Slay the Spire 2 features a lot of randomization, which makes every run feel unique. You’ll come across plenty of normal enemies and different bosses, including The Insatiable. As a result, you won’t know what to expect from any individual run.
The downside of this style is that it’s difficult to prepare ahead of time for specific boss fights in future acts. You don’t know which bosses you’ll fight or when you’ll fight them. However, understanding how each boss functions can be the difference between living and dying, especially for bosses like The Insatiable that have an insta-death timer.
Slay the Spire 2 – Insatiable Basics
Like other bosses, The Insatiable has a large health bar, deals decent amounts of damage, and will use some turns to buff itself. While it’s good to be aware of when you should attack and when you should stack blocks, the most important part of this fight is the death timer, which is called Sandpit.
If you look under The Insatiable’s health bar where status effects are shown, you’ll see an icon that looks like a hand reaching out of some sand. There’s a number on this icon, and that number is how many turns you have left before The Insatiable will eat you. After each turn, the number goes down by one. When you’re eaten, it’s an instant death, which means your current run is over and you have to start a new one to keep playing.
Of course, you still have to manage the actual fight as well. Here’s the action order for The Insatiable’s turns during its fight:
- The Insatiable buffs itself and gives you status cards (Frantic Escape). Sandpit begins with a counter of four turns.
- It attacks you.
- It attacks you again and deals more damage this time.
- It buffs itself.
- Repeat with increasing damage from its attacks.
The pattern of buffing then attacking is important when fighting The Insatiable. The buff increases the damage it deals permanently, so this means that you need to end the fight as quickly as possible. The good news is that the attacks are standard strikes, as dealing with the Sandpit timer and increasingly strong attacks is enough to juggle during the fight.
Slay the Spire 2 – Surviving The Insatiable
Unlike normal status cards that you’ll get from enemies, such as the Wound card, you find a number of cards added to your deck when fighting The Insatiable called Frantic Escape. These cards increase the distance between you and The Insatiable, which adds one more turn to the death timer. I didn’t realize they were playable cards at first, which led to me missing moments where I could’ve managed the death timer better.
Remember that Frantic Escape costs energy to use, so you’ll need to be careful about choosing your cards. Since I was playing as the Ironclad, using the Hellraiser card was crucial during this fight, as it plays any strike card you draw when it’s drawn for the rest of combat. This let me deal damage, but still be able to use Frantic Escape and stack block to avoid taking too much damage.
This means you want to use those cards regularly, but there are a few important details to know about them.
- You can lose them as part of other cards’ exhausting a random card.
- They’re as random as any other cards, so you might not have any in your hand when you need them.
- You can pull them out when you use a card or item that lets you draw additional cards, and that can end up being your only choice if you need one and get unlucky with your draw.
Beyond watching the number of turns you have and managing your use of Frantic Escape cards, the rest of The Insatiable’s boss fight is tracking when you need to block and when you need to attack in Slay the Spire 2.
