Not people. THE DEVS.

How would you feel if you put a whole lot of effort and time into coming up with a good list of challenge runs for players to attempt and then someone goes to write a how-to guide that makes the hardest one so easy even some 5-year olds could do it?

The devs imo were very obviously pissed that people were writing HOW-TO-GUIDES on how to get the hardest achievements in the game on seeded runs. Which is completely and utterly understandable. There has been a whole lot of complaining on this topic since then and the answer has always been that dailies make it too easy to randomly do hard things.

It's not even on purpose sometimes. The dailies are just too easy in general. Just as an example, a recent daily with the Hoarder mode gave you 3 Mind Blast and 3 Backstab at the beginning. If you took these in your run, you would easily get both the speedrunning achievement and the achievement for killing a boss in one turn. Despite the fact that both of those are supposed to be actual...... well achievements.

The short version: You aren't allowed to get achievements in seeded runs because they aren't random. This trivializes all the hard achievements. Dailies are particularly bad because some cards like Mind Blast are regularly overpowered in that mode AND dailies are seeded.

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The thing I don't understand is why people want to get all the achievements without having to work for them. They are responsible for more than two-thirds of the playtime I've put into the game (over 200-300 hours now?) because they offer most of its replayability, and the only other alternative is Ascension mode. Doing challenge runs is actually fun and severely extends the life of the game, and you feel really good/excited when you actually get the hard ones done.

Ascension 14 was really hard as the Silent.




^ Accidentally covered up the 5 Strikes in this picture.

Just look at the time lag between the two. Ironclad took one try and basically felt not that much harder than A13. Losing Max HP on the silent however..... that hurts really bad.

I'm beginning to think that Burning Blood is way more overpowered than I thought it was. And I thought it was flat out broken.

I just won my first run ever with the Defect aganist Time Eater and am so excited I have to share.



Probably shouldn't have drafted a deck that big. It is too THICC for my tastes. But the last 7 cards I took were all either key cards or Leaps.

2 in a row! Woke Bloke don't scale so I got more than 50 focus against him while messing around (wanted to get the achievement over with too).



Bottled Tornado on an upgraded Electrodynamics is completely broken. Did that early floor 2 and by the time I got to floor 3 it was a free win.

Unfortunately I lost the screen-shot where I had 999 armor and a ridiculous compliment of Frost orbs.

My first non beta Defect deck had 2 Static Discharge and Apparitions, but unfortunately I got an unskippable Orichalcum and never really got to trigger my Discharges. Didn't matter, I ended up perfecting the second and third bosses by getting orbs off Storm, buffing them with Biased Cog and Thunder Strike (lots of rares that run).

Next game I have 2 AFO and 2 Scrape by the end of act 1

This is my 4th Defect run and my only one I'm going to get today (having company over):



Unceasing Top + Pandora's Box happened... I one shot Donu and Deca. They just straight up died on turn 1, because I was able to exhaust the Turbo with recycle and everything else was just gas. Also had a bottled lightning on the upgraded Seek, so I basically just chose Panache and Double Energy every turn to start out with 8 energy and panache on floor 3.

This is probably the biggest deck I've ever made EVER. Once I saw the final boss wasn't Time Eater I took all the 0 cost cards I could.

I finally managed to make a Claw run, I can be happy now.

I had the portal event almost immediately on the 3rd act, that's why you can notice less floors than normal.
Finding the Unceasing Top from the merchant was super-lucky, I couldn't have beaten the Awakened One without that and a good streak of Claws on the same turn in the 2nd phase.
Blind was also really helpful, I won it from the card matching event. Once upgraded, it gives 2 Weak to all enemies (I didn't know that before this run).

I'm either a mad genius or crazy lucky. I'm 6-1 with the Defect total. Been doing 1 run per day while messing around on A15 with the other two characters.

The ascension 5 win is notable for the fact that I played 9 powers against woke bloke and won.

I just did a run where I paired Aggregate with Ice cream and Stacked and a ton of ice orbs with Calipers. Given 3ish turns to stabilize I became pretty much unstoppable. I took forever to kill some enemies, but they didn't stand a chance of stopping me. Just had to wait to power up my focus and play Tempest to channel 20 odd lightning in a turn.

