I had assumed that if there's a negative joker in the shop, you'd still need an open joker slot to buy it. But I just tried it and it turns out you CAN buy it and it just goes into the joker slot it creates.
I was actually a little disappointed the game doesn’t accept wraparound straights.
Seems like the perfect kind of goofy hand that should be valid in a game that accepts Five Flushes and shit.
The joker that allows flushes and straights of 4 cards is really neat because that also enables straight/royal flushes more easily.
And even more, for compound hands like straight flushes (or presumably flush 5/flush house which I don't recall if I've specifically scienced it, but no reason to think it wouldn't work) it can apply that benefit to separate parts of the hand.
E.g. you play a 10 9 8 6 of clubs and a Jack of hearts it counts as a straight flush even though the straight and flush are built from different sets of cards.
edit: Similarly, the jokers that give you boost if the hand "contains" a hand are nice because that doesn't require the hand to be that. So a full house, three of a kind, etc all "contain" a pair, as can flushes where you have multiples of the same card.
I on the other hand, while I really liked Slay the Spire, I very much disliked that any build had to be done very specifically to be able to beat the corrupt heart.
I on the other hand, while I really liked Slay the Spire, I very much disliked that any build had to be done very specifically to be able to beat the corrupt heart.
I on the other hand, while I really liked Slay the Spire, I very much disliked that any build had to be done very specifically to be able to beat the corrupt heart.
They really don't, honestly. I've beaten A20/Heart with all kinds of silly bullshit.
The things you need to beat a20/heart are:
Ability to do average of 100/damage a turn, and the ability to survive T2/T3, which will be a 67 damage attack, and a 3x15 attack.
How you do all this is immensely variable, from cleansing rebuffs through orange pellets, abusing disarm/malaise/dark shackles, being really really really fat, being a vampire, having a lizard tail, Appriations, a fossil, etc.
But that's getting into the weeds somewhat and it's a discussion for the StS thread.
I'm just hoping that patches ease up the ante 1/2 variance, and if the goal is enabling silly bullshit (which to be fair, is fun!), then some of the underperforming cards get brought up to speed.
Managed to stumble through Purple Difficulty.
The scaling there is very steep, and death can come very quick indeed.
Nonsense like the Arm (lose level of hand you play) or the Flint (half base chips & mult) are murderous, just like the Very and Extra large blind.
I was struggling to even grow quickly enough to beat regular blinds, but if a boss with "Hey, now get that score, but 4 times as big" comes along, that's no fun.
Orange difficulty is bonkers insane. "Add $1 per Ante to the Booster Packs".
Which means that one avenue of getting jokers (via Buffoon packs) becomes nigh impossible.
And I want to unlock the last deck
And start collecting gold stickers for every joker
I think with regards to balance, what I'd like is for under performing options to be buffed and maybe rework the shop slightly.
What makes any good roguelike -good- is the variance between runs; where you have rough runs(where you sometimes scrape by, sometimes not) mixed in with those golden runs where the player power spikes to incredible heights(and in some cases, infinity) that are deeply satisfying.
Balatro so far to me delivers a lot of the former, but not the later. Even at normal, a lot of decks and jokers feel like they scrape by, but I almost never get the feeling of being powerful. At high stakes, this turns into most jokers and decks feeling like junk, and needing specific strong jokers to make it deep(which is a bad feeling). Most of my high stake runs end before ante 3, with the feeling "I didn't get offered anything that would enable me to survive".
Part of which is the game feels like it's balanced around "high rolls" where the player gets the specific joker combos. For example, Stone High Card is a very strong deck once you get the "Add a stone card every round" joker and the "Gain 0.5Xmultipiler per stone card" joker, but the deck just dies at high stakes if you miss either of those jokers. Lots of otherwise worthless combo pieces and payoff cards in a game where you're never guaranteed to get any of the other pieces.
Which in turn is why flushes feel strong, because they're open enough as a game plan that they can be made semi-reliably to work, even if you miss otherwise desirable jokers.
Stake difficulty is bonkers and needs to be changed to be much, much easier than it currently is.
Once you get to purple and higher it's obscene, and not in a fun way. What ends up happening is the difficulty settings completely destroy your early game unless you luck into either getting a good early joker that can carry you while you build up money for interest or a blind skip that gives you something similar.
