ExcelsiorH said:

Keep in mind that a square of water takes 2 movement to enter.

And as for boxing in your warrior, that takes a LOT of work, considering that you can move diagonally between monsters.  If a warrior is surrounded by minions, it's usually: kill one with 1 attack, escape box with second action.

he was using traps to box the warrior in - with an awareness of 1 the warrior was almost guaranteed to fail.  Which ended their movement.

Couple that with the warrior (dwarf) only having 3 movement, and the warrior was always just too far behind to be useful.

And yes, water does take 2 to move - I'd have to look at the map again.  but from the closest spawn point in the goblin room to the water was I believe 7 squares, 8+9 to step in water, 10 to be on far side.

I'm the OL that ExcelsiorH has been talking about, and I'd like to add my observations.

With these smaller maps it is EXTREMELY easy to block all player movement. Now, it's not that easy to have your monsters survive for more than 1 player turn, but thats a gripe I'll discuss later. All of the maps we played were essentialy races. I almost always got to put monsters directly in front of where the heros start. Those monsters are always write-offs. You will never get to do anything cool with them. However; you dont need to. If you can make the players unable to take a double run turn, you are 50% father along than them. If you can pause them for 2 turns, there is little to no chance they will win. What this means is that I will always pick dragons or ettins, if they are availible, because they are the only monsters with anything close to reasonable defense, so on average they will last 2 turns. Thats two turns where the heros are not moving forward while my sprinters (usually goblin archers) are moving 10 spaces. The heros were griping about this the whole time we played. At first I was cackling madly inside my head about it but towards the middle of the session and especially towards the end when they turned the tables and did the same thing to me in Fat Goblin, Ive realized a few things. (one of them being how frustrating this tactic is)

1.)  Poor scenario/map design. I was all for the smaller maps, and I still like the game length compared to D1 - However, these maps have all been VERY small, so small that 2 turns can get you all the way across most of them, in some cases across and halfway BACK. When maps this small are used as RACES, but one side cant move…where is the fun there?

2.) Combat is still poor.

    a.) Players have insanely too much defense almost immediately. Everyone starts with 1 grey dice. 0,1,1,2,3,4 shields respectively. That is an average of 1.83 shields per dice roll. Now, I do like the variance that rolls for defense add instead of the just raw number you had to overcome in D1, but here where it gets broken. Almost every piece of armor you add doubles your defense. Doubles. The warrior got Chain Mail in the first dungeon from a search. That ADDED a grey dice. Now she's up to 3.66 average per roll, plus her shield. Then the cleric could add ANOTHER grey dice which puts her at 5.5 shields + shield ON AVERAGE per roll. Nothing is going to hit that in act 1. I mean you may sneak 1 or 2 here any there but an entire pack of monsters , doing 1-3 damage to a tank with 14 hp, well..whats the point? I already have no incentive to attack players, because none of my objectives ever involve killing them, just beating them to the punch, and thats good, since…you cant kill them. Sure sure, random is random and any given roll wierd things can happen, and I did manage to murder her once, but only because she made the mistake of going to full fatigue. It still took a LT., Master Ettin, 3 Zombies, Normal Ettin and Normal Dragon to take her down 5 hp. I get that heros are stronger, and its a hack n slash feel, heros mow down monsters in vast waves etc. but … eh. I think players should start out with Brown Defense dice. I think that equipping armor should REPLACE the base defense not add to it. Yes I know everyone will say boo hoo it makes the players weaker, no no no. Yes it will. It will also make combat more attractive to the OL, since maybe, if my monster group lasts more than 1 player round (fat chance if they arent dragons or ettins) I can actually hit the tank…and yes I base this all on the tank since they are going to force me to attack them anyhow.

