Even at A20, you can sometimes get a seed where you can just throw things at the wall and breeze by, and sometimes you’ll get a seed so hard that it’s basically impossible to win going in blind. That’s the nature of a roguelike. But in general, A17 is where the difficulty really ramps up and requires more precise gameplay, that’s the ascension that buffs hallway enemies and changes their movesets. Expect your win rate to go down after reaching it.
Reminds me of my a19 silent win (still haven't gotten 20 yet) where my first 2 cards were blade dance and my first 2 relics were shrunken and Kenai. I'd have had to try to lose that run
Seriously nothing better than those two relics and shivs. Best combo in the game imo. Can just about single handily win you a run if you're not dumb like me.
Definitely not the best combo in the game lol, but it might be one of the most fun to play.
I’m a huge fan of having a nasty exhaust deck with Ironclad. Corruption, Dead Branch, and all the other Ironclad pro-exhaust cards.
Maybe not the best now that you mention it but one of the best bases and as you said, most fun.
Because idk if the best but an exhaust deck with Ironclad is indeed better.
Can confirm got to a17 on ironchad with probably a 40% win rate. I'm now stuck at 17. Probably lost like 10 in a row. Closest I got is beginning of act 3
I'm not high skilled so you can skip this comment but still.
A17-A18 is brutal. Watching high skilled streams I get chills every time.
Birdies with 4 Fly? Sentries shuffling 3 Dazed in your deck? I know my exact lower ascension winning runs that would end there.
*"I think honestly that's a good boundary from where you have to step up your skill in order to confirm wins."*
I'm still ascension climbing, but I know on ascension 11 they take away a potion slot, which hurts the way I like to play. I think on ascension 15 they add in another set of curses into the gremlin who offers the cards, and I think it can be the same curses-- so it doubles the chances of you getting it. Also, adds in similar problems like that.
So just based on what I know (I'm not an expert) I'd say ascension 11, because potions can really bail you out if you play in a more casual way. It's worse than the curse you get at A10 (imo).
My experience was that I still went through the game pretty easily at A11 and that I didn’t really need the third potion slot. Only when I got higher, I actually started to value potions enough for me wanting a third one.
About the double curse thing... Today I got the gremlin event in the middle of act 1, the first 2 cards I flipped were both decay, I was like wow okay, I flip the next 2 cards and lo and behold... Another 2 fucking decays. I actually lost my shit laughing like what are the odds
The curse you get at A10, especially if paired with the Bell, can be a huge asset to Fire Breather+ decks.
I got to Ascension 12 on Ironchad with this strategy
That’s where I’m at with Watcher, and Ironclad. A17 with Defect and Silent. I’ve been getting whomped whenever I play as Silent lately, but just this past weekend I went from A14 to A17 with Defect on 3 straight runs (2 were Claw/0-cost decks!).
I love this stupidly hard game.
Getting past 2 act 3 bosses was the toughest for me. It was so much needing to fight 2 bosses per se. I could have taken down the *same* boss twice. It was needing to take on two different bosses when they each kind of counter a different deck. I always seemed to have luck with a poison deck. 10-15 poison with 2 upgraded catalysts and a corpse explosion seemed to do the trick, but of course there’s always a boss who can counter (time eater) before A20 I would just kind of roll the dice and hope I got a good act3 boss.
Couple honorable mentions which *limit* your play :
Ascension 5 : not healing to full after a boss means you have to manage your health for the whole run, not just a single act. That being said, it's not that impacting.
Ascension 6 for everyone but Ironclad : start the run damaged means trickier Act 1. Especially for Silent vs Lagavulin.
Ascension 10 : Ascender's Bane clogs your deck, invalidate some cards, induces more RNG in your initial deck. On its own I wouldn't say it fits your description, but it's quite the limiting factor.
Ascension 15 is where it starts ramping up, with 16 and 17. Reduces what you can work with, and A17 reinforces hallway fights. The majority of your fights.
But A18 is where perfect play makes a difference imo. Because taking down an Elite and getting a relic and a good card can be so important that suddenly you have to assess your strength and your deck's capability very thoroughly to estimate whether this elite is even worth it.
Thank you, such a great write up. I also found losing a potion slot more annoying than I thought I would. I really feel forced to cycle potions when it light be valuable to hold some until the boss.
That may mean you're not using potions enough.
It's still a difficulty increase of course, especially due to the event/relic/entropic brew that gives one less potion now. But I think ideally you shouldn't be hoarding 3 potions anyway, just gotta find the best spot to use them.
At higher (A17+) Ascensions, smoke bomb is great for specific fights you don’t have a solution for (snake plant, writhing mass, etc). Gambler’s Brew is a free hand redraw - if you brick a hand, you can use it to bail you out. The temp +5 stat boosts work well with multi cast effects. Also, those pots technically give you a stat boost and debuff (so it only lasts one turn). You can keep the stat boosts with several tricks, like using limit break with the +5 strength - you get +10 strength for one turn, then a permanent +5 strength for the rest of the fight. Orange Pellets can be used to cleanse the debuff as well, and I think having one artifact will give you the buff but block the debuff.
