Advice on the third character?

[Plump Sweet n Beggin for Cream]

I've managed to unlock the third character now (I forget her name) and Perceval and Bjorn both clicked with me after trial and error.

With her, I'm finding I dont really get it. The pet mechanic makes sense but I'm not sure how best to play around it. Survivability seems really low. Or rather, I'm struggling to find a play style that helps sustain her.

The game is awesome, I'm determined to see everything through and could use a bit of help on this roadblock

*Edit*: Thank you for all the advice! I found an excellent build by using fire, which got absolutely wacky after getting 3 pieces of fire brotherhood gear. Definitely found the boar was a hard carry early but fell off to uselessness later on, which is good to know for future runs

[Winston]

I beat Vanadis's story on hardcore with the following build using the starter class:

1.) 4 elven set pieces. Crystal is excellent. Evasion stacking is op.
2.) Heavy Bow (grants 3x bow damage)
3.) Prioritize stacking breach on enemies through cards with piercing multi-hits. Upgrade all basic piercing attacks so that they have multi-hit.
4.) Thin out as much of the deck as you can that doesn't contribute to breach.

I only used the pet in the earlier half of the run for survival. Once I got enough evasion and piercing card density in the deck, I didn't use the pet at all. Good luck!

[Nukleus]

She's a bit trickier than the other two for sure, especially with the pet boar. Though as far as boar go, it's a meat shield. I use him only to take hits while I'm stacking those sweet sweet piercing debuf to melt the foes while not taking damages. As always class items works wonder even if I'm yet to find where they all are if not just random drop/merchants.
But to be fair, each pet has it's own gameplay/synergy with her, and need to be summoned, put back according to what the ennemies are doing, i.e. they're not attacking, might as well stuck up on buff/debuff on them to boost the next pet summons, or finishing them off. Just be aware you can summon the pet only once per turn and can't be reinvoked if you de-summoned it.
_Boar benefits from breach on certain attacks, while getting block through connection when summoned and giving connection when taking hits. But I mostly use him to avoid taking hit while I do the work with piercing arrows.
_(not sure if you have unlocked the other class for her so I won't tell the name of the pet)
_The 2nd on is all about stacking evasion on main and avoiding getting hit (though evasion works just once and give you as many connection as you had evasion stacks) and summoning the pet to inflicts bleed on all ennemies.
_3rd one is about getting as many connection as possible as well before summoning it and plays on frosbite/burn with 5 class item it's really good
_the last one can't be put back once summoned, so it's either he does the work for you, or it get killed and you can play again. Though with one class item you can sacrifice it and gain its strength to boost you.

Also, if the pet dies, you can't summon it again for 2 turns.

Hope that helps a bit, she's really fun and I'm sure you'll come around finding your own way to play her like you did the other two

[Lionheartwolf]

I really liked the elven set on her. My first run with her I finally managed to get a complete armor set, and it just happened to be the elven set, and I won straight away. I'm not sure how evasion scales with difficulty, but a miss should be a miss which helps.

[thefollowingcharacters]

I beat the entire game on her on normal the first try. The boar is overpowered, because if he wasn't he would be useless. Get the elf set to stack evasions per turn. Get your boar out, and upgrade the boar's block on every rest stop. If you can get the talents that apply poison, burn, and frost every turn, just keep surviving with your boar. If he dies, you have a ton of evasive stacks to start stacking piercing. Summon your boar again, and repeat. The only character I had difficulty on was Sigmund.

[Coruskor]

Most Overpowered build I've made is with Vanadis. Bonebow, bear cape, 2 or 3 piece elvish. That's the basics for it. To go insane with scaling, the Talent "Poisoned hand" is completely nuts. It breaks the game. Last boss fight I had over 500hp and 150 strength. I didn't even have any of the pet or self buffs that are supposed to counter the totem. A enemy pet would be summoned and I would kill it the turn it came out. Easy to do over 1k dmg a turn.

[badger vortex]

honestly? a lot of the boar attacks just don't scale well so you want to stick with piercing attacks or burning/poison on vanadis. what i tend to do is only summon the boar when i'm about to take large amount of damage or help me heal if i get below 50% hp in a fight

she gets better damage dealing pets though as you unlock other subclasses, boar is mostly there to take the hit and heal you back while it takes damage

others have pointed out that the elf armour set is in fact good which is true, but not really relevant to vanadis as it's just really strong on every character

[Grizley]

She relies heavily on luck. Mostly she's absolutely awful.

The first guy is very solid, though I'm not a fan of the gold digger class. You can make a build around many items or cards that can win.

The wolf is just off the hook insane op. You'll win every fight by turn 3, turn 5 for bosses. The only one that's a little tricky is the final bosses shield. Since it's hard to build up your stack of 400 bleed vs a shield.

The archer... she is mostly garbage. With a few select combos that can be good if you happen to get them. Ie, the doubling thorns and immunity. A few others. But, they're all multi part, fragile and unreliable.

Reliability is probably the knight, then wolf and archer as a distant third.

Peak power is probably wolf, archer, knight.

[Nokturnal]

I found Vandis to be as OP as most of Bjorn's builds, even more so defensively due to how easily she can use Evasion and become Immune to incoming damage for 2 turns as well via one of her Legendary cards. (That Legendary card also gives you more Summon uses)

First win with her first subclass I did a connection = damage build. Cards that built connection based on how many cards in my hand and played, then having the Boar spend the connection to do nuts amounts of damage or gaining nuts amount of Block.