Difficulty settings that make you rely upon luck in order to win are Very Bad.
I know deckbuilders getting compared to Slay the Spire is old hat at this point, but it's worth doing here. Even at the highest difficulties in Slay the Spire, you have a chance at winning if you're good enough at the game. In Balatro, you have nothing in the early game to assist you besides luck. The only way you can really start making meaningful choices (read: incorporate skill into your run instead of just rolling the dice) is through buying items or packs at the shop. Ripping away your ability to earn money right from the beginning kneecaps the player before the run even begins. Occasionally there are blind skips that are worthwhile, but again, that just feels like taking player choice away. Who's going to fight the first blind and get maybe $2 if you can open an Arcana Pack instead? But there's no jokers at the start of the game, so what you get may or may not be enough to get you on your way to scaling the way you need to.
The way Balatro handles difficulty is like if Slay the Spire took away your whale bonus at the start of the game and made you play with your basic deck for most of the first act. It's really dumb. Instead of hitting the player in the wallet right from the start, the game could ramp up prices in the shops faster as the run progresses, for example. Then there's a meaningful choice to be made in the mid-game: do you spend your money now to get that joker that will sort of help you with the upcoming boss fight, or do you save it because there's a more expensive shop coming up that might have something specifically tailored to your build?
But rendering the player unable to shop from the beginning is fucking barf.
I know deckbuilders getting compared to Slay the Spire is old hat at this point, but it's worth doing here. Even at the highest difficulties in Slay the Spire, you have a chance at winning if you're good enough at the game.
As yet another StS A18+ degen I agree with both you and Zombie. I have fun playing Balatro, but unlike StS I often feel like I lose due to chance instead of my skill.
But at the same time it is unfair, Slay the Spire from an almost fundamental level is designed that each seed is possible ( https://forgottenarbiter.github.io/Is-Every-Seed-Winnable/ ), so the challenge of the game becomes improving as a player. But balatro is like poker and therefore a game of chance, and sometimes you get the very short end.
I have played 21 hours of StS, never got a win, have no desire to ever pick it up again.
I'm at 23 hours on Balatro, dozens of wins, indeed to get all the unlocks at the very least before i put it down.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I know deckbuilders getting compared to Slay the Spire is old hat at this point, but it's worth doing here. Even at the highest difficulties in Slay the Spire, you have a chance at winning if you're good enough at the game.
As yet another StS A18+ degen I agree with both you and Zombie. I have fun playing Balatro, but unlike StS I often feel like I lose due to chance instead of my skill.
But at the same time it is unfair, Slay the Spire from an almost fundamental level is designed that each seed is possible ( https://forgottenarbiter.github.io/Is-Every-Seed-Winnable/ ), so the challenge of the game becomes improving as a player. But balatro is like poker and therefore a game of chance, and sometimes you get the very short end.
Ehhh the "it's poker so you can luck into losing" argument is a cop out. It's not poker, it's Balatro. Yes it may be based on poker but opting to make 2/3 of seeds unwinnable above a certain difficulty level "because poker" is bad game design. Is it fun? No? Then it needs to be changed.
I know deckbuilders getting compared to Slay the Spire is old hat at this point, but it's worth doing here. Even at the highest difficulties in Slay the Spire, you have a chance at winning if you're good enough at the game.
As yet another StS A18+ degen I agree with both you and Zombie. I have fun playing Balatro, but unlike StS I often feel like I lose due to chance instead of my skill.
But at the same time it is unfair, Slay the Spire from an almost fundamental level is designed that each seed is possible ( https://forgottenarbiter.github.io/Is-Every-Seed-Winnable/ ), so the challenge of the game becomes improving as a player. But balatro is like poker and therefore a game of chance, and sometimes you get the very short end.
Ehhh the "it's poker so you can luck into losing" argument is a cop out. It's not poker, it's Balatro. Yes it may be based on poker but opting to make 2/3 of seeds unwinnable above a certain difficulty level "because poker" is bad game design. Is it fun? No? Then it needs to be changed.
