I think the main reason cov1+ is ‘harder’ is for that sneakiest of gaming anti-patterns: loot pool dilution. The starting cards are pretty strong when you first play but as you unlock more your rewards are less likely to synergize with whatever direction you’re trying to build in. Slay the Spire suffered from the same issue, IMO. The phenomena is exacerbated by the reward mentality of holding back some of the really good cards, or cards that really bring together a strong combo, until the last few unlocks.
I lost my first game, absolutely steamrolled my second then had about a 4-5 game loss streak since I just couldn’t put anything together. I had most things unlocked by that point on my ‘primary’ clan and have since enjoyed a 4 win streak.
I’m enjoying this, mostly thanks to its brevity, but damn is it imbalanced. I’m not sure it’s great design to get all the way to the end of something without your health being so much as scratched then to just get annihilated because the numbers have got so huge all of a sudden. Any trivial error or run of bad luck sees you getting absolutely pasted in short order. Losses in StS felt a bit more… orderly? drawn out? controlled? Something like that, at least…
Just to clarify, that was @MisterMourning. I get my ass handed to me frequently. But unlike some other games, I don’t find it stressful, even when things aren’t going my way. That’s a big deal for me, because there are many games I like, but don’t play for that reason.
I think that’s only true when you don’t know what to expect. Once you’ve seen that last fight a few times you should know, don’t you think?
Sure, but knowing what lies at the end doesn’t stop me getting crap rewards each time. I guess there’s wisdom in abandoning a duff run when you’re given a deck full of lemons, but StS did a way better job of convincing me that I could turn it into lemonade and eke out a win down the line.
Oh, I’ve done that (turned a game around). But if you are being offered cards that don’t fit what you are trying to do, don’t take them. And you have so much more ability to modify cards here (Or remove them), I feel the opposite is true. I feel much less like I’m at the behest of RNG here and if I don’t make it work it’s on me. There’s only a single run where I could argue I got screwed by luck, but even than I knew my hand was too damn big at 25-26. I didn’t pull a burnout card for my champion before he died. With a thinner deck that wouldn’t have happened.
I’m assuming you mean if I didn’t get any Lodestone Totems or Guardian Amulet recursion? You can usually get one of those strategies up and running in about 70% of games, and then normal enemies stop mattering because 12 sap will make it so they walk up to the Pyre and are unable to attack it while it blasts them into little pieces.
But in the cases that you can’t get a sap synergy running, the 2nd tank in the final few battles becomes the primary concern. There are a few answers. A naga with multistrike and hopefully a guardian totem with incant:armor. Siren’s Call costs 1 mana and destroys all normal mobs. There might be some rare situations especially where Seraph has increased their armor that your Pyre might take a bit of damage, but it’ll probably still be worth. The other Pyrebound spell that does 90 damage is also great to get that 2nd tank out of the way.
Even the 3 energy 100 piercing damage incinerate spell is pretty good, because you are casting everything else for free you’ve always got the 3 energy. I’ll even pick up the 5 piercing damage spell and upgrade it to 15 most games, because it kills those huge armored birds with a ton of armor but 10 hp.
Edited to add: if you can’t get a sap synergy, a naga with multistrike, or maybe some combination of the aforementioned spells then you probably aren’t going to win. But RNG will have been brutally against you for none of that to show up.
One of those final covenant runs I did my notable statistic was something like 143 Pyre kills. Haha. Also that strategy makes the relic which gives your pyre HP every time it kills something pretty hilarious.
Well, I’m a sucker for games like this and once I realized there was an additional 10% discount for Spire owners, that pushed me over the edge to go ahead and purchase it now. I’ll be giving it a try today.
Edit: Also, credit to the thread title for the Princess Bride reference.
No one else here had yet seen it, so for you, sir, here’s a 🥜
I wanted to try and encapsulate how this game was different from the slew of others out there and in development. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been trying to find a game in the genre I want to play over and over. This is it.
I finally beat a game on Covenant 1, after about 6 failures in a row. I used the Stygian Champion (even though I disparaged it earlier!), with a Hellhorned ally. I chose the champ’s -1 (eventually -2) spell cost trait, and I used that coupled with 3x Titanstooth (with emberstone reducing cost to 2 ember, so zero cost when used with the champ) as my main damage engine – 20 Frostbite/5 damage to all enemies in a row, often two-three times in one turn.