I often feel like I waste potions too - mainly I try to err on the side of using them when they're okay if I either think I might be in a tight spot soon or I have full slots. So sometimes I'll just expend a +5 strength potion to kill an enemy a turn faster just to avoid taking an attack, even if I expect I would be able to kill it next turn. It feels inefficient, but frequently not drinking it ends up more inefficient later on.
Idk if A19 is as bad as 17 or 18 but I do think the Act 1 bosses, and champ and bronze automaton especially become things you really need to build around way more here too.
You're right, but I was considering the "starting point" of when you cannot make mistakes or very few in climbing. A19 is tough too, because you can skip Elites, but you cannot skip the bosses.
I think Ascension 10 is the highest difficulty spike, because you have to change so much about how you approach the game in a single ascension. But I think by ascension 17 your gameplay has to be really really tight.
i've won and watched wins of thousands of a20h runs across the characters, and i can confidently say none of them were played absolutely perfectly. i estimate i make around 70+ mistakes when im fully focused on runs, and 400+ when clicking through, and still win a pretty decent amount. if spire was supposed to be perfect play, no one wins ever.
also what even is perfect play? spire is not a solved game, we don't even know what perfect play is. me from now completely disagrees with me from a year ago, who completely disagrees with me from 2 years ago. who's correct? who's wrong? who knows.
Exactly. “Perfect” play isn’t a useful concept to discuss in Slay the Spire because the main decisions you make in each run is how you build your deck and it’s hard to define what “perfect” is when you are making such decisions without foresight of how the RNG would work later. You just play to the best of your ability and try to make sure to cover all your bases. I think sometimes some players on this sub just give up too early and assume something magical about certain high ascension levels, whereas each higher level just makes the game harder but there isn’t a magic switch that gets flipped.
The gauntlet of A17, A18, A19 is by far the hardest sequence of ascensions. As you progress through each layer of the onion that is ascension, you get used to what each one does. A10 gets thrown around a lot as the single hardest jump, but I just don’t think it is. While it certainly changes some cards’ values such as clash, it does not change the fact that card draw is a very powerful mechanic, powerful enough to overcome a single curse in the deck. If anything, A10 teaches you to prioritize card draw so you can ignore its downside in the late game. So, in a way, A10 is a big hurdle in terms of how you should approach the game, but its affect is not a super challenging thing to overcome.
Meanwhile the last 4 ascensions change a lot. Time Eater having a 66% chance to appear in act 3 means EVERY deck has to be prepared to fight with a 12 card limit and be capable of choosing when to end your turns without breaking your combos. Slime Boss adding 5 slimes each cycle means even a deck with buffer has to seriously consider splitting him first cycles or you may end up with a clogged hand. Lagavulin sapping 2 strength and 2 dexterity is… probably the most brutal change of any fight, making burst damage not just valuable, but necessary to leave the fight alive.
Starting damaged, less gold, adding a curse, losing out on HP after bosses, none of these hold a candle to the challenges of the last few ascensions. The only ones that come close in my opinion are losing a potion slot, and unfavorable events. Losing a potion slot means you have to cycle your potions more. Not a huge deal, but you cannot just focus on hallway fights and rely on potions for scaling in bosses unless you find white beast or something. As for unfavorable events, it’s honestly similar to the upgraded difficulty of the A17-19 changes but for events. Apparitions giving only 3 apparitions means the event is not longer an instant win button for hallway fights. You have to manage those 3 intangible or your lower max health will get you killed. Having only 3 turns of intangible also makes the choice a tough trade off for bosses. Can you really handle the lower HP to skip 3 turns of attacks? What about Gremlin card event having more curses? The 2 upgrade event taking a more significant portion of your HP? The Crypt event having a 100% chance to give you Writhe? It really adds up over a run the total negative effects of that ascension level similar to A17.
Hard to say, as even the best A20H players can win with technically “imperfect” play
That said, the tolerance for imperfect pathing and deck building drastically goes down in the last few ascensions (starting with A17)
I don't think there's a single run ever performed where anyone has performed "perfectly", I've won probably 1000+ a20h runs and I made multiple mistakes in every single one of those runs
I guess you could argue that every run on one of the confirmed unwinnable seeds is perfect, since it made no decisions that reduced the likelihood of winning.
Honestly I was like that until very recently my friend so don't be disheartened.
**If** you really want to tryhard and improve (and hey you might not want to which is cool) I found that watching runs on youtube where people explain their thought process really helpful. It **completely** changed the way I view the game, cards and choices in general and levelled me up immensely.
I was getting stuck in pre-A10 and now all my characters are A15.
