The heart wakes up the next morning like... "I had the worst nightmare! This ghost lady came into my room and quietly just _organized her backpack at me_ until I died!"
"How can you be so sure this can survive indefinitely? Great question, that's the kind of thing that would be easier to demonstrate!" Rest of chat: "NO! NOT AGAIN!"
It makes it so much cooler that this run almost didnt even make it past ACT 1. Such a bummer that the video ends so soon after the run is over, def as always, but especially for this run, want more breakdown synopsis celebration lap.
Timestamps for when Baalor picks up the cards in the thumbnail (so many After Images): After Image #1: (28:06) For the rest, you'll be seeing them a couple times at least... (1:48:04 for the first Act 3 boss) (3:07:20 for Heart) I did _not_ notice the time when I clicked into this video until I saw just how long the first Act 3 boss was in the timeline. What an absolutely incredible, and absurdly ridiculous, run!
I can't play Slay the Spire anymore, because I burnt out HARD on both it and roguelikes, but it's fun to come back to runs like this occasionally. Imagine if he had that Neutral card, Panache, and how much faster this could have gone. ;)
20% chance to die to Gremlin Nob in act 1, leaves with 1 health turns into: 10 minute triple Jaw Worm fight in act 3 to heal 11 health. 1 hour long Awakened One fight in act 3. 40 minute Heart fight. 10/10 run for me. Necronomicurse run is still best of the best, but this is in the running for #2 easy.
I'm just imagining the enemies trying to figure out what their opponent is doing is they watch her chug and throw Potion after Potion on the ground yet they can't hit her 😂😂
I liked the part where baalor talked about each card being part of a bigger picture for the character when talking about pommel strike vs quick slash. I think a great example to demonstrate that point is prismatic shard. Cards like hyper beam and reprogram are bonkers for the characters who are not Defect because they are not affected by the focus down.
It wasn't until seeing both Cultist and Awakened One at 999 strength that I realized that the multi-attack and Cultist's attack have the same base. That's really cool thematically.
Surely at some point during the heart fight the roles changed here and Baalor became the villain? I dont think I've ever walked away from a run feeling SORRY for the heart before 💀
This got to be the longest video I've ever watched on TH-cam. And it was hilarious! A tense beginning transitioning to one of the most, if not the most, broken run ever.
Pommel Strike (or rather, two upgraded Pommel Strikes) was part of the deck that got me my first Ironclad win. It cycled through Rage, Body Slam and Pommel Strikes (as well as *something* else that I don't remember) with Barricade and Juggernaut active to just obliterate stuff by building up block and hitting like a truck every turn - something like 15 cards per turn. Getting Decu and Dono was just icing.
So your comments on the complexity of the game and the difficulty of calculating an optimal path reminded me of an idea I'd had once--post only the heart fight from a run, the final score, and the seed. The challenge is for other people to beat the heart with a higher score.
Quick Slash is just a worse Dagger Throw 38:32 Also, interesting note about smooth stone’s value in act 2 I just noticed, the increase in block is not removed by frail on unupgraded defends. In other words, even in Act 2’s frail environment, 1 dex is still worth 1 additional block under a significant number of circumstances And the same can be said about 3 dex based on the potion baalor drinks just a moment later
I'm glad to have somethin to listen to buy could we please put how many runs on streak there is in the description even if it's a zero it still comforts me to have the information
You could use a "perfect path" strategy to design your rogue like levels. The path starts with a winning strategy against the final boss, and generates a path back to the start where each of the required pieces are available, and combats that win with the missing pieces along the way. You would branch backwards from the winning path to create the actual experience the player is presented with. Is one way to display and "calculate" it with minimal complexity. There might be other winning strategies emergent from the other options, even "more winning" strategies, but there's some merit in your game always having a possibility of success, even if the thread is super tricky to find in practice.
You have convinced me of the value of Setup/Nightmare! I’ve always been afraid of attempting that combo. But this was so silly powerful, I now feel empowered!
I think Baalor knows this, but the supercomputer needed to brute force slay the spire would probably need an unimaginably larger number of transistors than particles than exist in the observable universe, and an ungodly amount of processing time to solve it.
