Yes. And no. Leveling up gives you a choice between two new cards. You then make room for the new shiny in your deck (hand size always stays the same) and re-assess how best to pair up and play your cards. This takes about 300 hours.
As far as the battles go, they are much shorter (and therefore easier) in guildmaster for the most part, but otherwise unchanged.
For the metagame, guildmaster has pooling of money, random quests and some campaign mechanics removed or altered. Overall it’s a fair bit simpler.
I would say guildmaster is a reasonable way to get used to the mechanics of the game, but the shorter scenarios could teach you some bad habits that will hinder in campaign mode. I’m not convinced about it as a standard way to play unless you find campaign mode overly difficult or you hate the exhaustion mechanics like Tom.
You get XP by playing cards that produce it and by completing scenarios. You get gold by looting it, primarily. You get perk points by completing battle goals (in campaign) or missions (in guildmaster).
Your XP causes occasional levelling up, which unlocks two new cards. These cards will generally be a bit better than what you have; some of the high level ones are extremely powerful. You add one of the unlocked cards to your available card pool, from which you select the cards to take with you for each scenario. As mentioned, your starting hand size never gets any bigger so you’ll have to drop one of your weaker cards to make room.
Levelling up also gives you a new perk, which (mostly) improves your attack modifier deck. You can also get a new perk by collecting 3 perk points.
Average party level affects the difficulty of scenarios, so the game scales with you.
You spend your gold on gear, which is another major source of getting stronger. It provides all manner of benefits, including boosting your defence, attack and staying power. You can also spend gold on temporarily adding bless modifiers to your deck or on enhancing your cards.
Very exciting!
I finished the tutorial and decided to start guild master mode. I chose normal difficulty - let’s see how hard it really is. Then it gave me the option to skip the tutorial. Which I did, since I already went through the tutorial. Only to find myself later in the tutorial.
Looking forward to actually playing the game.
Very soon I think!
Guild master is pretty good, but has extremely unfun scenarios (endless spawning hounds? No thanks)
I just hit Inox encampment, and my 2 mercs face 5 enemies, with additional enemies spawning, and I’m just noping out. Maybe Cragheart and Mindthief is a bad combo for this one.
I’m sure there are tools (go round the guards? Maybe summons are actually good here?) but I don’t yet have the intuition about the game to tell if I’m screwing up strategy or implementation or what.
A tough one. But keep in mind that you do not have to kill everything, only a certain number – I think it’s five times the number in your party. So 10 for you.
General strategy advice:
The Inox guards are not very tough, and they will make up the bulk of your kills. Once you get rid of the shaman and archer, gaurds can be outmanuevered and killed off pretty easily. But archers cause a lot of ranged damage, but if you do not get the shaman first, he’ll just heal any partial damage you do.
Specific spoiler:
With two mercs, a new guard spawns every other turn in the far back. You can turn the spawner off by entering the room right behind the spawner – but that is not necessarily to your advantage, because you then you will have another shaman and archer to deal with. Also, you do not need to go into any side rooms – those also contain more difficult opponents, but you do not have to kill them to win the scenario.
Ugh. I’m having a hanging problem when I try to use the Cragheart’s infused Blunt force on the scenario with all the walls you have to break. Akso, I am now too dumb to find save files.
Eight missions complete now, most of them quite intense. No losses, but only once or twice did I feel I had it in the bag before the very end. In fact, the scenario I finished last night, if my merc had not hit for the full expected damage on the final round, I would have lost.
While I have been winning, I have been less successful at piling up gold and perk points – which seem to be the main ways to “get ahead.” But I have not gotten skillful enough to be able to detour to prioritize those things and still succeed on the main mission.
All three mercs are now level 3. Whereas the Brute seemed to be the most important at the start of the game, his levelups have seemed rather meh, and now I value the Scoundrel and Mindthief more, as I find their levelup cards much more useful.
I’m expecting my first retirement quite soon, the Scoundrel, and quite looking forward to unlocking a new class. (I may even create another character or two and move them in and out of the party, especially if the digital game allow going back and replaying completed scenarios, a mechanism I have not yet tried out.)
I am really liking this game, but I can also see why people with no experience with tabletop find it more daunting. It’s not so much the basic game mechanics – they are initially complicated, but once you have the basic idea, all your questions can be easily googled. Rather, it is that in tabletop you have to learn and follow the rules for moving the enemy units. And doing that teaches what to expect them to do. In the digital, AI moves just happen, and it is less clear why. So it is a longer process to know the enemy. Since I have some but not a lot of TT experience, I am kind of in the middle on this.
Regardless, Gloomhaven has achieved the unimaginable, it has allowed me to achieve remission of my Caster of Magic for Windows addiction, and that is quite an achievement.
Which difficulty level are you playing on? Eight wins with no losses is very good!
I ran repeatedly up against this and only completed it when I changed my character mix. I was trying it with Brute/Scoundrel and needed a support character to get the requisite kills. I also had one situation where I cleared the room but didn’t have enough kills because not enough monstars had spawned.
