What is the Highest Torment?

[Saint Zach]

My friend and I hit 20 in duos and are really changing things up now that its that high.

Is there an upper limit?

[SoNgO]

How did u do that? We are stuck at 19 and seems unplayable. Any tips?

[Saint Zach]

Well I think the simplest thing you can do is run at least 1 mage. It is the class with the most options for Draw+mana and also has access to a lot of crowd control cards. Freeze and displacement can really save a lot of damage per turn. Mage also has consistent HP regain through the Swell > Mend Wounds card line. We also exclusively take draft now that we are past 20. Starter cards are absolutely garbage at this high and more of a liability in most cases. Being able to have some direction starting floor 1 really helps our decision making for the adventure slots.

Torment Levels

Must Haves Pacifist; All 1 cost Torments

Pacifist enables the Swell/Mend Wound cards by adding in poison wounds. It is actually a good trade off for the negatives, especially since Mage gets a few options to convert the status cards into doing something to the board state.

1 cost Torment are all easy enough to deal with by themselves, and also work as easy things to drop when we have to add another harder option once we climb another torment, which we can then toggle back on once we climb again.

Playstyle Torments

For a while my friend and I were doubling down on the "in combat" difficulty torments, especially through the climb in the teens. The biggest difference between the two playstyles we had was either going "Scatterbrained" or "hoarder". The two torments don't work too well together because scatterbrained wants a thinner deck so the 1 cost upgrades have a better chance of high rolling, while hoarder wants to be able to better shape the deck with high tier adventure choices. This is basically the difference between the two of our playstyles. I have went deep into the 3 cost torments, except for scatterbrained. Where I am hoarding money and only using one shop per adventure but making sure it is the most impactful per floor. My friend instead ignores "Distracted" and just doubles down on almost never buying anything big.

Card Choice

This one is far more subjective and depends on the context of the run. I mostly play mage and tinker, with a little bit of rogue. Generally one of us is a support mage and the other is Damage. We usually end up with a Mage + Tinker combo, and warrior is almost never played, simply because warrior has too many competing playstyles and not enough ways to help the team. Especially if we are reducing our block through torments.

Mage

However what I will say is that Mage has a lot more useful Skill cards than attack cards. You should expect fights to last at least 5 turns, and want to be rotating through your low value cards. Freeze, teleports, card draw, and mana are all super important. It is all about increasing your total potential per turn, and reducing incoming damage without spending mana on inefficient block cards.

You also want to get the most out of every fight. Mage is particularly powerful because you can essentially stall fights and use poison wounds with the healing influences to get back to full HP. This is really important because "Reckless" is a strong torment choice since most block cards are inefficient for their cost and the block cards that are good will still be blocking a significant amount of damage per turn if you need to use them. With Mage you can ensure any chip damage that makes it through is reduced considerably, if you are patient and aware enough.

Tinker

Early game screw and core generation into late game attack cards. Most contraptions are inefficient for their costs and we usually end up just taking the cheap low screw cost ones to recycle in later turns. Tinker has the strongest damage options in the game and so rare contraptions usually just can't compete with the resource cost. Usually the screw generating block cards are enough to carry the early game fight while you are working on building up your power play options. If mage is a god because of AOE crowd control, Tinker is a god because of AOE damage.

Rogue

Bombs and Quarrels. Before the Quarrel update rogue also had some consistent damage output with stacking the deck with arrows but the card additions make this less consistent and quarrels have a lot more crowd control options baked in to the individual card.

Bombs control individual segments, and even low tier bombs can be used in a low value quadrant to stack your odds of hitting an ignite for a quadrant that matters. Bombs don't meet the same potential as Tinker's AOEs but they get the job done. Rogue has a lot of value generating cards and should be specced into those as your late game. Usually the deck wants your skills converted into healing, stuns, or displacement, a handful of bombs to help the mage keep enemies in check, and the rest of the deck specced for concussive arrows and/or talon arrows.

Warrior

The class in most need of an overhaul. It was my favorite class until torment hit around 12-15. It struggles the most to keep up with the increased enemy numbers and a lot of its cards are in conflict with each other.

Even so, you can make use of this class by speccing into stamina gain, a small amount of passive block generation, high value single target damage cards, and end game focused on converting influences to the high tier Rare options to compliment whatever damage focus our draft direction allowed.

We have had the best success going something like "deep breath" "second wind" "immutability" and "battle Juice" for skill cards, and either the death-eater sword with "disarm" AOE attacks or speccing into "Flurry of Blows" > "Shadow Sword"

The main issue with warrior is that even without limiting your block through torments, a lot of warrior's damage cards strip them of armor anyway. So we usually just ignore trying to force block centric builds because getting them online is far less inconsistent than trying to focus on an off-damage support that has boss killing potential through the increased damage influences, multi-hit attacks, and scaling damage.

For what its worth, if you can get a good "shadow sword" build online with a support drawing you cards, you can chunk bosses and delete large enemies. It just takes a lot of babying to get anywhere with this class while the other 3 classes can all support themselves if they have to.

[that aint falco]

We're at 22, in duos as well, but the highest torment is playing with all of them at the same time which is near 35 I believe, but probably near 30 should be impossible

[Saint Zach]

Originally posted by that aint falco:

We're at 22, in duos as well, but the highest torment is playing with all of them at the same time which is near 35 I believe, but probably near 30 should be impossible

I eventually saw the leaderboard and yeah above 30 feels like a total crapshoot.