What covenant are you all playing on? At Cov5, the starting Melting Remnant guys all die before acting, and revives don't help when the issue is that their base toughness is simply too low to have any staying power.
At 4+ you have to put them behind something, or let them die to get beefed up and resurrected, or deploy them higher up and get some time for buffs or blockers to deploy
The most annoying opponent for them is anything with a high volume of attacks, it's true
Right, my point is that when you start off you generally don't have any beef to hide them behind and you're just playing from behind unless you can get some lucky unit drafts.
I think maybe they can be okay with Hellhorned because the direct damage spells you get can act as a sort of protection before you have strong meatshields, but at that point why not just play the inherently better Awoken/Stygian combo?
Like, I'm sure there are builds for Melting Remnant that work, it's just way more effort and reliant on far more RNG than playing one of the more consistent clans, and I'm not convinced there's a strong enough payoff for it to be worth. I kind of feel the same about Umbra; they're not as gimmicky as Melting Remnant, but if you don't hit a good Gorge+Morselmaster combo pretty early, you just don't get strong enough units rolling to actually kill the stuff on your train by the time you're at or past Daedalus.
If all you're trying to do is push Covenant levels, Hellhorned, Awoken, and Stygian are all a lot more consistent in giving you something solid to draft around early on. Also, and this is key, Awoken's champion is a very strong tank, and Hellhorned and Stygian's champions can both be very strong carries as long as you draft some kind of strong tank. Umbra and Melting Remnant's champions are much more gimmicky.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I think the issue with Melting Remnant, for me, is a broader issue with how they're designed in opposition to the other factions. By the time you're doing any sort of Covenant pushing, the best way to build is to have a few high quality units that you plop down and then to spend pretty much all your mana each turn casting spells. Spells are way more high impact/turn than units are, so once you've got stuff in place you don't want to be having to spend mana resummoning units (also, if you have a deck full of units, you're drawing those instead of spells each turn).
Melting Remnant mostly seems to have buff spells or unit cycle spells, and the nature of their units is such that they want to be spending most of their mana summoning units every turn. This is totally at odds with pretty much every other clan except maybe Hellhorned, and has the added problem of diluting your unit upgrades because you need to have more units than usual, and preventing you from spending a lot of mana each turn on high impact spells.
The end result is that Melting Remnant actively works against the gameplan of Awoken, Stygian, and Umbra, and while they could maybe be made to work with Hellhorned, you're still running into the issue of enemy units beating the shit out of your guys every turn. Party of why spells are so good is because they can protect and heal your units or reduce how much pressure is on a given floor, but if you're constantly having to resummon little candle dudes you're not spending that mana on spells!
Penumbra has been the most consistent champion for me. Monstrous and some life steal buffs and he can hold the first floor by himself for most of the battle, while you pump up a monster on the top floor with morsels (ideally the permabuff one)
He's just so able to trample through whole hordes by himself.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I've had a hard time consistently getting buffs for him. Also found that any time you go against a faction who gives Rage, he tends to go down by Round 2 unless you get really lucky with health Morsels.
@3clipse I think you may be overloading your deck with too many units. Melting remnant aren't a swarm faction, you want just enough units where one or two die each round of combat, then you resummon them for free using your reform spells. They don't cost any mana to reform.
Once again, I haven't been focusing on pushing covenant levels because I haven't hit level 10 with all the factions yet, but melting remnant easily are my strongest faction. I think you're doing something wrong if you think they're weak.
Steam: Spawnbroker
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I promise I'm not trying to be dismissive, but at Covenant 0-2 you can succeed with basically anything as long as you make reasonably smart choices about stuff. I've only started feeling just how big the differences in faction strength are Covenant 4-5, and Melting Remnant scale especially poorly into those difficulties because they tend to have very low health pools. Resurrection isn't super helpful when they die before getting attacks off :P
I've had a hard time consistently getting buffs for him. Also found that any time you go against a faction who gives Rage, he tends to go down by Round 2 unless you get really lucky with health Morsels.
I've found the key is lifedrain buffs and eating the ember penalty (especially if you have their various ember buffs to offset that), and using morsels as blockers when necessary.