Yes it is, I kept repeating in my head as I read the post (I hope it’s easy, otherwise I suck).
Sorry, I was not meaning to overstate my success. This is just easy level difficulty. Since most of my playthroughs have been nailbiters at this level, I am definitely not ready to move beyond that. My current plan is to go through some retirements and learn new classes on easy, then try moving up to normal. Maybe in Guildmaster mode first.
For another thing, I am playing with three mercs, which I believe is really the sweet spot.
Red flag for what? Grift? Malfeasance? Insider trading? Getting your chocolate in my peanut butter?
Communists!
Red Banner Northern Fleet!
Bleh wrong thread. Stupid phones.
Played another mission last night. When I first saw that it was sort of a novelty scenario to loot five different locations my heart sank. In most games, I don’t enjoy such missions. But my concerns were misguided, this was interesting and very well put together, not just weirdness to appease the bored.
The first half of the mission, I thought maybe I was seeing signs that I could notch up the difficulty level to normal. Things seemed to going smoothly, dispatching enemies efficiently. But in the end, it was quite a close call. Reminding me that I am still very much a beginner. Although it troubles me just a bit that I do not have a clear sense of what I need to do better. Maybe efficiency in moving from a completed room to the next? Or decisions regarding short versus long rests? I don’t know.
Gotta say, though, this is an incredibly balanced game, where a player at my skill level so consistently finds easy-level missions very close but winnable.
The big news, though, is that my Scoundrel retired after this mission. And this opened up a lot of stuff. First, it pushed up the prosperity level of Gloomhaven, so that any new recruits can now come in at level 2, and the Merchant has new, higher level goods to sell. The latter consideration makes gold acquisition an even higher priority.
Second, it unlocks a new character class – triangles. This is a first for me. Although I played some tabletop, I never got to this point. Now I see what all the excitement is about, it’s kind of like buying a whole new game, or better yet, the second iteration of a game that I already know I like.
The triangles class turns out to be both fascinating and daunting. Major spoiler: He is an elementalist, a spellcaster who specializes in area of effect attacks. Damage per enemy is minimal, unless you infuse elements, and even then it is not huge. But if you have the right elements to infuse, you can smack multiple enemies with stun, wound, etc. Which is kind of mind blowing in its possibilities.
But this presents me with a really interesting problem. My level three mercs – Brute and Mindthief – infuse very limited elements. And although I have not yet started a mission with the elementalist, I can easily see that if he has no infused elements to work with other than what he created himself on the previous turn, he will be quite ineffective. An interesting problem, but one I have very little to go on – I have never played a magic using merc, even in TT. One idea would be to recruit both an elementalist and either a spellweaver or cragheart, either of which would help infuse elements. I’m thinking that once I get the perks to get elements into the elementalist’s attack card deck, he ought to be able to be effective on his own, but getting him to that point could be painful.
So, for reasons, I may end up switching to a four merc party, which from my TT experience, is noticeably tougher. And two new recruits, both of classes I have never played before.
Should be interesting! I hope I get time to dive in later today.
Re: triangles:
I had a great time with this one, tabletop in 2-player with a lightning-bolt partner. It really pushed me to plan out at least 2 moves in advance (obviously, because elements) and honestly 3 moves is better. Stamina + mana potions are key, and remember that other characters can also use magic potions to benefit you. And IMHO having a basically non-magical partner isn’t a big deal; you’d end up stepping on each others’ toes a lot, anyway.
Honestly, though, I think it’s going to be tough at lower levels for a couple reasons: (1) the low-level cards were a bit underwhelming, IIRC. (2) You won’t be able to hold as many potions. And mostly (3) the class turns a huge corner at level 6 or 7 when it can just start deleting enemies off the map. The whole progression of the character from a “color-based” spellcaster (i.e. fire/ice/nature/wind) at low levels to a “light-and-dark” spellcaster (sun/moon) at high levels is pretty cool.
@ooomalley It’s funny you should mention playing this class in a social setting. I was just walking in the door, thinking about it, and realizing that I could never play this class socially because I would end up sitting and pondering turns for a totally unacceptable amount of time.
But I appreciate the advice. And upon reflection, I agree that the Spellweaver would make a poor companion. But I am thinking that Cragheart would provide earth and Mindthief ice, with neither needing nearly all of what they put out there. And even if the Elementalist remains weak, one weak merc in a party of four will be tolerable, while getting him up to a useful level. At least that’s the theory I am planning on trying out, first chance I get. If that fails, I’ll have to come up with a plan B. :)
On a whole other note, based on your experience, can yuo offer any advice on long rests versus short rests? (Other than, of course, you don’t want to long rest in a spot where you’re going to take an intolerable amount of damage). I’ve heard people claim that long rests are the way to really get good, but it seems to me that this can really slow you down, given that first you have to get to a safe place and then waste an entire round.
This is a great point.
I am only starting out with the digital version (I’m about 30 in on the tabletop version), and can’t figure out even how to use three characters on the first scenario. I seem limited by two. Sorry, this was probably covered upthread.