Demon Form, Inflame, Limit Break (works with Flex too), Anger, Spot Weakness, Barricade for the Ironclad; mostly Noxious Fumes and poison generation for the Silent; generating orbs/focus/orb slots, Echo Form, Creative AI for the Defect, or using and reusing Claws (Hologram is great if you upgrade it, All for One is almost mandatory for Claws). If you spam Frost Orbs, Blizzard turns all that defense into damage. If you spam Lightning/Dark orbs, they do the work just by being evoked, but a Thunder Strike speeds it up immensely.

Good AOE cards are Whirlwind and Immolate but a Cleave is ok too, for the Ironclad; the best AOE card is Corpse Explosion for the Silent (and my favorite card in the game, I always pick it over anything else); the Defect really needs Electrodynamics to cause AOE but a single Electrodynamics takes care of all fights that need AOE.

Third act:

By now, hopefully you should have 4 energy from relics and a deck of about 30 (plus/minus 5 cards). Personally, I try to get to the boss with the most health possible here. All fights and Elites are tricky during this Act.

Third act Elites:

Nemesis takes normal damage only half of the time, reducing all damage taken to 1 on the other turns. It hits hard 2/3 of the time, either in 1 big hit or lots of smaller hits.

Giant Head plays soft ball for 4 turns and then starts doing 30, 35, 40 etc. damage each turn. It has A LOT of health so you need to scale and you need to do it fast. During your turn, maximize the number of cards you play and leave damage dealing cards for last because each card you play increases the damage that the Head takes by 10%.

Reptomancer needs AOE badly. Each snake-dagger-thing hits for a lot so must clear them out as fast as possible.

You'll lose a lot until it all clicks but when it does it becomes so rewarding.

[ufo]

Get yourself to see HP as a resource that you trade for in different situations, don't rest to stay on max HP, only rest if you feel that it is vital to finish the act - upgrades are good. On that note, no matter what type of deck I'm running on the Ironclad I always prioritise getting an upgraded Armaments, because I find that it is functionally a sliiiightly worse Apotheosis

[Anteros]

Get yourself to see HP as a resource that you trade for in different situations, don't rest to stay on max HP, only rest if you feel that it is vital to finish the act - upgrades are good. On that note, no matter what type of deck I'm running on the Ironclad I always prioritise getting an upgraded Armaments, because I find that it is functionally a sliiiightly worse Apotheosis

On the other hand, you don't heal between floors on ascensions. So it's almost never worth it to lose health if you can avoid it.

[Rodin]

On the other hand, you don't heal between floors on ascensions. So it's almost never worth it to lose health if you can avoid it.

This is not true. On early ascensions, you still heal to 100% between acts. After Ascension 5 or 6 or so, you will instead only heal to 75% and if you are above that you will not heal. This means that the opposite strategy is what you want to be going with, especially for the Act 1 Boss. You want to be using your health as a resource early BECAUSE you will be getting that heal to 75% for free, and avoiding trouble to stay at 100% is leaving free healing on the table while also missing out on relics and gold.

The only place where you typically want to heavily avoid risk is Act 3, because by that point you should know if your deck is good enough to beat the boss. If you have a crappy deck, going for the Elites to aim for the miracle is a viable strat. Otherwise, playing it safe is wise. Act 1 is where you play it the riskiest, as you can often beat the Act 1 boss while taking no damage and one of the 3 bosses (Hexaghost) bases his initial attack on your current health.

Defiant: The power that makes block not expire at end of turn is essential.

I would dispute this as well. Statistically, Barricade is a very poor card to pick up in Act 1 and isn't much better in Act 2. Barricade is the capstone card you grab when your block build has started paying off and you can afford a "win more" card. In Act 1 in particular the card is horribly useless - you spend your entire turn gaining the ability to stack block in fights that typically only last 3 turns or so anyway. The damage you take setting it up is much higher than the amount you save later, and you're much better off just hitting them in the face. By Act 3, you will generally have enough AP that you can use Entrench without sacrificing your entire turn and have upgraded cards to generate block very quickly. Plus, the enemies in Act 3 are actually tough enough that you aren't (usually) deleting them on the first couple turns.