The only way to get a perfect path is to have a computer play through every single floor, in every possible variation. Which isn't even just encounter decisions, it's also combats. Maybe taking a campfire for an upgrade when you're at 55/66 HP is worth it, but if you don't heal when you're at 54/66 HP you die by one HP at a boss. When you start thinking about every little micro decision, you both get a new appreciation for the best players in the world who can win 10+ runs in a row, but also a dwarfing sense of hopelessness at how inconsequential your decisions might seem, yet how impactful they can be 10 floors later. A true encapsulation of "if I didn't take that 2 damage by mistake I would've lived here." and then you realize making a computer powerful enough to do that, in a timeframe that's actually relevant enough for you to care, as in immediately after your run ends, is genuinely impossible. Even if a computer COULD play every variation possible of a given seed, it would take at minimum hours, likely even days and possibly even months of letting it sit there. Even the best chess computers (if I'm to believe Baalor that STS's decision tree is larger than chess's) can take hours to solve a prearranged puzzle that has a determined solution, STS has no solution and thus creating one from scratch is... bonkers. Sorry this is an essay, it was just a really interesting question.
If someone could make a superhuman STS engine, it would still be a nice tool for it to analyze a game and tell you afterward what it thought the best path is. Superhuman STS engines are possible with current RL approaches, they just haven’t been built yet.
The decision matrix is extremely deep. Over an entire run of StS, it's actually orders of magnitude higher than the total decisions in Chess. Every hand drawn, every card played, and then every card choice changes all of these outcomes for every single fight, etc. The game is insanely deep, too deep to fathom. We haven't solved chess yet, and this game is magnitudes harder to solve than chess is.
I'm so glad this game has an amazing soundtrack so I didn't have to speed through the run. Unironically the best run in STS history as far as I'm concerned
I am still cant believe this game has so many options. some of the combinations are only for genius. and you sir, a genius. you are opening my mind with every video I watched.
recipe for a blade dance at home: turn 1: acquire a shiv by playing cloak and dagger, also setup nightmare and end turn turn 2: nightmare the shiv and end turn turn 3: play the three shivs *for absolutely free* !!
dude my tiny frost prime viewing brain can’t handle it when act one takes more than ten minutes, this is not okay. that said, really appreciate the intentionality and analysis!
LONG TIME VIEWER FIRST TIME COMMENTER 😅. ID TOTALLY BE DOWN TO WATCH YOU REPLAY SEEDS AND TAKE DIFFERENT PATHS/CHOICES THEN COMPARE THEM! SOUNDS FUN, SEEDED SUNDAY OR SOMETHING
@@ShadyNetworker imo necronomicurse was better than this one. In the end of day this run boil down to nightmare a free nightmare. While there are certain crazyness here and we get to see some stupid things, iirc baalor even made a nightmare into nightmare that even incorporated wish before. Meanwhile i think even if someone try for years they probably wont make a run like necro-potence-nomicon again.
The setup being the bottom card and then getting the kill on the last turn of vulnerable is just an incredible way to end this saga. There was a moment during the heart fight when Baalor was playing prepareds and he had this look of pure delight, it makes it all worth it.
As for the possibility of brute-forcing Slay the Spire with a computer, a distributed computing network like Folding@Home would probably be the best bet.
For the discussion around 11:45 on whether or not a computer could show the best path in a run: I think what could be a fun feature in StS 2 is if the game showed you the best paths from other players on the same seed! That idea excites me a lot, actually
I love your content, observing the way you think about the game has definitely improved my runs a lot, I used to struggle to get past act 2 boss, now most of the time getting to the heart, although I'm on a1. I really think you should play a game called breach wanderers, it's very similar to slay the spire, and I'd love to see how you play that so you can help me improve there too!
I'd love to use that map marking mod you've got it's very nice looking. This is a sick run. I really appreciate how much you explain everything. I just got into the game a week ago
I never noticed this before. In the early floor 2 shop, you bought a card, closed the shop, then opened the shop again -- and the cards were rearranged.
I'm too excited after the title and that intro! How could this possibly be crazier than blue candle/rupture/necornomicon, or wish/nightmare (which btw was so painful that you didn't madness either one)?!?
