Gold Stake is Absolutely Awful (Edit: New Patch is Blessed)

[TypeAtahuta]

Let me start by saying that if you think Stakes are this game's Slay the Spire Ascensions then immediately remove that idea from your head.

Balatro on its base difficulty is amazing. Addictive. Utterly immaculately designed. Which is why I am baffled that such a talented dev can produce such an awful "difficulty" setting. By the time you reach the Orange stake, things become a literal slot machine RNGfiesta. You can RELIABLY beat the game on its base difficulty I reckon 90% of the time as long as you know what you're doing but the Gold Stake is specifically designed to sap out all the fun from this game.

Because imagine this. What is the best part of Balatro? Manipulating your deck and getting special Joker builds that allow you to do crazy combos. How do you do this? By getting gold and buying stuff from the shop. Without gold a run is nothing.

Now what does Gold stake and the lesser stakes do? They completely kneecap your gold gain maling you entirely rely on RNG Jokers or hoping for good skip rewards.

That's like if the Ascensions in Slay the Spire didn't make encounters difficult but just gave you less card rewards and card draw and relic opportunities. In Ascension 20 the game introduces double Act 3 bosses. This is interesting. Why? Because the Act 3 bosses are specifically designed to "counter" certain builds. So adding two of them makes deckbuilding during an A20 run genuinely engaging and endlessly interesting. Gold Stake in Balatro on the flip side just makes it so that you have less opportunities to engage with the best part of the game which is modifying your run through the shop because you have no gold. I can't imagine playing Slay the Spire on lower difficulties meanwhile I can't imagine playing Balatro in anytging but the base difficulty.

I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea what the dev is smoking by making full Gold Stakes for every Jooer and Deck an actual cheevo. It's not skillful whatsoever just a test of patience.

tl;dr - Gold Stake (ironically) completely kneecaps your gold gain during a run leading to MORE RNG and less chances for the player to experience the best part of the game which is coming up with crazy combos.

Edit: These rebalancing on Gold Stake is great. Some tuning here and there but I think I might actually come back to the game now to finish the gold stake cheevos.

[kotamine]

I 100% agree. The base difficulty has some problems but overall the balance is great. The stakes are just obnoxious, and it's very clear they're an afterthought.

[TypeAtahuta]

Originally posted by kotamine:

The stakes are just obnoxious, and it's very clear they're an afterthought.

The craziest part is that the dev already almost figured it out. Eternal Jokers are amazing. They're the kind of mechanics I want to see more of in Balatro --- negative modifiers.

Most of the modifiers/enhancements for the cards and Jokers rqnge from neutral to positive. Eternal Jokers are of course bad because you have to commit to them and can't be pvioted off of. But at the same time, an Eternal Joker synergizes with any card that destroys other Jokers making it so that an Eternal Joker on an actually good Joker keeps it protected forever.

Ideally, this is how the dev makes the game difficult without just completely going "LOL NO GOLD FOR YOU" by introducing engaging mechanics that while they might be bad outcomes but they are outcomes the player can mitigate through skill:

• Wide Joker = Joker takes two slots.
  
• Nailed Joker = Joker stays nailed on the right most spot.
  
• Fleeting Joker = Joker lasts for X amount of rounds.
  
• DAMAGED Joker = Joker has a 1 out of 4 chance to activate in a turn.
  
• Scratched Card = This card has no suit.
  
• Deviant Card = Forcefully discard another card in your hand upon play.
  
• Anchor Card = -1.5X Mult.
  
• Bootleg Card = 1 out of 2 chance to be debuffed.

Basically imagine the curses from Slay the Spire but taken even further to act as a constant threat and adversity in this game beyond the Boss Blinds. The dev is only one guy from what I heard so I'll give him a break.

But an expansion pack entirely revolving around cursed mechanics plus a rework of the Stakes would be amazing.

