Witch Bonus Round (hard mode)

[ticobilbo]

After finishing all 36 regular episodes and the extra one, I am trying to complete all hard mode chapters.
I found them challenging but fair, until I started the Witch bonus round on hard.

My best runs so far ended on 5th floor, mostly because some new rules seem to be too unforgiving for the witch.

Any tips to win this episode?
Any rules potentially useful for this witch run?
Worst rules that should be always avoided?

[racknae]

Always pick Rose rule if it's offered, unless you have Sorceress rule. If you get Wolf Puppy rule, make sure to put something powerful in your prepared slot.

As for bad rules, Paper Knight can be tempting but it can seriously screw you over if a fight lasts more than 2 turns. Singer rule is bad because worst case it has the potential to leave you unable to do anything during your first turn. Cactus rule is tough to play around since most of Witch's spells do fixed damage.

[ticobilbo]

Nice tips. Yes...singer rule can be really annoying for the witch.
It is surprising how useful it can be for other characters though...it helped me to destroy everything on my inventor hard run with 2 upgraded flamethrowers.

Bounty hounter can also screw you over trying to use hall of mirrors.

[Cosmic Melon]

I was only able to get a Witch win with Paper Knight. It is so good of a boost to the scaling of Witch, and my only problem with her is scaling. You gotta go fast tho

[ticobilbo]

In my opinion Paper Knight is too risky with her, especially on level 5 and 6 when fights are always longer.
One major problem with Paper Knight could be Drake because that fight requires more preparation than others, and it would be really hard to drop his HP to 1 and using the wooden stake just with one die left.

[Giraffeguin]

I just finished all 36 episodes so haven't done any hard mode yet except 1 (which I also lost in round 5). But Normal Witch Bonus Round is still fresh to me since just did it today. I actually was forced to take Paper Knight (rerolled a rule change and that's what I got). It ended up being very close but kind of working out with my strategy since I had the spell that does passive damage at the beginning of a turn. I had 3 prepared slots and 1 upgraded. I started out with some burst damage to utilize all my dice, but would eventually just set everything to that spell for a passive 13 damage per turn (upgraded boosts by just 1 damage).


No idea how viable that would be in hard, but that spell is definitely a nice counter to paper knight if it's forced on you. I probably would have usually preferred something more consistent and got rather lucky.

(Edit: Enchanted Bolt was the spell.
https://diceydungeons.fandom.com/wiki/Enchanted_Bolt )

[Geronimo]

lucky you I didn't finished it in normal mode!

[ticobilbo]

I finally made it! Some more tips that could be useful for others:

- UPGRADES: Extra die > Prepared > Upgraded
For the three upgrades, in my opinion 2 prepared spells and one extra die is the best way to go. Prepared spells somehow compensate the slow start the witch usually has. Also it is very useful to have a powerful spell ready from the start, especially if you are lucky with the fury rules (Wolf pupy / Madison).

- STATUS EFFECTS: Freeze > Weak > Shock > Burn
Personally I found the freezing spells build the most consistent, as most enemies rely on high roll numbers. Weakness can also be really useful on some runs.

- BONUS ROUND RULES
In my opinion, it is a good idea to restart looking for benefitial rules on the first floors, like Wolf puppy, Ned or Rose. This is especially useful in hard mode. After that, it is just a matter of deciding the least annoying rule. Keep in mind that any rule that burns your dice, can be potentially useful, as throwing burnt dice does extra damage.

[Happiness Officer]

Originally posted by ticobilbo:

...especially if you are lucky with the fury rules (Wolf pupy / Madison).

Yes! I had this come up on my first Witch BR run and it was obscenely useful. It was a very lucky combo as I had picked my beloved Ice Shard as my first level-up prize... So the first turn was spent fury-freezing enemy dice which, by-and-large, neutered their fury attack.

In a second stroke of luck, I acquired the Paper Knight rule just after I picked up the enchanted missile (passive damage start of turn). So if I couldn't blast the enemy, I just queued up plenty of those. Finished up with Beatrice rule (all equipment shocked) and was like "darn, if only I had tons of spare dice to unfreeze my 2 prepped spells"...

