Card Discussion: Bombardment (Regent)
Hi y'all,
The purpose of this post is to share some technical ideas about Bombardment that may be useful to you. I'm a casual sts2 player since release, and I now play the game on a10 trying to win most my runs. The regent is my favorite character, and I wanted to talk about my favorite card of his: Bombardment.
https://sts2.untapped.gg/en/cards/bombardment
The job that I think Bombardment fulfills in a Regent run is to provide you with adequate damage to kill bosses and elites (and some chunky hallways like Hunter Killer or Owl Magistrate) while taking up very little room in your deck to do so. It's one card, and it arguably needs no enabling cards around it to do its 'thing'. What I feel this allows you to do is create a deck that has strong tempo cards for hallway fights (Crush Under, Big Bang, Collision Course, Cloak of Stars, Dying Star, just to spitball) but still has enough total damage output in a boss fight to kill it before it scales up and kills you. Or more accurately, I might say that Bombardment helps you turn the sort of deck you might have leaving act 1 with your front loaded damage commons and turn it into a deck that has enough output volume for later challenges.
Now, the perhaps obvious downside of bombardment is that it's expensive and has low immediate payoff. In fact, on the turn you play it, it has the same output as if you had spent the energy on strikes instead. Accordingly, I would afford you that Bombardment is not a 'premium' damage scaling solution. This is, after all, a character that can make triple digit damage Sovereign Blades to solve the same problem Bombardment solves (scaling damage). But I would argue that a10 is not currently balanced around needing the upper echelons of damage on Regent. With the help of my front-loaded damage cards that I probably took with hallway fights in mind, I find that Bombardment and some vulnerable application can provide enough damage to get me over the hump of the act 3 boss gauntlet. Sure I'd rather turn a boss to red mist with a 400 damage Blade, but if Bombardment is the first big scaling damage solution I see in a deck that's lacking it, my mindset is "O.K., if I take this, I know I can win the run even if I'm not offered anything better". I also don't know when I find the first piece of that ideal Blade package whether I'll find the other components I want whereas with Bombardment, I'm not counting on anything else being offered. Furthermore, Bombardment being a very compact solution to scaling damage means that your boss-ready deck can still draw almost entirely cards you chose to be good for hallway fights in said hallway fights. You're one Begone or Tyranny exhaust from forgetting it's even there.
Think of it this way. I, like many in this community, really like the colorless card Finesse. There are few mechanics in the game that make Finesse anything other than 'free' block. Excellent! Most decks of mine would love a Finesse if it fell into my lap. I don't have such warm feelings toward, say, Eternal Armor. It's clunky, hard to get in play, and takes two full turns to match the energy-to-block output of basic defends. But if my deck is sorely lacking the ability to consistently block and the Brain Leech event offers me Finesse and Eternal Armor side-by-side, I'd likely take Eternal Armor because "a deck that can't block" + Finesse = "basically the same deck that can't block". Whereas "a deck that can't block" + Eternal Armor = "maybe I'm ok now". That's how I feel toward Bombardment on the damage side of things. Just that one card causes a night and day difference in the amount of scaling damage output my deck has. A sight for sore eyes if that's what I lack!
When do I think Bombardment is probably a bad idea? Well you can probably get through all of act 1 without scaling damage if your single target damage is up to snuff. I find that the bosses have low enough hp that damage scaling is helpful but often unnecessary in act 1 (ymmv). It's probably more pressing to add block solutions to Regent's starter deck than scaling damage. It's also probably a bad card if your deck already has enough scaling damage to solve all the game's fights. Maybe Wrought In War was one of your early damage commons and you kept leaning into Blade. Now you have some forge package going on, and your blade scales fast enough to kill the bosses before they kill you. Great! Your deck already does the job that Bombardment tries to fulfill and probably has a better.
Oh, and I want to mention that much of this commentary on Bombardment can be applied to Rolling Boulder as well (a card which has saved many of my scaling-less decks).
Thank you for reading! Please be encouraged to respond to my points in this post as well as sharing other technical sts2 thoughts that this post makes you think of in the comments below.