pyromaniac221this just might bean interestin YTRegistered Userregular
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
psn tooaware, friend code SW-4760-0062-3248 it me
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BeastehTHAT WOULD NOTKILL DRACULARegistered Userregular
Just made a deck that was literally just afterimages x2 and flash of steel x3 thanks to peace pipe and kunai + shuriken
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
FWIW, this was me also. I got very hung up on Ironclad at two points, while Silent never gave me pause (I think I got to 16 with silent before hitting 10 with either of the others). Ironclad has a lot of cards I misunderstood or misjudged early on, and should definitely be played around with. Otherwise, good cards like Immolation or Reaper with strength scaling can make early runs almost by themselves.
We seem to be a minority? Maybe if you have any specific questions I can help you out since I've been where you are.
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
So! Ironclad issues? SOUNDS LIKE ITS TIME FOR ANOTHER PENGUIN LECTURE ON CLASSES!
The big weakness with Ironclad is that he massively struggles to block AND do damage at the same time. He has a lot of genuinely really good attack cards (Even a lot of his attack commons are very solid, comparatively - consider Cleave vs All Out Attack, just as an example), and he has some serious potent block cards (Shrug It Off, Flame Barrier, Impervious), but they're often expensive - and ironclad is energy hungry like mad.
Resultingly, the best way forward with ironclad tends to involve figuring out how to break this weakness and turn it to your favour. There's two major ways ironclad can solve this.
One: Corruption.
Corruption makes your skills free! They exhaust, but who cares? They're free. Add in Feel No Pain, and you have a block engine that's very potent. Add in Juggernaut, and now your block engine does megabikkies of damage. Soon, the spire shall be destroyed by a chronic case of TOO MUCH BLOCK BISCUIT. Okay, silly jokes aside, this is a very good basic strategy - you can add in stuff like Barricade, Entrench, combine it with Runic Pyrmiad or Snecko eye and do some very potent things. Maybe take a bodyslam to turn all that block into sweet sweet foe nuking.
There's a different approach though...
Two: Who needs Block anyway?
Ironclad is bar none, the best class at sustain. Burning Blood alone means the ironclad is exceptional at trading health for advantage, and the existence of Magic Flower makes bites cahrazy town (Seriously, 1e, 8 damage, gain 2-5 hp depending on if you have Magic Flower, they're upgraded etc. Nuts!). But the big big thing though is you have Reaper and Strength scaling.
This means that ironclad can often just take 100+ damage in a boss fight and walk out at full health - You basically forgo blocking (or only block while you're setting up your strength) and then just rip stuff apart with super-charged Reapers.
Strength decks tend to look very different depending on if they're doing Limit Break shennagins (have an expotential curve), Limit Break/Spot Weakness (Flat to very shallow curve), or Demon Form (Slow growth over time). Of course, most decks using strenght to have am ix of these things -
which sort of leads into point 3 - you'll often be mixing and matching strategies. but hopefully these two big points on how to survive as ironclad will get you started.
One other tip: Mark of Pain, Reckless Charge are both really bad, due to costing you card draw. Wild Strike is kinda bad, but has the bonus of giving you MASSIVE damage in return, making it a decent early game card. Immolate is so strong as to be overtuned, and only really falls of late, late act 3.
ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Caveat that, funny enough, Wild Strike can well earn its keep alongside Second Wind. This works out much better if you can also get an Evolve somewhere so it negates the draw penalty, but it kinda depends on the deck as a whole. I generally like Second Wind as a card, but it isn't the most consistent, and its favourite partner of Power Through is also uncommon, making it that much less likely you can reliably find both to begin with.
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
So! Ironclad issues? SOUNDS LIKE ITS TIME FOR ANOTHER PENGUIN LECTURE ON CLASSES!
The big weakness with Ironclad is that he massively struggles to block AND do damage at the same time. He has a lot of genuinely really good attack cards (Even a lot of his attack commons are very solid, comparatively - consider Cleave vs All Out Attack, just as an example), and he has some serious potent block cards (Shrug It Off, Flame Barrier, Impervious), but they're often expensive - and ironclad is energy hungry like mad.
Resultingly, the best way forward with ironclad tends to involve figuring out how to break this weakness and turn it to your favour. There's two major ways ironclad can solve this.
One: Corruption.
Corruption makes your skills free! They exhaust, but who cares? They're free. Add in Feel No Pain, and you have a block engine that's very potent. Add in Juggernaut, and now your block engine does megabikkies of damage. Soon, the spire shall be destroyed by a chronic case of TOO MUCH BLOCK BISCUIT. Okay, silly jokes aside, this is a very good basic strategy - you can add in stuff like Barricade, Entrench, combine it with Runic Pyrmiad or Snecko eye and do some very potent things. Maybe take a bodyslam to turn all that block into sweet sweet foe nuking.
There's a different approach though...
Two: Who needs Block anyway?
Ironclad is bar none, the best class at sustain. Burning Blood alone means the ironclad is exceptional at trading health for advantage, and the existence of Magic Flower makes bites cahrazy town (Seriously, 1e, 8 damage, gain 2-5 hp depending on if you have Magic Flower, they're upgraded etc. Nuts!). But the big big thing though is you have Reaper and Strength scaling.
