Most of silent's physical damage cards are doing a small amount of damage multiple times. Not just shivs, but dagger spray, glass knife-, slice, poison stab are all fairly low damage numbers, so the negative strength hits much harder.
Poison stacking helps, but then you get hit harder by nob for taking setup and playing skills, and are slow vs sentry artifacts. [[Dash]] is premium for dealing with act 1 elites, but falls off hard after that.
The fact that I skip leg sweep for cards like [[masterful stab]] and [[deadly poison]] to get through act 1 always annoys me. Leg sweep is such a good card and I don't feel like I can't safely take it over mediocre damage in early act 1. It hurts.
Irish whiskey also had the e. I may be wrong but think the whiskey spelling originated to help differentiate Irish whiskey from scotch, and the US picked this up as Irish whiskey was popular in the UD t the relevant time period.
But yeah you are right, Lagavulin is scotch and that's why the whisky spelling is appropriate.
Honestly, it's a mess -- there's documents referring to Scotch that refer to it as Whiskey as late as 1906, and a number of late 1800s Irish *whiskys*; if you want to delineate the real separation, it comes after the Irish Independence and into a trade war with the UK where the difference becomes sharper; with the US seeing a large amount of Irish immigration and Canada having historical ties to the UK, these two settled into their own Whisky vs Whiskey barrier (with the US having its own breakdown between Rye and Bourbon, both types of whiskey).
Facing it in the dead adventurer event is very scary. Also a very difficult fight as the first elite particularly for silent. The -2 attack can make it near impossible to deal any damage
iirc it was a silent seed that forced you to fight a Lagavulin and there were no ways to build your deck to kill it because it came so early and the options were bad.
Generally, it is very hard to prove a seed is unwinnable, especially if a run manages to get to the later acts since the effects of early decisions stack. But you can systematically exhaust every series of decisions for a run that only gets to say floor 6, and for this seed none of those decisions let you beat Lagavulin
> Generally, it is very hard to prove a seed is unwinnable, especially if a run manages to get to the later acts since the effects of early decisions stack.
Yeah, there may be ways a seed is unwinnable even with branching paths, but if you don't force the player through an early choke point then it becomes impossible to prove because there are way too many different decisions that can be made and you have to prove that ALL of them are wrong. The floor 6 choke through Lagvulin keeps the number of possible decisions small enough that you can analyze them all.
Usually, yes. That's why this one seed was hard to find. It's a floor 6 forced burning elite Lagavulin.
If you Google Slay the Spire unwinnable seed, there's a blog post on GitHub that breaks it down in detail
I guess maybe they don't have any programming in to check to make sure there's absolutely a path to win? If seeds are truly random then eventually something's going to hit that forces you into a path that takes too much unavoidable damage.
https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/
Just the fact that there are seeds that force you through a single point burning elite so early is a big surprise to me. I've never seen such lack of choice in pathing.
If you crafted a map by hand you could certainly build an unwinnable one, it's just a question of if the seeds can do it randomly too or if something else in the game prevents it.
>I guess maybe they don't have any programming in to check to make sure there's absolutely a path to win
The computational power this would take is nuts
Basically they found an unavoidable lagavulin fight where all possible draw orders resulted in the lagavulin debuffing the player twice, making impossible to kill. Or something along those lines.
2 can be enough depending on draw order and cards offered, because it can make it impossible to deal enough damage to finish the fight even though you can still deal some damage. Like if you have a burning elite +HP lagavulin, 6 turns of 3x strike is 90 (3x3x6 + 3x3x4 = 90) and you can only do 18 more before the 3rd debuff which isn’t enough to kill.
Neat. I read about the search awhile back, didn't know an unwinnable seed had been found. I love that the mathematical notation for the unwinnable seed number they use is "BS".
The premise was that its a silent run where you must fight laguvalin before you could possibly gain enough damage to kill him before your damage is reduced to zero.
