Transcription
Hello and welcome. If you clicked on this video looking to get better at Slay the Spire, you're in the right place. And if this scene looks all too familiar to you, this video is going to go in depth on how to prevent all of this from happening. Either you're taking too much damage from fights or your damage isn't as strong enough as you'd like and you can't kill enemies. We're going to go through all of that in depth to help you win your fights.
The real problem that a lot of people run into is they get into situations like this and the question is just what should I be doing in this situation? Right? I have defense. I have strikes. I'm being attacked. Do I full block every time? Do I attack every time? Do I just play a mix as best as I can? What should I be doing here?
The short answer is it depends on your deck. You should be looking at what your build is doing and what your build is capable of to inform your decisions. If you have better block in your deck than these defends, uh, but you don't have better attack, then you should probably be playing these strikes here because you need to be pushing damage. Essentially, if strike is all you got, you can't improve your efficiency of just playing an attack. It's going to be the same damage no matter what. So, you got to play them when you can to kill the boss. But if you have better blocks, waiting to play shrug it off instead of defend is 60% more efficient. You're gaining eight block for one energy instead of five. And over the course of the fight, that matters a lot.
Similarly, if you have better attacks coming but no damage, which is typically what you would encounter in act one elites, you usually take damage first. Then you probably want to play your blocks on this turn because it's much less efficient to spend energy on strikes than it is to spend energy on budgeon. So in this example, if you just have defense, you know, blocking whenever is always going to prevent the same amount of damage, but waiting to play a budgeon is 77% more efficient.
So the goal of combat is to be effective across the entire fight and not just this turn. And when you start considering that, the decision points become a lot more clear of what you should be doing. Um, and just two examples of, you know, if you look at the whole turn, what card you played throughout the turn. If you just played strikes and defends over three turns, this would do like 30 damage, you'd gain 20 block. Maybe you get two card rewards. You have a shrug off and a twin strike. And you set it up so that you play bash before the other strikes so they have vulnerable for the following turn. With a very small change can almost double your damage output. You don't need that many cards. Um, you know, shrug it off. If this was a defend, it'd be 15 block. Twin strike would make this like 45 damage, but you can still get like a 50% or 100% damage boost just on how you sequence your cards. And if you have better cards, this gets even better, right? If you can set it up so that you're like fiend firing your hand away and then bashing into an ashen strike, you're doing way more damage for the same amount of energy across three turns. And that's the goal of lay the spire is to be as efficient as you possibly can with your energy.
So step one, you have to look at your build. And this is kind of before every fight or just throughout the entire run, you need to answer these questions continuously. How does my deck attack? And how does my deck block? You need to have an answer in your head throughout every combat and you need to be thinking about this because that guides your decisions. Um, and it doesn't have to be complicated. Like the ironclad starting deck damage plan is just set up bash into strikes. That's the most efficient way it can deal damage. And so at the beginning of the fight, at the beginning of the run, that is your damage plan. So if you get to a combat situation like this where you're being attacked for 18 and you have bash and defense, well, you have a lot of defense in your hand. So, you know, you're likely to draw attacks off the top next turn. So, setting up bash in this situation is really critical because that sets you up to do the most damage your deck can possibly do. If you triple defend this turn, then you're going to be just playing like basic strikes next turn. Um, and that's not very efficient. You're going to spend extra turns killing the boss and in the process take more damage than if you had just gone bash defend this turn, setting up for next turn.
There's a bunch of different types of damage plans. The defect's default deck is kind of just playing zaps and then dual casting them. That's the best that it can do damage with. So if you find yourself in this position during an elite fight, it's probably better to play the zap here, getting an orb so that you can dual cast it later rather than playing all the defense because you have to kill this thing eventually. And if zap dual cast is your best source of damage, it's way more important to play that when you have it than just blocking. And again, there's so many different kinds of damage plans. I've had this before where all you have is like a hemocinesis and a potion. It's 28 damage for one energy. If you can set up like bash into this, it suddenly becomes like 34. And it's not perfect, but you have a damage plan. This is the most effective form of damage my deck can do. And you work with that.
With the necroinder, the base damage, the best thing you can do typically is like playing bodyguards early to store damage on AI. So then you can poke them for a lot of damage. Or something I like doing a lot is playing Patter into Celestial Might. It's a good block card. It's great damage. The Vigor makes this do eight damage three times, which is 24 for two. Not a bad play, and you just need to be mindful of like your sequencing, right? Playing strikes before pattern, so you can save this for Celestial Knight on future turns.