Everyone has different definitions of what fun is. If the designer likes high variance this design would be entirely reasonable and fun to them. People still enjoy NetHack, but I find it to be entirely unfun due to the incredibly high variance. That doesn't mean NetHack needs to change, it just isn't a game I will enjoy ( or play ).
I don't know if they'll do full rework/balance patches, but the Balatro wikia implies that there were cards in the demo or an earlier build that worked one way and now works a different way. That's sort of like balancing it. Or the thing with Hieroglyph, where you used to just go down one Ante without losing a hand. Now it's much more punishing.
I don't know if they'll do full rework/balance patches, but the Balatro wikia implies that there were cards in the demo or an earlier build that worked one way and now works a different way. That's sort of like balancing it. Or the thing with Hieroglyph, where you used to just go down one Ante without losing a hand. Now it's much more punishing.
Oh yeah you can look at the patch notes, they've been tweaking everything since it came out.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Managed a Green Stakes win with the Checkered Deck.
Arrowhead
Played cards with Spade suit give +50 Chips when scored
Negative Abstract Joker
+1 Joker Slot; +3 Mult for each Joker card (Currently +15)
The Duo
X2 Mult if played hand contains a Pair
Throwback
X0.25 Mult for each Blind skipped this run (Currently X2.75 Mult)
Cavendish
X3 Mult
1 in 1000 chance this card is destroyed at end of round.
Chased Two Pair, which I had upgraded to like Level 5 or something. Otherwise a Flush or single Pair.
Had the Verdant Leaf boss so had to sell a Joker off (it was a Holographic Droll Joker).
What makes any good roguelike -good- is the variance between runs; where you have rough runs(where you sometimes scrape by, sometimes not) mixed in with those golden runs where the player power spikes to incredible heights(and in some cases, infinity) that are deeply satisfying.
It definitely feels like with good decision making and efficient use of your resources, you can limp a mediocre deck close to ante 8, but then it just dies. In my experience so far, if your joker combo ain't cutting it, so you focus on leveling up hands, and filling your deck with +chip/mult booster cards instead, it won't be enough. Right now it feels like you either set up a progressive joker combo early, or you take the run to ante 7 and sputter out to the bigger blinds.
But they should do something like not make any standard packs or tarot cards or planet cards appear during the first Ante, so that you have more chance to get a joker or two before fighting the first boss. And lower the chance during Ante 1 for the money jokers, or the jokers like the "No sixes" that increases trigger chance.
They are all lovely, but not during Ante 1.
Also remove "Chance for a negative joker" as the very first blind skip, because nobody has the money to buy it (except with yellow deck, but that's a big exception).
And push the Arm (lose levels per hand played) and the Flint (half base chips and mult) away from Ante 1 and 2, to a later point.
Because the Flint has crippled me many times, and a normally good scoring flush becomes something like 116 points and when you need to get to 600, and even 4 flushes wouldn't get you there, well, why even try?
EDIT: And stop giving me face card jokers when playing the faceless deck; it feels like the probability for such cards is 10 times higher in that deck
And for some reason, in the hearts/spades deck, which is basically a flush deck, the probability for a Jupiter is tiny (while the Straight Flush planet, it appears easily).
Yes, I suffer from confirmation bias, why do you ask?
Money jokers are actually very very strong. Given how puntivie it is to have less than 25 gold, and the existence of The Bull, an early money joker is a great start.
Exception: vagabond, lol.
But really the shop just needs work, it's a huge part of the excess randomness the game has.
Ante 1 is the best time to get The Arm (on PC) because you're not likely to have many if any levels of those hands to begin with, so it could just be a dead blind. Unfortunately I saw mentioned upthread that on other platforms there's a bug that allows hand levels to go down to zero.
Ante 1 is the best time to get The Arm (on PC) because you're not likely to have many if any levels of those hands to begin with, so it could just be a dead blind. Unfortunately I saw mentioned upthread that on other platforms there's a bug that allows hand levels to go down to zero.
It did that for PC for a while too and I was extremely confused when it stopped. I assumed the thing was bugged for the longest time.
Money jokers are actually very very strong. Given how puntivie it is to have less than 25 gold, and the existence of The Bull, an early money joker is a great start.
Exception: vagabond, lol.
