Long rests should generally be your default. Ideally you can stagger them so the whole party isn’t resting on the same turn. Keep in mind that for a long rest your initiative is 99, which with either the bare minimum of positioning or an invisibility ability the prior round (which will thus last this entire round since you’re at 99) makes the “safe place” definition a lot more broad than you’d think. A long rest gets you healing, item usage, card selection, and (kind of) time in that you will be exhausted a turn later than you’d be with a short rest. (Yes, it’s a turn of inactivity, but there is positive value in being on the map playing no cards vs. not being on the map.) The difference in value is really big, especially later on as the items and cards get more powerful.
Short rests are best when you REALLY can’t afford the “turn off” due to combat pressure, situations where you need to accelerate more than you need maximum value (most often because something is spawning every X turns or you otherwise have a turn limit), or situations that are otherwise a bit of a crisis. In my in-person 3 player game I’d say we did about 2 long rests for every short rest, and as I’ve been playing with 4 in the digital version it’s probably even more towards long.
I can’t find it, but I’m pretty sure someone upthread mentioned that the first part of the first mission is part of the tutorial and you can only start with two characters. Adding more opens up at some point during this mission/tutorial, I think.
Thanks! I Googled and found pathways that were not correct.
I actually found my problem as I was reperforming it to report it…I had an ongoing power that I was supposed to activate or sip before my attack…so no bug. Me being dumb because I rarely use ongoing powers because they usually mean burning a card.
I’m thinking of starting over on easy. I’ve maxed my Cragheart and Scoundrel after quickly retiring my Brute. I’m still having fun even if I am repeating scenarios. I have enough available I can just skip around. I just must suck or not being thinking deeply and strategically enough.
To rephrase the rest of the post: the key to the game, for me, is managing monster targeting. If you can do a decent job with that, then you’ll be able to find a way for one (or more) character(s) to sit out for a turn without getting clobbered. Short rests, for me, are for when there’s serious time pressure to either finish off a room or monster (e.g. a boss or named enemy) or otherwise progress (escort or other movement-dominated missions). Sometimes you’ll get a character who really doesn’t need to long rest as a rule (doesn’t need to refresh items (especially armor), doesn’t care too much which card to lose, doesn’t need that extra healing (typically for poison), etc), but that’s the exception.
There is a bug in one scenario where rooms are supposed to open at certain intervals where 1 or more rooms never open up. It was one I was finally going to win, too!
Turns out that the “Triangles” class merc is a whole lot of fun to play. Especially in a party with a Mind Thief and Cragheart. Wow! Going to have us a boss fight today, though, so we will see whether this is efficient or just fun.
On the other hand, my resolution to use long rests came to very little. Almost every time it was time for a character to rest, he was in a time and situation where sitting there doing nothing for a turn was going to be a big problem. Clearly, I need to plan ahead for this better.
Number of mercenaries plays a big part. In a two character party long rests are a lot rarer, usually reserved for when one mercenary is near the door and the other has to leg it across the room. Long resting in the middle of combat for a two player party is usually not the smartest play…
I don’t get how that could happen. XP aside, a merc only levels up when you select a new card for your deck. (My level 3 Mindthief got enough XP to level up last night, but I went to bed without picking his new card, so he still lists as level 3.) Bug?
I’ve been selecting cards in a regular basis. But I wasn’t really paying attention to the levels. I looked to see when my Brute would get a new card, and noticed he wasn’t accumulating XP because he was level 9 and that is the level cap. I guess I took more shots at the Inox camp than I thought! I maybe should have ramped down the difficulty.
So you failed dozens of quests while collecting plenty of incidental XP along the way? What level did the Brute start at? It doesn’t seem normal to me.
It’s can be situationally quite useful so long as the resting character is not in the middle of an enemy swarm or if they’re not closest to a dangerous foe. Just one or two weak attackers won’t do much harm even if they do attack the init-99 character, and more likely they’ll attack the non-resting character anyway, while meanwhile the resting character is guaranteed not to lose a crucial card, plus they can heal their poison or wounded status even without having a heal power available.
Oh well! Especially early on I’m sure the Brute makes for a really difficult character to play, especially if you believe from the appearance and description that it’s capable of tanking enemy attacks. Doubly difficult in a two-person party.
My first shot at the game online was a Brute tanking for a Scoundrel. It didn’t go very well. I played a lot of missions before a friend was like, dude, just change the party mix. And I was all like NO I LIK3 THIS PARTY GODDAMMIT. But then I switched to four characters including the Sunbather and all of a sudden I was Golden Nugget.
As an experiment yesterday, I took a look at Guildmaster mode.
Battles themselves seem almost exactly one notch easier. I had been playing the campaign on easy mode, and found that normal mode here is about an equivalent struggle (after the initial hand-holding mini-battles, which I think can be skipped).
The story is far less ambitious, and the meta game is different, but interesting. Personal battle goals do not grant check marks towards perks, but rather towards experience. Perks are granted from meeting longer term goals (for example, an early Brute goal is to kill 50 enemies with melee attacks).
My sense of Gloomhaven is that you “get ahead” through perks and gold. (Experience/levels lead to better cards, which is fun, but the monsters get stronger too.) And the Guildmaster setup seems to rein in perks as a way to get too much of a leg up, particular for AOE and essence users.
Lots of achievements and awards for various accomplishments. Of course, I haven’t gotten far enough to know whether it provides the same satisfying progression as the main campaign.
Perks for me are the number 1 that grows your power with prosperity items 2.
The battles behave much differently once you remove most of the negative cards from your deck. At that point, your card synergies become significantly more powerful and obviously having more confidence that your plan will work as intended is another positive.
So, in a way, the game is most difficult at the beginning.
I just went back to it after about a week to start a new campaign now that I think I actually understand the strategy involved, and noticed a new difficulty level beneath Easy - I think it’s called Casual, or something like that.
I don’t know if any of the other levels have been adjusted.