I've tended to go for a monstrous build and spam all the possible deploy limit buffs, so that I can stack bodies in front of him and feed him morsels, and it has worked consistently
I've found Melting remnant (with Hellhorned for basically Ascend only) to be my most consistent faction in the covenant 4-6 range recently. I'd plant my champion on the top floor with the reform trait and dump my burnout minions on the bottom floor to die and soften up the enemies. I summon units with harvest (and no burnout) on the middle floor and that becomes a killing zone. Then I start using ascend to send minions from the bottom floor up to the middle and the combination of all the enemies dying (and my ascended burnout units) snowballs very quickly.
Funny enough, I don't struggle with non-burnout units dying but rather some armoured enemies having too much health and making it all the way through.
I stumbled into this strategy by accident on a double random faction run and it has cleared covenant 4,5,6 (my highest attempted) in a row.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Turns out frostbite caps at 999 stacks.
*glances over at Seraph that removes half its debuffs every run and yet still has 999 stacks*
Duplicated Holdover/0 mana/Doublestack Flash Freezes with the +2 Frostbite relic + duplicated Holdover/0 mana Hoarfrosts ends up...melting...bosses.
Up to Covenant 9 playing almost entirely as Remnant/Hellhorned. Keep in mind I got both clans to level 10 by Covenant 3, and there are some pretty important cards at later clan levels. Like, if you can reduce an Inferno to 1 ember, it is absurd with Remnant units and their reform strategy. Also Mortal Entrapment with Doublestack is easily the most reliably overpowered boss killing card in the game.
And, generally speaking, upgrading spells is more powerful than upgrading minions, but you want one or two minions with really strong buffs that you are trying to laser focus your reformations on so they can tackle the boss. Draff is a surprisingly strong unit. If you can get a Draff with Largestone and/or Quick, all you have to do is keep it wicked up and summon some rage imps and it will do an incredible amount of work for you. It's also important to know that at the shops (where you spend gold, more or less) you can view what's for sale and leave, then come back after you've visited another site or two at that stop. If you get lucky and get a upgrade unit shop and a flag on the same stop, it's important to be informed on your upgrade options before you decide what unit to take. Or even on what relic to choose from, sometimes.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
No I was quite clear, Melting Remnant are bad and I don't appreciate you all contradicting me!!!!!!!!!!!!
My initial impression after 12 hours of playing this is that it’s easier than Slay the Spire. But also sometimes harder because it’s not as diligent about giving you full information.
I’ve had units just... die when the pre-combat icons showed nothing of the sort.
My initial impression after 12 hours of playing this is that it’s easier than Slay the Spire. But also sometimes harder because it’s not as diligent about giving you full information.
I’ve had units just... die when the pre-combat icons showed nothing of the sort.
Was this because of Burnout, maybe because of buffs or heals applied to non-Remnant units?
My thoughts after watching a couple videos are, that this looks like Slay the Spire, but with all the unfun bits sanded off. Like how in Spire, you almost never actually want to take new cards, but in Train you usually do. Instead of one boring upgrade for each card, Train has a wide variety of ways to upgrade each card, and upgrades are pretty frequent. The map screen is much better, too.
I feel a strong urge to resurrect my dead potato computer to try it out.
Rumors of my potato's demise have been greatly exaggerated! Choo choo, mother gooses!
For my tutorial game, I upgraded one of the armorsmith dudes with extra attack and HP, then got the Copy x1 or Copy x5 event and said YOLO and threw that guy down the hole. The six of them carried me to victory. I can already see how that won't fly when I'm playing for reals, but it was fun while it lasted. GG angels
My initial impression after 12 hours of playing this is that it’s easier than Slay the Spire. But also sometimes harder because it’s not as diligent about giving you full information.
I’ve had units just... die when the pre-combat icons showed nothing of the sort.
Was this because of Burnout, maybe because of buffs or heals applied to non-Remnant units?
KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
I finally won with Umbra (allied with Awoken), picked the Monstrous trampling champ and just piled buffs on him, used Awoken spells to keep him healed up and AoE away the smaller guys. It was only Cov 1, but by the end he had like 200+x3 attacks and just solo'd the boss.