I'm a little disappointed it wasn't Hard Mode, as I think I would have stood a great shot of besting it. It was one of those elusive runs where everything just seemed to slot into place perfectly

[Kittysunlover]

I know I'm joining the party a bit late, but I just discovered this game a few weeks ago and tonight (after a whopping 16 losses), I finally beat the Bonus Round Hard Mode with the Witch. Figured I'd throw out my strategy notes for anybody else like me coming to the game late and inevitably finding this topic thread because... let's be honest... the Witch Hard Mode is the hardest in the game by far.

RNG definitely plays a huge part - considering that most Witch strategies require specific numbers of dice, commonly 6's being some of the most useful, and a lot of the bonus round rules can negatively affect 6's. But I think RNG is only part of it - the way that the witch's mechanics are designed makes calculating maximum damage output each turn very math intensive, as probabilities are involved with the high number of re-rolling spells available. So the mode is just harder to play as well as by nature giving RNG more opportunities to screw you. And if you look at the global stats on the achievements I don't think I'm alone in having trouble with Hard Mode, either. The most losses I had in any other modes were the Warrior and Robot elimination rounds, at 10 and 7 respectively, and the worst other Hard Mode was the Jester at 5 losses.

I had a pretty solid strategy going in the regular Bonus Round episode involving the Fruit Bowl and Snapdragon, and picking up Honeysuckle later (basically using mana to constantly cycle dice to get the ones I needed to increase my dice rolls in early turns and heal/produce damage spell combos in later turns). So when I went for the Hard Mode I tried to pick that starting gear pretty consistently, but found myself losing.. over and over again. My logged 16 losses don't even count the times I reloaded to the title screen and started over in order to try for optimal starting equipment or first floor rules. Eventually I decided that I wasn't getting anywhere with that and decided to try instead playing the first floor over and over with whatever gear I started with, and only reload until I got a favorable first floor rule.

A thing I discovered by paying attention to the starting gear and my early floor treasure chest finds is that... certain gear is more likely (or maybe only possible) to appear with certain starting gear. Or maybe I just got really really lucky. But the high damage output of enemies in Hard Mode (thanks to upgraded gear and on occasion rules like having fury or re-equip), the slow start and infinite dice Mana method mentioned above just wasn't cutting it, and switching starting gear opened up a whole slew of items I hadn't seen in dozens of runs.

My winning combination ended up being:
1. Gumball machine (Requires Max 3 die, Recovers 1 health and gives a new die)
2. Bronze Cauldron (Requires even die, Do 2 damage and get an odd die - reusable*
3. Ice Shard (Require odd die, does die value damage and freezes 1 opponent's die)

*the reusable part is key to the strategy!

I don't even remember what else I had but I had the Bronze Cauldron equipped in my first prepared slot. I did also have a Mirror Cauldron I could summon if I rolled the right combination of summon (I always put that in my 5 slot) and a 6 to activate it. Most of the time I didn't even need to have it in a prepared slot, even with 4 dice and the occasional limit break I usually had enough dice to summon it once or twice, then cycle the rest of my dice through combinations of Evens -> Bronze Cauldron -> Recycle the 1's into Gumball Machine to get new dice/heal a little -> repeat until only 3's and 5's left, then summon Ice Shards with the 3's and slot the 5's into them for massive damage and defense (since *most* enemies benefit from higher die rolls and I could consistently freeze at least half their dice).

I also ended up with the rule that creates a random spell in one of my slots pretty early on, so I'm not sure if that changed the RNG for what gear I could find, but it was maneuverable enough with only 3 slots, as long as I had the Bronze Cauldron prepared. On occasion I'd meet an enemy with a weaken ability but it was easy enough to just re-summon it once because statistically speaking, if I hadn't rolled a 2, I probably had rolled a 1 and/or had a Gumball Machine already prepared to recycle some dice and maybe get one. With this strategy, enemies that had just obliterated me on every previous run (Sorceress and Loud Bird, I'm looking at you ><) went down with barely a whisper, and the more drawn out low-damage but high-cc enemies, I'd end with higher hit points than I started thanks to the Gumball Machine (especially once I hit that final level up and grabbed an Upgraded spell slot).

