Are you doing specific strategies that are getting hard countered by end bosses?
End bosses are often built to hard counter the most straight-forward decks. Try building decks that do two or three things well rather than one thing great. Hybridized strategies take a bit more experimentation to build right, but they’re way less susceptible to being hard countered, and still plenty strong enough to take out the Act 3 boss and beyond.
Also, if you know the Act 3 bosses, you get to see which one you’re fighting when you get to act 3. If you’ve saved up a lot of money you can often push your deck in a different direction using shops in the final act.
If you’re already doing that, then you might not be playing risky enough. You could try smithing more at rest stops and hunting more elites, which will up your mid game challenge and make it more likely you’ll be stronger in the end-game if you make it there.
The other thing you could try doing if you’re trying to learn how certain decks and cards work together is to run a custom game and draft a deck to get familiar with the combos
It sounds like you lack ways for your take to scale. Cards like Demon Form and Toxic Fumes, for instance, that improve your entire deck every turn.
That possibly also means you’re playing too cautiously on your way up the tower - avoiding elites, for instance, will let you cruise up but you’ll miss out on some of the best rewards in the game.
After I posted that, I had a string of games where I failed to reach the final boss, so I’m finding that balance point.
I also realized I probably put too many mid-tier cards in my deck instead of focusing around the heavy hitters. I knew this was the name of the game from my Ascension days, but the cards are so fun that sometimes it’s hard to resist.
Yeah, take the minions out first if you can - ideally with AOE - as they gain +3 str every round and get absolutely brutal by round 3 or so, swinging for 12 each (base).
Looking for some general advice. I’ve completed Act 3 with all 3 characters now (twice, once on Game Pass and once on Steam) plus a few extra wins.
Would it be best to continue playing as-is to build up my play experience, try to go for the heart every time, or mess around with higher ascension levels?
Ultimately I’d like to beat the heart and take a break, but I don’t want to be frustrated if it’s tough to do with minimal experience.
But seriously, if you want to take out the heart for the real ending, you’ll need to do it once for each character (each has a unique ending, not much to it, but worth watching, and unlocks that come along with them) that was also my next goal, and I didn’t play around with Ascension, just went for it every game. Then I felt like I was “done” with the game, and uninstalled it…
…for about two weeks, then I missed it enough to put it back on.
Damn. Got to the Time Eater, and I had been kicking ass up until that point. I mean, I was kicking some ass even at that point, until boom random debuff remover outta nowhere removes 63 poison from him, poof. There was no coming back after that. Once again, feels kinda cheap.
This is my Game of the Year 2019, and so to celebrate, I’ll share this link I just found. Great video, I recommend it to anyone interested in the early development of StS, or just interested in game design in general.
Thanks for linking that @Scotch_Lufkin, that was a really interesting video that showed a little bit of their development process. The biggest takeaway I have from that is the idea that you shouldn’t be afraid to throw something away if it’s not working… A lot of times at work at home whatever, when I design something I get locked into the design and while I’m OK with iterating on it I often have trouble throwing it away and adopting a brand new idea or paradigm.
I just saw there was news today that the 4th character and all the additional content they have been beta testing will go into the main/live PC branch on Jan 14th, with ports to follow shortly after!
I played the new hero enough times to unlock her stuff but she doesn’t feel as fun to me as the other heroes do. But she’s a different playstyle and I’m sure some people are really into her. If you’ve never played the Slimebound mod I actually think it’s a more fun than any of the 4 vanilla heroes. It’s probably a tiny bit OP, but it isn’t egregious.
I hate this game. I’m really bad at it. And I can’t stop playing it. But I don’t seem to get much better at it… On the rare occasion, that I actually manage to learn from one of my many mistakes, I just make a new worse mistake. I must have done more than 50 runs by now, and I have only 4 wins to show for it (2 Ironclad and one of each of the other two characters). I have lost track of how many times I have died to the act 3 boss. And still, I just can’t stop playing.
