Maiden and Spell – Gameplay Tips and Tricks

Individual by Character

Sun Priestess

• Tapping diamonds gives you a speed boost that is well worth abusing. Be advised that the speed boost may not come out after a third basic.
• Dispel isn’t affected by spell lock the same way as every other defensive special. This generally makes it easier to use in panic than other defensives.
• Dispel erases attack lock, allowing you to skip the lockout after a third basic, or use two tap wides more rapidly.
• Holding focus while using basic puts the circle closer to you, intended for making head-on approaches more difficult.

Silent Redhood

• Using vanish refreshes cooldown on knives.
• There’s a slowdown at the end of vanish that leaves you somewhat vulnerable at the end of vanish. This slow can be overwritten with well-timed use of knives.
• Due to the long attack lock on wide, it’s more offensively efficient to use knives under this attack lock so you’re not stuck throwing out nothing.
• Using knives while focused changes their properties: shorter start-up, wider spread.

Royal Arcanist

• You can use tap DS after hold DS for a bit before both go on cooldown.
• If you catch your opponent in hold DS (clock), it’s usually a good opportunity to stack debuffs on them.
• If you time a moon after catching your opponent in the clock correctly, the moon will fall on them as the clock fades, securing a hit or forcing a defensive special.
• The previous points are combined. Once you time stop your opponent, you throw a couple debuffs on, throw a moon, and finish off stacking the debuffs. The number of debuffs you use before and after the moon depends on where, vertically, you landed the time stop.
• There’s a way to stagger the timing on wide to get extra bursts of movement without stopping the attack.
• If you move with basic, it’s possible to overlap them in a way that’s difficult to dodge. Very situational, only really occurs against opponents that are already staying mostly stationary full screen against you and don’t have something out to stop your advance.

Best tips for fighting lich are as follows:

Take the center and hold it. The best way to do this is to stand as close to the center flower as you can while dodging. This will allow you to clock Lich if she ever tries to approach to set a new flower. Even if you lose center, just sit at the edge of wherever the Lich wall happens to be and you should be able to retake center eventually.

Use debuffs. Lich, being the slowest character, is particularly vulnerable to debuffs. Don’t just spam them all at once though. Do one or two, followed by repositioning for another one or two. Once you get a bit more comfortable with the game and with how Lich works, you can watch what she does and go for debuffs when she slows herself down with basic or wide.

Take a vertical position at end game. If you can get to minimum walls and control either the top or bottom of the screen, you should have a good fighting chance at winning. Don’t let lich create a full vertical wall at small walls. To do this, make sure you transition from sitting to the side of flower (if you were) to sitting above or below flower when trying to prevent Lich from setting up.

Hero of Frost

• “Stutterstepping”. Infamously, you can get extra movement during focus basic by tapping focus and basic together in sync with the move’s attack lock interval. Less infamously but still powerful, If you drag the timing a bit, you can also reduce the rate of fire in exchange for nullifying the effect of the direction lock. 100ms window to not drop combo.
• Stun wave can combo into basic but it’s notoriously finicky. Things like waiting a bit before using basic, using focus after the stun, and not playing on mouse presumably help.
• Unfocused basic is slower than focus basic, so you can chase unfocused basic with focused basic. Situational, but I’ve found it to be powerful to do this overlap on the opponent’s recovery after a hit, and have found light success with it on an opponent who tends to macro-dodge basic as they approach a wall.
• If you want to play this character read Roxi’s guide. There’s a lot of value there that’s generally neglected in favor of the perception that frost is a one button character. Just be aware that some of the exact data there is out-of-date.

Tips for playing passive Frost vs. Lich:

Try to position yourself abutting flower’s perimeter when you can. This will make your shots as close-range as possible, making it more difficult for Lich to swoop in and place another flower. Dodge Roll and Stunwave can help you maintain such positioning in the face of butterfly pressure but keep in mind Stunwave is also helpful for threatening a punish vs. overextending flower placements.

Also, remember to give your offense a bit of variety here and there. If you’re 100% going through the full focus basic cycle all the time, Lich can kind of go on auto-pilot dodging to some degree. Slipping in a few unfocus basic shots or repeated focus basic 1 shots at the right moments can at least force Lich to dodge more intentionally and might score you hits in some cases. Roll combos are also good for less predictable pattern offsets and aiming.

Dreadwyrm Heir

• Laser -> wide at midrange is your main trick to hit people.
• Laser -> move -> Laser in the same use can catch people off guard.
• Novi fire can be used to secure hits on people who have their back in the corner and have a limited DS or DS on cooldown (arc, kinda frost for the former. Lich tends to keep her ds on cooldown as a control tool and can often be vulnerable for the latter reason).
• Watch out for the large dead-zone on wide. It usually won’t hit from particularly close ranges. There’s good reason for this.

Lich of Flowers

• Using wide leaves you with an awful move speed multiplier that effectively glues you in place. Placing a butterfly overwrites this movespeed with a 0.8x one, which is much more tolerable and leaves you far less vulnerable.
• Releasing defensive special gives you move speed.
• Focus OS places butterfly on you instead of in front.

Depths Secret

• Jellycat comes with some genuine invulnerability on release, in addition to eating some types of bullets.

Stormbeast

• Focus clone launches the clone half as far as normal.
• Focus tap basic releases a very fast, very long startup, very telegraphed “railgun” shot instead of a normal uncharged basic. You can desync uncharged + focused tap basic between you and your clone with a particular timing on focus. No other desyncs are known.

Miscellaneous Matchup Details

The slowdown from sun’s dispel can be overwritten with a different, more favorable move speed multiplier by some characters. Notably: frost can use wide and be free, lich can escape confidently with butterfly, and red’s kunai break her out with no penalty. There may be other notable instances I’m not remembering.

When arcanist lands a clock on wyrm, the only thing actually allowing wyrm to DS through the moon is the presence of the slow debuff that ends up increasing the iframes on novi fire. You can guarantee a hit by keeping track of the debuff cycle and cutting it before slow, but in practice nobody does this.

Sun’s dispel cleanses debuffs.

Novi life deletes nearly every projectile in the entire game when released. This leads to the lich mirror just being a completely different game entirely, as you can delete the opponent’s novi life, butterflies, and wides, and ideally spread out your fortress to prevent the opponent from doing the same to you.

Frost can stun redhood while she’s invisible. Additionally, arcanist can land debuffs during this time period.