Deck Synergies and my issue with Banners of Ruin

[Firellius]

Deck Synergies are the cornerstone of deckbuilder roguelikes, for me. They are the key to making a run feel complete and take off, and they're a good way to make players feel rewarded for putting together a strong deck.

In Banners of Ruin, this system's implementation is lackluster. Every deck archetype needs some basic cards that implement the mechanic, and execution cards that take advantage of it.

The only synergy I can think of that works properly is Bleed, as applied to enemies, and this, hopefully, makes a good example of how to make more and improve the game.

What applies Bleed:

Cutthroat - One of the best passives. Reliable source of bleed.
Carnage - Not to be underestimated. Drawn-out battles allow this to be applied in large quantities.
Precision - A bit awkward due to its high cost, but its variable application allows it to synergise well with charge and AoE effects.
Sharpened Steel - Bread and butter. A common card that is already in your starting deck.
Blood Sacrifice - Trickier to use since it costs vitality, but if your party has countermeasures for the self-bleed, this can do well. Synergises with blood offering builds, but those are extremely hard to build due to being tied to extremely rare cards and traits.
Hamstring - Decent bleed application, but it's hampered by having a large portion of its value applied through crippling, which, as an effect, isn't mechanically ingrained enough. It's too hard to take advantage of Cripple.
Nefarious - Decent enough card. Applies bleed and draws cards, overall a perfectly fine card.
Spiteful - Tricky and highly dependent on specific armour sets. Not fond of this one due to how conditional it is, and its payoff doesn't feel solid enough.

What takes advantage of Bleed:

Arterial Rupture - This card has no base vlaue but scales incredibly harshly. Pairs well with charge to allow absolutely devastating damage, but the card only works because bleed is so commonly applied.
Terrible Wound - This card is really well designed because it is a bit sub-par without supporting bleed, but is very influential when paired with bleed. At 1 cost, it's not too demanding, and although the base damage is low, it is directly applied to vitality, giving it distinction and value that allows it to be on par with a simple strike. On bleeding targets, however, this locks the bleeding value, making it easier to stack and more impactful.
Bloodbath - This card has no base value but scales incredibly harshly. In a dedicated bleeding deck, this can easily swing a fight.
Incision - Decent base value and adds a little extra on top. Not too spectacular.
Rake - Okay-ish base value, but the bleed benefit is almost negligible due to Cripple being hard to take advantage of.



This is overall a large quantity of cards that support this build, and most of these do well enough on their own. There's no reason not to pick up Terrible Wound: Even if you don't get -any- other bleed, it's just slightly sub-par without bleed.

Let's contrast this with Toxins.

Applicators:

Plagued: No harm in this one. it's easy access to toxin, very reliable source if you can get it.
Toxic: Decent. Not as good as Plagued, as it's more conditional on it showing up on a tank, but it's still acceptable.
Poison Tip: Bit of an investment, as the card itself effectively deals only 3 damage on its own turn, but the tradeoff is that the target is relentlessly marching towards his death. Acceptable value.
Foul Wound: More conditional, but with a good multi-strike, or lots of card draw, this can do quite well.
Miasma: Much trickier than Plagued, this only works if you have reliable sources of card draw.
Toxic Cascade: This is an excellent card because it plays off any status effect, but there's another reason I'll come to in a bit...

Executors:

Toxic Cascade: It actually scales off itself. When toxic ticks up, that procs Toxic Cascade, making this card both applicator and executor. Excellent card.
Plagueis: This is more conditional because it requires a target to have high toxin on it, and to have adjacent fighters. This makes it too conditional, and since high toxin targets likely don't last very long, this card has questionable value. It's also a will card despite all this, which honestly makes it quite unappealing.
Pestilent: A passive that kind of runs counter to toxin. Toxins add up slowly over time, and Pestilent requires bigger numbers, faster. It can potentially work, but... It's probably not the best passive you're being offered.

While Toxin has some adequate applicators, they're far fewer and farther between. Now, toxin needs less support because it inherently applies itself, once a single stack is on an enemy, but that does not solve the executor problem.

There's almost no cards that take proper advantage of a poisoned target. As a result, toxin will rarely amount to anything more than a bit of a side thing, something that gets tacked on with a passive here and a Poison Tip there.

We could do with passives that give charge to characters that attack poisoned targets, or a Talent that deals damage to a target equal to twice, maybe thrice the amount of toxin stacks they have, before removing them. Weasels are supposed to be good at poison, so these would sound like good fits. At the moment, they seem more occupied with bleed and movement.

