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Slice & Dice: Talking about both slicing and dicing

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
Slice & Dice is a dice-based dungeon crawler available on itch.io, Google Play, and the Apple Store. It is my 2022 GOTY. You should play it.

@Dark Medusa picked it up recently. This isn't the first time I've considered making this thread, but this is a more convenient format than Discord for an effort post, even if it's not the best effort post to kickstart the thread with.

OH WELL, HERE WE GO

How to kill Hexia

Of the game's three last bosses, Hexia is the one most likely to hard-counter your team. This is because of her two innates: first, she deals damage to melee attackers equal to the damage they deal; second, she deals one damage per mana spent to your bottom hero. This means that many teams have no way to damage her without taking damage. If you come up against Hexia with such a team and with no plan, you are going to have a bad time.

Before we talk about ways to deal with her, let's take a look at Hexia's die. She's got two each of these three faces:
  • 8 damage, descend, inflict-pain: This is pretty bad. 16 damage this turn (and likely a bit more next turn) is hard to deal with.
  • 4 damage, petrify: Whether this is bad depends entirely on whether you brought cleanse to the fight. If you didn't, and she targets a key hero on turn 1, you've probably lost.
  • Summon a demon: This is never great, but whether it's going to ruin your day depends on whether you planned to slow-play this fight. If you can burst down Hexia, the demon won't be much of a threat. If you planned to slowly whittle away at Hexia while soaking the damage, the demons might have something to say about that.

As with anything else in the game, success against Hexia involves killing her faster than she kills you. Hexia has 30 HP, and while your party collectively has more by the end of the game, you're still competing against a potential 16 damage per turn from Hexia alone. So we would prefer not to have to take damage one-for-one on top of that. What are our outs?

Orange

Poison: Venom and Assassin both have access to poison. After you eat the one-time up-front damage, you get recurring damage on Hexia.

Ranged: Assassin and Sharpshot actually get to deal direct damage without taking any! Of course, any items you have that add ranged to dice will be great for this battle.


Yellow

Steel: Brawler, Bash, and Curator have damage faces with the steel keyword. Yellow will still take damage, but the damage he takes with Steel will just be the face's base pips.

Just hit her already: The best yellow can usually do, though, is use his relatively large HP to weather the storm. Special mention to Leader for enabling other heroes to do better, though.


Gray

Valkyrie: Preventing death is a very cool trick. The most common use case is to slap it on blue then go ham with spells for a turn, but you can always find a use for "don't die" in this fight. The resurrection face is also very nice.

Shields, generally: The bigger, the better. You need damage mitigation in this fight. Special mention to Paladin for "shield + heal" and to Paladin and Stalwart for "shield, cleanse."


Red

Healing, generally: Shields are probably a little better, since you're otherwise limited to how much HP you can hold, but this is a fight that puts red through the paces.

Regen in particular: If you stack enough of it, you can get away with ignoring a lot of damage.

Resurrection: It's the last fight. There's no HP penalty to deal with. I think you also get a free cleanse off of dying, too, which neatly deals with a petrified hero.

Salve: Witch's spell deserves a special call-out for being efficient enough to outpace Hexia's mana burn.

Wraith: With cantrip dodge and the Bind spell, Wraith gives you multiple tools to bypass Hexia's gimmick.


Blue

Blaze: A single cast nearly kills Warlock from full health, but it's extremely mana-efficient, dealing more than twice as much in return.

Miasma: Poison is also good when you have to spend blue's HP on it. Blue gets worse bang for his buck, but he gets cleave in exchange.

Dodge: Orange has dodge, too, but Weaver and Chronos deserve special mention because they can hide from mana burn.


Items

Frankly, most items are useful to one degree or another here, but a few of them deserve special mention.

Titanbane Potion: There's not a lot of game-changers at tier 2. Titanbane Potion is a waste of a pick for most of the game, but it's a "get out of Hexia free" card. You still have to roll it, though.

Spell: Sprout: This is the poor man's Salve: from the third cast on, you get the same 2-for-1 mana efficiency.

