Part 14: King of Plague

Part 14 - King of Plague (YouTube)

This dungeon expects that your muscle memory will do you in. Fighting without countering is hard when you have things like the Mages' homing attacks coming at you, ratmen leaping at you, or a Lich coming back to burn your face off. If you don't fight the urge to counter, you'll starve yourself to death. The curse interacted badly with the Skeleton King sword, as countering is all but essential to build up the combo and start stealing life. And that global speed/damage boost? 10+ damage taken per hit when I'm wearing heavy armor is scary, so imagine if the adventurer were starving!

Stranger in the Shadows ended the way it did because I had Holy Touch and forgot about it. That blessing will cause the vampire's blood sucking attempt to fail, giving you a chance at either a grab bag of gold or a curse. Or you could just leave, but where's the fun in that?

Fun Fact: In a test recording I forgot to equip the White Minotaur mace before stepping on the Collector card, stopped, and facepalmed when I lost out on the 75 gold. The Collector card had also covered up the Call for the Priest store, so I'll never know if my outcome could've been better…

I also want to leave a little note about blessings. I passed up some blessings in the Priest's shop, but if you have so much gold it's burning a hole in your pocket, you may not want to copy me. At this point in the game the deck contains a non-insignificant number of "Gain x resource per blessing" cards, they have occasional interactions, and of course you have Self Righteous to help you dish more damage. A blessing in your inventory is also removed from future pulls; if at first you don't get the one you wanted, it might appear in later shops or encounters. You can also apply this advice to equipment if you're really holding out for something. Bear in mind the equipment pool is greater overall.


The King of Plague

Only the most savage and cunning of the ratmen rise to kinghood among their rank.

The King of Plague has three attacks. The first, a leap attack, will damage you if you stay underneath him. The second releases three shadow clones around you that close in on you; just touching them hurts, so you need to dodge either away or through them. The third attack is a three-part unblockable combo that lunges towards you on the third part; he'll perform the third attack between the other two based on how you're attacking him.

I've seen advice that suggests staying close to him to prevent him from doing the shadow attack more often, and if the Time Distortion curse were active, that would be good advice. The strategy would be similar to the King of Skulls. Buying off the curse lets you treat the encounter as a slightly more deadly ratman fight.

Don't worry, we'll see the King of Plague again later.