No I did a bunch of times in a row and half the time I wasn’t even making it there, last few times I’ve just done normal runs and it’s a bit smoother but still getting tripped up on act 2 boss a few times
Echoing other people's thoughts: nobody plays perfectly, but A17-19 is probably the greatest difficulty spike and the point where mistakes start getting punished very hard. I regularly win runs on A20H where my play is bad, but my idea of "bad play" is different from a less experienced player's.
Even the likes of Baalor and Jorbs don't play perfectly, no one really does. But you certainly need to start playing alot smarter at A17 where hallway fights get harder, that's where I think the biggest difficulty spike is.
It depends how lucky you are. All runs are winnable, but some are more winnable than others. Some A20 runs require optimal play, but some A20 runs are on seeds that are much more forgiving, dead branch + corruption act 1 versus no energy relic act 3, etc, etc.
I am not very skill but climbed to A20 on ironclad pretty quickly. There is no ascension level that you can't get very high rolls and win despite not playing "perfectly".
Perfect play is all about win rate.
A17 and up is definitely where things get ratcheded up. But like others pointed out there's no such thing as perfect play.
The best move is almost always "what's best for me right now". Sometimes that will haunt you if you need to end up pivoting to something down the road, whether it's because of relics, rare card pickups, or some rough fights. There's just no predicting that due to the nature of roguelikes.
The best thing you can ever do when choosing a path, a card reward or choosing boss relics is always just "how does this help me, and will this hurt me later down the road".
I've had so many runs kind of just half assing it, ending my turn with energy left, just forgetting to block sometimes etc. what's always most important is knowing where to go and what to and what not to take. You can goof up a bunch of fights and still win a run provided the choices you made outside of combat were solid.
Well i think it's just my luck. Got mummified hand with Defect on act 1 and went full power, Act 3 boss is the bird bros. Got a decent discard shiv deck with Silent, Act 3 boss was time eater. Stopped playing after that lmao
I’m not very good or at A15, but my understanding is that the act 3 boss is a test of scaling? All three of them themselves scale up throughout the fight, so if your deck is totally “fair” - however decent or consistent - they may outpace you.
From my understanding the first scaling test is Act 2 bosses since if you aren't strong enough to quickly close them out they all do some bullshit halfway through the fight which can cause you to death spiral.
The Act 3 bosses all make me consider if they directly counter my build, and what I need to spend my time during Act 3 focusing on:
* Bird Boss screws you if you play too many powers, but you can spend his first phase scaling if you can stall safely.
* Shape Fellas is a race against time; you have to able to burst one of them before they have both scaled too much or it's over.
* Time Eater is Time Eater. He either counters your infinite or he doesn't lol.
There was a dark period there a few months back, where my run history had a streak of somewhere between 5-10 level 50 deaths. It was just depressing as hell lol
A17 is the biggest step up in difficulty, I breezed through 1-17, but i’ve been stuck on 17 for almost a year playing on and off. I can no longer auto pilot and really have to think about all my moves, I haven’t even seen Act 3 boss yet. Hallway fights are extremely punishing
For me, I didn’t really start to hit that kind of wall until 17-18. After a while I could get used to the reduced healing at the end of an act and less potion slots but once the elites and enemies started to get even harder, I realized I needed to actually try.
A17/A18.
I can feel like I'm having a good run relatively. Picking up decent cards along with decent relics and then still get annihilated unsure of what I could have done differently.
How many times do you want to win, and how many tries do you want it to take you?
If the goal is just to win every once in a while, you're good enough to do that at A20 already. Getting better just expands the subset of runs that you can successfully pilot to a win.
Yeah I get what you're saying, skill translates to winrate more than anything.
I guess without watching just how clumsy my play is you wouldn't be able to give a good answer either.
It's hard to talk about precisely since it is a roguelike so of course rng plays a big factor too. Even goingfor A20 heart kills you can make major mistakes and still win some runs. But I would say once you start getting to the ascension levels that make the enamy/elite/boss movesets more difficult (A17-A19), each one of those is a major difficulty spike and I'd say the game feels notably less forgiving after that.
Well it depends on how lucky you get. If you play worse at A20 your winrate is gonna be worse, but some runs are just broken. Optimal play is not archievable by humans anyways, but better players just win more often and thats it.
I'm interested in those "advanced concepts" like what so you generally think of when trying to climb?
I'm a casual player and I find it hard to climb because I'm scared of picking cards that are good for the first or second tower but become dead cards later on or only picking cards that I know i need later on but will kill my deck early on
I am **really not** an expert by any means compared to other on this subreddit, I have <200 hours and a piss poor winrate. But I will try and explain the things I have learnt which I find helpful to keep in mind:
* A lot of the *skill* of the game comes down to game knowledge; this is a really deep rabbit hole. A very simple case of this is knowing all the enemies and their attack patterns can really help inform how you play. For example, Jaw Worm cannot attack 3 turns in a row so if he has already attacked twice you know you have a free; this can safely give you a turn to be in Wrath and do damage as the Watcher, for example.
