2nd win a grind?

[syiofkargath666]

I'm not sure if my game is bugged or not but I can't seem to eak out a second win. the final boss is always over 2000 hp and nothing I do can really stack up to that over the course of a run. am I meant to just keep grinding until I unlock better cards or is the game trolling me?

[ShinryuEXE]

No, your game isn't bugged.

No, you don't need to unlock better cards. There are more cards to unlock as well as an alternate champion per clan, but the unlocked cards aren't key to any clan and aren't intended as direct power increases by unlocking them.
You can and are expected to win with the basic card pools.

As for what you should be doing differently, it's hard to give you pointed advice without know what your decks are looking like, so feel free to post the Deeplinks from recent runs, but in general it sounds like you need to be focusing more on scaling offense and/or defense.
i.e. Keeping one unit alive and repeatedly playing Ritual of Battle on it is a lot more valuable than letting it die and replacing it with a new unit.

[syiofkargath666]

Originally posted by ShinryuEXE:

No, your game isn't bugged.

No, you don't need to unlock better cards. There are more cards to unlock as well as an alternate champion per clan, but the unlocked cards aren't key to any clan and aren't intended as direct power increases by unlocking them.
You can and are expected to win with the basic card pools.

As for what you should be doing differently, it's hard to give you pointed advice without know what your decks are looking like, so feel free to post the Deeplinks from recent runs, but in general it sounds like you need to be focusing more on scaling offense and/or defense.
i.e. Keeping one unit alive and repeatedly playing Ritual of Battle on it is a lot more valuable than letting it die and replacing it with a new unit.

that's what I've been doing in general. picking spells/artifacts that synergize with my units. picking units that can easily be buffed into monsters. I mostly avoid imps and in general all the first clans units and spells. they seem to be too steep of a trade off for temp buffs

[ShinryuEXE]

Originally posted by syiofkargath666:

that's what I've been doing in general. picking spells/artifacts that synergize with my units. picking units that can easily be buffed into monsters. I mostly avoid imps and in general all the first clans units and spells. they seem to be too steep of a trade off for temp buffs

Again, more helpful to actually see what your decks are looking like.

Imps are very strong, particularly Welder Helper and Fledgling Imp.
And Hellhorned has several very good units. Like Horned Warrior, Steelworker, and Railbeater are all solid. Their spells are good too, with a good balance of buffing, defense, utility, direct damage and even floorwide damage.
Like, what units and spells are you skipping? Cause most of Hellhorned is good.

[Goggled Banana]

Are you playing with the Last Divinity DLC? I don't recall Seraph having 2000 hp on a second play through (assuming you mean covenant 1 or 2).
It sounds like you're fighting the divinity with a large amount of shards.

[syiofkargath666]

Originally posted by ShinryuEXE:

Originally posted by syiofkargath666:

that's what I've been doing in general. picking spells/artifacts that synergize with my units. picking units that can easily be buffed into monsters. I mostly avoid imps and in general all the first clans units and spells. they seem to be too steep of a trade off for temp buffs

Again, more helpful to actually see what your decks are looking like.

Imps are very strong, particularly Welder Helper and Fledgling Imp.
And Hellhorned has several very good units. Like Horned Warrior, Steelworker, and Railbeater are all solid. Their spells are good too, with a good balance of buffing, defense, utility, direct damage and even floorwide damage.
Like, what units and spells are you skipping? Cause most of Hellhorned is good.

monstertrain://runresult/381df36c-4816-48e5-8d7c-7d5ed6825c66

[ShinryuEXE]

Originally posted by syiofkargath666:

monstertrain://runresult/381df36c-4816-48e5-8d7c-7d5ed6825c66

Alright, some thoughts, in no particular order:
- Your deck has essentially zero scaling. It looks like you were probably trying to utilize the Awoken Hollow to build stats via its Rejuvenate trigger, but you don't have a lot of healing spells to trigger it all that often and even then it looks like you were trying to split the heals with the two Thorned Hollows as well. I ran the seed myself before replying so I could see what else would have been available and to that end there were multiple options for damage scaling offered at one point or another, namely Sharpen (which is alright, a bit better with Wrathful Prince like you had since the Spike kills count for the Slay trigger), Steel Enhancer (which is decent, though you'd want multiple of them and/or Holdover), and Ritual of Battle (which is great and is what I ended up building around, eventually making it 1 cost and Holdover and then duping it)

- Instead of building for any type of scaling you're relying too heavily on raw stats, as evidenced by the three Hollows, each of which has Largestone on it. I imagine the spikes from the Hollows was part of your plan too, but I can't see you building up any meaningful amount of Spikes in any given battle.
Instead of going for raw stats, you could have built for scaling like I mentioned above both in your unit choices (look for Multistrike instead of only Largestones, or picked up one of the sweep units or an Animus of Will or Horned Warrior with their built in multistrike, or just taken Brawler Prince at the beginning since he starts with Multistrike and at rank 3 has 5 attacks) and in your card drafts.
Or you could have built harder into the Spikes plan, wherein you would have purged all your non-healing cards, used Merchants of Magic to minus cost all your remaining cards, taken double draw upgrades instead of Capacity and Ember, and spammed out heals onto your single Thorned Hollow as much as possible to stack up enough spikes to murder all enemies that attack into it.

- It looks like you're skipping every battle's Trial. Sure, it can be wise to skip on ones you're ill suited for, but winning battles with the Trials on gives you a lot of extra resources to work with. It's definitely worth losing a bit of health early on to take Trials that will better position you for the rest of the run.

But yeah, in general it just doesn't look like your deck is doing that much. It seems like you spent too much time investing in building up the raw stats of the Hollows, spent almost no time with Merchants of Magic because of it, didn't purge the unneeded cards from your deck, had poor draw because you took Capacity and Ember upgrades (though the Sap Tap at least helps offset that. Still, Draw in general is always very good and even moreso vs Diligent since the Scourge cards can otherwise ruin your turns), and just didn't have any plan set up to actually scale up your offense sufficiently (reading that back it sounds harsher than I mean it to. Not trying to be mean, just trying to point out the areas to focus on)

For reference, this is what I ran on that seed:
monstertrain://runresult/ef6bf501-5054-4e50-9fc3-8f9e6ab7cd57

I took Brawler Prince right at the start because the inherent Multistrike is really good.
And because I already had great offensive unit in the form of Prince my two main goals were 1. Find a good scaling option to build up Prince's attack and 2. Build sufficient defense to keep Prince alive.

To that end, I took the Sharpen when it was offered after battle 1 or 2. Not super exciting, but it gives attack to Prince and that's all I really needed, though I would have preferred a Ritual of Battle or Fledgling Imp. I took the Awoken Hollow because I could use the Restores and Glimmers to trigger the Cultivate onto Prince to add to his attack and health as well, and then I just slotted in a Heartstone and Battlestone onto the Hollow for a bunch of extra hp since all I wanted from the Hollow was a good tank to stand in front of Prince. I didn't take Largestone because it would have made the Hollow too large to fit on the same floor as Prince and would have forced me to take a Capacity upgrade to make that work.

Eventually I was offered a Ritual of Battle so I ditched the Sharpen to focus on that instead and systematically purged out my Stewards and all of my non-healing cards. And since I could only get the Ritual of Battle down to 2-cost with the Holdover, I tried to minus cost as many of my other spells as I could to ensure I'd still be able to play out most of them even while devoting 2 Ember to the Ritual of Battle every turn.