But really the shop just needs work, it's a huge part of the excess randomness the game has.
The cowboy boot joker can also get super powerful in a pure money run. Situational since you really want to get at least one, and preferably both of the interest raise vouchers. Still, I have had a monster run with The Bull, Cowboy Boot, and then some multipliers afterwards.
I’m almost always on the lookout for a money joker on high stakes in the early antes. It’s practically required when the Small Blind earns you $2 maximum on most decks. Scaling pack costs means if you don’t get a cash engine going quickly you won’t be able to afford anything.
The shop isn’t really tuned for high stakes. Two cards showing is pretty RNG-heavy, and if you want to see more you have to reroll, which costs more than a common joker to do.
Personally I would like to see rerolls cost slightly less and make the voucher that adds a card slot to shops base kit. 3 cards is still RNG dependent but you will see more things that can actually help you. I’ve lost count of the number of shops I’ve been to where everything is either meaningless to what I’ve been building or not nearly good enough. Especially considering you need linear and multiplicative jokers to even stand a chance on high stakes. It’s mandatory.
I like the idea of jokers you can’t get rid of once you add them. I would like to see some of the dumber high stakes modifiers replaced with adding more negative modifiers to jokers or something similar. Things like making a modified joker only half as effective, or having it also reducing hand size, things like that. It would keep the RNGfest intact but at least it would be more interesting than dying in the first 3 antes because the game just didn’t give you anything.
I know my posts make it seem like I’m shitting on the game, but I promise I’m really enjoying it! I just think it needs some balancing and then it’ll be perfect.
Had my first huge run with the Sacrificial Dagger joker combined with the one that clones the joker to the right copying the joker that gives X(number of empty joker slots). 100ish mult > 3X > 3X was pretty good. Still the only run I’ve broken 1m, haven been really struggling in ante 8 if I don’t get scaling jokers in ante 1.
Man, the black deck is really hard to get off the ground.
The black deck kicks you twice, because it's upside does bupkiss, but it's penalty costs you very dramatically in the early game.
Having beaten Gold stake, I'm very much feeling like all I'm doing is pulling a lever on a slot machine in this game. There's some room for skill expression, but not a lot.
What makes any good roguelike -good- is the variance between runs; where you have rough runs(where you sometimes scrape by, sometimes not) mixed in with those golden runs where the player power spikes to incredible heights(and in some cases, infinity) that are deeply satisfying.
It definitely feels like with good decision making and efficient use of your resources, you can limp a mediocre deck close to ante 8, but then it just dies. In my experience so far, if your joker combo ain't cutting it, so you focus on leveling up hands, and filling your deck with +chip/mult booster cards instead, it won't be enough. Right now it feels like you either set up a progressive joker combo early, or you take the run to ante 7 and sputter out to the bigger blinds.
I'm not so sure.
My 6th run was Hackx2, Fibonacci, 1.5x mult per suit card played, and eventually smeared joker.
Plus a bunch of mult/chips on the low cards.
So everything triggers thrice and things get silly.
It got to 50m per hand before dying to ante 12.
I guess it was never going to go infinite, but it did make me wonder how much better any cumulative joker would need to be to be an improvement.
That said, I did learn that Shortcut sucks, because it didn't feed the cumulative chips hand-contains-a-straight joker.
Yay! I managed to score a hand larger than 100M, and met the new joker in game, so all the jokers have been unlocked.
Orange stake difficulty is brutal, and feels more like a roulette game than a poker game:
- hope that you some good jokers early on
- also a non-enternal money joker or so
- and pray pray pray that the boss blinds will be kind to you
Because you are starved for money, the booster packs become more expensive, which throttles the supply of tarot/planet/spectral cards.
And Ante 8 is usually 360K to reach, unless you are me and you get Very or Extra Large Blind if I manage to scrape myself to Ante 8.
I did have a lot of fun with the Medusa Challenge (= faceless deck + 12 stone cards) and my first joker was the "add 1 stone card to your deck per blind.
The second one was the "Gain x chips per stone card in your deck". And then a Blueprint joker came along, so that challenge was exceptionally easy because of amazing luck
the black deck is painful. i beat all the other starter decks but this one i keep flaming out in ante 7 because i am barely able to keep it together for the whole game
Working on getting all the unlocks.
