![act 4 slay the spire act 4 slay the spire](https://images.nintendolife.com/screenshots/97023/large.jpg)
It follows then that tuning your deck to handle them and pathing through as many as you can (without dying) maximizes your opportunity to get stronger. In other words, you only have a certain number of floors between you and the next boss, and elites are where the highest rewards are concentrated per floor. You can value an elite reward at around 2.5-3 times the reward you’d get from another floor (you get a relic, triple the chance of rare/uncommon cards, and roughly double the gold of a normal fight). The floors in-between are the opportunities the game gives you to do that, and to that end your HP is a resource you spend to get stronger. The floors between you and your next boss shouldn’t be seen as obstacles. You need to get stronger to handle the boss and stronger still to handle the next act. Why elites are great:īut fighting them can get me killed! Not fighting them also gets you killed, it just happens later. In addition to fighting elites, having more frontloaded damage and block helps you do better in most hallway fights, which keeps you at higher HP so you can do things like Smith and spend HP on events for rewards. If you think you can kill them without the Poisoned Stab, or if we won’t be fighting Act 1 elites for some reason (usually inadvisable), the Dodge and Roll might be a better pick.Īlso, to be clear, Elites are the main reason to veer toward being strong as quickly as possible, but they aren’t the only one. The reason Poisoned Stab is the pick is that we’re in Act 1 and our deck needs to kill Gremlin Nob and Lagavulin to get the best rewards. I am NOT saying that Poisoned Stab is a better card than Dodge and Roll, or that the synergy between Dodge and Roll and Footwork is irrelevant.
![act 4 slay the spire act 4 slay the spire](https://assets2.rockpapershotgun.com/slay-the-spire-g.jpg)
This is an example of how micro-decisions can have ripple effects throughout the run, but there’s something I want to stress.
![act 4 slay the spire act 4 slay the spire](https://d2pyy4mni9b4yk.cloudfront.net/original/3X/3/2/3231a5c36dd9cb5a03f48835456b521d1ab1dd3a.jpeg)
Even if the Dodge and Roll is a better card for us later on, taking it now can leave us weaker in the long-run by not enabling us to get enough out of Act 1. These are assets we can invest in getting even stronger to snowball through the rest of the run. So if we take the Poisoned Stab, we come away a relic, more gold and a better card reward (because we got to take on the elite). In other words, if we don’t take the Poisoned Stab now, we can’t fight the elite, we’ll die.
#ACT 4 SLAY THE SPIRE PLUS#
Will we be fighting an elite soon? Our deck plus a Poisoned Stab might hold up against Lagavulin or Gremlin Nob, while our deck plus a Dodge and Roll will probably die to those. It might eventually, but we need to look at the map. Which one is the better choice? Doesn’t Dodge and Roll synergize with the Footwork we just added? Next, we’re offered either a Dodge and Roll, or a Poisoned Stab. Let’s say we’re in Act 1 and we just added a Footwork. Generally, you should skew strongly toward the short-term, because being strong in your current act gives you advantages that snowball into a stronger character throughout the run. In act 1 especially, there’s a balance between taking cards that are strong immediately (front-loaded damage, mainly) and cards that will be good later, when your deck matures a bit. Your deck needs to solve your immediate problems– short-term strength snowballs into long-term strength.īe thinking about the encounters you’re likely to face/want to face and how good you are at dealing with them. This is a guide for people who want to win more often on the highest difficulty available. This guide isn’t for you (A20 probably isn’t either). Some people like to play the game in a particular way, build certain kinds of decks, use pre-made seeds, go for Achievements. Mostly, I want to stress is that this is a guide to winning as many of your runs as possible. This is a guide to fundamentals that will help you get better if you’re not consistently winning at lower ascensions, or if you’re struggling to pull even the occasional win on A20. What works on A20 will also work while you’re climbing there (but the reverse is not true). Most of my advice assumes that you play at Ascension 20, but you can still use it to improve your play at lower levels. This is a guide for winning more often in Slay the Spire. By screwyioux on reddit Who/What This Guide is For: