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Help me be less terrible at Slay the Spire

Not quite yet! Early access starts on March 5th. Which is exciting, but it also means it'll be another year or two before it fully releases for those of us who just want to play the finished game.
 
I've never played a game in early access before, but I couldn't resist and picked up Slay the Spire 2 today. Having done an afternoon of runs, I'm happy to report it's still Slay the Spire but with Even More Stuff. I really like how they're handling meta progression this time and the new characters (I've only seen two so far) are fun and interesting. I can see losing dozens of hours to this game, so I'm going to try and intersperse it with other games so I don't feel like I'm done with it before the full release. Still, it already feels extremely polished, so I don't feel too bad about jumping in early.
 
I made it to the Act 3 boss and died on my first StS2 run. The game already feels pretty much done to me.
 
I don't know if it's just me (the person who made a thread entitled "Help me be less terrible at Slay the Spire") understanding the game better or if things aren't balanced as finely as the original, but so far I feel like the sequel is a bit easier. I've done maybe nine runs so far and won six of them. I've even gone up to the first ascension, something I never did on the first game.

I'm not complaining! Either way I'm still having a great time. I'll be very curious to see how the devs tune things going forwards.
 
This (I haven't tried to share a Steam screenshot before so hoping it works) is probably just placeholder art but I kinda love how goofy it looks.
 
Violentvixen said:
This (I haven't tried to share a Steam screenshot before so hoping it works) is probably just placeholder art but I kinda love how goofy it looks.
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It says placeholder in the bottom right corner, as does all the other Timeline art. I'm excited to see what the final art looks like, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to miss the MS Paint vibes.
 
lincolnic said:
It says placeholder in the bottom right corner, as does all the other Timeline art. I'm excited to see what the final art looks like, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to miss the MS Paint vibes.
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I must admit I had to look real hard to find the text that said placeholder, ha.
 
I pulled out a win with The Regent tonight on my first try. I had some luck due to a couple auto-revive items I picked up, but still I only used one of them against the Act 3 boss (the Doormaker is pretty cool btw). I really wasn't confident my run was gonna go the distance, but I leaned into a thing where I got 3 Wish cards at the start of Act 3, which let you draw any card from your deck, and so I was able to cobble together the right pieces I needed a lot of the time after that.
 
The Regent feels like the toughest character for me and I'm not sure if it's just because he's new, or if he needs a lot of rebalancing before 1.0. The Celestial Sword seems very awkward to the point of being extremely hard to successfully build around; I've had much better luck building around cards with Star costs instead. My last Stars run ended up extremely busted. At the start of Act 2 (I think), I got an Innate power from one of the Ancients that gave me a Star every time I played a card, followed almost immediately by another power that did 3 damage to all enemies (upgraded to 4) every time I spent or gained Stars. The deck kind of played itself from that point forwards.
 
My one successful run with him last night did rely on the Sword (I dealt the final blow to the boss with like a 180 damage sword), but I can't say it was actually a very effective deck for the most part. Had a mix of Star generation/consumption that wasn't terribly powerful, so mostly my deck was trying to draw cards and dig into the few powerful things I had.
 
I'm not saying the sword is bad as, like, a thing in your deck sometimes. I'm saying that the character is currently balanced in such a way that it feels very hard to build your whole deck around it as a strategy. Increasing your max energy seems a lot tougher than in the first game, so a cost of 2 makes it very expensive from the start. And once you do play your sword, you have to redraw it before you can attack with it again, meaning you're left with a a bunch of cards in between that don't really affect your enemies until you do. It feels like they need more cards that make the sword itself easier to play, or that can tutor it from your draw/discard piles or something.

I had a good old-fashioned Body Slam build with the Ironclad tonight, which is always fun. Unlocked his "beat 15 Elites" Epoch along the way.
 
lincolnic said:
It feels like they need more cards that make the sword itself easier to play, or that can tutor it from your draw/discard piles or something.
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That's kinda what I was doing to some extent. It wasn't very streamlined but I was able to get the sword card back from my discard pile with I think 1 card... don't remember exactly. Plus the Wish cards would let me pull it out of my deck after it got shuffled back in.

I won my first run with Necrobinder tonight and man that is a fun character to play with. I almost didn't think I was gonna get the win, but mercifully my Act 3 boss took a turn off from attacking when we were both around 18 HP. Had a pretty fun Summoning/Soul build, but I am super interested in their Doom cards too.

