Astronarch - Just set it and forget it. Indie Auto-battler Roguelike by Dale Turner

I think that’s the crux of it, yeah. Some of it just seems very opaque, though, and I find myself facing analysis paralysis doing things like trying to decide if I want this geegaw that adds +10 to armor, or this other one that adds +10 to health. It’d be useful to know, for example, how much damage I’m taking from piercing attacks to figure that out, but I don’t think I can?

I’m not opposed to deeply analytical games. I’ve spent hours peering at spreadsheets playing Football Manager to try to decide who the best young left back to purchase is. But there I feel like I actually have all the info I need to make a smart decision. I don’t get that here.

I’ll do a few more runs. I can see what people like about this and maybe it’ll click with me after a bit more trying.

I think you have to YOLO it a bit to get enough baseline info to really make much sense of the tooltips. Fail fast! ;)

The two I’m really struggling with are the Fiend and the Bard. I haven’t been succesful with Illusionist either but I’ve only tried them once.

Admittedly I haven’t upgraded the Fiend fully in either active or passive, but that’s mostly because both seem so lackluster. It feels like a way to distract enemies and then do a bit of extra damage or something, but I can’t figure out how to gear it so it’s effective. I’ve tried both offensive, in which case it dies too fast to be useful at the beginning, and defensive, where it at least lasts longer at the beginning but then doesn’t accomplish much else.

The Bard’s passive healing is just so slow. It is nice that the bard can heal people not adjacent, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. I feel like there’s a comp with it in some front row providing attack to, eg, the Beserker or something, but I can’t quite get there.

I’ve tried the bard and have failed with him every time. I have a feeling I just haven’t yet unlocked the best partner for him, or–like the Illusionist–will mostly shine on a certain corruption level/map rule. I’m sure there are items out there that will completely transform him when he’s got them equipped, but at the moment I have not had any success with item or group composition for him, and he ends up just being a tag along for most rides.

Because he implements bleeding, I’m thinking maybe there’s a guy I haven’t unlocked similar to Pyromancer, that can do with bleeding effects that the pyro does with fire–trigger them so they do all their damage at once. I don’t know yet, but for now I’ve got him on the back burner until I unlock more people and items.

I’ve liked the Bard so far but I’m no crazy expert or anything. His heal is crazy good. Get him some ability cost reduction and he’s a total boss. Like I’ve been running whatever the thing is that reduces cost and Brain Sage (buncha heals whenever you spend 50MP) on him and he does some really good work.

Splitting my damage and tanking and defense up between multiple styles and heroes has gone well so far. Again I’m on Corruption 0, but Pyromancer + Berserker with some things that apply burn and the Whirlwind Axe on the zerker was a really strong dual threat that successfully murdered all the things, while Druid and Paladin kept them alive.

I was hoping Paladin + Pyromancer was going to be more exciting, but Paladin just can’t do enough to matter. Sure does take a hit, though.

At the moment I’m having the most reliable luck with:

  • Paladin - Tanky tank
  • Cleric - Okay heals early on, But an upgraded Smite and frequent healing later on becomes big damage
  • Warlock - Good Damage and Healing from the start
  • Assassin - I typically choose him as my last (5th) hero. I love his Hidden ability (so he can sit unmolested and alone in the second party area) and his ability to attack back row when totems become a thing on map #3.
  • Random - I had a Ronin this time around and it served as a pretty good off-tank, but this slot can fit most anything.

Warlocks can top out both damage dealt and healing done in a single battle. And they heal for a lot. But while Warlocks might provide big heals, I’m finding that if you can increase the frequency and number of heals your clerics do they can start to compete with warlocks for damage. It just takes a while to get them there, where Warlocks are pretty good from the start.

My last run ended in success. In my runs leading up to this one I kept failing on either the final boss or The Oracle. Talk about a kick in the nuts. But I grabbed and upgraded an item that lets my Paladin (main tank here) avoid 36% of both standard and Active Attacks (The strawberry legendary), and his survivability went through the roof, allowing games to drag out much longer.