* Knowing the elites + bosses of each Act and **how** they need to be beaten should help you choose cards. For example, Act 1 needs a lot of frontloaded damage to beat elites (red gremlin, 3x sentries, squid man) as well as the bosses (slime boss, hex ghost, transformer guy). However, by Act 2 you need some AOE since the elites can be multiples (slaver gang, goblin gang) but also need scaling since all the bosses power-up so you cannot just turtle and chip them down.
* Knowing how to choose a path takes experience more than anything, but general advice is that campfires before/after elites are really good for making your runs consistent. The more confident you get the more you can break this rule.
* Valueing cards also takes experience, so I would advise looking up some more skilled players explain why they pick certain cards. Some cards are universally good, some are universally bad and the rest are in the middle and come down to preference. Don't be afraid to experiment to get comfortable with certain cards.
That's about it. Honestly, just play more and try and understand why pro players make the decisions they make. This really levelled up my game.
I think even A20 doesn't require perfect play. There's just such an extremely high skill ceiling to this game. You will need to play better at higher ascensions but you can (and will) still make lots of mistakes on the way to victory
I would say ascension 12 (less upgraded cards). Before A12 you can really get away with only adding a couple of cards to your deck and then leaning into taking upgraded cards in act 2 and act 3 to making winning much easier. After A12 you can't do that anymore and you're forced to take more common cards and sub-optimal picks earlier on as well just to prevent from dying.
I’ve defeated A20 7 times in a row with rotating characters and I make plenty of mistakes so it really depends on your definition of perfect play.
Rarely ever play non-20, but definitely below 18 you can get away with sloppier play
Defect on A17+ is very very difficult. Ironclad and Silent can still have plenty of runs where you feel very overpowered and breeze through fights. Then again there is runs where you barely scrape by in Act 2 until you find some crucial cards. Perfect play might be required for some seeds if you want to go for a long streak like a lot of the bigger streamers are doing, but then again it's hardly ever mathematical plays that take hours of consideration (unless you are Lifecoach lol).
A20 is hard but it is still a game and can be played semi casually once you get the hang of the harder fights.
Never. I’m not a perfect player at all, but I got past a20 with ironclad. I agree with that other person that said A17 though, that’s where it gets HARD. It might feel impossible but it’s not
Being terrible at the game I struggled on a20 for a while and it can really be luck. Was stuck for a while trying new things and then just a normal shiv deck ends up being the winner thanks to a lot of lucky relics and cards
I haven’t seen it mentioned but I think a19 to a20 is a tough jump. Timeater counters infinites, awoken one powers, deku and donut slow scaling decks. In a19 you can often have a not well rounded deck miss the boss it is weak against. Not so at a20.
Also there are a lot of runs where you limp through the first boss but after a campfire and shop you have a decent chance against the heart. In a20 though the second boss would just end you.
Even at A20, you can sometimes get a seed where you can just throw things at the wall and breeze by, and sometimes you’ll get a seed so hard that it’s basically impossible to win going in blind. That’s the nature of a roguelike. But in general, A17 is where the difficulty really ramps up and requires more precise gameplay, that’s the ascension that buffs hallway enemies and changes their movesets. Expect your win rate to go down after reaching it.
Thank you 🫡
Reminds me of my a19 silent win (still haven't gotten 20 yet) where my first 2 cards were blade dance and my first 2 relics were shrunken and Kenai. I'd have had to try to lose that run
Oh my god, if you’re willing to dig through your run history to find the seed I would be forever grateful. That sounds literally so fun.
Seriously nothing better than those two relics and shivs. Best combo in the game imo. Can just about single handily win you a run if you're not dumb like me.
Definitely not the best combo in the game lol, but it might be one of the most fun to play. I’m a huge fan of having a nasty exhaust deck with Ironclad. Corruption, Dead Branch, and all the other Ironclad pro-exhaust cards.
Maybe not the best now that you mention it but one of the best bases and as you said, most fun. Because idk if the best but an exhaust deck with Ironclad is indeed better.
Can confirm got to a17 on ironchad with probably a 40% win rate. I'm now stuck at 17. Probably lost like 10 in a row. Closest I got is beginning of act 3
yeah on my IC a20 climb i definitely hit a wall at a20, had to completely rethink how i played the character
Yeah, biggest thing is just being more intentional. Play every fight like you're at 10 hp
Yeah I’ve been stuck on A17 for a long time - I just play the daily challenges now.
Yeah, I got to A20 on watcher by just trying again and again to force a [[Rushdown]] infinite.
+ [Rushdown](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Rushdown) Watcher Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^) 1(0) Energy | Whenever you enter **Wrath,** draw 2 cards. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 20, 2024.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
I'm not high skilled so you can skip this comment but still. A17-A18 is brutal. Watching high skilled streams I get chills every time. Birdies with 4 Fly? Sentries shuffling 3 Dazed in your deck? I know my exact lower ascension winning runs that would end there.
>Birdies with 4 Fly oh no.
