Yeah, Sap is easily the best status effect in the game. It’s even competitive as a 3 cost spell doing 3 Sap to the whole row, so how crazy is it that a 1 cost / 1 space unit will do 2 as in incant effect?
Why is Sap the best effect? It’s because it basically solves every problem at the same time.
- It keeps your tank alive. in normal combat
- It protects the backline against sweep.
- It allows building a large floor even against the emberdrain + sweep jerks.
- In case your first floor didn’t manage to kill the units, it then grants almost the same benefits to your other floors.
- If a unit made it past the whole gauntlet alive, it then also protects the pyre. This is usually the big problem for defensive builds. But Sap mostly removes these DPS checks.
- In terms of bosses, it trivializes the ones where the main gimmick is Multistrike, Stealth, Sweep or Lifedrain. E.g. the Stealth boss will often be tricky for many builds since you need to use the main battle to construct speedbump floors and keep them alive until the boss arrives. While Sap doesn’t care about the boss getting 8 free attacks.
The best comparison I can make is to Stealth. IIRC it’s the Melting Remnant who have a spell that gives two stacks of Stealth. Which is amazing, and basically a run-winner by itself. But the situations where Stealth is better than Sap are kind of rare, while Stealth will not allow you to ignore DPS checks.
I’m still playing random/random, so can’t count on the Sap totem on every run. But the matrix of completions makes it even clearer than last time what works for me and what doesn’t :-D
Still no covenant wins with a Hellhorned champion, even though I did come within literally one strike once somewhere around covenant 18. And more interestingly, no wins with a support Melting Remnant. What that’s telling me is that Rector Flicker is even better than I’d been giving it credit for.