----

For the most part, I've found "Block all the things" strategies to be dangerously slow. It's not a bad way to start, and erring on too much defense is definitely better than erring on too much offense. However, going pure defense without having a plan in mind will almost always end in tears. Remember how I said you want to be risky in Act 1? This is where you settle your deck archetype. Get which direction your offense is going locked down first, then pick up defensive cards to complement that. Trying to force a particular deck style (like Barricade/Body Slam Ironclad) will often end in a loss because you weren't offered the right cards, or you were offered the cards out of order. It's great to have 3 Body Slams in your deck when you're in Act 3 and ready to kick ass. Staring at 3 0-damage attacks when facing the Act 1 slime swarm is considerably less fun.

Essentially, listen to what the game is telling you to do. If you get an early Shuriken as Silent, it is very tempting to drop everything and go for a Kunai build. But if you continue on and keep getting offered poison cards, maybe ignoring the Shuriken and going poison is the right path.

The other thing I would say is that below Ascension 5 or so, anything goes. You can win with the wackiest BS deck, because the game is well balanced enough to make those a viable option. It's only at high levels of Ascension that the game gets punishing enough that the wackier strategies start getting locked out in favor of the consistent-but-boring ones.

[Drasius]

The damage you do the heart at the end is your score for that run. You don't actually fight the heart (so far as I know).

Spoiler

Show

You can fight the heart but getting the 3 keys, but if you can't beat the act 3 bosses, you're not going to have a hope in hell of beating the heart, and it's more of an optional boss ala final fantasy post endgame sort of thing than a requirement to "beat the game"

Defense is king.

This...

For the most part, I've found "Block all the things" strategies to be dangerously slow. It's not a bad way to start, and erring on too much defense is definitely better than erring on too much offense. However, going pure defense without having a plan in mind will almost always end in tears. Remember how I said you want to be risky in Act 1? This is where you settle your deck archetype. Get which direction your offense is going locked down first, then pick up defensive cards to complement that. Trying to force a particular deck style (like Barricade/Body Slam Ironclad) will often end in a loss because you weren't offered the right cards, or you were offered the cards out of order. It's great to have 3 Body Slams in your deck when you're in Act 3 and ready to kick ass. Staring at 3 0-damage attacks when facing the Act 1 slime swarm is considerably less fun.

Essentially, listen to what the game is telling you to do. If you get an early Shuriken as Silent, it is very tempting to drop everything and go for a Kunai build. But if you continue on and keep getting offered poison cards, maybe ignoring the Shuriken and going poison is the right path.

The other thing I would say is that below Ascension 5 or so, anything goes. You can win with the wackiest BS deck, because the game is well balanced enough to make those a viable option. It's only at high levels of Ascension that the game gets punishing enough that the wackier strategies start getting locked out in favor of the consistent-but-boring ones.

... but also this.

The only way to lose StS in is to run out of HP, so don't do that and you're golden. How you choose to not run out is up to you, but remember you still have to kill things, so while not losing is good, having a win condition is also good.

There's lots of archetypes you can go, but trying to force something and not getting the cards you want/need for said archetype will often result in a loss. As Rodin mentions above, keep it loose until you get one or two supporting cards, then focus on that.

Personally, I find strength stacking Ironclad (at least one of Limit Break/Demon Form/Spot Weakness preferably combined with at least 1 of Heavy Strike/Sword Boomerang/Pummel/Dual Strike) the easiest, but exhaust (Corruption) or block (Juggernaught, Barricade, Body Slam) decks are also perfectly viable all the way to Asc20. Searing Blow is probably my favourite, but it gets more and more difficult as the ascencion creeps higher. Health trading Ironclad is another that's great fun, but really falls off hard at higher ascensions.

Poison Silent (Noxious Fumes, add your choice of additional poison cards) is an easy win more often than not, but there's Shiv's (any combo of Cloak and Dagger, Blade Dance, Accuracy, Infinite Blades, Finisher, A Thousand Cuts), Caltrops (block plus at least 1 copy of caltrops, more is better), Burst (loads of Backstab, Sucker Punch, Quick Stab, Glass Knife etc), Wraith Form (Wraith Form, Apparition, Artifact makes it better) and more that can be done.