Rules that I found to be incredibly annoying/harder to work around for the Witch specifically:
- Snowman - Freeze 1 die (makes it hard to activate Mirror Cauldron / Hall of Mirrors early on, since if you roll a 6 it'll be the first one frozen - and no, the rule that makes all 6's burn doesn't exempt them from freezing)
-Speaking of, I hated the "burn all 6's" rule (Hothead). Most of my winningest strategies involve recycling dice so for me this was a game killer, especially with upgraded equipment enemies dealing half of my max HP in damage in one turn on average, self-inflicted damage on that scale was hard to adjust for
-Fury. I never got Madison to come up but the Wolf Puppy rule makes both you and the enemy start with Fury, and I find that the Witch is a slow starter in even the best strategies, and enemies are much more likely to be able to make the most effective use of a fury action. Once or twice on a Fury rule run I would get lucky and roll a Mirror combo where I could get 2 extra dice for the price of 1, but then the next enemy would just obliterate me anyway.
-Singer (makes all dice rolls the same each turn) can be okay in some strategies, if you have lots of prepared slots with something like Fruit Bowl and can recycle your dice early on, but a lot of Witch strategies require more agility and this one can tank that
-Handyman (The rule that makes Shock require even dice) turned out to be my unmaking on the one run I made it to a boss before my winning run - because the boss turned out to be Beatrice, and the damage spell I had gotten for that run also required even dice to both summon and activate. Ouch. The strategy I was using with the Bronze Cauldron circumvented that issue since it only relied on 1 prepared spell.
-Keymaster - limiting moves to 6 per turn tanks any dice-recycling strategy

Rules that were benign or easily worked around:
-Vacuum - enemies having extra health is honestly negligible, I found that I was either getting obliterated, having a close battle only to be obliterated by the next enemy since I couldn't heal enough between battles, or getting to the point where I could easily do 10-20 damage in overkill on my winning turn anyway.
-Slime (Poison) and/or Fireman (the rule that makes just 1 die burn each turn) - the added damage is pretty negligible because again, the winning strategies/gear combos are gonna build up to massive damage quickly and/or involve steady healing.
-As mentioned above, the random spell rule (Witch's rule herself!) was quite liveable. Once in a while it would even have a beneficial spell I wouldn't have otherwise had access to. The most annoying part was that in later turns I had so many dice on my screen I often couldn't read the description of the random spell.
-Alchemist (enemy transforms into a Bear after 4 turns) - if you can't kill an enemy in 4 turns, you're probably not going to make it anyway, or for a handful of slow burn enemies, they focus so hard on status effects that they don't do much damage to you and you can take advantage of their bear transformation to stop getting silenced/shocked/weakened/blinded constantly. (Plus I got to fight a Vampire Bear so that was pretty cool)
-Kraken - you can see enemy health on the first turn so you can just keep track of how much damage you do, especially if you have spells that do static amounts of damage regardless of die value used
-Cowboy (where enemies always roll a six) - easily controlled for IF you have a freezing spell and can cast it at least once per turn (or for those rare enemies that only have odd-die abilities, just leave them unfrozen and laugh as you can take your time to heal, duplicate, mirror, and shield away)
-Sorceress (enemies can chuck dice at you now!) - most enemies make very efficient use of their dice, and if they don't, the extra 3-4 damage is pretty negligible. But be careful about picking this if you're using a lockout strategy (like freezing or burning all of the enemy's dice)
-Mimic (makes everything look like treasure chests) - I'd played enough times that I was familiar with the standard layouts and tended to know which "treasure chests" were enemies, healing items, or actual chests. The downside is not being able to strategize which enemies to fight first (like saving the harder ones for right before you level up so you'll full heal after a hard fight), but a winning strategy usually levels that out anyway

I didn't find any rules that directly benefited the Witch specifically (like for instance having Snowman for the Robot is so OP), except for maybe Dire Wolf (makes curse less likely to go off, and I don't know if Witch even has any curse effect spells). But I feel like that one is just benign for anybody. I also straight up avoided Sticky Hands (I did NOT want enemies going first and killing me before I had a chance) and Bounty Hunter (6's are too important to the Witch!), so I don't know if those are more mitigable than they seem. I never got it to come up with the Witch but Rose (everybody does 1 more damage per attack) also seems like it would be amazing, since a lot of my best Witch strategies involve repeated tiny attacks while recycling dice. And of course, a few more that are workable on just about any character even though I never got them to come up - Frog (any enemy can be the final boss), Cactus (overkill damage is reflected back), Crystalina (keep extra dice at the cost of hp - super easy to mitigate on the Witch since you can just chuck extra dice)

Thanks for all the suggestions in this thread! I'm so glad to have finally conquered the final challenge, though I'm kinda sad to be done with the game now. XD