I get how to win with Awoken: get a tank or two with stupid amounts of regen and spikes supported by whatever extra damage you have and there you go. Most of the mechanics that are really brutal for the other factions (Thorns, Sweep, big piles of Multishot damage) the Awakened just sort of laugh at. It feels kind of bad to get something other than Spikes on the Sentient, but Thorned Hollow is always available.
And I get what Stygian wants to do: stall long enough to build up enough spell weakness to do thousands of damage, or build up hundreds of Frostbite to similar effect. Although I've been pretty dependent on Awoken as the secondary due to Stygian native units struggling to tank the later bosses. (Also any amount of Thorns or Sweep totally wrecks their shit instantly, which isn't great.)
Hellhorned, though...I'm missing something with Hellhorned. Their champion always ends up feeling weaker than virtually any regular unit with a couple of upgrades applied...Multishot is hard to find reliable attack buffs for on a champion and Slay is hard to trigger consistently. And every time I think I have a solid unit layout, it plateaus a little too early and dies in the last couple levels. I thought I had something going on with a very fiddly Slay/Rage setup once, but it was too fragile and ended up getting run over by something or other. I'm not quite sure what I'm missing.
With my whopping experience of three hell horned games so far, I would say you really want some way to buff the champion. Possibly via his innate Slay trigger. And someone with a butt to block for him. The horned guy that knocks people to the back is good for that, and the rage imp. Guy that grants rage when slaying, if you have extra space to fit him. Spell that grants quick. Etc
I’m stuck on covenant 9 and it sucks. I only beat 8 due to massive luck. The scaling is so insane that I don’t feel like it’s skill at this point, mostly hoping I get the right stuff in the right order.
I’m stuck on covenant 9 and it sucks. I only beat 8 due to massive luck. The scaling is so insane that I don’t feel like it’s skill at this point, mostly hoping I get the right stuff in the right order.
This is an issue with all these games, including Slay the Spire. There's a point where the skill involved is knowing the wombo combos, and when you have one component of them, just hoping for the other pieces
The artifacts in this are just gonzo powerful (all demons get multiattack 1? Jesus) so they make or break runs pretty often
I always worry to what extent they produce a fake feeling of achievement because you just played the same way repeatedly but the time you won was due to getting better draws
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
I'll win one of these days as Umbra. I keep falling apart in the last few rings.
Meanwhile, it almost feels like the Gorge: Damage Shield 1 unit is honestly stronger than my champion.
AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
edited May 2020
Okay, so that's how you win at Umbra.
Three copies of Holdover/Doublestack Void Binding, a champion spec'd into Trample, and a Crucible Warden with Multistrike, +10 ATK, and a Major Refraction event (+2 size, +30 ATK, +30 HP).
Holdover/Doublestack Void Bindings are as ridiculous as you'd think on paper.
I’m stuck on covenant 9 and it sucks. I only beat 8 due to massive luck. The scaling is so insane that I don’t feel like it’s skill at this point, mostly hoping I get the right stuff in the right order.
This is an issue with all these games, including Slay the Spire. There's a point where the skill involved is knowing the wombo combos, and when you have one component of them, just hoping for the other pieces
The artifacts in this are just gonzo powerful (all demons get multiattack 1? Jesus) so they make or break runs pretty often
I always worry to what extent they produce a fake feeling of achievement because you just played the same way repeatedly but the time you won was due to getting better draws
Yeah, I'm worried that artifacts are either overpowered or everything else is underpowered. Like, I beat C10 by going Stygian and getting the Frostbite artifact immediately. That more than doubled my starting damage and let me take every possible risk, snowballing the run hard.
Did that feel like skill? Not really. It was super linear (grab frostbite things!) with few non-obvious decisions.
I'm looking forward to patches and new content tho. Could keep things fresh.
Can't stop won't stop playing Umbra/something morsel decks that steamroll through most of the game only to crap out on the final Seraph battle.
I did get a fun win in my first game with the Melting Remnant, with Umbra in support. Those direct damage spells that scale on friendly unit deaths can put out big numbers when you're gulping down 4-5 morsels every turn.