Decide to go for the "win in 12/18 rounds".
Pick anaglyph deck, very first attempt.
Spectral my way to 15 queen right off the bat
find some + hand size
anaglyph pays off with some doubled mega joker packs:
find Shoot the Moon (+13 mult for each queen in hand) and Throwback (x0.5 mult for each skip this run)
it was pretty dicy for a couple of the early rounds but pulled off a 12 round win on the back of queen 4 of a kind
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The black deck is heavily weighted towards endgame power, and struggles in the early game
It’s mostly okay though — until you get to Orange stake or higher, when it just cannot get rolling without some serious help from RNGeesus
Losing one of your hands while also earning almost no money from small stakes and the ballooning cost of packs means you’re gonna have a real bad time, and having an extra joker slot is fairly meaningless if you can’t afford to buy jokers
Just gotta hope you get some incredible blind skips and don’t fall at the hurdle of the first few bosses
The black deck is heavily weighted towards endgame power, and struggles in the early game
It’s mostly okay though — until you get to Orange stake or higher, when it just cannot get rolling without some serious help from RNGeesus
Losing one of your hands while also earning almost no money from small stakes and the ballooning cost of packs means you’re gonna have a real bad time, and having an extra joker slot is fairly meaningless if you can’t afford to buy jokers
Just gotta hope you get some incredible blind skips and don’t fall at the hurdle of the first few bosses
Yeah it feels like you gotta luck into a +multiplier and a +gold joker.
Yippie!
Playing a degenerate combo, that didn't get me to the 100 million hand (yes, I was playing a flush deck):
This was my 100 million hand joker combination:
Isn't polychrome Cavendish the prettiest thing you've ever seen?
(Flower pot seemed useless but hey, it was a negative uncommon, so Baseball made it useful)
The last condition based joker unlock I have is the $400 one. Not sure if there’s any way to brute force that or if I have to wait for the stars to align later in a run.
Still only had two of the three legendaries. I keep getting the same couple every time.
And there’s a number of vouchers I’ve unlocked but not managed to come across in the shop yet.
I just got $384 with the gold deck, before slamming into the 100 mil ante.
I think I almost got there with the red deck early on, purely because I hadn't unlocked a bunch of vouchers.
But for $400, it looks like you want to get the Present joker to get your Temperance payout as high as possible (before selling it) and then either To the Moon or an early Rocket help a lot.
Need the Seed voucher too, as well as every other economy voucher.
I'm tempted to go back to the.. Ancient? (No face cards) deck to just try for the Fibonacci/Hack/Lucky or Gold Seal cards money combo instead.
But Mask seems good too, if you can land it on the Parking voucher.
I just beat the no face cards deck yesterday with an early walkie talkie (+4 mult +10 chips for 10 and 4 cards) and immediately building around a full house of said 10s and 4s. Beat ante 11 with that.
I just beat the no face cards deck yesterday with an early walkie talkie (+4 mult +10 chips for 10 and 4 cards) and immediately building around a full house of said 10s and 4s. Beat ante 11 with that.
Dom did that arrangement live on his stream. His stream's a good time, and he has a bunch of great arrangements out there. Aaand his band is playing the 20th anniversary concert at PAX East here in a couple weeks.
Posts
The joker that allows flushes and straights of 4 cards is really neat because that also enables straight/royal flushes more easily.
And even more, for compound hands like straight flushes (or presumably flush 5/flush house which I don't recall if I've specifically scienced it, but no reason to think it wouldn't work) it can apply that benefit to separate parts of the hand.
E.g. you play a 10 9 8 6 of clubs and a Jack of hearts it counts as a straight flush even though the straight and flush are built from different sets of cards.
edit: Similarly, the jokers that give you boost if the hand "contains" a hand are nice because that doesn't require the hand to be that. So a full house, three of a kind, etc all "contain" a pair, as can flushes where you have multiples of the same card.
Yeah I honestly tired of StS after like A3.
They really don't, honestly. I've beaten A20/Heart with all kinds of silly bullshit.
The things you need to beat a20/heart are:
Ability to do average of 100/damage a turn, and the ability to survive T2/T3, which will be a 67 damage attack, and a 3x15 attack.