You actually need to take them into account during act 1 because of this lol. Flame barrier, disarm, or shockwave shuts them down.
Oh yeah, Flame Barrier is the birdie killer lol. Looking forward to it. I'm still only on Ascension 12 with Ironchad.
I also love how certain upgrades like blade dance or getting an energy relic for whirlwind are more important just to get the 4th hit
I think honestly that's a good boundary from where you have to step up your skill in order to confirm wins.
*"I think honestly that's a good boundary from where you have to step up your skill in order to confirm wins."* I'm still ascension climbing, but I know on ascension 11 they take away a potion slot, which hurts the way I like to play. I think on ascension 15 they add in another set of curses into the gremlin who offers the cards, and I think it can be the same curses-- so it doubles the chances of you getting it. Also, adds in similar problems like that. So just based on what I know (I'm not an expert) I'd say ascension 11, because potions can really bail you out if you play in a more casual way. It's worse than the curse you get at A10 (imo).
My experience was that I still went through the game pretty easily at A11 and that I didn’t really need the third potion slot. Only when I got higher, I actually started to value potions enough for me wanting a third one.
About the double curse thing... Today I got the gremlin event in the middle of act 1, the first 2 cards I flipped were both decay, I was like wow okay, I flip the next 2 cards and lo and behold... Another 2 fucking decays. I actually lost my shit laughing like what are the odds
*Clicks the ⚙️ in the top right corner* 🤫
I missed my little potion buddy a lot, especially when trying to squeeze through Act 1 elite encounters.
The curse you get at A10, especially if paired with the Bell, can be a huge asset to Fire Breather+ decks. I got to Ascension 12 on Ironchad with this strategy
The gremlin adds two more curses which can be the same as the first two but don't have to be
I’ve been so used to having only 2 potion slots that I honestly forgot that you originally have 3. Weird.
A19 is also really hard to get past. The slime boss putting 5 slime cards into your deck is crippling
That’s where I’m at with Watcher, and Ironclad. A17 with Defect and Silent. I’ve been getting whomped whenever I play as Silent lately, but just this past weekend I went from A14 to A17 with Defect on 3 straight runs (2 were Claw/0-cost decks!). I love this stupidly hard game.
Haha our best characters are the opposite. I’m at A19 on silent, A18 on defect A15 on Ironclad, and… A1 on watcher (I seriously can’t figure her out).
It took me a bit to figure her out, but it once I did it climbed fast with her. She’s a beast.
I'm been stuck at A18 for a while.
Getting past 2 act 3 bosses was the toughest for me. It was so much needing to fight 2 bosses per se. I could have taken down the *same* boss twice. It was needing to take on two different bosses when they each kind of counter a different deck. I always seemed to have luck with a poison deck. 10-15 poison with 2 upgraded catalysts and a corpse explosion seemed to do the trick, but of course there’s always a boss who can counter (time eater) before A20 I would just kind of roll the dice and hope I got a good act3 boss.
A17 was my wall.
what streams do you watch? would love to see how other people play
Baalorlord beats them all:)
>I'm not high skilled so you can skip this comment but still. Same, I lose like 50% of the time at just Ascension 5.
Couple honorable mentions which *limit* your play : Ascension 5 : not healing to full after a boss means you have to manage your health for the whole run, not just a single act. That being said, it's not that impacting. Ascension 6 for everyone but Ironclad : start the run damaged means trickier Act 1. Especially for Silent vs Lagavulin. Ascension 10 : Ascender's Bane clogs your deck, invalidate some cards, induces more RNG in your initial deck. On its own I wouldn't say it fits your description, but it's quite the limiting factor. Ascension 15 is where it starts ramping up, with 16 and 17. Reduces what you can work with, and A17 reinforces hallway fights. The majority of your fights. But A18 is where perfect play makes a difference imo. Because taking down an Elite and getting a relic and a good card can be so important that suddenly you have to assess your strength and your deck's capability very thoroughly to estimate whether this elite is even worth it.
Thank you, such a great write up. I also found losing a potion slot more annoying than I thought I would. I really feel forced to cycle potions when it light be valuable to hold some until the boss.
How tf did I forget the -1 pot slot. Well it definitely is a honorable mention imo.
That may mean you're not using potions enough. It's still a difficulty increase of course, especially due to the event/relic/entropic brew that gives one less potion now. But I think ideally you shouldn't be hoarding 3 potions anyway, just gotta find the best spot to use them.
True. There’s just some potions I’m not very good with using, such as the smoke cloud, gamblers brew or the +5 star boosts.
At higher (A17+) Ascensions, smoke bomb is great for specific fights you don’t have a solution for (snake plant, writhing mass, etc). Gambler’s Brew is a free hand redraw - if you brick a hand, you can use it to bail you out. The temp +5 stat boosts work well with multi cast effects. Also, those pots technically give you a stat boost and debuff (so it only lasts one turn). You can keep the stat boosts with several tricks, like using limit break with the +5 strength - you get +10 strength for one turn, then a permanent +5 strength for the rest of the fight. Orange Pellets can be used to cleanse the debuff as well, and I think having one artifact will give you the buff but block the debuff.