Just had a green/red run where I got the "your train stewards have multi strike and two damage shields" right at the start. Followed by an event in the first area that have a unit +2 size and plus a ton of attack and health. I called him Big Stew and he cleaned house all run. Especially after I got the upgrade to allow a third upgrade on units.
Only run I have done where I did not purge any train stewards. They were all ridiculous monsters
I'm starting to seriously question whether it's even possible to make an Umbra deck so bad that a Crucible Collector won't win you the game. I guess the one way to lose is to have so few attackers that your Pyre dies to regular enemies, since bosses become complete non-entities.
My general rule that has worked up to covenant 7 is to get two guys that are brick walls (one of them can be your champion if you're playing awoken), then get ~4 guys that can do some kind of offense to put behind them. The walls are most important, take challenges for unit draft and route your train based on where you're most likely to get them. After you have your guys, any additional card acquisitions should be impactful spells.
After getting your walls, route to shops that upgrade units. You probably want more survival in walls and more offense on everybody else. Once you've acquired some notable spells, route to magic shops. In either kind of shop, you should probably buy up all of the cheap upgrades at the first couple you visit, you can start being more selective later.
Generally, purge stewards at your earliest convenience, then work on getting rid of most of your starter spells.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
So I’m trying to get covenant 1 down and I just get wrecked near the end. Been running Umbra/ Stygian but just don’t quite make it.
Anyone got a decent build setup? This game is super addictive and finally unlocked the last clan just before work.
As Fry said, the most important units for any run are picking up a couple solid tanks early. In this combo, you've got two options: Umbra tanks, which require Morsel combos, or Stygian tanks, which require Incant combos. Umbra tanks are probably going to be more consistent, if you can get them, because you just need to pick up a Morselmaster and you'll be set to jet.
In this combo, most of your damage is going to come from spells - neither Umbra nor Styigan has particularly hard hitting units (excepting the Stygian invoke totem that gives enemies Frostbite). Or, more specifically, while you can always make a DPS unit through a good series of upgrades, that's RNG dependent. Really good spells to look out for are anything that gives Frostbite (particularly the 0 mana one), and...I think it's called Blizzard? Whichever one deals damage to 5 guys randomly. If you put +10 damage on that one, it applies to every single tick, meaning it goes from a 10 damage spell to a 60 damage spell (or 110).
The closest I came winning on covenant 1 was the umbra slug thing with 1 shield per gorge and a morsel master at the back ended up with a ridiculous stack of shields but the boss had like 2k of HP with sweep and won the battle in the end.
With all the bad beats though keep coming back for more.
So I’m trying to get covenant 1 down and I just get wrecked near the end. Been running Umbra/ Stygian but just don’t quite make it.
Anyone got a decent build setup? This game is super addictive and finally unlocked the last clan just before work.
I've found two main paths to success with Umbra (although they kind of overlap).
One is to feed Penumbra a billion morsels, give it multistrike with Furnace Tap, and let it kill everything. The rest of your deck is dedicated to protecting your Penumbra while it grows. You can win this way with no other creatures, although a cleanup floor might help just in case. I've done this on both the Trample and Gorge paths; they each have advantages. Grovel is my favorite morsel generator for this, since it provides damage shield to protect your Umbra and gives a chance of providing morsels that provide more damage shield or lifesteal, all of which is necessary to make sure your champion isn't chipped to death. Morselmaker, on the other hand, tends to work poorly, since it has no chance of providing lifesteal or damage shield and will fill up all your space and prevent you from putting them down from elsewhere.
The other is to instead feed a bunch of morsels to a Crucible Collector to give it a million stacks of lifesteal, at which point it becomes completely immortal forever. Put a good damage dealer behind it and a cleanup floor above it. No boss in the game has any chance of getting past a Crucible Collector. Morselmaker is a nice zero-maintenance way to make sure your Collector goes the distance, although any way you get there is fine (just be careful not to play Morselmaker at a time that will result in it clogging up capacity that you need for something else; it's bad about that).
