Yeah, perks make a huge difference (but sometimes with diminishing returns after a point, e.g., rolling modifiers for characters who make heavy use of advantage). Card enhancements, while typically few and far between, can also be game-changers.
Items are funny. In general, a lot of them give the appearance of being underpowered and of strictly limited utility, but every now and then those situational things like “add pierce” make a massive difference.
An appropriate thought for this afternoon. :) Having a hell of a time with a Guildmaster scenario, and the main thing, I think, is that I am so used to playing with heavily upgraded attack modifiers from the campaign to the point that I am surprised when a turn where I count on each merc getting the expected amount of damage goes awry.
For anyone still thinking about diving into this game: I am going to disagree with the advice to learn Gloomhaven by playing Guildmaster mode. Rather, I would advise starting right in with the main campaign, playing on the easiest difficulty level. Even if you lose some at the beginning.
I’m not saying Guildmaster is a bad game, but it lacks most of the things that make Gloomhaven great. The story, the very well voiced over text, the tone, the mission design, and, maybe most importantly, the character progression system. All of these feel hollowed out in Guildmaster, and I think this is going to leave players a lot less motivated to learn the intricacies of the system, long enough to get the greatness of the game. Guildmaster, is at its core, a derivative knockoff lacking the genius of the original and settling for fairly good. And fairly good does not justify enduring a steep learning curve.
In Gloomhaven, I typically finish a mission with the sense of having triumphed in an epic battle. In Guildmaster, I generally finish with a sense of having finally squished an annoyingly random roadblock. Far less planning and far more “one damn thing after another” shit.
And, as others have noted, Guildmaster subtly mis-trains a player for the campaign. It’s very often to your advantage in Guildmaster to play burn cards early, whereas in the campaign that’s generally the way to lose.
I played a few missions on Guildmaster, and then got stuck on a respawning enemy mission that I can’t seem to beat. So I’m going to play the campaign, the way God and nature intended.
I am primarily playing solo digital. I tried playing co-op with a friend a couple of weeks ago, but he didn’t play the tutorial and we repeatedly got slaughtered and haven’t had a chance to try again.
I have a few questions.
Are you meant to start with your chosen mercenaries (I’m going to play with 3 as I think that’s a good balance) and play them until retirement, or is it valid to roll up all 6 and rotate them in and out as the situation dictates?
Is there a difficulty level to the scenarios, other than the inherent difficulty level? For example, are the side missions more difficult than the main story missions? Should I do side missions when they are presented, or wait until I’ve leveled up some?
Any meta-progression strategic tips? Good or bad personal goals? Thoughts on synergies? I’m thinking of going Cragheart, Mindthief, Spellweaver.
In the physical version you normally just play your starting mercenaries until they retire, but in the digital version feel free to swap in as you like.
The scenarios will auto-level to the average level of your characters, so it doesn’t matter which ones you do. When you retire a character (mandatory upon completing their personal story), the new character will come in at a lower level equal to the prosperity level of Gloomhaven.
You can change the difficulty as well, the first scenario can be difficult, don’t feel bad dropping it to easy while you learn the game!
Team looks good, I like all three of those characters.
There’s absolutely nothing to stop you rolling up 6 characters and switching them in and out. The physical boardgame encourages this where different people will be dropping in and out of the campaign as it progresses.
The difficulty of the scenarios isn’t scaled by campaign progression but scales with the level and number of the characters, there is no doubt however that certain combinations of characters can make certain scenarios much easier or harder though. I didn’t notice any difficulty differences between main quests and side quests. I chose the missions mainly on the characters retirement goals, so doing a main or side quest didn’t mean a huge amount, it was whether it was going to further the retirement of a character that tended to guide the choice.
My experience is taking a personal goal that involves ticking off a quest in a number of different locations is much easier at the start of the campaign than getting it towards the end, unless you want to redo scenarios that you have already completed with other characters.
The personal goal “Finding the Cure” is a bit of a ballache, but once again if you are prepared to replay scenarios it can be progressed fairly quickly.
