r/slaythespire

Crushed the Doormaker.

Saw some people talking about their card misinterpretations and thought I'd share one of mine. Looking back on it I don't know how I misread the card this badly. Ig I just saw yellow and was like "ah yes that's the Defect's body" and thought the blue orb was its head orb thing?? And figured that the consuming part meant it was consuming the Defect's body. Also somehow completely missed its head in the bottom right and that the Defect does not in fact have a yellow torso.

Going in order, the first one being the "most helpful":

​"Until the developer themselves publicly livestreams how to beat difficulty 10 with all five characters, I probably won't be taking back this negative review. I have a hard time understanding what kind of mindset went into making these balance patches."

And some of the "most recent" ones:

"I really don't understand why they changed the doors. They restrict you to death, and then the monsters' desire to attack is ridiculously high. In multiplayer, you finally manage to fight a door with 80 HP, and after beating it you only have 11 HP left. Then you run into a test subject, you can't one-shot it in the first turn, and it one-shots you instead. Forcibly dictating how we play the game. Have you guys ever even played games? Dev team."

​"The monsters are really strong, the damage output is really high, the mechanics are really brutal, they just want me dead 🐴🐴🐴"

(Note: The horse emojis are often used as internet slang in Chinese to represent a curse word).

​"This door/portal is a bit of a joke/ridiculous."

​"Anthony, look at what kind of fking monsters you designed. On floors 1 and 2, there's a bunch of them that take off 10 to 20+ health in a single turn; one bad draw and you're eating massive battle damage. Don't even get me started on floor 3, do you like the tag-team of test subjects and doors? Is it even possible for a human to design these fking doors? You'd better be able to publicly livestream beating A10 with all five characters, [expletive]. Oh right, do you like how every monster just stuffs crap into your deck? If you draft a large deck, just wait to get a bad draw and get kicked to death."

​"Games are meant to serve the players, not to serve 'balance'."

​"Before, there was still the positive feedback of getting a good roguelike run going. The current doors are no longer meant for humans to fight; you can only gamble that your build doesn't get hard-countered. There is absolutely no sense of progression. You breeze through the first three floors, get to the door, and die instantly. Such 'great' design."

So it seems like the big issues to them are the Doormaker changes, and just overall difficulty. Both of which I don't understand why they would review bomb for.

Now I admit when I first fought the Doormaker, I also thought he was unnecessarily difficult. But after a few more a10 runs, I realized that he's actually the easiest boss! He feels really restrictive with his different phases, but they are very easily played around. Devour is actually GOOD for deck thinning, Scrutiny doesn’t matter much, and Grasp seems difficult but you really just need either high impact cards, or 0 cost cards. Sometimes not even that, because just playing 1 less card/turn isn't that bad. He doesn't hit especially hard.

Comparing this to the Queen, who PERMANENTLY plays each debuff on you and binds your cards, or the Test Subject who absolutely murders you for just playing skills, the Doormaker isn't actually very oppressive. And even when I did think he was difficult, I still had fun! It didn't even cross my mind to leave a negative review. Isn't the difficulty is part of the fun anyway?

And as for the overall difficulty, the comments saying they need to watch the devs beat a10 on stream is simply hilarious. They're acting like average players like us aren't beating a10 regularly. And if they're really struggling that much, they can just... not play high ascensions? I don't get it. And again, wouldn't review bomb a game known for being difficult for being difficult, lol. Maybe if it was literally mathematically impossible to win, it would be worth leaving a comment, but this game isn't even that hard as far as difficult games go... This is really such a strange phenomenon to me. It really just seems like they are mad because bad, lol.

Everybody memed this card to death when the game came out, but after playing a f*ck ton of StS2 I now think Snakebite is not just decent, but a very good early pick in various situations.

It's better than Deadly Poison in almost every situation, the card it gets compared to the most.

It pretty much doesn't even matter that it costs 2 mana because Retain allows you to always play this on the enemies' down turn. The upgrade is better than average, increasing poison by 3 is as much as Bouncing Flask, which is an Uncommon... and much more:

Since you can hold it in hand it removes itself from your draw if you want to.

It makes Calculated Gamble and Flechettes stronger, two really good Silent cards. It makes Storm of Steel and Bullet Time better. It uses Pounce really well. It can be discarded in those rare instances that you are forced to discard something and you don't really want to discard anything.

It has that awesome quality of being very good early and getting out of your way in the late game.

Pick Snakebite.

Tracking for 1 might be a bit busted. Who needs watcher with wrath or divinity? Weak and Vulnerable is enough to get triple damage, and the sky is the limit from here. Add a shadow step, and we are already dropping bombs before we even take a look at the relic possibilities.

Was mindlessly going through a run with Silent when I noticed that it talked a bit about her Sisters. It's pretty neat, made me wonder what else I missed for other specific characters after skimming over the already encountered events.

The critiques all seem to boil down to "I can't auto pilot my deck".

A humble ironclad meets STS2