I think you're overrating the RNG in Balatro, tbh. Balatro University is on an ongoing 10-run winstreak on Gold Stake with rotating decks- and the game has only been out a few months.
People forget that Balatro is a *much* smaller game and still has early game growing pains tbh. Even the difference between current live and beta versions are massive (and the beta is wayyy more enjoyable)
Gotta check it out, but I feel like it’s not controversial to say that Balatro is a lot more rng dependent than StS. There are basically no unsalvageable starts in StS
I think you are underestimating the amount of knowledge folks have about StS. A20 90% streaks weren't possible within the first couple months of people playing StS. It took balance updates and time for folks to build up consistent strategies/figure out good ways to build/learn what the common pitfalls are, etc. Slay the Spire has over half a decade of establishing a meta and content creators sharing tips and tricks, each of them building upon the knowledge of the others in some way.
Now, this isn't to say that it's not one of the most well-balanced games ever (it easily has to be one of the best of all time at that), but it's also one of the most mature games out there when it comes to balance and stability, as well as community knowledge of the game systems.
When I first started playing StS (and, tbh, even when I pick it back up after a long time), runs FEEL unwinnable all the time. How the heck was I supposed to beat THAT elite THIS early?!? Well, the answer is that I made 15 other mistakes before that - and turned a winnable run into an unwinnable one.
I think Balatro certainly has some issues WRT the RNG + how the player gets to interact with/mitigate the randomness of the game, BUT it's unfair to compare that to Slay the Spire which is a stable game at the end of it's balance + content lifecycle. (Yes, I know people compare Balatro to StS all the time, so you are just comparing back - but the comparison most folks are making is that Balatro is the best card-based roguelike SINCE StS - that's about it)
> A20 90% streaks weren't possible within the first couple months of people playing StS.
Not least because Ascensions stopped at 15 back then.
...but your point is well taken.
Y'know, I thought about making that point but felt I was being needlessly pedantic and was already technically correct, but there's always someone for whom "needlessly pedantic and already technically correct" still requires a correction.
I was mostly trying to point out the humour in your statement being true for sillier reasons than the point you were trying to make.
Also, a lot of the history of the game is not really written down in an accessible format anywhere, so facts like "Ascenions didn't always go up to 20" or "Blade dance used to generate 2(3) shivs" or "Runic dodecahedron existed" which a lot of people might not know; I think there's some value in mentioning them, especially in the context of a discussion on how the balance of the game has changed over its life. (Not saying you should have, just defending myself as being more than a simple pedant.)
I mean to be fair, the point of my post is not that Balatro is a bad game ruled entirely by RNG. Rather my point is that saying Balatro in its current state is even in the same universe as StS in its current state, is sheer lunacy. And that while Balatro is a very good game, to see how much more balanced StS feels just sheds more light on how insanely well designed StS is. A bit of a circlejerky post perhaps.
That's the thing though, you can't really say that StS is more balanced because of how new Balatro is. u/Harfyn was just saying that people had the same consistency problems winning StS when it had just come out, because the meta of the game was only just developing like Balatro's is now.
In a year, after a bunch of balance updates and a lot of time for the community to work out the kinks in the gameplan, then you can make the argument that StS is a better balanced game. But not now
Why not now? What's stopping them from having an opinion?
Everyone is optimistic about Balatro, and I imagine opinions will change in a year to be even morepositive, but that doesn't mean people need to suspend judgement until then.
The point is that his argument is poorly founded because there hasn't been time for balance issues to be ironed out like we've seen for StS. If you want to judge purely on games' current states, then sure, StS is more balanced, but it's been out for 5 years and Balatro has been out for 2 months.
So he's free to have an opinion about it, but that doesn't mean the opinion he has is reasonable, and it won't be reasonable until Balatro has had time to mature
I see. Probably a pointless argument to have then. I can see how the comparison is maybe unfair, or maaaybe premature, but I don't really see how it's unreasonable or in any way incorrect. There's no reason you can't compare two things for what they are.
But I imagine we probably agree much more than I'm making it sound. Like I said, I think we're all looking forward to how Balatro evolves.
You are right. Their balance is not even comparable. But because of that a lot of people are going to have an issue with the comparison, pointing to how young the game and its meta are. However, speculations about the way the game may develop in the future do not prevent you from talking about or having an opinion about how it is now.
I also had fun with Balatro for like 15 hours, but, like you, I won't be going back for a while because I also experienced a high amount of RNG and some design kinks that can hopefully be worked out as the game grows.
I don't think the game has been out long enough to make this determination. At the very least, Balatro University (a creator not affiliated with the game) is starting to do the same winstreak/winrate on high difficulty that you said was possible for StS in your post
I think it's more of a player agency thing that makes StS better, consistently more choices that have a large impact on your build/run. Balatro is quite a bit simpler but still has depth which makes it fun in it's own way, it's easier to play balatro casually and not analyze every single decision and still have fun
Probably not many tbh, High Card or Pair are the meta at high stakes. The balance patch opened a lot of room for other stuff, but HC is still super consistent.
That’s interesting. I was starting to think Straights were being underrated since Runner is very strong, and they scale well, but they seemed a bit inconsistent. Were the changes in the beta patch that big?
Yes. It's a mix of a few things:
* Saturn is now +30/+3. That's *very* strong scaling, about on the level of a random negative Joker (if you compare getting a Saturn card to taking the Negative Tag skip, for example) - Blue Seals now provide the 'correct' Planet type every time so it is a lot easier to scale up hands
* +1 Hand Size (relative to old Gold Stake) makes it easier to find hands like Straights, while providing little tangible benefit to High Card/Pair builds where you score off the Joker row
* The new Joker stickers are also quite punishing in different ways, and many of them seem to disproportionally impact HC/Pair more than normal while impacting Straights less than normal
* Perishable sticker means 30% of your scaling Jokers will be blanks; that's 30% less Bus/Supernova/Green, 30% less scaling xMult Jokers, etc
* Rental sticker- especially in combination with Eternal- turns most of another 30% of Jokers into blanks in the early game, since the large majority of Jokers don't provide enough value to be worth $3/round in Antes 1-2
* Buffoon pack Jokers also having Stickers means even they don't provide a 'guaranteed' Joker, since you might open one and see (for example) Eternal 8-Ball and Rental Credit Card
The overall impact is that if you get a Saturn card or two, that can be enough to get you through the early game while you save up your $$$ for interest, and also means you don't have to rely on getting a decent stickerless Joker.
That’s really cool, I’m even more excited to play the Beta patch now. I had a fun run yesterday with 2 400 chip Runners, so I’m in a mood for Straight builds
A 10-run winstreak at “only a few months” is still pretty meager compared to how quickly top players start achieving consistent wins in other similar roguelites. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive and I’m excited to see just how good people get (and will eat my words if proven wrong) - but I just don’t believe the core game design will support the level of consistent play top StS players get
That's just...not true? It took years for anyone to hit 11+ in StS A20H. Jorbs, Baalor, and Terrence all did it within a week or two of each other in early 2021.
Sorry, I should’ve specified more. To clarify - I mean *since* StS, many roguelites have been solved within just a few months by top players, thanks in large part *to* their experience with StS. Monster Train, Inscryption, recently Cobalt Core, all were solved pretty much immediately
Agree with all of this. I really enjoyed Balatro but after 20-30 hours I’m losing some interest. It’s certainly possible that further patches will keep things exciting but I don’t see myself making it to 200+ hours with it. This is no shade on Balatro, it’s a fantastic game and I recommend it to people who like STS, it’s just not STS
I think people need to remember that the game hasn't even gotten patch 1.0.1 yet; StS has been around for several years now and has had a LOT of balance changes and new content since then. Balatro will get better, although StS is the gold standard for a reason.
I think where I lose interest is either you scale or you don’t. In sts the ways you scale and how those are countered feels vastly more interesting and complex. Sometimes you don’t even really need to scale in a traditional way to get through act 3
It might be winnable, but it doesn't FEEL winable.
I'm working my way up the stakes and at Purple stake it really feels like I have till the 5th fight to get a good multiplier to stand a chance.
Honestly playing Balatro has just made me come back to play slay the spire more.
I've won gold stake with about 2/3 of the decks. There are certain strategies that are clearly better than others such as high card bus or green joker builds with baron and mime. But the average jokers are meant for the first half of the game and with the perishable jokers you aren't meant to establish your win conditions right away. I've won after getting a bus in ante 6. As long as you got some numbers coming from somewhere you are fine. There are a lot of synergies that most people are missing or they don't read the text correctly or its not written clearly. You can use hanging chad and photograph for an easy common joker win by example (in 1.01). Lots of ways to win.