Determination: This hero can't die for the first two turns. You can kill Hexia in two turns, right?

Ornate Hilt: Self-shield to all damage sides. Almost as good as ranged!

Shining Bow, Triple Shuriken: Ranged to all damage sides. Even better than Ornate Hilt!

Blinding Bolt: After a spell is cast, self-shield 2. This is great on blue, since it cancels out mana burn for Burst.

Ichor Chalice: 1 damage to the top-most enemy for each wasted point of healing you receive. This is a trap! You'll still get damaged by Hexia.

Study: Changes Burst into Burst+, putting you slightly ahead of the curve on mana efficiency.
 

Dark Medusa

Diamond Crusader
(He/they)
Thanks Mogri, definitely a good guide. I'm sort of souring a bit on the game since I've unlocked quite a bit of things and am hitting my head against hard. I've unlocked all 100 heroes though! It's fun, I just need to get a sense of what the long game is on this game that is already, admittedly, a big value at $7! Trying to win two hard runs in a row right now.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
For me, the long game has been achievement-hunting. Tonight, I beat Brutal (two difficulties after Hard: 20 points of curses to Hard's 4) in Custom with five blues, which is easily the strongest party. (The last boss was Hexia.) Before that, I'd been chasing two consecutive Classic mode Unfair wins (10 points of curses). I only have one achievement left: I need to pick a specific tier -2 item, which requires a specific curse plus a little luck.

For other people, the long game is about the leaderboards, which means Classic win streaks or extremely long Cursed mode runs. There are no leaderboards for difficulties below Hard, and it's impossible to reliably win anything above Unfair, so those are the only real competitive boards.

Success in the higher difficulties hinges heavily on figuring out which curses are okay and which will wipe you. A handful of the level 4 curses are barely noticeable (3rd turn goblins is maybe the easiest), while most of them range from pretty bad to ruinous (single-use on all faces).

If you're getting frustrated with Hard, I recommend trying the "complex hard" option, which lets you choose curses a la carte as long as they total 4 points or more. You'll get more variety, and it tends to be slightly easier.
 

Dark Medusa

Diamond Crusader
(He/they)
I actually found complex hard (which I unlocked two days ago) to be harder to grok because it's hard for me to totally understand what's easier than other curses and how certain curses interact with certain party compositions and other curses, whereas one strong curse is easier to think around. But yeah, once you get past the knowledge barrier it makes sense it'd be easier. But that's one thing I'm a little frustrated by is selecting the wrong curses and then wasting some more time figuring that out, it doesn't feel very satisfying to me.

What's your opinion on certain curses? I'd be interested to read about it.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
I just downloaded the Android version since I can try it for free, and I'm finding this interface really unintuitive.

I can't for the life of me figure out how to use magic? My mage keeps getting the blue whirlpool from dice but when I click on the mage and then an enemy nothing seems to happen? Then I get a notice that I'm storing mana, and that seems like it's hinting that I should somehow be using it instead?

I beat the first battle and got some sort of grid for upgrades but nothing seemed to happen no matter where I tapped. I opened the inventory but didn't understand what I was supposed to do. I tried to close the window but then it just told me I would be canceling the upgrade?

I'd like to play this but there's something I'm fundamentally not seeing here. I wish one of the trailers had a video of a battle or something.
 

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
As I understand the game from watching people play it on YouTube your mage generate mana from their dice and then once you have enough you click the spell name at the bottom of the UI to cast the spell.

Is your device not working with the game? When you get the character upgrade choices then you should be able to tap one of them to see the details and get the choose to make the upgrade.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Is your device not working with the game? When you get the character upgrade choices then you should be able to tap one of them to see the details and get the choose to make the upgrade.
Yeah, might be a phone issue then, because that's exactly what I was trying to do and nothing was happening. My phone's a bit older and was a lower tier at the time of release I suppose.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
Secret achievements, for people who are done having fun

I mentioned that I only have one achievement left. That's true in the sense that I only have one listed achievement left, but there are dozens of secret achievements, of which I only have ten.