Heart wishes it scaled by increasing number of hits each multi-attack turn up from 15. Then might have a chance. Or if it could eventually take multiple turns each time player hits end turn.
This is why I say never reset runs in rouges (unless you have some particular goal), you can never know by seeing a start like this if your end is also like this
The heart wakes up the next morning like... "I had the worst nightmare! This ghost lady came into my room and quietly just _organized her backpack at me_ until I died!"
underrated comment
Don't forget her little cymbals. Hahaha
@@theprofessor4534and the feats of acrobatics
It was terrifying.
So unbelievably true xD
"Huh, I wonder why this video is so long, they reach act 3 around the 1 hour mark"
"...oh no"
Lmao I had the same reaction, I was like "Huh, think it's time to check out the comments"
I thought maybe he'd run it back on the same seed to see what the starting rare card would have been.
I've been WAITING for this run to drop on the TH-cam. I watched this live and was cackling the whole time.
"How can you be so sure this can survive indefinitely? Great question, that's the kind of thing that would be easier to demonstrate!"
Rest of chat: "NO! NOT AGAIN!"
Quote of the run: "If the game didn't want me to do this, it shouldn't have given me the tingsha."
I fell asleep when Awakend one had 500 strengh, woke up to see 750. It was a good nap.
I am in for a show wth
I just got to 500 strength, might nap also
and im back 849 strength
1:06 “If this turns into a Nightmare seed…”
oh boy does it
different context, but still the same outcome :D
*checks the time*
Yeah sounds about right...
The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention. Now that. Is. Irony.
No refunds
It makes it so much cooler that this run almost didnt even make it past ACT 1. Such a bummer that the video ends so soon after the run is over, def as always, but especially for this run, want more breakdown synopsis celebration lap.
IT'S MY PARTY AND I GET TO PICK THE MOVIE
This is a really good movie though haha
my partner accidentally put on a spire lets play instead of the OTS and now I'm sitting here an hour deep into the most fun content I've seen in ages
Timestamps for when Baalor picks up the cards in the thumbnail (so many After Images):
After Image #1: (28:06)
For the rest, you'll be seeing them a couple times at least... (1:48:04 for the first Act 3 boss) (3:07:20 for Heart)
I did _not_ notice the time when I clicked into this video until I saw just how long the first Act 3 boss was in the timeline. What an absolutely incredible, and absurdly ridiculous, run!
I can't play Slay the Spire anymore, because I burnt out HARD on both it and roguelikes, but it's fun to come back to runs like this occasionally.
Imagine if he had that Neutral card, Panache, and how much faster this could have gone. ;)
@@hariman7727 the point wasn't to go fast, it was to get the awakened one to 999 strength
An hour in, he's in the third act-I check the time and there's still the majority of three hours left. Gotta love an absurd run.
20% chance to die to Gremlin Nob in act 1, leaves with 1 health turns into:
10 minute triple Jaw Worm fight in act 3 to heal 11 health.
1 hour long Awakened One fight in act 3.
40 minute Heart fight.
10/10 run for me.
Necronomicurse run is still best of the best, but this is in the running for #2 easy.
"these are the situations that couls lead to a very short run" yeah sure Mr. Lord, tell that to the 4 hour video i have in front of me 😂
"Mr. Lord" is hilarious lmao
@@nahuelmatBaalo R. Lord, at your service
I'm just imagining the enemies trying to figure out what their opponent is doing is they watch her chug and throw Potion after Potion on the ground yet they can't hit her 😂😂
I liked the part where baalor talked about each card being part of a bigger picture for the character when talking about pommel strike vs quick slash. I think a great example to demonstrate that point is prismatic shard. Cards like hyper beam and reprogram are bonkers for the characters who are not Defect because they are not affected by the focus down.
Hyperbeam Blasphemy is just gross
It wasn't until seeing both Cultist and Awakened One at 999 strength that I realized that the multi-attack and Cultist's attack have the same base. That's really cool thematically.
I wonder if there's any deep lore reason for that?
@@avitaltagarperhaps that a cultist is worth only a quarter of it’s deity
@@itsleo5697 that aint a bad ratio
I assumed the thumbnail was hyperbole, but it somehow grossly underrepresented the number of afterimages I would see in this run.