So, every fight you should be going through the damage plan checklist. What is the best way my deck can deal damage? And what do I need to do this turn to make that happen throughout the entire fight? And we do the same thing with block. You need to have a plan in place for how you're going to prevent damage coming to you. It could just be as simple as you just take big block cards, right? Flame barrier, mangle, both very efficient block cards. Mangle, not the best block card, but it's cool because you get like an attack and a block. And this is really good against enemies who attack multiple times. You could have a like synergistic block plan where you have like feel no pain into fiend fire and you have like this setup where you block. Um, if that's your game plan, you know, you might have to play feel no pain here instead of a defend so that you can prevent 21 damage later, right? You're if you compare the efficiency, if you play defend here, you're blocking for five now. That's it. If you play feel no pain here, you're not blocking for five now. But then if you fiend fire later and get 21 block, it's way more efficient to play this now. And these are the things you need to be considering during the fight. If your block plan is like coolheaded in a loop or somehow utilizing frost orbs plus focus, a similar thing like you might have to take the short-term hit of not playing a defend on turn one so you can coolheaded, but later on you can set up your blocking plan. And these are just a couple examples, but hopefully it's clear like what type of things you should be thinking of.
So the build checklist is basically every turn is blocking or attacking more efficient this turn relative to what my deck is capable of? And as a small caveat, I have to add, will the fight last long enough for that to matter? Um, sometimes you just don't have enough time to do your your ideal setup, and you just got to work with the cards that you have. But that I think that judgment call comes with experience. So, this video is more just about getting you thinking about your game plan and how to execute it. And we're going to jump into some in-game fights so I can show you more in depth what I'm talking about.
I took a very early elite. You can see we got like three combats, an event, and a fire before this guy. Um, this deck's very interesting because it's very defensive. I have like upgraded shadow shield, upgraded zap. So, what is our damage plan? Well, our damage plan is twofold. A first just accumulating lightning orbs. That's why we upgraded zap uh with focus strike. Our second damage plan, because we have dark orbs, could be growing a large dark orb and then hitting it with a dual cast. So, this is a bit of an interesting situation. We have some good defend coming up, like shadow shield and leap are both better defend cards than these, but we also have better damage coming up with like zap and focused strike. So, now we need to think about what does this fight look like? Does playing these strikes actually decrease the total duration of the fight? I don't think that it does. We're not going to be able to burst this guy down with a deck that looks like this, right? We're really realistically we're killing with a dark orb. So, we're going to play shadow shield, play zap a couple times, move it around, and then eventually dual cast it. So, we need to survive as long as possible. So, I want to play defend defend. Even though dual cast is more damage for us, we actually want orbs in our slots so we can do damage passively over the course of the fight. So, I'm actually going to play strike here. And we kind of are expecting to take a good chunk of damage going into this combat because we took an early elite somewhat recklessly. That just is what it is. We have a fire. We came in with full health. So if we can get out of this fight losing 30 HP, we're pretty happy cuz we came in with essentially full HP. So now we have nine block. So we'll start there. Sadly, shadow shield was on the bottom. So we're not going to be able to redraw it very much, but we can focus strike for a little bit of damage. And again, I don't think the strike is going to matter. I'm going to full block this. I take less damage than needed. Now they're attacking for 19. Again, playing defensively. I can full block all of this. Our lightning orbs are doing passive damage. But here's where it gets awkward, right? We are taking a big chunk. Dual cast on top. So if I redraw a way to move this, we could be okay here. Let's prevent as much as possible. We take 13 here and I draw the zap. So this is how we execute our plan. Our damage is dual casting a dark orb. So we go zap into dual cast and we kill. Um, hopefully that was very like indicative. Like our deck didn't have a very good it's not the best build, but we had a damage plan which is make a dark orb and dual cast it and you just play that out. You block until you get to that point. You know, if we had played strikes instead of defense early, it wouldn't have really changed the outcome because the dual casting dark orb was so much damage that we would have just taken damage that we didn't need to uh earlier on.