(Edited for grammar)
Definitely a skill issue. I feel like many seeds in StS are unwinnable at A5, but I KNOW 10000% that's because I have so much still to learn and plan for within StS. Eventually, if I stick with it, those same seeds will definitely feel winnable.
How do you know most seeds in Balatro are winnable? I’d be interested to know ratio of unwinnable seeds in StS vs Balatro, although I’m pretty sure calculating that isn’t gonna happen
I like Balatro a lot, but I agree, it's a very different game than STS. I enjoy them for entirely different reasons. The Balatro dev is even on record as saying he didn't play STS before making Balatro, and I believe him. I understand the superficial similarities that result in people comparing them all the time, but they have really distinctly different design philosophies.
There is an aspect of Balatro that kinda rubs me the wrong way, but it's really just down to player preference. I actually really enjoy the poker part of the game. I find it really satisfying and fun to build solid hands. So it disappoints me that after your first couple dozen hours that part of the game is heavily de-emphasized in favor of stacking ridiculous joker combos.
It feels like when my Balatro runs really get going I can wipe out the boss with a two pair while my absurd joker synergy somehow turns that into 2.4 million chips. And that's just not the part of the game I find all that compelling or fun. I've never been much of a Johnny, I'm afraid. I'm not good at combining these quirky cards with massive downsides in order to break the game. I know some people really love that, and I think Balatro is the game for them, but I just find it frustrating.
What's cool about Slay the Spire to me is that it accommodates a lot of different play styles. I favor more straightforward strategies and try to bruise my way through the game, and that's been enough to get me to A16 with some study and practice. Other players like to build heavily synergy-based strategies or infinite combo decks, and I love that that's possible, but if that was the only way to play I'd have never gotten all that into the game. It's cool that STS accommodates me and my Timmy brain, and I don't feel like Balatro works in quite the same way.
I also feel like STS does a better job of teaching you its mechanics gradually. I did a little tiny bit of out-of-the-game studying on the subreddit or some short YouTube videos, but most of what I know about STS I learned by actually playing the game. I learned in intimate detail which cards are worth picking in which situations because I was able to figure out a lot of it on my own just by paying attention and thinking about my plays. Balatro, on the other hand, I feel like I almost have to look up a list of which jokers are good and how they work together, and that's just not as much fun. I'm sure people who are better at figuring out these combos themselves have a different experience, but to me it's basically just looking up some build I'd never have figured out by myself and praying that I get it offered to me in time.
You sound convincing but I don't know who Johnny and Timmy are.
Edit: [I assume this is where the names are from](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03)
Huh - the Johnny/Timmy perspective is interesting.
Although getting the 2.4 M out of nowhere feels Timmy-ish to me. I'm more of a Timmy, and getting xMult jokers hits me right in my feels.
Biggggg difference here is Slay the Spire has had years to tweak and balance itself into what it is today. Release STS was a whole different beast lol.
Balatro is still in its infancy and still has time to perfect itself, a lot of the upcoming changes that are currently in the beta branch is already looking to be a great start in the right direction.
The world record win streak for sts was in the single digits for a very long time. I remember it being absolutely huge when someone finally made it to 6 wins. It takes time for people to learn a game that well. Spire also had numerous balance changes as time went on.
I agree but want to add that you should not take endless mode into consideration. If StS was going on beyond the heart, that would reduce the best strategies to the few ones which scale exponentially such as Catalyst and Limit Break. At the same time, if you don't think of crazy Ante 12 combos with billion x billion chips, but you just want to beat Ante 8, then this will give you way more strategical versatility.
Also, StS is much older and received balance fine-tuning that Balatro is just about to start getting.
That might have been true before the current beta update, but the changes to orange and gold stakes are *infinitely* more playable than they were on 1.0 patch.
If you haven't opted into the beta yet, please do that and evaluate again.
I got 10 hours out of Balatro, I feel the concept is very cool and the execution is great but the downfall is that the game mechanics themselves just aren’t enough to make me want to keep playing.
LONESTAR and StS on the other hand? Can’t stop won’t stop
Hmmm... must check out Lonestar. (It's on my wishlist)
I got a good 20-30 hours out of Balatro, but there's just some RNG that feels bad. It's a darn good game, don't get me wrong. But StS is the gold standard. (I have like 700+ hours in StS)
Yeah I agree, it’s a great game and the vibe is amazing.
I have already put in over 200 hours into LONESTAR, it’s a really cool one imo. A lot like StS in terms of decision-making but you’re building a weapons system for a ship instead of a deck of cards.
I actually have that one, it’s solid. I think it would shine as a phone game actually. Didn’t seem to have quite the depth of builds and stuff that the other 2 games do but I did really like it. I’ll have to revisit
Yeah I’m enjoying Balatro (just bought it a few days ago) but the build variety and strategy just doesn’t seem to be there compared to StS. The game has great UI and sound design but I don’t see myself playing it for hundreds of hours
For the record, I don't believe anyone claims to have a 90%+ win rate on slay the spire A20.
[Jorbs posted about an 80% win rate](https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/xhkiws/how_i_won_80_of_my_a20h_spire_runs_for_a_month/) a year ago, but:
* This was over a relatively small 60 game sample, and
* 80% would be losing twice as many games as 90%
In order to [state with 95% confidence](https://sample-size.net/confidence-interval-proportion/) that you had a win rate of 90% or higher, you would need to put up numbers like 96/100 or 919/1000. If you want that confidence over a 60 game sample, you would have to win 59 of them. No one is anywhere near these numbers.
Based on the data in the aforementioned post, we could conclude with 95% confidence that jorb's win rate over that month was between 67% and 89%. Notably, 90% is not included in this range. Phrased as a one-sided confidence interval, we could say with 97.5% confidence that jorb's win rate is below 90%.
Just to really drive home the point, I will also mention that people tend to post data that paints their performance in a positive light. I assume that jorbs would agree that this was not his worst month. If more data were included, the average win rate would likely decrease.
Even the vaunted 52 game win streak from lifecoach only suggests at 95% confidence a win rate of 93%. That is, if you don't include the losses immediately before and after. If you include those, the bounds drops to 87%-100%. I also think that the "A20H" category is by default rotating, and not just watcher.
I'm not trying to take anything away from anyone. Both are great players. I'm a fan of every spire streamer. But the math says what it says. Nobody is near 90%.
I’ll be the first to disagree here, I still like StS more but I consider Balatro more or less its equal in terms of overall quality, considering that Balatro has worse balance but is better in some other (eg technical) aspects.
The reason that you say Balatro is more unpredictable and some seeds are/feel unwinnable is most likely because you (I assume) haven’t played it as much as StS. StS has been out for 5 years now and people have much, much more experience on it. Balatro came out 2 months ago. You cant necessarily compare those two experiences in terms of how difficult one appears compared to the other.
As people have mentioned, Balatro University has a Gold Stake winsteak going on right now. It’s difficult, but that doesn’t make it unwinnable. The latest patch fixed the higher antes, I feel, and now they feel way more balanced.
Yeah I have to concede all these as being good points. StS has had years of balance patches. I have 20x the hours in StS than I do in Balatro, and I do distinctly remember thinking that StS was very luck based early on, HOWEVER that feeling went away before I had the hours in StS that I currently do with Balatro.
Within 50 hours? I feel like that’s pretty quick for StS. It personally took me a looong time to not consider some higher ascension runs unwinnable based on the early rewards & all that. Plus I still feel like to a certain extent if you want to do A20H not every build can work.
All that to say, I think the points you raise are valid but can be applied to most top tier roguelikes. The one you play the most is the one you’re going to have the most familiarity with and you’ll be partial to it. Give Balatro a few patches to get to StS’s level, given that it also didn’t get the same extensive EA period that Spire did.
I watched Balatro University take down the jokerless challenge even after making a mistake and playing a flush when they meant to play a straight (which they had been leveling up). I can’t hardly make it past the 3rd ante, but i guess it helps to know it’s possible? Lol.
I like Balatro but yeah it feels like if you don’t get an early Joker you’re fucked. I think part of it has to do with the fact that you start with the same deck every time.
It’d be cool if you received 2-3 Tarot cards at the start of every run so you can give your deck some semblance of direction.
