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Question for people who have opened and completed everything to do with Envelope X (seriously, don't click here if you don't want spoilers): Are there any better discussions of strategy for the class than in the single guide I found on reddit? Or does anyone here have any play tips/experiences? I am starting the class from level 2 alongside a low party group and trying to figure it out. I would like to lean into just the multi-attacks but it seems like at least at this level I would need to do at least a partial summon build. Just wondering if there's anything I should be aware of or anything I might've missed on first glance
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 20:00 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 08:18 |
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I love this game but the balance for the locked classes is all over the place. I'm not sure Gloomhaven would get the pass it does if it wasn't for all of the hidden information making conversation about it difficult. I hope Frosthaven has better playtesting.
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 20:13 |
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Guy A. Person posted:Question for people who have opened and completed everything to do with Envelope X (seriously, don't click here if you don't want spoilers): Still major post-Envelope X spoilers: Most of the low level summons can be used as decent persistent buffs by dropping them in a down turn after you clear a room, and with an 11-card hand you can afford a couple of losses. I'd skip wasps and scarabs but the rest should be worth it. You will need to take some other cards that say "summon" on them but there should be enough cards like Swarming Minions with at least one fine action to fill out your hand without ever expecting your summons to do anything. I've seen discussion be down on Tomb of the Immortal but it's ideal for expanding your options at lower levels by acting as a second loss copy of any action you like, with a bonus element. The trade off is that until you use it for the loss it's an Attack 2/Move 2 with bad initiative.
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 20:17 |
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NRVNQSR posted:Still major post-Envelope X spoilers: Also still major post-Envelope X spoilers: Excellent, basically what I thought but helpful tips I was also mildly worried by the lack of attack cards with a larger hand size at early levels, but I suppose if you are putting out a few losses right away that basically bridges the gap, and with the buffs from those summons even generic attacks become more worthwhile. Definitely excited for the 3x3 workhorse card that's available at level 3. Guy A. Person fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Feb 6, 2020 |
# ? Feb 6, 2020 22:47 |
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KPC_Mammon posted:I love this game but the balance for the locked classes is all over the place. I'm not sure Gloomhaven would get the pass it does if it wasn't for all of the hidden information making conversation about it difficult. There are individual unlockable classes that are as strong as entire parties of weaker classes.
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 22:54 |
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Guy A. Person posted:Question for people who have opened and completed everything to do with Envelope X (seriously, don't click here if you don't want spoilers): Or read basically any of the comments that follow if you can put two and two together from context clues
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 23:43 |
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dwarf74 posted:You're not wrong! The game has a reputation for tight balance but I think that's a factor of how well it gives you a sense of imminent doom, while you still get it done in the end.
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 23:54 |
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!Klams posted:Or read basically any of the comments that follow if you can put two and two together from context clues That's (I believe) why NRVNQSR still gave a spoiler warning It was my intention to also playfully piggy back off that warning by quoting it, but I edited my post to make it more explicit
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 23:54 |
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Gloomhaven is good at having balance that is "good enough." Nothing is so unplayably weak that it can't fumble its way through most scenarios, and high power classes can always crank up the difficulty if needed. Most of its competition in the fantasy RPG minis space is hot dogshit, so even vaguely okayish balance is enough that it stands out head and shoulders above the rest.
