How am I supposed to beat the heart?

[Mikki]

I managed to beat one with silence, but because she's the type that plays more defensive, debuff, and importantly poison, which help me focus more on tanking the damage. But ironclad and defect? The first turn of the heart throws like 61 damage, debuffs, then proceed dealing another high damage like wtf am I supposed to do? Barricade takes some turn before it becomes invincible and defect takes bunch of focus and frost evoke.

[mldb88]

By the sound of things you're focusing too much on building around certain cards rather than looking at general synergies (in your case = barricade, focus/frost evoke). There's a lot of ways to deal with the high damage output, but you're probably not going to be able to consistently block 100% of the incoming damage, especially not the first few turns.

For Ironclad, You have things like clothesline or uppercut if you have ways to generate enough energy or energy relics to play more than 3 energy per turn, shrug off if you need the additional draw to see if you can pull into more block, disarm for the multi-hit, feel no pain if you have an exhaust heavy deck or a dead branch, flame barrier to uno-reverse his multi hit, ghostly armor, power through, impervious for a big boost of defense when you need it most, along with potions and relic that help with block such as the boat set, tungsten rod, charron's ashes, etc.

For defect you've got leap (I know it's not amazing but it gets the job done), auto shields if you don't have much frost generation, gennetic algo if you found one early, Glacier, Reinforced body with pretty much any energy generation card, and probably the best card for the chonky hit - buffer. You've also got seek which lets you hunt any card out of your deck.

If you can manage to survive the first few turns while scaling up your damage enough to end the fight before you have to deal with too many other attacks or get a block engine going to consistently mitigate most of the damage after the first cycle, you're usually in ok shape. Granted this is all for low ascension heart, a lot of the same advice applies to higher ascension but the ways of doing it that are viable become a little narrower.

[Mikki]

Originally posted by mldb88:

By the sound of things you're focusing too much on building around certain cards rather than looking at general synergies (in your case = barricade, focus/frost evoke). There's a lot of ways to deal with the high damage output, but you're probably not going to be able to consistently block 100% of the incoming damage, especially not the first few turns.

For Ironclad, You have things like clothesline or uppercut if you have ways to generate enough energy or energy relics to play more than 3 energy per turn, shrug off if you need the additional draw to see if you can pull into more block, disarm for the multi-hit, feel no pain if you have an exhaust heavy deck or a dead branch, flame barrier to uno-reverse his multi hit, ghostly armor, power through, impervious for a big boost of defense when you need it most, along with potions and relic that help with block such as the boat set, tungsten rod, charron's ashes, etc.

For defect you've got leap (I know it's not amazing but it gets the job done), auto shields if you don't have much frost generation, gennetic algo if you found one early, Glacier, Reinforced body with pretty much any energy generation card, and probably the best card for the chonky hit - buffer. You've also got seek which lets you hunt any card out of your deck.

If you can manage to survive the first few turns while scaling up your damage enough to end the fight before you have to deal with too many other attacks or get a block engine going to consistently mitigate most of the damage after the first cycle, you're usually in ok shape. Granted this is all for low ascension heart, a lot of the same advice applies to higher ascension but the ways of doing it that are viable become a little narrower.

So, if I get it correctly, the build would be more into energy-tank build? How many would I need to make sure it can run like... every turn? And finally, how many cards do I roughly need to have in the deck total before it diluted the draw?

[LHGreen]

One word: cholesterol.

[Zu]

Originally posted by Mikki:

The first turn of the heart throws like 61 damage, debuffs, then proceed dealing another high damage like wtf am I supposed to do?

So turn 1 it applies debuffs in this order: Vulnerable, weak, frail.
Turns 2 and 3 consist of a big hit and multi-hit in random order.

What can you do to mitigate some or all of this? I'm sure you can figure it out.
Hint: Cards are not the only tools at your disposal.

[Bumc]

Entrench Ironclad generally can pop up to 999 armor after drawing all deck even with interference from Heart shuffles, geometric progression goes brr.
Frost Defect is on a shorter timer, but as long as you pack some finishers should have no problems with heart.

[Mikki]

Originally posted by Zu:

Originally posted by Mikki:

The first turn of the heart throws like 61 damage, debuffs, then proceed dealing another high damage like wtf am I supposed to do?

So turn 1 it applies debuffs in this order: Vulnerable, weak, frail.
Turns 2 and 3 consist of a big hit and multi-hit in random order.

What can you do to mitigate some or all of this? I'm sure you can figure it out.
Hint: Cards are not the only tools at your disposal.

yeah, I know about potions, though sometimes it does not go into my favor. same goes to relic, though it takes time to figure out some good ones for the deck synergy.