How you do all this is immensely variable, from cleansing rebuffs through orange pellets, abusing disarm/malaise/dark shackles, being really really really fat, being a vampire, having a lizard tail, Appriations, a fossil, etc.
But that's getting into the weeds somewhat and it's a discussion for the StS thread.
I'm just hoping that patches ease up the ante 1/2 variance, and if the goal is enabling silly bullshit (which to be fair, is fun!), then some of the underperforming cards get brought up to speed.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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The scaling there is very steep, and death can come very quick indeed.
Nonsense like the Arm (lose level of hand you play) or the Flint (half base chips & mult) are murderous, just like the Very and Extra large blind.
I was struggling to even grow quickly enough to beat regular blinds, but if a boss with "Hey, now get that score, but 4 times as big" comes along, that's no fun.
Orange difficulty is bonkers insane. "Add $1 per Ante to the Booster Packs".
Which means that one avenue of getting jokers (via Buffoon packs) becomes nigh impossible.
And I want to unlock the last deck
And start collecting gold stickers for every joker
What makes any good roguelike -good- is the variance between runs; where you have rough runs(where you sometimes scrape by, sometimes not) mixed in with those golden runs where the player power spikes to incredible heights(and in some cases, infinity) that are deeply satisfying.
Balatro so far to me delivers a lot of the former, but not the later. Even at normal, a lot of decks and jokers feel like they scrape by, but I almost never get the feeling of being powerful. At high stakes, this turns into most jokers and decks feeling like junk, and needing specific strong jokers to make it deep(which is a bad feeling). Most of my high stake runs end before ante 3, with the feeling "I didn't get offered anything that would enable me to survive".
Part of which is the game feels like it's balanced around "high rolls" where the player gets the specific joker combos. For example, Stone High Card is a very strong deck once you get the "Add a stone card every round" joker and the "Gain 0.5Xmultipiler per stone card" joker, but the deck just dies at high stakes if you miss either of those jokers. Lots of otherwise worthless combo pieces and payoff cards in a game where you're never guaranteed to get any of the other pieces.
Which in turn is why flushes feel strong, because they're open enough as a game plan that they can be made semi-reliably to work, even if you miss otherwise desirable jokers.
Once you get to purple and higher it's obscene, and not in a fun way. What ends up happening is the difficulty settings completely destroy your early game unless you luck into either getting a good early joker that can carry you while you build up money for interest or a blind skip that gives you something similar.
Difficulty settings that make you rely upon luck in order to win are Very Bad.
I know deckbuilders getting compared to Slay the Spire is old hat at this point, but it's worth doing here. Even at the highest difficulties in Slay the Spire, you have a chance at winning if you're good enough at the game. In Balatro, you have nothing in the early game to assist you besides luck. The only way you can really start making meaningful choices (read: incorporate skill into your run instead of just rolling the dice) is through buying items or packs at the shop. Ripping away your ability to earn money right from the beginning kneecaps the player before the run even begins. Occasionally there are blind skips that are worthwhile, but again, that just feels like taking player choice away. Who's going to fight the first blind and get maybe $2 if you can open an Arcana Pack instead? But there's no jokers at the start of the game, so what you get may or may not be enough to get you on your way to scaling the way you need to.
The way Balatro handles difficulty is like if Slay the Spire took away your whale bonus at the start of the game and made you play with your basic deck for most of the first act. It's really dumb. Instead of hitting the player in the wallet right from the start, the game could ramp up prices in the shops faster as the run progresses, for example. Then there's a meaningful choice to be made in the mid-game: do you spend your money now to get that joker that will sort of help you with the upcoming boss fight, or do you save it because there's a more expensive shop coming up that might have something specifically tailored to your build?
But rendering the player unable to shop from the beginning is fucking barf.
As yet another StS A18+ degen I agree with both you and Zombie. I have fun playing Balatro, but unlike StS I often feel like I lose due to chance instead of my skill.
But at the same time it is unfair, Slay the Spire from an almost fundamental level is designed that each seed is possible ( https://forgottenarbiter.github.io/Is-Every-Seed-Winnable/ ), so the challenge of the game becomes improving as a player. But balatro is like poker and therefore a game of chance, and sometimes you get the very short end.