  b.) The power curve of attacks for players is…lacking.  You start out with 2 dice weapons. You upgrade them to …2 dice weapons. You never really DO more damage, all you get is trickery to push through damage despite the defense dice of your opponent. You get Surge generating, surge spending, combo bs that after 2 adventures, I didn't even bother to keep straight anymore, I just said "Whatever dude just tell me how many hearts I took" After 1 shopping trip by the heroes, I because disinterested in any combat rolls. It became this odd feeling. Instead of them rolling the dice and I rolled against to see if I blocked, it was, They rolled the dice, then did accounting BS for 30-45 seconds, then I rolled my dice, and then totally ignored the roll because it didn't MATTER. That's the problem. I have no solution to this one off the top of my head but all in all, this edition of Descent should have made combat between the Monsters and hte Heros more balanced. If a monster group of Goblin Archers, had the SAME BASE STATS as players but thier measly little 2 hp…theyd still die almost instantly, and do little to no damage to the players. But they dont even have that, they are substatially weaker than a naked wizard, and thus NEVER USED TO ATTACK WITH, they just get to run and steal crops.

Combining these 2 problems you come up with what we experienced. Heroes had no fun because I had no reason at all to engage with them in any sort of contest. I just blocked hallways and ran. Very scary all powerful evil being I am huh? I had no fun because that is the ONLY tactic availible to me. I WANT to smash the heroes flat under a tidal wave of evil minions. I have the tidal wave of evil minions, sadly they are a tidal wave of dandilion fluf and pixie dust, they have no force. If combat were a LITTLE more balanced, if the maps were not all races, and if they players power curce was a smooth increase instead of jerky doubling, I think we all would have had more fun.

I read in here someone knocking on me saying I'm at fault because I wasn't making it fun and fair for the players. Well…I'm a player too. This is a competitive game. My goal is to BEAT them, not to make them have fun. It's FFG's job to make them have fun by building a better platform to play on. If this were D&D, sure, its my job to make sure they have fun, but this isn't, its a board game with winners and losers, so why should I actively try to lose? Is that more fun for anyone?

I've been following this discussion an others with vivid interest, and it seems to me that most of the problems related to cheap rule exploiting are caused by an excess of metagaming.

lucaster said:

Could you clarify what that means?

I'm assuming you mean, the drive to win the campaign/quest and get the rewards is causing both sides to try and over game it?  If so - I agree.

The OL having a seperate win condition from the heroes, along with their own rewards, puts both sides in to competition - over different things.

One of our hero players put it best.  "I want to dungeon crawl to kill monsters and fight bosses, not to watch the OL game the system, have no interest in combat, while running away with my tomatoes that I couldn't get to in time".

It is a serious change in play/style from D1.  Yes we made assumptions about the play that screwed us early on, while the OL caught on faster.  But at the end of the day, it sounds like this is how D2 plays now and it will take a few campaigns to figure out how to counter the 'block the hall' strategy.

 I wouldn't even consider it cheap rules exploit.  I think the overlord played very well, while the heroes didn't.  OP, if i were you  I would try all the problem scenarios again, play with the same heroes and have the overlord use the same tactics, except this time, make judicial use of two attacks plus fatigue move to kill off any would be blockers and have your more nimble ranged characers run past the hole made by your battling heroes to catch the objective runners of the overlord.  Also, make sure to use whatever heroic feats you can if it will give you the advantage.  I honestly just think that the heroes were outplayed by the overlord, and not that this is an unbeatable situation.  Use fatigue, make a hole, and RUN to catch the monsters threatening to win objectives.  If you guys still fail, then maybe there is an inherent flaw in the game.  

Losman2001 said:

We did make judicial use of two attacks and fatigue moves - the problem was damage output.

Class 1: Thief (hobbit) - very low damage with no tricks, lucky to damage/kill anything after 2 attacks.  Ended up not doing combat at all and just running around for treasures

Class 2: Knight (dwarf) - slow movement, kept getting trip lined.  Usually only effective using the triple attack feat for the first move to try and clear out the entrance.  Most of the time, just couldn't be in range to damage.

