How do you mitigate battle RNG?

[Sir Slush]

This game's RNG seems really heavy to me. I can handle most types of enemy encounters, though once in a while certain (regular enemy) compositions will kill my main damage dealer in one turn. What usually kills me are the boss battles, and it's usually because I can't draw enough cards or I don't get the skills I need (always healing when I want damage and vice-versa.)

I do take draw skills as a priority after everyone gets their first level-up. When selecting a card skill, I always go for whichever will draw the most cards overall, and I usually get about three or four additional draw skills before ultimately dying to something in Carnival or Graveyard because all my draw skills bunch up at the end of the deck, and the mana costs to play them become turn-consuming before I can really get any of my necessary skills. It seems I'm often ending turns with most of my mana unplayed since I've run out of cards, or a coupe of draw skills and no mana left to play the skills I needed to draw.
I do, of course, take on every encounter I can find.

I've lost all of my previous... eight games, I think. I've won a few times in previous patches. I'd have to say I'm not bad at card games, as I win more than half of my A20 Slay the Spire runs and play card games pretty well IRL, but my win rate in Chrono Ark is abysmal. Will someone who "gets it" explain how you mitigate the ever-present RNG? I'm getting really frustrated.

[UnlimitedNC]

Game version? Difficult? Heroes? Cards? Artifacts? Consumables? Enemies? More clarity and fewer tears.

[Sir Slush]

No tears here, just trying to believe, understand and gain some knowledge from those of you who claim to have 70% win rates.

Game version 1.41, current, no beta. Normal difficulty; until I can win that consistently, I'm not even attempting hard. Usually I take Azar and Suz, Huzz, Liam, Pressel, or Joey in whatever combination I can find, preferably starting with Azar and either Liam or Suz.
I don't see what the artifacts, consumables, etc have to do with the randomness, but they change every run. Tell me how you get the same ones consistently and I'll tell you which ones I end up frequently taking.
Mainly I build Azar as primary damage-dealer and make the other characters support his attacks, with Liam or Pressel running secondary damage. My ideal team is Azar, Suz, Liam, and Pressel, with Liam having at least one Come At Me and Pressel being a hybrid healer-dps.

[UnlimitedNC]

Originally posted by Sir Slush:

I don't see what the artifacts, consumables, etc have to do with the randomness, but they change every run. Tell me how you get the same ones consistently and I'll tell you which ones I end up frequently taking.

I just want to say that it is important to use them. Lot of people lost heroes with tons potions/shields/pills. And need buy keys in every stage(if drop unlucky) for new artifacts. Books of skills very helpful too.

Originally posted by Sir Slush:

Mainly I build Azar as primary damage-dealer and make the other characters support his attacks, with Liam or Pressel running secondary damage. My ideal team is Azar, Suz, Liam, and Pressel, with Liam having at least one Come At Me and Pressel being a hybrid healer-dps.

Well, i think 2 support characters for normal too much. Just Pressel with all heal skills(mainly aoe heal) its good. Huz(or Sizz?) more advanced characters, may better later use them. And need 2 dd character, Liam good, but pretty slow, possible use her it as an support with taunts, stun, some times dd.

[Sir Slush]

Ah, I see. I buy keys in most stages to build equipment over the course of a run, as well as buying identification scrolls which I use strictly on potions; on average I will end a stage with between 1200 and 2000 money.

OK, for my next few runs I'll try dropping Sizz or Pressel and using another damage character. Thanks for your suggestion.

[Khor]

Honestly.... can`t really tell what you are doing wrong... maybe you take too much Draw and don`t use Fixed skills enough?

Maybe you can make a better party?
Azar is/was probably the most busted character.
Sizz (with Incise and that skill which increases damage) is great with him.
Pressel is always nice, but she just bring some armor reduction here.
Liam is, again, always nice... again but, she is the one you want with an already mana-heavy party.


Two of the best supports for Azar are Trisha and Silverstein
Trisha is great because she can copy Azar`s Sword duplication (that, in turn, fuels here passive). Also, Heal and Pain removal.

Silverstein can Stun and has Quickshot. Each Hollow Sword cast during Quickshot is also a special hit from Silverstein (and every 6 hit he draws). Trisha can also duplicate Quickshot for some extra fun

[Jamjars]

The RNG is the number one complaint people have about the game. And as seen, the 'git gud' mentality is strong here, lol. This game just isn't as tightly balanced as Slay the Spire or Monster Train. There's a lot more tiny probabilities and if any of them chain the wrong way, you lose, nothing you can do about it.

Some of the RNG can't be mitigated. Every action has a permanent 2% fumble chance you can't get rid of, for example. And there's not much you can do about the low level crit chance all enemies have except Joey's weakening gas.

Pressel's cards are kind of meh but her passive helps reduce draw RNG, which is pretty strong. And if you are lucky they can boost a skill at a clutch moment. Like giving Ticket to Heaven to Ironheart or Miss Chain and boosting it.

Joey is better at just keeping your party alive turn to turn since his support cards are a bit better than Pressel's, and tossing chemical weapon on Azar or Silverstein adds a lot of damage, but his passive isn't as useful turn to turn. Potions are neat but they take up precious inventory space.

[Sir Slush]

Thanks for your suggestions!
Pressel's passive is the main reason I like to have her on the team as Sizz's healing is usually enough on its own and having Eve buff attacks is a great bonus. That said, again the problem I always have is drawing the wrong cards and not getting my draw cards, so initially I think I'll try dropping Sizz first and adding Trisha or Silverstein as additional damage/control. Later I'll try swapping Pressel back out for Sizz or Joey.