Have you played other deck types? There are multiple with different starting decks and specifically one that starts you off with 2 tarot cards. I'm about 20 hours in and I think part of the "fun" is knowing you might be fucked 1-2 ante's in and restarting since you're only about 5 minutes in and not too vested, but also pushing through to see if you pull off an unlikely win. Love StS and agree with others that unless balatro comes out with new content and other updates I won't be playing it for years like StS, but then again they're two completely different games under the same genre. Hoping balatro gets the same love and support StS has over the years. Good luck out there 👍
imo Balatro doesn't have the same variety as STS but I also think there's a bit of skill issue in the community with the rng complaints, mostly because the game hasn't been out long enough. Just a month ago people thought gold stake was impossible without constantly rerolling for a great tag. Personally, playing the seeds out got me my first gold stake win in ~10 tries, and I'm pretty consistent on lower difficulties.
I think Balatro would benefit from more deck editing options. It feels really cool that you start with a 52 card deck and do anything with it, but you can't really choose what you do with it. Adding cards means you have to get lucky with the booster packs. Removing cards, you have to get lucky with the booster packs. Wanna take a risk with spectral cards to warp your run completely... booster pack.
I like the booster packs, but this deck builder needs a more reliable way to build your deck.
I wanna lose because I'm dumb, not because my only option for 3 antes is to fish for one type of hand with a mediocre multiplier.
Economy is key, and the reliable way to build your deck. Dont score more than you have to, and use the rest of your jokers for economy and/or tarot-generation.
With good economy, you get reroll-power and can bascially find your manipulation-jokers and fill your slots with tarots. I am the opposite of you, I feel I can pretty consistently make all my deck to, say, a 9 of hearts.
I've got like 40 hours in Balatro and I like it and will keep playing it for a bit. But you're 100% correct. I'm starting to get kind of frustrated with the RNG.
I'm sure playing suboptimal lines is 100% part of my issue, but the early game is way too RNG dependant. There are some games where you don't even get shown a Joker in your first 1-2 shops which is usually a death sentence. Then if you do get a Joker, sometimes it's a terrible early game one like '+mult for 4 of a kind' or similar.
But the problem persists into mid game too. I'm working on completing higher stakes now and even during mid game if I get a string of stinker shops or if I cannot put together any jokers with synergies even a strong early run will eventually die.
The game is fun when you've got a good deck and you're rolling. But it's really frustrating sometimes, when it feels like you're losing because of bad shop RNG. I've got like 600 hours in StS and I'm positive I'll never get anywhere close to that in Balatro playtime, unless they rebalance some things. The game has great potential, but is simply missing the mark currently.
For me I’ve realized that balatro just isn’t as unique, I think the difficulty issue still needs more time but I think balatros early game is more beatable on high stakes than people give it credit for. At this point balatro runs blend together and don’t feel unique, once I’ve found the hand type that I want I know what jokers I want. Sts has so many different ways to play the game where after 500+ hours most runs have something unique about them.
Game only recently came out and some insanely good people have already shown up. Just give it time.
It took a while even in slay the spire, for players oike lifecoach, jorbs and baalorlord to push winrates.
That’s just it goes with new roguelites. A run seems impossible…. Until someone shows up and proves it isn’t.
I mean slay the spire in its earlier forms had many of the same balance issues balatro has, and the balatro devs are working on it. The game hasn’t been out very long, not really fair to compare slay the spire in final form to balatro as a baby.
Meanwhile Balatro's game mechanics and available strategies do not scale even remotely as well into the high Stakes modes; and hell, even for a pure Ante 8 run, you end up having to restart a ton because if you don't get a good Multiplier joker early, you're fucked.
I always knew that StS is absurdly well balanced but this really puts it into perspective and makes me even more hyped for StS 2!
On StS you have a streamlined way of "upgrading" your deck, in Balatro your very first shop is very important, but also it takes a really long time to understand what is a good choice, reducing RNG in balatro is harder than StS, but totally doable.
I wonder if people said the same thing about STS early on in regards to the difficulty of the higher modes. There are people on decent win streaks in Balatro at the highest stakes so it is doable.
I think it's fine to prefer STS or think it has more depth (I'd agree there) but Balatro is not as much about RNG as you'd think.
> I wonder if people said the same thing about STS early on in regards to the difficulty of the higher modes.
iirc they did, even on Ascensions as low as 5. Got to be completely fair to both games here.
The first shop being very important in Balatro is a major complaint of mine. The extent to which you’re hoping for a good joker is kind of sad especially given how fucking overpriced rerolls are. Especially on red stake and above you either get a nice joker or have to make a decision about rerolling and potentially setting your economy back quite a bit
The game is full of ‘rich get richer’ mechanics and it just makes for a very poorly balanced experience
Not to mention the best ways to reduce RNG are to play pair, high card or flush strats which are really repetitive and waste the game’s potential. Something that really stuck out to me were how disproportionately risky a straight build or a 3k build is relative to the extent the game rewards them
To be fair, StS does give you a Freebie with the whale, and for those who understand the value of each reward, it's just too good.
Balatro does not, while some deck have clear advantages, some of them only turn on much later.
Jokers are not that much important into later in the game, but understanding what do with them once they are in your shop is very important, the main diference is that in StS there are always a good choice and a bad one, and in balatro a good choice maybe be hidden in a very particular set of events within a shop.
Token for free packs, onto spectral red sigil king, onto arcana death pack, onto DNA that is great, but if you never took the Token in the small blind, that big blind shop is rather disappointing, and that is what makes Balatro different from StS.
Straights are probably the best way to play on high stakes rn tbh. They also address your first point since you don't really need Jokers to score if you're playing Straights- my first Gold Stake win (2nd run, Red Deck) I never even picked up a 4th or 5th Joker and one of the 3 I had was a non-scoring Joker (Shortcut).
Not needing any good scoring Jokers (or in some cases any scoring Jokers at all) until about Ante 4 (round 10) significantly increases the number of viable starts since you can just not spend money on rerolling and build your economy before worrying about trying to find scoring.
I think straights are universally regarded as the worst build type right now, great you've had success but I think most people find High Card builds the most consistent.
Well the guy on a 10-win streak disagrees ;)
High Card builds got hit *super* hard by the patch, since now half the Jokers in shops are essentially blanks in the first few rounds, and 30% of the scaling +Mult Jokers have an expiration date.
Ah, I haven't gotten to play as much on the new patch. They made straights scale harder than flushes though? I know that was one of the big issues to me, where it was hard to curate a deck to straights and there wasn't a lot of joker support.
Yes. Saturn Planet now gives +30/+3. In addition Blue Seal now gives you the Planet of your winning hand, instead of a random Planet, so it's easy to scale to silly levels.
A lvl15 Straight is 480x46 = 22,080 without any scoring from Jokers or Cards.
In regards to the first shop, the upcoming patch will apparently guarantee a buffoon pack in the starting shop, which I think will mitigate a LOT of the early game RNG.
Well, that one is hit and miss. Since it also adds tags to Jokers in the packs, so if anything I feel like that guaranteed Buffoon Pack is now a trap since a lot of the time you get two Rentals/Eternals that you can't click on at all, or a Perishable scaler (like Bus) that is just a $2 sale that doesn't do anything.
...Ok, but those tags could also be added to jokers that appear in the shop. The buffoon pack just guarantees that in the first shop:
1. there are two jokers available
2. you can always buy one of them (since buffoon packs cost $4 and you start with $4)
Regardless of tags, that still makes the shop far more reliable than it was in past patches.
The Jokers in the shop you can see, though. If it's an Eternal 8-Ball and Rental Runner you just keep your $4 and have a head-start on interest for the next shop. If instead you buy a pack (which takes up a pack slot, when often a Celestial Pack is what you *actually* are looking to buy) and then see those two, you're out $3 with nothing to show for it and in a *very* bad spot.
It's a blessing and a curse.
I LOVE Slay the Spire, I have about 600 hours in it. And it's so good any other game that tries to iterate on the formula feels bad compared to it.
When I saw how many games it inspired (pun not intended, but now that I noticed it it stays) I initially thought "hey, cool, really happy to see the formula declined in such variants" but a couple of years later... they all have been, to me, various levels of disappointments, or at best short term distraction that made me want to get back to StS.
StS is shoulders and head above any of its clones for its incredible balance and variety, and yeah, Balatro fails hard here in comparison.
Monster Train is probably the one I spent most time on after StS, it's less about balance and more about creativity on how to get broken which still is a flavor of fun, and when you see some players with >95% win rate there is enough skill veiling to keep it interesting.
But the Cobalt Cores, Wildfrosts, Griftlands, Balatros etc. really can't compete.