Okay, so I'm here with another example on the ironclad. I took a very irresponsible route to demonstrate. I got two combats, two shops, and an elite. So, we have very little setup here. But if we look at our deck, we can still form a damage plan um because we have battle trance, bloodletting, two zerocost attacks, and a bash and a headbutt. So really, our game plan is built around playing battle trance, drawing into our zeros, and hopefully using bash to set up vulnerable. So we can do that. Um, we can also make a lot of angers so that hopefully we can draw into a lot of them and maybe counteract some of these infested things. So, our block pan, we really don't have one besides defense. Um, but our goal is basically to find battle trance, draw a lot of zeros, and just play the zeros a lot. So, let's start with headbutt. I don't think I want to headbutt a to strike back on top because strike is not our most efficient form of damage. So, let's just push damage while we can. We're going to get infested. Uh, but now we draw the battle trance and I will play that. So, we have Bash and Bulis on top unfortunately. So, it's actually much more efficient to block this turn than anything. But, I think we can actually do both because we have bloodletting. But if we didn't have bloodletting, strike is just so much less efficient than playing like anger or bash into anger that if we didn't have bloodletting here, I would just triple defend and then anger, right? I would do this. Um, but because we have bloodletting, you know, taking three damage to do an extra 12 is worth it. So, given that option, we'll play this. Uh, so we only take one damage here. And I think honestly this is going to be a good turn because now I get to go bash into uh bololis. We get that back. Anger and strike will kill. So now we have to ask a decision. I'll talk about this later in the video, but when you kill this guy, he'll transform um and then you'll get like all the little minions will be stunned. So, we can kill here, but then next turn, we're facing 18. And I think it's actually better to wait and kill him next turn. That way, we'll have all of our energy ready to take on all of the little minions. Um, so we're going to do that. We take three from this. We get three in infections. Uh, that's fine because we can guaranteed kill here. We're going to get bullets back. And now we get this whole turn of extra time to do damage to these guys before they hit us. And we can even like headbutt in anger back on top of our deck if we want to. Uh, which could be really good with battle trance. So I think I will actually do that. And this turn I can do 15. And we're going to draw the bolus, right? 9 + 6 is 15. The bolus only does three. So guess I'll go here. So, we're going to get this for free. I could put anger on top. I could also put bash on top. Bash into bololis could be a lot of damage as well with a bloodletting. That's also a good consideration. I So, this this is more just a judgment call of what is more damage. I think I'll take a bash here and then I will strike this one and play defend to block the infection. So now we're being attacked for six. Uh the plan didn't work out. I took bash because I wanted to be able to bash with bloodletting and battle trance. So I think taking an anger in hindsight would have been better. Um, but now I can go bash strike bulis or something. Anger kills this one. Then we can bash plus bulus is going to do eight. I think three is going to become like four with vulnerable. It's not that much. Um, 3 * 1.5. Yeah, it's four or five. So 8 + 4 is 12. And then strike would be another nine. So we can kill this one. But it might actually be better to kill this one and take six because no, actually next turn looks fine. Okay, we're going to kill this guy. Go here. Here. You're dead. Now these guys buff and we're being attacked for two. We're probably taking a big hit here, but we have battle trance. We have bloodletting. Uh, there's the bash that I was hoping to do last turn. So now again, our best damage plan is bash. Um, we're very likely needing to bloodletting here. So, let's play that. And then we can calculate. I don't think we can kill both. We can very likely kill one of them. Let's go. Bash. Strike does nine. Bullest kills. And then I can defend strike. We do take like a little bit of damage here, but I get hit for nine total. And then we just get to kill. So, we went into a combat which was very aggressive, right? We took an elite with almost no setup. Our deck looked pretty bad, but we had a damage plan, and that damage plan is trying to battle trance to draw a bunch of zeros. Use headbutt to put our good attacks on top. We took a bulis from the shop just to give us like, you know, we need damage to kill the boss, and this is guaranteed damage. And it fits in with the theme of like using bash to set up attacks. Um, and we got out of that combat. Oh, and we um killed the elite at the right time. So, we got a whole extra turn to attack little minions. And we got out of that combat taking like 10 damage in total, which I think is quite good given how poorly set up our deck is so far.
So, now that you've got your plan set up, you have a damage plan, you have a blocking plan, there are cards in most characters card pools that let you do your plan more often. These act as sort of a multiplicative effect onto your base game plan like headbutt, grave blast, wellade plans, and skin. So, just as a quick example, if you take a headbutt, put headbutt in your deck, if you can headbutt a budgeon back on top of your deck, you're able to use Bludgeon twice per deck cycle instead of once per deck cycle. So, adding a headbutt to your deck can be almost as much, if not more, total damage than just adding a second copy of Bludgeon because headbutt does more damage than a strike and then you get to play budgeon twice as often. So, the purpose of cards like this is to accelerate your already existing game plan, and that's why they're so good, and that's also why they're so challenging for newer players who might not know exactly what they're supposed to be for. Um, similarly, if your block plan involves playing define, giving weak, which is a very good card, grave blast can just amplify that. Maybe now you can do this two times per deck cycle, your block plan just got twice as good by taking grave blast, which is great. And this scales into the late game really really well because like taking a second to five is cool, but as the game goes on, your block plan is going to scale up and cards like grave blast and headbutt scale up with your block plan because now instead of getting budgeon back, you're getting back fiend fire or whatever your key combo card is. So this is kind of a multiplier on your game plan. So these cards are very important to take.