Defect is usually Frost (Glacier, win condition is blizzard), though Lightning is also a thing (and generally more fun). Dark is in a weird place where 1 is good if you don't cycle your deck often, Plasma is generally not great outside of infinite decks and Meteor shenanigans. All for One is viable, but much like some of the Ironclad options, it gets a lot harder on higher Ascensions. Power spam is also a winner, but really, Echo Form is a win conditionall by itself.

Have a look at some of the overexplain runs by jorbs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqP2FSbA8GA) if you have a few spare hours and want to git gud.

A large amount of it comes down to:
- Take cards that will help you NOW, not in 20 fights time...
- ...Unless you're already winning, then you can play the long game
- Remove bad cards from your deck
- Judge what cards you take (or don't take!) based on what you need, not the deck you want
- Try and fight 3 elites in A1 (relics are for winners), avoid elites in A2 (unless you've got a good deck, A2 elites are pretty hard) and usually fight them in A3 (they're not much harder than regular battles but give a relic)
- Have at least 1 strong attack in A1
- Have at least 1 AoE in A2
- Have a generic win condition in A3
- Always have some defence

[lord_khaine]

Defect is usually Frost (Glacier, win condition is blizzard), though Lightning is also a thing (and generally more fun). Dark is in a weird place where 1 is good if you don't cycle your deck often, Plasma is generally not great outside of infinite decks and Meteor shenanigans. All for One is viable, but much like some of the Ironclad options, it gets a lot harder on higher Ascensions. Power spam is also a winner, but really, Echo Form is a win conditionall by itself.

Dark is actually kinda funny.
Even if you do cycle quickly, then upgraded dark is still 18 damage after just 1 turn.
Thats pretty good efficiency for only 1 energy.

[Drasius]

Dark is actually kinda funny.
Even if you do cycle quickly, then upgraded dark is still 18 damage after just 1 turn.
Thats pretty good efficiency for only 1 energy.

Like I said, depends on how you cycle through them. By endgame, most Defects can cycle their entire orb battery in under a turn, even if they've got max slots. Plus you can't target who gets hit, sometimes that's a big issue while othertimes it won't matter at all.

As to efficiency, it's less about that than it is about card advantage (though yes, on an energy efficiency basis, Dark is pretty great, though with Plasma, Defect can bypass this at times) and being able to control when it triggers. If you want to have dark build up, you can't make use of the actives of anything behind it and you need to make sure it's available at the front when you need it. If you're controlling how many orbs you expend, you're generally not cycling your deck freely which often means trouble when you get a bad draw with no defence.

Dark is a great idea, but the mechanics don't always work out so well. When it does work though, it works really well, but given that both Frost and Lightning generally involve making constant use of expending their orbs for the active effect, while meteor abuse involves cycling plasma constantly with limited cards, having dark be something that mostly works with only 1 or two sources and limited cycling kinda limits it to other builds and it doesn't work quite as well with power spam and doesn't have zero cost synergy with All for One.

[Knaight]

First things first - there is no "Defiant", the class is the Ironclad.

With that out of the way, key advice:

1) Go as hard as you can, but no harder. It's good to use campfires to upgrade, to spend HP on improvements, to hunt lots of elites, but unless you've been really lucky with your deck you're going to have to spend some resources on the maintenance of not dying.

2) Grab cards that fit a strategy, yes, but also grab just generally good cards. Sure, upgrading every other card in your hand is technically a card and an energy spent that isn't in line with the main deck strategy (with one very notable exception), but it's still generally fantastic, so take that opportunity.

3) Defense is usually your friend. There are exceptions, starting with strength Ironclad decks where the best defense is throwing out one Reaper near the end of a fight to get an enormous amount of healing, but generally you want it.

4) However, you usually want just enough defense, so it doesn't get in the way. Even a defense+poison centered deck can go wrong if it has too much defense and not enough poison. Again, there are exceptions here (damage based on defense is a wonderful thing), but that's generally the best practice.

