Nemesis - What's the trick?

[Mister Bones]

Nemesis has a move that prevents it from taking damage greater than 1 for 2 turns, and then deals two attacks while in this effectively invincible state. The first move stuffs your deck with trashcards that damage you without then exhausting itself, and the second deals more damage than most builds can reasonably block at once, forcing you to always take some damage.

What's the trick to beating this boss that I've missed? I can only see the Poison Turtle build having more than a decent chance against this boss, and even then, the first move would likely stuff your deck with too much trash for you to be able to recover. What am I meant to do?

[sweetnothin]

Well, one turn of three he *is* vulnerable. So you try to block as much damage as possible first two turns and then strike. He's an elite, therefore if you feel your deck can't block that much you may route around elites.

[Konrad]

Originally posted by sweetnothin:

Well, one turn of three he *is* vulnerable. So you try to block as much damage as possible first two turns and then strike. He's an elite, therefore if you feel your deck can't block that much you may route around elites.

you dont know what elite you are going to fight before you start it tho lmao

[Flavorable]

Originally posted by Dorict:

Originally posted by sweetnothin:

Well, one turn of three he *is* vulnerable. So you try to block as much damage as possible first two turns and then strike. He's an elite, therefore if you feel your deck can't block that much you may route around elites.

you dont know what elite you are going to fight before you start it tho lmao

True, but you do know there's a risk of running into Nemesis. If your deck can't handle Nemesis (or one of the other Elites), you shouldn't be fighting Elites at all.

[TerraSleet]

Personally I think Nemesis is fine, yes you can only reasonably damage him once every 3 turns but unless your deck is imbalanced (too offensive or too defensive) his attacks aren't that dangerous and you can kill him before his burns start to slow you down. That said, he is a run killer if you fight him with a bad deck.

Nemesis is a good test to see if your deck is built to handle every situation. In my opinion the best deck to beat Nemesis is a 20+ card deck with ~40% block cards, ~40% offensive cards and ~20% card draw + utility cards such as powers and debuffs. Yes you will sometimes lose to sheer RNG but this happens in every fight and having a balanced deck like this minimizes those odds not just for Nemesis but for all fights.


As a side note, poison turtle isn't a very good deck. There are several enemies in zone 3 that ramp up quickly and will smash through your defenses before you can grind them down with Caltrops/Fumes (unless you get some insane card+relic RNG like 5 energy, backflips a burst and a catalyst with snecko skull in which case it isn't a turtle deck anymore :D)

[Soffa]

Personnally I defeated him on turn 2. I had the most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ deck and played about 100 flashes of steel. It was long. Very long.

[Mister Bones]

Saying that he's a 'run killer' if you have a bad deck is redundant - if your deck is bad, your run is already dead, even if you haven't quite lost yet. I can't think of any Elites past the first Act you can expect to beat with a 'bad deck'. The point I'm trying to make is that unless you're running a busted deck, like Skud helpfully mentioned, you can't reasonably beat this enemy because it counters most kinds of decks.

I mentioned the poison turtle archetype because, in my eyes, it's the type that is mostly likely to have a good chance against this opponent. Enemies with huge health pools that ramp quickly is an unfortunate case of Act 3 not really being balanced that well yet.

I'm not angry or disappointed about the Nemesis, because the game's still EA. The point of this thread is to make them aware that this is one enemy that would benefit from being tweaked.