Can someone explain how Surge works exactly?

[Bola de Ouro]

I love the game and all, but you unlock Surge, the game basically says: 'Here's Surge a new mechanic that will make the game more complex'
But how? What does it do? How does it work? I had comps get Surge before the mechanic popped up on tier 7, I'm really confused. Thanks.

[archez.a]

When you generate energy with a champion, an icon appears in the top left corner. Hover your mouse over it, and you'll get all the necessary information about how it works :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3412354985

[Bola de Ouro]

Originally posted by archez.a:

When you generate energy with a champion, an icon appears in the top left corner. Hover your mouse over it, and you'll get all the necessary information about how it works :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3412354985

Thanks for the reply man, but I don't get the 'energy' thing. And why did I have surge before unlocking it? Clearly surge on its own is kinda easy to understand, but I don't get which combos generate said energy or not.

[Citadel]

Basically surge is an A+B mechanic, where you need both sides for it to work.
A: some items/passives/effects say you generate energy, which levels up the surge bar each battle.
B: As the surge bar levels, other items say you get stronger.

So basically, you find some ways to level the surge bar, and then you find some other ways to take advantage of the level.

So for example, whip says gain 50 energy for every crit, so every crit it charges the surge bar. Then you have gloomy mace, which says every time you surge, gain 10 attack and 10 spellpower. So that means whenever you get enough energy to surge (surge means to level the surge bar), then your gloomy mace triggers.

[Bola de Ouro]

Originally posted by Citadel:

Basically surge is an A+B mechanic, where you need both sides for it to work.
A: some items/passives/effects say you generate energy, which levels up the surge bar each battle.
B: As the surge bar levels, other items say you get stronger.

So basically, you find some ways to level the surge bar, and then you find some other ways to take advantage of the level.

So for example, whip says gain 50 energy for every crit, so every crit it charges the surge bar. Then you have gloomy mace, which says every time you surge, gain 10 attack and 10 spellpower. So that means whenever you get enough energy to surge (surge means to level the surge bar), then your gloomy mace triggers.

Hey thanks for the reply. I get that part, what I don't get is why I had Surge (it showed on my top left corner and went up to 7) without using any items with the text Surge on them. Apparently there's more to it and it's not clear at all, that's what's confusing the heck out of me. The heroes and the items that say When Surge, generate Surge, Surge Slowdown - those I understand. What I don't is why it happened BEFORE I even got to codex 7.

[Trench]

Surge won't appear in the top left until you have something that interacts with it (it can be a hero or an item). Once you have ANYTHING relating to surge it "unlocks" and goes up at a base rate of 15 per second.

So I'm guessing you had some hero that gets some benefit relating to surge.

[Bola de Ouro]

Originally posted by Trench:

Surge won't appear in the top left until you have something that interacts with it (it can be a hero or an item). Once you have ANYTHING relating to surge it "unlocks" and goes up at a base rate of 15 per second.

So I'm guessing you had some hero that gets some benefit relating to surge.

Thanks for the reply.
I'm not sure tho, are there heroes that use surge that you unlock before unlocking the actual surge ones? I'm not all sure about that, I sent a pic of my first clear to my friend and he was like 'how are you using surge?' And i was like what even is surge, what do you mean?
Confusled.

[Robo]

Unlocking surge (even though the surge bar appears before unlocking it so it might be confusing) unlocks items and heroes who utilize surge.

The problem I see with surge is, that the level is capped at 12 - which (when I was trying to utilize surge) was achieved after like 10 seconds max of combat and then stopped doing anything. Other items can scale you endlessly. Also often the "good stat" on the item is - increase surge gain which does nothing on its own.

I am pretty sure I did not try all the surge heroes yet, but as of now it looks to me that surge only adds more RNG to the runs without offering much in return.

In other words - I did not manage to build anything broken based on surge, yet. And it only makes broken builds more scarce as it floods you with stuff which is underperforming. But I might be missing something amazing of course.

[Bola de Ouro]

Originally posted by Robo:

Unlocking surge (even though the surge bar appears before unlocking it so it might be confusing) unlocks items and heroes who utilize surge.

The problem I see with surge is, that the level is capped at 12 - which (when I was trying to utilize surge) was achieved after like 10 seconds max of combat and then stopped doing anything. Other items can scale you endlessly. Also often the "good stat" on the item is - increase surge gain which does nothing on its own.

I am pretty sure I did not try all the surge heroes yet, but as of now it looks to me that surge only adds more RNG to the runs without offering much in return.

In other words - I did not manage to build anything broken based on surge, yet. And it only makes broken builds more scarce as it floods you with stuff which is underperforming. But I might be missing something amazing of course.

Hey thanks for sharing your experience.
I feel the same as you right now with Surge. My main issue with it being it either requires a lot of items without being possible to get said items and staying alive at the same time. My biggest complain when I started playing the game was the sheer amount of items and as my codex opened up, it all got worse. I'm not going to stay around complaining tho because I don't really see a way to fix it. Similar games like Slay the Spire have way less variables making it more likely that you get to complete a good deck reliably enough if you play smart. This game has a lot and it"s really fun, but unlocking new things just make you sigh and be like 'oh great, more stuff i'll barely be able to use because the RNJesus must be glowing on a bald man's head at exactly 37.825144 degrees angle. But again, I don't know how to fix that at all. Its a dope game tho all the love for the developer.

