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.

Running it back

This is another Gloomhaven post, but there will be no spoilers, for those of you who want to remain pure.

When I first started playing Gloomhaven I thought healing potions were the best.  Don't die and you will eventually win, thought I.  I wasn't particularly impressed with stamina potions because it didn't seem that exciting to get to replay particular cards; the healing potion gives you 3 health without having to play anything, so how often is a stamina potion going to give you that much benefit?  If you want damage, isn't a power potion going to be better?  People online were all going on about how good stamina potions were and I didn't get it.  They add flexibility, sure, but what I want is raw throughput, not options.

I have reversed my opinion on this.  As I have levelled up in my new class I have been using a stamina potion and finding it to be extremely powerful, far more so than my other two options.  The thing that I wasn't aware of at the beginning was just how much more powerful a level 9 card could be than a level 1, and I also didn't realize how much cards would ramp up in effectiveness when properly enhanced.  Part of this was learning that while Gloomhaven is pretty reasonably balanced there are specific cards that are totally nuts and getting to play those repeatedly is devastating.

I have one particular card at level 4 that is totally off the charts powerful.  It is baseline about twice as good as a level 1 card and it is enhanced to be about 3 times as powerful.  Now given that I am level 9 my baseline turn is better than a level 1 card... but I still use level 1 cards, and many of my actions are only marginally better than that.  My level 4 card is definitely twice as good as my default turn.  My level 9 card is similar; if I squint at it and take off half of its stuff it is still totally playable, and in fact it is quite similar to other cards I put in my deck quite happily.

Using a stamina potion on cards that are as powerful as that is game changing.  It is effectively granting me a turn at twice my normal effectiveness, easily averaging out to dealing 18 damage and gaining 6 health.  The stamina potion is responsible for half of that, clocking in at something like 9 damage dealt and 3 damage healed.  At this point it is *four times* as powerful as one of my other potion choices.

The best part of all this is that as I find more money and get more items I can multiply these sorts of effects together even more effectively than now.  Enhancing cards multiple times is ruinously expensive but eventually I will get there and these cards that are already extremely powerful will get even better.  Every additional item that can recover cards makes buffing my best cards more powerful, and those buffs make recovery effects better.

I do like the gradual complexity increase of the game.  At the start the rules were big and complicated enough that a healing potion was just my speed.  All you do is wait until you are badly hurt, then drink up.  But now that I have played more I am thrilled with the greater amount of choice available to me.  I can arrange combos across multiple turns easily and plan huge swings that make me grin.

That last thing is the key to the bit:  Stamina potions let you do all kinds of nutty things.  I love watching other people gape at my big turns and trying to figure out if I can top the last savage combo I pulled off.  Even if the raw power of stamina potions wasn't as big as it is, the fun factor at high levels is certainly there.

Broke dragons

Money in DnD makes no damn sense.  If you go by the rules as published characters have absurd amounts of gold and carry around bandoliers of healing potions, laugh at the cost of spells and ingredients, and upturn economies just by wandering into town.

Naked Man has tried to fix that in our current campaign, and I can see why.  Gold scaling gets rapidly out of control, and players who are poor have more interesting decisions to make much of the time.  Unfortunately there are some issues with scaling back money that are hard to deal with.

For example, in our latest adventure at level 4 we encountered hobgoblins.  They have about 150g worth of stuff on them in the form of armour and weapons.  One would imagine that if they could afford that much stuff that they would have lots of cash, but mostly they had in the neighborhood of a 1g.  That makes little sense, but the legions of hobgoblins we have slaughtered would have left us stupidly rich if they had appropriate cash on hand considering their obvious wealth, so we take our tiny amounts of gold and just accept that all the weapons and armour are 'monster weapons and armour' which means they are nearly worthless.

Just recently we attacked a dragon and managed to drive it off, though not kill it.  We got about 200g worth of cash from it.  The adventure certainly had it listed as having far greater sums, probably multiple thousands of gold pieces, but Naked Man did his usual thing of chopping the cash rewards to a tiny fraction of their normal value.  That makes sense - thousands of gold pieces from this hoard would warp the campaign to bits.