So far I've only lost with the Ironclad, which kinda tracks because that was my least favorite character in the first game, heh.
 
Necrobinder is really fun, yeah. Maybe my favorite character so far. I have a Pro Tip that wasn't obvious to me for a couple of runs: if you get any of her powers that have you lose an amount of strength to make an enemy also lose strength, that doesn't affect Osty's damage at all! He's not losing anything. My most successful decks with her have been Osty-focused but I avoided those powers because I didn't realize they wouldn't affect his attacks.

I only played seriously with Doom in one run, but it kinda felt like a worse version of Poison to me. Having to wait until the end of the enemy's turn for it to kick in was a little more cumbersome than I expected, and unlike Poison, it doesn't do anything by itself if you're not also attacking. Kinda like the Celestial Sword, I think it's totally fine as something that might happen to end up in your deck -- I've had encounters where a little bit of Doom was able to close them out a turn or two quicker than they otherwise would've ended -- but I haven't seen a great way to build around it yet. It's possible that there are more Necrobinder cards I haven't unlocked that will make it more appealing.
 
I've only got Regent and Defect left to clear Ascension 1. Necrobinder took me like 4 runs to finally clear A1. I don't think I really got very far with Ascensions in the first game. So now I'm just following the Timeline unlocks.
 
lincolnic said:
I only played seriously with Doom in one run, but it kinda felt like a worse version of Poison to me.
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Several days and runs later, I'd like to report I was wrong about this. Doom is fine. Poison, on the other hand, is currently a lot less viable than it was in StS 1. Maybe it'll come back in future balance patches.

I've unlocked all the Epochs and have cleared A2 with everybody (A3 with the Silent), so I might slow down on the game for now. There's a lot of time ahead of 1.0 and I imagine a lot of things will change by then. Better to take my foot off the gas and still be excited to play the game later rather than burn out on it before it's officially released.
 
We tried multiplayer for the first time and it's very fun and we had no glitches at all. We'd played the first game with some multiplayer mods that were fun but not stable so I'm really happy the second game has official multiplayer.
 
Violentvixen said:
We tried multiplayer for the first time and it's very fun and we had no glitches at all. We'd played the first game with some multiplayer mods that were fun but not stable so I'm really happy the second game has official multiplayer.
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I've heard nothing but good things about the multiplayer in this game but haven't been able to try it yet myself. I want to though! It has unique cards, right?
 
lincolnic said:
I've heard nothing but good things about the multiplayer in this game but haven't been able to try it yet myself. I want to though! It has unique cards, right?
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Yeah, we were playing as Silent and Defect and Silent had a card that let my next attack hit twice which was cool
 
It's a couple months later and I'm still playing fairly regularly (not every day as I don't have the time, but certainly a couple times a week). I've been enjoying working my way up the ascension ladder, which I never tried in the first game. Right now I have Ironclad and Silent at A8 and everyone else on A7 (except for the Regent, who's still on A6).

I saw some statistics from the devs recently that said the average win rate for a given run is around 25%, which somehow feels both surprisingly low and also not that far from my own experience. I've definitely learned a bunch since the game came out, but I feel like I still have a long way to go. Lately I've been trying to really pay attention to either drafting things that I know I'll need for upcoming fights, or things that I know my deck is missing (things like noticing I don't have enough card draw, or enough block, or enough AOE, etc). I'm not sure if I'll try to clear A10 with everybody, but if I get there, I'll probably stop until they launch the full 1.0 and then start a new save file to experience the finished product.
 
I've got everyone up at A9 now, and holy crap A9 is such a massive difficulty spike. I was home sick today so I spent objectively too much time playing, and I think maybe only three runs made it out of the first act. It feels like if you don't know exactly what you're doing at every possible step, you've got no chance to succeed. I might stop here, honestly, I'm not entirely sure if I can find the fun at that difficulty.
 
I'm at A9 on a few and it's a bit of slog. I feel like, at this point, it's all up to the RNG and if you don't get a busted card or relic out the gate, you're screwed.
 
Balrog said:
I feel like, at this point, it's all up to the RNG and if you don't get a busted card or relic out the gate, you're screwed.
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Yeah. I mean, I know from the fact that there are content creators who exclusively play on high ascensions that this isn't objectively true, but it sure feels that way sometimes.
 