This means that ironclad can often just take 100+ damage in a boss fight and walk out at full health - You basically forgo blocking (or only block while you're setting up your strength) and then just rip stuff apart with super-charged Reapers.
Strength decks tend to look very different depending on if they're doing Limit Break shennagins (have an expotential curve), Limit Break/Spot Weakness (Flat to very shallow curve), or Demon Form (Slow growth over time). Of course, most decks using strenght to have am ix of these things -
which sort of leads into point 3 - you'll often be mixing and matching strategies. but hopefully these two big points on how to survive as ironclad will get you started.
One other tip: Mark of Pain, Reckless Charge are both really bad, due to costing you card draw. Wild Strike is kinda bad, but has the bonus of giving you MASSIVE damage in return, making it a decent early game card. Immolate is so strong as to be overtuned, and only really falls of late, late act 3.
This was, like, exactly what I need as input to start my quest to beat the heart with the ironclad.
I think I figured out at least some viable strategies for both silent and the defect, but I'm still struggling to move past act 2 with the ironclad. I always seemed to have too expensive attacks, or too meager blocking or both. With the pointers above I feel ready to Slay The Spire!
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
So! Ironclad issues? SOUNDS LIKE ITS TIME FOR ANOTHER PENGUIN LECTURE ON CLASSES!
The big weakness with Ironclad is that he massively struggles to block AND do damage at the same time. He has a lot of genuinely really good attack cards (Even a lot of his attack commons are very solid, comparatively - consider Cleave vs All Out Attack, just as an example), and he has some serious potent block cards (Shrug It Off, Flame Barrier, Impervious), but they're often expensive - and ironclad is energy hungry like mad.
Resultingly, the best way forward with ironclad tends to involve figuring out how to break this weakness and turn it to your favour. There's two major ways ironclad can solve this.
One: Corruption.
Corruption makes your skills free! They exhaust, but who cares? They're free. Add in Feel No Pain, and you have a block engine that's very potent. Add in Juggernaut, and now your block engine does megabikkies of damage. Soon, the spire shall be destroyed by a chronic case of TOO MUCH BLOCK BISCUIT. Okay, silly jokes aside, this is a very good basic strategy - you can add in stuff like Barricade, Entrench, combine it with Runic Pyrmiad or Snecko eye and do some very potent things. Maybe take a bodyslam to turn all that block into sweet sweet foe nuking.
There's a different approach though...
Two: Who needs Block anyway?
Ironclad is bar none, the best class at sustain. Burning Blood alone means the ironclad is exceptional at trading health for advantage, and the existence of Magic Flower makes bites cahrazy town (Seriously, 1e, 8 damage, gain 2-5 hp depending on if you have Magic Flower, they're upgraded etc. Nuts!). But the big big thing though is you have Reaper and Strength scaling.
This means that ironclad can often just take 100+ damage in a boss fight and walk out at full health - You basically forgo blocking (or only block while you're setting up your strength) and then just rip stuff apart with super-charged Reapers.
Strength decks tend to look very different depending on if they're doing Limit Break shennagins (have an expotential curve), Limit Break/Spot Weakness (Flat to very shallow curve), or Demon Form (Slow growth over time). Of course, most decks using strenght to have am ix of these things -
which sort of leads into point 3 - you'll often be mixing and matching strategies. but hopefully these two big points on how to survive as ironclad will get you started.
One other tip: Mark of Pain, Reckless Charge are both really bad, due to costing you card draw. Wild Strike is kinda bad, but has the bonus of giving you MASSIVE damage in return, making it a decent early game card. Immolate is so strong as to be overtuned, and only really falls of late, late act 3.
This was, like, exactly what I need as input to start my quest to beat the heart with the ironclad.
I think I figured out at least some viable strategies for both silent and the defect, but I'm still struggling to move past act 2 with the ironclad. I always seemed to have too expensive attacks, or too meager blocking or both. With the pointers above I feel ready to Slay The Spire!
One other thing i shoulda brought up that's true for all classes, but particularly true for ironclad is that cards that are good late often arent good early (eg Demon Form and Corruption often are awful anywhere in act 1, but can become linchpins of your stratergy form act 2 onwards). The reverse also applies - Perfected Strike can get you through act 1, but it's often junk by the time you're in act 3. That's okay! You still need to put cards in your deck to beat act 1.
Another tip is learn how you can do dumb combos. Like, i once beat the heart on A20 with reapers... without any kind of strength engine. How the fuck did i pull that off?
I strung together Runic Pyramid, Dual Wield+, Madness+ and Reaper - then lined things up so i could create infinite 0 cost reapers, and use them to vamp back my health. It was a deeply stupid combo... but it worked!
Also i missed option 3 for ironclad: just get feed early (like start of act 2 or before early), eat in every fight you can, and end up really fat. it's very hard to loose the heart fight when half health is like 90 hp.
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
So! Ironclad issues? SOUNDS LIKE ITS TIME FOR ANOTHER PENGUIN LECTURE ON CLASSES!
The big weakness with Ironclad is that he massively struggles to block AND do damage at the same time. He has a lot of genuinely really good attack cards (Even a lot of his attack commons are very solid, comparatively - consider Cleave vs All Out Attack, just as an example), and he has some serious potent block cards (Shrug It Off, Flame Barrier, Impervious), but they're often expensive - and ironclad is energy hungry like mad.
