The silent sucks

[⋆ Beetroot ⋆]

Am I the only one who finds that she is the worst character to play? I'm a new player. but I've gotten to the acenssion with Ironclad and Defect and found them fair to play.

However, the silent 9/10 is frustrating to play. It feels like there are too many cards spread out for different playstyles. Energy, discards, poison, shivs, etc. It's hard to get something decent in a run, I can't help but look back at Ironclad and Defect for how much better it felt to play them.

Am I alone in this?

[Imhotep]

From profile:

Prof. At making women cry.
Put that on a CV!

[Zu]

Depends. The biggest difference is that scaling from cards isn't as bombastic.

Catalyst has potential. Piercing wail is an excellent hard counter and reset tool. Wraith form is frankly broken. Shivs and discarding got a lot better back in 2020.

On the other hand we have ironchad who casually gains hundreds of block in one turn with the exhaust package and ends with meteoric body slams.
Then there's defect who can scale to high heaven with heat sinks and mummy hand.
And watcher either goes infinite or gets insane mileage out of talk to the hand.

Silent struggles the most in the early game because you might not find adequate damage. Especially slime boss is a bad matchup. Still, you often have no choice but to hunt elites anyway since the spammy nature of shivs and discard synergy interacts nicely with relics.

So, if you get really unlucky with relics or don't earn many to begin with, I can see why you'd think that silent is underwhelming.

[Nibbie]

Not alone, but many other people disagree. Pretty much weekly we get a "this class is so much easier than the others" and/or "this class is so much harder than the others", and it is different classes each time. Some people just gel with some classes more than others; Silent is my favorite class for example. I find the draw consistency and defensive ability really strong and easy to set up, which enables whatever form of offense you choose. Defect frost orbs or Ironclad barricades may have higher potential, but usually requires a lot more upfront investment each battle than Silent does, and if you get a Wraith Form or two, you can just ignore any other defense completely at various points in the run.

[Darkeonz]

Originally posted by Nibbie:

Not alone, but many other people disagree. Pretty much weekly we get a "this class is so much easier than the others" and/or "this class is so much harder than the others", and it is different classes each time. Some people just gel with some classes more than others; Silent is my favorite class for example. I find the draw consistency and defensive ability really strong and easy to set up, which enables whatever form of offense you choose. Defect frost orbs or Ironclad barricades may have higher potential, but usually requires a lot more upfront investment each battle than Silent does, and if you get a Wraith Form or two, you can just ignore any other defense completely at various points in the run.

The silent is less good than the others though, but it is also one of my favorites. If you check out Baalorlord who is arguable the best slay the player spire in the world (longest winning streak on ac20). He said he has the least success with the silent because there's fewer combinations of cards that work well, compared to the others. So with the silent you're more depending on running into the right cards compared to the other characters.

[mldb88]

Silent is arguably the weakest of the 4 classes in terms of consistency, but those numbers and perspectives usually are also in the context of A20 play (basically the highest difficulty). At low ascension or A0 these issues really aren't as big of an issue. What IS an issue though is that her synergies and archetypes tend to lead new players into trying to shoot for a certain "build", far more than you would with the other classes. This usually leads to newer players ignoring extremely viable or even necessary counter picks for later encounters that help balance out a deck just because it doesn't fit the theme of "poison" or "shiv" or "discard".

Silent also seems to be a lot more reliant on using relics to her advantage more than the other classes as well, and some of her class specific relics like the kite or wrist blades are a LOT more niche and impactful if built around than some of the other character specific ones.

My advice would be to focus early damage in the first half of act 1, prioritizing cards that also provide an additional benefit (dagger throw for card cycling and to proc sneaky strike if you grab one early, flying knee for bonus energy, sucker punch for more defensive options, quick slash for draw, all-out attack to deal with gremlin/slime horde room, poisoned stab if you see you'll be up against guardian or hexaghost as the boss). These all provide some additional bonus, but also most importantly get around gremlin nob's strength gain. That's honestly the biggest early game threat to Silent, and you want at least one elite down for the relic in Act 1, preferably two.

Once you encounter a nob, or if there are no more elites in your pathing, focus on balancing out your deck for the boss. If it's guardian, add some more defensive cards like piercing wail to counter his multi-hits, caltrops to turn his attacks into free damage, maybe some poison cards to let you focus on pure defense while he's in ball form. If it's hexaghost focus on damage stacking, either through blade dance, more poison cards, flying knee to get more value out of following turns, and a caltrops and dodge roll or dash to help front load block if you don't have the damage to kill before he cycles back to his multi-hit or a piercing wail.. For slime boss, focus on getting a chunky damage card or AoE. Poison is pretty much useless on him since it gets dropped when he splits.

Once you hit Act 2, see what your deck has going for it, and try to patch up any weaknesses (needs more defensive options, no answers to enemies with artifact, need a multi-hit or repeated low cost hits for birbs, etc). By the mid point of Act 2 focus mostly on only picking up cards that help your deck function but without adding bloat. For example if you have a lot of discard effects or a gamblers chip, Eviscerate is an absolute house. If you just rube goldberg through your deck and play all the things and take a minute solitaire turn, a finisher or choke could help turn all that durdling into raw damage.

Lastly, give this a read if you haven't already. It's more using Ironclad as examples for most things, but the foundational stuff applies to all the characters really.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2673443183

[1.2M | Missingno.]

The hardest part of Silent is dealing with Lagavulin. Once you get out of Act 1 things get a lot better.

[GenSec39]

I only started to play and already finished the game as Silent on 3rd run. Played a lot as Ironclad before and thought that probably it would be impossible to play without HP regen. Turnt out easier than I thought.

I really had to 'work' for a good deck for Ironclad. But for Silent, it was just a matter of few game changing cards.

[Riley]

Originally posted by GenSec39:

I only started to play and already finished the game as Silent on 3rd run. Played a lot as Ironclad before and thought that probably it would be impossible to play without HP regen. Turnt out easier than I thought.

I really had to 'work' for a good deck for Ironclad. But for Silent, it was just a matter of few game changing cards.

I thought that as well at first, but once you figure out how the Ironclad cards work he's so much easier in my opinion. His builds are broken strong, I remember going from Ascension 6-9 without losing a run and 9 was the first time I managed to beat the heart(The actual ending boss fight), all with Ironclad being a beast. I'm still struggling to even get to AQ9 on my silent and beat the heart with her tbh.

[nul]

Weaker characters are better because they require you, the player, to be stronger and better at the game to play them.

[⋆ Beetroot ⋆]

I finally beat the heat with The Silent!!!!

[mldb88]

Originally posted by Womens' rights:

I finally beat the heat with The Silent!!!!

Congrats! Now go enjoy that hilarious beta art for her deck lol.

[Romaki]

I like it. The Ironclad is the basic brute, so it's nice to have a class for defensive play.
It's certainely more challenging than Defect and Watcher, that's why I like it though.

[Lilly Satou]

600 stacks of poison would like to have a word with you

[Lilly Satou]

Originally posted by Womens' rights:

I finally beat the heat with The Silent!!!!

godspeed to you op