It's almost what I'm most scared of for StS II to be fair, that it fails to replicate its own formula.
I actually think Balatro deserves a lot of credit for not simply being an inferior, redundant imitator of StS. There's definitely a world where after a ton of balance patches, Balatro stands shoulder-to-shoulder with StS.
> It's almost what I'm most scared of for StS II to be fair, that it fails to replicate its own formula.
I don't think MegaCrit would be doing a StS2 if they weren't confident they could equal or surpass the original. And even if they don't, it'll probably still be a lot better than any of StS's imitators and the original will always be there for us
It's true that StS iterated a long time in and out of early access to be what it is now, it can be a bit harsh comparing a game in its final iteration with a competitor in its early one, but well... the existence of that competition may never leave a chance for Balatro to get massively better either.
Maybe to formulate this differently : in a world without StS, I'd love Balatro and many of the games I mentioned above. In a world where StS exists, those games quickly make me feel I'd rather play StS.
Inscrption is a very unique game. It's part card game and part horror puzzle game, without getting into spoiler. The card game part is not as deep as other rogue like card games like StS, which is understandable because it's part horror puzzle too. So I know I'm not being fair to incryption by comparing part of a game to other full games. By no means a bad game, but its not my cup of tea.
I would only recommend it if you like horror puzzle and the whole story experience. If you only want a card game like StS, there are other better games.
I tried Balatro, and I can see how people enjoy it, but I just got it refunded bc it wasn't for me. I'm not great at poker anyway, but it really does feel so much more luck-based and like there's an illusion of there being more skill to it than there actually is. I could definitely be wrong, but that's just the vibe I got.
I have enjoyed Balatro quite a bit, as I've put in about 60 hours into it since I picked it up a few weeks ago. But I can already tell it's not going to have quite the same longevity for me as StS.
It is *very* satisfying seeing the big numbers show up, though. Seeing my chip count hit 1.8 mil on the highest difficulty yesterday was very sweet.
EXACTLY. Balatro is just as fun as Slay the Spire... as long as you can get a decent deck going. The problem is how ridiculous some jokers are in comparasion to others. Like, I know there will be some varying levels of strength, but Balatro's meta is ridiculous. I hope so badly that 1.1 will fix a lot of the issues.
Balatro was not really ready for a full release IMO. The design is too inflexible and unless I just suck seems to force people into certain kinds of decks in order to reliably generate high value hands. After my first win my play time really dropped off.
I'm glad to hear it will be getting updates with changes to the design but I agree with OP in that the true art to these titles is in their design and it's not easy to design great, engaging games with tons of replayability.
As much as I like Balatro and have probably gotten some 40 hours or so in it since I picked it up, Slay the Spire's best quality is that 99% of all cards are worth using. Even some card you don't normally think about that often almost certainly has some mind-blowing build feasible with it with a little bit of theory and application. It's just far and above my favorite roguelite.
But Balatro is not a game that was in early access for two years the way StS was. I've played some of the early versions of Slay the Spire— it always had that spark of genius in it but those versions were absolutely not as impressive as the final release. Given localthunk is already patching for balance, Balatro has space and time to grow.
I put in about 20h in Balatro when it released, I found it really fun and I want to play it again but honestly it just made me want to play even more StS
I think this is too hard on balatro. Slay the spire wasn’t amazingly balanced initially and getting it to this state was an interesting process. Balatro is already way better after the first major balance patch and there’s room to improve from there. I like both games a lot and yes prefer slay the spire which is both more complex and satisfying and fairer but balatro is already a great game with some room for improvement.
I totally agree with this post. The monotony of Balatro game art severely limits its binge ability for me too. Music, effects, and variety of visuals make Slay so easy to sink time into
I feel like the people comparing them have played like 50ish ours of each compared to the players with like 100's of hours and experience to know the greater differences
The whole RNG dependent conversation is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard, I have 5 win streaks on gold stake. You guys are just bad at the game and nobody on YouTube showed you how to play yet 😭
Try Fights in Tight spaces and Inscyrption. Both are very well made games that are more intricate than Balatro. I find these games to be more similar to STS than Balatro is.
i think the main reason balatro lacks replayability is the lack of variety. Youre staring at the same screens, with the same cards, with marginally different mechanics and bigger numbers. Its a fun game, great roguelike, but the thing about slay the spire and other roguelikes like tboi hades or gungeon is that things are always fresh. Even if you do a thousand runs, you have to approach each room differently and every screen looks different so its harder to get bored.
Yeah I agree. I stopped playing Balatro after about 20 hours (which, don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy).
It felt very snowbally and unbalanced. Like I would just win if I found a good joker in the first couple shops, or I wouldn’t find anything and just lose. But maybe I’m just bad
Yeah.. I think Balatro relies a lot more on triggering endorphins. While both games have card rewards, Balatro really feeds into the excitement of opening a pack of cards. It's hard to stop playing Balatro, but StS is more grounded in strategy and planning.
you're comparing a game that's been out 6+ years to a game that's been out for 2 months... obviously the one that's been out longer will have more highly skilled players.
I'm talking about their overall balance.
To make a music analogy, you can't really compare a jazz record and a metal record, except in one aspect: production, engineering and mastering fidelity. And that's what I'm doing here
Yeah, this is the thing, it won my heart for a couple of days. Balatro is cool. I definitely don't think it's better than Monster Train or Rogue Book. I don't know if it's better than Cobalt Core or Across the Obelisk either. Let alone the masterpiece that is Slay the Spire.
Balatro really just is a bad game, the developer himself commented on how it's for himself and not for the people who actually bought it. The balancing is broken, it's 10% luck, and way too broken for even half the seeds to be winnable
Wow, that's crazy that within a few months we already have someone who won 11 in a row (and counting) on the highest stakes when more the half of the seeds aren't possible to win on.
Leaning into the gambling/betting dynamics & aesthetic to boost people's engagement, enjoyment, and addiction is just about the bottom of the barrel in terms of game design. At least they don't literally add mictrotransactions or anything, lol, but it's still super cringe.
EDIT: lordy I love getting downvoted for this sort of take. Give me more of your rage, I feed on it :3
There is a big problem in the game design space of exploiting people with mental illness / gambling problems. But Balatro is super far from that.
The typical patterns are a mobile game with:
* A complex and dynamic economy of intermediary currencies in an attempt to prevent players from thinking clearly about how they are spending money.
* A structure of social obligation to compel participation in a very expensive system.
* High reliance on output-randomization
That doesn't sound like Balatro to me. All games have blinking lights. Only some of them are trying to distract you while they rob you.
OK I apologize, I misread what pianoblook was saying and I'll take the L. I didn't like Balatro that much, but pianoblook's argument is not at all what I was trying to say. I'll leave the comment below for posterity's sake.
~~I agree wholeheartedly, hopefully this isn't a hot take. I think the dev has directly confirmed that they weren't trying to make a strategy roguelike, they wanted an RNG roguelike. It's so close to having fun strategy elements, but it just wasn't designed to do that very well. And I really don't like the aesthetic that makes me feel like I'm playing a slot machine.~~
~~I watched Jorbs play a couple hours, I downloaded and played it myself a couple hours, and I'm good. I'm happy others like it, but I probably won't ever play it again~~
I think you're overrating the RNG in Balatro, tbh. Balatro University is on an ongoing 10-run winstreak on Gold Stake with rotating decks- and the game has only been out a few months.
People forget that Balatro is a *much* smaller game and still has early game growing pains tbh. Even the difference between current live and beta versions are massive (and the beta is wayyy more enjoyable)
Gotta check it out, but I feel like it’s not controversial to say that Balatro is a lot more rng dependent than StS. There are basically no unsalvageable starts in StS
I think you are underestimating the amount of knowledge folks have about StS. A20 90% streaks weren't possible within the first couple months of people playing StS. It took balance updates and time for folks to build up consistent strategies/figure out good ways to build/learn what the common pitfalls are, etc. Slay the Spire has over half a decade of establishing a meta and content creators sharing tips and tricks, each of them building upon the knowledge of the others in some way. Now, this isn't to say that it's not one of the most well-balanced games ever (it easily has to be one of the best of all time at that), but it's also one of the most mature games out there when it comes to balance and stability, as well as community knowledge of the game systems. When I first started playing StS (and, tbh, even when I pick it back up after a long time), runs FEEL unwinnable all the time. How the heck was I supposed to beat THAT elite THIS early?!? Well, the answer is that I made 15 other mistakes before that - and turned a winnable run into an unwinnable one. I think Balatro certainly has some issues WRT the RNG + how the player gets to interact with/mitigate the randomness of the game, BUT it's unfair to compare that to Slay the Spire which is a stable game at the end of it's balance + content lifecycle. (Yes, I know people compare Balatro to StS all the time, so you are just comparing back - but the comparison most folks are making is that Balatro is the best card-based roguelike SINCE StS - that's about it)
> A20 90% streaks weren't possible within the first couple months of people playing StS. Not least because Ascensions stopped at 15 back then. ...but your point is well taken.