I didn’t have any OMGWTFBBQ DPS generators this go round, but my Assassin and Cleric managed to carry damage-wise. All my cleric needed was a Tooth legendary thingie and his frequency of heals shot up (30% of attacks would heal), meaning his Smite damage shot up as well.

My Warlock carried most of the game healing & damagewise, but for some reason he didn’t put in much of a showing during this final battle. I’m chalking it up to the Cleric’s new Tooth legendary, which he had only just picked up on a very recent encounter.

See, that’s funny, because bard heal seems really weak to me

Haven’t used him yet, but my understanding is that people use him as a meat shield (since you don’t lose morale when he dies) and to hold items they may not want in a different character. You might try unstable orbs.

I wish there were a way to better communicate all the items and upgrades I have, like a stat sheet, but I’ll explain a bit:

Anyway, check this out:

My pyromancer is obliterating absolutely everything so far, but the damage spread is misleading because it’s the Paladin that’s setting him up with most of the burn stacks with which to do so. I’m only half way though map #3, so I still have to contend with the final boss and the oracle, but hopefully I can maintain my momentum.

Right now my party is as follows:

Support for the main players:
Fiend (Main Tank)
Gladiator (Off-Tank)
Cleric (Worthless + Frost item)

The main players:
Paladin (Burn Stacker and tertiary tank)
Pyromancer (Detonator)

I have all skills on my Pyromancer fully upgraded, and fully upgraded my paladin’s passive ability, which stacks burns. I also loaded my paladin up with upgraded fire weapons to stack even more burns.

By the time my fully upgraded Pyro detonates his active ability (for 2x damage thanks to upgrades) there’s about 20ish stacks of burn on the enemy, and thanks to all the upgrades, these are some beefy stacks.

I was originally using my paladin as a tank, but scuttled that idea when his burn stacks became more important than his damage absorption. An upgraded Fiend makes for a great main tank in this situation because his resurrect time is decreased, and the 1k+HP Gladiator can take a few hits in the meantime.

I doubled and tripled down on the Paladin’s burns. And even though his weapon’s burn DAMAGE is based off his attack value, and even though I have other heroes with higher attack values (like Gladiator), my other heroes need to either be firing off their Active Abilities as much as possible or they need defense because they’re tanking. This leaves the Paladin as the perfect guy to dual wield burning weapons. Plus, those fully upgraded fire swords give my paladin up to +30 SPD each, meaning his PASSIVE will being applying hefty burn stacks that much faster, along with the weapons themselves.

Here’s my paladin’s stat sheet:
disco_inferno

His attack speed is as fast as I can get it with my current loadout, but he’s still pumping out 3 burns per swing on the main target (and a new burn each swing on adjacent targets), every 0.9 seconds. I’d love to replace a frost weapon he has for something else, but I haven’t come across something I’d like to replace it with. But check out his passive, he’s dumping upgraded burns on everybody, so in the unlikely event the pyro has a different target the pyro still has something to work with.


EDIT:

I just finished my Pyro run with a victory. Hahaha, he was detonating his active ability for 7k a shot. I managed to find and fully upgrade a third fire sword for my Paladin just before the final fight(s) and his attack speed was down to 0.2, and the final boss had 40+ stacks of burn on him when the Pyro detonated.

All my party had to do was live just long enough for my pyro to nuke a single time and the game was over.

I forget the term for it, but I just noticed this game resets item shops and Loot Events with different items when you save and reload on those tiles. So you can keep reloading till you get the item you want.

I’m way too lazy to do this, but I suspect there’s a large number of people who will sit there reloading the game over and over to create that perfect build. Cheaters!

If you can get the sword that sets your ATK to 80, and your speed to 1.5, and it can’t be changed, Palies become gods, especially with something like a warlock in the party healing. Paladins are just soaks until you get that item, I always build mine for pure defense, by the time they die, get resurrected via the 90% bean, and die again, the rest of the party has killed most stuff.