The game tells you, "Secrets don't unlock anything and probably aren't fun to attempt!" Please listen to the game. It knows what it's talking about here.

As an example: there are achievements for losing 1 and 2 heroes by using an ability (that is, a die). There are secret achievements for losing 3, 4, 5, and 6 heroes by using an ability. There are also secret achievements for reviving 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 heroes with a single action. Losing a single hero with an action isn't hard and will often happen in standard play (i.e. with self-harm dice). Losing two heroes with the same die is actually fairly tricky to pull off. Six heroes? Your party doesn't even usually have six.

Some of the secret achievements are interesting challenges, like "Complete Classic with 0 spells cast." Some of them are puzzles, like "Roll 4+ different types of Blank." Some of them are simply tedious, like "Complete Classic with 0 undos."

A few of them are all three of those. This is my foray into the "Total-kills 0" secret achievement.


First of all, what

If you haven't played a hundred hours of this game, your first question might be, "How is it even possible to win without killing anything?" Well, you've probably seen enemies flee. They will do that if your party's total HP is ten times as much as the enemy party's total HP. (There's a setting to automatically allow fleeing. Otherwise, the game will ask you if you want to allow them to flee. If you say no, the enemies will never attempt to flee again for that combat.)

To complicate matters, I had assumed there was an achievement for "Win with 0 damage dealt." This is something only an inhuman madman would even attempt, but of course, here I am.

I have made several enormous mistakes in this endeavor:
  • Custom mode: This allows you to create a party to your specifications. Vital for setting up a party of five reds, the only hero who can increase total HP out of the box. Notably, Custom is not Classic.
  • Achievement does not exist: As mentioned, I am chasing something that doesn't -- and very reasonably shouldn't -- exist.
  • Playing on Easy: I started down this road before I unlocked Heaven mode (20 points of blessings to Easy's 8). I don't think it's possible on Easy.
  • Cataclysm blessing: I thought, "What if I don't deal damage myself? I could just have Cataclysm instantly kill everything." First of all, see "Achievement does not exist." Second, even if it did, I wouldn't get the "Total-kills 0" achievement for it.
  • Making things way harder on myself: Suppose that "Total-kills 0" allowed you to play on Custom. I was still doing things in the most tedious way possible by not allowing myself to damage the enemies, instead relying on inflating my party's HP to ridiculous levels to trigger fleeing.


But we learned things along the way

Some very unintuitive interactions I found in this process:
  • Reinforcements are not counted when calculating enemy HP. All in all, a very good thing for anyone who dares attempt this.
  • Cataclysm does not kill reinforcements. It also doesn't retrigger within a fight, which is less surprising.
  • After Cataclysm, some things reset. Played with "Highest HP enemy starts poisoned," when Cataclysm wipes the board, one of the reinforcements will enter poisoned. This makes no sense at all!


And yet

Anakin/Padme meme: "Now that you've figured out the game won't acknowledge what you're doing, you've abandoned it, right? ...Right?"

Well... maybe. But I think my current run has a shot! And wouldn't it be a shame to abandon it?

Anyway, the next question you might have about this endeavor: "Tedious, sure, but how is it difficult?" And you've got a good point: a small minority of runs ends due to our heroes taking fatal damage. Instead, they run into a few existential threats:

  • Bramble: This is flat-out unwinnable without dealing damage. There is no blessing except Cataclysm and no item available this early that will allow a win against Bramble's "single-use" passive. I also got super unlucky once and ran into a Jinx with the "second single-use" curse.
  • Rotten: You're losing 5 max HP per round against this guy. That might be survivable if he didn't also poison and summon.
  • Petrification: Poison is not usually a huge obstacle for red teams because you have lots of healing, you usually have regen, and you often have a little cleanse. Petrification is a much bigger issue even when you have a couple sources of cleanse, because it doesn't take much going wrong to cut off those sources. This is especially true when you're up against a group of Illusions, who will weaken when they're not petrifying.
  • Fanatics, Sabers, and Bell, presumably: If you're actually going for "Total-kills 0," then you'll need a way to win before they kill themselves.