Crucible Collector, Morselmaker, and Morselmaster are the only units I ever really bother to use with Umbra. I haven't seen the purpose in any of the others so far...Crucible Warden is drastically worse than Crucible Collector (it can easily take 5+ stacks of damage shield to do the same job as one stack of Lifesteal against some enemy formations), Overgorger is strictly worse than Penumbra (and too clunky to be worth investing in even if Umbra is your secondary clan), and Alloyed Construct is seems awkward and fragile for not that much gain (you can't put a tank in front of it without depriving it of fuel, and you can give anything multistrike with Furnace Tap anyway).
One cutesy thing you can sometimes do with Umbra is get all your important spells down to zero cost (or get a Perils of Production with Holdover or something) and then Emberdrain yourself into oblivion while buffing your stuff. It's easier to do than you'd think.
The awkward thing about Umbra/Stygian in particular is that I can't think of anything that Stygian provides that Umbra cares about even a little. Literally, I'm struggling to think of even a single Stygian card that I'd be happy to take in this combo (Sap to help stabilize early, maybe?). That's mostly fine, since Umbra is good at winning on its own, but you're probably not going to be relying on Stygian cards for much of anything. The reverse pairing might flow better in that respect, since the one thing Stygian desperately needs to thrive is a good tank, and Crucible Collector is that.
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Right, my point is that when you start off you generally don't have any beef to hide them behind and you're just playing from behind unless you can get some lucky unit drafts.
I think maybe they can be okay with Hellhorned because the direct damage spells you get can act as a sort of protection before you have strong meatshields, but at that point why not just play the inherently better Awoken/Stygian combo?
Like, I'm sure there are builds for Melting Remnant that work, it's just way more effort and reliant on far more RNG than playing one of the more consistent clans, and I'm not convinced there's a strong enough payoff for it to be worth. I kind of feel the same about Umbra; they're not as gimmicky as Melting Remnant, but if you don't hit a good Gorge+Morselmaster combo pretty early, you just don't get strong enough units rolling to actually kill the stuff on your train by the time you're at or past Daedalus.
If all you're trying to do is push Covenant levels, Hellhorned, Awoken, and Stygian are all a lot more consistent in giving you something solid to draft around early on. Also, and this is key, Awoken's champion is a very strong tank, and Hellhorned and Stygian's champions can both be very strong carries as long as you draft some kind of strong tank. Umbra and Melting Remnant's champions are much more gimmicky.
Melting Remnant mostly seems to have buff spells or unit cycle spells, and the nature of their units is such that they want to be spending most of their mana summoning units every turn. This is totally at odds with pretty much every other clan except maybe Hellhorned, and has the added problem of diluting your unit upgrades because you need to have more units than usual, and preventing you from spending a lot of mana each turn on high impact spells.
The end result is that Melting Remnant actively works against the gameplan of Awoken, Stygian, and Umbra, and while they could maybe be made to work with Hellhorned, you're still running into the issue of enemy units beating the shit out of your guys every turn. Party of why spells are so good is because they can protect and heal your units or reduce how much pressure is on a given floor, but if you're constantly having to resummon little candle dudes you're not spending that mana on spells!
He's just so able to trample through whole hordes by himself.
Once again, I haven't been focusing on pushing covenant levels because I haven't hit level 10 with all the factions yet, but melting remnant easily are my strongest faction. I think you're doing something wrong if you think they're weak.
I've found the key is lifedrain buffs and eating the ember penalty (especially if you have their various ember buffs to offset that), and using morsels as blockers when necessary.
I've tended to go for a monstrous build and spam all the possible deploy limit buffs, so that I can stack bodies in front of him and feed him morsels, and it has worked consistently
Funny enough, I don't struggle with non-burnout units dying but rather some armoured enemies having too much health and making it all the way through.
I stumbled into this strategy by accident on a double random faction run and it has cleared covenant 4,5,6 (my highest attempted) in a row.
