Monster Slayers - a Deck Building Roguelike

Inspiration also doesn’t trigger off a mulligan; not sure if that’s intentional.

I believe it was mentioned on the steam forums as intentional.

Is there any wiki page or something which says what cards the harbinger gets? My last run he had 2 bonebreakers and as a knight that more or less means instant game over.

I think it changes from game to game with the shrine, even if you pass on the offered blessing, giving you clues on what to expect once you reach him.

Most of the time the shrine hints are for his resistances so not sure if it influences card choice or whether the cards are random from a limited list. I know I always tend to see things like bulwark, fortify, the life stealing attack card, maybe I just got unlucky in him having not one but two bonebreakers. Being a knight who only has support cards meant I only got to play one card pretty much every round.

@nerdook, experienced a crash while the “mandoline” was doing its turn opening magic as a brute (I couldn’t get the full log selected to copy paste it, sorry)

Maybe it happened because the ignite triggered on its action and would have killed me or something?

Alright I’ll get it fixed!

Invulnerability doesn’t seem to be working. I was taking a lot of damage even though I was invulnerable!

Is that just physical resist now?

The hovertext still says “Invulnerable to damage until next turn”

I’ve been obsessively hacking away at this the last few days, because this sort of game is like crack to me. So far I’ve beat the Harbinger on normal with Cleric, Apothecary, and Knight. Currently working on Wizard.

At first I was super impressed with how different classes were going to have different experiences and thus give the game a lot of legs. I’m starting to wonder now if that’s actually true though. When I won with the Apothecary I had one-point, mid-run, where I didn’t have any of the apothecary-special recipe cards in my deck anymore. I’d deleted them all and was thriving with a fairly vanilla wizard build. When I won with the Knight I hadn’t ever upgraded any of the Defense cards, even though that’s supposed to be the Knight’s special schtick. Is the class variation an illusion? I’m starting to wonder if there aren’t just a few certain core strategies that work well and the winning strategy, regardless of character, is just to build a deck around them.

Hasn’t been my experience at all. I mean, if the RNG gives you a bunch of Swarms and Magic Echoes and such, yeah, you’re probably going to follow more of a Wizard type of build. But you’re freaking nuts for deleting the Recipe cards, dude. At worst they cycle for 1AP, but the upside is much much higher.

Recipe A seemed to be a crap card at higher levels, and playing the recipe and the consumable at higher levels means burning 1 AP and 2 cards on the board for a very minor effect. That’s really bad news in the third dungeon where some enemies are toting Enough cards.

I did buy and appreciate a Recipe B and Recipe C, but I couldn’t get rid of my Recipe A cards fast enough. And frankly the B and C cards were “nice to haves” and not core to why my deck worked.

And is it my imagination, or are the necromancer’s “summon” cards kind of terrible?

They are unplayably bad once your deck starts rolling. Initially they’re no worse than Attack I, but that’s a rather low bar. And the high level ones aren’t very good either.

I also find Traps pretty bad in general. I appreciate that they do damage and replace a draw for the opponent, but the number of turns it takes for them to pay off can get you killed on harder levels.

I had a lot of fun with a trap-heavy deck and a bunch of the card that makes your opponent discard and re-draw 3 at a time. It fizzled against the Harbinger (too much Enough!), but it cleaned up everything until that point.

The Necro summons are just bad.

The summons are useful for getting some more cards into your deck when you have leveled-up Bury cards (which you should). They’re not a priority to upgrade or anything (that would be Bury) but they’re hardly horrific.

I played a lot of Agricola on the phone against the AI, and I was aiming for a similar design philosophy in this game: certain GENERAL strategies will always be viable as a fallback, but niche strategies like Heavy-Traps or Recipe-Elemental-Manipulation should be possible to win with as well (and classes that have them should feel distinct to a certain extent).

Of course, it’s extremely difficult to balance the strategies to be equally easy to achieve, but I do try tweaking key cards to make the niche strategies fun and viable. I’ll be boosting the Undead Minion damage in the coming update to compensate for their deck clogging tendencies.

The necromancer minion cards are fantastic once you can reliably cast the summon army spell every turn that adds “draw 1 card” to the text of every necromancer minion. But yea, you’ve basically got to plan your deck around having 2 of those, forgive me for not remembering the name.

Agreed, both the Necromancer and Beastmaster are below par at the moment, and I will be addressing them in the coming update. The Assassin’s Hook Shot was changed earlier to support the Trap strategy (by drawing them out earlier), and I feel this brought the class close to the base viablity line.

Necromancer’s Summons should not feel weak, since he’s a freaking Necromancer… I’ll start by boosting the summon damage to 9/18/27 Physical from the current 6/10/15, and testing this change.

Beastmaster will be getting special active Talents on his Wolf, similar to those that Companions have.

Updates will be a little slow this week as I prepare the new levels/cards for the DLC, which will bring Dragons as a playable class!