And now that we've got the game plan in that you should have an attack plan, you should have a block plan. And a way to maximize that, we'll get into a fight. And there's really two things you need to ask for a fight is how long is this fight going to last? And what is the mechanics of the fight? That's what you need to consider. And you need to do this before you play any cards. It's really easy to jump in, start playing stuff, and then realize, oh, this guy has some mechanics. So at the beginning of fight, just ask yourself, is this a long fight or short fight? And what's the mechanics of the fight? For short fights, you might have to skip the setup cards. The fight not might might not go long enough for you to enact your full master plan. So, you might just have to, you know, play a strike wherever you can to kill them really quickly. It might not be worth playing devastate or like some powers might not necessarily be worth it if the fight's long enough. So, in these short fights, immediate impact is more important than peak power. It doesn't matter how much damage you could do three turns from now. It matters how much damage you can do right now and how much damage you can block right now. So, if you're dying in regular combats, I would guess you have too many setup cards. The defect is very common to run into this problem where you just have a bunch of powers. These powers improve your setup potential, your peak power, and that's great, but they don't do anything on turn one. They don't help you end the quick fight. So you end up taking extra damage every single turn that accumulates over the course of a run and you could just be dying because you're taking more damage than you need. So if that's the case, you need to take some cards that provide immediate impact. Hyperbeam is like the best example of that. It just kills everything. Refract as well. You might just need some more block so you can have time to set up. Weaken acts very well as block. Sweeping beam can hit all enemies. So just look out for that.
Um, also in a fight, before you do anything else, the first question you should be asking is just, can I kill this enemy? That first picture that I showed of me taking damage was me unsuccessfully playing this turn where I was just short of killing. The correct sequence is if you play ball lightning and then dual cast. Ball lightning evokes an orb, dual cast evokes an orb, and then throwing hatchet is a exact kill on this fight. It doesn't look like you should be able to kill cuz it's at 61 HP. And if you don't ask that question, you're going to be leaving fights on the table. You're going to be taking damage you didn't need to take uh because you didn't just take the kill right away. So before you make any plays, a lot of people's first instinct is to block. But before you make any plays, just say before I do that, can I kill this guy? If you can't, then you move on to the other decision-making. But that's very important first. The second thing you must ask is look at your deck and say, can I kill next turn? And that's very important because if you can end the fight sooner, you're effectively preventing damage because you don't have to take a hit, you know, two turns from now. You're blocking next turn effectively. So, you can always click your deck, look at it. You might not be able to know exactly what's coming up, right? You're drawing five and there's seven, but you can look at what possible outcomes are going to happen and how likely are you to kill next turn. Maybe you need to play all three of your attacks this turn so you can kill next turn. Or maybe you're guaranteed to kill next turn and you can just double block. That insight makes it much easier to make decisions on like this turn like what should I be playing because yeah killing faster prevents damage. If I was careful on that one turn I wouldn't have taken this 18 and I would have done that last five damage and careful planning can get you a long way in fights like that.
For longer fights like things like elites and bosses, peak power matters a lot more. So taking a hit for 25 here so you can set up your star engine is almost certainly worth it because the fight's going to go long enough where the stars will accumulate more value than like the 10 or 15 damage that you took to be able to set up. So in longer fights, it's more about like what your build is capable of because you have the time to set up and get going.
