Slay the Spire Mods: The Prismatic First Run

I love the way that this mod plays around with the 4 classes, with the way that some of the edits smooth out the synergies.
These runs teach me that wow have I just really not played enough Watcher.

[@DrMonty-ng5fo]

Mod developer for the Prismatic here. So glad you loved the character! Thank you for trying our mod, it was really fun to watch :D I also watched your Twitch stream, which was fun. You talked a lot about the balance of the mod, and how easy it seemed, so I wanted to explain our rationale. The main objective our mod is to be...fun. Straight up. To me, the beauty and fun of this game comes not just from the difficult, but the crazy and interesting synergies you can create. And the Prismatic...well, even after playtesting them for 2 months, every single run was unique and different, with an incalculable number of synergies and different builds you can make. And that's awesome! And part of achieving that goal was to make a lot of weaker, but interesting cards stronger. Cause like, there are some cards in this game like Alpha/Beta/Omega which are really cool, but they just...suck absolute dong at higher ascensions. Same with cards like Pressure Points, Conjure Blade, Firebreathing, Claw, etc. Giving them a better base rate makes players take them more, which means that they get to find these awesome synergies. So that's one of the main reasons that they're stronger. (Though I will admit, we might have gone too far on Prepared, lol. It's there to make the Mill build more enticing, but it's just great on it's own. You aren't the first to mention how strong it is.) Another reason for the buffs is to give strategies enough cards to actually create their builds, even though the card pool is so gigantic. For example, the reason why Study also gives +1 focus isn't to make it a better card on it's own, it's so that if you're playing a orb build, you have an extra opportunity to grab a card that increases your focus, which is critical in any orb build. The base game only has 3 cards which give focus, which just isn't enough for a card pool this massive. This is why Doom will Bloom applies mark, why Sever Soul gives Mantra, etc. The buffs are also meant to help with creating more interesting cross-class synergies. For example, you can discard a Reflex (If this card is milled from your hand, draw 2 card.) with Alpha/Beta, letting you draw the next piece immediately. As you noticed, changing Lock-on to Target (all non-attack damage increased by 50%) means that it works with so many different builds. And ultimately, yes, the Prismatic is stronger than Vanilla characters. But...they aren't a Vanilla character. The vast majority of players will only play modded characters once or twice at the absolute most. So, I think creating the most fun, balls to the walls experience is more important than balance, *if* players are only going to play it a few times. But also, for people who love this kind of experience, they can get infinite replayability value out of it. (And also, for context, we were playtesting the mod on A15. So that's the difficulty it was primarily balanced around. Another factor is that the The Prismatic has extremely strong scaling as the fight goes on, but pretty poor-average up-front damage. So, I think it's really biased towards feeling insane at lower ascensions (with stuff like Chimera Form, Alpha/Beta, etc.), but these strategies really fall off at higher ascensions) So yeah, I hope that gives some insight into our thought process, and I'm very glad to hear that you enjoyed it :)

[@clannadtears]

:o blows my mind that the one video that got me to start watching you was the library of ruina watcher run and it's one of your sole like...less than 20 runs of watcher xD