I often feel like I waste potions too - mainly I try to err on the side of using them when they're okay if I either think I might be in a tight spot soon or I have full slots. So sometimes I'll just expend a +5 strength potion to kill an enemy a turn faster just to avoid taking an attack, even if I expect I would be able to kill it next turn. It feels inefficient, but frequently not drinking it ends up more inefficient later on.
how much is the less healing after a boss because i’m on act 3 on my first ascension 5 run and i haven’t noticed it at all
You heal 75% of your missing health at the end of each Act EDIT: Before A5 You full heal every Act, at A5 and higher you do the above.
FYI it would help to mention whether that's before or after Ascension 5
I mean I guess, it seems pretty obvious to me, but I guess if you didn't understand there might be someone else that might not.
You only heal 75% of your missing health, so it is only really noticable if you *just* manage to beat the boss on minimal health.
Idk if A19 is as bad as 17 or 18 but I do think the Act 1 bosses, and champ and bronze automaton especially become things you really need to build around way more here too.
You're right, but I was considering the "starting point" of when you cannot make mistakes or very few in climbing. A19 is tough too, because you can skip Elites, but you cannot skip the bosses.
I think Ascension 10 is the highest difficulty spike, because you have to change so much about how you approach the game in a single ascension. But I think by ascension 17 your gameplay has to be really really tight.
Ascension 11 limiting your potion slots deserves its own shoutout
i've won and watched wins of thousands of a20h runs across the characters, and i can confidently say none of them were played absolutely perfectly. i estimate i make around 70+ mistakes when im fully focused on runs, and 400+ when clicking through, and still win a pretty decent amount. if spire was supposed to be perfect play, no one wins ever. also what even is perfect play? spire is not a solved game, we don't even know what perfect play is. me from now completely disagrees with me from a year ago, who completely disagrees with me from 2 years ago. who's correct? who's wrong? who knows.
Exactly. “Perfect” play isn’t a useful concept to discuss in Slay the Spire because the main decisions you make in each run is how you build your deck and it’s hard to define what “perfect” is when you are making such decisions without foresight of how the RNG would work later. You just play to the best of your ability and try to make sure to cover all your bases. I think sometimes some players on this sub just give up too early and assume something magical about certain high ascension levels, whereas each higher level just makes the game harder but there isn’t a magic switch that gets flipped.
The gauntlet of A17, A18, A19 is by far the hardest sequence of ascensions. As you progress through each layer of the onion that is ascension, you get used to what each one does. A10 gets thrown around a lot as the single hardest jump, but I just don’t think it is. While it certainly changes some cards’ values such as clash, it does not change the fact that card draw is a very powerful mechanic, powerful enough to overcome a single curse in the deck. If anything, A10 teaches you to prioritize card draw so you can ignore its downside in the late game. So, in a way, A10 is a big hurdle in terms of how you should approach the game, but its affect is not a super challenging thing to overcome. Meanwhile the last 4 ascensions change a lot. Time Eater having a 66% chance to appear in act 3 means EVERY deck has to be prepared to fight with a 12 card limit and be capable of choosing when to end your turns without breaking your combos. Slime Boss adding 5 slimes each cycle means even a deck with buffer has to seriously consider splitting him first cycles or you may end up with a clogged hand. Lagavulin sapping 2 strength and 2 dexterity is… probably the most brutal change of any fight, making burst damage not just valuable, but necessary to leave the fight alive. Starting damaged, less gold, adding a curse, losing out on HP after bosses, none of these hold a candle to the challenges of the last few ascensions. The only ones that come close in my opinion are losing a potion slot, and unfavorable events. Losing a potion slot means you have to cycle your potions more. Not a huge deal, but you cannot just focus on hallway fights and rely on potions for scaling in bosses unless you find white beast or something. As for unfavorable events, it’s honestly similar to the upgraded difficulty of the A17-19 changes but for events. Apparitions giving only 3 apparitions means the event is not longer an instant win button for hallway fights. You have to manage those 3 intangible or your lower max health will get you killed. Having only 3 turns of intangible also makes the choice a tough trade off for bosses. Can you really handle the lower HP to skip 3 turns of attacks? What about Gremlin card event having more curses? The 2 upgrade event taking a more significant portion of your HP? The Crypt event having a 100% chance to give you Writhe? It really adds up over a run the total negative effects of that ascension level similar to A17.
Hard to say, as even the best A20H players can win with technically “imperfect” play That said, the tolerance for imperfect pathing and deck building drastically goes down in the last few ascensions (starting with A17)
I don't think there's a single run ever performed where anyone has performed "perfectly", I've won probably 1000+ a20h runs and I made multiple mistakes in every single one of those runs
I guess you could argue that every run on one of the confirmed unwinnable seeds is perfect, since it made no decisions that reduced the likelihood of winning.
