i've seen it (and shared it) and i'm very happy about it!

i was debating going into dev tools and creating the 'ideal' situation myself a week ago, but I figured it'd be cheap if I did it, much more fun to have it happen on live, by a player.

It's really fun because Dark Pact was barely used by our playtesters. The designer who came up with it and I both knew it was wildly powerful, but we didn't get all that much playtest data on it hahah

Yep sadly this is the case. When we implemented Reflection (as a pointer to deck manipulation, which we decided not to do for complexity issues), I wanted to do secret hands to go with it. Since it was just for one sigil, it was a "nice to have" feature that we had to cut for time. Discovering Balatro's secret hands for the first time was a wonderful experience.

We started with a flat heal, and effectively it would create "doomed" game-states a lot more commonly. A player would either be at low HP the entire game, or be at nearly full. A big requirement I had was that about half the players who would play Story Mode would be able to complete it (with Hard and Demon being harder / more reliant on creating a synergistic build). Ultimately, pushing to a percentage-based heal helped rubber-band players who were behind to get a chance to keep progressing until they found their sigil build.

It is, however, one of the core flaws in my tuning, and a sign that I somewhat ran out of time to make sure the harder difficulties were fair enough but ALSO hard enough. I opted for "easier than I, as a player, would like" to make sure as many players as possible could get the icon and the title. We played a bit with making the heals different values on different difficulties too, but ultimately made the call to just keep it consistent.

Great job, you're the first person I've seen use this to it's full potential. I know what Sigils they are, but considering I implemented most of the materials on those assets I'd be cheating if I say it ;)

FWIW, I also hid the builds I used to clear Demon Mode in testing, because I wanted people on the team to form their own synergies and strategies. At some point near the end of our dev cycle, I strongly considered nerfing the "go for Demon's Hand every round" playstyle (I was considering making it 1500 or maybe even just 1000 flat damage, lol) and decided against it. It's wildly satisfying to do, and I wanted to retain that satisfaction. I'd already increased the cost of Unity/Cohesion to make people have to choose which they'd want to get at the certain price breakpoints, and that was enough for me.

While the Demon's Hand / Marching Horde strat is a really consistent way of winning, it's my least preferred way of getting a win in Demon Mode. There's a bunch of viable strategies,...

Oh interesting. Yeah, hadn't seen that bug reported yet, but I can think of why it's happening. Sigils get unloaded after combat, we have to save persistent info elsewhere. It's probably just not getting the info correctly when the sigil reloads since it's changed slots. I'll go reproduce and put in a ticket for it!

Glad you're having fun! I'm so happy Demon's Hand is out, it was one of my favorite projects I've worked on at Riot. I designed the enemies, about half the sigil effects, and am responsible for balance / tuning. I've been nervously watching people not familiar with the inspirations play it for the first time hoping it's not too hard hahah

We're reading all the feedback, and I can probably answer a few questions here or there if you have any!

Play League and you'll unlock Rare Sigils over time! They're dropped pseudo-randomly after certain game-time thresholds are reached, very similar to the battle pass mission that says "Play games to earn points." Games of Arena progress the invisible missions that track your progress 30% faster.

gg! Feeling like you broke it is absolutely my intention. please go break it harder next time.

Responded below, but basically just play a bunch of League! Rare sigils are dropped somewhat randomly based on time spent playing League games. If you're looking to progress faster, and you enjoy Arena, play Arena - it progresses the invisible missions that track your progress 30% faster than SR modes or ARAM.

They're a fair bit harder, but basically similar to green stake; not gameplay or system modifiers. They make enemies more challenging, build synergy more required, and lingering damage more dangerous.

For an experienced player who understands the systems, they're not going to take tons of attempts, but they should at least provide a meaningful challenge.

Sorry, the wording's a bit confusing! Basically, if you play, for instance, a pair of 2's, and then add in the any of the Command cards (Scout 一, Shaman 二, Warlord 三, or Assassin (o) ), those Command cards will contribute their value and any sigil effects they trigger towards the hand. It's a low-cost sigil that helps with the "Command" card synergy sigils you can get.

Passed these performance issues along to our engineers - appreciate all the reports, they're going to look into it!

Can you have her open a support ticket? We'll get a bit more info about the account and things that way!

I've not cleared it myself on my live account yet (busy day, lol), and I've not seen a live issue come in for it.