Slice & Dice – Curse Mode Guide

What Is This?

In this guide I will be outlining the easiest ways I have found to progress in Curse Mode. The primary focuses of this guide will be the three major milestones the community currently has, and one final goal: 

• Floor 57: The “Unlucky Number” achievement, requiring you to win a battle with 13 curses.
• Floor 100, triple digits. Getting here is no easy feat.
• Beyond Floor 100, to accomplish a run that would bring you to the top of the leaderboards.
• Reaching the ERROR Curse on about Floor 176 or above.

Hero & Item Choices

Hero choices remain similar to Standard Hard mode choices: Cleanse is very important, and Cleanse-less colors (Orange and Yellow for the most part) are flexible for this purpose. 

However, choices also depend on your current Blessings and Curses. A blessing like Better Blades would make you more likely to want to pick Soldier, as an example.

(I’m sure you can see how this would affect your hero picks.)

The same goes for Item picks and even Curse picks. Tankard and Bottom Poison are another clear interaction.

That being said, while there are some tougher combos to notice, when you do notice one it can tip the scales on a choice.

Curse Choices

Curse choices are more rigid than most other choices in this game, in my opinion. As a warning, this list is my opinion and you are free to disagree, but it has worked for me.

Take these Curses if they are available:

Usually take these Curses:

Take these Curses reluctantly:

Avoid these Curses if possible:

Run-ending Curses:

Blessing Choices

Blessing choices are also quite easy, although your choices will begin to depend on your current Curses and Blessings after a loop or two. For this section I’ll be using a similar style to the Curse Choices section. Again, these lists are the sum of my experiences and you are free to disagree or offer a different list. 

Yes tier:

Usually take these Blessings:

Decent Blessings that offer lesser utility:

Blessings that are either ruined by Curses or underwhelming:

Weakness?

If you saw Weakness (AKA Hamstring) in Yes tier and were a little confused, that’s a valid first impression. Its value is hard to see at first. Here’s a list of most of the high-value reductions Weakness has on enemies:

•  Spiders cannot poison any more.
•  Goblins, and Zombie: Both cleave sides.
•  Quartz: Weaken 2 -> 1.
•  Witch and Basilisk: Only poisons for 1.
•  Sisters: removes half of Agnes’ 1 to all attacks and reduces two of Magrat’s cleaves.
•  Ogre: Two cleave sides.
•  Troll and Rotten: Can no longer poison at all. Negates poison cleave 1.
•  Alpha: Both summon sides are entirely negated.
•  Troll king and Dragon: Poison cleave -1 (1 and 2 respectively.)
•  Tarantus: Summon -1.
•  Hexia and Lich: One less petrify.
•  Snake: Two Poison sides are negated.
•  Boar, Slimer, and Slime Queen: Flanking sides -1.

Against other enemies with no value sides to reduce, Weakness is still a flat -1 damage to their sides ⅓ of the time. Therefore, it counts as a great deal of effective block and even cleanse over the course of a Curse Mode run.

Milestone 1: Floor 57

Before going in to attempt this, I recommend unlocking Better Blades by winning a Custom Party run on Hard or above without Blue or Red heroes. Curse choices should be as shown above, with the exception of Tarnish and Rust not appearing until you beat floor 57 for the first time.

There are a few “traps” you can fall into when attempting to reach this floor which can either end your run before Floor 57 or severely cripple it afterwards:

• Picking the random curse option can lead to a very bad curse, such as On The Brink.
• Attempting to pick heroes for Synergy instead of Cleanse: Warden is much better with Survival Specialist, but he still doesn’t Cleanse! Debuffs can end runs.
• Picking a random Blessing choice when a good option is presented in the hopes of receiving a better one.

Otherwise, if you’ve been following the Curse Choice guide and you haven’t been particularly unlucky, reaching Floor 57 should be similar in difficulty to doing 3 Standard Hard runs consecutively. It is worth resetting if you have a particularly awful Blessing choice, but reaching Floor 57 is generally within the realm of possibility.

