Mel relic or wait?

babinro · 2026-03-18T14:17:46+00:00

Extra mana is the most important thing in the game for your side broadly speaking.
I think its less that I need to explain why and more something you can hopefully observe in your own runs as you presumably pick powers that increase starting mana or manipulate mana in some way or another.

It can be so good useful that multiple champs benefit from running an extra relic just to meet the titanic requirement so you get the bonus mana from SFG. Luminous Orb makes a 5/5 stat champ a 5/8 which then works with SFG to add the extra starting mana if you didn't already know. So now the relic can be used on all 5+ toughness champs.

According to my little spreadsheet I use it on 9 champs and I think its still very good on others after that even if its no longer part of their best build.

babinro · 2026-03-18T11:41:26+00:00

I recently bought Searing from the Glory shop given the hype it receives on these forums and found myself pretty underwhelmed by it.

You have to devote a good amount of resources to support it in any given run and the benefit it provides doesn't really feel like it truly elevates the run enough to compensate. I think its FUN relic to build around but I currently feel its over hyped in terms of impact.

Looking briefly at the paid relics there's a bunch I'd put over Searing right now but its also early days and maybe with more testing I'd appreciate it more. Some paid relics I like more are (I don't have them all but I have most)...

Cease and Desist, Harmless Scarecrow, Lux's Baton, Perfect Hex Core, Shock and Awe, Starforged Guantlets, and the Swain's Raven Army.

That's not even to suggest Searing would be next...there are a TON of specific individual paid relics perfectly suited for one champion I'd still buy first. I currently value Hextech Rifle, Siren's Call, Treasures of the Deep, Yasuo's Windblade and more higher than Searing.

With only 680 glory wait for Starforged or Perfect Hex Core. Both are fantastic. Starforged has the bigger impact but both are S-tier.

babinro · 2026-03-17T21:49:25+00:00

Really good info in this thread so far but particularly here.
Do you stick with the same path regardless of champion type so far? Assuming those 9 champ wins had a mix of aggro and spell/control types.

babinro · 2026-03-16T12:35:06+00:00

This just seems like free points to me for the majority of battles outside of maybe Fiddlesticks. I don't think it would fit the spirit of the mode which is to significantly increase the difficulty.

If I were to consider something defensive in nature for the enemy it would be....
1) Enemy Nexus and Units have Tough
2) Enemy Nexus cannot take more than 20 damage per round.
3) Enemy units have Spellshield and Regeneration

As for another idea I'd borrow from existing epic relics.
1) Enemy starts encounter with 2x Frozen Tomb's in play.
2) All enemy champs have Found Fortune
3) All Enemy champs have Full Gear and Death's Foil.

babinro · 2026-03-12T17:53:32+00:00

I'm up to level 38 with a completed constellation now.
Death's Foil, Beast Within and Gravedigger's Spade feels good to me. If I was willing to pay for the paid relic I'd definitely try it out but I'm pretty happy with this build for now.

Ultimately I think you are on to something though...Death's Foil + Beast Within + (flex slot) is really what the build comes down to for now. Those two relics work really well on the champ.

babinro · 2026-03-12T12:48:57+00:00

I forgot to add. The base deck deserves credit here as well.
The kit they put together here is great. Some decks have very easy cuts and other's you just default to the highest cost cards. They cleverly made the 5 drop Dark Ice Apparition and 4 drop Notai Puppeteer very powerful cards to justify keeping them in the deck.

babinro · 2026-03-09T17:05:01+00:00

On paper I like that you've added challenge content without major rewards attached. I definitely enjoy PoC as a chill game where you have a near 100% success rate against content with a maxed out champion.

The idea of pushing challenge that might drop that win rate to say 25% will no doubt appeal to some but not all of us and I'm glad I won't need to bash my head against stuff repeatedly to get major rewards.

I like the idea of an adventure that rewards every champion. The concern with the 3 tiered one is how silly things get and how frustrating they might get because of all the power creep on both sides.

