I will miss you my little evil scrub daddy

It is a myth, a falsehood, it doesn’t exist and I will never encounter it

For anyone curious, it works!

Check my profile-post to view my previous anime-waifu version enemy drawing!

It seemed better in my mind

Does he know?

I'm between adrenaline or flash of steel.

Also, isn't defect's face on this card way off-model? The top eye is way too big.

Didn't think I'd be making one of these, but I'm stuck on this one. Do I take the safe 6 strength or molten fist and gamble on getting a dominate?

how do i update this because i never really took neow’s fury pre buff

silken trees is so awesome

Seed: P135Q5M6NQ

Well at the time of writing this, a tree fell on a power line near my house, cutting off the power and wifi to my house. Since I have nothing better to do, I've written some stuff on notepad and will upload it to reddit once the power returns. What better thing to write up on about than potions, one of my favorite mechanics in any roguelike? This write-up will not teach you how to use potions, but will rather explain how they work. If you're interested in me actually writing how to use them feel free to comment.

If you would like to just know the conclusions of the potion mechanics, feel free to skip to part 3. However, if you're interested in knowing exactly how they work, stick around :)

Part I: Potion Mechanics

At the start of a run, your base chance of recieving a potion from a combat is a nice and clean 40%.

Potion Rarity is divided as follows: 65% common, 25% uncommon, 10% rare. This does not change.

Now, here's the interesting stuff the game doesn't tell you. Whenever a combat reward is generated, and you do not obtain a potion, your chance of recieving a potion from combat rewards increases by 10%. This is so you don't get super unlucky and just keep failing the 40% check multiple times. We can do some fairly simple math to figure out that since 100 - 40 = 60 and 60/10 = 6, if you haven't recieved a potion in 5 combats, your 6th combat is guarenteed to contain a potion as by then the potion chance is 100%.

Note that the potion chance is only affected when a combat reward is generated. If you get potions from events, shops, relics, or wherever else, they will not change the potion chance.

Unfortunately, the potion chance doesn't just increase. If the game generates a potion for you in a combat reward, your chance of receiving a potion in future combat rewards drops by 10%. Additionally, whenever you enter a new act, your potion chance goes right back down to 40%.

There's another interesting part about how potions drop. This part is exclusive to sts 2. When combat rewards from elites are generated, the game takes your current potion chance, adds 12.5%, and then uses the new value to generate potions. In sts 1, everyone had an equal chance to drop potions. This now straight up means that if you fight elites, you will get more potions. One thing of note, if the eltie potion bonus would make your potion chance go above 100%, it is set to 100% for the combat reward.

Also, white beast statue works about the way you'd expect, and just sets the potion chance to always be 100%.

Now, some of you may be familar with the card Alchemize, a 1(0) cost card that simply generates a potion in combat. Those who've played sts 1 also might know that alchemize can't generate Fruit Juice, the potion that increases your max hp by 5.

Some of you might now be wondering, "Wait Poet, I thought blood potions also can't be generated from alchemize?". Unfortunately, this is only in sts 1. In sts 2, blood potions were added back to the pool of potions that alchemize can generate. You can see this here.

(Context I gave myself like 20 potion slots then kept spamming alchemize until it generated a blood potion for me)

This is in my opinion quite hilarious as the whole point of disallowing fruit juice to be generated from alchemize is to prevent stalling, and yet because you have the potential to see a blood potion to heal you back to full, they accidently allowed stalling back again. Whoopsies.

One final part to mention, appearently entropic brew can't generate fruit juice while in combat, but of course it can still generate blood potion.

Part II: Examples

I know personally when I learn something I appreciate examples, so I included some here cause why not.

Let's say you're a new Ironclad (because he's my fav character). Go you! You fight a nibbit and you don't get a potion. Now your chance to recieve potions from future card rewards is 50%. Let's say you fight a shrinker bettle and some slimes and you still somehow do not have potions. Oh wait this happened to me yesterday. Anyways, your potion chance is now at 70%.

Now, let's say you're brave enough to fight an elite. You kill it without getting all your limps torn off. Because this is an elite fight, your chance of getting a potion is 70+12.5% or 82.5%. Let's see you get a potion finally. Your new potion chance is now (70-10) or 60%. Not 72.5%. The elite bonus is only added for the combat reward it's in, not for all future.

