how to make the candle guys work at covenant 25

[frost]

i beat cov 25 with every clan by cheesing it with stygian but im stuck at candle guys now because they have literally no synergy with stygian (or any other clan besides umbra they kinda do their own thing and its really bad)

any tips

[Yojo0o]

I'm still covenant 18, but my favorite pairing for Melting is Hellhorned. Getting to constantly re-play the Imps is extremely strong, especially if you find a TranscendImp.

[NeverLucky]

dose holdover stealth work? and yeah they dont really have the beefy units that everyone else (cept stygian) has to really hold them back for frostbite stacks to build

[Neon Black Interactive]

Candle boys are definitely on the weaker end of the spectrum for a variety of reasons. I don't think there's any way to even semi consistently win with them on cov 25 so I really think you just need to get lucky. I do however believe that pairing them with stygian straight up won't work out as well as other pairings. I think you're best bet is getting a lucky early legion of wax and then building the run around that.

Biggest issue with them is that their core mechanic is burnout and for that to be good you need to take a bunch of cards to make burnout better but none of these cards do other stuff. So you're basically taking a bunch of do nothing cards just for the sake of making your somewhat above rate dudes not worthless half way into the fight.

This is especially problematic because rector flickers only worthwhile upgrade path is burnout which essentially forces you to take these do nothing cards just to ensure your champion makes it through the fight. This is especially bad because you can get screwed by card draws and have your rector just die.


Basically I think you should just avoid burnout entirely and do something else entirely (sometihng that's not stygian though cause there's no stygian support in burning remnant).

[Doctor Gitgud]

I'm only covenant 10, but I don't think burnout creatures should be avoided. Just prioritize rez cards and upgrading them with holdover/lower cost. Usually I don't want to apply melting to my units because I want them to die so I can rez them stronger, and to buff spells that scale with friendly deaths. The only time I want to extend their lives with a melting card is for the boss phase. Often I use melting cards on non-melting units to kill them quicker.

[Neon Black Interactive]

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I'm only covenant 10, but I don't think burnout creatures should be avoided. Just prioritize rez cards and upgrading them with holdover/lower cost. Usually I don't want to apply melting to my units because I want them to die so I can rez them stronger, and to buff spells that scale with friendly deaths. The only time I want to extend their lives with a melting card is for the boss phase. Often I use melting cards on non-melting units to kill them quicker.

But how are you gonna kill seraph with a strat like this? The scaling rate from reform is nowhere near enough and you're gonna be spending too much time drawing the same reform cards over and over to give your units okayish buffs rather than spending time building a more potent scaling engine to grind through his hp.
I really don't see how a reform strat is gonna be able to grind through seraphs 4000 hp pool fast enough. You really need something that scales a lot faster. Hypothetically you could use reform to recycle the same buffed units on each floor to maybe deal with seraph but his op adds are just gonna run you over (screw the guys that sit in the back and attack for 15x2, they're awful, and the emberdrain guys are even worse if you're not playing stygian).

[DoubleByte]

Yeah I've tried dedicated reform strats and you just don't scale HP fast enough, and the Remnant don't really have great tanks- they generally either burn out or offer early game utility, but theres nothing as strong as the other factions.

You just get pulled in a few too many directions at once with them

[Lorska]

Reform strats are not about scaling health, they're about scaling damage.
Use stealth to make your units survive if needed. I'm usually successful with reforming morsels like crazy because while you don't scale as quickly as other things, you scale off 3 things at the same time, reform, morsel buffs, and gorge/harvest.

You also get access to cave in, multistrike and trample if needed and all spells for this strategy are low cost, so emberdrain doesn't actually do anything.

[Khor]

Honestly, i haven`t played enough to say "This works better than that"
So i`m just gonna say: i won Ascension 25 twice with the Candle guys

1 Rector "tanking" with a bunch of multistrike candle dudes in the back (and lots of stuff to give burnout) Stygian support for some odd spell damage

2 Melting/ umbra
Duped Crucible Collector with Rector on top reforming good morsels (mostly Collector OP)

[frost]

Originally posted by Khor:

Honestly, i haven`t played enough to say "This works better than that"
So i`m just gonna say: i won Ascension 25 twice with the Candle guys

1 Rector "tanking" with a bunch of multistrike candle dudes in the back (and lots of stuff to give burnout) Stygian support for some odd spell damage

did it like this and won thx but i played umbra not stygian

[Panda]

Originally posted by ....:

Originally posted by Khor:

Honestly, i haven`t played enough to say "This works better than that"
So i`m just gonna say: i won Ascension 25 twice with the Candle guys

1 Rector "tanking" with a bunch of multistrike candle dudes in the back (and lots of stuff to give burnout) Stygian support for some odd spell damage

did it like this and won thx but i played umbra not stygian

who did u use to tank instead of rector?