5) Do not go in with a set strategy. They all blend to varying degrees, so you can stay noncommittal with generally good cards at first, until you start seeing how your relics are shaping up.

[lord_khaine]

Like I said, depends on how you cycle through them. By endgame, most Defects can cycle their entire orb battery in under a turn, even if they've got max slots. Plus you can't target who gets hit, sometimes that's a big issue while othertimes it won't matter at all.

No, being able to consistently produce 9 orbs in a single turn isnt something most Defects, or even a lot of them, are able to do.
It requires some quite specific combinations of energy generation and card cycling.

Else. Its still just a matter of timing then. If you want your dark orbs to blow up for 18 points of damage then you simply put them in the end of the line.
Then they are guaranteed at least a turn to mature in.

[Drasius]

No, being able to consistently produce 9 orbs in a single turn isnt something most Defects, or even a lot of them, are able to do.
It requires some quite specific combinations of energy generation and card cycling.

Else. Its still just a matter of timing then. If you want your dark orbs to blow up for 18 points of damage then you simply put them in the end of the line.
Then they are guaranteed at least a turn to mature in.

As with everything else, you and I play very differently then.

[Rodin]

No, being able to consistently produce 9 orbs in a single turn isnt something most Defects, or even a lot of them, are able to do.
It requires some quite specific combinations of energy generation and card cycling.

Else. Its still just a matter of timing then. If you want your dark orbs to blow up for 18 points of damage then you simply put them in the end of the line.
Then they are guaranteed at least a turn to mature in.

Point of order, Dark Orbs take 2 turns on the wheel to evoke for 18.

Which is the problem with them, really. With no synergy, they're quite poor DPS. They deal 0 on the turn you played them unless you evoke them immediately, and in that case they're only as good as a Strike. They're only gaining the strength of a Strike per turn unless you have some Focus going, and if you have Focus you're probably going to be rotating through your orbs pretty fast to reap the rewards. Dark Orbs are back-end damage instead of front-loaded, which is inherently inferior. There's really only two advantages to them.

1) They're actually targetable, to an extent. Going for the lowest HP monster is where you typically want the damage to go, and if you are going to overkill a monster you can often poke it to death with other attacks so you can land the big hit on the next weakest monster.

2) Evoking it multiple times has a dramatic effect. If you evoke a Lightning Orb 3 times, you're getting 8x3 = 24. If you evoke an 18 damage Dark Orb 3 times, you're getting 18x3 = 54. The difference is impressive. It's just really hard to set up.

When it comes to generating orbs, if I'm on an orb heavy strategy I'd say generating 4-5 orbs per turn is the minimum I would be generating by the end of the game. My last run was a quadruple-Tempest run where every Power I played generated 4 lightning orbs, and I was playing 2-3 Powers per turn depending on what cards I drew and what powers I randomly generated.

Of course, the boss was the Awakened One and my deck literally had no other way to fight. I took his second form from 300 HP down to 100 in a single turn, then he swatted me for 60 damage and I died horribly. C'est la vie.

[Rynjin]

What's you guys' opinions on the Vampire and Apparition events? Worth or no?

[Drasius]

Vampire is... OK, if you haven't gotten rid of most of your strikes already and you don't have any other method of healing and you can afford to throw 1 or 2 energy at what is basically a strike by the time you get them. I don't think I'd consider it unless I had the relic to avoid the %hp loss and was already on low hp.

Apparitions are one of the best options available to the player on higher ascencions and are often considered one of, if not the, best cards in the game. The ability to block 40+ damage for 1 energy is monstrous, and only gets better on characters with the ability to cycle their deck and/or search for cards.

Of course if RNG decides that you don't get it when you need it, or you do get it when you don't want it means that deck building for search and cycle engines takes even higher priority than usual, but those cards are often priority picks anyway.

[Anteros]

Vampire is pretty much never worth it. Maybe if you are about to die and desperate for healing. Apparition is good depending on a few things. You need the ability to reliably draw it, and you also need the ability to end the fights before it runs out.