Can't wait for the thumbnail guy to add in every After Image that Baalor duplicates
Honestly, I kind of wish the thumbnail was just the screenshot of the 1005x4 Awakened One.
@@chjabr0010 no spoilers :)
There aren't enough pixels in the world for that
The part that hammers home how off the rails this run went: you forgot that ending the turn is supposed to draw new cards into your hand
Imagined being the reptomancer. Having a nightmare of hundreds of Silents; mixing, drinking and throwing around potions.
Watching you is very helpful for improving my game. Thank you for thoughtfully explaining your reasoning behind card choices and other decisions
Surely at some point during the heart fight the roles changed here and Baalor became the villain? I dont think I've ever walked away from a run feeling SORRY for the heart before 💀
when he says sneaky strike it sound like stinky strike
1 hp floor 8 with slime boss at the end is where im pausing to say, yup never give up!
This is going to be the perfect video to play in the background for my 3.5hr drive from Michigan to Ohio. 😂😂
Join us in the 2x speed watcher club
Are you a trucker 😊?
Doing the same except Ohio to Michigan!
@@michaelcimino7435 Perhaps they will stop at TA in Monroe
ONLY IN OHIO
This got to be the longest video I've ever watched on TH-cam. And it was hilarious!
A tense beginning transitioning to one of the most, if not the most, broken run ever.
Pommel Strike (or rather, two upgraded Pommel Strikes) was part of the deck that got me my first Ironclad win. It cycled through Rage, Body Slam and Pommel Strikes (as well as *something* else that I don't remember) with Barricade and Juggernaut active to just obliterate stuff by building up block and hitting like a truck every turn - something like 15 cards per turn. Getting Decu and Dono was just icing.
Baalor could even challenge Illidan with how prepared he is.
Runs like this make me glad for my extension that allows for up to 16x speed. Lol. XD
how do you even comprehend what's happening at that speed?
@@beric_ailey2330 i guess they dont even listen to what hes saying?
@@beric_ailey2330 I watch at 4x speed
@@qb4428 4x is still wild LOL i watch at 1.25x at most
@@-book My brain is weird I guess. 1.25x is torture for me.
It's at 1:43:47 when you learn why you're going to be watching this for the next two hours .... can't wait!
The classic, after you've watched the movie, you'll understand why it was needed for the sequel.
So your comments on the complexity of the game and the difficulty of calculating an optimal path reminded me of an idea I'd had once--post only the heart fight from a run, the final score, and the seed. The challenge is for other people to beat the heart with a higher score.
On the same seed I assume?
@@ARatherDapperTapir That would be the idea, yes.
Could be a cool "tournament" or challenge set up. Everyone plays the same seed, highest score wins.
@@hugoboss3689... Thats just daily challenge.
@@gengarisnotinsmash... fuuuuuuuuck true
But i meant organized as an event between the best spire slayers.
I'm only at the beginning but I gotta say as a low player (A2 currently) I love hearing your thought process!!
Beating the heart with tingsha only....good God man
Quick Slash is just a worse Dagger Throw
38:32 Also, interesting note about smooth stone’s value in act 2 I just noticed, the increase in block is not removed by frail on unupgraded defends. In other words, even in Act 2’s frail environment, 1 dex is still worth 1 additional block under a significant number of circumstances
And the same can be said about 3 dex based on the potion baalor drinks just a moment later
I'm glad to have somethin to listen to buy could we please put how many runs on streak there is in the description even if it's a zero it still comforts me to have the information
This video didnt have the usual streak counter because it was an out of sequence one, but the streak was 0 here. I've added it to the description
You could use a "perfect path" strategy to design your rogue like levels. The path starts with a winning strategy against the final boss, and generates a path back to the start where each of the required pieces are available, and combats that win with the missing pieces along the way. You would branch backwards from the winning path to create the actual experience the player is presented with. Is one way to display and "calculate" it with minimal complexity. There might be other winning strategies emergent from the other options, even "more winning" strategies, but there's some merit in your game always having a possibility of success, even if the thread is super tricky to find in practice.