[frost]

Originally posted by Panda:

Originally posted by ....:

did it like this and won thx but i played umbra not stygian

who did u use to tank instead of rector?

i did use him as a tank

here is the run if you are interested

https://imgur.com/a/pysYKZF

[Yojo0o]

Originally posted by Urilbedamned:

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I'm only covenant 10, but I don't think burnout creatures should be avoided. Just prioritize rez cards and upgrading them with holdover/lower cost. Usually I don't want to apply melting to my units because I want them to die so I can rez them stronger, and to buff spells that scale with friendly deaths. The only time I want to extend their lives with a melting card is for the boss phase. Often I use melting cards on non-melting units to kill them quicker.

But how are you gonna kill seraph with a strat like this? The scaling rate from reform is nowhere near enough and you're gonna be spending too much time drawing the same reform cards over and over to give your units okayish buffs rather than spending time building a more potent scaling engine to grind through his hp.
I really don't see how a reform strat is gonna be able to grind through seraphs 4000 hp pool fast enough. You really need something that scales a lot faster. Hypothetically you could use reform to recycle the same buffed units on each floor to maybe deal with seraph but his op adds are just gonna run you over (screw the guys that sit in the back and attack for 15x2, they're awful, and the emberdrain guys are even worse if you're not playing stygian).

It's worked brilliantly for me up to Covenant 18. 15x2 is awful, but 85x3 is getting somewhere. It's really not that hard to scale units up significantly before Seraph activates.

[Doctor Gitgud]

Originally posted by Urilbedamned:

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I'm only covenant 10, but I don't think burnout creatures should be avoided. Just prioritize rez cards and upgrading them with holdover/lower cost. Usually I don't want to apply melting to my units because I want them to die so I can rez them stronger, and to buff spells that scale with friendly deaths. The only time I want to extend their lives with a melting card is for the boss phase. Often I use melting cards on non-melting units to kill them quicker.

But how are you gonna kill seraph with a strat like this? The scaling rate from reform is nowhere near enough and you're gonna be spending too much time drawing the same reform cards over and over to give your units okayish buffs rather than spending time building a more potent scaling engine to grind through his hp.
I really don't see how a reform strat is gonna be able to grind through seraphs 4000 hp pool fast enough. You really need something that scales a lot faster. Hypothetically you could use reform to recycle the same buffed units on each floor to maybe deal with seraph but his op adds are just gonna run you over (screw the guys that sit in the back and attack for 15x2, they're awful, and the emberdrain guys are even worse if you're not playing stygian).

I haven't had problems with it. Legion of wax is great, the stalker guy who gets a permanent +10 atk every time he dies is great, I've even won using 3x multistrike cloned Draff.

Don't forget that you're also printing money here using the baron guy who gives 5 gold every time someone dies. I also had an artifact once that was 5 gold for ALL deaths on ALL rows, which was nuts. And using reform, the guy who gives +20 gold per kill can get strong enough to actually get kills regularly if you have multistrike on him.

All of that gold means you can have tons of artifacts and upgrades. You can also dip into the secondary faction for your boss finisher (for example, memento mori + spell weakness, thorns/frostbite/rage + legion of wax, etc.).

[Brolando]

Well I haven't tried this myself yet, but what if you took remnant's champ, give him harvest. have him at the top floor getting super tanky while pairing him up with hellhorns and using ascend cards to stack the top floor with high damage dealing units?

[Neon Black Interactive]

Originally posted by Baithoven:

Well I haven't tried this myself yet, but what if you took remnant's champ, give him harvest. have him at the top floor getting super tanky while pairing him up with hellhorns and using ascend cards to stack the top floor with high damage dealing units?

This general strat can work very well at cov 25 but you need some other important pieces to make it work. Burning remnant + Hellhorned will have enough damage to deal with the major tanky dudes pretty reliably and will be able to grind out bosses with the doomstack. You do however need ways to clear out the support line before combat happens. Without this your tank will take too much damage against shadewings and the like.
It also really helps to have something to help smooth out your draw. The biggest concern with the ascend/descend strat is draw order. If you draw your cards in an order that's a bit too counterproductive you can lose control of the situation very quickly. The run could end just cause you didn't draw unit x before unit y and z or because your ascends were all at the top or bottom of the deck. I've found that march of shields is very, very useful for helping here because it gives a lot more lenience in the order you can draw your units. More draw power is obviously also very helpful but hellhorned/remnant isn't exactly known for their card draw.