The Beatdown Strategy, AKA Index Targeting

[FreewayPound]

To give some background, I played the huge, initial controversial patch with the lack of detailed patch notes and whatnot. IIRC, Liu Association fixers initially had like 118 health. I hadn't updated any of my decks or did passive transfers, but I decided to do the Liu combat anyways.

It should have been a massacre on my end. Passives were even in the % chance state, where they weren't guaranteed. But it wasn't. Why? I adopted the Index's targeting strategy- beat each one down, one by one. I mean, what else could I have done clashing against their strong cards? And so I completed the reception, and was appalled. After all, if I could beat the most recent Star of The City without engaging with any of the new systems... What does this mean going forward? Even if it was a fluke, should that kind of gameplay be possible, where one can completely ignore core gameplay mechanics and come out on top?

Ever since, I've been somewhat reluctant to play the game, but I've still kept up with it. It just feels too easy to break. Flygoniaks has touched on some of this in his post about the current iteration of the passive transfer system.

In all honesty, I am not hoping that this strategy is burned down. I just think it was crazy that it worked so well. There are things PM can do to counter this- the easiest ones I can think of are more enemies that force clashes, like Love Town, or pages with more counter dice. It's just food for thought. I'm interested to see what people have to say about this "beatdown" strategy, especially since the game seems to be scaling to more dice.

[Arch-Knee]

Index targeting for Liu is the recommended strategy for two reasons.
1. Clashing with them gives them emotion gain, which makes Liu fixers more powerful as the battle drags on, especially with their passive.
2. You will not deal enough damage with clashing as there are 5 double-dice enemies before they get to emotion level 3 or 4.
It's the intended strategy. Of course, most likely they'll have ways to counter index targeting later.

[Dima green]

Oh wow, it took people so long to realize that one of the most effective strategies in this game is literally rushing down people one by one. I am fairly impressed

[fish444]

crying children already counters index targeting, which i think is a dumb strategy.
usually i adapt to situation, i beat index easily because the only thing they do is index targeting
apparently its not the best strategy if the enemy does it
against most battles you want to get emotion levels up high, and you outclash if you pick your clashes

[FreewayPound]

Originally posted by fish444:

crying children already counters index targeting, which i think is a dumb strategy.
usually i adapt to situation, i beat index easily because the only thing they do is index targeting
apparently its not the best strategy if the enemy does it
against most battles you want to get emotion levels up high, and you outclash if you pick your clashes

Well actually, Crying children is the worst offender. It does not counter index targeting. I would argue that Love Town does a better job due to +10 power if not clashing.

Crying Children actively stops clashes, forcing you to stagger Unhearing Child through a beatdown. In fact, the most you should do is include pages with counters to get through their fatal 1-dice mechanic. And only then can you clash properly. It's still best to beatdown the children so that you remove them temporarily. There are not many cards that can perfectly clash against the later stages of the boss.

I'll also argue that any strategy employed by the enemy is always going to be weaker. The enemies are rarely perfectly tailored to their strategies. For example, the Cleaners survive off of themselves dying. Their attacks are hardly damaging and would rarely get kills even before the big update. Index also had the issue of not having optimal decks, either. Proselyte's Blade and a lot of their other cards aren't exactly great for their passives or their targeting strategy. This is all by design- if enemies were perfect, it would be a struggle for players to actually progress and get stronger.

[Arch-Knee]

Originally posted by fish444:

crying children already counters index targeting, which i think is a dumb strategy.
usually i adapt to situation, i beat index easily because the only thing they do is index targeting
apparently its not the best strategy if the enemy does it
against most battles you want to get emotion levels up high, and you outclash if you pick your clashes

Crying Children.
The reception where index targeting is CRITICAL because you can't clash accurately in parts of the reception due to passives, that can only be removed by staggering the enemies quickly, which you need to do by index targeting or it's not enough.

[fish444]

fair enough, counter dice are better for that particular fight but yeah
i just try to clash with each enemy to get the turn 1 clash and also have counter dice

tomerry is probably the better example

i value emotion levels more than index targeting strategies, though i guess that comes from playing with weaker pages

i though full-stop stacking also counts as an index targeting strategy, which is why i was thinking crying children

[Mastema]

unga bunga mode

[taotieh7]

emotion levels are important only for rarer core pages
we won't be eager for blue or green pages because we'll get dozens of those before acquiring the rarer ones, and hence focusing is commonly more valuable to let the target alone

[CarThief]

It's weird how that's basically the only strategy now. As you start out, you're able to clash with enemies, negate their offence while sneaking in your own, maybe even use defence dice.
(Oh, i remember the old days of using Backstab to "sneak" past a enemy's offence and hit them unopposed... Or the many uses of Struggle, E-endure or Flaming Bat...)

