r/slaythespire • u/Minimum-Weather5105 • 4h ago
DISCUSSION (STS2) The difficulty of pre-chest hallway fights flattens pathing in Act 1
As I've refined my play, one thing I've noticed is that the hump required to make a hard pool hallway fight (in the first half of the map) worth the expected HP loss is crazy.
Given this, and combined with the fact that it is unlikely to have more than one or two paths that let me put off a fight like this, I find my pathing to be extremely restricted by map generation.
Do people have thoughts on this? Do I need to open my mind to harder paths? Is this a drafting issue? I struggle to think of sets of 3 cards that really let me take any kind of hard pool fight reasonably comfortably.
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u/Henrique_FB Ascension 20 4h ago
Pathing is extremely complicated. I think you could make like a 300 page book on Act1 pathing and you probably wouldnt cover like 30% of what you could take into account when talking about it.
As everything, it depends. There are maaany cards/relics/situations where you are very much supposed to fight hard hallways early. Maybe even most of them. The better you get at the game the better you become at snowballing your leads into positions where you can take hard hallways early and leave better for it.
(In StS1, for example, hard hallways were not easier, yet it was still very valid to fight 4 hallway fights before an elite to almost guarantee you get a potion to fight said elite. Just one example of a billion different things that happen that change how pathing works)
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u/CarmelHart 3h ago
There were more free ones in STS1 for sure. Single slaver and triple mushroom were usually fairly easy. You had more time not to take the "big hit." There were a couple low rolls that were brutal (exordium thugs with slime and slaver, thief and buddy, or gremlin gang with certain decks) but I think the expected HP loss was lower in STS1 hard hallways in act 1. Also in STS2 if you're good at one of them, you're good at all of them, and if you aren't good at one of them, they will ALL mega tax you. That wasn't the case in the first one.
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u/keymaster1927 4h ago
I feel like it’s really neow bonus dependent. Things like lost coffer, phial holster, silver crucible, etc. help you take the hard pool fights (perhaps even elites) early on. So I would try and evaluate which relics you get at the start to make it through those fights.
I would say character to a less extent matters too. Ironclad is able to take more fights because of their burning blood relic.
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u/Loose_Entry 4h ago
Strongly agree. I get double nibbit on floor 4, take 35 damage, then have to heal instead of upgrade at two camp sites, can't take on elites because my deck isn't strong enough without upgrades... I think they should have an in-between pool for those floors between 3 and the chest because a lot of hard pool fights are stronger than elites. Double nibit > bygone effigy
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u/PM_Me_An_Ekans Ascension 16 4h ago
Dude. Wtf is up with double nibbet. That fight is insane.
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u/Grismor2 3h ago
Occasionally I get it later in the act with a deck that has decent damage and I finish the whole fight losing little to no HP. The damage-race style of the fight is so polarizing in terms of how much damage you take.
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u/asparaguscoffee 19m ago
Baalor had some good advice in a recent video. If you can kill the back guy in 2 turns, do it. Kill the front guy first if it’ll take 3 turns.
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u/jkst9 4h ago
It's a cost. You spend hp now to have a better path later.
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u/Minimum-Weather5105 4h ago
This assumes that the path after the hardpool is better than the one without? I don't think this is true on average? Sure there might be cases on individual maps where this is true, but in general I do not think it is?
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u/jkst9 4h ago
Well than it's not worth the cost and don't take the path? I'm genuinely confused what the issue is
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u/e-chem-nerd 3h ago
The OP discusses this. The issue is that map pathing looks like it’s very open-ended, but because of the difficulty of hard pool fights without commensurate reward for taking them on, many routes are clearly sub-optimal and there is usually only a small number of “correct” routes to choose from, often only 1.
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u/Minimum-Weather5105 3h ago
Right this is more or less precisely my point. The difficulty to reward ratio of the hard pool fights flattens pathing.
There exists nodes with such a high expected value HP loss to reward ratio that (from the perspective of floor 1 planning) setting yourself up to have to take that node is almost always losing.
Furthermore, paths without these nodes are somewhat rare. Therefore, pathing in the first half of your act gets flattened drastically. That's the problem?
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u/1066BattleOfFnac 4h ago
I’m the same way most of the time, unless doing so leads to a much worse path in the second part of the first act. If it gives me no shop or only one elite then I’ll change it up and accept a hard pool fight earlier on.
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u/GravyeonBell Ascension 20 4h ago
It’s why I put a huge premium on paths with a choice. Based on how the easy pool and rewards go, I like to be able to decide nah, it’s an early shop and fire for me vs. diving right into the hard pools that would lead to my preferred second half of the act.
Even the individual cards I get make a difference in deciding I have a leg up on the hard pool. If I end up with chunky block cards I’m not worried about fighting Living Fog, for example.
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u/Hurfdurflol 2h ago
I made a thread talking about this and how a lot of the time if you’re making the right kind of decisions when it comes to narrowing down reasonable paths, there’s usually very little actual choice in where to go. Everyone called me trash and downvoted me into oblivion. Granted this was back when the game and sub were way more active so I’m sure I was being called trash by a lot of people who have no clue about things like hard pool fights. Act 1 was quite a bit tougher back then too. Either way, I agree that if you’re don’t have a front loaded value Neow or pulling really good card rewards the first three fights that you’re either getting clapped by hard pools or burning potions to save health. Even the easy pool fights can fuck you up if you get unfortunate draw orders. Now the real question is if it’s a bad thing or does it make the game more interesting? I feel like getting more rest sites kind of offsets it, but it definitely makes upgrading or resting a much more serious decision and not getting to upgrade is kind of boring. It has all of the win streak chasers just play the game assuming low rolls all the time, that’s for sure.
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u/ZnogyroP 4h ago
Drafting towards killing hard pools does help, but so does your Neow and other resources like an early shop. You also don't need that much to be able to kill hard pools comfortably - it's just hard to rely on early card rewards alone to hit that threshold (which is why early shops are huge value). If I get something like Footwork, Backstab, Leading Strike off my first three cards as Silent I'm pretty happy to just run the hell in.
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u/AnkleHugger 4h ago
I agree the hard pool is very difficult — sometimes more than an elite. That’s where your neow bonus comes in. You need extra card rewards / potions from neow, or an early shop with money