Originally posted by Bumc:

Entrench Ironclad generally can pop up to 999 armor after drawing all deck even with interference from Heart shuffles, geometric progression goes brr.
Frost Defect is on a shorter timer, but as long as you pack some finishers should have no problems with heart.

shorter timer? do you mean because of the requirement to build up focus or evoke some for larger block?

[Lavie]

Hi!

Maybe this will also help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzFZmpik5xI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoMQCDlbFCg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9czLA-7ELdM

[Mikki]

Originally posted by Lavie:

Hi!

Maybe this will also help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzFZmpik5xI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoMQCDlbFCg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9czLA-7ELdM

interesting, I actually managed to cleared the heart (amidst low ascension at 2 for ironclad and 3 for defect), but these are good references as well for future runs

[Bumc]

Originally posted by Mikki:

Originally posted by Bumc:

Entrench Ironclad generally can pop up to 999 armor after drawing all deck even with interference from Heart shuffles, geometric progression goes brr.
Frost Defect is on a shorter timer, but as long as you pack some finishers should have no problems with heart.

shorter timer? do you mean because of the requirement to build up focus or evoke some for larger block?

Nah, they both have setup time.
Its just that heart will eventually kill you no matter how much you tank up.
It also has maximum damage taken per turn so while ironclad can just shield bash it a few times, defect finishers take several turns to charge up (unless you invoke enough frost for blizzard to be relevant).

[ian_span]

Ironclad is a strength character. Cards like Heavy Blade and Boomerang (strength multipliers) become very powerful. You need a weak card. Rage+ can be awesome. For relics Tungsten and Torii help a lot. Smaller, balanced decks with additional draw and not much set up (too many power cards) are preferable imo.
As for defect... I don't know, defect doesn't exist.

[mldb88]

Originally posted by ian_span:

Ironclad is a strength character. Cards like Heavy Blade and Boomerang (strength multipliers) become very powerful. You need a weak card. Rage+ can be awesome. For relics Tungsten and Torii help a lot. Smaller, balanced decks with additional draw and not much set up (too many power cards) are preferable imo.
As for defect... I don't know, defect doesn't exist.

Honestly heavy blade is actually pretty meh if you actually compare the raw numbers, if you get nothing better then go for it but even a twin strike scales harder unless you’re hitting absurd levels of strength buffs, and is more cost effective in the early game. It’s also very possible to do it without relying entirely on strength boosting either if you don’t see much of it (has some good standalone damage and other synergies.

[Corlindale]

There are many viable paths to beating the Heart, so I would first of all advise against convincing yourself that specific cards/relics/potions are necessary to do it. It’s true that there are some cards/relics/potions that are especially good against the Heart because of the way its mechanics work, but there are no ‘must-haves’. The main thing you absolutely need is some way to tank both a number of small hits and one big hit, and depending on your offense you may have to do so more than once.

I fairly recently managed to beat the Heart on A20 with all four characters for the first time. Just as an example of how varied Heart runs can be, I will give the rundown of some of the things that helped me succeed in each case. The only specific element that reoccurs across two examples is Kunai, which is coincidentally one of my favourite relics in the game.

Ironclad: This was a Perfected Strike run with Necronomicon. I had six copies of Perfected Strike+ along with a bunch of other strike cards and a decent chunk of energy. This meant a lot of frontloaded damage despite little to no strength scaling. Another helpful tool was Kunai. Thanks to Necronomicon I would almost always be playing at least 3 attacks, so I could scale dex fairly efficiently and get a lot of mileage from my block cards (notably didn’t have neither Barricade nor Entrench). Self-forming Clay also saved my life against one of the big hits, because it generates a ton of block after a flurry of small hits.

Silent: The easiest victory of the four. I managed to get both Shuriken and Kunai in a Shiv-heavy deck (the dream!), so I could scale both strength and dex like crazy. Coupled with some judicious use of Burst + Blur, which often meant rolling over 50+ block from the non-attacking turns.

Defect: A power escalation deck containing 5 copies of Storm and a bunch of high-value power cards + several copies of Amplify. Amplified Buffer and Amplified Biased Cognition (+ frost generators) helped me generate enough block over the course of the fight that my lightning generators could burst it down.

Watcher: The toughest victory of the four. This was very much an ‘Alpha Strike’-deck. I had a bottled Omniscience and a huge chunk of the relics that boost your first turn. Steamrolled most of the content up to the Heart (one turn kills against Time Eater, Awakened One’s second form, and Spear and Shield), but you cannot nova the Heart in one turn, and my defences were really not up to par compared to my offense. Still managed to scrape by, with Omniscience into Wish+ for 16 plated armor being the key move that helped me tank enough damage. Also had a Divinity-potion stored up for the final turn. Still a very close thing!