Slay the Spire 2 Defect guide – strategy, builds, and tier list

How do you play The Defect in Slay the Spire 2? After a deadly battle against The Heart, The Defect was forced to retreat to the scrapyard after sustaining critical damage. It quickly made friends with another robot named Flaw, and together they entered the Spire to take out some bugs lurking within. The pair were overwhelmed by a toxic wasp colony, forcing Neow to bring the defective construct back to life after the fateful clash.

The Defect climbs the Spire once again in hopes of meeting its creator, The Architect, and asking him to repair it once and for all. Sporting a new beefy body and a whole host of cards, The Defect returns to the card game as one of the returning Slay the Spire 2 characters. Join us as we break down the strategy you need to climb the Spire, as well as each build, and a card tier list to know what you should be hunting for.

The Defect strategy

There are three Defect builds to pick from: Orbs, Status, and Claw. We’re using orbs as a catch-all term, but generally speaking, you’re trying to build up several orbs to bolster you throughout combat. Status is a new deck archetype in STS 2, letting you take advantage of powerful cards that burden your deck with status cards that you can eventually take advantage of. Finally, we have Claw, a zero-cost attack that has the potential to scale up rapidly.

It’s reductive to say that there are any strict ‘builds’ for The Defect as you’ll want to use a range of cards to get through all the acts. While Status and Claw are both archetypes you can technically build towards, their effectiveness drops off a cliff at the higher Ascension levels, so we’ve opted to ignore those for now.

The Defect has access to the Orb mechanic, allowing it to generate orbs representing different elements. The effect of each orb scales with the amount of Focus you’ve built up, effectively acting like Strength and Dexterity. Orbs have a passive ability that triggers at the end of each turn, and they can be evoked to generate a big effect, destroying the orb in the process.

Here’s what every orb does in Slay the Spire 2:

• Lightning
  • Passive: Deal 3 damage to a random enemy.
  • Evoke: Deal 8 damage to a random enemy
• Frost
  • Passive: Gain 2 Block.
  • Evoke: Gain 5 Block.
• Dark
  • Passive: Add 6 damage to this orb’s evoke.
  • Evoke: Deal x damage to the enemy with the lowest health.
• Plasma
  • Passive: Gain 1 energy.
  • Evoke: Gain 2 energy.
• Glass
  • Passive: At the end of turn, deal 4 damage to all enemies and reduce this orb’s value by 1.
  • Evoke: Deal 8 damage to all enemies.

The Defect’s starting relic, Cracked Core, generates one lightning orb at the beginning of a fight. You can both increase and decrease the number of orb slots you have using cards, giving you room to utilize more passive or evoke effects, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Most decks require a strong orb foundation before leaning into the other archetypes.

The Defect Orbs build

The goal of an orb-focused deck is to create enough orbs that you can primarily rely on the passive effects to both block and deal damage for you. You don’t need to use cards like Capacitor to increase your number of orb slots, but it certainly does help, especially in longer fights.

Here are some orb cards you should aim to acquire right away:

• Ball Lightning
• Cold Snap
• Lightning Rod
• Focused Strike

Ball Lightning and Cold Snap generate lightning and frost orbs, respectively, while dealing Strike-level damage. Lightning Rod is also a better version of Defend that also generates a lightning orb, an easy auto-include in Act 1. Layer this up with Focused Strike when you’ve got several orbs running, and you should have no problems sustaining yourself throughout most Act 1 fights.

Pick up these cards to improve the consistency of your orb deck:

• Glacier
• Chill
• Hailstorm
• Hotfix

It’s difficult to build towards a specific orb, so you should try to maintain a healthy balance between attack and block effects. With that said, building towards a frost-focused deck is the safest thing you can do, as you’re rarely punished for not having enough damage, especially on the lower Ascension levels.

Once you can consistently play cards that generate frost orbs, you’re free to build any deck you like. Increase the potency of your orbs using Hotfix, though be aware that this effect only lasts for a single turn.

Pick up these Orb cards to take your deck to another level:

• Capacitor
• Defragment
• Synchronize
• Voltaic

You can probably see a pattern with the main orb cards we’re aiming to pick up: we want to increase the number of orbs on offer using Capacitor, and once those orbs are active, we want to increase our Focus. Defragment is the best card to improve your Focus, though it being a rare card means you won’t see it as often as you’d like. Similarly, Synchronize is simply a better version of Hotfix that only gets better as you progress to the endgame.

When you’re ready to end a fight, Voltaic will most likely be your finisher. This card relies on you channeling tens, if not hundreds, of lightning orbs throughout the course of a fight. Once you’ve accumulated enough lightning orbs, play Voltaic and watch the sparks fly as you destroy everything in sight.

The Defect card tier list

Similarly to The Silent, there are a lot of Defect cards that don’t directly synergize with the deck archetypes on offer, but they are outstanding in their own right. Cards like Hologram and Echo Form offer unbelievable value and should almost always be prioritized if you see them.

Here’s our Defect card tier list, ranking cards from best to worst:

And with that, you should have everything to meet The Defect’s maker in Slay the Spire 2. If you’re sick of orbs and you want to try something different, we’ve got guides on all the other characters, including Regent, Necrobinder, and Ironclad.