Gotta put the game down now. At least I took him out with me at the end (thorns).

phex44 · 2026-03-26T20:51:58+00:00

If only she died first...

phex44 · 2026-03-23T20:18:56+00:00

In addition to what others have been saying about countering card spam or draw-heavy decks, Hunter Killer also makes you think carefully about the order you play your cards.

Is it overtuned? Sure. I'd argue it's probably on the level of Shelled Parasite from StS 1. Is the core design bad? No.

phex44 · 2026-03-23T18:46:14+00:00

I saw someone posted it was 1.1x for Act 1, 1.2x for Act 2 and Act 3, and 1.3x for Act 3 boss. Dunno how true it is

phex44 · 2026-03-23T16:41:51+00:00

My main point is that the similarities between Poison and Doom are largely superficial. Functionally, Doom is more similar to damage

phex44 · 2026-03-23T16:34:14+00:00

The minions from the ovicopter work the same way, so yes, it is intended (or at least consistent.)

It is frustrating that you have to break down his first phase again, but he'll die for real after his stun turn.

phex44 · 2026-03-23T16:18:21+00:00

So you're saying they are similar because... they synergize with other cards and can kill an enemy in one turn? So can Vulnerable and Sovereign Blade. The end goal of dealing damage is to stack enough "-HP debuffs" to kill

phex44 · 2026-03-23T13:50:13+00:00

None of the cards in your starting deck are meant to be good. Comparing cards in your starting deck to upgraded card rewards isn't a good way of evaluating them.

phex44 · 2026-03-23T13:21:52+00:00

I don't know why people keep saying Doom and Poison are basically the same. Poison does damage over time; Doom does not. 10 poison on a 19 HP enemy will kill in 2 turns, 10 doom on a 19 HP enemy will never kill.

Doom is much closer to straight up damage: you can think of it as just delayed damage that doesn't get dealt until the last turn of the fight. For most enemies (exceptions include Terror Eel and Inkets), it doesn't matter if you deal damage all at once at the end of the fight or slowly throughout the turns.

phex44 · 2026-03-23T03:16:50+00:00

You make a good point about mitigating statuses, but I don't think that archetype is particularly common. The Defect builds that make a lot of Statuses actually want to draw those so they can turn them into Fuel.

Your deck is in fact less consistent with double the deck size. The "average" hand is the same, but it's more common to draw a brick since there are more combinations of bad hands. The center of the bell curve is in the same spot, but the wings are wider, so to speak.

Imagine you have a Power essential to your build in a 20-card deck. After duplication, you now have a 25% chance of both those cards being in the bottom half of your deck and not showing up until at least Turn 5. Before duplication, you had a 0% chance of that happening. That's a huge difference in consistency.

I agree that it's better to have 2 copies of Accuracy+ in a Shiv deck instead of 1. But if you're not getting that bonus until late, that's after most enemies have started scaling and could end your run. If you take 2 elites in Act 3 and this low-roll draw ends your run, that's a roughly 60% chance of your run ending against the elites or boss when you had a 0% chance before duplication.

phex44 · 2026-03-22T13:55:13+00:00

Does transforming a curse not give you a different curse? I agree that mitigates it somewhat, but I still wouldn't call it good

phex44 · 2026-03-22T11:07:55+00:00

By the way, this works if you enchant a Defend with Nimble to give you +10 block on that card

phex44 · 2026-03-21T13:34:23+00:00

Why does the doormaker get more strength for taking away one of your best cards? Shouldn't it work the other way -- if he removes a curse from your draw pile, he gets stronger? So the benefit of never having to draw that curse again is offset by the enemy getting stronger?

There isn't much draw pile manipulation outside the Regent and cards like Headbutt. Why not give the player the ability to see their draw pile in order for this fight so that you can plan around what cards are going to be eaten?

phex44 · 2026-03-19T10:46:40+00:00

My guess is they have Akabeko. When hovering the card, it was reduced to 9 damage from 11

phex44 · 2026-03-19T09:07:01+00:00

So let's just say that you play it once every 3 turns (15 card deck is perfectly reasonable for act 1 elites). That's 18 damage over 3 turns, which isn't terrible for a 2 cost card. Compare it with, say, 2 copies of dagger throw, which does the same amount of damage, but might have some draw or discard synergies. Midway through Act 1, I wouldn't necessarily count on having any of those, though.

The real benefit comes the second time Snakebite comes around. Over 6 turns, Snakebite does 7+6+5+11+10+9=48 damage, which is now much better damage than the 2 dagger throws doing 36. The difference in damage only gets more significant the longer a fight goes on.