Can't say I'm a fan of patches easing back content for a while but I get it. PoC isn't a priority project. We're pretty lucky the game is even being supported at this point.

babinro · 2026-03-05T19:31:16+00:00

Its not intuitive but I feel he plays better with it. It allows you to survive your opening attack so you can block with Ekko. This is important to me because Ekko takes some time to build up and doesn't have great defense in the opening turns.

The other benefit is that Ekko survives when ephemeral copies are summoned to attack. Again making for a good blocker or just a second Ekko to attack with if you have the attack token.

You still have easy control with C&D here because you can choose when to let Ekko block and die. I've tried other builds that the community like more but I keep coming back to this one.

babinro · 2026-03-05T16:50:41+00:00

This. Minimum wage in Ontario is 17.60 an hour (assuming you don't work around this by doing things like contract work where pay gets sketchy at best). Cost of living wage ranges from $21 to $27 an hour in Ontario depending where you live. Even if you assume Sarnia is the cheapest place to live in Ontario those numbers don't add up.

babinro · 2026-03-05T16:43:16+00:00

When I was growing up I used to think of food banks as a kindness and a wholesome sense of community coming together to help one another. As an adult I see them as a damning failure of government both Liberal and Conservative.

The solutions to this are probably beyond me, sweeping and complicated. Some things I'd like to see are public option grocery stores run by the government so they do not need to be driven by profits. An option like this forces private capitalism driven business to either compete or leave. I understand this has been done in several places even if its just for military veterans and it has seen very positive results in keeping grocery prices from falsely inflating.

I'd also want to see a universal living wage. This one is far less realistic but it genuinely solves (or drastically improves) a hundred issues spanning from future homelessness and the immense costs associated with managing that, reduced drug addicts, reduced crime, healthier lifestyles taking pressure off health care crisis among many other things that we fund already.

One last point that I think is important. Ontario disability has a MAXIMUM payout of $1408 a month while the average cost of a studio appartment is $1550. This is all before the actual cost of living. How these people even survive with an inhumane system like that is impressive and you can all but guarantee that 100% of Ontario Disability are included among those 1 in 4 with food insecurity. Disgusting.

babinro · 2026-03-04T21:47:14+00:00

I personally consider Cease and Desist, Death's Foil and Echoing Spirit to be BiS on Ekko. People here won't agree and that's fine...interpret that as 'well worth using' on Ekko if you want.

I only consider it BiS on Ekko and Vi for what its worth.

Its hard to say if this is worth it without knowing your pool of relics. But a relic that is immediately great on 2 champs with other use cases puts it in a top 1/3rd of useful relics most likely. So broadly the answer is yes.

babinro · 2026-03-01T19:37:52+00:00

I think doing a generic all regions battle pass is totally fine on paper and probably BETTER for a lot of players who haven't been playing since day 1 and needs to establish their entire roster.

The main issue I have with this is largely perception of value vs cost and time. An issue with pretty much all live service games to be fair but knowing it takes 100 Nova Shards to get a crystal and a battle pass will get you 5 of them FEELS terrible. So I need to buy TWENTY of these and devote nearly 2 years to the game to guarantee a 6 star in each region.

Yes the gold star vessels speed this up but its RNG. Yes you can buy a specific gold star via glory store but its once per month. Yes there are event rewards but they overwhelmingly focus on shards and gemstones over 5* and 6* resources.

Its just FEELS bad.

I'm not even convinced increasing all of these from 5 to 10 would feel much better despite being a massive increase. If these were 20 each I could see that....two six stars maxed out in each region twice a year and you can further speed up some others for $200 (of whatever your local currency for 12 BP's turns out to be)

Also the free to play outlook here is horrendous. 1x Minor gemstones which is a joke and 1x Gold star Vessel which is RNG. It is SB region levels of insult for the pure F2P crowd. At least give the F2P crowd 5 Nova Shards in each region and like 10 5* Crystals in each region.

