Weird difficulty

[Ray64]

I played about a dozen attempts and only won a single time so far. So only at rank one while my clans are at like rank 5. I feel like I am missing something, I would expect there to be a curve to the difficulty but instead is just a massive wall of grind and luck, ranking up the clans has not actually decreased the difficulty at all.

So far the angel boss gets me most of the time, it is sometimes close like one hit away from a win, and a few times there was no chance at all.

[Malkav0]

Find them, the broken combos ^^ Don't crowd your decks too much, try to aim for reliable mechanics (at least to begin). I did not meet a wall before rank 15, kept trying, changed my ways of playing, got through, climbed to 25, it's brutal but now I'm playing it like its the standard. You're right if you're saying it's not an easy game, upper rank are absolutely hard, but the curve is very good IMO. At the start you'll fail because of a lack of knowledge and understanding of mechanics, but the game will be very forgiving for a time. Initially I had played all the combination at rank zero before starting to climb though.

[s†. Chris†opher]

it seems like a grind and luck because you have yet to fully understand the game. while the game is inspired by slay the spire etc its quite different.

to be honest, one of the harder jumps for me was from cov 0 to cov 1, rest of it was gradual.

the covenant system is actually the difficulty setting, cov 0 is the tutorial(which is why its ultra easy) and cov 1 is the default difficulty.

two things, will help you out.

1. Always press Z to view your deck when your getting new cards, a cards value is only how well it fits into your deck, not how the card performs on its own. so while some cards are strong, you're sometimes served not taking at all, so you can draw you win condition cards and synergies.

2. keep your deck concise and small, you'd think having several tanks, spells etc would mean you'd have more chance at getting them, but this game really relies on you upgrading certain cards and making them uber strong, you want to draw your OP cards to win.

anywho, the rest comes with time and experience. I took me 100 hours of blind play to get to cov 25, i'm sure other people did it faster, but if you want speed up the process, watch youtube videos and read up meta's on the forum.

[Ray64]

You say cov 0 is easy, yet I just tried going back to 0 from 1, and I still lost twice in a row. I got farther the second time, including past the angel boss but then in the next ring it gave me shadewings with multistrike, doing 20 damage each and they steamrolled me.

[Ryika]

Games like this can be pretty hard for players who are new to the genre, because you have to put together a lot of things all at once to get a successful setup.

Primarily, there are a lot of "hidden concepts" that may not be intuitive if you've never thought them through. Like, for example, the idea that was mentioned above, about how you want your deck to be as small as you can get away with, because adding too many cards to the deck decreases its consistency, and average card quality.

But also how Pyre Health is a resource that is often more useful when used to gain additional power (especially through trials) compared to just letting it sit there, or how some mechanics have multiple uses.

Secondly, you have to get a decent understanding of which combos work out well, and why.

Thirdly, you have to get a feeling for when to take calculated risks.

All three of those heavily interfere with each other, which makes "disentangling" the game very difficult when you're just having a go at it without prior knowledge.

Since the game doesn't offer you an in-depth tutorial that gives you all the knowledge that you need, it's pretty much on you to gather it. There's really three ways to do that:
- Watch good players play
- Watch/read guides that teach you the basic and advanced concepts
- Play very, very slowly while thinking about every move to discover these "secrets" yourself

In any case, don't forget that you can restart a battle by quitting to the main menu without any penalties as long as you do it before you die. That way, you can practice specific fights, try different approaches and see where things go wrong to figure out why they go wrong. If you don't stand any chance at all with any approach, chances are the problem is your deckbuilding.

[Ray64]

Sure you talking about learning the ins and outs of everything, yet why do I have to become an expert to beat the standard difficulty? That is not a difficulty curve, it is a big wall. Grinding to unlock new cards has not really reduced the difficulty either. Seeming if I make one mistake then the match is lost, that is about as unforgiving as it gets, and if grinding does not making it easier then what is the point, as even though I'm much more familiar with the game it does not seem any easier at all.

[Ryika]

Well again, it's a wall because the game expects you to be familiar with these concepts. That makes sense, I think, because you learn these concepts once, and then you can apply them to just about any game that's similar - many concepts even apply to card games like magic. So that's pretty much a "once per lifetime"-climb that you're expected to do.

If anything, one could fault the game for not familiarizing you with these concepts by offering proper tutorials, but again, there's enough content out there that you can watch if you want a quick start. In the end it's on you.

Once you understand what you're doing, the lower difficulties are very forgiving. I think it's fair to call them "easy", since you can get away with just about any strategy as long as it is generally executed sensibly, even if you make a few mistakes here and there and make bad card choices.

I don't think it would make sense to offer a "very low" difficulty where you can get away with not knowing what you're doing, since that would just give you a false sense of where you're at. Because the simple reality is, if you can't win on cov 0 at all, or only very inconsistently, then you're almost certainly still missing some core concepts, because an in-depth understanding of what cards are good and which ones aren't is not required on that level. So that's very important feedback that the game's giving you there.

Unlocking new cards isn't supposed to make the game "easier", not a lot at least. These cards are generally more advanced and enable more specialized builds. That's why, I think, they're locked behind progression, to give you a chance to get an understanding of the basic toolkit before opening up more arcane options. They can, generally speaking, be very potent, but also require more specific decks.

[Neon Black Interactive]

Originally posted by Ray64:

Sure you talking about learning the ins and outs of everything, yet why do I have to become an expert to beat the standard difficulty? That is not a difficulty curve, it is a big wall. Grinding to unlock new cards has not really reduced the difficulty either. Seeming if I make one mistake then the match is lost, that is about as unforgiving as it gets, and if grinding does not making it easier then what is the point, as even though I'm much more familiar with the game it does not seem any easier at all.

You don't need to know the ins and outs of everything to get through cov0/1. You just need to understand the fundamentals. If you haven't yet grasped the fundamental strategies the game will brick wall you very early. Then as you go higher and higher in covenants the game requires you to have more refined understandings, as well as employing more robust and nuanced strategies.

If you're truly stuck on cov0/1 then you've yet to understand the most fundamental, basic strategies.

[xxdovaxx1]

0 is very easy, to begin u come into a game without settings or something, and i win that first match xD the secound match too and the 3. but the 1 difficult is so mutch different i ask a lot of times what i have to do different, i think the 1 difficult is not for new decks, u have to lvl a lot before u try a new difficult