Resultingly, the best way forward with ironclad tends to involve figuring out how to break this weakness and turn it to your favour. There's two major ways ironclad can solve this.
One: Corruption.
Corruption makes your skills free! They exhaust, but who cares? They're free. Add in Feel No Pain, and you have a block engine that's very potent. Add in Juggernaut, and now your block engine does megabikkies of damage. Soon, the spire shall be destroyed by a chronic case of TOO MUCH BLOCK BISCUIT. Okay, silly jokes aside, this is a very good basic strategy - you can add in stuff like Barricade, Entrench, combine it with Runic Pyrmiad or Snecko eye and do some very potent things. Maybe take a bodyslam to turn all that block into sweet sweet foe nuking.
There's a different approach though...
Two: Who needs Block anyway?
Ironclad is bar none, the best class at sustain. Burning Blood alone means the ironclad is exceptional at trading health for advantage, and the existence of Magic Flower makes bites cahrazy town (Seriously, 1e, 8 damage, gain 2-5 hp depending on if you have Magic Flower, they're upgraded etc. Nuts!). But the big big thing though is you have Reaper and Strength scaling.
This means that ironclad can often just take 100+ damage in a boss fight and walk out at full health - You basically forgo blocking (or only block while you're setting up your strength) and then just rip stuff apart with super-charged Reapers.
Strength decks tend to look very different depending on if they're doing Limit Break shennagins (have an expotential curve), Limit Break/Spot Weakness (Flat to very shallow curve), or Demon Form (Slow growth over time). Of course, most decks using strenght to have am ix of these things -
which sort of leads into point 3 - you'll often be mixing and matching strategies. but hopefully these two big points on how to survive as ironclad will get you started.
One other tip: Mark of Pain, Reckless Charge are both really bad, due to costing you card draw. Wild Strike is kinda bad, but has the bonus of giving you MASSIVE damage in return, making it a decent early game card. Immolate is so strong as to be overtuned, and only really falls of late, late act 3.
This was, like, exactly what I need as input to start my quest to beat the heart with the ironclad.
I think I figured out at least some viable strategies for both silent and the defect, but I'm still struggling to move past act 2 with the ironclad. I always seemed to have too expensive attacks, or too meager blocking or both. With the pointers above I feel ready to Slay The Spire!
One other thing i shoulda brought up that's true for all classes, but particularly true for ironclad is that cards that are good late often arent good early (eg Demon Form and Corruption often are awful anywhere in act 1, but can become linchpins of your stratergy form act 2 onwards). The reverse also applies - Perfected Strike can get you through act 1, but it's often junk by the time you're in act 3. That's okay! You still need to put cards in your deck to beat act 1.
Another tip is learn how you can do dumb combos. Like, i once beat the heart on A20 with reapers... without any kind of strength engine. How the fuck did i pull that off?
I strung together Runic Pyramid, Dual Wield+, Madness+ and Reaper - then lined things up so i could create infinite 0 cost reapers, and use them to vamp back my health. It was a deeply stupid combo... but it worked!
Also i missed option 3 for ironclad: just get feed early (like start of act 2 or before early), eat in every fight you can, and end up really fat. it's very hard to loose the heart fight when half health is like 90 hp.
Yea, I was really surprised at my first victory as the silent. My deck felt so-so all the way up to half act 2, and I almost considered to just quit. Then something kind of clicked, and I was moving through battles like a lawnmower.
I really would like to play more to get that deeper understanding of decks and strategies, like, I can see that this deck is bad now but it will melt faces very soon. Also, understanding when to just stop accepting new cards instead of just adding stuff.
Decided to take a break from beating my head against the Ironclad wall to do a Silent run and slapped together a 40-card deck with a ludicrous amount of card draw, energy regen, and poison. I grabbed early on the relic that gives you +1 dexterity whenever you play three attacks in a turn and by the time I reached the act 3 boss, I could easily string together 12 card plays a turn and after a few turns, a couple block cards could essentially render me invulnerable. I thought I was boned when I ended up against Time Eater since my strategy, such as it was, was sheer volume, but playing a little more judiciously led to him eating 50 stacks of poison even after he purged the first batch.
I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
So! Ironclad issues? SOUNDS LIKE ITS TIME FOR ANOTHER PENGUIN LECTURE ON CLASSES!
The big weakness with Ironclad is that he massively struggles to block AND do damage at the same time. He has a lot of genuinely really good attack cards (Even a lot of his attack commons are very solid, comparatively - consider Cleave vs All Out Attack, just as an example), and he has some serious potent block cards (Shrug It Off, Flame Barrier, Impervious), but they're often expensive - and ironclad is energy hungry like mad.
Resultingly, the best way forward with ironclad tends to involve figuring out how to break this weakness and turn it to your favour. There's two major ways ironclad can solve this.
One: Corruption.
Corruption makes your skills free! They exhaust, but who cares? They're free. Add in Feel No Pain, and you have a block engine that's very potent. Add in Juggernaut, and now your block engine does megabikkies of damage. Soon, the spire shall be destroyed by a chronic case of TOO MUCH BLOCK BISCUIT. Okay, silly jokes aside, this is a very good basic strategy - you can add in stuff like Barricade, Entrench, combine it with Runic Pyrmiad or Snecko eye and do some very potent things. Maybe take a bodyslam to turn all that block into sweet sweet foe nuking.
