The silliest of combos

In my last post I trash talked the Brute class in Gloomhaven.  It was pointed out to me that the Brute, while it does have bad level 9 cards, as I said, does have one thing going for it in terms of endgame:  Totally irresponsible levels of single target damage.

This isn't something that is easy to achieve.  It requires a specific combination of cards and setup, which is why the Brute isn't considered an overpowered class.  However, when you do finally get to a boss and the Brute unleashes his maximum damage potential no class can even come close.  Other people might be like "Oh, I can manage to do 50 in a single strike!" which is fine and all, but they aren't even in the ballpark of the Brute's capabilities.  It all rests on these two cards:

With this combo, you have Immovable Phalanx active, find a way to deal a bunch of damage, then turn all that damage into a move, which becomes more damage.  Bam!  But how do you do a lot of damage to start it off?  The Brute has good damage cards, but using your own cards is just so basic.  Better to use someone else's cards:

This requires a Spellweaver and a Tinker in your party, but between them they can manage to get an Inferno into your hand.  This means on your turn instead of using a Brute card you Inferno, and in a room of zombies you can easily hit 15 enemies with it.  I assumed a particular scenario that has a bunch of zombies in a small room with a boss, and looked at what would happen if you filled the room with zombies, 4 characters, and the boss.  Presuming some good rolls and as many bonuses as you can stack onto Inferno it is easy to imagine that you deal over 100 damage this way.  Then you Balance Measure, get a critical, and deal over 200 damage to the boss.  Awesome!

But in the Facebook thread I claimed 1700 damage was my estimate.  How do I get there?   This part is going to have spoilers for classes and gear that aren't in the base set, so read on at your peril.

First off, you get a lot more damage by getting more actions per turn.  There are items that let you play an extra top and bottom card at the end of your turn, so that is really valuable.  There is also an item that lets you take an extra turn, as well as a class ability from the Sunkeeper that gives you yet another turn.  We can leverage those to get more buffs up, specifically Frenzied Onslaught, which can give us a +3 bonus on all of our attacks.  That requires someone to get Immobilize on the entire room but it is easy enough for the Spellweaver to do that if they have a bunch of idiotic Immobilize enhancements on their cards, which we naturally assume that they do.

We can also use multiple damage potions to give us +2 on damage on the Inferno.  There are 2 potions that do this, and we can recover both of them twice, so that is +12 damage on Inferno, pumping it up to a base damage of 20.  We have to be careful not to critical with the wrong attacks because we need the enemies alive for the next section, but we can draw better than baseline damage and deal about 22 per zombie.  Baseline I assume 440 damage dealt from the Inferno.

The bottom action we use first is Balanced Measure.  We use a scythe weapon from higher prosperity to turn it into a 3 hex attack, hitting each hex for 440 damage, criticaled to 880.  That delivers 880 damage to the boss, and raises our total damage dealt this turn to 3080.  Obviously this requires a deck with lots of Bless cards in it, but clearly we can set that up if this is what we are doing.

Then we use our items that give us extra card plays at end of turn, and pick up the Inferno and Balanced Measure.

The second Inferno isn't nearly as good.  However, it should still up up for delivering 7 damage per target, at 7 targets (since that 720 Balanced Measure killed 2 zombies, and the criticals from the last Inferno killed 6), and our critical are all spoken for so we don't deal much damage this way.  Still, that is only another say 60 damage, bringing us to ~3140.  Then we Balanced Measure again, bashing in for 3140 damage, criticaled to 6280.

Total damage dealt to the boss:  6280 + 880 + 14 + 40 is 7214.  Obviously that is a rough figure, and you could improve it by making extra turns you get deliver a bit of additional damage.  But honestly nothing is even relevant compared to that 6280 hit... what are you going to do, deal an extra 10 or 20 damage?  Who cares?  7000 is a lot bigger than 1700, but there are some refinements I made to the strategy when I had to actually write it up.  There might be other things that make it even better, obviously because there is a lot of the game I haven't unlocked yet.  Still, this gives you a good idea of what the highest possible single target damage turn looks like.