Any goal that involves gathering gold (e.g. Greed is Good) will seriously stunt your progression since the amounts required to retire are large enough in game terms that it will be pretty much all that character does with his loot, even spending 10 or 15 gold on some items will set you back a scenario or two for instance, on the upside you can absolutely dictate when the character with that goal retires unlike some of the other goals…
I haven’t noticed any difference in difficulty. But whereas the overall game and the main missions are amazingly polished and bug-free, I have noticed some significant problems in side missions.
But in terms of difficulty, I find the game to be amazingly well-tuned. If I am at a particular skill level (in my case weak maybe now transitioning to mediocre), then mission after mission will push me to almost exactly the same extent. One mission, I will feel like "hey, I’m blowing them away… only to run into serious trouble on the last part. Next mission, I will feel like “no chance I’ll win this… only to find the last room just falls into place.” But in each case, I just barely win.
As to synergies… In my view, the most important thing is to include “crowd control” abilities like stun and disarm and, to a lesser extent, immobilize. All of these are even better when part of ranged attacks.
The Mindthief is far and away the best at this. The others have only tiny bits to add to this, although, of course, enhancements can help any party member later.
The second thing is to include a character with at least some tanking ability. I don’t find the Brute especially fun to play, but early on he is the only one who can mitigate damage much at all. And he can get better at this at early level ups. (Cragheart has hit points and a picture that looks tanky, but really does not work out well in this role.)
So… in my mind, I’m not going to tackle the early missions without those two. At which point, most any character could be a third, and everything should be fine. Scoundrel goes very well with the Brute, since her attacks are helped a lot by attacking a monster that is adjacent to an ally. Cragheart has some nice ranged attacks, and his heals and hit points are nice in the early going.
I like the Tinker for healing and recovering burnt cards
I’ll disagree with this. The main point of tanking, in my experience, is reading the monster moves and channeling them (and managing initiative) so as to minimize the number of hits you take, not mitigating (i.e. with shield) or healing damage. The Cragheart is great at the former (channeling monster moves), but not quite as good with managing initiative. And it also has sufficient heals, hitpoints, and the-perk-that-lets-you-use-armor to handle the ones that do get through. There’s also a bit of crowd control with immobilize, iirc.
Of course, YMMV, and plenty of people have success with the Brute.
I completely agree with this. If you play the Brute like a tank you are going to have a tough time. Brute can’t build up enough shield to be useful, and the HP pools are just too low. Retaliate is one of the worst specs in the entire game, and only serves a narrow purpose when facing low HP/high shield enemies. I use Brute as a high damage striker with hit an run tactics. Unbalanced measure with boots to take out a high HP enemy, or sweeping blow with the stun hammer. Stuff like that.
Mindthief, Cragheart is a great initial core, then you can pick whatever interests you for your third. The Tinkerer is much maligned in Gloomhaven circles, but is a good choice for a beginner because of the crazy high card count, heals, and summons. With Cragheart, don’t dismiss the crowd control you can accomplish by dropping down obstacles. My experience is that Mindthief accumulates XP fast early and slows around level 4-5. Cragheart is the opposite, slow to get to level 4 then takes off in XP generation.
Yes, I left this unstated but it is key to the Craggie’s success. Early on you get one obstacle card that is somewhat situational but can make for a great chokepoint. The class really comes into it’s own with level 4 (iirc) when you can drop several rocks at range (and do damage, too!).
I just started playing with Cragheart and yeah, that XP generation is really tough early on. He’s definitely lagging the rest of the group!
I suspect our difference of opinion has to do with something I realize I left out in my post.
I think of the early game as centering around a Mindthief-centered strategy. He’s got control skills, but also damage skills. Once you use Mind’s Weakness to augment melee attacks (typically turn 2), even generic melee attacks become attack 4’s. Perverse Edge becomes attack 5. And none of these attacks are burns. Plus the perk possibilities make it reasonably quick to make him highly reliable. During the early missions, this is way ahead of the curve.
But these are melee attacks, and with his low HP, he can’t take a lot of enemy fire before he starts to have to burn cards. He’s not helpless on the front lines, he has a bottom stun and a bottom invisible. His high initiative cards can be great for getting out of trouble (but they can also backfire by making him more of a target).