The problem is that in the lore of the world that dragon is supposed to have a treasure hoard.  It doesn't even have enough money to buy a decent suit of armour!  That 'hoard' we found isn't enough cash to buy splint armour, a shield, and a sword for a random city guard.  Sorry dragon, you are pathetic.

Thousands of gold pieces would have been a problem.  Hundreds of gold pieces seems absurd.  How can random guards and starting adventurers have more money than a powerful dragon?

But I won't blame Naked Man for this.  The game *requires* absurdity one way or another.  Here is the logic:

The players must kill huge numbers of enemies to gain levels.
The players will take all the accumulated wealth from the enemies they kill.
Those enemies have enough money to buy good equipment.

Therefore, no matter how you slice it, the players should have the accumulated wealth of huge numbers of appropriately geared soldiers.  They players then use this wealth and their newly found levels to fight more powerful things, which should have commensurately more cash, increasing the player's money holdings.

You have to break that chain somewhere or the players end up with absurd amounts of money from consolidating the total cash reserves of huge numbers of enemies.  No way around it.  You can do what I do, which is have fights be much more rare and levels be based on accomplishing goals rather than vanquishing foes.  That goes against the basic plan of DnD though.  You can insist that somehow when enemies die the characters don't gain much money, which is what Naked Man is doing, but of course that makes the world make no sense.  You could just only pit the characters against zombies and slimes and bugbears so that they never find any money because their opponents don't have any, but that isn't how adventures are normally written.  No matter which link in the chain you break, you have big problems.

I don't have a good solution.  Naked Man's solution, given that we are doing DnD with normal experience rules and running through published scenarios, is pretty much his only option aside from just throwing up his hands in despair and accepting that we will be stupid rich.  If you are going to slaughter tons of people who are wealthy enough to have expensive equipment and take all their stuff, something has to break sometime.

Castles in the sky

In my DnD game last night my group is about to assault a flying castle.  We were in the middle of an encounter where we learned the location of the castle and the time at which it would leave, carrying away its enormous hoard of treasure.  We were told that the castle was going to leave in a couple of hours, and it is a few miles away.

(Faugh, miles.  Real roleplaying systems use kilometers!)

The group looked at each other and quickly concluded that we weren't going to the castle.  We were all badly beaten and nearly out of spells and going into a difficult fight was suicide.  With no time to rest there was no hope - it was time to collect the spoils from our previous encounters and go home.  The castle would fly off and we would have to hope that someday it would come back.

Naked Man, the DM, looked at us with panic in his eyes.  He hadn't realized that we were so beat up, that our spells were so low, and that his timeline had left us no time at all to rest.  We were completely correct to run away, no doubt about it.

So he changed things.  He told us the castle was further away than that, and that it would be leaving in a day or so.  That would give us enough time to rest and replenish our strength before invading the castle in our endless search for more money.

This is a challenging decision, from the DM's chair.  It is hard when you build a campaign and have a bunch of important stuff to have the players simply walk away from it.  That is especially true when they are walking away because you gave them a relatively arbitrary answer to a question and only afterwards do you realize that arbitrary answer totally derailed your plans.

It isn't the decision I would have made though; I would just have accepted them walking away and moved on.  If I really wanted to have the characters invade that flying castle I would have brought it back later.  It flies around, so it could easily end up in our path at a later time.  I think that people realizing they can't do something and retreating is a powerful part of a story!  It establishes player agency, and allows them to feel like they can control what they do and that the world will change based on their decisions.

In the past I have let characters really mess things up a lot.  Sometimes they invade buildings by setting those buildings on fire and then the fire spreads to other buildings and then they have to cope with having started a major catastrophe.  Sometimes they have killed important people that I did not think would die, and the plot shifted dramatically because of it.  I really like that sense that I set it up, but the players choose how and when to knock it down, and then we all examine the pieces and figure out where to go from there.

However, I am not working from a written adventure.  I make everything up from scratch so if the characters choose not to go into a particular castle that isn't a huge problem - it isn't as though that is the only castle to go into.  When you are working from a written adventure though there are lots of places the characters *must* go, or nothing happens.  The world has some interesting places and the rest of it is blank.

