Slay the Spire 2 Character Tier List: Ranking the Spire's Most Miserable Souls
Mega Crit's sequel just got a serious balance shakeup, and the character who used to be a punchline is suddenly the one carrying every run.
Slay the Spire 2 launched into early access with five characters, and figuring out who's worth investing your climb in used to be a mess of trial and error. Balance patches on the main branch have settled the dust a bit, and the standings look nothing like they did at launch. The rankings below reflect the current main branch as of the most recent update, not the beta branch, which gets its own tweaks every few weeks and can shift things before they ever hit the stable build.
The Five Minute Unlock Trick
Before any of the tier list stuff matters, you need actual access to these characters. The game unlocks them one at a time through the new Timeline system, and it gates each unlock behind completing a run with whoever comes before them in the chain. That sounds like a grind. It isn't.
Boot up a run with your current character, hit escape, and select "Give Up." The game logs that as a completed attempt and hands you the next character in line immediately. No fighting required. Spawn in, quit, repeat until the whole roster is sitting on your select screen.
One more thing worth knowing if you're playing co-op: duplicate characters are allowed in multiplayer. Nobody has to fight over who gets to be the Silent this run.
The Roster Unlock Chain
Here's the exact order you'll need to follow to brute-force your way through the unlock trick above.
The Current Standings
Once the whole cast is unlocked, the real question is who to actually invest your climbs in. Right now the order runs: The Silent in S-Tier, The Defect and The Necrobinder sharing A-Tier, The Regent sitting in B-Tier, and The Ironclad rounding things out in C-Tier. That last one might read as a surprise if you remember him from the original game, and there's a reason for it below.
S-Tier: The Silent
The rogue remains the standard everyone else gets measured against. Her whole kit revolves around quick strikes and damage-over-time effects, and the new Sly keyword is what pushes her over the top. Sly cards play themselves the moment you discard them, which means the cycling and card-draw tools she already leans on now double as extra actions instead of just filtering your hand. Poison and shivs round out her damage, and building a deck that goes infinite is well within reach once you know what to prioritize.
In co-op she pulls her weight without needing setup, and cards like Piercing Wail and Expose turn rough fights into non-events for whoever she's playing alongside. The balance patches barely touched her. Acrobatics got bumped up in rarity and Sly decks got toned down slightly overall, but none of that changes the fact that she's still the best pick on the roster.
A-Tier: The Defect
The orb-channeling robot has barely changed since launch, and that's a compliment. Orbs keep working for you passively whether your card draw is good or bad, which means you're rarely in a position where the run just falls apart on you. Once your orbs are established, losing becomes genuinely difficult. She's also the most flexible pick in co-op, able to shift into a damage role by stacking Lightning or support a team through Mana-generating cards depending on what a fight actually calls for.
A-Tier: The Necrobinder
The Necrobinder pairs a squishy 66 HP pool with Osty, a summoned hand that tanks hits and can be buffed into an offensive tool. Her Doom mechanic executes enemies once their health drops below a set stack count, which feels great to pull off when the math lines up. Where she loses ground to the Silent is consistency. The Souls archetype right now is strong enough that it overshadows every other build path available to her, and her Doom mechanic still has room to reach the polish of the Silent's Poison playstyle. A recent tweak to Borrowed Time now grants Mana instead of costing HP, making her higher-cost cards like Bury and Reanimate easier to actually cast.
B-Tier: The Regent
The alien royal has the highest skill ceiling in the game, and that's both the appeal and the problem. He runs on two resources, Mana and Stars, and his Forge keyword slowly builds a Sovereign Blade capable of ending a boss in one swing when it comes together. The issue is that his card pool isn't weighted evenly, and it's easy to pick up Forge cards early that actively work against you before you understand which ones to avoid. He's gotten more buffs than anyone else on the roster, with cards like Sword Sage and Parry going from ignored to must-picks in Sword-focused builds, and in co-op runs stacked with multiple Regents the synergy gets close to broken. He's climbed a long way from where he started, just not far enough yet to catch the top two.
C-Tier: The Ironclad
The original poster boy is still exactly as sturdy as you remember, and that's sort of the problem. Burning Blood heals 6 HP after every fight, which forgives early mistakes, and his Vulnerable and Exhaust builds still hit like a truck. He's even picked up a new card, Not Yet, that offers a bit of in-fight healing. None of that is bad. It's just that everyone else got stronger around him. He hasn't dropped because Mega Crit nerfed him, he's dropped because the rest of the cast caught up and passed him. Recent beta branch changes have handed him more buffs than the main branch has seen yet, so there's a reasonable chance he climbs back up the list once those changes go live.
So Which One Should You Actually Play First
If you want the smoothest path through your first few climbs, unlock the Silent as fast as the Give Up trick allows and lean into her card draw and Sly interactions. The Defect and Necrobinder are both safe next stops depending on whether you want steady orb damage or the satisfaction of timing an execution. Save the Regent for once you've got a feel for which Forge cards to skip, and treat the Ironclad as the character you fall back on when you just want a fight you already know how to win. None of this is locked in stone either. Mega Crit's still actively adjusting the beta branch, and given how much the standings have already moved since launch, don't be shocked if this list looks different again next month.
