Random Dice

 Random Dice was one of my two Game of the Year of Quarantine Year games. I'm starting with general tips, then early co-op, then late co-op, then pvp.

Here's some tips on Random Dice. Save gems. You can occasionally buy a guaranteed legendary in the daily shop for either 40k gold or 500 gems. Do so. Any other resources go towards buying boards and upgrading dice and boards.

Eventually you'll want all your dice to class 12 for the critical modifier. 

The next section doesn't discuss any legendary dice. Thems more downer.

Early on in co-op your best bet is to try to run support as best you can. You may be tempted to use slow dice. Don't so. Rather, Lock is good but anything else becomes tedious until a boss wipes your board. 

The idea is that the decks that can hit the high waves - Yin-Yang, Combo, Sun+Moon - generally start out weak, so you'll want to focus on carrying the match until at least 9 and possibly 16 if you can. Good early support dice are Crack (ideally you'll only want one high-dot dice out), and Bounty (try to power them up before merging). Good support support dice are Mimic, Cracked Growth, Sacrifice (use this shit sparingly) and Mine. 

When making a deck focus on one, maybe two dice you want to try to spawn and power up (if it needs to be powered up,) with the other dice serving to buff or spawn more of them. Unless you've got SP to spare you'll generally want to go to power level two after the first boss, level three after the second and so on. Some dice should never be powered up, like Growth. Some dice should be powered up situationally, like Cracked Growth. Once you unlock a Growth Dice you'll almost always want one in your deck.

Standard strategy: fill your board. Don't merge, don't level up, just fill your board up and look at what your partner's doing. Depending on how fast the first boss dies your board will be within 10 SP of full. From here you can merge or power up accordingly. Don't merge if you can't afford to buy a replacement. Don't take a risk you can't afford to spend your way out of. If there's not an obvious move wait just wait just fuckin g wa it why are you spamming metas on wave 2 wy why. 

For offense your best starter dice are Wind and Iron. Wind is your best all-around damage dealer, especially buffed and powered up, until you start unlocking Rares. The next tier up you'll want to check out Gear, Switch, and Clone (trust me).

Some other noteworthy's:

Random Growth is great by itself but DO NOT pair it with other growth dice. 

Cracked Growth is great but will betray you. 

Energy seems like you could math it to be really OP but unless you're paired with a dedicated support partner it almost never escapes the damage curve. It' glorious when it works but there's way easier ways to play.

Now, on to Legendaries.

The two best legendaries are Joker and Moon and they're both useless by themselves. Moon is a hard mode dice because you have you worry about how many of its kind are on the board, on top of positioning and dot count. 

For co-op support you have quite a few options, the most popular being Assassin and Metastasis. 

metassist deck

Number 1 Tip: do very very very very little until either wave 40 or your partner give the thumbs up.

Corollary to Number 1 Tip But Extra Important: Don't merge any Assassins before you get the thumbs up DON'T goddamnit don't you fucking do it don't you throw that fucking assassin I didn't ask for you fucking scumbag I will tank us right the fuck right now befor eyou doom us at wave 23 you foul and godforsaken creature go the fuck home ANGRY EMOJI NO EMOJI

Metastasis: don't merge any before wave 11 unless you have to. At wave 11 try to only merge pinks. After Knight don't merge anything until 21, then merge pinks again and wait for the Lion debuff to pass. After 25 the Meta payout maxes, so merge at your discretion. Extra tip: If you merge near the end of a wave the next wave won't start until the SP dice turns the corner. You can use this to buy time, pretty much indefinitely, if you happy cloud Meta on the Blessing board and bring Mimic. There's a sentence for you.

When it comes to support: 

Combo Decks only need SP, 

Yin-Yang almost only needs Assassin, and 

Sun+Moon needs SP/time early, and assassin later AFTER THE THUMBS UP YOU UNNERSTAN ME. 

Other support options are Bubble, IIIIIIII, and Time. Time is the overall best support dice, but it's also the hardest to work and maintain.  

On to offense;

There are other decks that can be used to farm, and there are decks that are certainly more fun to play, I'm just focusing on the current top 3.