I have played 21 hours of StS, never got a win, have no desire to ever pick it up again.
I'm at 23 hours on Balatro, dozens of wins, indeed to get all the unlocks at the very least before i put it down.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Ehhh the "it's poker so you can luck into losing" argument is a cop out. It's not poker, it's Balatro. Yes it may be based on poker but opting to make 2/3 of seeds unwinnable above a certain difficulty level "because poker" is bad game design. Is it fun? No? Then it needs to be changed.
Everyone has different definitions of what fun is. If the designer likes high variance this design would be entirely reasonable and fun to them. People still enjoy NetHack, but I find it to be entirely unfun due to the incredibly high variance. That doesn't mean NetHack needs to change, it just isn't a game I will enjoy ( or play ).
The only real point is whether Sokoban gives you an amulet of reflection or not.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Oh yeah you can look at the patch notes, they've been tweaking everything since it came out.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Played cards with Spade suit give +50 Chips when scored
Negative Abstract Joker
+1 Joker Slot; +3 Mult for each Joker card (Currently +15)
The Duo
X2 Mult if played hand contains a Pair
Throwback
X0.25 Mult for each Blind skipped this run (Currently X2.75 Mult)
Cavendish
X3 Mult
1 in 1000 chance this card is destroyed at end of round.
Chased Two Pair, which I had upgraded to like Level 5 or something. Otherwise a Flush or single Pair.
Had the Verdant Leaf boss so had to sell a Joker off (it was a Holographic Droll Joker).
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
It definitely feels like with good decision making and efficient use of your resources, you can limp a mediocre deck close to ante 8, but then it just dies. In my experience so far, if your joker combo ain't cutting it, so you focus on leveling up hands, and filling your deck with +chip/mult booster cards instead, it won't be enough. Right now it feels like you either set up a progressive joker combo early, or you take the run to ante 7 and sputter out to the bigger blinds.
But they should do something like not make any standard packs or tarot cards or planet cards appear during the first Ante, so that you have more chance to get a joker or two before fighting the first boss. And lower the chance during Ante 1 for the money jokers, or the jokers like the "No sixes" that increases trigger chance.
They are all lovely, but not during Ante 1.
Also remove "Chance for a negative joker" as the very first blind skip, because nobody has the money to buy it (except with yellow deck, but that's a big exception).
And push the Arm (lose levels per hand played) and the Flint (half base chips and mult) away from Ante 1 and 2, to a later point.
Because the Flint has crippled me many times, and a normally good scoring flush becomes something like 116 points and when you need to get to 600, and even 4 flushes wouldn't get you there, well, why even try?
EDIT: And stop giving me face card jokers when playing the faceless deck; it feels like the probability for such cards is 10 times higher in that deck
And for some reason, in the hearts/spades deck, which is basically a flush deck, the probability for a Jupiter is tiny (while the Straight Flush planet, it appears easily).
Yes, I suffer from confirmation bias, why do you ask?
Exception: vagabond, lol.
But really the shop just needs work, it's a huge part of the excess randomness the game has.
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Switch: 0293 6817 9891
It did that for PC for a while too and I was extremely confused when it stopped. I assumed the thing was bugged for the longest time.
The cowboy boot joker can also get super powerful in a pure money run. Situational since you really want to get at least one, and preferably both of the interest raise vouchers. Still, I have had a monster run with The Bull, Cowboy Boot, and then some multipliers afterwards.
The shop isn’t really tuned for high stakes. Two cards showing is pretty RNG-heavy, and if you want to see more you have to reroll, which costs more than a common joker to do.
Personally I would like to see rerolls cost slightly less and make the voucher that adds a card slot to shops base kit. 3 cards is still RNG dependent but you will see more things that can actually help you. I’ve lost count of the number of shops I’ve been to where everything is either meaningless to what I’ve been building or not nearly good enough. Especially considering you need linear and multiplicative jokers to even stand a chance on high stakes. It’s mandatory.