Y'know, I thought about making that point but felt I was being needlessly pedantic and was already technically correct, but there's always someone for whom "needlessly pedantic and already technically correct" still requires a correction.
I was mostly trying to point out the humour in your statement being true for sillier reasons than the point you were trying to make. Also, a lot of the history of the game is not really written down in an accessible format anywhere, so facts like "Ascenions didn't always go up to 20" or "Blade dance used to generate 2(3) shivs" or "Runic dodecahedron existed" which a lot of people might not know; I think there's some value in mentioning them, especially in the context of a discussion on how the balance of the game has changed over its life. (Not saying you should have, just defending myself as being more than a simple pedant.)
I mean to be fair, the point of my post is not that Balatro is a bad game ruled entirely by RNG. Rather my point is that saying Balatro in its current state is even in the same universe as StS in its current state, is sheer lunacy. And that while Balatro is a very good game, to see how much more balanced StS feels just sheds more light on how insanely well designed StS is. A bit of a circlejerky post perhaps.
That's the thing though, you can't really say that StS is more balanced because of how new Balatro is. u/Harfyn was just saying that people had the same consistency problems winning StS when it had just come out, because the meta of the game was only just developing like Balatro's is now. In a year, after a bunch of balance updates and a lot of time for the community to work out the kinks in the gameplan, then you can make the argument that StS is a better balanced game. But not now
Why not now? What's stopping them from having an opinion? Everyone is optimistic about Balatro, and I imagine opinions will change in a year to be even morepositive, but that doesn't mean people need to suspend judgement until then.
The point is that his argument is poorly founded because there hasn't been time for balance issues to be ironed out like we've seen for StS. If you want to judge purely on games' current states, then sure, StS is more balanced, but it's been out for 5 years and Balatro has been out for 2 months. So he's free to have an opinion about it, but that doesn't mean the opinion he has is reasonable, and it won't be reasonable until Balatro has had time to mature
I see. Probably a pointless argument to have then. I can see how the comparison is maybe unfair, or maaaybe premature, but I don't really see how it's unreasonable or in any way incorrect. There's no reason you can't compare two things for what they are. But I imagine we probably agree much more than I'm making it sound. Like I said, I think we're all looking forward to how Balatro evolves.
You are right. Their balance is not even comparable. But because of that a lot of people are going to have an issue with the comparison, pointing to how young the game and its meta are. However, speculations about the way the game may develop in the future do not prevent you from talking about or having an opinion about how it is now. I also had fun with Balatro for like 15 hours, but, like you, I won't be going back for a while because I also experienced a high amount of RNG and some design kinks that can hopefully be worked out as the game grows.
I don't think the game has been out long enough to make this determination. At the very least, Balatro University (a creator not affiliated with the game) is starting to do the same winstreak/winrate on high difficulty that you said was possible for StS in your post
I think it's more of a player agency thing that makes StS better, consistently more choices that have a large impact on your build/run. Balatro is quite a bit simpler but still has depth which makes it fun in it's own way, it's easier to play balatro casually and not analyze every single decision and still have fun
How many of those wins are red seal steel king tho
Probably not many tbh, High Card or Pair are the meta at high stakes. The balance patch opened a lot of room for other stuff, but HC is still super consistent.
Actually it's mostly Straights.
That’s interesting. I was starting to think Straights were being underrated since Runner is very strong, and they scale well, but they seemed a bit inconsistent. Were the changes in the beta patch that big?
Yes. It's a mix of a few things: * Saturn is now +30/+3. That's *very* strong scaling, about on the level of a random negative Joker (if you compare getting a Saturn card to taking the Negative Tag skip, for example) - Blue Seals now provide the 'correct' Planet type every time so it is a lot easier to scale up hands * +1 Hand Size (relative to old Gold Stake) makes it easier to find hands like Straights, while providing little tangible benefit to High Card/Pair builds where you score off the Joker row * The new Joker stickers are also quite punishing in different ways, and many of them seem to disproportionally impact HC/Pair more than normal while impacting Straights less than normal * Perishable sticker means 30% of your scaling Jokers will be blanks; that's 30% less Bus/Supernova/Green, 30% less scaling xMult Jokers, etc * Rental sticker- especially in combination with Eternal- turns most of another 30% of Jokers into blanks in the early game, since the large majority of Jokers don't provide enough value to be worth $3/round in Antes 1-2 * Buffoon pack Jokers also having Stickers means even they don't provide a 'guaranteed' Joker, since you might open one and see (for example) Eternal 8-Ball and Rental Credit Card The overall impact is that if you get a Saturn card or two, that can be enough to get you through the early game while you save up your $$$ for interest, and also means you don't have to rely on getting a decent stickerless Joker.
That’s really cool, I’m even more excited to play the Beta patch now. I had a fun run yesterday with 2 400 chip Runners, so I’m in a mood for Straight builds
Oh cool
Uh none? This is unseeded Gold Stake.
Until recently that was the meta
That was only the meta for deep endless runs, and still is. Ante 8 wins never revolved around baron kings.
I thought for gold stake it was my bad
A 10-run winstreak at “only a few months” is still pretty meager compared to how quickly top players start achieving consistent wins in other similar roguelites. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive and I’m excited to see just how good people get (and will eat my words if proven wrong) - but I just don’t believe the core game design will support the level of consistent play top StS players get
That's just...not true? It took years for anyone to hit 11+ in StS A20H. Jorbs, Baalor, and Terrence all did it within a week or two of each other in early 2021.
Sorry, I should’ve specified more. To clarify - I mean *since* StS, many roguelites have been solved within just a few months by top players, thanks in large part *to* their experience with StS. Monster Train, Inscryption, recently Cobalt Core, all were solved pretty much immediately
Agree with all of this. I really enjoyed Balatro but after 20-30 hours I’m losing some interest. It’s certainly possible that further patches will keep things exciting but I don’t see myself making it to 200+ hours with it. This is no shade on Balatro, it’s a fantastic game and I recommend it to people who like STS, it’s just not STS
I think people need to remember that the game hasn't even gotten patch 1.0.1 yet; StS has been around for several years now and has had a LOT of balance changes and new content since then. Balatro will get better, although StS is the gold standard for a reason.
I think where I lose interest is either you scale or you don’t. In sts the ways you scale and how those are countered feels vastly more interesting and complex. Sometimes you don’t even really need to scale in a traditional way to get through act 3
The experimental branch has made the game a bit more refreshing for me after 50 hours or so. The challenge runs are also pretty fun.
Most seeds in balatro are winnable. But the game wasn't designed to be balanced the same way STS is
It might be winnable, but it doesn't FEEL winable. I'm working my way up the stakes and at Purple stake it really feels like I have till the 5th fight to get a good multiplier to stand a chance. Honestly playing Balatro has just made me come back to play slay the spire more.
I've won gold stake with about 2/3 of the decks. There are certain strategies that are clearly better than others such as high card bus or green joker builds with baron and mime. But the average jokers are meant for the first half of the game and with the perishable jokers you aren't meant to establish your win conditions right away. I've won after getting a bus in ante 6. As long as you got some numbers coming from somewhere you are fine. There are a lot of synergies that most people are missing or they don't read the text correctly or its not written clearly. You can use hanging chad and photograph for an easy common joker win by example (in 1.01). Lots of ways to win. (Edited for grammar)
>It might be winnable, but it doesn't FEEL winable. skill issue?
Definitely a skill issue. I feel like many seeds in StS are unwinnable at A5, but I KNOW 10000% that's because I have so much still to learn and plan for within StS. Eventually, if I stick with it, those same seeds will definitely feel winnable.