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# ? Feb 6, 2020 23:57 |
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The single biggest class balance issue is that executes break scaling, so for classes with non-loss executes putting up the difficulty doesn't make the game much harder.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 00:03 |
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Gloomhaven's shining achievement is that it gives you a real action economy and a persistently difficult decision to make each round with how its card play works. Everything else about it is secondary - its sins are innumerable: The choose A/B options blind cards are bad, most of the interaction with gloomhaven is bad, the writing is very slightly below average for an rpg, some of the monsters are degenerate in how they treat the board state (slimes), the encounter design is very uneven in the guest scenarios, the AI system leads to gaming certain encounters in dissatisfying ways, the metaprogression through gloomhaven's item market is glacially slow, locking players out of content feels terrible, its possible to wind up with nothing to do but grind near the end of the campaign, the personal quests vary extremely wildly in difficulty to execute, certain classes bust things open, its hard for players to continually play a class in the archetype they prefer due to how unlocks work, the way elements work is unintuitive for most players, new characters often start out as a liability on a party due to lack of equipment, the map board is an afterthought that can and should be replaced by an app, handling the monsters without an app is an outrageous chore. It's still an incredible game and definitely the best of its kind.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:18 |
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Impermanent posted:its sins are innumerable: Yeah it's funny that it's one of the best games I've played and is also something I could write thousands of words on what it does wrong. Most of the issues are on the campaign side of things (and a few are in scenario design) and it's part of the reason I'm eager to see how much Frosthaven (and Subtitle) fixes. Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Feb 7, 2020 |
# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:24 |
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It does kind of suck that you can simply get locked out of some side content simply because you made the wrong choice on a card
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:33 |
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A wrong choice that often has no real indicator on the card to what they will result in.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:35 |
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Cinara posted:A wrong choice that often has no real indicator on the card to what they will result in. Yeah it'd be one thing if it was "Do you want to help this NPC with their quest Y/N?" but that's only like half of the time in our experience
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:40 |
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Most cards are easy, you always spend the money and you never walk away. The worst that typically happens is you take some damage or lose some gold for nothing.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:40 |
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There are a couple that are a bit weird. Like "do you rat out your former ally to their enemies, or do you keep mum".
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:53 |
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I am best friends with all my former allies even when theyre assholes who make me look bad, and Im definitely not a snitch e: it helps that most of the unlockable content ones are "do you pay a money for this dubious item", and Ive been seeing a couple of those show up as scenario rewards anyways. And it doubly helps that our plan after running out of scenarios is going to be "unlock everything and play through the rest"
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:54 |
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that's what i mean the only way to get the missions is to snitch on your former allies
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:56 |
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Oh yeah THAT one. That one is egregiously bad I agree
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 01:59 |
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We've had a few where the solution is not intuitive to the options, like straight up "you scare the person away with your eagerness to help" style outcomes that felt like they were trying to be clever at the expense of letting you do the thing you wanted. I feel like they should communicate more about the rewards/trade off (like, you can accept the bribe of gold but your reputation will go down for looking the other way) or at least not lock out cool/fun outcomes based on you choosing something that seems arbitrary at the time.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 02:00 |
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If the results of City/Road events are especially bullshit my friend and I will just decide we made the other decision after the fact. My biggest problem with those is that a lot of them don't give you a real choice; either you participate in the event or you walk away and nothing happens. Every choice should have interesting consequences, or else its just a waste of time in a game that already takes too long to setup. More choices that can be changed if you have certain party members would also be good.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 02:57 |
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sirtommygunn posted:More choices that can be changed if you have certain party members would also be good. Even these I wish there were some way where there were some that went in or out of the deck unless you had specific classes in the party (or you just moved them to the bottom and skipped over them), or at the VERY least wouldn't trash and miss a cool thing because you didn't have "sword symbol" or whatever in your party when you got it
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 03:03 |
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Guy A. Person posted:Even these I wish there were some way where there were some that went in or out of the deck unless you had specific classes in the party (or you just moved them to the bottom and skipped over them), or at the VERY least wouldn't trash and miss a cool thing because you didn't have "sword symbol" or whatever in your party when you got it I think you could have some kind of long term event system where the options might be to confront the problem immediately, and suffer a penalty, or set it aside to be confronted later, but while ignored has some kind of passive negative effect on the town. Although, that's yet another thing that adds more busywork between missions, so maybe that's not a great idea.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 03:31 |
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sirtommygunn posted:I think you could have some kind of long term event system where the options might be to confront the problem immediately, and suffer a penalty, or set it aside to be confronted later, but while ignored has some kind of passive negative effect on the town. Although, that's yet another thing that adds more busywork between missions, so maybe that's not a great idea. Yeah I definitely get keeping it as simple as possible, at the very least there shouldn't really be any clever trickery or locked off paths behind a simple misunderstanding, and yeah there should be (mostly) clear stakes.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 04:27 |
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I fill in for a second group and they're trying to lower their reputation and the event system is the bane of their existence. At times it feels like 'there is some dude on the street buying an apple, what do you do' 'stab him in the back in broad daylight!' 'he turned out to be a cultist! +2 rep!'