Yin-Yang is either the easiest or hardest meta to make work, depending on if you have the right deck or not, which is

with the order of the last two optional. The reason the order is important is because of the Blessing board, which is the one you want most, followed by Prism Shield or whatever they call it. If you have to sub a dice out I'd recommend Cracked and/or Switch as alternates. 

Essentially you want to make an L shape of YYs so that both self-buffs are active on one dice, and then grow the other 8 slots as high as you can. The damage scales with your total YY dot count, with a soft cap at 50 and hard cap at 70. You'll want to push for at least fifty, even if it means you lose a dice or two to the dreaded Seven Star Supplement, 70 is a lot more risky but can be done pretty reliably with the Blessing board.

Combo used to be a lot stronger, but it also used to be harder to play. In order to get to the higher waves with it you'll want to pair it with Moon, if you can, with Moon in the Sad Cloud slot, the plan being that you're trying to have three or maaaaaybe five out by late game.

Don't merge anything but Combo, unless it's a pink Metastasis and/or you have to. Combo count is way way way, way, way way, way WAY more important than dot count. You hear that Assassin deck players? Don't get me wrong there are great ass-spammers out there, and it's not exactly difficult to figure out, you just get like Class 16 players straight up shotgunning your growth dice to 7 by wave 9, and then buying like 1 dice every 3 waves, and then spamming the laugh emoji when the boss immediately deletes the single, one dot mimic he keeps summoning every three rounds like there's goddamn anything goddamn funny about this Anthony.

Sun+Moon involves having both buffs active at once, which is tricky. Solar activates with 1, 4 or 7 on the board; Moon with 3, 5, or 7. You'll also want a second attack dice, preferably something that does percentage damage, since Solar takes longer to ramp up the longer you go. Gun, Crack, Earthquake, and Holy Sword can all fill this role pretty reliably. 

With Gun or Sword, the idea is to have one 7-dot Solar Dice bordered by high-dot Moon Dice, and all of your other attackers being either Swords or Sniper Rifles (7-dot Gun dice, which is the only good Gun dice). With Crack, as always, you really only want one high-dot dice out. You don't want Blessing for this one, so go with Plasma Shield. Earthquake is new, idk yet.

That's kind of a basic overview of some of the Co-op stuff. There's a ton of stuff to experiment with and there's no "wrong" deck to play, I've just tried to outline the best strategies I've found for farming cards with randoms. 

UPDATE

Earthquake - Great dice but slows the game to a crawl. 

Sand Swamp - The new trait is fantastic for support

Energy - New meta. Metagame I mean. 

PvP

PvP is a lot more open to deck variety, but there are also about half a dozen decks that are just straight up better. Early on, though, you'll want to stick with simple: buffed Wind and Iron. Focus on filling your board, powering those up, then merging as needed. Slow-effect dice can help out, but unless you have Atomic and Speed Gun to go with them you'll usually just end up getting screwed by a boss.

Pretty much any attack dice can have a winning pvp deck built around it, even if it's just 'Shitty Dice, but Lunar buffed'.  Having said that

Assassin spam is scummy, but it's fast; you either win before the first boss or throw the flag.

Leon is an almost guaranteed win against certain decks.

Yin-Yang, with the Growths swapped for Sacrifice and Switch is another good 'win fast or die slow' deck, and more honorable than Assassin.

Bosses

AI 022 - Token of Spite

Token recognizing that the owner 

has traveled worlds to defeat others.

Simply carrying these tokens shows the bitterness 

of the grudges the holder has accumulated.

The Honorable Path

The sky is holy to kings and crows both.

Look here's this I'll try to add pictures later you know how it is

It could be debated that the Red Sign Soapstone is the real treasure hidden in the Painting. I suppose the choice comes down to whether we'd rather fight a gang of bonewheels or fight a gang of pissed off corvians with every advantage. That staircase tho.

The sky is fake in that world, of course; a canvas stained by long dry blood letting in dim and difuse twice-filtered moonlight from the world outside.

Can a Darkwraith, or something approximating it, retain its honor in pursuit of its ends?