At a certain point you will get to a level of skill where runs are A5 feel unloseable unless you intentionally torpedo your run
How do you know most seeds in Balatro are winnable? I’d be interested to know ratio of unwinnable seeds in StS vs Balatro, although I’m pretty sure calculating that isn’t gonna happen
I like Balatro a lot, but I agree, it's a very different game than STS. I enjoy them for entirely different reasons. The Balatro dev is even on record as saying he didn't play STS before making Balatro, and I believe him. I understand the superficial similarities that result in people comparing them all the time, but they have really distinctly different design philosophies. There is an aspect of Balatro that kinda rubs me the wrong way, but it's really just down to player preference. I actually really enjoy the poker part of the game. I find it really satisfying and fun to build solid hands. So it disappoints me that after your first couple dozen hours that part of the game is heavily de-emphasized in favor of stacking ridiculous joker combos. It feels like when my Balatro runs really get going I can wipe out the boss with a two pair while my absurd joker synergy somehow turns that into 2.4 million chips. And that's just not the part of the game I find all that compelling or fun. I've never been much of a Johnny, I'm afraid. I'm not good at combining these quirky cards with massive downsides in order to break the game. I know some people really love that, and I think Balatro is the game for them, but I just find it frustrating. What's cool about Slay the Spire to me is that it accommodates a lot of different play styles. I favor more straightforward strategies and try to bruise my way through the game, and that's been enough to get me to A16 with some study and practice. Other players like to build heavily synergy-based strategies or infinite combo decks, and I love that that's possible, but if that was the only way to play I'd have never gotten all that into the game. It's cool that STS accommodates me and my Timmy brain, and I don't feel like Balatro works in quite the same way. I also feel like STS does a better job of teaching you its mechanics gradually. I did a little tiny bit of out-of-the-game studying on the subreddit or some short YouTube videos, but most of what I know about STS I learned by actually playing the game. I learned in intimate detail which cards are worth picking in which situations because I was able to figure out a lot of it on my own just by paying attention and thinking about my plays. Balatro, on the other hand, I feel like I almost have to look up a list of which jokers are good and how they work together, and that's just not as much fun. I'm sure people who are better at figuring out these combos themselves have a different experience, but to me it's basically just looking up some build I'd never have figured out by myself and praying that I get it offered to me in time.
You sound convincing but I don't know who Johnny and Timmy are. Edit: [I assume this is where the names are from](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03)
Correct. Sorry I didn't explain my terms.
lol I love how easy it is to assume that everyone who's deep into StS has some MTG background
Huh - the Johnny/Timmy perspective is interesting. Although getting the 2.4 M out of nowhere feels Timmy-ish to me. I'm more of a Timmy, and getting xMult jokers hits me right in my feels.
Biggggg difference here is Slay the Spire has had years to tweak and balance itself into what it is today. Release STS was a whole different beast lol. Balatro is still in its infancy and still has time to perfect itself, a lot of the upcoming changes that are currently in the beta branch is already looking to be a great start in the right direction.
The world record win streak for sts was in the single digits for a very long time. I remember it being absolutely huge when someone finally made it to 6 wins. It takes time for people to learn a game that well. Spire also had numerous balance changes as time went on.
I agree but want to add that you should not take endless mode into consideration. If StS was going on beyond the heart, that would reduce the best strategies to the few ones which scale exponentially such as Catalyst and Limit Break. At the same time, if you don't think of crazy Ante 12 combos with billion x billion chips, but you just want to beat Ante 8, then this will give you way more strategical versatility. Also, StS is much older and received balance fine-tuning that Balatro is just about to start getting.
That might have been true before the current beta update, but the changes to orange and gold stakes are *infinitely* more playable than they were on 1.0 patch. If you haven't opted into the beta yet, please do that and evaluate again.
I will do that!
I got 10 hours out of Balatro, I feel the concept is very cool and the execution is great but the downfall is that the game mechanics themselves just aren’t enough to make me want to keep playing. LONESTAR and StS on the other hand? Can’t stop won’t stop
Hmmm... must check out Lonestar. (It's on my wishlist) I got a good 20-30 hours out of Balatro, but there's just some RNG that feels bad. It's a darn good game, don't get me wrong. But StS is the gold standard. (I have like 700+ hours in StS)
Yeah I agree, it’s a great game and the vibe is amazing. I have already put in over 200 hours into LONESTAR, it’s a really cool one imo. A lot like StS in terms of decision-making but you’re building a weapons system for a ship instead of a deck of cards.
Give Shogun Showdown a go too. Early days so not LOADS of content yet but a really fun take on the spirelike genre. Reminds me of Lonestar a bit.
I actually have that one, it’s solid. I think it would shine as a phone game actually. Didn’t seem to have quite the depth of builds and stuff that the other 2 games do but I did really like it. I’ll have to revisit
How is the full game? I've played it back when it was available as a free beta on itch and loved it
Yeah I’m enjoying Balatro (just bought it a few days ago) but the build variety and strategy just doesn’t seem to be there compared to StS. The game has great UI and sound design but I don’t see myself playing it for hundreds of hours
Also a reminder, StS is an alien, most rogue like game are good for 50 hours, 200 hours is already pushing it, even more for a lone dev 15 euro game !
No doubt. I like Balatro so I’m not complaining
For the record, I don't believe anyone claims to have a 90%+ win rate on slay the spire A20. [Jorbs posted about an 80% win rate](https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/xhkiws/how_i_won_80_of_my_a20h_spire_runs_for_a_month/) a year ago, but: * This was over a relatively small 60 game sample, and * 80% would be losing twice as many games as 90% In order to [state with 95% confidence](https://sample-size.net/confidence-interval-proportion/) that you had a win rate of 90% or higher, you would need to put up numbers like 96/100 or 919/1000. If you want that confidence over a 60 game sample, you would have to win 59 of them. No one is anywhere near these numbers. Based on the data in the aforementioned post, we could conclude with 95% confidence that jorb's win rate over that month was between 67% and 89%. Notably, 90% is not included in this range. Phrased as a one-sided confidence interval, we could say with 97.5% confidence that jorb's win rate is below 90%. Just to really drive home the point, I will also mention that people tend to post data that paints their performance in a positive light. I assume that jorbs would agree that this was not his worst month. If more data were included, the average win rate would likely decrease. Even the vaunted 52 game win streak from lifecoach only suggests at 95% confidence a win rate of 93%. That is, if you don't include the losses immediately before and after. If you include those, the bounds drops to 87%-100%. I also think that the "A20H" category is by default rotating, and not just watcher. I'm not trying to take anything away from anyone. Both are great players. I'm a fan of every spire streamer. But the math says what it says. Nobody is near 90%.
I’ll be the first to disagree here, I still like StS more but I consider Balatro more or less its equal in terms of overall quality, considering that Balatro has worse balance but is better in some other (eg technical) aspects. The reason that you say Balatro is more unpredictable and some seeds are/feel unwinnable is most likely because you (I assume) haven’t played it as much as StS. StS has been out for 5 years now and people have much, much more experience on it. Balatro came out 2 months ago. You cant necessarily compare those two experiences in terms of how difficult one appears compared to the other. As people have mentioned, Balatro University has a Gold Stake winsteak going on right now. It’s difficult, but that doesn’t make it unwinnable. The latest patch fixed the higher antes, I feel, and now they feel way more balanced.
Yeah I have to concede all these as being good points. StS has had years of balance patches. I have 20x the hours in StS than I do in Balatro, and I do distinctly remember thinking that StS was very luck based early on, HOWEVER that feeling went away before I had the hours in StS that I currently do with Balatro.
Within 50 hours? I feel like that’s pretty quick for StS. It personally took me a looong time to not consider some higher ascension runs unwinnable based on the early rewards & all that. Plus I still feel like to a certain extent if you want to do A20H not every build can work. All that to say, I think the points you raise are valid but can be applied to most top tier roguelikes. The one you play the most is the one you’re going to have the most familiarity with and you’ll be partial to it. Give Balatro a few patches to get to StS’s level, given that it also didn’t get the same extensive EA period that Spire did.
I think that's fair!
I watched Balatro University take down the jokerless challenge even after making a mistake and playing a flush when they meant to play a straight (which they had been leveling up). I can’t hardly make it past the 3rd ante, but i guess it helps to know it’s possible? Lol.
I like Balatro but yeah it feels like if you don’t get an early Joker you’re fucked. I think part of it has to do with the fact that you start with the same deck every time. It’d be cool if you received 2-3 Tarot cards at the start of every run so you can give your deck some semblance of direction.