Other archetypes that are trying to be there but aren't quite there yet:

Blood rites: There's some strong passives and strong effects built off of turning bleed into a positive thing. However, these are -extremely- rare and practically never come together. In all the runs I've done, I've probably been offered the Unholy Communion about three times.The theme is interesting though, and could do with more applicators (Skills that deal good damage but apply bleed to self, or a thornshield that adds guard, damage reflection, and bleed) and executors.

Cripple: Very rarely applied, and cards that force an enemy to move are rare and clunky. Most force-move cards stop working against a full party (And the warden always has a full party), and a lot of them stop working if the enemy is in the wrong spot, ironically. The billhook works well with this and should be offered far more often. It only seems to show up on characters from the tavern, never from a weapon crate or loot screen.

Card Draw: Somewhat rare, but the bigger issue is that the executors are hindered by base card draw and hand size limitations. Throwing Daggers has a max of 50 damage, because you always draw five cards at base and can't draw more than five on top of that. Similarly, the Hare's 'Eccentric' seems confused in its purpose: Drawing 8 extra cards in one turn requires a full 5 preparation, PLUS three more 'draw one' cards like Setup, Second Wind and Quick Hands. And then you're supposed to be able to draw a card from Banish (Which requires you to have considerable value stored there), but you might very well end up skipping that because your hand is full. This needs max hand size increases. Could be a good idea for an innate passive for the hare, or a will-based talent.

Banish: Facilitation of banish is difficult as it's surprisingly rare. Card generation is probably the most reliable method, but that's down to weapons, mostly, which you don't get many of. There's also not enough executors. We could do with skills like 'Gain charge equal to your banish pile'.

Discard: Not much to be said, there's too few cards that discard other cards, and not enough cards that benefit from discard. The one wolf talent that gives you charge and a multi-hit attack is great though. Still, we could do with a defense card that requires a discard, for example, and more cards that have a baseline effect that's just average, but get stronger when discarded.



TL;DR: While I do like the game's audiovisual presentation and there's a lot of quality around the game, the game itself is lacking the key parts of what makes a deckbuilder roguelike appealing to me. A lot of deck archetypes feel very incomplete and could use a lot of work.

Also, bleed is good.

[Nightmare]

That's exactly what I think about this game.
After 11 hours and 2 successfull runs that all both used some sort of poison (the one more than the other) I feel like "what else should I try"?

Yes bleed is another effect with many good synergies but others are rare.

I tried to build a 'ruin' based deck which didn't worked because there are so few cards that synergies with this effect and when you don't even get one of the few ones...

Charges are cool if you have some "times x" attacks but in the end you need to feed charges over and over to a character to do a one time big attack and then start over to collect charges.

The game is fun, I also like the graphical presentation and the soundtrack is amazing but the missing synergies makes deckbuild really clunky sometimes.

[Soul4hdwn]

Toxic Cascade also shuts down an opponent that gains lots of buffs, like the wolf with survival gear or any of the "bosses" currently in game.

you didn't point out passives vs cards/traits/weapons, i'd like to note. Toxic Cascade and miasma are very common and synergize with passives like "bleed on hit". so its more like one build feeds the other or can be mixed effortlessly.

i have yet to get a "charge"/multihit build working that isn't also bleed or poison.

banish has a (rare) finisher, or executor as you call it more appropriately, from the unlock menu. wolves rarely also get it as a card gained from a passive too, a multi hit based on number of banished cards. there's more (common) ways of banishing in current version that isn't from armor/weapon extra spawned cards.

the game is still developing so we should see shifts or gaps filled eventually.

[Wrenny]

I rarely use any cards that effect cripple, I mostly just use them to set up combos or make them miss a turn.

[Firellius]

An extra note on movement on player characters: There's a lot of cards that dictate that the active character moves to a lane or row. These cards are absolutely terrible because they randomise where in the lane or rank the character ends up. Weasel's Control, for example, claims to move the character to the same lane, but it kept putting my backline, cloth armour weasel on the front when used, in disregard of which rank the target wound up on.

It'd be far more tactically involved to give players better control over where their formation ends up.

[Firellius]

Another card that exemplifies the lack of synergistic play: Plague Doctor.

The effect is solid: Whenever you take damage from toxins, a random party member gets 3 revitalisation. That is pretty strong.

However, there is only one (1) enemy in the game that applies toxins. Outside of that, the only ways to get toxin on a character is by either getting the talent that turns bleed into toxin, or by having a bear with the talent that inflicts toxin on themselves.

That is far too conditional. Plague Doctor serves almost no purpose.

EDIT: There's apparently an even worse one that simply applies the poison of the wielder on the target. Worst card ever, also because it's on weasel, which doesn't have access to the talent that heals 15 and inflicts 2 toxin.