[Rodin]

I don't like subjecting myself to the risk of Apparition, personally. A lot of the times when I've taken it, I've had that one turn where I didn't draw one and then I got one-shot by an attack I would otherwise have survived. I'll take it occasionally when I feel like my deck is very weak (same with Vampirism), but mostly I don't risk it.

Oh, Vampirism is actually good in one more case - if you're playing Ironclad and you've managed to get a couple of Feeds and manage to find the Vampirism event relatively early, you can offset the lowered max HP with Feed and make better use of the extra healing.

[lord_khaine]

Point of order, Dark Orbs take 2 turns on the wheel to evoke for 18.

Which is the problem with them, really. With no synergy, they're quite poor DPS. They deal 0 on the turn you played them unless you evoke them immediately, and in that case they're only as good as a Strike. They're only gaining the strength of a Strike per turn unless you have some Focus going, and if you have Focus you're probably going to be rotating through your orbs pretty fast to reap the rewards. Dark Orbs are back-end damage instead of front-loaded, which is inherently inferior. There's really only two advantages to them.

Point dismissed, not relevant to contex here

Dark orbs generated by an upgraded Dark card only need 1 turn on the wheel to hit for 18.

[Rodin]

Point dismissed, not relevant to contex here

Dark orbs generated by an upgraded Dark card only need 1 turn on the wheel to hit for 18.

Oh. You're talking very specifically about the DARKNESS card. Not Dark orbs.

Yes, there is a good card that utilizes Dark orbs. I wouldn't like to build an entire strategy around it.

[lord_khaine]

Oh. You're talking very specifically about the DARKNESS card. Not Dark orbs.

I though that was kinda clear when i said -upgraded- Dark in the very first post

[Knaight]

Vampire is a lot more worth it when you pay for it with a relic instead of HP. There's still the occasional thing it would ruin (any deck that uses Perfect Strike heavily), but generally it's a pretty solid option under those circumstances.

Also, as long as we're talking dark orbs it's worth remembering that the evoke->replace card replaces them as they were, with all the damage built up. The defect has enough other nifty tricks that I tend not to favor that one as much, starting with Storm/powers decks that mean you will be all lightning, all the time, especially once you start pulling in lighting on enemy turns.

[Anteros]

The reason vampirism is bad is because you're filling your deck up with garbage cards, not the max HP loss (although HP loss is hardly a good thing). It's basically saying "here's some crappy healing in exchange for ruining your deck and your max HP." The best decks are usually as small as possible in order to reliably draw your best cards. There's almost always a better form of healing available, and you shouldn't need so much for every single fight either. A single bandage card, or healing relic should be sufficient in most cases.

Vampirism might be ok if you get it extremely early before you deck is online and before you've removed all your strikes.

[Narkis]

Vampirism might be ok if you get it extremely early before you deck is online and before you've removed all your strikes.

The event that gives you Vampirism is only on chapter 3 though. If your deck isn't online by then, you're in trouble.

[Knaight]

The reason vampirism is bad is because you're filling your deck up with garbage cards, not the max HP loss (although HP loss is hardly a good thing). It's basically saying "here's some crappy healing in exchange for ruining your deck and your max HP." The best decks are usually as small as possible in order to reliably draw your best cards. There's almost always a better form of healing available, and you shouldn't need so much for every single fight either. A single bandage card, or healing relic should be sufficient in most cases.

It replaces your strikes - and tiny, tiny decks aren't remotely the only viable option. At higher ascension in particular the process involved in making these tiny decks tends to leave you so vulnerable that you can't do much, and as long as you haven't been removing strikes specifically the cards are an upgrade (again, Perfect Strike aside).

Essentially the assumption that you will remove all your strikes, guaranteed, is a really dubious one.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

My two cents here:

* Don't dodge elites unless you don't think you can take them. For example, running into Nob as your second or third encounter as Defect is probably going to have a Bad Day(tm), but conversely if you don't get relics to power up, you're going to get behind the power curve in the second and third acts.

* Don't dodge regular floor fights if there are cards you are actively looking for. You get card selection every time you win a floor encounter, dodging them is counter-productive if you are still building your deck.

