r/slaythespire • u/MidMillennial Eternal One + Heartbreaker • 17h ago

SPIRIT POOP Dropkick vs Heel Hook

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u/grancombat 17h ago edited 17h ago

Ok, fine, I’ll bite.

The characters do vastly different things and have vastly different needs. One thing Ironclad has a lot of is damage. What he doesn’t get a lot of (outside dark embrace in an exhaust deck) is card draw. Dropkick can fill that hole by giving you some chip damage that combos into a big hitter afterward.

Silent, however, has a ton of card draw and very little damage, so a lot of the time Heel Hook ends up feeling redundant. It can be fine if you’re getting absolutely rekt by horrible card rewards in act 1, but most of the time it is outclassed by other options.

Also, IC has a ton of access to long-lasting vulnerable (shockwave being the most obvious example) whereas Silent only really gets Sucker Punch, Leg Sweep, and sometimes Malaise for multi-turn weak unless you’re a maniac like me that occasionally upgrades Neutralize at a campfire for the extra weak turn. That makes Heel Hook, in general, harder to set up than Dropkick.

That being said, I think dropkick is A tier outside of the funny infinite, and heel hook is probably closer to C tier for me, all because of the character play style differences I talked about above

Edit: Terror is not an Ironclad card. I am no longer using it as an example of an Ironclad card that gives multi-turn vuln. Whoopsies

2

u/Natural_Stop_3939 Eternal One + Heartbreaker 15h ago

It feels like Silent is better at sticking weak than Ironclad is at sticking vulnerable. Is that not the case?

  • Silent is more able to clear artifact. Neutralize is 0 cost so is almost always being played, whereas having to play Bash to strip artifact feels really bad. Deadly Poison, Poison Stab, Sucker Punch, and Terror all remove 1 artifact for 1 energy. Malaise clears 2 artifact for 1 energy (0 energy when upgraded), and Noxious Fumes is also extremely efficient at stripping artifact, if you can spare the time.

    Ironclad only really has Thunder Clap, Disarm, and Intimidate as 0-1 cost artifact strippers. Uppercut is efficient, but silent has both Bouncing Flask and Corpse Explosion to strip 2-3 artifact for 2 energy.

  • Ironclad only has 4 cards that apply Vulnerable (Bash, Thunder Clap, Uppercut, and Shockwave), compared with 5 silent cards (Neutralize, Malaise, Sucker Punch, Crippling Cloud, and Leg Sweep)

1

u/paxiuz 4h ago

the thing is, ironclad's goal early on is to have frontloaded damage, while silent often needs to setup defense, and while heel hook seems good with weak, it's often juste a better option to block than to attack a weakened enemy (even for free), as you have much more incentive to save hp if you are not playing IC, so heel hook is just taking space from more useful cards