Of much greater importance, I proffer here a solution to the conundrum of our times:

The Silent in Smash Bros

• B^
  Smoke bomb- Disappear in a cloud of smoke and reappear somewhere above. Shiek's teleport move basically.
  or
  Storm Of Steel- Become a whirl of blades and hit all immediately adjacent opponents several times for light damage. When used in midair this move acts as a 3rd jump. Similar to Link's B^ move.
  or
  Dex Potion - Quaff an alchemical elixir to dramatically increase your speed for a short time. Cool down period of at least the speed boost's duration.
• B
  Shiv- Press the button to throw a shiv straight ahead. Medium range. Hold the button down to gather shivs. If you already have shivs gathered you throw multiple shivs instead of just one when you press the button.
• B>
  Bouncing Flask. Throw a bottle of poison ahead of you. Bounces twice (that's 3 hits when you include the initial landing). On impact with the enemy or the last bounce, bursts into a small cloud of green smoke. Deals no damage but poisons the enemy. Similar in concept to Duck Hunt's bouncing explosive. I'm split on whether players should be able to control the projectile like Duck Hunt does.
• B down
  Noxious Fumes. A cloud of poison vapour spreads out from the Silent, poisoning and momentarily stunning players caught in the cloud.
  or
  Envenom. For a short time your normal attacks inflict poison in addition to their regular damage.
• Final Smash
  Die! Die! Die! The Silent throws a stream of shivs in the direction of each enemy player. These shivs have no maximum range but can still be blocked by obstacles, or players unlucky enough to stand between the SIlent and her intended target.

Poison mechanic: Poison deals damage continuously. The duration is only a couple of seconds, but is extended every time the inflicted player takes damage from a source other than poison. Poison stacks.

Play style- Hit and run. Poison enemies and keep them at a distance while avoiding direct confrontation. Stay nimble. Be tricky.

SOund effects- The silent should never vocalize. Other sounds like the rustle of clothe, the clink of daggers and the uncorking of bottles may have to be emphasized to make up for this.

Well I just got my first and last daily run win ever (hopefully).

Turns out that when you start with 5 Electrodynamics all you need to do is find a Thunder Strike for bosses and you are golden.

Getting the "Neon" achievement is turning out to be hell.

I'm surprised this only took me 15 attempts. Got super lucky.




As far as I can tell, there are four "good" ways to get this:

1. Snecko Eye
2. Runic Pyramid
3. Inserter
4. Echo Form
5. Unceasing Top

All of them suck to actually attempt.

I only had one close run before this one, which was an Unceasing Top and Fusion build where I didn't get the achievement because the Maw had too little health and the boss was Time Eater.

It turns out relying on getting a bunch of Holograms/Meteor-Strikes an/or a boss/rare relic/card to even make a halfway-decent attempt makes this one just ..... not fun. I think this is a bad achievement. Any deck capable of making it far enough to attempt the achievement just feels really bad to try and attempt the achievement with, unless you get Unceasing Top off of a starting bonus.

After a long streak of failures, this felt really good:

Echo Form + Tempest + Thunder Strike = a lot of lightning. The last double Thunder Strike took the second half of Time Eater's life (there really wasn't much less than half) before his healing attempt.

I am starting to really wish floor 3 had more than 3 possible bosses. If they are all going to hard counter certain decks, than there should be more than 3 of them so you don't frequently lose runs to a die roll. Everyone likes to hate on Time Eater specifically, but I think they are all equally bad when it comes to ruining the player's fun.

I ran my first daily challenge ever today (I wanted to unlock the new endless mode on the beta branch), and it was great! The hero is the Silent and the first modifier is Shiny: starting deck is replaced with 1 of every rare card. You end up with a deck that works well enough as it is through the first battles, with good powers and Bullet Time.
I stocked up on After Images and used exclusively them to block, so that the dexterity decrease from Wraith Form was never a problem. The last boss was the Awakened One: I tried to push him to 2nd phase as fast as I could, and played only 1 power before that. Easy peasy.

Why?

Once you've done everything, they're a great little bit of fun. StS with a bit of flair for 1 game per day. A nice little fix of the game, without falling into the trappings of being samey once you've reached that point that the game is autopilot with mediocre variation between runs.

Pretty great that they also added seed modifiers for the players to get their hands on varied modifiers.

I think that Time Eater is the most hated one because it's the most effective at hating out its chosen strategy. If I'm up against the Awakened, I pretty much just ignore the fact that it gets strength every time I play a power; it's not a huge detriment. Against he Time Eater though, I often feel I have to radically rework my strategy. A huge part of TE's power is locked up in countering a deck type. It's easily hte swingiest of the bosses.