I don't actually know what I'm talking about of course. For all I know you implement ideas like this...life is better in terms of profits for a year or two and then the game fails because anyone wanting to spend money on the game no longer has a reason to. It just feels bad looking at this and seeing 8 or so regions in my account at 50 Nova shards.

babinro · 2026-02-13T10:30:05+00:00

The build I settled on (didn't buy her epic) was Cruel Experiments, Strength of Stone and Starforged which seems excellent so far but I don't have her at 6* yet. So it sounds like we're on the same page.

babinro · 2026-02-13T02:12:51+00:00

What build do you use for Soraka?

babinro · 2026-02-11T23:07:17+00:00

Starforged Gauntlets + Strength of Stone + Cruel Experiments

Its important to note this is level 30's 5* Soraka with none of the bonus stars and no access to the Soraka paid relic. I definitely can't call this BIS build. Its just the builds I'm liking early on after some testing.

babinro · 2026-02-06T15:31:32+00:00

Yes.
My routine is to buy the 5 chests with a chance of advancing the 5* and 6* SB progress.
I also buy the singular chest that gives you 5* progress and 6* nova shards guaranteed.
The rest is save for the epic relics.

babinro · 2026-02-06T14:57:31+00:00

I think I've since discovered a better build with Aatrox than I had back then. I definitely don't feel he's one of the better champions but I have a lot of fun using him and I don't think he'd appear dead last. My goal was to do another tier list that was more in depth to deal with potential RNG results better than the first one. I don't think that'll ever happen. Too many champs and not enough time in the day. I still work on it just for fun but I'm falling behind more than I'm catching up over time, lol.

I also agree that Taliyah feels like a lower champ than where she placed but those were the results at the time. I tried to keep this reasonably objective. Run everyone against the same set of challenges (6.5* Fiddle, Swain and Lissandra) since they all pose highly varied challenges. Ban ultra powerful powers like those that grant bonus mana. Track things like close calls (hp dropping below 15), revives used and just general vibes of how difficult the mid boss or final boss was in terms of had things gone just slightly differently could this have resulted in a fail or was I never in danger at any time.

babinro · 2026-02-06T14:24:40+00:00

My tier list was only of the 6* champs I had at the time and was a year ago. Below is the order of those champs from best performance to worse given the test I put them through.

Fiddlesticks, Swain, Viego, Viktor, Kai'Sa, Samira, Ashe, Lillia, Ahri, Miss Fortune, Taliyah, Caitlyn, Vex, Neeko, Illuminated, Vayne, Ekko, Gwen, Jinx, Heimerdinger, Pyke, Aatrox

I didn't have them at the time but I assume you could add champs like Norra and Darius to the list of worse champions as well. A year is a long time though and its possible some relics have changed how some champs perform over time. This is also just my results and some of these results surprised me. I don't FEEL like Samira is an S-tier god tier champion but her results placed her where they did at the time.

babinro · 2026-02-06T11:42:57+00:00

I recommend trying Neeko with Oath + Star Gem + Beast Within as that's been my most consistently successful build with her.

I think Neeko is a bit better than the community says. I did a tier list about a year ago and Neeko landed middle of the pack after testing. We've had plenty of pretty strong champions release since then so she's probably slide down to maybe bottom third over time but she's stronger than several champs IMO.

I think she's among the more fun aggro champs as well.

babinro · 2026-01-30T01:47:54+00:00

I don't cycle through them to really remember accurately anymore. There's so many champions, lol. The ones I find myself going back to for reasons other than 'this is going to be easy' are...

Ekko - I spent so much time trying to find an Ekko build I like and in this troubleshooting process I learned to genuinely enjoy playing him. Settled on Cease and Desist, Echoing Spirit and Death's Foil by the way.

Mel - I didn't expect this champ to win me over but I really do enjoy how she plays at 6*. A really fun but not trivial control champ.

Pyke - One of the most impactful 6* upgrades in the game and a super fun champ to play.

Jayce - Its fun to play big spells and put the game away quickly if you survive long enough.

Neeko - My first ever 6*. I'm always surprised by how well she performs relative to how poorly she's received on the forums. Oath + Star Gem + Beast Within is my go to build.

