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.