There's a different approach though...
Two: Who needs Block anyway?
Ironclad is bar none, the best class at sustain. Burning Blood alone means the ironclad is exceptional at trading health for advantage, and the existence of Magic Flower makes bites cahrazy town (Seriously, 1e, 8 damage, gain 2-5 hp depending on if you have Magic Flower, they're upgraded etc. Nuts!). But the big big thing though is you have Reaper and Strength scaling.
This means that ironclad can often just take 100+ damage in a boss fight and walk out at full health - You basically forgo blocking (or only block while you're setting up your strength) and then just rip stuff apart with super-charged Reapers.
Strength decks tend to look very different depending on if they're doing Limit Break shennagins (have an expotential curve), Limit Break/Spot Weakness (Flat to very shallow curve), or Demon Form (Slow growth over time). Of course, most decks using strenght to have am ix of these things -
which sort of leads into point 3 - you'll often be mixing and matching strategies. but hopefully these two big points on how to survive as ironclad will get you started.
One other tip: Mark of Pain, Reckless Charge are both really bad, due to costing you card draw. Wild Strike is kinda bad, but has the bonus of giving you MASSIVE damage in return, making it a decent early game card. Immolate is so strong as to be overtuned, and only really falls of late, late act 3.
This was, like, exactly what I need as input to start my quest to beat the heart with the ironclad.
I think I figured out at least some viable strategies for both silent and the defect, but I'm still struggling to move past act 2 with the ironclad. I always seemed to have too expensive attacks, or too meager blocking or both. With the pointers above I feel ready to Slay The Spire!
One other thing i shoulda brought up that's true for all classes, but particularly true for ironclad is that cards that are good late often arent good early (eg Demon Form and Corruption often are awful anywhere in act 1, but can become linchpins of your stratergy form act 2 onwards). The reverse also applies - Perfected Strike can get you through act 1, but it's often junk by the time you're in act 3. That's okay! You still need to put cards in your deck to beat act 1.
Another tip is learn how you can do dumb combos. Like, i once beat the heart on A20 with reapers... without any kind of strength engine. How the fuck did i pull that off?
I strung together Runic Pyramid, Dual Wield+, Madness+ and Reaper - then lined things up so i could create infinite 0 cost reapers, and use them to vamp back my health. It was a deeply stupid combo... but it worked!
Also i missed option 3 for ironclad: just get feed early (like start of act 2 or before early), eat in every fight you can, and end up really fat. it's very hard to loose the heart fight when half health is like 90 hp.
Yea, I was really surprised at my first victory as the silent. My deck felt so-so all the way up to half act 2, and I almost considered to just quit. Then something kind of clicked, and I was moving through battles like a lawnmower.
I really would like to play more to get that deeper understanding of decks and strategies, like, I can see that this deck is bad now but it will melt faces very soon. Also, understanding when to just stop accepting new cards instead of just adding stuff.
If you'd like, i can kick my stream live for a bit and and do some runs to show you how i think about/approach these things, might be helpful?
Caveat that, funny enough, Wild Strike can well earn its keep alongside Second Wind. This works out much better if you can also get an Evolve somewhere so it negates the draw penalty, but it kinda depends on the deck as a whole. I generally like Second Wind as a card, but it isn't the most consistent, and its favourite partner of Power Through is also uncommon, making it that much less likely you can reliably find both to begin with.
Power Through, Mark of Pain and Wild Strike work okay as feeders if you've got Second Wind or True Grit+ and Evolve, like you're saying.
Power Through is good enough, energy to block-wise, to be worth taking if one comes up early. It'll solve more problems than it causes in Act 1.
@Morran & @pyromaniac221 - i ended up streaming some tonight anyway. Suggest giving this VoD a watch if you've got time to spare - you can see me take an Ironclad deck through an awful act 1, all the way into an A20 heartkilll - and without necessarily anything insanely strong, just cobbling together enough strength, enough ways to defend etc to turn it into a winner. (Though snecko/pellets in act3 was preddddy good)
VOD and Decklist below. Please feel free to ask questions etc, i was pretty tired when i streamed this so i wasnt quite as talky as i might be otherwise
Got this in the steamy sales the other day and I can see why there's been a hullabaloo about it, it's rather fun! Managed to get myself to the heart with the Defect chappy, who's definitely clicked the most with me so far. Gonna use advice given on slashy man and hopefully stop failing so hard!
One gripe I have so far is how there's a pause before I can click a card to play it if I use number keys to do so. I've selected the damn thing game, let me click!!!
BeastehTHAT WOULD NOTKILL DRACULARegistered Userregular
Cards I've learned to always windmill slam with defect:
Glacier, hyper beam/sunder, echo form, coolheaded, defrag/capacitator, skim, seek, FTL, static discharge, go for the eyes, overclock, turbo
It's served me well so far
Claw is a trap
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
If you think Claw is a trap, boy have I got news for you about Hyperbeam. ;P
First rule of Slay the Spire: There are no auto-picks.*
*There may be a few cards that, especially at lower ascensions, are safe picks the vast majority of the time, but man, that's a bad habit you'll want to break as you climb.