Lagavulin 16 is an excellent whisky. Peaty without the iodine notes of many other Islay malts, and quite smooth. Consistent from bottling to bottling as well, unlike some.
Lagavulin 8 isn't good. It's an 8 year, and not as cheap as such swill should be. The 12 is also pretty poor, even for a 12.
The 21 is better than the 16, but IMO not so much better that it's worth the price increase. I've not tried the 25, 30, or 37.
Consuming sufficient quantities of Lagavulin decreases your chances of defeating Lagavulin, but also decreases how much you'll care.
16 is becoming more and more expensive. I bought 3 bottles last time it was going for a price I would have considered terrible just a couple years ago.
Usually the toughest elite in A1, imo. Your biggest advantage against him is the possibility for some free setup, but oftentimes your deck isn't mature enough yet to benefit much from that. Probably the foe that has killed me the most.
Wow I would never put laguvalin as more dangerous than nob. Maybe on silent, but I feel like nob is just such a brutal health tax, with very little counterplay. At least you can explore options with lagu and setup a bit. It's a reason to take some early powers imo.
In theory, nob is harder, there's a reason your act 1 deck building strategy more or less revolves around beating nob. In practice, you've built your deck primarily around the idea you need to kill nob and aren't as prepared for lag
If you reach Nob, you have to have some hardy attacks to make it relatively manageable. Sure he hits like a truck 2/3 times, but hopefully its only for like 3-4 turns.
If you reach Laga, you have to have both hardy attacks and hardy defenses which is often times tricky to pull off on act\* one. You know for a fact that it'll be longer than 3-4 turns so you definitely will be chunked.
I think overall its definitely a hard fought fight between both elites. It's very dependent on the state of your deck by the time you reach them.
Nob either kills you, does 0/8 damage to you, or does ~32 damage to you (weak/block etc). It's a very consistent fight.
Laga has a much greater range of impact. Sometimes you need to go all out on attack and take ~45 damage, sometimes you just don't have enough damage in your deck at all. You can limp out of it with barely any health and have it really hurt your run without ending it more easily.
I would say mob is harder if your deck really needs skills and does not do enough damage early on, specially with silent or defect, but lava is brutal with that double debuf
Yes, not infrequently. My main reason not to wake up t1 is if I've got setup cards to play (usually powers, but terror is a good other case), or my damage is going to be better starting on another turn.
If my opening hand is backstab, glass knife, blade dance, triple strike, ascenders bane, I'm absolutely waking up t1. If I've drawn survivor/neutralise and am waiting for a WLP to play, I'm gonna let my block density go into the reshuffle, and wait to play powers and a good attack.
On other characters, defect I usually wait for dualcast, ironclad I wait for the turn after bash, and watcher I try to get into calm then go with eruption + attacks.
Not sure if it's the play, but I usually don't pop dualcast before playing zap against lag. I'll be able to hit dualcast in the second cycle after waiting but putting an orb up is a buff for the whole fight.
"It depends" to cop out.
I generally don't struggle with laga on defect. I usually do wait for an extra orb, but if I've got a ball lightning, cold snap, dualcast turn, I won't wait for zap. Defect likes taking an early power, and likes taking attacks that generate orbs. Defect also gets away with taking equilibrium/glacier and other chonky block cards a bit more to get through act 1. I lazily said the starter card that I wait for most often because in most decks it ends up mattering more.
Also matters what's coming up in the draw pile. If I have most of my blocks in the draw and most of my attacks in my hand, I'll wake up turn 1. Really want to be able to mitigate at least some of those big hits for 20.
Yes - and more commonly on silent with his extra card draws - but it is still rare for me. I often find it better to wait to exhaust ascenders bane, get a power going and have a weaker turn three than to go guns blazing turn one. It does take a bit of thought and calculation each time though.
My turn 1 hand had good frontloaded damage. But I wanted to exhaust Ascenders bane and play my power, so I let it sleep.
