Slay the Spire: B&B GOTY 2018, 2020, 2021, and Forum Pariah 2019 - The Bear and Badger

equinox_code

My tier list changes, but it's always IC or Silent top and always Watcher or Defect bottom. At this precise moment I'm playing silent most as discard really is shit hot since the patch. A few nights ago I almost managed to kill deca + donu on turn one without playing a single attack. letter opener did all the work.

hunk

Defect is also ridiculously powerful. If you get your defense up and learn to manage your orbs carefully he becomes a monster. All that innate lightening damage really adds up.

Dark Soldier

Defect
IC
Watcher
Silent

I find Silent very fucking boring to play.

equinox_code

Have you tried her much since the patch? shivs and discard got a lot better and this makes quite a difference.

Just looked at my stats and surprised to see she's the character I played most. I assumed it would be ironclad.

IC - 202 hours playtime, 36 victories
Silent - 249 hours playtime, 30 victories
Defect - 158 hours playtime, 20 victories
Watcher - 104 hours playtim, 26 victories

RedDave2

I'm not nearly up to the level of some here but I go silent, defect, ironclad and watcher.

I love using the poison with silent and building up a strong and quick plan of injection.

Defect is very good fun trying to find the right balance and when you get a good run of orbs going, chef kiss.

Ironclad feels very basic but I tend not to put a huge amount of time into him. But he isn't frustrating.

Unlike watcher who i feel really swings on luck. Sometimes you can be an unstoppable machine and other times barely able to get past the act 2 boss.

Probably discussed long before but how do people feel about the boss tiers. Not sure on the names but for act 1 I find none particularly problematic, act 2 the Knight is probably the trickiest although the reaper with the 2 helpers can be tricky. For act 3 the donut brothers seem by far the easiest with the time guy being my particular nemesis for me.

equinox_code

If I had to choose, I think I'd probably say Time Eater is the hardest, though that might be because my preferred play style leans in to making turns as long as possible.

That said, any of the bosses can be the worst opponent depending on how well you have built your deck around facing them. If you're playing as Silent, for example, you're more likely to want to add poison cards/relics if you see you're fighting Hexaghost or the Champ, but if you go into fighting Bronze Automaton or Slime Boss with a similar deck you might struggle.

Tempy

I think Watcher is less luck dependent than the Defect, she's way easier to plan with and stuff like Blasphemy is just absurd powerful.

hunk

Interesting, I usually avoid blasphemy preferring to build up the divinity meter more gradually. Need to explore blasphemy a bit more to see what watcher is capable of.

Tempy

You need a calculator, but you can't really sniff at 3 extra energy and triple the damage.

hunk

Defect is nothing to sneeze at either. Maxing out his amount of orbs can make him absurdly powerful. The orbs offense and defense capabilities are innate and cumulative too making him second in power only to silent.

Managing his orbs is similar to managing Watcher's stances but less risky due to their innate abilities.

SpaceGazelle

Silent
IC
Watcher
Defect

pantyfire

I’ve exclusively been using defect lately.
Can’t buy a win.

Gremill

Love Defect. If you get the right amount of orbs and a few Biased Cognition to play at the right time you can rack up the damage and defence.

GooberTheHat

I love Watcher. So much fun.

Pseudoscot

Love defect. Silent is ok. Still can't get into Ironclad at all.

JonB

I think I've had the easiest time with Silent and Defect. Ironclad I just find a bit dull. Watcher either seems to fail quickly or get crazy powerful.

Facewon

JonB wrote:

I think I've had the easiest time with Silent and Defect. Ironclad I just find a bit dull. Watcher either seems to fail quickly or get crazy powerful.

I find all but silent consistently fun and interesting in their own ways. Still enjoy silent, and realise it's on me, but it's also that discard is a kinda faffy sort of mechanic, gotta decide what to discard etc. (only thing more annoying is scry with watcher. There may well be ways to make it work, but I'd just rather deck kull and have the cards I want thanks.)

Defect and watcher are fun for I think obvious reasons.

IC, personally, is super fun because card exhaust has some super fun/risky/powerful synergies. Dead branch is obvious, but even without it, there's some nuts methods for doing some silly damage.

equinox_code

Discard can be a bit tricky as both energy generation and card draw need to be equally boosted and optimised. it doesn't work at all if you just buff one key component, unlike a few of the other archetypes. But I still think it's my favourite if only for the obvious potential for massive turn one kills.

equinox_code

Facewon wrote:

discard is a kinda faffy sort of mechanic, gotta decide what to discard etc.

Endless agony is a great but also not-so-obvious inclusion for this purpose.

Dark Soldier

Had an ASC level 8 run last night with IC. Swapped relic at start, got Snecko. Utterly wrecked everything picking 2+ cards. Insane fun.

Started a new save when I was in Covid zone. Asc 9 IC, Asc 5 Watcher, Asc 11 Defect so far.

JMW

I still don’t really get remove a card - it costs, it’s sometimes up as a prize but what’s the big deal? I’d thought you could remove curse cards or whatever originally but you couldn’t (haven’t looked again since as it seemed a waste of money) so what’s the big deal? Is it just to make sure you’re not overloaded with weakish cards, seems not really worth the cash?

Tempy

Strikes and Defends are, rule of thumb, very inefficient cards for the energy. Once your deck starts building towards something, you generally want to draw different cards, and spend your energy on those cards. So you remove strikes and defends to allow you to do just that. Similar you might pick up a good early card and then decide you don't want it later because it mismatches what your deck has become.

These primers for Ironclad are pretty good

hunk

The smaller your deck, the less diluted it is with unnecessary cards. It's for focussing your 'build' upping the chance to deal higher level cards and combos. That's the idea behind it I guess.

JMW

Oh cheers. I’m assuming I’m never going to progress beyond about asc2 on all four (where I’m kind of stuck now) without starting to use some of these tactics?

Tempy

I mean it depends, it's a very flexible game. Skipping card rewards and getting rid of cards are important mechanics overall. The received wisdom is "small deck best" but the reality is really "the deck that is the right size to do what it wants to do is best" and usually strikes and defends get in the way of that.

hunk

JMW wrote:

Oh cheers. I’m assuming I’m never going to progress beyond about asc2 on all four (where I’m kind of stuck now) without starting to use some of these tactics?

Yes, you'll need to figure out how and which cards combo best with one another. It also helps if you're familiar with certain mathematical concepts like feedback loops, accumulatiion and recursion as lots of the big combos lean on that. Focussing your deck on those will up your chances of ascending.

Dark Soldier

I've won runs with 15 card decks, I've won them with 40+ decks. All about building it right. If Dead Branch, a lot of exhaust, if Snecko a lot of 2+ cost etc.

Facewon

Re curse cards: some can't be removed, but most can be.

Kow

I see between Switch and PC I have about a hundred hours put into this, which is loads for me. Then I see how many hours you lunatics have played for. I mean, don't you have any other things in life to do, even other games?

JonB

I tend to prioritise ditching strikes and defends at shops now. Unless there's something really worth having.

It's a weird adjustment to make from most other types of game, where there's no penalty for hoarding. Refusing a reward seems so counterintuitive, but it's sometimes key to success.

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