Cards I've learned to always windmill slam with defect:
Glacier, hyper beam/sunder, echo form, coolheaded, defrag/capacitator, skim, seek, FTL, static discharge, go for the eyes, overclock, turbo
It's served me well so far
Claw is a trap
I mean, i agree with some of these....
Personal opion on those:
Almost always: Glacier, Echo Form, Coolheaded
Most of the time: Defrag, Capaiator, Static Discharge, Seek, Claw (If early)
Some of the time: FTL, Skim, Go for the Eyes, Hyper Beam (If a1/pre-a2 elites, promote to almost always)
A bit of the time: Sunder (Higher with Snecko), Turbo (Signifanctly higher with runicpyramid), Overclock
Logic on those:
Almost always are basically guaranteed to make my deck stronger - the circumstances in which they're bad cards are very, very rare
Most of the time: Good, but depend on how crowded i am for powers, if i need what those powers are providing, if i have targets to find with seek, if i need Claw for scaling damage, or it's early and i just want a card that'll do some work for me.
Some of the time: These cards are all pretty specific. Hyper beam is great early, but falls off hard - but again, that's totally fine, you take cards like that because it will get you through a1/a2 and murderizes a lot of the hall way fights.
A bit of the time: I really have to need what these cards are offering, or have very specific circumstances to make use of them. Turbo specifically gets massively better when you have Runic Pyramid (Defect is great at exploiting RP for serious shennagins)
I almost always take FTL with The Defect when it's offered. A 0-cost card that deals damage and replaces itself (assuming you're not in a draw heavy deck) feels like a no-brainer. Only downside is against Time Eater or Normality, drawbacks which aren't exclusive to this card.
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
Cards I've learned to always windmill slam with defect:
Glacier, hyper beam/sunder, echo form, coolheaded, defrag/capacitator, skim, seek, FTL, static discharge, go for the eyes, overclock, turbo
It's served me well so far
Claw is a trap
I mean, i agree with some of these....
Personal opion on those:
Almost always: Glacier, Echo Form, Coolheaded
Most of the time: Defrag, Capaiator, Static Discharge, Seek, Claw (If early)
Some of the time: FTL, Skim, Go for the Eyes, Hyper Beam (If a1/pre-a2 elites, promote to almost always)
A bit of the time: Sunder (Higher with Snecko), Turbo (Signifanctly higher with runicpyramid), Overclock
Logic on those:
Almost always are basically guaranteed to make my deck stronger - the circumstances in which they're bad cards are very, very rare
Most of the time: Good, but depend on how crowded i am for powers, if i need what those powers are providing, if i have targets to find with seek, if i need Claw for scaling damage, or it's early and i just want a card that'll do some work for me.
Some of the time: These cards are all pretty specific. Hyper beam is great early, but falls off hard - but again, that's totally fine, you take cards like that because it will get you through a1/a2 and murderizes a lot of the hall way fights.
A bit of the time: I really have to need what these cards are offering, or have very specific circumstances to make use of them. Turbo specifically gets massively better when you have Runic Pyramid (Defect is great at exploiting RP for serious shennagins)
I almost always take FTL with The Defect when it's offered. A 0-cost card that deals damage and replaces itself (assuming you're not in a draw heavy deck) feels like a no-brainer. Only downside is against Time Eater or Normality, drawbacks which aren't exclusive to this card.
Eh, i feel like there's enough places where a cantrip that's based on attacking is a detriment, or at least just neutral. I have to be wanting to do silly 0 cost things for me to be excited about FTL
FTL's problem is the heart, it's a pretty good card to have 1 or 2 of otherwise. It also has kind of anti-synergy with other draw cards that can make it clunky in the late game.
Interesting deck that just lost to the heart. Would have won fine if i'd managed to line up Incense burner on the right turn for the A4 elites, but i did not and took too much damage.
Early peace pipe lead to a super aggressive approach to pruning out strikes and defends - i might have overpruned. Unsure if cursed key was better than orrey - i think it was, probably, though my logic on not being THAT energy starved/wanting more cards was okay? But probably not a great choice.
But still, a good example of doing funky defect stuff that goes in directions you wouldn't necessarily expect
It was also a good deck at killing bosses/elites, but not so much hallway fights which really hurt it.
I almost always take FTL with The Defect when it's offered. A 0-cost card that deals damage and replaces itself (assuming you're not in a draw heavy deck) feels like a no-brainer. Only downside is against Time Eater or Normality, drawbacks which aren't exclusive to this card.
Eh, i feel like there's enough places where a cantrip that's based on attacking is a detriment, or at least just neutral. I have to be wanting to do silly 0 cost things for me to be excited about FTL
My first win against the heart was based upon silly things with FTL, claw and all for one.
Think i had some artifacts that allowed redraw of my start hand as well, so i had a almost guaranteed 4-5 claws the first round, followed by a few other 0-cost cards.
I almost always take FTL with The Defect when it's offered. A 0-cost card that deals damage and replaces itself (assuming you're not in a draw heavy deck) feels like a no-brainer. Only downside is against Time Eater or Normality, drawbacks which aren't exclusive to this card.
Eh, i feel like there's enough places where a cantrip that's based on attacking is a detriment, or at least just neutral. I have to be wanting to do silly 0 cost things for me to be excited about FTL
My first win against the heart was based upon silly things with FTL, claw and all for one.