[White Gaming Bunny]

While I agree some statuses are not remotely viable to use in combos, especially cripple, I did recently have a run that became focused on toxic debuffs. I got lucky with draws and four of my characters had the card where enemies are poisoned with each extra card drawn (one character got it twice from a reroll event). I also had three characters with the ability to draw extra cards for each character on rank with stamina remaining after cards ran out, as well as about five cards that specifically made extra cards get drawn.
This coupled with poison/toxin's natural increasing per turn made even the warden fight moderately simple.
Again, I know I just got lucky with draws, but I think synergy for toxins at least is viable, just requires luck to get. From that one run I think making it more accessable might also create severe unbalance with other debuffs as it already has potential to be the most powerful debuff. meanwhile, in contrast, I've only managed to get cripple cards a total of about six times in all my runs, but three times that with cards that play off of it.

[Firellius]

In the same vein of issue: There's too many hard counters to strategies. Ender Spearmen's carapace practically invalidates multihit, there's the dumb attack that deals a bit of damage and adds massive bleed if the target has too much defense, and there's the mechanism where enemies get charge when they get hit by strong attacks, which discourages your own charge.

Best not to implement these kinds of things until players have options for deck builds.

[Firellius]

Secondary layer of this issue: I keep playing runs in the hopes of encountering and logging more talents and passives I haven't yet seen, but in doing so, I am reminded: If I haven't seen these show up yet in the dozens of runs I've done, they're so rare that they're not worth playing the game for.

Card distribution is too harsh. I don't know exactly how it works, but I suspect that there's common, uncommon and rare cards. However, where in most games, rare cards might have a 10% drop chance (With events an challenges that can force them to spawn), it feels like in Banners of Ruin, rare cards, talents and passives are sitting on around 1% drop chance. This makes them non-factors in the overall gameplay and turns them into wasted space.

One way to improve this is to increase non-combat card drops from 3 to 5, and to always give four options when selecting a talent or passive, with the fourth being a guaranteed racial talent/passive.

[edge_braak]

I think the biggest issue by far is that the different animals/classes have almost no difference between them. Most of the best traits and perks in the game are neutrals that anyone can get, they all start with the same gear and play the same way until you've got multiple levels, and the fact that equipment cards are so powerful only makes this more prevalent.

They need to play more Slay the Spire.

[Firellius]

Originally posted by edge_braak:

I think the biggest issue by far is that the different animals/classes have almost no difference between them. Most of the best traits and perks in the game are neutrals that anyone can get, they all start with the same gear and play the same way until you've got multiple levels, and the fact that equipment cards are so powerful only makes this more prevalent.

They need to play more Slay the Spire.

It is indeed a major problem that the characters are very poorly defined amongst each other, which is in part due to racial talents and passives just... Never showing up, and in part because they're usually trash tier.

It would already help a ton if each race started with a unique passive and a different load-out depending on their position on the field.

As it stands, the game is just starting to frustrate me with the ways it misses the mark.

[Clocktopus]

Originally posted by Firellius:

Originally posted by edge_braak:

I think the biggest issue by far is that the different animals/classes have almost no difference between them. Most of the best traits and perks in the game are neutrals that anyone can get, they all start with the same gear and play the same way until you've got multiple levels, and the fact that equipment cards are so powerful only makes this more prevalent.

They need to play more Slay the Spire.

It is indeed a major problem that the characters are very poorly defined amongst each other, which is in part due to racial talents and passives just... Never showing up, and in part because they're usually trash tier.

It would already help a ton if each race started with a unique passive and a different load-out depending on their position on the field.

As it stands, the game is just starting to frustrate me with the ways it misses the mark.

While I do agree with the crux of your post, remember the game is only about 1/3 of the way through their roadmap to release. Give it some more time and keep giving feedback.

[Leaffe]

A couple of thoughts on this:

1) I believe that the deck synergy must be viewed in conjunction with passives and equipment. There are a lot of potential synergies there, but, that also leads to point 2..

2) as several people have said, it is still early. It feels like they've got a few different archetypes of strategies that they are working towards, but that they haven't all been fleshed out. I think there are going to be balance issues that will need to be reviewed with just about every card (and currently, some cards are way overpowered for the cost, and some are just awful). I think the framework is there, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it gets fleshed out.

[brokenfixer]

It is not early any more; the game is more-or-less finished.

Races are still undifferentiated and their racial abilities are just embarrassingly terrible.

Talents are still trash tier. Neutral cards are outright better than talent cards (in addition to being playable by any character!). Sometimes two of your three talent choices synergize off of Ruin (an unfinished, undercarded, and unworkable gimmick). Other talent cards trigger off of cripple stacks, or your next turn's Prep stacks, or some other niche effects that you have absolutely no way to deckbuild around.