My Ironclad is currently at Ascension 11 b/c I haven't felt like brute forcing it through 15 yet. I'm waiting to see where they stop with Ascensions and achievements before doing so.

And it's really a matter of brute-forcing it to be honest, if all you care about is beating Ascension 15. Shrug It Off + Body Slam + Offering + Battle Trance is a powerful deck that shows up consistently enough (because the two key cards are common) that it's really a matter of brute-forcing 5 more wins than an actual act of skill to beat A-15 on Ironaclad.

My Silent is where she currently is at just because I'm taking a break from the game (still watching a lot of youtube of it though) until they release the 3rd character on non-beta branch. AKA - When it's significantly more polished. The Silent is also a matter of brute-forcing it imo, but it's more dependent on skill and getting certain relics (like Paper Krane) than specific common cards. I just haven't put in the time and effort to do so yet b/c I have too much backlog and not enough to play.

I refuse to play on beta branch so I've seen footage of the Defect but haven't played it.

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Somehow I have a bugged 74/75 on cards discovered on Silent, despite being able to read the text on every card. I'm guessing I actually have to choose the Wraith Form rework (because that's the card that did it originally) rather than just being offered it.

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In other news the only relic i'm missing is Fairy Poop. Like.... there is actually going to be a saturday afternoon at some point here where I sit down to farm that out because that is annoying me something fierce. But it's going to be after I've done everything else.

Part of me is excited for new potions.

Part of me is going insane (in a bad way) over the amount of new potions. This is going to be interesting but it's also going to completely remove the consistency of White Beast Statue and Alchemize. And... just potions in general. They are somewhere between tripling and quadrupling the number of potions in the game in the beta branch, and that's a massive balance change. The fact that it's probably going to release around the same time as the new character is just a lot to take in to be honest.

Edit:

They also added animations for the Red Masked Bandits and are going to move that event out of the Beta branch into the main one.

Here's all the new potions in the beta branch??? Going to straight up rip off the list I'm copying from by including Ascension Level 11 nerfs in parenthesis.

Fear Potion - Apply 3(2) Vulnerable. Common.
Skill Potion - Add a random skill to your hand. It costs 0. Common.
Attack Potion - Add a random attack to your hand. It costs 0. Common.
Power Potion - Add a random power to your hand. It costs 0. Common.
Steroid Potion - Gain 5(4) Str. Lose it at the end of the turn. Common.
Speed Potion - Gain 5(4) Dex. Lose it at the end of the turn. Common.

Ghost in a Jar - Gain 1 Intangible. Uncommon.
Focus Potion - Gain 2(1) Focus. Uncommon. <- It doesn't say but i'm assuming only the Defect will be able to see this one.
Liquid Bronze - Gain 3(2) thorns. Uncommon.
Gambler's Brew - Discard any number of cards, then draw that many. Uncommon.
Essence of Steel - Gain 4(3) plated armor. Uncommon.
Blood Potion - Heal for 10% of your max HP. Uncommon.

Fruit Juice - Gain 5(4) Max HP. Rare.
Snecko Oil - Draw 2(1) cards. Become confused. Rare.
Fairy Potion - When you die, revive with 10% Health and consume this potion. Can't be used regularly. Rare.
Smoke Bomb - Escape from a non-boss combat. Receive no rewards. Rare.
Entropic Brew - Fill all your empty potion slots with random potions. Rare.

Hey, now there's a new way to beat the champs execute on ascension

I browse the slay the spire reddit a lot.

There is/was a thread called "Will there be a 4th character."

A developer account responded to the thread with "Yes."

Obviously there is no eta or even a mention of this being a part of early access. All we know is that at some point in time the game will get at least a 4th character according to that one account labeled developer.