Notably, though, summoners are not as big a problem as you might expect, and other bosses (crones, Basalt) are not the walls you'd think they'd be. Hexia's petrification and The Hand's whole deal could be bigger problems, but that remains untested.


I love you, but I'm not going to read all of that

Probably for the best, honestly.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Have you considered informing the devs of your achievement so they can add it as an official secret?
 

SabreCat

Sabe, Inattentive Type
(he "Sabe" / she "Kali")
What a delightful recommendation--I picked this up over the weekend and have been playing it pretty much every chance I get since. An absolute dopamine faucet!

I suspect I will forever be a casual, unable to even maintain a Classic x Normal win streak much less chase the ridiculous achievements y'all are delving into, but it's a good time anyway. The game has a sense of humor: all of the "Tier 0" items I've seen have cracked me up. And trying to make good use of bizarre characters like Statue or Twins is a lot of fun.

I've faced Hexia twice so far. The first time I had no idea what I was doing and got obliterated very quickly. The second time, I had a much more coherent party build, cheesed her with a Titanbane Potion and wiped her out with some enormous Barbarian attacks... then died to her summoned cohort. It came down to a single die roll, three chances at getting one of the ~2 faces that would have ended the fight, but alas, luck was not in my favor.
 

Kalir

Do you require aid.
(whatevs)
Wraith has Leech, Bind is Forsaken's spell. Both are good against Hexia, though, for the reasons cited.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
150 turns into a no-damage battle against Rotten seems to have bricked my run. I was only a couple dozen turns away from making them flee, too.

This is a sign to call it, I think.

Edit: never mind, it just froze for like ten seconds and was OK after that. Won on like turn 148.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
After Rotten had me slam the brakes -- this challenge is very slow to begin with, and it's particularly frustrating when you're losing 5 max HP per round -- the rest of the run was a breeze. Final stats:

Time: 5h7m
Turns: 728
Undos: 61
Rolls: 6701
Xs rolled: 383
Kills: 0
Dmg Taken: 7969
Blocked: 1398
Healed: 8002
Spells: 199

My blessings for this run:
Hamstring (6): -1 to monsters' two right sides. This is really nice because summons tend to be on these sides.
Monster Blank (6): Monsters' left side is blank. Less necessary but still nice: the more often monsters are doing nothing, the more you can do your thing.
Survival Specialist (4): +2 empty max hp and +1 to incoming healing for all heroes. Not super necessary, but it does turn regen 1 into 2, and it makes heal X vitality heal X+1 (but still only vitality X).
Turn 3 Heal (4): Heal and shield 3 to all allies at the start of turn 3. I was filling to 20 points here. This isn't bad, but it doesn't do too much for me.

Blessings to watch out for if you ever try this:
Hero pristine (20): x2 to all sides if you're at full health, which you will be very often. Sadly, this is a 20-point blessing...
Hero engage (13): x2 if your target is at full health, which is often even better in this challenge.
Hero regen (13): Never saw this, but it's probably an instant win if you don't see Bramble.
Hero invigorate (8): +X to all sides, where X is the amount you've been healed this turn. Weirdly, heal X vitality counts as a heal only if you weren't at full health, but it's easy to play around. Super cheap blessing that also probably just wins if you don't see Bramble like I did.
Hero growth (8): Every battle runs long, so growth ensures the run is much, much quicker. This does not help you win, unfortunately, since the first three turns of each combat will decide whether you survive.
Poison immunity (5): Tarantus would've kicked my butt if it weren't for Hamstring + Monster Blank. This is useless in most fights but wins a handful of fights that you would just lose.
Hero cleanse (6): Probably strictly preferable to poison immunity.