*glances over at Seraph that removes half its debuffs every run and yet still has 999 stacks*
Duplicated Holdover/0 mana/Doublestack Flash Freezes with the +2 Frostbite relic + duplicated Holdover/0 mana Hoarfrosts ends up...melting...bosses.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
And, generally speaking, upgrading spells is more powerful than upgrading minions, but you want one or two minions with really strong buffs that you are trying to laser focus your reformations on so they can tackle the boss. Draff is a surprisingly strong unit. If you can get a Draff with Largestone and/or Quick, all you have to do is keep it wicked up and summon some rage imps and it will do an incredible amount of work for you. It's also important to know that at the shops (where you spend gold, more or less) you can view what's for sale and leave, then come back after you've visited another site or two at that stop. If you get lucky and get a upgrade unit shop and a flag on the same stop, it's important to be informed on your upgrade options before you decide what unit to take. Or even on what relic to choose from, sometimes.
End result: T1, my Penumbra has 431 damage, 134 life, 16 lifesteal
I’ve had units just... die when the pre-combat icons showed nothing of the sort.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Was this because of Burnout, maybe because of buffs or heals applied to non-Remnant units?
Rumors of my potato's demise have been greatly exaggerated! Choo choo, mother gooses!
For my tutorial game, I upgraded one of the armorsmith dudes with extra attack and HP, then got the Copy x1 or Copy x5 event and said YOLO and threw that guy down the hole. The six of them carried me to victory. I can already see how that won't fly when I'm playing for reals, but it was fun while it lasted. GG angels
Nope, haven’t unlocked Remnant yet
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Fel and Seraph did not even get to board the train.
I get how to win with Awoken: get a tank or two with stupid amounts of regen and spikes supported by whatever extra damage you have and there you go. Most of the mechanics that are really brutal for the other factions (Thorns, Sweep, big piles of Multishot damage) the Awakened just sort of laugh at. It feels kind of bad to get something other than Spikes on the Sentient, but Thorned Hollow is always available.
And I get what Stygian wants to do: stall long enough to build up enough spell weakness to do thousands of damage, or build up hundreds of Frostbite to similar effect. Although I've been pretty dependent on Awoken as the secondary due to Stygian native units struggling to tank the later bosses. (Also any amount of Thorns or Sweep totally wrecks their shit instantly, which isn't great.)
Hellhorned, though...I'm missing something with Hellhorned. Their champion always ends up feeling weaker than virtually any regular unit with a couple of upgrades applied...Multishot is hard to find reliable attack buffs for on a champion and Slay is hard to trigger consistently. And every time I think I have a solid unit layout, it plateaus a little too early and dies in the last couple levels. I thought I had something going on with a very fiddly Slay/Rage setup once, but it was too fragile and ended up getting run over by something or other. I'm not quite sure what I'm missing.
This is an issue with all these games, including Slay the Spire. There's a point where the skill involved is knowing the wombo combos, and when you have one component of them, just hoping for the other pieces
The artifacts in this are just gonzo powerful (all demons get multiattack 1? Jesus) so they make or break runs pretty often
I always worry to what extent they produce a fake feeling of achievement because you just played the same way repeatedly but the time you won was due to getting better draws
Meanwhile, it almost feels like the Gorge: Damage Shield 1 unit is honestly stronger than my champion.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Three copies of Holdover/Doublestack Void Binding, a champion spec'd into Trample, and a Crucible Warden with Multistrike, +10 ATK, and a Major Refraction event (+2 size, +30 ATK, +30 HP).
Holdover/Doublestack Void Bindings are as ridiculous as you'd think on paper.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Yeah, I'm worried that artifacts are either overpowered or everything else is underpowered. Like, I beat C10 by going Stygian and getting the Frostbite artifact immediately. That more than doubled my starting damage and let me take every possible risk, snowballing the run hard.
Did that feel like skill? Not really. It was super linear (grab frostbite things!) with few non-obvious decisions.
I'm looking forward to patches and new content tho. Could keep things fresh.
Has a different rhythm than slay the spire and found that I was getting railroaded sometimes with a bad draw.
Been keeping at it and just got my first win. Silence and frostbite stacking saved the day.
monstertrain://runresult/abe8ef53-c737-4ff4-a610-7184b9e4a158
I did get a fun win in my first game with the Melting Remnant, with Umbra in support. Those direct damage spells that scale on friendly unit deaths can put out big numbers when you're gulping down 4-5 morsels every turn.