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In other news, a dev account said that the game will get more achievements at the same time "The Defect" is released to the main branch.

the main reason i play beta branch over stable is because it has additional floor 3 encounters and i hate every fight being orbs

The main reason i play the main branch, and just be patient in cases of things like the defect, is that they keep introducing major bugs into the beta branch but fixing them before they get to the main branch. It literally is a beta branch in the truest sense, in which the game feels like an early access game rather than the much more polished content that eventually makes its way over to the main branch.

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The new character is going to get released on the 17th or the 24th. They could technically delay all the way to the 31st, but I do not think they are going to do that.

I'd be willing to bet that within a month of the new character making it over the remaining "new" enemies on the 3rd floor will make their way over too. The fact that the bullies got moved over makes me think they are prioritizing making the main branch as close to beta as possible, because the bullies have been in the beta branch for FOREVER and it seems like a weird time to prioritize them over more stuff with the 3rd character if they aren't making that a heavy priority. And the serpent and flame bruiser are really the main out-standing things that have been around forever and not gotten patched.

As for "every fight being against shapes", that's nowhere near as bad as it used to be compared to when Exploders still had their old effects. That fight is much less frustrating when only 1-2 enemies discourage hits vs 2-3 (on average).

I'm looking at my stats.

Total Victories vs Deaths
Ironclad: 26 vs 291
Silent: 9 vs 65

You can tell who I did most of the achievements on. Also I'm ascension 11 on Ironclad and that nukes your win-rate b/c that character is harder to build good ascension decks on.

Also worth noting: 55 of my 65 deaths on Silent are on Normal, and she's currently on Ascension 5. So when I want to be I'm not that terrible at this character. I just keep doing stupid ****. I remember at least 25+ of those deaths were trying to kill a boss on turn 1 with an infinite combo, and another 10+ were for "Who Needs Relics" before I just decided to brute force it on ironclad.

This game has some evil achievements where I just kept resetting A LOT at the first boss if I didn't get a good setup. Infinity and Ninja are extremely bad when you try to do them on purpose. "Ooh Donut!" is an rng cluster****. Minimalist and "Who Needs Relics?" took a massive number of attempts, a lot of those on the 2nd one being b/c I just couldn't stop taking relics. Oh and Speed Climber is actually pretty bad. That one has certain breakpoints where you know you are going to make it or you just aren't, so I had a lot of hard resets after looking at the clock at the beginning of floors 2 and 3. Each boss fight takes 2-3 minutes unless you have an insane deck, so you want to beat floor 1 in less than 7 minutes and floor 2 in less than 14 if you want a decent shot at the achievement. If you get to floor 3 and you don't get the portal before 17 minutes, you just aren't going to have time to do the floor without a Whirlwind deck.

"You are Nothing" is the achievement that looks hard but you will do naturally trying to beat Ascension 15 on Ironclad probably. I've done it like 7-8 times.

Edit:

Analyzing it logically, I have 26 Ironclad wins.
- 4 were unlocking Ascension mode (sad to say I only had 1 Silent win way back when).
- Ascensions 1 through 10
- Speed Climber (18:57)
- Who Needs Relics
- Minimalist

I have only like 9 more wins on the character after that, and I think 6 of those was me trying to get a good win-streak number (best is 3 right now). I do not think I have played this game that casually yet.

I just had the best Dead Branch Corruption deck that I've ever managed to build carry me to victory on Ironclad Ascension Level 11. And I still hate that relic's guts. It is the most random thing ever and I absolutely hate playing it. But when the stars align (as you will see below) it's a stupidly good synergy that just does too much stuff to not work. Except one time it won't work and then you just lose the run right then and there because you are **** at that point and have no deck to rely on.

It started out as me trying to build a Body Slam deck. And then I got Dead Branch which made it basically impossible to play my deck because I kept getting random crap from Ascender's Bane and Disarm. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 2 extra cards in what I was trying to get down to an 8 card deck with the curse included. I had previously turned down Corruption (for good reason) and as soon as I got Dead Branch I said to myself "Damn it I have to look for another copy of Corruption don't I?"

