While I enjoy the variety (the game is pretty simple as-is) of having the wayfinder, from a purely mechanical perspective, a good melee character beats her out for two major reasons: 1) no strength bonus to ranged; 2) no deathblow equivalent.
Yes, the wayfinder is good for clearing out the herd. But, if you stop and think about it, the trash mobs really aren’t much of a threat. The only times you really, really need a wayfinder or good mage is to deal with shamans. Otherwise, the game is heavily melee-tilted. Heck, I suspect my wayfinder did as much melee damage as she did ranged due to the frequency of deathblows.
I may play around with swapping her out for the wizard this time, but I really found the ranged ability tactically useful when we were jumped and we had crap at the end of long corridors. Having run down there was tedious.
I agree on the tedium, but unless it was a shaman down there, it wasn’t really a huge advantage, game-wise. In addition to the issues I mentioned above, the game lacks mid-level ranged threats. By 5-6 level, the dinky arrow boyz can pretty much be ignored until you get around to them.
First, the Wayfinder does have melee. Right now my Wayfinder has 3 melee attacks and 3 ranged attacks, and as I previously noted, with the right equipment, I can actually give her 4 ranged attacks. So while her individual damage per attack will definitely be lower than say the Dwarf Slayer, she’s got at least twice as many attacks. Second, there are some trash mobs that can be a threat – most notably spiders. A spider can take your heavy damage dealers out of action, so I make them a high priority. Spiders in the back can’t be attacked by melee fighters on the initial turn of a fight, but can move forward to web a melee fighter during the monster turn, the Wayfinder can blast them before they have a chance.
All I can say for sure is that my Wayfinder consistently has the highest XP at the end of a dungeon. I think those 6 attacks add up.
I also find it useful for the Wayfinder to take out mobs that show up behind us on ambush. She can knock out the Skaven Globe Throwers and random Archers that sometimes show up well behind your group. She’s also handy peppering up a group of enemies down to the point where the Grey Wizard’s Shadow Bolt can actually kill them (at least in my run through the Grey Wizard is always lagging the others on leveling). I use the Wayfinder to bring groups of enemies down to the 5 hp or so level and then the Grey Wizard bags them all.
Finally as a battlefield medic, it’s super handy putting your bandages, food, and potions on someone who cannot be pinned and who has a high movement range. This means you can always get healing to someone in trouble.
The only thing thats stopped me from buying the Skaven expansion is that all the enemy types in this game seem really similar (from a strategy perspective). I’m worried that the the Skaven will just be reskinned Orcs. Do they have many tactically relevant abilities? (like the spiders web attack).
Basically really high WR, so they are way harder to hit (but raw damage is less important) so you need to change build. Plus poisoning. That is level 1-4, there might be more stuff hidden, but yes they feel very different to orcs IMHO. I find them way harder to deal with.
LOL - Condolences. Learning the hard way, aren’t we? I lost one Grey Wizard (lvl 5) and, later, one Archmage (also at level 5). Just a bad combination of circumstances, e.g. surprise attack with 8 black orcs and nobody could get to the archmage in time. Dead. All items gone. Start over. (only playing hard core of course, otherwise where’s the drama)
The Wizard was even worse. A routine encounter with spiders and other critters - my party at that level would have finished them all within 1 or 2 turns, and with ease. But then disaster strikes - I accidentally hit “End Turn” before taking any actions - whoops! And now these 3 hit point spiders were webbing my warriors and killing my wizard before I could do anything. It was so sad…
Live and learn. I made another party with a Priest, a Grey wizard, a Trollslayer, and an Archmage and leveled them up to Level 5.
Strategy follows an iron rule:
Each member of the party has a healing item of some sort; only to be used in a “brink of death” emergency
Party sticks together and doesn’t separate; this is so if one is on the brink of death, another one can get there within 1 turn.
Addendum: Healing item must be scroll or potion. When I lost the Archmage the Dwarf was next to him with 2 bandages, and both “failed” when they were needed most.
It’s THE weapon in the game. It’s a bit strange because you’ll have to give it to the best warrior - the Marauder - as he has the most attacks. And then the Marauder has an even bigger gap to the next best fighter. It seems like there should be an item of similar quality for fighter #2.
The Hammer of Sigmar is the only reason I’ve won several battles, would not have been possible without. As whoever is using it routinely gets 65 - 75 HP in one blow. Even the toughest enemies don’t look so good after two 70 HP strikes.
Wayfinder is more predictable and reliable than the wizards.
I played with both Archmage and Grey Wizard + 2 fighters - the problem is that the magic users have 0 magic points when you get a surprise attack. Since surprise attacks happen constantly in the higher level dungeons, and very often during battles that are already pretty hard, the Wayfinder is better to have around. He doesn’t do that much damage, but it’s a pretty consistent 35+ points and good for taking out enemy wizards and archers/globadiers. He also has one melee attack (disappointing should get 2 at some point at least?!) and herblore which is pretty handy.
The Wayfarer, just like the Trollslayer, suffers from an unavailability of better weapons.
Are people still playing? I know I got a little bored after a while, even though initially I had a lot of fun. I feel that the game was lacking somewhat in variability as I got towards the end of the main campaign.
Anyway, new expansion announced. Out in September.
I’m not still playing, but I enjoyed it a lot and I got in 23 hours, which I view as very good value for a $4.99 game. Looking forward to the expansion, we’ll see if having some new characters to play with gets me hooked again or not.
I played it a fair bit, but it didn’t have the legs that it should have. I think it was because it was too much like a modern video game where the difficulty curve is so flat. Sure some things could go wrong on a bad set of 1’s for the magic roll or when first starting out, but generally it was fairly easy and since they were spreading content out over a progressive campaign, it lacked the ‘get in and see how far you get’ craziness of the board game. I guess that translates to WHQiOS was too much of an easy dungeon crawl rather than the tough as nails rogue-like that the board game was. Also the content felt too overused, and I think the pay walls they have set up won’t help that.
