So I have a question about the wording in the 2nd encounter of Rise of Urthko.

Under setup for adding extra health to Urthko. It says "For each villager token in the overlords play area from encounter 1, Urthko applies +1 to its health per hero."

Does this mean that if playing with four heros each villager token would be worth 4 health?

Or would it be +1 health for each villager token and +1 health for each hero?

He applies + (N x H), where N is the number of villagers, and H is the number of heroes. So, 1 villager, 4 heroes, + 4 health. 2 villagers? +8.

I managed to get 7 villagers. So I would have had to add 28 health?

That seems like a lot a health for a monster, when the hero's pretty much have only 8 turns to get to him and kill him.

7 villagers is a lot though. I only got 2 villagers and had to fight tooth and nail to get them. What happened to your heroes? If I remember correctly, there isn't actually a lot of monsters on the map to occupy them while you collect the villagers.

I tried to block hero movement the best I could to slow them down. I also kept my master ettin back from the fight right away untill the hero got closer to the pit. Since they were rushing to farrow they just ignored him. So since my master ettin wasnt killed I was able to get 2 throws in and toss 2 heros in the pit. That slowed them down. I was also using OL basic II had a nice grease trap to cause another hero to slide into the pit. Also had blinding speed card to help one ettin get up towards the pit room pretty quick after respawn. But I think I did get lucky when the heros had to break down the door. They got a few poor rolls not doing any damage to the door. Then I just ran in with farrow thru the door dropped a villager and ran back behind the door. I always left him enough movement so he wasnt caught on the other side with the heros. I was close to a win but the heros broke the door down and started attacking and I got bad luck with his defense rolls and farrow went down pretty quick

Ah, I see. The heroes ignoring the Master Ettin with his Throw ability sounds like a major blunder though. Surely they knew about the pits, knew about the Ettin's throw ability, and knew about his 3 damage surge? It's not like he is terribly tanky, or gets reinforced on that encounter.

I have a question on encounter 1...

"Each time Lord Merick Farrow enters a space adjacent to a captive, he may pick that captive up. If he does..."

Does it take an action to pick up the captives? I know it usually always does for objective tokens, but these are villager tokens. Are they counted as Objective tokens? Are they free to pick up?

It's not like he is terribly tanky, or gets reinforced on that encounter.

Ettins do reinforce, 1 per round. If the master is dead, can't the OL reinforce the master?

This doesn't take an action for Merick in this case, as the trigger isn't spending an action while adjacent, it's simply entering an adjacent space.

Thanks. (I actually saw you browsing some other thread and was going to tell you come read this)

Yea I took a quick look and it seems if it does not require an action, this encounter is doable for the OL in around 6 rounds (more or less depending on OL cards and hero blocking). If it did take an action, it would be more like 10 rounds, and by then heroes would surely be blocking the door/ killing Merick. (and thats just too long for Encounter 1 of 2)

Another question on encounter 1. Dont have the quest guide right on me, but it says essentially 'Merick Farrow cannot voluntarily enter pit spaces'. Flight lets you "ignore terrain effects". So if I give Merick the Flight ability (there is an OL card...) can he ignore that the space is a pit terrain, and treat it as regular terrain; therefore he could fly over the pit spaces? Or would the quest guide overrule here. It is still a pit space, even though he can ignore the terrain effect, he cannot voluntarily enter becasue it is still a pit space?

Thematically makes sense that he could fly over the pit, not 'entering' it, he is just not allowed to jump down into the pit.

Thoughts?

It is still a pit space. Even flying monsters have to deal with starting and ending movement in pit spaces. Just because they ignore the effects of entering them doesn't make it "not a pit space."

I'm very interested in other player's experiences in this mission because it seems horribly imbalanced in favor of the OL. I played as OL and maybe I picked good open groups, but frankly I don't think the heros stood a chance.

In the first encounter I got all 8 captives out and can't understand how an OL would get any fewer than 4 really. IIRC I had 4 captives after 3 rounds. It would be very challenging for heros to get to the door in 3 rounds, let alone block it for the remainder of the encounter.

As for the second encounter, Urthko had 38 health. Even if I would have gotten only 4 captives in first encounter, He would have had 22 health (4 heros). That is a ton of health to take down even if the heros started right next to him. Of course, there were also the other Barghests, and the lieutenant to deal with. Oh and Urhtko even moves 4, so even if I wanted to just try and run away, it'd be challenging to get more than a few hits on him per turn. Tack on top of all that the fact that I was able to heal him twice and had some potent howls.