Think i had some artifacts that allowed redraw of my start hand as well, so i had a almost guaranteed 4-5 claws the first round, followed by a few other 0-cost cards.
Good Ol' Gambling chip. One of the most insanley powerful relics in the game. Best combined with Bag of prep, and if you can wing it, Snecko Eye, giving you 19 (20 if silent) card starting hands in effect. Which is fan-fucking-tastic for ensuring you get your powerful shit turn one.
Meanwhile, on sad notes, piloted a silent run allll the way to the heart and went splat. Once again a case of bad draws vs the A4 elites mauling me, and that leading to my doom. Deck just needed more copies of well laid plans and a wraith form or similar to get everything online, but that never happened.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I dunno why I pick up games like this, the uncontrollable failure just pisses me off. I'm up to having Defect unlocked and frankly, I'm sick of the game going one of two ways: cripple along through the early stages and die because of shitty card/relic drops, or completely crushing everything until getting to a single enemy that completely destroys me.
Case in point, my last run for Act 2. I have two Buffer+, which means I should be able to eat some huge attacks. Except the boss fucking summons minions, weakens the player, buffs his own strength plus his minion strength, and then lays out about 60 points of damage spread across three attacks (which means Buffer becomes useless). I survive that once, and then the exact same fucking attack is happening just two turns later. And there's fuck-all I can do about the fact that there hasn't been a single drop along the way to improve Focus or get multiples of Frost orbs, so defeating this boss would have been essentially impossible without being able to pick the hand you want for every single turn.
It's just my own fault for picking up these games where victory is more of a dice roll than anything else. I've got better ways to blow through an hour than random game overs.
Ninja, look up "overexplained" runs from a YT/Twitch streamer named Jorbs. They really helped me up my game & understanding on it. Sometimes you just don't get the cards you want, but you kind of figure out what to do with the cards/relics you do get or change up how you run through the level to optimize your chances.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah, it's a lot less of a waste of time for me to just straight-up forget the game in general instead of trying to learn the exact "right" cards to pick. That's not strategy or skill to me, that's memorizing the best cards out of a clump of competing cards. And the way a lot of the bosses and minibosses are built to just straight fuck certain builds does not endear me to the gameplay.
Just to be clear, I'm not ripping on the game itself, I'm just irritated with myself for buying another one like this. I know it's going to be a big time suck and I know I'm not going to be satisfied with endlessly banging my head against the wall until I memorize the perfect way to do things. It's not a fault of the game by any means, it's just not something I enjoy and I should know better.
So rather than learning why you are wrong you will instead insist that you are not, in fact, wrong.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
No, I know there are better combinations to pick, it's just not satisfying for me for that to be the way to beat the game. It says to me that there are 2-3 good "decks" for each character and I feel like they just threw them all together to pad out the game duration because you have to figure out what works well together.
Like I said, the fault isn't in the game, it's in me for not recognizing the game won't satisfy me. It's like getting mad at an FPS because it makes me shoot people: the problem isn't that it's an FPS, the problem is that what it's doing isn't something I like.
That said, I still feel that I really lucked out on that build.
I still feel that my ironclad runs are heavily dependent on a getting a small set of specific cards and building around them - more so than for the two other classes.
I think this is more me needing to figure out ironclad rather than issues with the class.
Looking forward to unlock all cards for all classes and then moving on to Ascension runs.
No, I know there are better combinations to pick, it's just not satisfying for me for that to be the way to beat the game. It says to me that there are 2-3 good "decks" for each character and I feel like they just threw them all together to pad out the game duration because you have to figure out what works well together.
I'll note that I hard disagree on there being 2-3 good decks for each character. Playing at the highest difficulty, every card is viable, every relic is viable.
Even fire breathing, widely held to be the WORST card in the game. (It's actually searing blow :P)
It's just context that shifts. There are a lot of cards that are super niche, an a chunk of cards that are generally useful.
And even beyond that, actual skill in playing cards and turn to turn decision making is a huge facet of the game. Like I'm pretty on the ball with my drafting, and good at identify weird weird ways to win. Actually playing and piloting those decks?
Oof. My win rate would be an awful lot higher if I improved there.
Alllll oh that said... Hey! If you're not having fun, then putting the game down is the right decision, and respect to you for identifying that.
I got this for the switch, then I got it for the PC when I saw you could mod it. Man, whoever made the "Senshi" mod for this game really did a good job. That must have been a labor of love to say the least.
Ninja, the reason I wanted to suggest those videos for you is because that's what snapped me out of thinking of "oh, I just need to pick X card every time". There are really few times where that is true, realistically the choices are more deterministic based on what cards you have, what the map layout is like, what you're going for with your current cards, etc. Sometimes the correct choice is to not pick a card at all.
Sometimes, you just lose. That's just how the game works. But it's entirely possible if you reloaded that seed, went a different path, saw different relics/events/cards, maybe you'd win that time. That's also 100% a possibility.
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I don't get how this game feels so much easier when I'm not playing Ironclad.
and then you got time eater in act 3
We seem to be a minority? Maybe if you have any specific questions I can help you out since I've been where you are.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
So! Ironclad issues? SOUNDS LIKE ITS TIME FOR ANOTHER PENGUIN LECTURE ON CLASSES!