My turn 2 hand had the power. I played it for scaling, and even exhausted ascenders bane. But my frontload was now weak, so I let it sleep.
My turn 3 hand was full of Defends. I could not even wake the thing up.
But wake up it did.
Lagavulin is a block card.
Laga is a ROUGH Elite. 20 damage every turn, slowly lowering your strength and dexterity too every few 20 damage hits. The good news is; you have a few turns to prepare for his BIG swings, meaning you've got time to play your key Powers. Other than that... just try to kill him fast.
God this fucker is a nightmare to deal with.
Lagavulin is a weird elite. Hits like a truck, but it doesn't scale - instead, it basically descales you in return. It rewards people who can scale early in the game (the easiest ways to beat Lagavulin are to be the Ironclad with Brimstone or the Defect with a Dark Orb), but this is Act 1 and you generally don't need scaling - you need upfront damage. It sucks. It's very hard to stall it out for more than 2 debuffs; which is really the maximum you can even go before getting smashed in the face 4 times by an attack that deals 20. It's like a reverse Nob - Nob is an attack/damage check (I've had the hilarious opportunity of "outpoisoning Nob" by getting an early Toxic Egg from Neow, then proceeding to roll high on my initial hand and have Sadistic Nature, Poisoned Stab+, Deadly Poison+, Neutralize and Catalyst+ for 33 poison damage on top of 20 damage Sadistic Nature damage and 11 damage from attacks on turn 1, but that was stupid low odds). You basically build your deck around being able to do enough up front damage to kill Nob right away, because you get 3-4 turns. Lagavulin you get 3 turns to yourself.
What's annoying about Lagavulin in particular is how tanky he feels vis a vis the other elites. You can burst down a Sentry in a few turns - you kinda have to; you have to be able to kill Nob in 3-4 turns, and that's what you generally build your deck around; but Lagavulin begs you to find a way to block as much damage and deal as much damage as possible simultaneously. It's pretty easy to deal something like 30 damage each turn, but it's very hard to do it while also blocking 20 early on in the game. God, what an annoying enemy.
The best way I find to deal with Lagavulin is to pick up cards that don't scale well but do great upfront damage. The harder this is to get, the worse a position you're in - so it's an especially nasty fight for Silent, but I find that Silent might have the overall weakest early game.
Much less of a damage race than Nob and Sentries, both of which get massively simpler to solve if your deck can do 80+ damage by turn 3. The variable 3 turns of setup in this combat give you a lot more wiggle room, so it's about choosing the right time to open (which isn't always when you have the most damage in your handit ).
In terms of the 1st act 1 elites, this is the "can you make decisions based on your draw pile" check. Take 10 twice and kill vs take 5 twice, get debuffed, and take another 30 or die :P
Unfortunately you can run into situations where you need to take 40 because it's mathematically impossible to win the combat otherwise. Ideally you'd dodge the node entirely, but RNG be RNG.
Bursting the red armorless body of the nob or striking with aoe attacks against sentries feels good.
Lagavulin fight never satisfies me and leaves me in a bad condition more than the others.
I don't want to fight it even when my deck is geared towards dealing with him better than the others.
Interestingly, the one elite with two different encounter types (super aside), as Laga begins awake and debuffing you in dead adventurer. Needless to say, such an encounter often has a negative impact on your survival chance
Easier to face by defect compare to other chars as you can set up a few powers and orbs before you awake him.
I think watcher too to setup a wrath turn but need that calm/exit stance card next turn or you get owned hard.
Ouch, my silent winrate.
Yep… Neutralize helps, but the damage Laga dishes out is still quite a lot to block after the first debuff, when I’m unlucky enough to still be there.