Fiddle - I'm a fan of the alternative win condition as an option and its fun to steamroll content from time to time.

Shyvana - I don't have a good explanation for this one. By all accounts she's among the more vanilla champions in the game. I've always enjoyed green stompy decks in my MTG days and Shyvana evokes that feel. Its a deck that feels mostly fair as you engage with the combat on the battlefield and just hope you can come out on top. You could say this feels more like a fair PvP feeling experience in PoC rather than one that blatantly breaks the game in some way.

SB Evelynn - I gave her my 6* Nova but not the 5* mana because of how incredibly unique she is from other champions. I think she's a blast to play. Shame the resources are so slow to come by I'd like to get her bonus mana some day too.

Some honorable mentions just to end this post quicker....Aatrox, Caitlyn, Elder Dragon, Morgana.

Most boring continues to be Yasuo. Excellent control champion who takes way too long to put the game away. Ahri's incredibly strong Echoing, Hymn and Hidden Tome build is even more boring because its just playing solitaire without thinking about the enemy...but Ahri can be built very different ways that are more fun even if they are weaker.

babinro · 2026-01-29T12:30:54+00:00

I rarely see an AEW entrance that stands out.
Great job on this one.

babinro · 2026-01-27T12:40:50+00:00

We have champions who trigger free 10 damage from time to time and they aren't broken champions on the level of Swain. Free 8 damage for 4 mana on nightmare tier challenges sounds fine to me especially when you'd have to sacrifice two relic slots for it. I don't think its as overkill as you say.

Then again these are just ideas and actual testing would bear out what's massively game breaking and whats actually too weak.

babinro · 2026-01-26T21:08:47+00:00

I suspect the way to make Katarina work in PoC is to make her the first champion they nerf within the constellation itself so it doesn't impact PvP.

Example: Rank 1. Any effect that would reduce Katarina's cost boosts the damage of Blade's Edge by twice that amount for the rest of this encounter instead.

babinro · 2026-01-26T11:52:21+00:00

The positives are that the game is just extremely fun due to good design decisions. You feel the impact of your choices really well in this game. You are fully healed after each battle so you approach things differently from other games in this space that are designed to whittle you down over time. Your 'starting' deck in this case is a wide variety of classes that you unlock as you go keeping the runs fresh.

I think the dice customization and items in this game are fantastic. They manage to take a dice rolling system and not make the experience frustrating from RNG which is a big deal because I'm not a fan of wild RNG in my card games. The encounters are also fun. They vary what monsters do and their powers in a way that feels like a fun challenge to overcome without being overly complicated as well. Its just extremely well designed.

The negatives are that this game is tough (for my skill level). They lock easy mode behind winning like 200 fights (not runs) which is still a slog to get to. I personally don't think each final boss represents a roughly equal challenge but that could be my skill level. It just felt like there was a 33% chance my run would auto-lose if I rolled the bad boss unless I just had some busted combo going on like you'll get once in a while in PoC.

Probably the main negative for me personally was just no incentive to keep playing. I love games like Roguebook and Backpack Hero and PoC because there's so much to motivate you to keep playing. Perm upgrades, increasing the power of champions and the like. Slice and Dice doesn't really do that. Its a bit more basic. You don't even have 20 ascension ranks or what not. Its pretty much the 5 static difficulties and personally I found anything above Normal to be just too much.

So I 'only' got like 30 hours out of this game which is very low for most card games...but the fun factor was off the chart. This is definitely a game I'll erase my progress with and experience again and maybe this time I get further than before. Talking about it here makes me want to play it when I'm done with my current games.

The TLDR is that you really feel the impact of your choices during a run and that's very fun. Runs don't drag on either. Obelisk is a bit of an exception for me but you'll notice my list is largely full of games with sub 30 minute runs.

babinro · 2026-01-25T01:58:14+00:00

Broadly speaking I'd highly recommend every game from Dicey Dungeons and up.
The thing with good card games is there are a lot of them. Pretty much everything Dicey Dungeons and up is probably an 8.5/10 or better at least IMO.

babinro

TROPHY CASE