The following is the broken **** deck that won the run:

1x Exhume
1x Fiend Fire
1x Offering+

1x Burning Pact+
1x Carnage+
2x Corruption+ - the fact that I found two more of these after passing up a copy is insane to me
1x Disarm+
1x Sever Soul+

1x Armaments+
1x Body Slam+
2x Havoc+
1x Shrug It Off

1x Bash
3x Defend
1x Strike

1x Finesse

1x Injury
1x Ascender's Bane

I kept removing strikes after getting an injury on floor 1 because i'm too stupid to remember it was in the deck until the run was over.

The only thing I didn't get to upgrade that I really should have was Fiend Fire, and Armaments+ (from the earlier skeleton) fixed that up almost every single time anyways.

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For people who don't know how the deck works, the key cards you are trying to randomly get are:

Seeing Red
Sentinel
Exhume
Offering
Bloodletting

Fiend Fire
Sever Soul
Second Wind

The first 5 cards give you energy directly or indirectly that just lets you keep going and going and going. And Fiend Fire (and to a lesser extend Sever Soul and Second Wind b/c they hit powers) gives you another 9 rolls at getting more copies of these. In addition to that, every skill you get once you cast Corruption gives another chance at one of these. If you can keep the chain going long enough you will get way too much block and find SOME random win condition for ending the combat. Repeat for every combat as long as you can get to Corruption fast enough and you are set.

So you have a 1 in 15 chance of any exhausted card becoming "free" energy. Base. And there are another 23 skills that give you another 1 in 15 chance at getting free energy. And Sever Soul and Second Wind and Fiend Fire as soon as you get any of those make all your powers (and in the case of Fiend Fire attacks) ANOTHER free 1 in 15 roll at getting something good. And with all that energy you just do....... whatever. I beat Donu and Deca on my second turn by killing Donu on turn 1 with my last 2 energy, then chaining off again turn 2 off of Exhuming a Fiend Fire and eventually double tapping a 41 damage Heavy Blade for the win on turn 2. And other than that I have no **** idea what happened because the battle took 3 minutes to play 2 turns and I didn't write it all down. The only reason the run clocked in at 70 minutes is my APM is at an intense level from trying to speed-run this **** as the silent (hint: it doesn't work too good).

This is before we get to the fact that lots of cards you are casting for free have the word "draw" on them. And that a lot of attacks cost 0. And so on.

So when it works it's stupidly broken. I've had a lesser version of this combo go "off" and help win runs. Nothing to this extent. My combats this time around all basically lasted until I cast Corruption or 1 turn after that. That one time it took two turns after Corruption b/c i got a hand full of Dazed and I just used the random crap from those to go off the turn after.

The reason I hate this strategy and this deck and hate playing it is because the RNG doesn't have to add up and frankly I'm not playing a deck once I've cast the signature power. I'm repeatedly pulling the lever of a slot machine and hoping Yogg gives me something good this time.. You can spend 20 minutes chaining and then just be out of skills and exhausts in your deck and have a random deck that can't win against Donu and Deca for obvious reasons (we are pretending Time Eater doesn't exist for the purpose of this discussion). I've had that happen to me and lost a good run because of it (I think it was around Ascension 4?).

<- Oh yeah and this deck auto-loses to Time Eater because you play 50+ cards a turn on many turns. Most of them don't do something unless you randomly generate and play a Barricade. I really hate decks that literally auto-lose to counter-bosses just b/c that almost always happens to me and this time I got lucky. Yesterday I played a deck with 9 powers that beat the **** **** out of Woke Bloke because all of those powers basically added up to 45+ damage per turn. That deck works and was not countered by the counter boss. Dead Branch and Unceasing Top decks that go all in on the combo flat out lose to Time Eater so every time you make one you have a 1 in 3 chance of losing the run for no good reason.