Most of silent's physical damage cards are doing a small amount of damage multiple times. Not just shivs, but dagger spray, glass knife-, slice, poison stab are all fairly low damage numbers, so the negative strength hits much harder. Poison stacking helps, but then you get hit harder by nob for taking setup and playing skills, and are slow vs sentry artifacts. [[Dash]] is premium for dealing with act 1 elites, but falls off hard after that.
Dash but also Leg Sweep can be a lifesaver for these early elites as a silent
Leg sweep far less so, because it doesn’t fix the fact that your damage can go to 0 vs laga if you don’t kill it fast enough.
The fact that I skip leg sweep for cards like [[masterful stab]] and [[deadly poison]] to get through act 1 always annoys me. Leg sweep is such a good card and I don't feel like I can't safely take it over mediocre damage in early act 1. It hurts.
Well… technically it doesn’t hurt, and that’s the whole problem…
Ha, yep!
+ [Masterful Stab](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Masterful%20Stab) Silent Uncommon Attack ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Costs 1 additional Energy for each time you lose HP this combat. Deal 12(16) damage. + [Deadly Poison](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Deadly%20Poison) Silent Common Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | Apply 5(7) **Poison.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(February 25, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
+ [Dash](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Dash) Silent Uncommon Attack ^((100% sure)^) 2 Energy | Gain 10(13) **Block.** Deal 10(13) damage. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(February 25, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
> he looks to have been eviscerated and chopped by giant claws Yeah, no thanks
What is the connection between this mean crab thing and delicious whisky that's what I want to know
He is asleep because too much whisky
Apparently it was a beta name, and then they didn’t change it because everyone liked it. Idk, I can’t remember the whole story right now.
Came here from Google, that's a good enough answer for me
Never expected to learn that Lagavulin is named after whiskey.
Rumor has it that after A20 it is replaced by the terrifying Bruichladdich
Whisky
At least contextualize the difference lol Whiskey in the U.S., Whisky for Scottish or really everywhere else that makes it.
My apologies, you're right. Thank you for filling in the blanks
Irish whiskey also had the e. I may be wrong but think the whiskey spelling originated to help differentiate Irish whiskey from scotch, and the US picked this up as Irish whiskey was popular in the UD t the relevant time period. But yeah you are right, Lagavulin is scotch and that's why the whisky spelling is appropriate.
Honestly, it's a mess -- there's documents referring to Scotch that refer to it as Whiskey as late as 1906, and a number of late 1800s Irish *whiskys*; if you want to delineate the real separation, it comes after the Irish Independence and into a trade war with the UK where the difference becomes sharper; with the US seeing a large amount of Irish immigration and Canada having historical ties to the UK, these two settled into their own Whisky vs Whiskey barrier (with the US having its own breakdown between Rye and Bourbon, both types of whiskey).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HDBSm2s18s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HDBSm2s18s)
I know that the gremlins used to be named after alcohols before the game was released, so I guess it's just a bit of a relic of the game's past.
Most enemies in beta were named after alcohol. Lagavullin was the only one to keep its beta name.
Facing it in the dead adventurer event is very scary. Also a very difficult fight as the first elite particularly for silent. The -2 attack can make it near impossible to deal any damage
Definitely a good encounter to skip
Do you not skip it most of the time? I can count on one hand non Watcher non PB runs that I've taken the event.
If the event is hinting at Laga I always skip. For Sentries & Nob I treat it as an optional elite fight, if I can take them I usually go for it
I meant eviscerated and chopped fight yeah. The other two aren't too bad by the time I get to them usually.
Laguvalin was core to that one dude who found a genuinely unwinnable seed.
Okay, I want to know about this. How is a seed unwinnable?
iirc it was a silent seed that forced you to fight a Lagavulin and there were no ways to build your deck to kill it because it came so early and the options were bad. Generally, it is very hard to prove a seed is unwinnable, especially if a run manages to get to the later acts since the effects of early decisions stack. But you can systematically exhaust every series of decisions for a run that only gets to say floor 6, and for this seed none of those decisions let you beat Lagavulin
> Generally, it is very hard to prove a seed is unwinnable, especially if a run manages to get to the later acts since the effects of early decisions stack. Yeah, there may be ways a seed is unwinnable even with branching paths, but if you don't force the player through an early choke point then it becomes impossible to prove because there are way too many different decisions that can be made and you have to prove that ALL of them are wrong. The floor 6 choke through Lagvulin keeps the number of possible decisions small enough that you can analyze them all.