Some enemies to watch out for:

• Caw, especially with Max HP boosts.
• Dragon remains a threat that you should have cleanse for.
• Hordes of Tiny enemies with Swarm or Mob.
• Slates with Stitch or Mend: it’s even possible to get softlocked!
• All enemies that have Summon moves, Poison Cleaves, or other high-value sides with Skulk, Lurk, or Ambush.
• The Three Witches boss fight can be nasty with Max HP boosts as well.

Milestone 2: Floor 100

Reaching Floor 100 is substantially more difficult than the previous milestone. It will require a greater understanding of Curse Mode and how it buffs enemies, and likely some luck. 

Managing your characters’ HP will be much more difficult than in normal modes due to Spikes, Deathrattle, Arthritis, and more. In addition, many enemies will have significantly buffed HP, so it’s crucial that you are offered high-value Blessings to get this far.

Item quality will likely also be lower at this point due to Tarnish and Rust, so each loop will start with multiple Tier 1 items. It should be noted that, of those items:

The following have strong synergies with Blessings:

• Worn Arms, Ballet Shoes, Change of Heart, Castor Root.

And that the following can be effectively useless or worse with Curses:

• Coin, Cloak, Scar, Big Shield.

Floors 17-20 on every given loop are likely to be the hardest due to the combinations of Osteoporosis and Rust, so strong Hero picks are basically necessary on later loops. Strong hero synergies with mid tier items can carry your teams through loops. Sorcerer with Bottom Venom and Tankard is an example I showed earlier, but a very strong one nonetheless.

If you’re struggling, then counters to Caws, Zombies, and hordes of Tiny enemies should be your goal. Caw alone is most of the reason you’d want to avoid Fear and Dread.

When you do manage to reach Level 100, your hard work has certainly paid off! Very few players have been able to make it this far.

Milestone 3: Beyond Floor 100

Now that you’ve reached Floor 100, your main objective is to reach a high leaderboard placement, and to do that you’ll need to focus on the last Curses you haven’t picked, and a loose order for picking them in. 

There will be very few if any “good” options this late, and picking Random Curse is even riskier than before. As a result I’d highly recommend using the Curses list sheet I linked earlier, making a copy, and checking off the Curses you’ve already collected. 

Since there’s a very real possibility you will be forced into these Curses, I will explain exactly what makes them potentially “run-ending” curses.

• On The Brink makes it incredibly difficult to recover from hero deaths, to the point that even with Preparation your heroes will effectively have 3 HP the next combat.
• Armour and Guard make all fights with multiple enemies incredibly dangerous, as your primary source of damage mitigation in these fights is usually killing off enemies.
• Boss Armour ends your run at the next Rotten, 3 Witches, Dragon, or even Slime Queen. Needless to say, the odds of survival are poor.
• Iridium Dice and even Leaden Dice both drastically reduce the quality of your rolls, to the point that Iridium Dice still ends your run if you have Greased Dice. Iridium Dice may even be worse than ERROR.

As very few runs have reached this point, it’s difficult to give general advice, but do keep in mind that the final floors, 17-20, will be the hardest by far, especially this late. A broken combo for these floors can save an otherwise doomed loop.

Final Milestone: ERROR

For context, ERROR is the failsafe curse put in place by the developer so the game doesn’t crash if it has no more Curses to give you. It’s also there to prevent infinite play so the leaderboards stay fair if someone does manage to reach it.

Curse you are forced to pick eventually:

To reach ERROR, one would normally need to reach at least Floor 184, after receiving their 9th Blessing. The reason this is so difficult is because it requires almost all of the game’s Curses and then, in addition, requires the hardest part of the game to be completed one last time on floors 176-180 before it may appear.

It may also be reached earlier by leaving Heavy Dice and A as your final curses, meaning the game would have no additional curses to give you as early as Floor 164. However, by picking ERROR at this point, you would be ruining a run that could top the leaderboards.