I kept the deck thin and used a couple of Offering Tokens (draw 1/discard 1 for zero cost) to cycle through my deck fast. A Guardian’s Amulet with stackstone/emberstone added 6 Sap too. The deck was so thin, in fact, that I didn’t have enough heroes for all three levels. I often just left the middle one empty and let Frostbite finish enemies on its own.
I made some mistakes. Toward the end I picked up the Imp Scholar to let me replay a consumed card. I’m not sure that was a good decision. I also stupidly spent my last gold on a needless armor upgrade for that Scholar, before I realized that I could spend that money on an artifact shop at the same er train station. Also, sometimes I couldn’t work out whether it was better to play 20 Frostbite or 6 Sap. You’d think the math would be easy, but I dunno.
So what should I do next? I just unlocked the Umbra, so I’m eager to try them. Should I do so on Covenant 1 or 2? Should I always be playing on the highest possible Covenant level?
Yeah, now you’re thinking! Love what you did with the Titanstooth to exploit your champ. That’s the mindset you need… how to exploit something to make it crazy good.
You don’t need to have heroes on all the levels. You just need what you need. Sometimes you may only need guys on one. Umbra are neat.
The covenant thing is up to you, but I would play on Cov1 at least (I like theVariance in starting cards and the challenge level is more appropriate). Do what’s fun for you.
Patch Notes:
9358
June 2, 2020
We’ve increased the power on the two champions that currently had the lowest win rate across all players, Penumbra and Hornbreaker Prince. In general we’ve tried to keep them focused on what they’re good at doing in order to keep the trade-offs inherent in the choice. That said in a few cases we’ve mitigated the weaknesses somewhat where it felt like it was potentially too punishing.
GAMEPLAY - increased Penumbra’s base stats by 5 attack and 5 health.
GAMEPLAY - Penumbra’s Architect and Monstrous paths now have increased stat scaling.
GAMEPLAY - Penumbra’s Glutton path now has 2 Lifesteal, non-scaling, on all upgrade stages.
GAMEPLAY - Hornbreaker Prince’s Wrathful path now gives +5 Armor at all levels on Slay and has increased base stats.
GAMEPLAY - Hornbreaker Prince’s Brawler path now has some base Armor that lightly scales to increase survivability against Spikes.
GAMEPLAY - Hornbreaker Prince’s Reaper path now has increased base attack.
BUG FIX - after the last update a player was able to provide us some useful information about progress data loss by sending us a corrupted save file. In response to this new information we changed how we write files to the hard drive at a low level to ask Windows to skip its internal file cache and write the file to storage immediately. We’re optimistic that after this change even if your computer blue screens while playing (which is an issue completely out of our control) you will not encounter progress loss.
BUG FIX - fixed an issue where restarting a run just as you were winning or losing a battle in combat could lead the game to get into a bad state upon attempting to resume the run.
I won my my first run on Cov0 using Hellhorned with the Hornbreaker Prince champion on the brawler path. He was my main damage dealer. I went with rage cards and by the end he was doing huge amounts of damage with rage, revenge and multistrike (about 300 per attack).
The after game stats are really nice. In fact, all around it’s generally really slick in every way. It plays very differently from Spire but it’s just as fun or even more so. I’m very happy I bought it and can’t wait to play more. Next up is Cov1. From what I’ve read, Cov0 is just tutorial mode and Cov1 is ‘normal’ difficulty so I expect it to get a lot harder.
Yep yep, I’m starting to get it. It’s really a fun challenge. As you suggest, I’ll stick to at least Covenant 1, and in fact I think I’ll go ahead with Covenant 2 for my next run.
Impressive! Congrats on the win! Good luck with Covenant 1. :)
Penumbra definitely felt the worst to play with, as was Hornbreaker Prince with the Armor. Kinda surprised they buffed Hornbreaker across the board, but they have actual metrics to base these decisions on.
I’m not. He’s was extremely fickle. Sure he could scale out of control with a perfect set up, but a lot of the time he just sucked. If you didn’t get handed ways to ramp his damage so he could snag kills he couldn’t pop off. If you tried to tank with him, he just died. He always felt bad to me unless I got the perfect draw/draft for him.
And Penumbra was good early and then fell off a cliff since he didn’t scale. You were better off with basically every Gorge creature you could get over him.
