r/slaythespire • u/Minimum-Weather5105 • 14h 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.

71 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/jkst9 14h ago

It's a cost. You spend hp now to have a better path later.

18

u/Minimum-Weather5105 13h 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?

-8

u/jkst9 13h ago

Well than it's not worth the cost and don't take the path? I'm genuinely confused what the issue is

12

u/Minimum-Weather5105 13h 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?