This is an awesome game, got it as per this thread, hadn’t heard about it, and haven’t played anything else since I got it. It’s a great combination of RNG, class comps, and tactics. The length of games seems about perfect as well, it’s pretty easy to get into “just one more run” syndrome.

Same lineup for me, but recently I’ve been dumping the cleric, as I’d rather have more DPS and right from when I get them. In general, this game favors a ‘kill it before it kills you’ sort of strategy, best I can figure. I’ve never been able to make a heavy sustain/defense party work well. Try slotting in a heavy DPS in favor of the cleric and see what you make of it, I’d be curious of your thoughts on it.

My best version of this so far is a pally with final bastion and an enchanter’s armor.

I had several failed runs today. I’m trying different comps to find new things that work (or don’t) and not do the same thing every time. Been using the ranger a lot, and while it can be godly, it seems pretty item dependent and I never seem to get what I’m looking for.

I try and get at least one character with a passive I want to upgrade immediately and one with an active (on my last run I started accidentally with three passive-types and it was unpleasant). I also try to have one character that has a great autoattack Effect in case I find good speed items.

I’ve also been trying to find ways to use various ancient items, but they can also be pretty tough to get working well. Fun when you do, though.

Does anyone like the brawler? He seems…weird to me

Ah, Hydras are so hard vs poison parties. Every time a head dies you have to start all the poison + duplicating over again. Outlaw has a fantastic Active Attack that will apply a massive poison which transfers to the next target when an enemy dies (mine was up to 120 per stack), but when a hydra head dies it’s the only target on the board so there’s nothing for it to transfer to. The other heads aren’t actually targets until the prior one dies, so the Outlaw poison doesn’t transfer like it should, meaning your Alchemist is now rendered useless too because there aren’t any poison stacks to duplicate.

In my opinion that should be considered either a design flaw or a bug. The hydra shows up so late that by the time you know which lane you’ll be facing on map 3 your party’s composition is all but cemented–and in my last run I was applying and duplicating massive ticks of poison. I’ll have to tweak it and see what I can do.


A speedy reply from dev on Steam forum:

Dale:
Good question. Correct that Hydra is 1 enemy who is cleansing themselves of all negative effects between heads. There aren’t many counters to Outlaw in the game, but this is one of them.

Heh. I was going to say the same. Working as intended. The hydra description even says it cleanses when a head dies

Yea, but I couldn’t read the description after I was dead so I didn’t see that part of the fine print until the next time I encountered him, after an hour of grimacing my way back to him.

Boy this game is awesome, there are so many crazy things you can do depending on your luck with items. Warlock…oh my god Warlock… My absolute go to character in any party. Just had a game where my warlock had the Sword that gives you 150% life steal, the amulet that increases your speed every second, and the amulet that slows EVERYONE else down by 45% per tic…absolutely wrecked the game, pretty much soloed it. One thing I realized about this build half way through, is that all of your regen effects, aren’t effected by the slow, so if you have a lot of it, once you get the enemies slowed down to 5, your party is pretty much immortal, as your regen tics will outheal the super slow attacks coming in. By far my most OP build to date.

I really love this game, what a great find.

Reverie Totem is awesome, yes, but keep in mind “slow” effects like that don’t have anything to do with magic attacks, they just slow attack speed. (Frost, on the other hand, explicitly slows magic down.) So keep that in mind when analyzing encounters.

In that particular setup, I also had a couple people that had frost applies, I may have even had a frost mage, can’t remember, but I do know I had pretty much perma frost going. It was pretty ridiculous, I got through the final boss without anyone dropping below 50% (palie with 6 second immunity at the start). By the end of the fight everyone was full health pretty much.

Very nice!

Yeah, Frostmancer is a stud anyway and with Reverie on a heavy hitter he’s even better.

I’ve had the opportunity to take reverie, but haven’t tried it yet. Maybe I should try.

It’s overpowered if you have the right setup for it. I’ve moved it around on different characters, and I really loved it most on my Warlock, although I can see it working with any high damage class, especially one with AOE. The best thing about Warlock, is that if other party members do actually die, it just makes them stronger.