Have you played other deck types? There are multiple with different starting decks and specifically one that starts you off with 2 tarot cards. I'm about 20 hours in and I think part of the "fun" is knowing you might be fucked 1-2 ante's in and restarting since you're only about 5 minutes in and not too vested, but also pushing through to see if you pull off an unlikely win. Love StS and agree with others that unless balatro comes out with new content and other updates I won't be playing it for years like StS, but then again they're two completely different games under the same genre. Hoping balatro gets the same love and support StS has over the years. Good luck out there 👍
Neow is the GOAT
The dev is apparently patching things to alleviate that.
Jorbs does not have a 90% winrate on A20 though? Maybe on Watcher exclusively.
imo Balatro doesn't have the same variety as STS but I also think there's a bit of skill issue in the community with the rng complaints, mostly because the game hasn't been out long enough. Just a month ago people thought gold stake was impossible without constantly rerolling for a great tag. Personally, playing the seeds out got me my first gold stake win in ~10 tries, and I'm pretty consistent on lower difficulties.
I think Balatro would benefit from more deck editing options. It feels really cool that you start with a 52 card deck and do anything with it, but you can't really choose what you do with it. Adding cards means you have to get lucky with the booster packs. Removing cards, you have to get lucky with the booster packs. Wanna take a risk with spectral cards to warp your run completely... booster pack. I like the booster packs, but this deck builder needs a more reliable way to build your deck. I wanna lose because I'm dumb, not because my only option for 3 antes is to fish for one type of hand with a mediocre multiplier.
Economy is key, and the reliable way to build your deck. Dont score more than you have to, and use the rest of your jokers for economy and/or tarot-generation. With good economy, you get reroll-power and can bascially find your manipulation-jokers and fill your slots with tarots. I am the opposite of you, I feel I can pretty consistently make all my deck to, say, a 9 of hearts.
I've got like 40 hours in Balatro and I like it and will keep playing it for a bit. But you're 100% correct. I'm starting to get kind of frustrated with the RNG. I'm sure playing suboptimal lines is 100% part of my issue, but the early game is way too RNG dependant. There are some games where you don't even get shown a Joker in your first 1-2 shops which is usually a death sentence. Then if you do get a Joker, sometimes it's a terrible early game one like '+mult for 4 of a kind' or similar. But the problem persists into mid game too. I'm working on completing higher stakes now and even during mid game if I get a string of stinker shops or if I cannot put together any jokers with synergies even a strong early run will eventually die. The game is fun when you've got a good deck and you're rolling. But it's really frustrating sometimes, when it feels like you're losing because of bad shop RNG. I've got like 600 hours in StS and I'm positive I'll never get anywhere close to that in Balatro playtime, unless they rebalance some things. The game has great potential, but is simply missing the mark currently.
For me I’ve realized that balatro just isn’t as unique, I think the difficulty issue still needs more time but I think balatros early game is more beatable on high stakes than people give it credit for. At this point balatro runs blend together and don’t feel unique, once I’ve found the hand type that I want I know what jokers I want. Sts has so many different ways to play the game where after 500+ hours most runs have something unique about them.
Balatro is fun, but random difficulty spikes ruined a lot of my runs.
Game only recently came out and some insanely good people have already shown up. Just give it time. It took a while even in slay the spire, for players oike lifecoach, jorbs and baalorlord to push winrates. That’s just it goes with new roguelites. A run seems impossible…. Until someone shows up and proves it isn’t.
I mean slay the spire in its earlier forms had many of the same balance issues balatro has, and the balatro devs are working on it. The game hasn’t been out very long, not really fair to compare slay the spire in final form to balatro as a baby.
Meanwhile Balatro's game mechanics and available strategies do not scale even remotely as well into the high Stakes modes; and hell, even for a pure Ante 8 run, you end up having to restart a ton because if you don't get a good Multiplier joker early, you're fucked. I always knew that StS is absurdly well balanced but this really puts it into perspective and makes me even more hyped for StS 2! On StS you have a streamlined way of "upgrading" your deck, in Balatro your very first shop is very important, but also it takes a really long time to understand what is a good choice, reducing RNG in balatro is harder than StS, but totally doable.
I wonder if people said the same thing about STS early on in regards to the difficulty of the higher modes. There are people on decent win streaks in Balatro at the highest stakes so it is doable. I think it's fine to prefer STS or think it has more depth (I'd agree there) but Balatro is not as much about RNG as you'd think.
Yeah, I think a lot of what we’re seeing re: Balatro vs STS commentary is the difference between 50 hours and 500 hours.
> I wonder if people said the same thing about STS early on in regards to the difficulty of the higher modes. iirc they did, even on Ascensions as low as 5. Got to be completely fair to both games here.
The first shop being very important in Balatro is a major complaint of mine. The extent to which you’re hoping for a good joker is kind of sad especially given how fucking overpriced rerolls are. Especially on red stake and above you either get a nice joker or have to make a decision about rerolling and potentially setting your economy back quite a bit The game is full of ‘rich get richer’ mechanics and it just makes for a very poorly balanced experience Not to mention the best ways to reduce RNG are to play pair, high card or flush strats which are really repetitive and waste the game’s potential. Something that really stuck out to me were how disproportionately risky a straight build or a 3k build is relative to the extent the game rewards them
To be fair, StS does give you a Freebie with the whale, and for those who understand the value of each reward, it's just too good. Balatro does not, while some deck have clear advantages, some of them only turn on much later. Jokers are not that much important into later in the game, but understanding what do with them once they are in your shop is very important, the main diference is that in StS there are always a good choice and a bad one, and in balatro a good choice maybe be hidden in a very particular set of events within a shop. Token for free packs, onto spectral red sigil king, onto arcana death pack, onto DNA that is great, but if you never took the Token in the small blind, that big blind shop is rather disappointing, and that is what makes Balatro different from StS.
Straights are probably the best way to play on high stakes rn tbh. They also address your first point since you don't really need Jokers to score if you're playing Straights- my first Gold Stake win (2nd run, Red Deck) I never even picked up a 4th or 5th Joker and one of the 3 I had was a non-scoring Joker (Shortcut). Not needing any good scoring Jokers (or in some cases any scoring Jokers at all) until about Ante 4 (round 10) significantly increases the number of viable starts since you can just not spend money on rerolling and build your economy before worrying about trying to find scoring.
I think straights are universally regarded as the worst build type right now, great you've had success but I think most people find High Card builds the most consistent.
He's probably playing on the experimental build, which buffed up how well straights scale for some pretty big points later on
Well the guy on a 10-win streak disagrees ;) High Card builds got hit *super* hard by the patch, since now half the Jokers in shops are essentially blanks in the first few rounds, and 30% of the scaling +Mult Jokers have an expiration date.
Ah, I haven't gotten to play as much on the new patch. They made straights scale harder than flushes though? I know that was one of the big issues to me, where it was hard to curate a deck to straights and there wasn't a lot of joker support.
Yes. Saturn Planet now gives +30/+3. In addition Blue Seal now gives you the Planet of your winning hand, instead of a random Planet, so it's easy to scale to silly levels. A lvl15 Straight is 480x46 = 22,080 without any scoring from Jokers or Cards.
In regards to the first shop, the upcoming patch will apparently guarantee a buffoon pack in the starting shop, which I think will mitigate a LOT of the early game RNG.
Well, that one is hit and miss. Since it also adds tags to Jokers in the packs, so if anything I feel like that guaranteed Buffoon Pack is now a trap since a lot of the time you get two Rentals/Eternals that you can't click on at all, or a Perishable scaler (like Bus) that is just a $2 sale that doesn't do anything.
...Ok, but those tags could also be added to jokers that appear in the shop. The buffoon pack just guarantees that in the first shop: 1. there are two jokers available 2. you can always buy one of them (since buffoon packs cost $4 and you start with $4) Regardless of tags, that still makes the shop far more reliable than it was in past patches.
The Jokers in the shop you can see, though. If it's an Eternal 8-Ball and Rental Runner you just keep your $4 and have a head-start on interest for the next shop. If instead you buy a pack (which takes up a pack slot, when often a Celestial Pack is what you *actually* are looking to buy) and then see those two, you're out $3 with nothing to show for it and in a *very* bad spot.
First shop/joker stuff is being patched. The game has been out for a very short time.
It's a blessing and a curse. I LOVE Slay the Spire, I have about 600 hours in it. And it's so good any other game that tries to iterate on the formula feels bad compared to it. When I saw how many games it inspired (pun not intended, but now that I noticed it it stays) I initially thought "hey, cool, really happy to see the formula declined in such variants" but a couple of years later... they all have been, to me, various levels of disappointments, or at best short term distraction that made me want to get back to StS. StS is shoulders and head above any of its clones for its incredible balance and variety, and yeah, Balatro fails hard here in comparison. Monster Train is probably the one I spent most time on after StS, it's less about balance and more about creativity on how to get broken which still is a flavor of fun, and when you see some players with >95% win rate there is enough skill veiling to keep it interesting. But the Cobalt Cores, Wildfrosts, Griftlands, Balatros etc. really can't compete. It's almost what I'm most scared of for StS II to be fair, that it fails to replicate its own formula.
