D1 Act 3

[Maranaa]

Just the first enemy encountered there.. And getting that poison debuff ? Having 37 poison so fast on me ? How the heck do I even get through that.

[Paw]

it's the plague looking guys. basically, you need to hit them with your strongest attack and to kill them as soon as possible

any form damage will increase the plague guys passive to give you 1 additional attack to you per turn, so it builds up rather quick. if you hit them 4 times without killing them, they are dealing RAMPING 5 damage per turn, so each turn they are kept alive from this point on will ascend to 5 -> 9 -> 13 -> 17 (increments of 4 instead of 5 because one stack of poison gets removed per turn) damage per turn until the end of battle.

[The Panda]

I'm hoping they change the mechanic or keep it to adding only 1 poison per turn as that would make it more manageable.

[brickey.8]

The ideal strategy with these guys is to just not deal any damage to them until you've scaled up enough to deal 30+ damage in one hit. Just focus on blocking and on building up a terrain tile or locked dice or something like that. Until you attack them your net poison just increases by 1 per turn, or 3 if there's two of them. That's not always possible depending on your relics/build though.

[Muu]

My problem was D1 was the petty enemies, already the strongest enemy in the game imo, having thorns. The thorns give them as much as 12 extra damage and it even disables stuff like the 'reduce first unblocked hit to 0' because if you deal even 1 damage to them from an effect, you lose it. Better pray you remembered that you lost that effect. And don't forget to remember that splash damages trigger thorns when you're adding up all the enemy collective damages and any poison and you're adding together your healing and block and health ...

Really, thank god they didn't put poison and thorns in d0 because if you don't understand the order of operations you'd die without understanding anything about why you died.

If I remember right, poison bypasses block since you lose block before poison triggers, so it feels like between that and the petty enemies it's the only thing that messes with the block meta. Unfortunately thorns messes with anything that doesn't rely on block.

[brickey.8]

Poison does not bypass block, poison damage happens at the very end of the turn. For the player, if you have 10 poison it's like an extra 10 damage attack happens after everyone else attacks. For enemies, the "end of the turn" means immediately AFTER they give themselves block.

Thorns does bypass block, usually. Anything that deals damage or grants block outside the normal order needs to be considered, such as flash dice and barrier (can grant block soon enough to protect you), damage dealing relics (I think most of them are after block but I'm not sure; there's also some that occur before you even finish placing dice), and poison (if you somehow manage to poison them without attacking them, that would consume thorns after block).

The thing that bothers me is that taking damage from the thorns on the petty enemy does not seem to count as them dealing damage to you, for the purpose of petty. That just seems wildly unfair, what's the point of putting both those effects on the same enemy if it's not going to count.

[Muu]

Oh, right, I think the problem with poison is its interaction with Regeneration. It's not clear at first if poison happens before or after regeneration, but I believe it's before regeneration. There should be something that clearly says that regeneration ... Isn't it currently at the end of turns? It should just say "at the start of your turn". Even if it happens at the end of combat as well, it'll be clear that it comes after stuff like poison.

[Maranaa]

Well , I hope some D1 Act 3 balancing is coming , I had an almost hitless act 1 and 2 only to die in the second fight in Act 3.. It's kinda silly.