In one of my previous games I set up a realm that was going through a revolution and the characters had to choose if they wanted to support the revolution, or defend the current order.  (They could have wandered off and ignored the revolution too, I would have rolled with that, but I expected them to pick a side, and they did.)  This changed everything - who was in charge, how the government worked, their command structure, and more.  You sure can't do that in a published adventure.

Naked Man is constrained.  He can't just let us make that big a mess.  But when I am in the command chair I LOVE messes.  I get a gleam in my eyes and cackle wildly when the characters do something destructive and they groan, knowing that their lives are about to get complicated.  I remember in the 2nd edition rules there was a section talking about giving monarchs more hit points so that some crazed player character doesn't overthrow your fantasy kingdom with a single swipe of their sword.... but overthrowing the kingdom with a single swipe of a sword sounds like a ton of fun, from both sides!  There are going to be consequences, often including the death of the character in question, but if you are allowed to do that you tend to think carefully about your choices, and I like that.

Charging off

Escort quests are a pain in the ass.  I remember many of them during my years playing WOW, and the old ones were always the worst.  The NPC you have to escort would always charge off into the middle of packs of enemies, regularly getting itself or you killed.  When the AI wasn't the problem, buggy behaviour would often step in and wreck your day instead, as the NPC would sometimes flat out ignore the fight that was currently going on and go back to walking along its path to find some new stuff to engage.

It turns out escort quests in Gloomhaven are just as bad.  Maybe worse.

(Spoilers for scenario 19 and two mini class ahead.)

My Gloomhaven group took its first legit loss last week as we did as escort quest where, Hail, the idiot NPC, walks towards the end of the dungeon, 2 hexes per turn.  At least in WOW the NPCs usually stop and punch the enemies as you engage them, but Hail doesn't even do that.  She rushes to the end of the dungeon as fast as possible, ignoring all threats to her health and well being.  She opens doors and walks into traps and is all kinds of stupid.

We had things seemingly under control in the third room when Hail walked into the doorway to room four.  All the monsters in the room activated and took their turns, instantly smashing Hail from full to dead, ending the scenario.

I had completed this scenario with my other Gloomhaven group previously so I knew how bad it would be, but I didn't want to give too many spoilers to the folks doing it for the first time.  I did tell them that this is by far the most difficult scenario I had found to date and that we would most likely lose, but Naked Man was convinced that I was simply lacking confidence.  The reason I won with my first group is that I am playing the Beast Tyrant class and thus have a card that swaps the location of any two figures on the board.  This allowed me to swap Hail back to the start of the dungeon once she was halfway through, and the extra five turns it took her to get back on track was key to surviving.  Without that card, we would have lost *hard*.

Even now that we know how the escort quest works and where the enemies will appear it isn't clear to me that we would win on our next try.  The internet has lots of stories of people who find this scenario to be heinously difficult, and I quite agree with that assessment.  Certainly this escort is drastically more difficult with 2 players because you can't block Hail from walking about as easily.  With 4 players you can devote a much greater amount of time to slowing Hail down just by taking up space, and that is an important advantage.  In WOW you can't do this sort of thing of course because NPCs will just walk through you, but in Gloomhaven you can keep Hail pinned in fairly easily, if you devote the resources to it.

Now the burning question is:  What do we do about this loss?  Naked Man thinks that we should roleplay it properly, which means never attempting the scenario again, because we lost it.  I don't get that, because if we roleplay it properly it means that Hail died, so we can't use her services as an enchanter again, nor can we do any scenario that references her.  That is ridiculous, and would break a lot of the game, so I can't get behind it. 

I figure we should just git gud and beat the damn scenario on our next playthrough.  We made all kinds of terrible mistakes and I think we can do it just fine so long as we learn from our problems and keep it tight.  However, the rest of the group seems to be in Naked Man's court here, figuring that once we lose a scenario we should abandon it.  Gloomhaven does have a lot of content, so we can probably do that for quite a while before it stonewalls us.