TLDR: Yay! i got to Ascension 12 on my 19th attempt as Ironclad. I still hate Dead Branch though.

Warning: This rant has a sequel. "Why I hate ascension mode."

I wrote a whole multi-paragraph rant about how I hate Hexaghost and Ascender's Bane.

I decided I just want to say I hate Hexaghost on Ascensions 4+ and Ascender's Bane and leave it at that.

I also hate Slime Boss, but that's got nothing to do with Ascension (well it does but it doesn't) and everything to do with his recent mechanical overhaul. Dude only gets 10 more health and him doing more damage (including the ones that remain after he splits) isn't really an issue.

the reason they haven't moved the 3rd floor encounters over (and presumably the bullies (until recently?)) is because they were missing animations for them. I imagine that whoever is responsible for animating those things was either tied up doing card art for defect for the past while, or they just contract that sort of thing out and hadn't gotten around to it yet.

I don't find the beta branch buggy. I can't think of a time I've ever noticed a bug on either branch, at least, although I'm sure there have been some. The patches are mostly bug-free by the time they're deployed I think, and if there are any major bugs left over, they're usually hotfixed within an hour. It does feel less polished to me though, primarily because it doesn't have as many artistic assets.

The main reason I'd be tempted to play main branch over beta branch is so i can more easily compare scores with my friends list.

I've only done a dead branch corruption deck once and it was pretty wild. My favourite ironclad archetype is probably just a bunch of efficient attack cards (clash, perfect strike, bludgeon, double strike) and then maybe some power stuff as well.

The beta branch is quite buggy, but in very short bursts. I pay attention on a daily basis so I guess I'm more likely to notice a lot of it? Or maybe I just notice the particularly funny accidents that happen and that has led me to believe it is more buggy than it is. But there are several incidents where things that already worked have stopped working, or something extremely strange has happened. These of course show up on the subreddit so....

For example, there was about a one to two hour period where they accidentally replaced the Ironclad's starting relic for some people and a bunch of people were simultaneously very excited and very unhappy with the swap. Because the swap spoiled a future relic (Potion Belt), but having an extra potion slot isn't as good as having Burning Blood once the novelty wears off.

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I know about the animations thing. The bullies got moved over b/c they fixed their animations. My statement includes the fact that I am assuming they are just waiting to add animations to those before moving them over.

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My favorite archtype for Ironclad is a well-oiled Whirlwind or Body Slam deck. It's very hard to get an 8 card deck that just destroys everything in one or two turns, but once you do it's a thing of beauty.

i stay up to date with the beta branch discord and have exclusively played beta branch for probably my past 100 hours of gameplay

although it might seem more prominent if you are on the subreddit because the passage of time is portrayed differently. the amount of activity might also be different, although the devs are fairly active on the discord and patches+hotfixes are always posted there as soon as they're uploaded.

My active problem with Ascension Mode is that it severely limits the number of builds that are "viable". Doubly so once Ascender's Bane comes into play.

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If you are playing Ironclad, the only decks likely to win on Ascension 11+ generally have to abuse one of the following cards: Limit Break, Demonform, Barricade, Whirlwind, Corruption, Body Slam, Dropkick.

Basically you need insane offensive scaling (Limit Break, Demonform, and/or Whirlwind); insane defensive scaling (Barricade and/or Body Slam); or an infinite combo (Corruption or Dropkick) that doesn't run into Time Eater. Decks that don't scale really heavily and don't go infinite just take too much damage too often to be able to win what is basically a war of attrition.

Even then, on higher Ascension levels you also need to get lucky and get certain relics (Necronomicon, Meat on the Bone, Anchor, Bottled Lightning, etc.) to be able to survive the harsh conditions and actually survive making your deck on the earlier two floors so you can hopefully spend as little time as possible playing the 3rd floor (the new portal skip event is a godsend sometimes).