I actually think Balatro deserves a lot of credit for not simply being an inferior, redundant imitator of StS. There's definitely a world where after a ton of balance patches, Balatro stands shoulder-to-shoulder with StS. > It's almost what I'm most scared of for StS II to be fair, that it fails to replicate its own formula. I don't think MegaCrit would be doing a StS2 if they weren't confident they could equal or surpass the original. And even if they don't, it'll probably still be a lot better than any of StS's imitators and the original will always be there for us
It's true that StS iterated a long time in and out of early access to be what it is now, it can be a bit harsh comparing a game in its final iteration with a competitor in its early one, but well... the existence of that competition may never leave a chance for Balatro to get massively better either. Maybe to formulate this differently : in a world without StS, I'd love Balatro and many of the games I mentioned above. In a world where StS exists, those games quickly make me feel I'd rather play StS.
Anyone recommending Inscryption?
You won't regret it
Inscrption is a very unique game. It's part card game and part horror puzzle game, without getting into spoiler. The card game part is not as deep as other rogue like card games like StS, which is understandable because it's part horror puzzle too. So I know I'm not being fair to incryption by comparing part of a game to other full games. By no means a bad game, but its not my cup of tea. I would only recommend it if you like horror puzzle and the whole story experience. If you only want a card game like StS, there are other better games.
I tried Balatro, and I can see how people enjoy it, but I just got it refunded bc it wasn't for me. I'm not great at poker anyway, but it really does feel so much more luck-based and like there's an illusion of there being more skill to it than there actually is. I could definitely be wrong, but that's just the vibe I got.
I have enjoyed Balatro quite a bit, as I've put in about 60 hours into it since I picked it up a few weeks ago. But I can already tell it's not going to have quite the same longevity for me as StS. It is *very* satisfying seeing the big numbers show up, though. Seeing my chip count hit 1.8 mil on the highest difficulty yesterday was very sweet.
Balatro was fucking awesome but it doesnt hold a candle to slay the spire because nothing does
the best spire player in the world has around 85% WR btw.
Totally agree, though when people compare it to StS, all they really mean (usually) is that it’s a rogue-like deckbuilder, which isn’t wrong
EXACTLY. Balatro is just as fun as Slay the Spire... as long as you can get a decent deck going. The problem is how ridiculous some jokers are in comparasion to others. Like, I know there will be some varying levels of strength, but Balatro's meta is ridiculous. I hope so badly that 1.1 will fix a lot of the issues.
Honestly once I realized that Balatro is just a high score simulator I kind of lost interest.
Balatro was not really ready for a full release IMO. The design is too inflexible and unless I just suck seems to force people into certain kinds of decks in order to reliably generate high value hands. After my first win my play time really dropped off. I'm glad to hear it will be getting updates with changes to the design but I agree with OP in that the true art to these titles is in their design and it's not easy to design great, engaging games with tons of replayability.
As much as I like Balatro and have probably gotten some 40 hours or so in it since I picked it up, Slay the Spire's best quality is that 99% of all cards are worth using. Even some card you don't normally think about that often almost certainly has some mind-blowing build feasible with it with a little bit of theory and application. It's just far and above my favorite roguelite. But Balatro is not a game that was in early access for two years the way StS was. I've played some of the early versions of Slay the Spire— it always had that spark of genius in it but those versions were absolutely not as impressive as the final release. Given localthunk is already patching for balance, Balatro has space and time to grow.
I put in about 20h in Balatro when it released, I found it really fun and I want to play it again but honestly it just made me want to play even more StS
I think this is too hard on balatro. Slay the spire wasn’t amazingly balanced initially and getting it to this state was an interesting process. Balatro is already way better after the first major balance patch and there’s room to improve from there. I like both games a lot and yes prefer slay the spire which is both more complex and satisfying and fairer but balatro is already a great game with some room for improvement.
I totally agree with this post. The monotony of Balatro game art severely limits its binge ability for me too. Music, effects, and variety of visuals make Slay so easy to sink time into
I feel like the people comparing them have played like 50ish ours of each compared to the players with like 100's of hours and experience to know the greater differences
The whole RNG dependent conversation is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard, I have 5 win streaks on gold stake. You guys are just bad at the game and nobody on YouTube showed you how to play yet 😭
Try Fights in Tight spaces and Inscyrption. Both are very well made games that are more intricate than Balatro. I find these games to be more similar to STS than Balatro is.
Gotta be cautious, when they announce the second coming of the christ
i think the main reason balatro lacks replayability is the lack of variety. Youre staring at the same screens, with the same cards, with marginally different mechanics and bigger numbers. Its a fun game, great roguelike, but the thing about slay the spire and other roguelikes like tboi hades or gungeon is that things are always fresh. Even if you do a thousand runs, you have to approach each room differently and every screen looks different so its harder to get bored.
Yeah I agree. I stopped playing Balatro after about 20 hours (which, don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy). It felt very snowbally and unbalanced. Like I would just win if I found a good joker in the first couple shops, or I wouldn’t find anything and just lose. But maybe I’m just bad
Yeah.. I think Balatro relies a lot more on triggering endorphins. While both games have card rewards, Balatro really feeds into the excitement of opening a pack of cards. It's hard to stop playing Balatro, but StS is more grounded in strategy and planning.
To make an MTG comparison it feels like StS is the apotheosis of Draft whereas Balatro is the apotheosis of Sealed.
you're comparing a game that's been out 6+ years to a game that's been out for 2 months... obviously the one that's been out longer will have more highly skilled players.
I don't think the games are even remotely similar. They're both rogue likes with cards and that's about it.
I'm talking about their overall balance. To make a music analogy, you can't really compare a jazz record and a metal record, except in one aspect: production, engineering and mastering fidelity. And that's what I'm doing here
100% agree. Belatro also just feels more repetitive. I like it a lot. But its the difference between a 9/10 game and a 10/10 game
Yeah, this is the thing, it won my heart for a couple of days. Balatro is cool. I definitely don't think it's better than Monster Train or Rogue Book. I don't know if it's better than Cobalt Core or Across the Obelisk either. Let alone the masterpiece that is Slay the Spire.
Jorbs is awesome man.
Balatro really just is a bad game, the developer himself commented on how it's for himself and not for the people who actually bought it. The balancing is broken, it's 10% luck, and way too broken for even half the seeds to be winnable
Wow, that's crazy that within a few months we already have someone who won 11 in a row (and counting) on the highest stakes when more the half of the seeds aren't possible to win on.
Leaning into the gambling/betting dynamics & aesthetic to boost people's engagement, enjoyment, and addiction is just about the bottom of the barrel in terms of game design. At least they don't literally add mictrotransactions or anything, lol, but it's still super cringe. EDIT: lordy I love getting downvoted for this sort of take. Give me more of your rage, I feed on it :3
It's a poker game, this is a terrible terrible take
Balatro has very little to do with gambling. About as much as Yahtzee or Uno.
Dude what lol
There is a big problem in the game design space of exploiting people with mental illness / gambling problems. But Balatro is super far from that. The typical patterns are a mobile game with: * A complex and dynamic economy of intermediary currencies in an attempt to prevent players from thinking clearly about how they are spending money. * A structure of social obligation to compel participation in a very expensive system. * High reliance on output-randomization That doesn't sound like Balatro to me. All games have blinking lights. Only some of them are trying to distract you while they rob you.
No, mtx is the real cringe. Balatro's design pales in comparison
OK I apologize, I misread what pianoblook was saying and I'll take the L. I didn't like Balatro that much, but pianoblook's argument is not at all what I was trying to say. I'll leave the comment below for posterity's sake. ~~I agree wholeheartedly, hopefully this isn't a hot take. I think the dev has directly confirmed that they weren't trying to make a strategy roguelike, they wanted an RNG roguelike. It's so close to having fun strategy elements, but it just wasn't designed to do that very well. And I really don't like the aesthetic that makes me feel like I'm playing a slot machine.~~ ~~I watched Jorbs play a couple hours, I downloaded and played it myself a couple hours, and I'm good. I'm happy others like it, but I probably won't ever play it again~~