Only run I have done where I did not purge any train stewards. They were all ridiculous monsters
Thank you very much for being my 'not as bad as...' writing this as I am at 2:34 am having finally peeled myself away.
Anyone got a decent build setup? This game is super addictive and finally unlocked the last clan just before work.
After getting your walls, route to shops that upgrade units. You probably want more survival in walls and more offense on everybody else. Once you've acquired some notable spells, route to magic shops. In either kind of shop, you should probably buy up all of the cheap upgrades at the first couple you visit, you can start being more selective later.
Generally, purge stewards at your earliest convenience, then work on getting rid of most of your starter spells.
As Fry said, the most important units for any run are picking up a couple solid tanks early. In this combo, you've got two options: Umbra tanks, which require Morsel combos, or Stygian tanks, which require Incant combos. Umbra tanks are probably going to be more consistent, if you can get them, because you just need to pick up a Morselmaster and you'll be set to jet.
In this combo, most of your damage is going to come from spells - neither Umbra nor Styigan has particularly hard hitting units (excepting the Stygian invoke totem that gives enemies Frostbite). Or, more specifically, while you can always make a DPS unit through a good series of upgrades, that's RNG dependent. Really good spells to look out for are anything that gives Frostbite (particularly the 0 mana one), and...I think it's called Blizzard? Whichever one deals damage to 5 guys randomly. If you put +10 damage on that one, it applies to every single tick, meaning it goes from a 10 damage spell to a 60 damage spell (or 110).
The closest I came winning on covenant 1 was the umbra slug thing with 1 shield per gorge and a morsel master at the back ended up with a ridiculous stack of shields but the boss had like 2k of HP with sweep and won the battle in the end.
With all the bad beats though keep coming back for more.
One is to feed Penumbra a billion morsels, give it multistrike with Furnace Tap, and let it kill everything. The rest of your deck is dedicated to protecting your Penumbra while it grows. You can win this way with no other creatures, although a cleanup floor might help just in case. I've done this on both the Trample and Gorge paths; they each have advantages. Grovel is my favorite morsel generator for this, since it provides damage shield to protect your Umbra and gives a chance of providing morsels that provide more damage shield or lifesteal, all of which is necessary to make sure your champion isn't chipped to death. Morselmaker, on the other hand, tends to work poorly, since it has no chance of providing lifesteal or damage shield and will fill up all your space and prevent you from putting them down from elsewhere.
The other is to instead feed a bunch of morsels to a Crucible Collector to give it a million stacks of lifesteal, at which point it becomes completely immortal forever. Put a good damage dealer behind it and a cleanup floor above it. No boss in the game has any chance of getting past a Crucible Collector. Morselmaker is a nice zero-maintenance way to make sure your Collector goes the distance, although any way you get there is fine (just be careful not to play Morselmaker at a time that will result in it clogging up capacity that you need for something else; it's bad about that).
Crucible Collector, Morselmaker, and Morselmaster are the only units I ever really bother to use with Umbra. I haven't seen the purpose in any of the others so far...Crucible Warden is drastically worse than Crucible Collector (it can easily take 5+ stacks of damage shield to do the same job as one stack of Lifesteal against some enemy formations), Overgorger is strictly worse than Penumbra (and too clunky to be worth investing in even if Umbra is your secondary clan), and Alloyed Construct is seems awkward and fragile for not that much gain (you can't put a tank in front of it without depriving it of fuel, and you can give anything multistrike with Furnace Tap anyway).
One cutesy thing you can sometimes do with Umbra is get all your important spells down to zero cost (or get a Perils of Production with Holdover or something) and then Emberdrain yourself into oblivion while buffing your stuff. It's easier to do than you'd think.
The awkward thing about Umbra/Stygian in particular is that I can't think of anything that Stygian provides that Umbra cares about even a little. Literally, I'm struggling to think of even a single Stygian card that I'd be happy to take in this combo (Sap to help stabilize early, maybe?). That's mostly fine, since Umbra is good at winning on its own, but you're probably not going to be relying on Stygian cards for much of anything. The reverse pairing might flow better in that respect, since the one thing Stygian desperately needs to thrive is a good tank, and Crucible Collector is that.
Also this might be the one game where Rage is actually not bad.
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