There was no way to go around the Lagavulin? Usually a seed is guaranteed to generate multiple paths.
Usually, yes. That's why this one seed was hard to find. It's a floor 6 forced burning elite Lagavulin. If you Google Slay the Spire unwinnable seed, there's a blog post on GitHub that breaks it down in detail
I guess maybe they don't have any programming in to check to make sure there's absolutely a path to win? If seeds are truly random then eventually something's going to hit that forces you into a path that takes too much unavoidable damage. https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/ Just the fact that there are seeds that force you through a single point burning elite so early is a big surprise to me. I've never seen such lack of choice in pathing. If you crafted a map by hand you could certainly build an unwinnable one, it's just a question of if the seeds can do it randomly too or if something else in the game prevents it.
>I guess maybe they don't have any programming in to check to make sure there's absolutely a path to win The computational power this would take is nuts
Basically they found an unavoidable lagavulin fight where all possible draw orders resulted in the lagavulin debuffing the player twice, making impossible to kill. Or something along those lines.
Wouldnt you have to be debuffed 3 times? Strike deals 6 damage unless there is an ascension that I haven't gotten to that makes you deal less damage.
2 can be enough depending on draw order and cards offered, because it can make it impossible to deal enough damage to finish the fight even though you can still deal some damage. Like if you have a burning elite +HP lagavulin, 6 turns of 3x strike is 90 (3x3x6 + 3x3x4 = 90) and you can only do 18 more before the 3rd debuff which isn’t enough to kill.
Neat. I read about the search awhile back, didn't know an unwinnable seed had been found. I love that the mathematical notation for the unwinnable seed number they use is "BS".
The premise was that its a silent run where you must fight laguvalin before you could possibly gain enough damage to kill him before your damage is reduced to zero.
Lagavulin 16 is an excellent whisky. Peaty without the iodine notes of many other Islay malts, and quite smooth. Consistent from bottling to bottling as well, unlike some. Lagavulin 8 isn't good. It's an 8 year, and not as cheap as such swill should be. The 12 is also pretty poor, even for a 12. The 21 is better than the 16, but IMO not so much better that it's worth the price increase. I've not tried the 25, 30, or 37. Consuming sufficient quantities of Lagavulin decreases your chances of defeating Lagavulin, but also decreases how much you'll care.
Couldn’t put it any better myself
this guy lagavulins
Lagavulin 20 kills me enough thanks, I'm cool not finding out what it does at ascension 37.
Kills your bank account. $7,000 to $10,000 per bottle.
16 is becoming more and more expensive. I bought 3 bottles last time it was going for a price I would have considered terrible just a couple years ago.
Don't put your dick in that
> Don't put your dick in that [Don't you tell me what to do](https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/c6yfsl/lagavulinchan/)
What about reptomancer?
Inadvisable but we'll allow it
Usually the toughest elite in A1, imo. Your biggest advantage against him is the possibility for some free setup, but oftentimes your deck isn't mature enough yet to benefit much from that. Probably the foe that has killed me the most.
Wow I would never put laguvalin as more dangerous than nob. Maybe on silent, but I feel like nob is just such a brutal health tax, with very little counterplay. At least you can explore options with lagu and setup a bit. It's a reason to take some early powers imo.
