Some weird thing happened with my game in that in the middle of it last night—without me changing anything—all of a sudden the animations became absurdly fast. However, there still seems to be a delay between simple things like choosing two cards to recover and the “Confirm” button lighting up. Kind of annoying. And that’s on a Ryzen 9 with a 3080 card.
Digital has taught me a rule I am sure I botched up in tabletop.
Groups of monsters all use an available element, for better or worse, kind of as if they were one entity.
If ice is available, it can help all the elite and the two normal frost demons. But if Ice is available, it can harm the elite and the two normal fire demons.
Of course, that is not true for your party. If one merc uses the ice, it is gone before the next merc’s turn starts.
Makes a big difference! And I am 99% sure I was not doing that in the board version.
I don’t know if I’ve encountered elemental demons yet. What does Ice element availability do to fire demons?
On at least one of their eight cards, they consume ice and suffer one damage. Which is significant given their high shield low HP nature.
Gotcha, thanks! Affecting all the demons vs. the first one to go is definitely a big deal. Good to know!
Yeah, that’s a fairly common error. I don’t think I ever fell pray to that one, specifically, but I kind of want to get the digital version now just to see what I did mess up…
Ha, but the quartermaster is the, er master at this. If he takes the occasional turn off (admittedly lowering overall group combat efficiency) he can never run out of cards.
I think Gloomhaven is just right for four ordinary characters at normal difficulty level. It does take getting used to, so it’s not the best game for non-wargamers, but you don’t have to invest chess- or go-level or squad-leader amounts of time to learn how everything works, and at normal level you can play with a modicum of casualness once you’ve internalized the basics.
However, I think some combinations of two characters will have a great deal of trouble with certain scenarios. For example, scenarios that either require AOEs or lots of focused damage as the case may be and for which neither of the two fits the bill, or scenarios that require control-powers like stun and disarm to reduce the severity of the initial onslaught.
So it’s not surprising that people who just run through the tutorial and only make two characters for their first experience of the game sometimes have problems. Because they a) won’t know how the characters are supposed to be played at first, and b) may have distorted ideas how they should be played based on other games in which tank, dps, and healer roles are more clearly defined.
Regarding the frequency of bad draws:
If you are like me, you tend to think the null card “should” come up 5% of the time. But follow the conventional wisdom and obtain a “thin deck” and that number rises noticeably.
But much more important, perceptually, is that (again, if you are like me) it’s like walking into the supermarket to buy toilet paper. You don’t remember all the times the plan worked, and the toilet paper was right on the shelves. And you don’t notice when the store has excess stacks of the stuff. But it sure makes an indelible mark on you memory when there’s a pandemic and your plan to buy toilet paper fails.
Ditto with these card draws. Most of the time, there’s a clear plan. Four HP needed to kill that monster? If I get my four, well, that’s what I expected, so toss the Charmin in the basket and don’t give it another thought. If I get five or six or eight damage, well, who needs all that extra toilet paper? Whatever. But a three? That’s SOL with no toilet paper, and you better believe I will be remembering that.
Pretty much.
Crits and Misses get seen the most because unlike everything else they immediately get shuffled back in as well. So if your odds of drawing a Miss are 1 in 15 and you draw one, the odds of the next draw being a Miss is 1 in 15 again. If you’d drawn your only +2, well now it’s in your discard pile. Your odds are now: never. You probably wont shuffle it back in for the next 7-8 draws. Then it will go back to 1 in 15 again.
If you’ve thinned your deck down to 10 cards, that Miss is gonna make a lot of appearances.
Looks like many of the changes that people hoped for here are going to be implemented soon. Including rebalanced and persistent enhancements. Some of the frosthaven rule modifications are also coming.
Well shit, now I don’t wanna play again until that’s live.
Except to sell all my enhancements before the prices change so I can have more of them.
why is that guy making that face
I feel validated, and also chuckling remembering when a dev in Discord told me some 6-8 months ago that this was impossible to do and to suck it up.
That’s like a wishlist of changes for me. I’m putting this on hold until the update drops!
On Discord?! It’s in the “Launch Day FAQ!”
How different is Gloomhaven Digital from the original board game?
A 1:1 adaptation was both not possible or desirable
They should call the next update “THE NOT POSSIBLE OR DESIRABLE UPDATE”
Are you (both) talking about permanent enhancements? Granted, my experience as a software engineer is pretty far from designing games, but I can’t possibly imagine how it would not be possible to make enhancements permanent.
I completely missed this yesterday - do you want to put our co-op game on hold until this goes live, other than maybe refunding the recent enchantments we both made?
EDIT: Watching the video, I think I like the option to have cheaper but non-persistent options the best.
My experience as a human that wasn’t born yesterday told me that. It was honestly wild that they claimed it was “not possible”
And it was obviously “desirable” since the only reason it was a question in their FAQ was that players desired it