[CMDR Shven]

Agreed. I've made it to Gold on several decks but yet to win it once on any of them. Feels like almost every single run collapses somewhere in Ante 2-3 because I just can't seem to put together any sort of combo. The few times I've made it to 7-8 I got completely ♥♥♥♥ on by RNG and just happened to draw every dead card in my deck and couldn't pull off any decent hands even though I had previously been scoring 2-3x the chips needed to win the final round.

The idea of having to complete Gold with random, useless jokers eating up a spot in order to get "100%" completion sounds agonizing and borderline impossible. And this is coming from someone who 100% completed Binding of Isaac.

[Nothing]

Just won my first Gold run on Blue deck, and Gold is absolutely obnoxious. It does get pretty RNG heavy on Purple and Orange, but Gold is where it throws out any pretense of not being ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Most of your runs are just physically incapable of getting past Ante 2 which is ridicoulus. I'm hoping it'll get changed at some point, as I'd like to climb with all decks but Gold just sucks all of the fun out of the game. Also agreed, I'd like to see stakes more similiarily designed to what Red, Black and Orange are now (interesting changes that force you to rethink what you took for granted and change the general strategy in an interesting way). Albeit the Booster packs getting more expensive scales a bit too quickly right now in my opinion, but the idea is certainly there.

[sab0t]

Originally posted by TypeAtahuta:

Originally posted by kotamine:

The stakes are just obnoxious, and it's very clear they're an afterthought.

The craziest part is that the dev already almost figured it out. Eternal Jokers are amazing. They're the kind of mechanics I want to see more of in Balatro --- negative modifiers.

Most of the modifiers/enhancements for the cards and Jokers rqnge from neutral to positive. Eternal Jokers are of course bad because you have to commit to them and can't be pvioted off of. But at the same time, an Eternal Joker synergizes with any card that destroys other Jokers making it so that an Eternal Joker on an actually good Joker keeps it protected forever.

Ideally, this is how the dev makes the game difficult without just completely going "LOL NO GOLD FOR YOU" by introducing engaging mechanics that while they might be bad outcomes but they are outcomes the player can mitigate through skill:

• Wide Joker = Joker takes two slots.
  
• Nailed Joker = Joker stays nailed on the right most spot.
  
• Fleeting Joker = Joker lasts for X amount of rounds.
  
• DAMAGED Joker = Joker has a 1 out of 4 chance to activate in a turn.
  
• Scratched Card = This card has no suit.
  
• Deviant Card = Forcefully discard another card in your hand upon play.
  
• Anchor Card = -1.5X Mult.
  
• Bootleg Card = 1 out of 2 chance to be debuffed.

Basically imagine the curses from Slay the Spire but taken even further to act as a constant threat and adversity in this game beyond the Boss Blinds. The dev is only one guy from what I heard so I'll give him a break.

But an expansion pack entirely revolving around cursed mechanics plus a rework of the Stakes would be amazing.

man, i would love to see modifiers like these instead of just less money / hands / discards. i'm playing on purple stake right now and i already have to agree with what you're saying. it's just not quite as fun as the lower stakes as it ends up relying alot more on RNG

[0xxian]

My win rate also fell of a absolute cliff on gold I would strongly suggest dumping the hand size hit at the very least. Instead you could take a leaf out of slay the spire and go double bosses. I mean water and needle together would absolutely suck but at least you would see it coming and could try to set up counterplay via consumables or rerolling it. The hand size hit is just cripplingly placing you at the mercy of rng. Like painted deck was so much more consistent than any other gold stake deck in my experience it was a joke

[kotamine]

Originally posted by TypeAtahuta:

The craziest part is that the dev already almost figured it out. Eternal Jokers are amazing. They're the kind of mechanics I want to see more of in Balatro --- negative modifiers.

Yeah, they're really cool. I like how you can actually play to their strengths, such as duplicating an eternal joker with an ankh multiple times.
My only problem with them is that they can appear on jokers that they really shouldn't appear on, like the egg, or (previously) the luchador.