Special shout-outs:
Prophet is the best hero for this challenge. Soothe's 1 regen to all is basically "ignore everything the enemy is doing" mode, and he's got two heal 4 vitality sides.
Shaman has a single heal 5 vitality side, so she got the duvet (x2 to that side if you didn't use this hero last turn) and passed every time she didn't land that side.
Priestess is the best tier 2 thanks to two heal 3 vitality sides.
Whey gives your left side vitality, making it one of the best tier 2 items. Thanks for existing, whey! I would rather have found friendship bracelet (which cuts the flee threshold in half), but it never materialized. Its usefulness fluctuated over the course of the run, but it always did something.
Infused Herbs is an all-star tier 1 item for this team. It replaces the bottom side with "heal 2, regen, cleanse, mana-cost" -- in other words, for 2 mana, heal 2 + regen + cleanse. You won't necessarily have regen access otherwise.
Acolyte is the only tier 1 hero with vitality.


"You just won a completely ridiculous self-imposed challenge. What are you going to do next?" Well, I finally got an all-gray win, which was not a sure thing even on Heaven difficulty because grays have nearly no damage. I had a rough run-in with some Graves that nearly ended my run. That earned me the "Custom Party Masochist" secret achievement (win Custom with all mono-color teams).

I suppose the next ridiculous challenge I try might be "Hell victory." Brutal wasn't actually too bad with mono-blue, so maybe Hell will be okay, too?
 

SabreCat

Sabe, Inattentive Type
(he "Sabe" / she "Kali")
It's no comparison to that mind-boggling achievement, but I did defeat Hexia finally!

The Barbarian was the main player again. This time, though, I had the assistance of an Enchantress, whose self-heal/self-shield sides can effectively cancel out pain and/or Hexia's damage reflection--I actually declined the final Blue class advancement to hold on to that. The Enchantress was also equipped with a Duck (+"echo" to the two right sides), allowing an amusing sequence where I attacked with one of the Barbarian's huge damage sides, then applied a now equally huge boost to the Dancer's multi-attack rampage face. That took care of the adds!

There was a little bit of luck involved still, as I did manage to roll a Revive Potion I'd been holding on to at just the moment I needed it to bring Barbarian and Dancer back to their feet after self-destructing, but it was a satisfying victory.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
First time beating Hexia is worth celebrating!

I cleared "All t1" last night: beat Classic with a t1 team. Loot mode is already this but easier, and it's still hard even on Easy, so you don't want to attempt this without Heaven. Even then, you need a good starting team and a little luck with blessings. The most important skill is, of course, not reflexively picking a level up.

I got Ruffian with Origami and Scales, which gives him 5 damage cleave. I got Dabble with Simplicity and Wooden Bracelet, which is +2 to all sides. The other heroes were not nearly as blessed. My two prior attempts died to stage 20, so I took Boss Smash+ for +3 to all sides on bosses. Got The Hand as my boss, and won thanks in large part to the Infinity spell (10 mana: kill a thing).
 

SabreCat

Sabe, Inattentive Type
(he "Sabe" / she "Kali")
I haven't seen The Hand yet, only Hexia and Dragon. I'm guessing that boss needs to be unlocked somehow?
 

Dark Medusa

Diamond Crusader
(He/they)
There's a boss that has to be unlocked by having a streak (i.e. two wins in a row) on Hard, which you can see if you look at the list of enemies. I assume that is The Hand.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
Yep. Hexia is tricky; The Hand is just a jerk.

I think Dragon is straightforwardly the easiest of the final bosses: it's the only one that doesn't summon, it's the only one that doesn't petrify, it doesn't have a weird gimmick. It just tries to kill you. (Actually, Troll King is the only other boss that neither summons nor has a gimmick, provided you don't consider regen 2 a gimmick. Honorable mention to Slime Queen, since she doesn't have any dice that summon, and she doesn't have a persistent gimmick.)
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator

You can ignore the video portion, which is almost entirely "guy beats Hexia" (with occasional overlays related to the information being discussed), and just pay attention to the audio.

Dude talks about Thimble, which I forgot to mention in my list but is indeed a very good Hexia item. Comments suggest Pick mode as a way to practice a certain fight.
 
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