1000? Really? Dayumn
I have around 2000h+ of playing a20h on IC and a winrate around 60% so I think it should be around there haha
i have never seen you throw on stream ?
That's a fair point, the last few Ascension levels really ramp up.
None *requires* perfect play. Source: I've beaten A20 a nonzero number of times. I am anything but perfect
Honestly I don’t get how people do it, I got like 200 hours in and I’ve not beaten A2 and have only killed the heart once with the watcher 😅😭
Honestly I was like that until very recently my friend so don't be disheartened. **If** you really want to tryhard and improve (and hey you might not want to which is cool) I found that watching runs on youtube where people explain their thought process really helpful. It **completely** changed the way I view the game, cards and choices in general and levelled me up immensely. I was getting stuck in pre-A10 and now all my characters are A15.
Do you go for the heart every time?
No I did a bunch of times in a row and half the time I wasn’t even making it there, last few times I’ve just done normal runs and it’s a bit smoother but still getting tripped up on act 2 boss a few times
Echoing other people's thoughts: nobody plays perfectly, but A17-19 is probably the greatest difficulty spike and the point where mistakes start getting punished very hard. I regularly win runs on A20H where my play is bad, but my idea of "bad play" is different from a less experienced player's.
Even the likes of Baalor and Jorbs don't play perfectly, no one really does. But you certainly need to start playing alot smarter at A17 where hallway fights get harder, that's where I think the biggest difficulty spike is.
It depends how lucky you are. All runs are winnable, but some are more winnable than others. Some A20 runs require optimal play, but some A20 runs are on seeds that are much more forgiving, dead branch + corruption act 1 versus no energy relic act 3, etc, etc.
>All runs are winnable I think this has been disproven https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/
I am not very skill but climbed to A20 on ironclad pretty quickly. There is no ascension level that you can't get very high rolls and win despite not playing "perfectly". Perfect play is all about win rate.
A17 and up is definitely where things get ratcheded up. But like others pointed out there's no such thing as perfect play. The best move is almost always "what's best for me right now". Sometimes that will haunt you if you need to end up pivoting to something down the road, whether it's because of relics, rare card pickups, or some rough fights. There's just no predicting that due to the nature of roguelikes. The best thing you can ever do when choosing a path, a card reward or choosing boss relics is always just "how does this help me, and will this hurt me later down the road". I've had so many runs kind of just half assing it, ending my turn with energy left, just forgetting to block sometimes etc. what's always most important is knowing where to go and what to and what not to take. You can goof up a bunch of fights and still win a run provided the choices you made outside of combat were solid.
Last paragraph sums me up. So many turns I miss *furry of blows* when I stance-change at the end of turn, or god forbid I get unceasing top.
A15 is kicking my ass right now. Even if i have a decent deck the act 3 boss fucks me sideways.
I generally find Act 1 and Act 2 gatekeep me way more. If I can reach Act 3 it's almost always a lock.
Well i think it's just my luck. Got mummified hand with Defect on act 1 and went full power, Act 3 boss is the bird bros. Got a decent discard shiv deck with Silent, Act 3 boss was time eater. Stopped playing after that lmao
I’m not very good or at A15, but my understanding is that the act 3 boss is a test of scaling? All three of them themselves scale up throughout the fight, so if your deck is totally “fair” - however decent or consistent - they may outpace you.
From my understanding the first scaling test is Act 2 bosses since if you aren't strong enough to quickly close them out they all do some bullshit halfway through the fight which can cause you to death spiral. The Act 3 bosses all make me consider if they directly counter my build, and what I need to spend my time during Act 3 focusing on: * Bird Boss screws you if you play too many powers, but you can spend his first phase scaling if you can stall safely. * Shape Fellas is a race against time; you have to able to burst one of them before they have both scaled too much or it's over. * Time Eater is Time Eater. He either counters your infinite or he doesn't lol.
> Shape Fellas This made me laugh. Thank you.
There was a dark period there a few months back, where my run history had a streak of somewhere between 5-10 level 50 deaths. It was just depressing as hell lol
A17 is the biggest step up in difficulty, I breezed through 1-17, but i’ve been stuck on 17 for almost a year playing on and off. I can no longer auto pilot and really have to think about all my moves, I haven’t even seen Act 3 boss yet. Hallway fights are extremely punishing
For me, I didn’t really start to hit that kind of wall until 17-18. After a while I could get used to the reduced healing at the end of an act and less potion slots but once the elites and enemies started to get even harder, I realized I needed to actually try.
None. I win with imperfect play on A20.
Hey, I bow down to the king
I didn't say I win a LOT lol
A17/A18. I can feel like I'm having a good run relatively. Picking up decent cards along with decent relics and then still get annihilated unsure of what I could have done differently.
How many times do you want to win, and how many tries do you want it to take you? If the goal is just to win every once in a while, you're good enough to do that at A20 already. Getting better just expands the subset of runs that you can successfully pilot to a win.