The big weakness with Ironclad is that he massively struggles to block AND do damage at the same time. He has a lot of genuinely really good attack cards (Even a lot of his attack commons are very solid, comparatively - consider Cleave vs All Out Attack, just as an example), and he has some serious potent block cards (Shrug It Off, Flame Barrier, Impervious), but they're often expensive - and ironclad is energy hungry like mad.
Resultingly, the best way forward with ironclad tends to involve figuring out how to break this weakness and turn it to your favour. There's two major ways ironclad can solve this.
One: Corruption.
Corruption makes your skills free! They exhaust, but who cares? They're free. Add in Feel No Pain, and you have a block engine that's very potent. Add in Juggernaut, and now your block engine does megabikkies of damage. Soon, the spire shall be destroyed by a chronic case of TOO MUCH BLOCK BISCUIT. Okay, silly jokes aside, this is a very good basic strategy - you can add in stuff like Barricade, Entrench, combine it with Runic Pyrmiad or Snecko eye and do some very potent things. Maybe take a bodyslam to turn all that block into sweet sweet foe nuking.
There's a different approach though...
Two: Who needs Block anyway?
Ironclad is bar none, the best class at sustain. Burning Blood alone means the ironclad is exceptional at trading health for advantage, and the existence of Magic Flower makes bites cahrazy town (Seriously, 1e, 8 damage, gain 2-5 hp depending on if you have Magic Flower, they're upgraded etc. Nuts!). But the big big thing though is you have Reaper and Strength scaling.
This means that ironclad can often just take 100+ damage in a boss fight and walk out at full health - You basically forgo blocking (or only block while you're setting up your strength) and then just rip stuff apart with super-charged Reapers.
Strength decks tend to look very different depending on if they're doing Limit Break shennagins (have an expotential curve), Limit Break/Spot Weakness (Flat to very shallow curve), or Demon Form (Slow growth over time). Of course, most decks using strenght to have am ix of these things -
which sort of leads into point 3 - you'll often be mixing and matching strategies. but hopefully these two big points on how to survive as ironclad will get you started.
One other tip: Mark of Pain, Reckless Charge are both really bad, due to costing you card draw. Wild Strike is kinda bad, but has the bonus of giving you MASSIVE damage in return, making it a decent early game card. Immolate is so strong as to be overtuned, and only really falls of late, late act 3.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
This was, like, exactly what I need as input to start my quest to beat the heart with the ironclad.
I think I figured out at least some viable strategies for both silent and the defect, but I'm still struggling to move past act 2 with the ironclad. I always seemed to have too expensive attacks, or too meager blocking or both. With the pointers above I feel ready to Slay The Spire!
One other thing i shoulda brought up that's true for all classes, but particularly true for ironclad is that cards that are good late often arent good early (eg Demon Form and Corruption often are awful anywhere in act 1, but can become linchpins of your stratergy form act 2 onwards). The reverse also applies - Perfected Strike can get you through act 1, but it's often junk by the time you're in act 3. That's okay! You still need to put cards in your deck to beat act 1.
Another tip is learn how you can do dumb combos. Like, i once beat the heart on A20 with reapers... without any kind of strength engine. How the fuck did i pull that off?
I strung together Runic Pyramid, Dual Wield+, Madness+ and Reaper - then lined things up so i could create infinite 0 cost reapers, and use them to vamp back my health. It was a deeply stupid combo... but it worked!
Also i missed option 3 for ironclad: just get feed early (like start of act 2 or before early), eat in every fight you can, and end up really fat. it's very hard to loose the heart fight when half health is like 90 hp.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Yea, I was really surprised at my first victory as the silent. My deck felt so-so all the way up to half act 2, and I almost considered to just quit. Then something kind of clicked, and I was moving through battles like a lawnmower.
I really would like to play more to get that deeper understanding of decks and strategies, like, I can see that this deck is bad now but it will melt faces very soon. Also, understanding when to just stop accepting new cards instead of just adding stuff.
If you'd like, i can kick my stream live for a bit and and do some runs to show you how i think about/approach these things, might be helpful?
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Power Through, Mark of Pain and Wild Strike work okay as feeders if you've got Second Wind or True Grit+ and Evolve, like you're saying.
Power Through is good enough, energy to block-wise, to be worth taking if one comes up early. It'll solve more problems than it causes in Act 1.
VOD and Decklist below. Please feel free to ask questions etc, i was pretty tired when i streamed this so i wasnt quite as talky as i might be otherwise
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
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One gripe I have so far is how there's a pause before I can click a card to play it if I use number keys to do so. I've selected the damn thing game, let me click!!!
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
Glacier, hyper beam/sunder, echo form, coolheaded, defrag/capacitator, skim, seek, FTL, static discharge, go for the eyes, overclock, turbo
It's served me well so far
Claw is a trap
First rule of Slay the Spire: There are no auto-picks.*
*There may be a few cards that, especially at lower ascensions, are safe picks the vast majority of the time, but man, that's a bad habit you'll want to break as you climb.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I mean, i agree with some of these....
