Combat Deck - No Need to Stack

I love the combat deck and I think it is one of the biggest strengths of the game. The one thing I find very complicated and complex is the idea of stacking glyphs when I get multiples. In the middle of battle, I have to keep my eye on the combat bar so I can stack similar glyphs just to get to the more powerful version.

I would prefer that mechanic to be dropped. When a glyph appears in the combat bar, I should be able to immediately press and hold the glyph to power it up just as I would do if it was locked. Having to stack just seems needlessly complex and actually incentivizes me to stick with locked glyphs and bypass the strength of the combat deck.

--Edit: In case I am using the wrong term, stacking to me is when you wait till you get two of the same glyph in your combat hotbar, and you drag one onto the other to get a more powerful version of that glyph. To get to level 5 of the glyph, you have to wait around for the glyphs to appear.

 

That still wouldn't be as effective as stacking. The great part about mastering stacking is you don't have to charge the skills. Forcing us all to do that would remove strategy and lots of power from those of us that already stack like it's second nature. Also certain skills like the bard skills aren't really possible to charge.

Have you tried different methods? It took me countless different setups before I found the one that I use now.

 

Get rid of the stacking and you also get rid of the combos ... Just sayin'

 

This is a video of me showing one of the ways to stacking.

Some abilities take so long to charge, that stacking is the only reasonable way to increase their power, such as bard skills.

Dr L on YouTube also showcases different ways to use a dynamic deck.

One thing I can guarantee you, dynamic decks are far more powerful than locked decks, and once you figure it out, it's hard to go back!

 

I love how the dynamic deck works in the game, but we must agree that there's no such thing as the real option to play locked glyphs. It's just substantially more effective to use a dynamic deck over a locked one. We can discuss all day long whether or not a more complex and intricate way of playing should be that more powerful than "regular" play.
A good way to incentivize glyph chargers would be by adding a skill in Focus tree to boost auto attack power while charging locked glyphs or something like that, so at least we don't feel the charge time is totally wasted.

 

I am really not understanding. On a locked glyph, to get level 5 of a glyph I just have to hold my mouse button down. On an unlocked glyph, I have to wait till I get five of the same glyph. I don't see how that is better.

 

Showing the actual deck you are using and the stacked glyphs in the deck would be helpful information for people trying to understand this concept.

 

Not even close, also, that was Bard 'pre-nerf' when one nerf happened to Atonal Aria, I don't think I could do LB's Castle this way again without being able to hit Atonal Aria's full damage without the Cover debuff.

Like Barugon said, you can stack multiple glyphs at a time, in that video, I am stacking 3 different abilities at the same time, and while I am casting, I am re-stacking immediately. Another up-side is that fizzling only misses the cast, it does not use up your stack, unlike Charging which will force you to re-charge it. There are also draw speed modifiers such as Spellbinders stance, Chaotic Feedback and Light armor specializations upgrade to flurry, which will speed up the speed at which you get your glyphs a lot!

 

Wow ! Don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who used a Spec for Light Armor..... Enlighten me, M'Lady... @Violet Ronso

 

With pleasure, Light armor spec is actually my favorite spec in the game!

The first really big thing with LA spec is the draw speed modifier from flurry. When using dynamic decks, this means you can draw glyphs at super speed, generally so fast that with 3x wicked caster gems, it acts as a slightly l safer but weaker version on the Chaotic feedback spam deck. On a deck with stacking, you can generally have your glyphs restacked within 2 seconds of casting them, meanwhile on a spam deck you can use 2 weapon skills per second or more!

Another huge benefit is the Evasion perk. This isn't on the tooltip, but Evasion gains even more critical whatever name it gives, this means crit will deal that much less damage, I can generally get it up to around 70% reduction, which is huge. 6 stack that before most encounters, and it should last you a while and make your defense quite good. Paired with a shield, critical hits against you become an afterthought.

Then you have dodge that gets its big buff for longer, 4 seconds at 80 spec, 5 seconds at 120 spec, that is huge, I dodge a ton thanks to it.

If you use charged decks, I would not recommend Light armor spec though, as the biggest buff becomes pointless.

 

Just wanted to mention, the mind lock skill is a must when stacking. It allows you to hold the stacks indefinitely as long as you recast it on time.

One of my favorite stacking techniques is I set up the glyphs similar to in Violet Ronso's video. I'll use my bard/tamer as example - I will stack the bard abilities up to 6 and keep them running consistently. Then i have another deck, that's almost a duplicate of that deck, but it will have additional abilities. With all bard abilities stacked and loaded at 6, I can jump to the alternate deck that has all my healing spells that pop up in the same box as where Ronso has m3 in that video. The 6 stacks of bard will stay locked in place but I can spam all my healing spells whenever I'm taking too much damage. It allows the pet to keep killing and I can run for cover and heal up. Then when I need to recast my bard skills I jump back to the original deck so that the healing spells won't get in the way of my stacking. It's a lot of fun and can be tough to manage at first, but I can almost clear LBs invasion completely unbuffed with no food. I can make it all the way to the last wave unbuffed using that method. Fully buffed, I can clear everything without any trouble at all.

In other circumstances, if I'm looking for more dps I switch to a deck with more attacks instead of heal spells. Tons of possibilities and different setups to experiment with.

 

The main benefit is that there is no execution time to stacking, so you only get that delay when you activate the skill, whereas when you charge, the execution time is applied to every glyph added to your stack. Charging works pretty well for skills that have short execution times, but it isn't even an option for things with really long execution times like some bard songs.

Also, another minor benefit of stacking is that you can stack at some times when you can't do anything else, like when executing a skill or harvesting.

I agree with you that it's hard to manage some convoluted stacking scheme on a hotbar while also paying attention to what's going on around you, but I think there's plenty of viable ways to play that don't require doing any of that, so I think it's fine.