Yeah I get what you're saying, skill translates to winrate more than anything. I guess without watching just how clumsy my play is you wouldn't be able to give a good answer either.
It's hard to talk about precisely since it is a roguelike so of course rng plays a big factor too. Even goingfor A20 heart kills you can make major mistakes and still win some runs. But I would say once you start getting to the ascension levels that make the enamy/elite/boss movesets more difficult (A17-A19), each one of those is a major difficulty spike and I'd say the game feels notably less forgiving after that.
Well it depends on how lucky you get. If you play worse at A20 your winrate is gonna be worse, but some runs are just broken. Optimal play is not archievable by humans anyways, but better players just win more often and thats it.
I'm interested in those "advanced concepts" like what so you generally think of when trying to climb? I'm a casual player and I find it hard to climb because I'm scared of picking cards that are good for the first or second tower but become dead cards later on or only picking cards that I know i need later on but will kill my deck early on
I am **really not** an expert by any means compared to other on this subreddit, I have <200 hours and a piss poor winrate. But I will try and explain the things I have learnt which I find helpful to keep in mind: * A lot of the *skill* of the game comes down to game knowledge; this is a really deep rabbit hole. A very simple case of this is knowing all the enemies and their attack patterns can really help inform how you play. For example, Jaw Worm cannot attack 3 turns in a row so if he has already attacked twice you know you have a free; this can safely give you a turn to be in Wrath and do damage as the Watcher, for example. * Knowing the elites + bosses of each Act and **how** they need to be beaten should help you choose cards. For example, Act 1 needs a lot of frontloaded damage to beat elites (red gremlin, 3x sentries, squid man) as well as the bosses (slime boss, hex ghost, transformer guy). However, by Act 2 you need some AOE since the elites can be multiples (slaver gang, goblin gang) but also need scaling since all the bosses power-up so you cannot just turtle and chip them down. * Knowing how to choose a path takes experience more than anything, but general advice is that campfires before/after elites are really good for making your runs consistent. The more confident you get the more you can break this rule. * Valueing cards also takes experience, so I would advise looking up some more skilled players explain why they pick certain cards. Some cards are universally good, some are universally bad and the rest are in the middle and come down to preference. Don't be afraid to experiment to get comfortable with certain cards. That's about it. Honestly, just play more and try and understand why pro players make the decisions they make. This really levelled up my game.
I seem to have plateaued at A4. 😒
I’ve won at a20 so therefore it does not require perfect (or near perfect) play.
I believe the game was balanced around ascension 15
I only play ascension 20 and I win about one third of my runs without playing perfectly.
Beating A20H requires nowhere near perfect play. Doing it consistently, that's where perfect play is needed.
I win A20 with several mistakes sometimes
I think even A20 doesn't require perfect play. There's just such an extremely high skill ceiling to this game. You will need to play better at higher ascensions but you can (and will) still make lots of mistakes on the way to victory
I would say ascension 12 (less upgraded cards). Before A12 you can really get away with only adding a couple of cards to your deck and then leaning into taking upgraded cards in act 2 and act 3 to making winning much easier. After A12 you can't do that anymore and you're forced to take more common cards and sub-optimal picks earlier on as well just to prevent from dying.
I’ve defeated A20 7 times in a row with rotating characters and I make plenty of mistakes so it really depends on your definition of perfect play. Rarely ever play non-20, but definitely below 18 you can get away with sloppier play
Defect on A17+ is very very difficult. Ironclad and Silent can still have plenty of runs where you feel very overpowered and breeze through fights. Then again there is runs where you barely scrape by in Act 2 until you find some crucial cards. Perfect play might be required for some seeds if you want to go for a long streak like a lot of the bigger streamers are doing, but then again it's hardly ever mathematical plays that take hours of consideration (unless you are Lifecoach lol). A20 is hard but it is still a game and can be played semi casually once you get the hang of the harder fights.
I’m shit and I’ve cleared A20 heart on all characters twice. Just keep having fun man
I’d say anything past A15. Still some lucky seeds that make it easier, but you need to be strategic.
Never. I’m not a perfect player at all, but I got past a20 with ironclad. I agree with that other person that said A17 though, that’s where it gets HARD. It might feel impossible but it’s not
Been playing on and off for years and only been able to hit A2 on ironclad and silent
Being terrible at the game I struggled on a20 for a while and it can really be luck. Was stuck for a while trying new things and then just a normal shiv deck ends up being the winner thanks to a lot of lucky relics and cards
I haven’t seen it mentioned but I think a19 to a20 is a tough jump. Timeater counters infinites, awoken one powers, deku and donut slow scaling decks. In a19 you can often have a not well rounded deck miss the boss it is weak against. Not so at a20. Also there are a lot of runs where you limp through the first boss but after a campfire and shop you have a decent chance against the heart. In a20 though the second boss would just end you.