Out of curiosity, what are your compositions/strategies for hard difficulty? I would assume anything that works on hard should also work on normal.

[UnlimitedNC]

Originally posted by Sir Slush:

Thanks for your suggestions!
Out of curiosity, what are your compositions/strategies for hard difficulty? I would assume anything that works on hard should also work on normal.

My 2 last runs in expert i successfully finished with Ironheart/Pressel/Charon/Narhan and Azar/Huz/Ironheart/Silverstein. But i play in beta patch. And its more fun compositions for me, not optimal.

[Khor]

The OP parties are Azar/Sizz/Trisha/Silver, Ironhearth/Pressel/healer/whatever, and probably Joey/Charon/Ms. Chain/Huz(or whatever, really).

As long as you avoid Phenix and keep a balanced party (decent Heal, possibly some Stun, some "ignore taunt") you can win "expert" with pretty much any composition.

[Orban King Enjoyer]

Over commit on your healer. Don't over-level them (4-5 by end of game), but do snap up any good healing skills you find at shops. Not uncommon for my healer to have 7-9+ healing skills by end of game. Which might sound like a lot, but i usually run with 2 Attacks, so you'll have some damage in there. Along with getting 4-5 Lucy skills, almost always of the "Draw" variety (Draw, Continuous Draw, Character Specific Draw skils, etc) I tend to shy away from the more gimmicky Lucy skills unless i get them as a drop.

Remember to Fix a good healing skill to your healer so you have it if you need to.

One of the finer points of the game, which took me a while to grasp, was judicious use of the Wait button and how too much speed can be too much. 2-3 Speed is fine, but more than that the enemies are going to have too much action time to wait through. And if you can't clear them all, you're going to end up eating a lot of attacks in a row (especially in A2). If you're smart, you can see that an enemy is about to attack, WAIT, let them hit, then use a healing skill rather than just END TURN.

Discard/Draw button is also your friend.

[Sir Slush]

Thank you, Arkterus. Could you explain to me how speed works, and how I get more aside from scrolls of Swiftness? I know that it affects how often enemies attack, but the exact nature of how it works and the number of attacks enemies will perform on "their turn" (or at the start of "your turn") is unclear to me. If the tutorial said anything about that, it's been too long for me to remember.

[Khor]

There`s not really a "your" or "their", just "the" Turn.

Enemies have a fixed amount of Actions and start the Turn with their own Countdown or delay or whatever you want to call it (they have a hidden Speed stat too). When that reaches 0 the enemy attacks.
Your Speed is simply added to each enemy's personal Countdown. Just that.


Turn management is a pretty important mechanic.
That makes me think, maybe, the problem is that you just need a bit more time to get comfortable with the game.
If you can get familiar with the various (somewhat obscure) mechanics, you`ll probably find winning much easier

[AncientSpark]

From what you've said in your OP, it also sounds like your card priority might be a bit lopsided.

You should not be in a position where you have too much mana and running out of cards in Carnival that often. Hell, it's pretty common to have runs where you never take a single draw skill until Graveyard. What it sounds like to me is not only is there the support issue that other people have pointed out, but that there might also be too much emphasis on low mana attacks and/or not utilizing fixed skills enough or taking too much defense.

Given neutral speed, you should be attempting to kill the most problematic mob within a group within 2-3 action counts or making the kill inevitable with Pain DoTs. If you can't do that on most enemy formations, you don't have enough burst within your card choices.

Example is with an Azar comp (on live), you should be generally in a position where you can use another character as setup (Joey Chemical Weapon is the most obvious example), then burst down the hardest enemy with Ascending Slice or Blade Starfall+Calling of Hollow Blades in most encounters. Or potentially be running a second DPS to make this more consistent (as Azar can sometimes struggle without good card setup), or have some hybrid attacking in with your healer.

Chrono Ark is inherently a very aggressive game. In addition to the high damage of enemies, if all the enemies get attacks off, you are likely dead, because aggro control is limited and you only have limited ability to time heals correctly for full value due to heal card density in your deck and the healing gauge mechanics.

And the action system is a catch-22 for this; if you group your own actions together and fail to kill, then enemy actions are bunched up, so you're likely dead from that. If your don't group your actions up, then enemies will waste your mana/cards by forcing you to respond to their attacks with healing. So the best answer to this is enough damage so when you do group up your actions with mechanics like Swiftness, you've killed enough to limit the crackback damage.

[Sir Slush]

Thanks, Spark. I do lean heavily toward low-mana attacks, so I'll attempt to change up my card selection for a bit more mana diversity in the future. Regular enemy encounters have not been a problem for me; usually I finish both Carnival and Graveyard encounters in one to three turns with little or no lasting damage, but boss encounters are where I often run out of cards, hence the draw skills and the desire for better deck control.

[AncientSpark]

Yeah, you have to keep in mind that high mana attacks are "virtual card draw" in this game, because you are getting more damage per card drawn compared to low mana attacks. In exchange, high mana attacks are less efficient in terms of damage per mana (on purpose). Because mana tends to climb faster than card draw, high mana attacks tend to be better than low mana in this game (although there are specific encounters that can punish high mana attacks, especially early in the game).

This is not like StS where you will always draw up to the same amount of cards at the end of the turn; long term card advantage has much more sway over this game than traditional deckbuilders.

This is also why attacks that are flexible on this front (Shadow Slash from Trish comes to mind) tend to be quite powerful.