 

a Long time ago, we did not have the ability to 'charge' skills. Back then, stacking was the only way to go. Some of us (or me, if i talk for myself) never stopped stacking when charging skills where introduced. Many Many... Many... Many moons later . It's really second nature for me to stack skills. I think it's one of the best things of SOTA and AFAIK it's an very unique way of deck-work in games.

Pure stacking/hybrid stacking works like a charm, takes some time to master.

My best advice is, ask others how they run their 'stacking setups', learn the 'tech' behind it, add your own sauce and enjoy the 'gained power' from stacking.

How i run my decks mostly:
I am left handed, i have remapped all 0 to 9 to my numpad, my right hand is always sitting on my numpad and that is how i stack, hella fast (i think most of us have a calcularor in their mind-muscle, in my case, it's also my deck. Feels extremely natural running the stacking this way)

I've seen others use a usb numpad to do the same, but for right hand. Seen allot of 'crazy wierd' remaps but those peeps all made stacking work. Heck.. even one of our guildmembers is half blind and hybrid-stacks 'with ease'. it all boils down to: make a config what works for you, understand how the tech works behind running a smooth stacking deck (it's more then just throwing enough glyphs in) and practice, practice, practice!

Some great videos on youtube on stacking-decks BTW. I believe @Coswald_Dirthmire did a whole 'series' on it.

Probebly enough 'stackers' around who would love to show you/record a video/stream it etc.

Vero

 

I also am one such who hasn't mastered stacking and probably never will.
Instead, I'm a skill spammer. My favorite setup is a deck with 3 dynamic slots. I dump all attacks I want to use in those 3 slots and mix in some defensive ones in the third. In simple fights I spam skills mainly from slot 1 and 2 and in more difficult fights I spam mainly from slot 2 and 3. It's not foolproof, but it works for me
The main setback is that I need more focus than I would if I could stack, but that's ok. I'm not going to be the best fighter in Novia, but I have fun and that's what counts!

 

I think any game would want their action to be fast and furious so that you can't just sit back and wait on glyphs. Spamming should be the preferred method because it means your action is intense and not boring. I too pick like my top five glyphs in terms of damage and lock those to the bar. Then I might set the rest of my skills in the rotation of three slots. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the glyph and combat deck system. I just don't want to have to sit around waiting on five of the same glyph to populate when I should just be able to hold down on the one glyph and power it up. If I am watching the action, I could miss the glyph. If I am watching the glyphs, I am missing the action.

 

That's the cool thing about the combat system in SOTA, you want to do what you prefer and you make it work, perefect! others do what they want to do and make it work, pefect!

 

I totally agree, I love the dynamic stacking system and all that it opens up. It's one of my favourite parts of the game as well and that's coming from someone who has made builds specifically designed to use fully locked decks.

The only thing I have to mention is that the truly amazing series of videos made on dynamic deck building were created by Mimner, who goes by Dr L on twitch and youtube. Here's a link to what may well be my favourite SotA resource ever: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkAe0QV2N1GrEDLL6HZ_JlurnYnj3hKa4

 

@FrostII I forgot a super important part to this!!! The other great thing about this whole kit is you can use Defensive stance with Flurry, so your defensive buffs (Such as Evasion) are even stronger, while not losing any of your offensive power!

 

I've put my hotbar on the top of my screen, under the compass. Doing this allows me to look at my hotbar (a little) while still seeing very well the rest of the screen, much better than looking down at the hotbar.

With a deck setup correctly, you can actually not even look at your hotbar after the initial setup because if you stack "correctly"* you will use one glyph, stack it back up (FAST AND FURIOUS STYLE if you use draw speed modifiers, which you should), and then use another one, so in my case, I use glyph 1, spam M3 + 1 to stack it back up, cast 2, spam M3 + 2 to stack it back up, etc. In my new build (pure water mage), my main damage ability is Ice arrow, so what I did was make a deck with W and T (or 3 and 4 for the default keybinds) being ONLY dynamic ice arrow glyphs (6 times), I then have a few stacked glyphs like Ice Field, Soothing Rain, Melody of Mending or something else on my usual stack slots. When I am fighting, I release a 6 stack ice arrow, spam W+T to stack it up to 5 (takes a second or so), cast a 5 stack, restack in a second or so, cast a 4 stack, etc. This allows me not only to spam cast my ice arrow, but spam cast it fully stacked/charged, much faster than if I used them locked, because locked I would : Hold to charge for 3-4 seconds, cast, hold to charge for 2.5-3.5 seconds, cast, etc. Dynamic decks CAN be very very fast, fast and furious style even if you are stacking, you just need to learn, and you have many masters of the art here to help you with any question you got on how to build YOUR dynamic deck.

Also, here is The Playlist from Dr. L (or Mimner) that explains the different styles of dynamic decks you can use and then modify to your liking.

 

There are a number of features that make dynamic incredibly more powerful than locked deck. Amongst them are:
1) you don't increase next glyphs cooldown after using skills/spells (this enables for non stacked fast spamming, as in dynamic cooldown is always minimum);
2) no glyph limit, you can cast two 5-stacks in a row (although must have a bit of luck with the glyph draw) while it's impossible to do two 5-stacks in a row with locked deck, as it will temporarily block the usage of one stack fornthe cooldown period;
3) combining more than one skill at a time, so you can unleash a succession of more-than-one-stack easily;
4) can use manual/charged attacks while stacking.

The combination of these capabilities culminates in a way higher rate of attacks per minute (both regular and glyphs) because you minimize skill usage time, cooldown and down time.

I never really measured the difference in DPS between locked and dynamic decks, but I believe dynamic will roughly double locked deck's DPS.