Then friggin' Sweepers come along and force you to single-target enemies. And then the Index Proxies who litterally FORCE you to do this to them before they'll beat you to death with it. Then the Liu encounter, and so on...

Numbers go up, and clashes become less desirable because often they're unwinnable. This appears to be somewhat of a slippery slope PM has gotten themselves into. It's effectively the only strategy that works post Star of the City, and in some slightly earlier missions.

Hm... I suppose the best ways to counteract it would be to give enemies gimmicks that if left unopposed punish the player heavily. Often as enemy-exclusive abilities. Or things that reduce the effectiveness or outright negate one-sided targetting. (Like litterally being untargetable if no clash will occur by ordering the attack.)

[Arch-Knee]

Originally posted by CarThief:

It's weird how that's basically the only strategy now. As you start out, you're able to clash with enemies, negate their offence while sneaking in your own, maybe even use defence dice.
(Oh, i remember the old days of using Backstab to "sneak" past a enemy's offence and hit them unopposed... Or the many uses of Struggle, E-endure or Flaming Bat...)

Then friggin' Sweepers come along and force you to single-target enemies. And then the Index Proxies who litterally FORCE you to do this to them before they'll beat you to death with it. Then the Liu encounter, and so on...

Numbers go up, and clashes become less desirable because often they're unwinnable. This appears to be somewhat of a slippery slope PM has gotten themselves into. It's effectively the only strategy that works post Star of the City, and in some slightly earlier missions.

Hm... I suppose the best ways to counteract it would be to give enemies gimmicks that if left unopposed punish the player heavily. Often as enemy-exclusive abilities. Or things that reduce the effectiveness or outright negate one-sided targetting. (Like litterally being untargetable if no clash will occur by ordering the attack.)

What? Focus targeting a single enemy without bothering to clash other attacks is a bad strategy, especially in Index where they literally focus on one person so you need to clash to divert attention from that person so that he doesn't die.

Sweepers aren't even that much of a problem, they have weak attacks and you weaken the rest while focusing on one to build emotion.

Liu and Tomerry are the only case where you have to start ignoring clashes for some enemies. And in Liu, you still need to clash with the stronger attacks to mitigate damage while ignoring one enemy to prevent emotion build up.

[CarThief]

I think you're severely misunderstanding. This tactic doesn't EXCLUSIVELY involve ignoring ANY AND ALL clashes, good Lord, you'd have to be utterly stupid to think of it that way. There's ussually important stuff to block/clash with. But that's a on-the-side thing. The main goal remains quick one-by-one elimination to minimize losses.

(Though one could get away with mimicking the Proxies' tactic without clashing ever since they're stupid enough to pile all their DPS on a near-dead enemy with like 10 HP. It's basically a free turn.)

Hm, can't think of any good reasons to ever clash with the Liu though. Unless you already have their cards you can't beat their good cards like Emotional Turbulence, nor can you beat their high-rollers.
And their weak DPS filler cards are technically easily clashed and won, but you'd be empowering them massively, giving them Light, +1 power and eventually more dice slots. So, that's not a healthy idea (unless you need that improved droprate).

[Patrick]

I think the main cause is the higher HP and resistances on key cards. You had to divert attacks away from fatally weak librarians, and you more often had a librarian staggered, and were clashing to protect them.

That made block dice more useful too since your goal was just to minimize damage, not win the clash.

Now instead of fatal > endured, it's just normal > endured.
So an attack of 10 goes from 20 > 5 to 10 > 5, not even worth bothering with.

Another thing is if you and the enemy have the same number of attacks and you clash, the only way to do damage is to win clashes. so I think they should always have a couple less.

[Patrick]

Stronger on-hit effects might help, so you clash to block them. If they're too strong to ignore they might be OP, but they could make them custom enemy cards, like with the circus animals.

A tangential idea I had is enemies with [On death, all allies heath is doubled]
It would have to increase max HP too, or it's pointless.
That way you'd want to kill them on the same turn, or have the others be almost dead.
If the player can use it, it might help in other battles too. To use the effect you'd want one librarian
to die asap, while protecting the others. After it procs it's back to focusing, though.
It might still be better to focus down one enemy, just almost killing them instead of killing them, but tanking 5 enemies might be too much to survive for the whole fight.

[changb1]

I am okay with Index targeting being an optimal strategy for most fights. Though perhaps PM can introduce more passives for future receptions thats not easily beaten by index targeting, to encourage players adopt other strategies. Passives that gain boost (EX: protection) upon negative situations (EX: losing health/having unused defense die/receiving one sided attacks) could do the trick.