How To Tithe Souls (Daughter Guide)

An allegedly concise overview on turning THE high-risk-high-reward spec a bit more toward the "reward" side.

The Basics

Don't Fear the Reaper: The core of Soultithe is that it triggers Thresholds, grants you Corruption, and hurts you. Two of these are positive, and more important, immediate - the damage will take until the end of the NEXT turn to take a chunk out of your health. You should play conservatively earlier on, getting your Soultithe up to 5 or 6 while keeping enemies under control and still gaining Corruption (Purge! Purge even if it wastes energy! PURGE!) to use later. Your long term goal isn't to avoid having a lot of Soultithe, just to avoid having a lot of it until you're in position to use it.

Slow, then fast: Much like the Corruption spec, you'll find yourself having a bi-modal gameplay style. What you're waiting for will vary - maybe you're waiting for a Rage card, or stockpiling some Death Strike, or just accumulating some Corruption. But either way, you'll hit harder later, so don't feel the need to throw damage against the wall early. It'll probably hit a lot harder given some time.

Grasp!: Grasp is one of the more fundamental starter attacks to a spec long-term, despite how numerous it is. In particular, an upgraded Grasp perfectly transitions into an un-upgraded one. It hits extremely hard for how cheap it is with Threshold, fuels other Threshold and Unleash cards, and very important, triggers a Void Stone an extra time - making them great targets for Yellow, Blue, Purple and especially Red long-term.


Exponential Offenses: Rage, Death Strike, Vulnerable (and Unleash!) can all multiply each other (with Death Strike and Rage being specific to Attack cards). A Red Stoned Grasp+ with Death Strike 1 on a Vulnerable Target starting with 50% Rage will hit for 23 on the first hit, 26 on the second hit (from Threshold), and then 30 on the third hit (from Death Strike). And you'll come out of it with 125% Rage, meaning following it up with an un-upgraded, un-stoned Grasp on the same target will be throwing in another 2 hits of 24 apiece. That's a lot! Setting up this conflux of bonuses will be the heart of your game plan, and both Vulnerable and Death Strike (and Soultithe/Corruption) can be set up to linger across turns to meet these conditions.


Fewer, Larger Blocks: Your core game plan is "play a lot of support for offensive cards, and a lot of offensive cards." But you'll also be hurting yourself in the process, making you need Block even more. What do you do? Play high cost blocks. There are two advantages - the first is that large Blocks are often stronger per cost to make up for that it'll be rarer to use the large number well all at once. The second is that they are more efficient on a per-card basis - with a Tower Shield, you need reserve only a single slot in your hand to have Block 30 available next turn. The same benefit applies to Recur effects - 2 and 3 cost blocks will give you choices when Recurring to decide exactly how strong you need something to be to deal with large Threat stacks.

Just Outrun the Pain: Normally, it takes 2 turns for Soultithe to "catch up to you" - you have the rest of the current turn, and then at the start of the next turn the Threat is applied, leaving until the END of that turn to actually take damage. But you'll always have Spirit Shield in your deck - since it scales to Corruption, and Corruption is gained via Soultithe, Spirit Shield pretty much is the same as "ignore Soultithe for the turn," since it'll Block for as much extra (if not more) than you've accumulated Soultithe. With a tentative 3 turn allowance before Soultithe hurts, that's a lot of heavily-augmented attacks you can sneak in with reckless abandon.

Key Key...words

Death Strike: At its core, Death Strike is a simple force multiplier. You can view a level of Death Strike as being a delayed 1 extra energy worth of attacks played - but it's a lot stronger than that. Because of how heavily Soultithe focuses on combining offensive bonuses, "play twice as many attacks at once" is a lot stronger than "play twice as many attacks long-term." Death Strike doesn't just earn you more damage, but can draw more cards, trigger more Void Stones, ramp up your Soultithe for some devastating Opportunity finishers even faster (or boost those finishers themselves), you name it. The heart of your strategy is playing attacks, and Death Strike improves everything about them. Just one detail - keep in mind that triggers don't multiply each other. So while Death Strike will double the effect of a Power Draw, it'll only be the same as a 50% effectiveness boost to the already-double-triggering upgraded Opportunity (when meeting its Threshold). Depending on the Void Stone that might still be a great deal, but something to remember.


Rage: Mak numbrs more biggererRRRRAAARRRRGGGHHHH. That pretty much sums it up. Rage will multiply (rounded up!) attack damage. You'll be doing a lot of that. And then that will get multiplied by thanks to Vulnerable. And Death Strike. And just playing more cards. B VERI ANGERY.


Unleash: WITH ALL YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I AM MAJOR DAMAGE. All of the previous stuff? It's incredibly powerful when applied to simple cards that cost 1 energy and deal somewhere in the 7-to-12 damage range. Taking a base 10 damage card and seeing it hit for 100 is very possible with enough bonuses. So what if a card was base 25 damage instead? That's what Unleash-based attacks offer you. The great thing is, this isn't a choice you have to make. Simply playing a lot of your powerful class attacks will pile on the Soultithe, and thus the Corruption - before you know it, Opportunity will be hitting a lot harder than anything else. And it'll be hitting that later on in the combat - conveniently enough time for you to play your Buffs, stack some Debuffs, maybe have a Death Strike left over from the last turn... While just using conventional attack damage can already win fights with a good deck, you don't need to do anything but just take your time to accumulate Corruption, allowing you to turn all of those power multipliers on a card with ever-growing base damage. Seems like a pretty good Opportunity, eh? Get it? It's the... name of... card... name... you get it.

[ultrapearl14]

SOULITHE SUCKS

[ultrapearl14]

USE PATH THAT DOES NOT KILL YOU

[theDING]

This guide allowed me to get over my despair of failing at playing the Daughter. Lots of great insights here, and was successful on my very next run. Thanks for the advice and tips!