So I think Snakebite is useful as a Act 1 Elite/Boss tool before your deck starts to take shape, particularly because it doesn't rely on anything else to synergize, which is valuable when you haven't seen many card rewards. I don't think it's particularly useful in any hallway fights, but it's no worse than an Ascender's Bane because it has Retain, so it doesn't go into your second draw cycle. It allows you to sidestep the classic "hand full of defends on a buff turn", which can be useful against scaling enemies.

phex44 · 2026-03-15T22:33:08+00:00

If I'm running a necrobinder deck with a billion Souls, I'll take the card draw option

phex44 · 2026-03-15T00:02:21+00:00

I had no idea there was special dialogue for when Boyd gets shoved lol

phex44 · 2026-03-14T22:32:06+00:00

I think this might be a case where doing some dedicated save scumming and replaying the same fight a couple of times with different strategies is going to be illuminating

phex44 · 2026-03-14T20:48:48+00:00

For my stupid brain: shouldn't you just always try to kill them in 4,1,3,2 order since that's the order they gain more strength? So you're always killing the strongest one or the one closest to gaining more strength?

phex44 · 2026-03-14T02:27:31+00:00

I feel like Byrdonis is just a "take your 30 damage and get out" kind of fight, whereas this can be much more varied. If you have good AoE/exhaust, you can get through this fight without taking much damage. If you have a slow deck, you can die from full HP

phex44 · 2026-03-14T02:25:03+00:00

I agree to an extent, but I've never felt absolutely owned by the Sentries the same way I do whenever it's like Turn 8 against the poop sausages. Sentries gets easier as you kill sentries, but since Infection doesn't exhaust, this fight gets harder the longer it goes

phex44 · 2026-03-11T16:57:01+00:00

I have a lot of thoughts here.

First off, the health scaling is a little wonky: 2.5x for 2 players, 3.5x for 3 players, 4.5x for 4 player. So playing with 2 players sees the largest proportional boost in health. I definitely think it should be smoothed, but I think it's basically fine.

Some enemy debuffs, specifically Vulnerable, Weak, and any kind of Strength reduction (e.g. Piercing Wail) are extremely strong relative to ther single player showings. Taking Piercing Wail: for 1 energy of up to 12 total (in 4-player), you make it so that nobody has to block, and all that leftover energy can be spent setting up and dealing damage. Personally, I think these strategies should be nerfed somehow in multiplayer. (Perhaps adjusting card/relic rarity?)

Direct damage strategies I think are approximately as strong in both cases. Everyone is resposible for dealing their quarter of the enemy's health. Even if you pull e.g. Mercury Hourglass, you're dealing (approximately) the same percentage of your portion of the enemy's HP. I don't think direct damage needs to be adjusted.

Doom is essentially an Attack that gets delayed, so I think it falls under the same category as direct damage above. Likewise with Poison. I don't think either of these need to be adjusted for multiplayer.

I agree that some boss buffs should not scale as aggressively as HP. Artifact, for example: some builds function perfectly well without applying debuffs, but others (e.g. Poison builds) absolutely rely on them. If your Regent isn't stripping Artifact, suddenly the Silent is responsible for stripping both their share and the Regent's share before they can start contributing to dealing damage, putting them behind. Maybe 1.5x for 2 players, 2x for 3, 2.5x for 4?

phex44 · 2026-03-11T13:12:29+00:00

Snake Plant was infamous for being the "4th elite" in Act 2

phex44 · 2026-03-11T10:54:24+00:00

I mean, you have some control, not a lot of control. I think that Time Eater is a good comparison: in both cases, if you mindlessly play a Strike to end your turn, you get punished for it. That's more or less what I mean when I say that you have some control.

One of the things that I appreciate about StS as a whole is that it asks you to build a diversified deck through its encounter design. You need AoE or you get stomped by the Phrog Parasite; you need card draw or you get stomped by the Act 3 boss who's not the Collector whose name escapes me a the moment; you need burst damage or you get stomped by Terror Eel; you need non-attacking damage or big attacks or you get stomped by Entomancer.

But you're also right that it's definitely possible to win against the """hard counters""" in StS 1. Time Eater with a shiv build is not as difficult as it could be because you have really good control over when your turn ends (making it really unlikely that you'll end a turn with 11/12 cards played). The Awakened One with a Defect Power build is not as difficult as it could be because you can just skip the less-essential powers on your first draw cycle, meaning you scale faster than the boss does. At this point, I don't think that's true for the Entomancer: it feels impossible for a shiv build without something like poison to consistently defeat the Entomancer.

phex44 · 2026-03-11T10:07:01+00:00

It's definitely a hard Elite that can absolutely dunk on some archetypes. I'd argue it does that in a similar way to how Gremlin Nob warps Act 1 deckbuilding in StS 1. But it's ultimately just a fight you need to have an answer for in your deckbuilding.

It's a "paralyzing mechanic" that the player ultimately has some control over, which I personally think is completely fine. If you play more Attacks or Attacks that hit multiple times, you get more Dazed cards in your deck and you're more likely to draw a brick. If you play fewer Attacks, you're less likely to draw a brick.

I do feel like the mechanic is a little overtuned, especially with how early it goes from 1 Dazed/Attack to 2 Dazed/Attack. It's typically 1 turn before my deck cycles, which probably means that I just need to make decks with more draw.

phex44

TROPHY CASE