In the first game Kaathe gives you the red eye orb: for invaders seeking a deeper Dark. The Orb is absent in the the second game, but the cracked eye orbs, sold by Gren and dropped by torturers, inform us that the eyes belonged to sinners that succumbed to dark.

So would this make the orb the eye of a sinner that DIDN'T succumb to dark or to someone that succumbed to dark but WASN'T a sinner?

The purpose to which the orbs are put to use in the second game was to spill blood -- madly and indiscriminately slaughtering strangers if that's your thing, in honorable duels of skill between the likeminded if that's your thing. Blood spilt that's the important thing.

Paint the world in blood.

In the third game we get the red sign from the non-hostile Finger of Rosaria, but we had to kill him to get it, which isn't exactly dishonorable, he seems perfectly happy to let you do it. He even stands at the edge of the 'arena' as you battle your way through the other fingers to Rosaria's door.

If we prove ourselves competent invaders, Ringfinger Leonhard will give us his name and the key to an uncracked orb. The orb itself id dropped by the Darkwraith in the Lothric dungeon, who seems to be either a training dummy for Lothric Red Knights or a voluntary beheading machine for same.

So in the first game the Orb requires you prove your competency to Kaathe (donate ten soft humanity to the covenant,) which itself requires you to murder Sif and Ingward and the Four Kings before interacting with Frampt. Which is more hoops than Leonhard.

Further: Kaathe wanted the orb to be used to spread Dark, while Leonhard wants us to bring Rosaria tongues, which is gross but probably w/e for most fingers that don't volunteer for wormhood, but wormhood seems to be a requirement for earning the covenant's trust. The tongues may just be a way of keeping score with the real goal to spread the infestation, which may be a way of opposing the Deep faction in a way similar to the Rot or Burn factions of Ariandel.
...
crows again.

Of course Leonhard doesn't give you the orb and the Darkwraith doesn't willingly give you his. But, again, with the wraith: whether you think of yourself as invading his cell or challenging him to a duel: does it matter so long as the painting gets painted?

Of course killing the Darkwraith involves killing someone that jumped through Kaathe's hoops and we have no idea how Kaathe would feel about that or how Leonhard got the key and whether his actions with Rosaria -- any of them -- are sanctioned by or turned a blind eye by to either Anor Londo or Lothric. They're tolerated Aldrich and the Archdeacons but we don't know to what degree.

It's interesting that McDonnel, head of Alrich's covenant, doesn't have anything like these items. Mechanically there is no reason we couldn't claim the orb from Mcdonnel's corpse along with covenant membership. The covenant functions by auto-summoning, which was associated with the Blades/Sentinels, among others, in the first two games.

So what role does honor play in all this?

The corvians of Ariamis could be thought of as guarding a body holding the Red Sign that is being given an approximation of a sky burial. Eyeballs and blood don't last long with sky burials, which is probably why Eileen likes them.

There aren't any crows specifically guarding Priscilla's bridge. But we find Jeremiah there. Jeremiah who is down below spilling Vlad Dracul levels of blood on the other side of the gate.

Ariamis Crows = burn, which is honorable
Jeremiah+ Priscilla = rot forever, out of spite, in the alternative

How solid does that sound?

Titchy Gren, the faceless, possibly-crazier-but-also-kinda-maybe-sane Bellkeeper puppet guy speaking for Nahr Alma sells the Soapstone for 5k souls, and sells limited cracked eyes for same. on NG+ he'll at least sell unlimited orbs but charges twice as much. He'll sell the Delicate String for 20k, which can be thought of as an auto-invasion item put to both honorable and dishonorable use. Summon invaders for greater glory and thereby protect the innocent v. set up gank squads; the choice is yours!

So velka values honor and Kaathe values results. Gren doesn't care but recognizes that you shouldn't make 'results' too easy for people, you want servants after all.

Leonhard doesn't care, even if it means potentially crossing Kaathe, Carim the Deacons et al. We don't know if Rosaria wants this or if wanting this is even a bad thing in this context, but the way Leonhard acts it feels like Leonhard's faction is unsanctioned. The worm faction of the fingers would seem to prefer honorable duels, probably are somehow tied to Lloyd's duels of law. 