Okay. And then mechanics. So there's a lot of enemies. I'm working on a guide for these. And it's hard to cover like any specific mechanics, but I'm just using this as a disclaimer that how you do fights also depends on what the enemies do. Like this squiggly slime guy, when you kill him, he's going to spawn a bunch of smaller slimes. And so the turn that you kill him is really important because the slimes spawn dazed. So, for example, if you kill him with zero energy and no attacks left, you're going to basically not get that turn to attack all the slimes. And so, it's kind of wasted efficiency. But if you're able to kill him, you know, using like a beam cell and then you get to go like strike strike zap after you've killed him and spawn the slimes, that's just extra free time that you had to attack these guys that you wouldn't have otherwise just by planning out your turn and kind of planning when you want to kill this thing. Cuz sometimes taking 16 here could be worth it because you're going to take potentially more down the road if you can't kill these guys fast enough. So, this is more just a reminder like keep in mind the mechanics of the enemies, learn them, try and pay attention to them. I'm working on a guide for the elites specifically, so look out for that. But another like this guy staggers at 70. Once he's staggered, he does a charge up and then he does a massive hit. So, if you're able to go from 70 to zero very quickly, you might want to spend a little bit more time above the stagger because he only attacks for like 17. It's not that bad until then, but after that, he hits for like 39. So, you know, maybe blocking a little bit more until that point could be beneficial in this fight. A guide will help this, but just keeping it in mind that, you know, you shouldn't always just be doing as much damage as possible. You should be considering what the fight dictates. So yeah, basically you want to be asking when should I kill? Will it stagger? And will it provide any debuffs? Enemy guides will help with this a little bit, but just keep it in mind during the fights.
And then lastly, kill priority is another thing people get wrong. Like it's very daunting just to have multiple enemies and be asked, "What should I do here?" There's a couple different heristics you can use if the fight's going to go long or just in general if you're unsure. Enemies that are buffing themselves are probably the best first target because they're going to be stronger, you know, on turn three, four, or five, they're going to become more of a threat. So, even if they're not doing damage now, the amount of damage they'll do over the course of the fight is high enough that it's worth killing them. If the fight's ending soon, like if you have crazy damage, maybe just taking out the one that's doing the most damage instead of blocking can be effective so that you can get through the fight taking as little damage as possible. And then if you're still unsure, you could take the one that's the most damage efficient. So in this case, I have vodra. So falling star into strike is a perfect kill on this rat. And then I can play bull work, full block them as well. So sometimes you need to consider things like that. I get the sword. So I can then kill this one with the sword next turn. Damage efficiency can matter a lot. So generally a kill priority checklist is basically number one, what can you actually kill? Because that's you got to ask that first. Number two, is there something that's like going to kill you right now? Because you can't do anything else if something's attacking you for like 30. So deal with that first. Then after that, what's going to become the biggest problem later? It might not kill you this turn, but maybe something's charging up for like a 30 hit attack next turn. That should be your next target. If you can't decide or they're all fairly equivalent, what's the most damage efficient? What lines up the best with your attacks?
So, if we put together everything we've learned from this video, this is basically a checklist. You can just follow every single turn. Uh, first question, can I kill the enemy that I'm fighting? That's the most important one. If if you take nothing else from this video, just ask, can I kill the enemy every single turn? It will help you a lot. Next, can a potion let me kill? Can I end this fight right now, preventing any other issues if those two don't happen? The third is, can I die? Uh, are they attacking beyond lethal? Do I need to block to survive? If all of those you've passed, then you kind of look at what should I target and what's in my deck and use those to inform your decision of what am I using this turn for? Is this a turn where I have to push damage? Is this a turn where I have to block? Is this a turn that I have to set up? And you use your block and defend plan to inform this decision of what you're doing for that turn. And if you do this every single turn, you will have much better fights. I promise you if you get good at practicing these strategies, there is one limiting factor which is you have to have a good build to be able to push damage and block and that's a deck building skill that's kind of beyond the scope of this video. But one thing I wanted to talk about is there's a really cool setting where you can just practice really quickly. Uh, if you go to Slay the Spire into custom, you can just do draft or sealed deck and this lets you you basically get 10 card rewards and use that as your starting deck. And that's a great way to practice coming up with a plan and executing it without having to, you know, you could just do some runs where you do a draft, run right into an elite, invite it, and just see how strong you are. Take note of how the cards work together. Try it again. Maybe over time you get a sense of what cards work together and what cards don't. What makes a good game plan? So, this is something I did a lot when I was practicing Slay the Spire a couple years ago. So, it's a tool. Use it at your disposal. But, as always, it's an encouragement. You guys got this. I started so bad at this game about three years ago and now I've put probably three to 5,000 hours in the game and I've improved a lot. If I can do it, you definitely can. So, best of luck. And uh let me know in the comments what you thought. If you have any questions about this video or anything you'd like to cover on a separate topic, and I'll do my best to get to it.
Hey, and if you like the way I talk about or play card games, you might be interested in the game that I'm working on, which is a single player deck building rogike card game called AOTH. We're still in pre-alpha, but the game is very playable, and we're looking for wish list and play testers to help us make the game better. So, if you're interested in that at all, go check out the links in the description and check it out.