* Trying to build a combo out of a single card is like trying to draw to an inside straight.. it's theoretically possible, but unlikely. For example, picking up Catalyst before you find any reliable means of applying lots of poison to enemies is a questionable choice, despite Catalyst being one of the top-tier winning cards for the Silent, because it requires synergy for it to be effective. Don't just grab meme cards because meme, get cards that you can use now.

* You don't have to always take cards. When selecting cards, you have two criteria: 1) is it relevant and useful, and 2) Is this card more useful than having a thinner deck? The second is especially important. The thinner the deck, the more frequently you cycle through your cards, but also the more vulnerable you become to deck trashing. Especially if you are wanting zero cost 'infinite' decks, you're going to want to Think Thin. There are uses for thick decks, but you have to understand what you are getting into.

* Defense is critical, but so is offense. You are vulnerable to attrition unless you have some means of healing between combats, and even then you are still vulnerable to attrition if you take sufficient damage. However, you cannot win if you have no offense. Playing too defensively is just as risky as playing too offensively. You need a blend of defense and offense if you are going to win.

* You only need one 'win condition', assuming you can get it into play consistently. Once your win condition is secured, and you can reliably get it into play, the rest of your deck can be relegated to defense.

* Not all curses are equal, and not all are cause for alarm. Some just lard up your deck with unplayable cards. If you have Exhaust mechanics, or if you have discard mechanics, you can deal with them effectively. The only really bad one is Normalcy, which you want to get rid of ASAP. They aren't good, but sometimes it is better to get a curse and get something else useful than to get nothing at all.

* Energy Relics are everything in this game, but most of them come with very painful downsides. Consider carefully. Among the biggest traps are things like Ectoplasm (unless you already have your deck fully built), Force Hammer (unless you have all of your upgrades done already or have Apotheosis), and the Ruinic Shell is a newbie-killer but can be quite useful if you already have a sense of what most opponents are already going to be doing. I consider Sozu a no-brainer pick, and most times I won't hesitate to pick up Philosopher's Stone unless my defenses are particularly weak.

* Usually, you'll want some kind of multi-target aggression in your deck, be it something like the amazing Electrodynamics or Noxious Fumes or Whirlwind. If you don't have party attacks, you'll need truly amazing defenses to survive Act 2.

Class specific stuff:

* Ironclad will usually go one of two ways for their 'win condition'. First is Strength scaling, second is Barricade + Body Slam. Barricade is safer, but it requires FINDING a Barricade, which is a rare card. If you can get it, then do so and immediately start fishing for Body Slams and defensive cards, while getting rid of all other offensive cards you can. If, on the other hand, you find yourself with Spot Weakness and maybe a Limit Break or two, pick up strength-scaling cards to take maximum advantage of this, and get enough defensive cards to cover yourself.

* Silent, at least in the high ascension, typically tries to go Poison. Low ascension you can do a Shiv build, but there are many things that will punish Shiv builds, especially Time Eater and the Heart battle itself, and it gets worse the higher up you go. There is a hybrid build that uses Envenom and shivs, but it is pretty niche and requires a particular setup, and is still punished pretty heavily by Time Eater. Shiv builds also tend to fare poorly against Thorns mechanics. However, if you get some kind of scaling strength mechanic (such as Shuriken), Shivs can be a good vehicle for that. But at least high ascension, you're going to want to find as many Poison and defensive effects as possible. Blur is godlike in almost every build, and Dodge and Roll is almost as good, these should almost always be automatic pickup unless there's something else truly amazing on offer.

* Defect. Claw builds are all the rage, especially if you get Spinning Top or other potential infinite-draw mechanics, but it requires a very thin deck to pull off effectively. However, as it doesn't require any sort of investment into orbs, you are free to use them defensively and fill up with Frost orbs to your heart's content. This makes cards like Chill very valuable to a Claw build, as it is a 0 cost card with recurring defensive benefit and also Exhausts so it doesn't continue cluttering up your deck in later cycles. Coolheaded can also benefit a Claw deck because it is both defensive and has draw. Claw builds also tend to run into problems against encounters that punish card spam, such as Time Eater, or Thorns mechanics. Since you need a thin deck, you can't invest too heavily into Focus generation, so defense tends to be a weak point in Claw builds.