Also, Patches spends his free time dressed like a Catarine trying to giant to death anyone that tries to access Rosaria but appears to be either neutral towards or friendly to the fingers as they ignore his presence. The difference, I imagine, has something to do with the thing in Rosaria's lap, as Patches was probably something like captain of the original princess guards before he turned undead and became the undead champion, if that's what his story is. I hope I wrote about that somewhere or it'll sound crazy. 

The Champion's Gravetender is guarding ashes, wait hold on, bones, not ashes, that hold a blue lion banner. These are the bones of the Undead Champion. Lapp leaves them for us. 

Gwyn rose to power as red oni. Gwyn trembled at Dark and switched to Blue oni, set up the firelinking and became lord of cinder. The Firstborn inherits the throne of the gods and goes full Bush Jr. with the military and disrespect of anything that wasn't strength of arms. 

The Firstborn, at the height of his madness, is cast down, stripped of name, title, and godhood, and cast out -- alternately, he befwiends the wittle dwagons and makes everyone big mad because they're so mean. The throne then falls to Gwynevere, who is as much the primal blue oni as Nameless is primal red. This is, I suspect, the period when Patches filled the role that Gwyndolin would like you to think Ornstein and Smough fill in the first game and that Targray fills in the second: faith in Father Gwyn and Sister Gwynevere.

He, Patches, turns undead, at some point but proves to be uniquely resistant to hollowing. Gwynevere leaves at some point. Patches remains but doesn't seem to have any favor from or faith in the Gwyndolin/Seathe regime by the time the Chosen Undead shows up. 

At some point he set up the original undead matches. The merit of an undead is number of deaths, so they should celebrate by beating the shit out of each other. This event appears to have happened a long time before the fall of Oolacile as the Gazebo is done in what I think of as pre-Fire Anor style, which is something like clay brick and wooden beams later upgraded with statues, devices, and additions, probably under Gwynevere's rule, as we see in Sen's Fortress.

Now, and I know this is gonna seem like a weird thing to close on,

Sword Master is the Last Princess Guard. But he'll help us kill the Dancer.

Staked

I grew up on what I suspect is an upheaved tomb from an old kingdom out in the desert. Estacado we called it. They, we. Doesn't matter. Staked, it meant. They like to translate it as 'palisaded' cuz it sounds nice. Walled off. Fortified. So of course we dug down and of course we found wondrous treasure and of course it was haunted and of course we didn't connect the dots

I spent a lot of time, alone, wandering around in that desert. I was a weird kid, probably. Huck Finn of the High Wastes. I can say that, it was somebody else.

You'd find pits, out there in all that flat. Not big pits, ten meters across, three deep, maybe, but I was shorter then. 

Some had cars, some were dumps, some were camps, some recent but were never occupied when I stumbled across them. Worn semi-truck tires and broken shopping carts and bench seats weathered to rusty skeleton chairs and spent fluorescent tubing and rusted pipes and withered blankets rotting on mesquite bushes and dead grass.

They cleaned it up, at some point, at least that little stretch prowled by me and my bicycle while Reagan won us the war. There are hotels, new ones with logos you'd recognize, slowly succumbing to the same curse that everything else is slowly succumbing to.

I went back, see, when I started to remember.

As near as I can tell when I was 25 something happened, probably a drug overdose, led to me forgetting everything. I still have almost no memories from the ages 23 to 27, when I woke up in a homeless shelter in south texas with a court appearance in two days and not so much as a social security card to my name. They only let me in the shelter because the weekend manager recognized me from 12 step meetings I had apparently attended at some point. I attended a lot of 12 step meetings for the next few years, got in touch with my family, and was able to travel back home for a few holidays.

They, family, mostly all died over the course of the next few years from the curse I was somehow able to break at the proverbial last minute but which left me with quite a mystery to solve as far as how I happened or how I survived or how I will, hopefully, continue to with all these goddamn ghosts.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.