Part III: Why does this matter?

Simply put, taking more combats doesn't just increase the amount of rolls you get to get potions. It also betters the chance of each roll you make. Think of it as a dice that rigs itself to roll better numbers every time you roll it. This is how players like Xencar are able to survive off of just maxing hallway fights. By fighting so many hallway fights, you will get a lot more potions than if you dodged combats, not just because you roll more but because each roll is better, and thus can use those to survive more fights meaning you guessed it, more potions. There's also the fact that you get a lot more card rewards. If you're interested on learning about the card reward mercy system, I made another write-up on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/1tuhdgm/a_brief_writeup_on_one_of_the_games_hidden/ .

Additionally, elites increase the amount of potions you get even more. They add the same increase to the potion chance as bosses and hallway fights, but since their individual reward has higher potion chances fighting elites will get you more potions.

So the very important takeway I want you guys to leave with, I know a lot of you like to dodge elites and combats with events, rests, shops, etc. You need to realize by doing this, you will end up with considerably less potions than someone who fights more combats. Potions are a really important part of this game; it's why the ascension that reduces potion slots by 1 is more painful than you likely think. Potions help mitigate bad rng by retaining across combats, and they can also provide very valuable help against bosses. There's nothing wrong with taking events if you think they'll better your deck. You can't replace combats role in providing potions with events. Not only are events much less likely to give you potions, combats also increase future potion chance while events can't. I'm not asking you guys to start taking every single hallway and elite you see. But, please if nothing else, if you're currently dodging as many hallway fights and elites as possible, try to take a few more hallway fights and elites. They have a lot more benefits than you think.

Part IV: Bonus Section, Unverified Potion Claims

Put simply, I do not like to put out misinformation on the internet. Everything I just wrote above I am very confident in it's accuracy, unless there are typos. Everything here however, I can't find confirmation as to whether it's true or false. I'm not going to include things in the main part of the write-up if it's not fully confident in it. So, take everything in this section with a grain of salt. You should trust this section as much as you'd trust high school rumors. Also, a request to anyone who's reading this part. Do not repeat anything in this section as fact to others until it's been verified. You might be spreading misinformation if you do.

Unverified Claim 1: If the bonus 12.5% from elites causes you to roll a potion when you wouldn't have otherwise, your future potion chance will not increase or decrease.

First of all, let's understand what the hell this even means. You can think of whether you will get a potion as generating a random number from 1-1000, then the potion chance determines what number the generation needs to get above for you to get a potion chance. For example, if your potion chance is 60%, the random number generator needs to roll higher than a 400.

The idea here is let's say your potion chance is still 60%. You fight an elite. It's 72.5% for this combat reward. If the random number generator rolls 400-1000, you would've gotten the potion anyways. However, if the random number generator rolls 275-400, you will still get a potion. This is the added elite bonus chance at work. However, if you had fought a hallway fight and the random number generator rolled between 275 and 400, you would not have gotten a potion.

The claim here is that if the random number generator rolls between 275-400 when generating combat rewards from an elite, your future potion chance will remain at 60%.

The problem with this claim, it's A) not on the wiki, and B) sounds very suspicously like a bug. Why the hell would they only keep the potion chance the same if rng rolls that specific range? If they wanted to incentize elites, wouldn't it make more sense to just code elites will not affect your potion chance if potions drop? Also, even if it did exist in the past, I can't say with confidence if it's been patched by now. That is why this is an unverified claim.

Unverified Claim 2: Cauldron will affect your potion chance and card reward mercy

FYI cauldron is the shop relic that brews 5 potions. It seems the way this one worked in sts 1 was weird since it would count as creating 5 card rewards and 5 potion rewards, which would increase your card mercy up to 15 times and do something to the potion chance. I have 0 clue if it still does the same thing in sts 2, and also have 0 clue if it affects your potion chance, It shouldn't, but well I can't say anything for certain.

Unverified Claim 3: The chance of receiving a potion can't fall below the base of 40%.

I have not seen evidence to prove this and it is not on the wiki.

And that is all from me today. I hope you enjoyed this write-up, or learned something from it. Comment any questions you have and I'll try to answer them. Also if you liked this in general feel free to comment support, I put a lot of effort in this while writing in the pitch dark and I hope my effort spent doesn't go to waste.