[CMDR Shven]

Originally posted by Nothing:

Just won my first Gold run on Blue deck, and Gold is absolutely obnoxious. It does get pretty RNG heavy on Purple and Orange, but Gold is where it throws out any pretense of not being ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Most of your runs are just physically incapable of getting past Ante 2 which is ridicoulus. I'm hoping it'll get changed at some point, as I'd like to climb with all decks but Gold just sucks all of the fun out of the game. Also agreed, I'd like to see stakes more similiarily designed to what Red, Black and Orange are now (interesting changes that force you to rethink what you took for granted and change the general strategy in an interesting way). Albeit the Booster packs getting more expensive scales a bit too quickly right now in my opinion, but the idea is certainly there.

The price scaling is murderous for sure. Having to spend $12 for a basic tarot booster that might not even have anything relevant essentially kills your run.

[Meng]

I'm not even at gold stake yet, but even on orange the RNG is crazy, they should add a key shortcut to restart the run because i can't even make it out of ante2 most times

[mass choas]

Originally posted by Meng:

I'm not even at gold stake yet, but even on orange the RNG is crazy, they should add a key shortcut to restart the run because i can't even make it out of ante2 most times

there is a key restart, hold r key

[Nothing]

I've thought about replacing the flat debuffs stakes while retaining the general idea, and the best I came up with was Blue Stake adding a Cursed Pack at the end of Ante 2, where you choose one of 3 debuffs (-1 hand, -1 discard, -1 hand size and so on) from a random pool, with Gold Stake changing the normal pack into a Mega (choose 2 of 5). Obviously the pack would be unskippable, but I think something along these lines could work well for a more flat debuff while introducing a layer of strategy (what can I lose out of these options). These packs could also be opened at the very beggining instead of Ante 2, but that'd: 1) Incentivise resetting for the best setup and 2) I don't personally think the very beggining of the game needs to be this punishing and could instead offer something to ease you into a run.

[swolblu]

I think this issue starts happening from Purple and onwards. Like you need to have the stars align each round because you just don't have any time to build consistency.

Someone already touched on adding more modifiers to jokers as a potential replacement to the difficulty, which sounds like a great idea.

I think another option would be taking inspiration from trading card games and adding more consistency options. Add ways to increase draw power, searchability, etc. Something like: if you play a specific card, draw 2 more cards. Or maybe even a once per round power that allows you to draw another card at the expense of halving the current hand's multiplier.

[TypeAtahuta]

I'm a bit more apprehensive about giving the player more options to buff their deck because the player in Balatro is already incredibly powerful. So buffing them up to be able to match Gold Stake will just make the base difficulty even easier than it already is. However, if we run under the assumption that the game will have cursed mechanics, negative modifiers and mini boss blinds/elites for the smaller blinds then maybe more buffs for the player would be good too.

That draw/cycling idea is pretty good though. In my head it would be like this.

White Seal - If this card is discarded, draw two more.

Alternatively we can take inspiration from Wildfrost for more consistency:

Royal Seal - This card is always drawn in your opening hand.

And if we add negative modifiers to the game I think a funny mechanic would be adding sleeves as an additional card enhancement. If a card is "Sleeved" it can't be affected by negative effects.

[malogoss]

It's weird to me how some people have no problem with white stake and actually mention how much fun they have playing it, but then complain about other stakes.

It's as if tougher difficulty being tougher is a problem. What were you expecting?

[TypeAtahuta]

If the difficulty being tougher was all it was then it would be no problem. Like I said, Ascension 20 Slay the Spire is really difficult and most people would agree that the higher Ascensions just make the game more fun overall.

But Balatro's stakes are specifically designed to be as unfun and RNG-heavy as possible. There's no skill in holding R and hoping that you get a good skip reward. I was expecting the difficulty increase to make things more engaging not make things more braindead.

And sure its optional but the fact that the dev thought it was reasonable to make it so that there are two achievements dedicated to getting gold stake on all decks and Jokers is just absurd.