The eyebrow raise at 3:06:20 killed me lmfao
A very symbolic White Statue
I hope when the devs are making StS2, they take a look at this video to ensure something like this is possible in the next game
You have convinced me of the value of Setup/Nightmare! I’ve always been afraid of attempting that combo. But this was so silly powerful, I now feel empowered!
thanks for talking through your thoughts
Been a while since I watched you. I forgot how good the commentary is for watching in the background while I work.
I’ve always been a heavy blade believer, brings me joy to hear baalor come around to it
"No sweetie, we have blade dance at home."
Cue set-up on nightmares to nightmares a shiv.
I think Baalor knows this, but the supercomputer needed to brute force slay the spire would probably need an unimaginably larger number of transistors than particles than exist in the observable universe, and an ungodly amount of processing time to solve it.
11:50 I've read that even a single fight has more variations than a chess match. In the same article that proved there was, in fact, unwinnable seeds.
funnily enough he trashes quick strike during the one run it could have been used to set up infinite damage
The only way to get a perfect path is to have a computer play through every single floor, in every possible variation. Which isn't even just encounter decisions, it's also combats. Maybe taking a campfire for an upgrade when you're at 55/66 HP is worth it, but if you don't heal when you're at 54/66 HP you die by one HP at a boss. When you start thinking about every little micro decision, you both get a new appreciation for the best players in the world who can win 10+ runs in a row, but also a dwarfing sense of hopelessness at how inconsequential your decisions might seem, yet how impactful they can be 10 floors later. A true encapsulation of "if I didn't take that 2 damage by mistake I would've lived here." and then you realize making a computer powerful enough to do that, in a timeframe that's actually relevant enough for you to care, as in immediately after your run ends, is genuinely impossible. Even if a computer COULD play every variation possible of a given seed, it would take at minimum hours, likely even days and possibly even months of letting it sit there.
Even the best chess computers (if I'm to believe Baalor that STS's decision tree is larger than chess's) can take hours to solve a prearranged puzzle that has a determined solution, STS has no solution and thus creating one from scratch is... bonkers.
Sorry this is an essay, it was just a really interesting question.
If someone could make a superhuman STS engine, it would still be a nice tool for it to analyze a game and tell you afterward what it thought the best path is. Superhuman STS engines are possible with current RL approaches, they just haven’t been built yet.
The decision matrix is extremely deep. Over an entire run of StS, it's actually orders of magnitude higher than the total decisions in Chess. Every hand drawn, every card played, and then every card choice changes all of these outcomes for every single fight, etc. The game is insanely deep, too deep to fathom. We haven't solved chess yet, and this game is magnitudes harder to solve than chess is.
I'm so glad this game has an amazing soundtrack so I didn't have to speed through the run. Unironically the best run in STS history as far as I'm concerned
I am still cant believe this game has so many options. some of the combinations are only for genius. and you sir, a genius. you are opening my mind with every video I watched.
You're the hero we need, Baalor. Thank you.
50:00 love the DIY blade dance
Double nightmare is just too insane. Incredible run as always!
Runic Pyramid, 2 nightmares, and Setup is blatantly broken.
And that's why we love Slay the Spire.
End of act 2 and a quarter of the way through thr video...
I am watching the Awakened One fight and the video has 2 hours left lmao. Who let this man cook
recipe for a blade dance at home:
turn 1: acquire a shiv by playing cloak and dagger, also setup nightmare and end turn
turn 2: nightmare the shiv and end turn
turn 3: play the three shivs *for absolutely free* !!
When you thought you have seen it all baalorlord says " strap in and hold my beer"(screen shot of awakened one doing 1005x4 damage)😂😂😂😂
alright what kind of decisions are to be made in a 3.5 hour long run???
Double nightmare apparitions. Infinite stalling to get 999 strength on cultist, awakened one, and heart. Just cuz.
Ok I now see why, brilliant!
The meme run waa predicted early on. "If this becomes a nightmare run..."
Well played. Sickest deck I have EVER SEEN in SoS
One would think it was a long game but it was just a series of long pauses thinking which card to add
The fact that this is up so soon after the speed run seed you did 😂
I finished three entire heart runs during this video, and one of the runs fit entirely within the awakened one fight... I love this so much
It aint after image anymore, its a fricking alternate realm
dude my tiny frost prime viewing brain can’t handle it when act one takes more than ten minutes, this is not okay.
that said, really appreciate the intentionality and analysis!