So… someone else needs to be able to move in close and take some of the hits, while still being able to do their main job. Cragheart has trouble in cramped quarters, causing collateral damage and not being able to use those excellent ranged attacks as reliable. The Brute, by contrast, is at home in melee, and his being there distracts from quite a bit of what would have been turned on the Mindthief. I agree that his shielding potential is limited, although he has an early perk and a level one card that can each help a little. A level two card helps more. Maybe tank is a misleading term, he isn’t a tank in the sense of “take almost zero damage and retaliate all over their asses.” But in my experience, he can play his melee role and rarely need to burn cards to mitigate damage, assuming of course that you are using control techniques like stunning hammer and the Mindthief’s stun abilities. And simultaneous take a lot of heat off the Mindthief. (Not mention offering adjacency opportunities if you use the Scoundrel.)
On another note, one role I forgot to mention above – you need something in your party to deal with shields. Especially 2+ shields paired with dangerous offensive abilities but low HP. Wound and pierce abilities help a lot there, also, to some extent, poison. There I see the value of Cragheart. His “collateral damage skills” are hell on those enemies, because shields don’t mitigate against it. Of course, once you get a good AOE character with a wound enhancement, the entire problem becomes a lot less pressing.
Please inform RNGesus. I swear the game just loves to alternate between X0 and -1 over and over. :) They’re the only two negative cards in my deck and even trying to add positive ones, I think the last mission I was on I fumbled (whatever the X0 is called) four or five times [EDIT: I mean four of five times for just the mind thief, I had more aside from him]. Had to take a break from the game after that one…
I’m sure this is just bias, but I feel the same way. I stopped playing the steam version for awhile because it felt like every attack was a negative or null, and it drove me up the wall.
My friend had started keeping track over the last few play sessions and the results skewed towards negative despite perks making our decks skew pretty heavily towards the positive. Small sample size though so maybe just some bad runs. Of course, the only reason he started doing that was because we were frustrated by all the bad “rolls”.
Random streaks like this really impacts my enjoyment of the game. I find the game very challenging (maybe I just suck, which is fine) and scenarios tend to go down to the wire. With how god-awful slow the animation speeds are even at the “fast” speed, I really hate having to redo missions because of chains of absurdly unlucky rolls. It just gets tedious after a while.
When I first started playing I was really excited to see how perks could skew your deck which would help with the RNG streaks I hate in D20 games and the like. Unfortunately, when I realized the crits reset your deck my enthusiasm waned because as I said, I just keep pulling X0 over and over which makes my mind thief very at the mercy of the RNG gods.
I’m aware of human psychology on this sort of thing, but something very much feels off with however they’re pulling cards in the digital version.
I totally hear you. I played 18 scenarios of JotL over the summer with a friend, and the nulls only hit once or twice per scenario, but with the digital version it feels (feels being the key word) like nulls are hitting 4-5 times.
Two things here:
tdlr, it should be a bit less streaky than if we had dice, or a flat X% chance (i.e. hit chances in XCOM, the common example).
However, if the digital version doesn’t implement it as a true deck but rather reshuffles after every draw, that would be bad. I can’t imagine they actually did that, though.
The digital game only reshuffles after a null/crit. It just gets super… not streaky exactly, but for me it pulls null way more often than it feels like it should. It feels like there’s something off with the logic/RNG they use when determining what card to pull from the remaining deck which is why my (frustrated) friend started keeping track.
In any case, I kind of wish null/crit didn’t reshuffle. Get a bad streak? Cool, you’ve got a bunch of good cards to work your way through.
from Steam forum (reposted from Discord I believe)
One of the devs simulated 200,000 attacks both 1 per round and 5 per round. Results look pretty normal to me.
FF_James May 14, 2021 7:29am
"In case anyone’s interested I just simulated 200,000 attack modifier draws using the exact some code we use in game.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/467319856740696074/842740312597463080/unknown.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/467319856740696074/842743069366419466/unknown.png