Personal opion on those:
Almost always: Glacier, Echo Form, Coolheaded
Most of the time: Defrag, Capaiator, Static Discharge, Seek, Claw (If early)
Some of the time: FTL, Skim, Go for the Eyes, Hyper Beam (If a1/pre-a2 elites, promote to almost always)
A bit of the time: Sunder (Higher with Snecko), Turbo (Signifanctly higher with runicpyramid), Overclock
Logic on those:
Almost always are basically guaranteed to make my deck stronger - the circumstances in which they're bad cards are very, very rare
Most of the time: Good, but depend on how crowded i am for powers, if i need what those powers are providing, if i have targets to find with seek, if i need Claw for scaling damage, or it's early and i just want a card that'll do some work for me.
Some of the time: These cards are all pretty specific. Hyper beam is great early, but falls off hard - but again, that's totally fine, you take cards like that because it will get you through a1/a2 and murderizes a lot of the hall way fights.
A bit of the time: I really have to need what these cards are offering, or have very specific circumstances to make use of them. Turbo specifically gets massively better when you have Runic Pyramid (Defect is great at exploiting RP for serious shennagins)
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Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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I'm always fission and core surge, too
And I love Hello World in early act 1.
Eh, i feel like there's enough places where a cantrip that's based on attacking is a detriment, or at least just neutral. I have to be wanting to do silly 0 cost things for me to be excited about FTL
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Early peace pipe lead to a super aggressive approach to pruning out strikes and defends - i might have overpruned. Unsure if cursed key was better than orrey - i think it was, probably, though my logic on not being THAT energy starved/wanting more cards was okay? But probably not a great choice.
But still, a good example of doing funky defect stuff that goes in directions you wouldn't necessarily expect
It was also a good deck at killing bosses/elites, but not so much hallway fights which really hurt it.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
died to the heart because i couldn't get my combo going in time, rip
e: I just found an AMUSING interaction between all for one and snecko eye
it draws all the 0 cost cards from your deck.. the potentially very high cost cards that snecko has reduced to 0 this turn...
that went well with a lot of meteors streamlines and sunders
My first win against the heart was based upon silly things with FTL, claw and all for one.
Think i had some artifacts that allowed redraw of my start hand as well, so i had a almost guaranteed 4-5 claws the first round, followed by a few other 0-cost cards.
Good Ol' Gambling chip. One of the most insanley powerful relics in the game. Best combined with Bag of prep, and if you can wing it, Snecko Eye, giving you 19 (20 if silent) card starting hands in effect. Which is fan-fucking-tastic for ensuring you get your powerful shit turn one.
Meanwhile, on sad notes, piloted a silent run allll the way to the heart and went splat. Once again a case of bad draws vs the A4 elites mauling me, and that leading to my doom. Deck just needed more copies of well laid plans and a wraith form or similar to get everything online, but that never happened.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Case in point, my last run for Act 2. I have two Buffer+, which means I should be able to eat some huge attacks. Except the boss fucking summons minions, weakens the player, buffs his own strength plus his minion strength, and then lays out about 60 points of damage spread across three attacks (which means Buffer becomes useless). I survive that once, and then the exact same fucking attack is happening just two turns later. And there's fuck-all I can do about the fact that there hasn't been a single drop along the way to improve Focus or get multiples of Frost orbs, so defeating this boss would have been essentially impossible without being able to pick the hand you want for every single turn.
It's just my own fault for picking up these games where victory is more of a dice roll than anything else. I've got better ways to blow through an hour than random game overs.
Just to be clear, I'm not ripping on the game itself, I'm just irritated with myself for buying another one like this. I know it's going to be a big time suck and I know I'm not going to be satisfied with endlessly banging my head against the wall until I memorize the perfect way to do things. It's not a fault of the game by any means, it's just not something I enjoy and I should know better.
Like I said, the fault isn't in the game, it's in me for not recognizing the game won't satisfy me. It's like getting mad at an FPS because it makes me shoot people: the problem isn't that it's an FPS, the problem is that what it's doing isn't something I like.
That's not really a helpful post in a thread about games and taste. Games are for fun and if they start feeling like work it's ok to quit!
I managed to get a ridiculously overpowered build with corruption, feel no pain, juggernaut, barricade, metallicize, oh, and body slam.
Like, all my blocking cards were free. And i got more blocking when i used them. I also had cards to double my block which also gave me more block.
On top of this my block was saved between turns and also I did damage to enemies when i got more block.
SOO MUCH BLOCK!
I still feel that my ironclad runs are heavily dependent on a getting a small set of specific cards and building around them - more so than for the two other classes.
I think this is more me needing to figure out ironclad rather than issues with the class.
Looking forward to unlock all cards for all classes and then moving on to Ascension runs.
I'll note that I hard disagree on there being 2-3 good decks for each character. Playing at the highest difficulty, every card is viable, every relic is viable.
Even fire breathing, widely held to be the WORST card in the game. (It's actually searing blow :P)
It's just context that shifts. There are a lot of cards that are super niche, an a chunk of cards that are generally useful.
And even beyond that, actual skill in playing cards and turn to turn decision making is a huge facet of the game. Like I'm pretty on the ball with my drafting, and good at identify weird weird ways to win. Actually playing and piloting those decks?
Oof. My win rate would be an awful lot higher if I improved there.
Alllll oh that said... Hey! If you're not having fun, then putting the game down is the right decision, and respect to you for identifying that.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Sometimes, you just lose. That's just how the game works. But it's entirely possible if you reloaded that seed, went a different path, saw different relics/events/cards, maybe you'd win that time. That's also 100% a possibility.