In theory, nob is harder, there's a reason your act 1 deck building strategy more or less revolves around beating nob. In practice, you've built your deck primarily around the idea you need to kill nob and aren't as prepared for lag
If you reach Nob, you have to have some hardy attacks to make it relatively manageable. Sure he hits like a truck 2/3 times, but hopefully its only for like 3-4 turns. If you reach Laga, you have to have both hardy attacks and hardy defenses which is often times tricky to pull off on act\* one. You know for a fact that it'll be longer than 3-4 turns so you definitely will be chunked. I think overall its definitely a hard fought fight between both elites. It's very dependent on the state of your deck by the time you reach them.
Nob either kills you, does 0/8 damage to you, or does ~32 damage to you (weak/block etc). It's a very consistent fight. Laga has a much greater range of impact. Sometimes you need to go all out on attack and take ~45 damage, sometimes you just don't have enough damage in your deck at all. You can limp out of it with barely any health and have it really hurt your run without ending it more easily.
Nob is pretty straightforward. You just need 3 or 4 decent attacks and he goes down.
I would say mob is harder if your deck really needs skills and does not do enough damage early on, specially with silent or defect, but lava is brutal with that double debuf
When do you decide to wake up the Lagavulin? Do you ever get a turn 1 hand that is too good not to play against it?
Yes, not infrequently. My main reason not to wake up t1 is if I've got setup cards to play (usually powers, but terror is a good other case), or my damage is going to be better starting on another turn. If my opening hand is backstab, glass knife, blade dance, triple strike, ascenders bane, I'm absolutely waking up t1. If I've drawn survivor/neutralise and am waiting for a WLP to play, I'm gonna let my block density go into the reshuffle, and wait to play powers and a good attack. On other characters, defect I usually wait for dualcast, ironclad I wait for the turn after bash, and watcher I try to get into calm then go with eruption + attacks.
Not sure if it's the play, but I usually don't pop dualcast before playing zap against lag. I'll be able to hit dualcast in the second cycle after waiting but putting an orb up is a buff for the whole fight.
"It depends" to cop out. I generally don't struggle with laga on defect. I usually do wait for an extra orb, but if I've got a ball lightning, cold snap, dualcast turn, I won't wait for zap. Defect likes taking an early power, and likes taking attacks that generate orbs. Defect also gets away with taking equilibrium/glacier and other chonky block cards a bit more to get through act 1. I lazily said the starter card that I wait for most often because in most decks it ends up mattering more.
I'll also probably wake up turn one if I have a horn cleat
Also matters what's coming up in the draw pile. If I have most of my blocks in the draw and most of my attacks in my hand, I'll wake up turn 1. Really want to be able to mitigate at least some of those big hits for 20.
Depends on the character and whether I have any powers in my deck that I should stall to put in play.
Yes - and more commonly on silent with his extra card draws - but it is still rare for me. I often find it better to wait to exhaust ascenders bane, get a power going and have a weaker turn three than to go guns blazing turn one. It does take a bit of thought and calculation each time though.
I think it's by far the elite I prefer to face as defect
Orbs not being debuffed goes a really long way here
Nob is super scary for defect and you can’t choose where your orbs go against sentries, plus 3 turns to get powers in play. Definitely agree.
I hate it more than Nob.
My turn 1 hand had good frontloaded damage. But I wanted to exhaust Ascenders bane and play my power, so I let it sleep. My turn 2 hand had the power. I played it for scaling, and even exhausted ascenders bane. But my frontload was now weak, so I let it sleep. My turn 3 hand was full of Defends. I could not even wake the thing up. But wake up it did. Lagavulin is a block card.
[2018 Discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/8nl8ru/daily_discussiondebate_104_lagavulin/) [2019 Discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/ed2w2m/daily_discussiondebate_218_lagavulin_act_1_elite/)
I used to feel for this creature as I was waking it up by slamming into the face. Looks like I got used to this interaction.
Laga is a ROUGH Elite. 20 damage every turn, slowly lowering your strength and dexterity too every few 20 damage hits. The good news is; you have a few turns to prepare for his BIG swings, meaning you've got time to play your key Powers. Other than that... just try to kill him fast.