LONG TIME VIEWER FIRST TIME COMMENTER 😅. ID TOTALLY BE DOWN TO WATCH YOU REPLAY SEEDS AND TAKE DIFFERENT PATHS/CHOICES THEN COMPARE THEM! SOUNDS FUN, SEEDED SUNDAY OR SOMETHING
To hear Baalor say this is his “stupidest run” is so wild, he has had so many crazy, bonkers runs
The Necronomicurse mastery was pretty bonkers too
@@ShadyNetworker imo necronomicurse was better than this one. In the end of day this run boil down to nightmare a free nightmare.
While there are certain crazyness here and we get to see some stupid things, iirc baalor even made a nightmare into nightmare that even incorporated wish before.
Meanwhile i think even if someone try for years they probably wont make a run like necro-potence-nomicon again.
The setup being the bottom card and then getting the kill on the last turn of vulnerable is just an incredible way to end this saga. There was a moment during the heart fight when Baalor was playing prepareds and he had this look of pure delight, it makes it all worth it.
Baalor (finishing battle at 1 hp): Whatever
Baalor (finishing battle at 26 hp): What a terrifying fight!
😂
As for the possibility of brute-forcing Slay the Spire with a computer, a distributed computing network like Folding@Home would probably be the best bet.
For the discussion around 11:45 on whether or not a computer could show the best path in a run: I think what could be a fun feature in StS 2 is if the game showed you the best paths from other players on the same seed! That idea excites me a lot, actually
Lmao that confused chatter asking if you were soft locked really brought into perspective for me what this grind looked like.
You know it's a good one when the Heart Fight ALONE is over 30 minutes.
That funeral joke made me overjoyed
I love your content, observing the way you think about the game has definitely improved my runs a lot, I used to struggle to get past act 2 boss, now most of the time getting to the heart, although I'm on a1. I really think you should play a game called breach wanderers, it's very similar to slay the spire, and I'd love to see how you play that so you can help me improve there too!
That 6012 block though
I'd love to use that map marking mod you've got it's very nice looking. This is a sick run. I really appreciate how much you explain everything. I just got into the game a week ago
that small pause after the "if you *enjoyed* that video..." made me question some things
so there's a 1 hour awakened fight, that's gonna be interesting
1:15:45 - The exact moment Baalor realized that this will be a four hour run
absolutely elegant and beautiful nosl run
How does this man make a single run 3 hours jeez
The choke at the end of act 3 actually have been nuts with the infinite nightmare card loop? Absolutely not needed but laughed at the thought
I never noticed this before. In the early floor 2 shop, you bought a card, closed the shop, then opened the shop again -- and the cards were rearranged.
awesomely amazing run, Sir. Kudos.
I've been waiting for this to get on youtube since the run
Dont forget pommel strike also deals more damage baseline than quick strike
I usually skip sts videos that are longer than an hour and a half or so... but when it goes over 3 hours I just need to see what happened.
All I was seeing in my head when watching this video is Michael Reeves saying "Nightmare! Nightmare!Nightmare!"
Every couple of months I have an unhealthy addiction to this game
This run is a perfect example of how the devs intended this game to be played
I'm too excited after the title and that intro! How could this possibly be crazier than blue candle/rupture/necornomicon, or wish/nightmare (which btw was so painful that you didn't madness either one)?!?
hell yeah man, youre getting pretty good at this game
Heart wishes it scaled by increasing number of hits each multi-attack turn up from 15. Then might have a chance. Or if it could eventually take multiple turns each time player hits end turn.
I guess there's a soft lock if you have too many Nightmares in your hand at once with Pyramid.
That was a lot to watch, even at x2 speed. But it was worth it. Great run!
Now thats a good background to clean the whole house 😂
This run was just a big flex from Balorlord xD
This is why I say never reset runs in rouges (unless you have some particular goal), you can never know by seeing a start like this if your end is also like this
*looks at video length* Oh god BaalorLord, what did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?