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You can win with other decks. People do win ascension runs with good_stuffs decks. But if you are trying to maximize your chances of beating ascension mode consistently; the above are the decks you end up trying to make. And a lot of cards you just end up no longer picking, unless they are extremely good jack of all trades cards like Inflame and Metallicize.

A lot of very fun cards and very good decks on the base difficulty are cards/decks you basically stop picking altogether. Clash is the biggest example; but other good examples are Rampage, Juggernaut, Searing Blow, and Perfected Strike. For all intents and purposes those cards/decks are non-starters on Ascensions 10+, because they don't scale fast enough or get going fast enough to be worth deliberately trying to get them to work. So while it's really fun to play with those cards and decks on the base difficulty, you can't try-hard with them and that makes me feel bad.

Edit: I could make equivalent examples for the Silent and Defect, but I don't think that would aid my point and it would just make the post a lot longer.

For sake of being thorough, the equivalent list for Silent is:
- Noxious Fumes
- Panache
- Kunai
- Shuriken
- Unceasing Top
- Paper Krane
- Heal Hook
- Escape Plan
- Grand Finale
It's funny, but this list is almost half relics instead of just cards like the Ironclad was.

Paper Krane is the best relic in the game without competition and if gotten in the right deck is basically an auto-win.

Kunai, Shuriken, and Panache enable shiv decks to work really well.

Heal Hook and Escape Plan make the Silent equivalent of Ironclad's dropkick infinite. This one is harder because you need to have Flash of Steel + Finesse, Flash of Steel + Escape Plan, Panache, Thousand Cuts, or the Red Mask for this to work.

Grand Finale is a deck with Well Laid Plans and card manipulation that, kept thin, can be really really good.

Unceasing Top can make infinite decks with Concentrate. This is harder to build than Grand Finale decks.

Noxious Fumes+ in a purely defensive deck provides enough inevitability that you can just play Noxious Fumes and defend and wait. It's actually a fast enough clock that it can keep up with bosses with possibly a bouncing flask or two thrown in, where-as none of the other Silent cards have that kind of slow inevitability.

Disclaimer: These are my opinions on the character I've only put 50 hours into. ... Personally. Not including discussion and youtube.

Edit: Tingsha, Tough Bandages, and Ice Cream are just really good relics on Silent. Their synergies can go in any deck and are not deck defining.

yeah that's probably my biggest issue with ascensions as well

The best thing about the main branch, tbh, is that I am never going to see all the crap the Defect is going through right now. The character STILL needs a drastic overhaul, and they are hoping to have it released this month. I can't imagine how they are going to pull this one off unless they just release it broken and balance it later.

The character, as far as I can parse from the constant complaining, is in a really bad state where its only consistently good build for Ascension doesn't use the Orb mechanics at all. The only card that ever did anything really powerful with orbs was deprecated within a day or two of release into the beta branch, and since then Focus as an entire mechanic is just a joke.

They've also managed to concentrate most of his win conditions into the Orange slot so trying to do any particular build is just inconsistent.

My impression was that the best/safest archetype for defect relied on frost orbs+focus to generate stupid amounts of block, although I haven't been paying too much attention lately.

It does seem to be generally lacking in viable archetypes though and feels pretty inconsistent because all of its viable archetypes revolve around constructing combos, so if your deck doesn't start shaping up by the end of the first floor (or earlier in higher ascensions) then you're probably screwed. That's true to an extent with the other two classes, but both of them have more ways to generate block with miscallaneous cards, and ironclad also has a self-healing relic and some burst to get them through until they get their deck together.

I don't think balance is too important, being a single player game where the only real competitive aspects are character-specific leaderboards. Rather, It would be nice if some characters were overpowered and others were weak. Its true the class has been seeing some pretty radical and frequent revisions since its release and those don't seem to be slowing down, which could be awkward on the stable branch, and potentially makes it easier for earlier players to reach milestones than it is for later players, which again, is only a minor concern.