Obviously this will never happen.  Filling the room with level 7 zombies is a problem, the shenanigans you need to do to get Inferno into the Brute's hand are silly, and this isn't even a good group.  I would love to see somebody try to do something similar though.  It would be glorious to deal 7000 damage in a game where 100 damage kills nearly anything in the game.

Playing fair

Recently in my home Gloomhaven group we have been cheating.  Apparently our particular variety of cheating is common, because our new house rule is that people who have reached level 9, which is the maximum level, can just retire whenever they want to.  Normally you have to finish your life goal in order to do this but we were having problems with the level 9 characters in the group.

Notably there was one scenario recently where we busted into the final room and Wendy and I blew the place up.  She did 35 AOE damage, killing four of the eight monsters, and then I did 31 single target damage, killing one more monster and nearly finishing off the boss.  This wasn't an example of rolling a bunch of critical hits, or even going full nova.  It was just the kind of rounds we have, given the level 9 cards we have access to.  Our two companions looked at their cards and seemed dejected, because their turns were something like 'Move in and hit for 5 damage'.

Move in and hit for 5 is a fine turn.  It is pretty much what you do in Gloomhaven once you level up a bit.  But it isn't nearly as broken as the stuff high level characters with access to a lot of gear can manage, and playing the two groups together ends up being crappy for the people being carried.  Cards like this are the problem:

This card is nuts.  It can be reasonably modeled as hitting 3 targets for 4 damage each, which would be super on its own, but it has the added advantage of being able to pierce shields on the splash targets.  The thing that really makes it silly though is that using any add target effect allows you to hit a whole new set of targets, instead of just a single additional target as it would with most AOEs.  I have seen this card, not a loss card mind you, deliver 20 single target damage to a priority target and also more than 50 damage in AOE to the things around it.  Wendy has been absolutely ruining whole rooms with this thing, and using stamina potions to bring it back to use it over and over again.

I don't do crazy AOE like this.  I have an entirely different sort of brokenness, where I deliver unreasonable single target damage.  18 single target damage is a pretty normal round for me, one which I will do many times during a scenario.  I can use a crazy combination of items to ramp that up to ~45 damage in a round, usually healing myself for about 6 in the process.  Bosses just melt when I do this, and our two characters complement each other perfectly since one of us can do the nova turn no matter whether our challenge is a single target or a mass of dorks.

Gloomhaven is absurd at level 9.  Not all classes get the broken stuff of course - the Brute, my first class, has particularly sad level 9 cards that would be solid at level 4, but are a joke compared to the real stuff.  But enough classes have nutty things they can do at max level that the game gets too easy.  The scaling is off, basically, because level 1 monsters are reasonable at level 1, but level 9 characters are supposed to be fighting level 5 monsters by the book but that is a cakewalk.

This is why we houseruled it so that a level 9 character can just retire.  Play a few sessions, use your broken abilities, then start again with something reasonable.

It does mean that people don't necessarily have to finish their personal quests, and can ignore them if they want to.  Retiring at level 9 isn't so far away.  However, I think this is a feature.  Lots of the personal quests are boring and effectively just require you to stand around waiting till a particular scenario comes up until you can stop playing.  That isn't something you work towards, or think about.  It is just a random thing that happens.  Roleplaying your quest, like hunting down particular monsters or upgrading your character in a particular way, these can be fun.  But if you are done with your character, got max level, and want to move on?  Just do it, I say.

So now I have retired and am starting afresh at level 5 with a Spellweaver.  My turns sometimes involve hitting an enemy for 1 damage, and the rest of the group shakes their heads, wishing for my old character who would consider doing 8 damage a wasted round.  But the challenges are much more challenging this way, and trying new things is fun.  Maybe I will actually do my quest on this character, maybe not, but in any case a consistent way to retire on schedule is definitely the way I want to play.

It is fun to *get* powerful, but it turns out that it isn't that much fun to *be* powerful.  So let's do more of the former and less of the latter, says I.

What to pitch

My last post talked about Gloomhaven and how to compare various potion effects.  Ferris commented that he hugely valued the extra turn a stamina potion can give, and he felt like just that effect alone was more effective than a healing potion for 3 health.  This made me think a lot about card efficiency so I am going to ramble a bunch about that.  The potions I was referencing look like this:

For this post I am going to just talk about low level content with the starting classes and equipment; the conclusions change dramatically at higher level.

