StS Non-Commentated - Ironclad A5 #3
0Slay the Spire is a roguelike deckbuilder full of carefully calculated attacking, defending, and weighing the tradeoffs in both the short and long terms. https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/
Hmm. Now, this is just an early hunch, so don't spread this word too far... I think this game might be a bit difficult. Just a wee bit tough.
Anyway, I think even these short failed-run videos can still potentially be instructive, and it lends a certain legitimacy to show these kinds of runs so I can properly show what kinds of problems I'm trying to plan around and avoid. It's just going to take more work, is all.
...All that philosophical stuff aside, though, Ascension 5 doesn't even do anything until the start of act 2, so in this particular case it's Ascensions 3 and 4 that's actually killing me here. I looked up Guardian's statistics and it doesn't actually get buffed that much by Ascension 4 - only 1 more damage on its weak defense-mode attack, and 4 more damage on Fierce Bash which is already "the attack you should avoid by activating Mode Shift", and if you don't, 4 more damage isn't really that much more when it was already doing 32 damage anyway. (It seems pretty rare that Vent Steam actually gets to happen; maybe after a particularly anaemic attempt to block Fierce Bash followed by over-drawing defense that turn, but that tends to be rare following the usual advice of getting attacks for elite-fighting. So it's not like the extra damage gets boosted by Vulnerable very often.)
So it's probably a matter of either playing the decks wrong so my draw pile doesn't look right when coming out of Defensive Mode back into offensive mode, or maybe I'm upgrading the wrong cards. I don't think, as far as I can tell, that I was too aggressive with Elite hunting on this run - in theory 42 HP ought to be enough for the Guardian fight. But maybe I need to adjust my expectations on that too.
All this means is that the game isn't a solved problem yet. I'll get used to it.