I like the idea of jokers you can’t get rid of once you add them. I would like to see some of the dumber high stakes modifiers replaced with adding more negative modifiers to jokers or something similar. Things like making a modified joker only half as effective, or having it also reducing hand size, things like that. It would keep the RNGfest intact but at least it would be more interesting than dying in the first 3 antes because the game just didn’t give you anything.
I know my posts make it seem like I’m shitting on the game, but I promise I’m really enjoying it! I just think it needs some balancing and then it’ll be perfect.
The black deck kicks you twice, because it's upside does bupkiss, but it's penalty costs you very dramatically in the early game.
Having beaten Gold stake, I'm very much feeling like all I'm doing is pulling a lever on a slot machine in this game. There's some room for skill expression, but not a lot.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
I'm not so sure.
My 6th run was Hackx2, Fibonacci, 1.5x mult per suit card played, and eventually smeared joker.
Plus a bunch of mult/chips on the low cards.
So everything triggers thrice and things get silly.
It got to 50m per hand before dying to ante 12.
I guess it was never going to go infinite, but it did make me wonder how much better any cumulative joker would need to be to be an improvement.
That said, I did learn that Shortcut sucks, because it didn't feed the cumulative chips hand-contains-a-straight joker.
Orange stake difficulty is brutal, and feels more like a roulette game than a poker game:
- hope that you some good jokers early on
- also a non-enternal money joker or so
- and pray pray pray that the boss blinds will be kind to you
Because you are starved for money, the booster packs become more expensive, which throttles the supply of tarot/planet/spectral cards.
And Ante 8 is usually 360K to reach, unless you are me and you get Very or Extra Large Blind if I manage to scrape myself to Ante 8.
I did have a lot of fun with the Medusa Challenge (= faceless deck + 12 stone cards) and my first joker was the "add 1 stone card to your deck per blind.
The second one was the "Gain x chips per stone card in your deck". And then a Blueprint joker came along, so that challenge was exceptionally easy because of amazing luck
I've been struggling to beat the blue deck ever since.
Decide to go for the "win in 12/18 rounds".
Pick anaglyph deck, very first attempt.
Spectral my way to 15 queen right off the bat
find some + hand size
anaglyph pays off with some doubled mega joker packs:
find Shoot the Moon (+13 mult for each queen in hand) and Throwback (x0.5 mult for each skip this run)
it was pretty dicy for a couple of the early rounds but pulled off a 12 round win on the back of queen 4 of a kind
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
It’s mostly okay though — until you get to Orange stake or higher, when it just cannot get rolling without some serious help from RNGeesus
Losing one of your hands while also earning almost no money from small stakes and the ballooning cost of packs means you’re gonna have a real bad time, and having an extra joker slot is fairly meaningless if you can’t afford to buy jokers
Just gotta hope you get some incredible blind skips and don’t fall at the hurdle of the first few bosses
Yeah it feels like you gotta luck into a +multiplier and a +gold joker.
Playing a degenerate combo, that didn't get me to the 100 million hand (yes, I was playing a flush deck):
This was my 100 million hand joker combination:
Isn't polychrome Cavendish the prettiest thing you've ever seen?
(Flower pot seemed useless but hey, it was a negative uncommon, so Baseball made it useful)
Still only had two of the three legendaries. I keep getting the same couple every time.
And there’s a number of vouchers I’ve unlocked but not managed to come across in the shop yet.
I think I almost got there with the red deck early on, purely because I hadn't unlocked a bunch of vouchers.
But for $400, it looks like you want to get the Present joker to get your Temperance payout as high as possible (before selling it) and then either To the Moon or an early Rocket help a lot.
Need the Seed voucher too, as well as every other economy voucher.
I'm tempted to go back to the.. Ancient? (No face cards) deck to just try for the Fibonacci/Hack/Lucky or Gold Seal cards money combo instead.
But Mask seems good too, if you can land it on the Parking voucher.
I just beat the no face cards deck yesterday with an early walkie talkie (+4 mult +10 chips for 10 and 4 cards) and immediately building around a full house of said 10s and 4s. Beat ante 11 with that.
Dom did that arrangement live on his stream. His stream's a good time, and he has a bunch of great arrangements out there. Aaand his band is playing the 20th anniversary concert at PAX East here in a couple weeks.
Still enjoyable, though.
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