Her fox subclass though I tried the connection build on that one, it instead relied on Bleed as it's damage source and though I breezed through every prior fight, the last fight the Bleed wasn't being applied properly, so it took forever, but I still beat it. A bug was preventing my bleeds from removing the enemies Ward stacks. So even though I was applying hundreds of bleed per attack it wasn't doing anything to the target I was trying to kill lol.

[Grizley]

The problem is, the archers pets do not benefit from items. So it basically doesn't scale at all. Her cards are very weak for the most part, with the most actively terrible cards of any character. In theory, having 5 energy vs 3 or paying health is supposed to compensate. However, the knight is at either 4 or 6 energy by the end of the first act, and his cards are much better per energy. The wolf doesn't actually have card costs, which is part of what makes him so busted. By the end of the first act he's drawing tons of cards a turn, and healing back his entire health bar every turn.

There are some ok combos for the archer, but literally every one of them requires gold card(s). This is mostly because her base and blues are so awful. Try playing her sometime and never hitting skip. Now do it with either of the other characters. You will notice the difference, it's because of the massive difference in average card strength, trying to do too many things, and the general weakness of the synergy between the things she's trying to do.

Piercing damage is good, but then all damage cards that aren't pierce are actively detrimental.

Burn/frostbite are probably ok? I haven't seen a gold card that makes it worth playing for, but maybe one of the crappy little animals unlocked later does something with it.

Most of her draw/burn/card trick stuff is just not good. Mostly because of a lack of strong things to work with. Some of it's alright, most of it is just too expensive for what it does. 3/5 energy to copy a card just isn't good. It means you can only copy 2 energy cards, and if you do that's all you do for the turn.

Now one thing that she can do well, is short fights. Where she just does damage until they start to attack, throw up a speedbump pet, dismiss it if it somehow lives and then keep attacking. Problem is, that runs into the summon limit. You can expand that a little, but only with gold cards.

TLDR: She's 70% of character, the pet is 40%. But 70% + 40% != 100% in practice.

[Nukleus]

Originally posted by Grizley:

Burn/frostbite are probably ok? I haven't seen a gold card that makes it worth playing for, but maybe one of the crappy little animals unlocked later does something with it.

On raven burn is so OP with a blue card (Fan the flames on the pet side, forgot the name on vanadis side) that stacks the burn so easily, it's a one cost card that basically doubles the burns all targets everytime, having that and once you reach 4 item of her raven set you'll be building so much burn stacks.
Frostbite is also pretty strong as it totally ignore blocks, though it is a bit harder to stack up, but there's also a blue card that deals damage xtimes the frosbite stacks, you manage to get 9 stacks (as it resets at 10) you do 10x the damage, add some nice strenght and you melt everything

You can also easily stack up enormous amount of bleeds with the fox, the only difficulty is that you can only evade one attack per turn on her, but you buff your fox bleed stacks in camp, have a nice evasion build with high stacks, and you can easily out bleed the enemy by the end of the run

And the badger can become really strong but can be slow to start, but if you have some balm item with you, you can stack up some connection before summoning him, then it starts with lots of strenght and can melt stuff while increasing it's on max hp and healing with balm and gaining more strenght, had run where i had close to 500hp on the badger with insane amount of balm regen and strenght on final boss, he didn't do much

She's not the easiest to play as it requires you to know when is the best time to summon and call back your pet in order to maximise their effect, but once you do, she's very easy to beat the content

[Grizley]

My main problem with her is basically twofold.

One, pets don't scale from items, only cards and camp training. This means as the game goes, they get weaker and weaker even if you pump training into them.

Two, she's a mishmash of incompatible concepts. Burn, frostbite, bleed, piercing are all basically a disadvantage in any deck that isn't of that focus. Worse, she's heavily reliant on gold cards. But feel free to prove me wrong and do a run with no gold cards and never skipping. I'd be interested to see if you can find a decent setup like that.

So comparing her to the other two.

Both of them scale with items, obviously. Either of them with something as simple as a Sword of Weakness already has the game won. Multiple items that can be built around for basically sure wins.

So card synergies.

The knight gets a lot of cards based around + armor, +block, +strength. All with strong synergies, all good in most/all builds.

The wolf gets a lot of cards based on card draw, bleed, healing, multi hit. All strong synergies again. You can say, oh I want scars not balm, or I want balm not scars but you do want healing.

Then look at card efficiency/energy economy.

Knight basic block is what 6? Wolf heal 2+spirit for no cost, or burn for more, archer... +1 connection. So 1 block for the boar. Terrible.

Basic attacks, 6 damage, vs 2 piercing. Here the gap isn't as bad. It can catch up in the first turn and then speedbump with the pet, on a good draw at least. But, a perfect draw of 5 Punch for 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 20 damage vs 18 with a much easier draw.

The trend gets even worse with advanced attacks, as both the knight and wolf get attacks that are 2x or 3x the efficiency. Plus, they get better strength scaling. 3 hit attacks on a character that is gaining 5+ strength a turn? Yeah, that gets gross fast. Especially when it's also applying 2-7 bleed per hit.

It's not hard to figure out when to summon the pet. "When I'm about to get plastered, let the pet take the hit" The fox is slightly more interactive, since while it is a speedbump, it also can apply bleed if you've been dodging a while. etc. All pretty basic.

[SmokeDragon]

you can kill the boss before they even get a turn.. look at the post i made to chain stun all