[Trench]

Originally posted by Robo:

Unlocking surge (even though the surge bar appears before unlocking it so it might be confusing) unlocks items and heroes who utilize surge.

The problem I see with surge is, that the level is capped at 12 - which (when I was trying to utilize surge) was achieved after like 10 seconds max of combat and then stopped doing anything. Other items can scale you endlessly. Also often the "good stat" on the item is - increase surge gain which does nothing on its own.

I am pretty sure I did not try all the surge heroes yet, but as of now it looks to me that surge only adds more RNG to the runs without offering much in return.

In other words - I did not manage to build anything broken based on surge, yet. And it only makes broken builds more scarce as it floods you with stuff which is underperforming. But I might be missing something amazing of course.

surge can definitely be very strong. There are two items crazy mace and void ring that both let you get surge effects when you cast or when you heal/shield (every 1.2 seconds). Theres a hero that raises your surge cap on cast. Another hero who basically gets 2 activations of her surge items when she casts. And just items/relics in general that let you raise the surge cap.

But even if you don't do all that and just have 1-2 surge payoff items (and a way to hit 12 surge very quickly) those items can still be very strong.

[realjustin]

I also saw surge appear before it was unlocked, in hindsight it was because i was in a challenge. it wasn't a surge specific challenge, so maybe some or all challenges have access to the entire character and/or item pool. Not sure if that's what happened to you, but at the time i was certainly confused.

[Robo]

Originally posted by realjustin:

I also saw surge appear before it was unlocked, in hindsight it was because i was in a challenge. it wasn't a surge specific challenge, so maybe some or all challenges have access to the entire character and/or item pool. Not sure if that's what happened to you, but at the time i was certainly confused.

I am not saying it cannot be strong. I just run couple of runs with it again and it definitely feels that it only adds more useless bloat than useful things making the runs more inconsistent.

[fritzdis]

Originally posted by Robo:

Unlocking surge (even though the surge bar appears before unlocking it so it might be confusing) unlocks items and heroes who utilize surge.

The problem I see with surge is, that the level is capped at 12 - which (when I was trying to utilize surge) was achieved after like 10 seconds max of combat and then stopped doing anything. Other items can scale you endlessly. Also often the "good stat" on the item is - increase surge gain which does nothing on its own.

I am pretty sure I did not try all the surge heroes yet, but as of now it looks to me that surge only adds more RNG to the runs without offering much in return.

In other words - I did not manage to build anything broken based on surge, yet. And it only makes broken builds more scarce as it floods you with stuff which is underperforming. But I might be missing something amazing of course.

There are a variety of ways to increase the surge cap. I've definitely gotten into the 30s (and had a great run because of it). In theory, it's limitless because reborn Celeste increases the surge cap by 1 every cast.

[Citadel]

Surge is fairly strong and according to the data analytics, has a good winrate. But it is a mechanic that takes some experience to use correctly. All you really need to enable surge is one strong item/origin to generate energy, and then you can pick all the strong surge payoffs. So don't view it as like you need a bunch of surge items in order for it to do anything, just view it as needing a single enabler and then you can start taking payoffs.

Also, level 12 surge is totally enough to make the item good enough. For example, gloomy mace gives 20 ad and 20 sp every time you surge, so if you're actually capping surge at level 12 in 10 sec (which is not that easy and probably requires multiple surge generators), then that single item gave you 240 ad and 240 sp, which is more than other comparable non-surge items.

[fritzdis]

Just got to surge level 45 in the act IV finale of the Reborn Pinnacle challenge. Literally the only 2 things I had that increased the cap were reborn Celeste and reborn Alaric. Possible even in a normal run with the relic that lets you reborn twice.

Maybe it's because I'm not great at finding/implementing other strategies, but I think surge has been a part of a lot of my most successful runs.

[Bola de Ouro]

Originally posted by fritzdis:

Just got to surge level 45 in the act IV finale of the Reborn Pinnacle challenge. Literally the only 2 things I had that increased the cap were reborn Celeste and reborn Alaric. Possible even in a normal run with the relic that lets you reborn twice.

Maybe it's because I'm not great at finding/implementing other strategies, but I think surge has been a part of a lot of my most successful runs.

Hey man thanks for sharing your experience.
Tho I feel like you're heavily biased as 'just two reborns' isn't really an easy feat, a lot of good RNG went your way for that to happen. I've been able to get a steady streak of wins without using Surge with my understanding of the game growing by each run. I still have the feeling Surge+Reborn end up bloating the game way too much. Sure it feels nice when you Reborn n number of heroes and get n number of items that -totally look trivial and common- because you happened to roll them at first or second, but considering the pool of items on the game as well as the RNG to get a good run + RNG to drop viable items on the RNG to get decent heroes (which honestly, more than half of them are borderline useless without the PERFECT items) the game goes to RNG hell way too quickly. I'm only critizing that because I enjoy the game and I think it has a lot of potential, but the amount of rolls that must be in your favour for it to work right now is just way too much. Too many niche/useless items/passives/heroes that need too much to be viable.