Class 3: Runemaster - effective ranged unit, was our damage dealer

Class 4: Spirit Mender - melee range (with reach), powerful skills though and got really effective once given a ranged weapon (3rd quest).


So which of our 'nimble ranged' units would you suggest run through to catch the OL runners?

ExcelsiorH said:

If you've taken the thief package, then you've got the knives, which do blue+yellow at range (same as Runemaster, I believe), and if he happens to be melee, he does +1 heart to any enemy he's adjacent to.  If he then picks up Sneaky with his first XP (which he has to have after First Blood), he'll do another +1 heart against any enemy who didn't have line of sight against him at the beginning of his turn.

Not to mention that if he get attacked while adjacent to another hero, he gets to add their defense pool to his own.

Frankly, he has the potential to be one of the more dangerous heroes.

Yes, the dwarf is very easy to hit with Tripwire.  There are two of those in the entire Overlord deck.  If he's getting hit with them first turn every Quest, that's just bad luck, not the fault of the game.

 Well your thief, instead of running for treasures as you stated, could be chasing down and killing the 2 hp goblin archers.  Surely he could put out enough damage for that.   If you were using fatigue to move grisban (who plenty of people stated is pretty awful due to his low movement speed), the overlord could not legally use tripwire, as that requires a move action, not just a move.  I would say use grisban and your runemaster as your top damage dealers to clear out the damage soaking blockers, and the thief and spiritspeaker to run around and chase the objective chasers.  I would also recommend killing the objective seekers instead of running around and wasting precious actions on searching if your party is having their tail end handed to them that quickly.  You don't have time to waste on a search, and can do that after you are no longer in danger of losing.  If you were to go back and change your party, I would recommend tossing grisban, use syndrael instead, toss your hobbit for jain, and use the wildlander class.  Switch runemaster for a necromancer for extra damage.  I think your party composition is pretty slow and it is hurting your overall movement, which may be contributing to the overlord winning anything that has to do with race to win.

Losman2001 said:

Unfortunately, if playing by the rules, characters/classes may not be swapped out once a campaign has started.

That being said, it may be worth going back to the beginning and redesigning the party.  I have seen Gisban be very effective, but the 3 movement can create more problems than his ability solves.

KristoffStark said:

Yeah, that's what I meant, if needs be, scrap the party and start anew.

Losman2001 said:

Well I would like to try out other class/party set ups - this was our first campaign so we were just winging it.  Just so much time investment to get up to speed and learn all the classes, compared to how often we can play.

Maybe my dice rolls suck, but I found even the goblins weren't worth going after with the thief because 1dmg was usually my average output - I very early on gave up on combat with my character after several rolls of no damage getting through.  So the strategy became run around and search to get the money to try and upgrade for the next quest and maybe catch up to the overlord in progress.

I'll stop complaining about the classes - since that's not really the point of this thread - until we try more of them.  But it does seem confirmed that with the right (or wrong) hero party make up choices and just a small number of bad dice rolls on combat, that the OL can pretty much just block and run to victory on the quests we played.  Guess I'm just not a fan of that play style so far - I don't feel like a hero conquering a dungeon.

I'm hoping there's more variety in the encounter design for act 2…

Certainly a change coming over from D1 of what dice rolls will mean, and how you progress through and encounter - still learning it all.  But boy has it been frustrating experience so far.  Surprisingly though, everyone seems willing to keep trying!

 I'll definitely agree that D2 feels very different than D1 (which I still prefer).  Hopefully you have better luck your next time around, and now you know the kind of nasty you are dealing with when it comes to the overlord and race objectives.  And hey, I'm also not saying that it isn't a difficult strategy to contend against.  I am very curious to see how your next roundabout goes.

Can any other OL's attest to this strategy in a real game sense?  Is it really as bad as the OP says or was it just bad dice/char selection?  I play the OL in my group and while I agree with the OL a bit in that, this is a game I am trying to win… I can definitely see where it would stop being fun regardless of what anyone thought of the tactic.

Again, looking to see if any other OL's have used this to the same effect.