There are multiple ways to get extra tempo in GH by losing cards.  The simplest is just pitching a card to avoid damage.  In the early going this is probably saving you about 4 damage.  It is fantastic for tempo as it does not require you to spend an action to do it, and that tempo is worth a full top action.  It also usually costs you about 3.5 turns of longevity.  It *could* cost you five turns if you do it at the outset of the game or as little as 1 turn at the end, but I am going to average to 3 here, assuming that you pitch that card when your next hand size would be 6 or 7.  That extra .5 of a turn is the penalty of losing an extra card from your hand, which shrinks your current number of turns by 0 or 1.

A lost card gives a bigger effect than a card pitch.  For example, the Brute has a solid Level 1 loss that saves 6 damage.  However, you have to actually play the card, so while it is better than a card pitch in power it loses you the ability to play another action.  This, if you accept the model above, is a loss of 3 turns in longevity for an effect that is about twice as good as a normal play.  Loss cards that grant attacks can't be as easily compared to pitching a card, but there is a model of card efficiency that can help us.  Lost cards are usually twice as good as used cards, whether they are defensive or offensive. 

Keep in mind that AOE damage isn't as good as single target.  Sure, the Spellweaver can Fire Orbs to hit 3 targets for 3, but that isn't three times as good as a default Attack 3 Range 3 effect.  If it were 3 sequential Attack 3 Range 3 effects it would be, but it isn't, so it actually fits the model of being twice as good pretty well.

Lost effects and pitching cards gets us the effectiveness of an extra action right now, but costs us 3-3.5 turns at the end of the game.  Clearly you do this when you have to, but you pay a high total output price to gain that spike of power.

Now I can use these standards to compare potions again.  If you are in a scenario where you never need to use lost effects or pitch cards to reduce damage then the scenario is trivial and nothing matters.  Keep in mind for this assumption, we are talking about low level here.  Sure, your level 9 party can lock down all the enemies so none of them get to swing and pitching cards won't matter, but at low levels you simply cannot do that and getting beat to death is a constant risk presuming you are playing at a difficulty that is a challenge for you. 

Assuming that you need to use lost/pitch effects to survive, a stamina potion grants you 1 extra turn.  If you can use a healing potion to avoid pitching or losing a single card, you save yourself 3-3.5 turns.  A healing potion adds roughly the same level of tempo that a lost card or a pitched card does, so this is a reasonable comparison at low level.  You can sometimes do better than that if you happen to pitch to avoid a big 6 damage critical hit, but even then the healing potion is far superior than the stamina potion in terms of efficiency - on average, at least.  At the beginning of the game a healing potion is even better because it can give you more than 3 turns, at right at the end of the game you are on your way out anyway so a healing potion can be as little as a single turn.

Of course the stamina potion lets you reuse specific cards, and gives you flexibility in rest timing.  Those things are real.  Still, I think if you want pure longevity you are actually better off with a healing potion to get you through rough patches rather than a stamina potion because you can avoid losing or pitching cards with that healing for backup.  Certainly a Cragheart or Brute, who has a large health pool, can make better use of a healing potion.  They also have weak combo potential, so the stamina potion is not that exciting at the outset.  A flimsy character like the Mindthief though struggles with a health pool of size 6, so they often can't even use the whole healing potion but still are worried about dying. 

Some of this holds true as you level up.  High level loss cards and card pitches scale up in power but have the same cost in longevity.  Low level loss cards become worthless though as the effect is not worth the cost in time.  There is no point in losing a card to heal for 6 when a normal monster swings for 6!

However, stamina potions scale effectively while healing potions do not.  At higher levels stamina potions let you reuse powerful high level effects giving you a huge tempo boost as well as improving flexibility, rest timing, and longevity.  Healing potions, on the other hand, fade into obscurity.  Better than nothing, sure... but vastly inferior to stamina.  At the beginning there is a real argument to be made for each of the starting potions depending on your class.  At the end though, the conclusion is simple - stamina > all.