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 04:56 |
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Just tried Clank Legacy for the first time and its campaign seems to be on point when it comes to minimizing bullshit during event choices, and won't arbitrarily lock you out of something without at least unlocking something else
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 05:58 |
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xiw posted:I fill in for a second group and they're trying to lower their reputation and the event system is the bane of their existence. At times it feels like We tried so drat hard to hit -10 rep from the very beginning, we're half way through the campaign (according to stickers on board), and all we've managed to do is fluctuate between 0 and -4 reputation. This game definitely won't let you be a bad person.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 19:26 |
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poemdexter posted:We tried so drat hard to hit -10 rep from the very beginning, we're half way through the campaign (according to stickers on board), and all we've managed to do is fluctuate between 0 and -4 reputation. This game definitely won't let you be a bad person. Yeah, the main group I play with has been pegged at max rep for a long time, until we took a few weeks off and I let the main guy running it not realize he was making a choice in which scenario we did next and did the kinda bad thing to the city. Dropped us down like 4-5 rep, think we've got it all back over the next handful of sessions.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 19:52 |
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poemdexter posted:We tried so drat hard to hit -10 rep from the very beginning, we're half way through the campaign (according to stickers on board), and all we've managed to do is fluctuate between 0 and -4 reputation. This game definitely won't let you be a bad person. It took me and my friend quite awhile to hit -10 even while taking every evil bastard option offered to us. Bouncing back from that to hit +10 was pretty trivial though. I'd suggest just waiting for the personal goal that unlocks eclipse rather than trying to get it through rep.
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# ? Feb 7, 2020 21:06 |
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The event system could simply have good, neutral, and bad events, so it isn’t a matter of choosing between a good and a bad choice but you can’t always determine which is which, it’s about either choosing which bad result you prefer, or which reward, or maybe whether to get both a boon and a bane or walk away without either. I agree the scenario unlocks are deeply disappointing. If you want a few scenarios that most players never unlock, then have a good event that forces you to unlock one scenario and lock another for your campaign, don’t bury the unlocks in a counter-intuitive event chain that might never trigger in the first place.
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# ? Feb 8, 2020 15:34 |
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I'd prefer they make it so every scenario (and item while we're at it) is unlockable through normal gameplay, but events give you a chance to unlock stuff early.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 01:06 |
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Spoilers for three spears and scenario 17 God drat. I feel dirty. Collected 22 coins throughout the scenario and then got another twenty five for the scenario completion bonus. Non discard loot two as a top action is too powerful.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 01:31 |
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Our early game party of Spell weaver, Mindthief and Scoundrel looks like it's just about to have our Brute player retired for the Squidhead. How screwed is our game plan?
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 07:09 |
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You'll need to adjust a bit but you'll be fine.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 07:34 |
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Yeah ok I took a sneak at what scenario 52 (and further) would be and I couldn't help but laugh.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 11:10 |
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bewilderment posted:Our early game party of Spell weaver, Mindthief and Scoundrel looks like it's just about to have our Brute player retired for the Squidhead. Scoundrel is a medium hp progression character and is fine taking some hits in mid-game. You may want to consider picking up some shields for some of the characters and you’ll need to carry some healing for between rooms, but as long as you spread out damage and aren’t afraid of using loss cards/having a character or two exhaust in the final room you’re good. Mindthief/Scoundrel and Spellweaver/Cthulhu pair pretty well.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 14:51 |
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bewilderment posted:Our early game party of Spell weaver, Mindthief and Scoundrel looks like it's just about to have our Brute player retired for the Squidhead. If he lays down enough curses you will be perfectly fine.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 15:39 |
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bewilderment posted:Our early game party of Spell weaver, Mindthief and Scoundrel looks like it's just about to have our Brute player retired for the Squidhead. Your scoundrel will have to coordinate with your mindthief about adjacency, since the brute was a frontline fighter and your new squidface character isn't.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 15:47 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 08:18 |
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sirtommygunn posted:I'd prefer they make it so every scenario (and item while we're at it) is unlockable through normal gameplay, but events give you a chance to unlock stuff early. Casual Mode exists.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 16:46 |