Right now I feel like there are two parts of the game that are major difficulty spikes. Act 1 is much tougher in STS2 than it was in STS1 - especially the bosses, who don't offer nearly as many prep/attackless turns as Guardian/Slime Boss/Hexaghost. Hard pool hallway fights are also pretty costly, and can cost you 10+ HP on one bad draw. In STS1 I could focus on taking risks and building resources in Act 1 - in this one, I'm just trying to survive (while building out a coherent, or at least workable, deck.)

The other big difficulty spike IMO is actually Act 2 elites, which were already pretty terrifying in the original. Decimillipede is a strictly worse version of the slavers fight from STS1, with 3 enemies (who will regenerate unless all are killed) attacking every turn, starting at 29 damage the first turn and scaling up from there. It will probably kill you if you don't have sufficient AoE. The bee man requires either non-Attack damage sources or sufficient power in your attacks to outrace the statuses and damage. And the dorito guy penalizes non-Attack damage, so don't lean in too hard on that archetype. Unless things are already looking great, anything more than 2 elite fights in Act 2 is a little hubristic.
 
ozacrot said:
The other big difficulty spike IMO is actually Act 2 elites
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Big agree, Act 2 elites are super tough. The dorito guy (Infested Prism?) was too easy in its original incarnation, but I think they went way too far in the opposite direction when they made the current version.

I played a few more A9 runs today and I think this is where the game might lose me. It feels like you have to focus so much on optimizing each turn and card choice that there's no room to just...have fun playing a game. Obviously "fun" is subjective, and I like hard games, but the odds feel so overwhelmingly stacked against you at that point.
 
Having said all that, I did get an A9 victory with the Ironclad today. I read some internet advice about how being able to build for the Act 1 elites will set you up in a better position to win, specifically that if you're in Overgrowth you want to be able to do more damage quickly and if you're in the Underdocks you want to be a bit tankier with more block. I rolled Underdocks and chose to transform a Strike and a Defend for my starter relic, got Conflagration and Feel No Pain, and was able to draft around the strength/exhaust plan. The run went shockingly smoothly -- probably better than any other run for the past couple of weeks.

Maybe I'm not out yet.
 
lincolnic said:
I read some internet advice about how being able to build for the Act 1 elites will set you up in a better position to win, specifically that if you're in Overgrowth you want to be able to do more damage quickly and if you're in the Underdocks you want to be a bit tankier with more block.
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I think this has cracked things open for me; I've noticed a direct correlation between runs that are able to take at least two elites in Act 1 and runs that succeed. (Obviously, small and anecdotal sample size so far, but still.)

I had two more A9 wins today, one with the Silent (my first run of the day, very sweet poison/shiv deck) and another with the Regent (had a couple of losses before I was able to get rolling with him). The Regent deck was one of the more absurd decks I've ever had (in a fun way). Early on I hit the event that lets you take either a relic or card from the first game that was cut from the second. It gave me the old Defect card Hello World, a 1-cost power that adds a random common card to your hand at the start of every turn. Regent has a ton of "whenever you create a card" synergies, so I wasn't upset about it. Pretty shortly after that I was offered a copy of Tyranny, another 1-cost power that lets you draw an extra card every turn and then exhaust a card from your hand. Stacked on top of each other, they trigger in the order you'd want them to, so you create the random common first and then get to choose a card to exhaust. If I didn't want or need the card it created, I just exhausted it. Upgrading both made them Innate, so I was able to set this up at the start of every single encounter.

After getting the Tyranny I knew I wanted to lean into card creation, so I kept an eye out for things like Supermassive (eventually finding three), Pillar of Creation (found one), and the easier to find stuff like Collision Course and CHARGE!!. An Arsenal would've been the cherry on top, but I never saw one. Other helpful stuff I did find was Joss Paper (letting me draw a card after every five exhausts), the relic that enchants all your Defends with Goopy (so they permanently gain block and then exhaust every time you use them, letting me draw into the more important parts of the deck faster) and, late in Act 3, the event that gives you the opportunity to duplicate your entire deck in exchange for a curse. At that point I was steamrolling things, so I figured "what the hell" and went for it. Here's what the winning deck looked like:

JaYGTSV.jpeg


Don't let the 11 HP in the top left fool you, I was mostly untouchable for the majority of the run. I lost basically all of that in the final boss fight (the Queen), when I had an unlucky string of turns where I failed to draw or generate enough block before killing her minion. I had 11 HP when it died, and I never took another point of damage after that.
 
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