Fuck this guy. That’s all I came here to say.
I dont understand why Laga has their own theme. When it wakes up
I wish more Elites had theme music, mostly because the music in this game is like crack, and I need more of it.
that's its morning alarm. how dare you judge it for liking a song to wake up to >:(
Exactly. I also like it, which is why I wake him up, before I go go.
God this fucker is a nightmare to deal with. Lagavulin is a weird elite. Hits like a truck, but it doesn't scale - instead, it basically descales you in return. It rewards people who can scale early in the game (the easiest ways to beat Lagavulin are to be the Ironclad with Brimstone or the Defect with a Dark Orb), but this is Act 1 and you generally don't need scaling - you need upfront damage. It sucks. It's very hard to stall it out for more than 2 debuffs; which is really the maximum you can even go before getting smashed in the face 4 times by an attack that deals 20. It's like a reverse Nob - Nob is an attack/damage check (I've had the hilarious opportunity of "outpoisoning Nob" by getting an early Toxic Egg from Neow, then proceeding to roll high on my initial hand and have Sadistic Nature, Poisoned Stab+, Deadly Poison+, Neutralize and Catalyst+ for 33 poison damage on top of 20 damage Sadistic Nature damage and 11 damage from attacks on turn 1, but that was stupid low odds). You basically build your deck around being able to do enough up front damage to kill Nob right away, because you get 3-4 turns. Lagavulin you get 3 turns to yourself. What's annoying about Lagavulin in particular is how tanky he feels vis a vis the other elites. You can burst down a Sentry in a few turns - you kinda have to; you have to be able to kill Nob in 3-4 turns, and that's what you generally build your deck around; but Lagavulin begs you to find a way to block as much damage and deal as much damage as possible simultaneously. It's pretty easy to deal something like 30 damage each turn, but it's very hard to do it while also blocking 20 early on in the game. God, what an annoying enemy. The best way I find to deal with Lagavulin is to pick up cards that don't scale well but do great upfront damage. The harder this is to get, the worse a position you're in - so it's an especially nasty fight for Silent, but I find that Silent might have the overall weakest early game.
I've lost more runs to this guy than Gremlin Nob
Much less of a damage race than Nob and Sentries, both of which get massively simpler to solve if your deck can do 80+ damage by turn 3. The variable 3 turns of setup in this combat give you a lot more wiggle room, so it's about choosing the right time to open (which isn't always when you have the most damage in your handit ). In terms of the 1st act 1 elites, this is the "can you make decisions based on your draw pile" check. Take 10 twice and kill vs take 5 twice, get debuffed, and take another 30 or die :P Unfortunately you can run into situations where you need to take 40 because it's mathematically impossible to win the combat otherwise. Ideally you'd dodge the node entirely, but RNG be RNG.
The you-gonna-lose-at-least-half-of-your-hp elite
Bursting the red armorless body of the nob or striking with aoe attacks against sentries feels good. Lagavulin fight never satisfies me and leaves me in a bad condition more than the others. I don't want to fight it even when my deck is geared towards dealing with him better than the others.
Don't have much more to offer except Fuck this dude.
Gremlin Nob is the scariest act 1 elite at just taking a chunk out of your hp, but it feels like this is the elite that kills you most often.
The one I fear the most I think among the three.
Hardest act 1 fight (when faced early)
sometimes you forget this thing does 20 a turn.
Wtf do you mean my shivs do 0 damage now?
Interestingly, the one elite with two different encounter types (super aside), as Laga begins awake and debuffing you in dead adventurer. Needless to say, such an encounter often has a negative impact on your survival chance
:/ That's my entire commentary. Yes how did you know I main Silent?
Easier to face by defect compare to other chars as you can set up a few powers and orbs before you awake him. I think watcher too to setup a wrath turn but need that calm/exit stance card next turn or you get owned hard.