A combination of Frost and Lightning orbs can be a good blend, especially if you want to cycle them regularly. To this end, you'll want some form of incrementing your Focus. If you pick up Consume, make sure to get some form of adding orbs, such as Capacitor or, if you can find it, the Inserter. Biased Cognition is largely a trap, unless you have a reliable means of applying Artifact to negate the downsides, in which case it is one of the strongest Focus producers in the game. Remember, if you are using your focus for offense, you might as well use it for Defense as well, and as long as you continue drawing into frost/lightning orbs, mandatory evoking just means more of a good thing. A Blizzard deck can work, but there are several encounters which will scale faster than you, which will turn out poorly for you.

Don't forget the power of Bull's Eye. Lock-On is basically Weakness to Orb damage, and can be particularly crippling in a Darkness deck if you can apply Lock-On before Dualcasting your built up Dark Orb, but it is also very strong in Lightning damage builds.

Dark Orb decks focus on obtaining and powering up a Dark Orb to stupid levels. Your first upgrade MUST be Dualcast, there simply is no other option for a Dark Orb build. Darkness is your next upgrade, as it iterates your other dark orbs as you generate a new one. Unlike most Orb decks, you don't want to cycle your orbs until you are ready to, and orb control is going to be the key to victory, which means you're probably getting rid of Zap at your earliest opportunity, and this is the one build that you can safely sacrifice your starting artifact for a different one. Obviously, picking up a Loop is going to be very good for you. However, the problem is that you absolutely MUST have amazing defenses to survive long enough for the dark orb to be useful, AND you can't use Frost Orbs to help with that, which lets out many of the Defect's defensive cards. You'll likely want to try to pick up Multi-Cast as well as Reinforced Body, so Charge Battery will also be a valuable defensive card to carry energy over to a more useful turn.

There's also the Fusion/Hyperbeam/Meteor Strike combo. Remember that Fusion orbs don't care about your Focus, and so the normal penalty for using Hyperbeam doesn't apply, and does give you bonus energy to offset the normal penalty for using the higher cost cards you'll be employing. Charge Battery can also help. Since you can't use Frost orbs, your defenses will be lacking, much like Dark Orb builds. Leap, Charge Battery, and Reinforced Body are going to be key pickups. This is a silly rare combo to get, of course, because both Hyperbeam and Meteor Strike are fairly rare cards, and Fusion is also a very rare card to find. But if you can get this combo going, you can wipe out encounters very rapidly.

[Anteros]

It replaces your strikes - and tiny, tiny decks aren't remotely the only viable option. At higher ascension in particular the process involved in making these tiny decks tends to leave you so vulnerable that you can't do much, and as long as you haven't been removing strikes specifically the cards are an upgrade (again, Perfect Strike aside).

Essentially the assumption that you will remove all your strikes, guaranteed, is a really dubious one.

I've only played up to Ascension 15. I think there's 20 now? Regardless, I'm not the best at the game, but I'm not talking completely out of my behind either. You may not remove all of your strikes, but you're definitely going to try. And while I agree that sometimes larger decks can work...refilling your deck with a new bunch of marginally better strikes doesn't seem like it would ever be a good option.

The event that gives you Vampirism is only on chapter 3 though. If your deck isn't online by then, you're in trouble.

I didn't know this. That makes it even worse.

[Rodin]

I didn't know this. That makes it even worse.

That's because it's not true. Vampirism is an Act 2 specific event.

I don't use it often myself, but there are times. Having the healing flower as Ironclad can make it quite appealing, for example. It's definitely not one of the best events though.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

That's because it's not true. Vampirism is an Act 2 specific event.

I don't use it often myself, but there are times. Having the healing flower as Ironclad can make it quite appealing, for example. It's definitely not one of the best events though.

Do you consider it a worthwhile trade for the Blood Vial instead of the max life hit? It would probably give better sustain, although I can certainly see where it would largely lard up your deck with sub-par options, and if you're using bites for healing... well, you probably have more pressing concerns.