I know we see all the time heros complaining about unbeatable missions, but as OL, I don't see how heros could stand a chance.

Side note: I typed all this from memory of our experience two days ago and I don't have the game in front of me. LMK if I made any mistakes and I'll comment again.

Hahahahahah!

Ok, actually it's not that funny. Quests like this make me want to quit descent and never take it out of the box again. Seriously, who comes up with these?

We just finished this quest, and didn't stand a chance. I mean, at all.

Our game:

Mordrog - Knight

Leoric of the Book - Geomancer

Silhouette - Stalker

Avric Albright - Prophet

Overlord - Basic II, Bol Goreth plot deck, focusing on the Enchanter OL cards

http://d2etracker.com/campaign_overview.php?urlGamingID=31018141

Encounter 1, Overlord chose Plague Worms as open group.

The overlord can just put the ettins side by side so there is no way around them. He plays Elixir of Stone (+1 defense), Dragonbone Pendant (attack +1 damage) and Rune of the Phoenix on the Ettins (if a monster is defeated, he heals 5 instead).

I takes us at least 2 rounds to take the minion ettin down, at which point he just respawns at full life. In the mean time, Merrick is able to drop as many as 2 villagers per turn!! into the pit, since they are so close to the pit to begin with.

We are finally ablte to kill the minion ettin, ignore the master, and move to the next room (4B). Since pit spaces work in a special way here, thh only way to the other side is via the bridge, which is blocked of by the plague worms.

We try to kill them, but of course fail, Avric is downed by the master ettin. The overlord does the burrow action of two of the plague worms to drop the 3 remaining heroes into the pit. At which point the only action is to climb out of the pit and end their turn, at which point the ol just burrows again and drops them back in. So basically, the game was in an infinite loop at that point, until the OL got all the tokens.

Encounter 2, Overlord choses Flesh moulders as open group.

So basically, the master barghest starts with 38 health, and all it needs to do is to survive for 8 turns. (it needs to get 8 tokens, which are given at the start of the OL turn)

It has at least 2-3 tokens before you get to it and then you have to somehow manage to deliver 38 damage in those remaining 5 turns.

So the OL draws all the blue tokens to give to the master barghest, which means he has +4 on each attack, so he usually hits for 11 damage, Enough to instakill some of the heroes. Which happens a few times.

On top of that the flesh moulders can easily use both their actions to heal him a few times and the OL also plays the secrets of the flesh OL card which lets him heal all his monsters.

(Even without that, I still don't see how we could have won)

I think in the end the master barghest still had 20 HP, and this was after 2 turns of all the heroes hitting only him.

So easy victory for the OL again.

Seriously, I'm not sure anymore if I love Descent, or if I just love the idea of what Descent could be.

Day in day out I'm reading on these forums "Omg, give some love to the OL, the heroes have it way to easy", yet during our campaigns, with 3 different people playing overlord, its has just been win after win for the overlord.

(And one of those those people playing overlord barely cared about strategy and went 'just select some random open group, or just select the influence token at random i don't want to know either' half the time, and still won.)

I just don't know what we are doing wrong, but half the time, just looking at the quest objectives makes us go 'how are we ever going to make that?'

I'm perfectly fine with losing, if it's at least close. but that has maybe happened twice in all the games of descent we've played.

Sorry about the negativity, but i'm just a bit pissed off with how this evening went. It's supposed to at least be fun you know..

Take this as you will, but 3/10 groups seem to have played that quest with hero victory- so it seems to be possible. That sounds like it was a really rough session, though.

Maybe with those all-star hero teams Indalecio is talking about

Sounds like massive hero pwnage here I have never played that quest but pit spaces and Plague Worms is a nasty combination to be facing as the heroes. But to be honest though it looks like the heroes failed at clearing the way in an efficient manner and the OL seemed to have had the perfect hand all the time so that adds up to the note.

I am a bit surprised 4 heroes combined could not kill an Ettin and also couldn't the Worms be shot at longer range? Weren't the heroes getting ultra unlucky here? HoB is notoriously quite balanced campaign but maybe there are a couple of exceptions, will have a look at it in details when I get home.

Well, on average I guess we roll 3 damage on our attacks? With 2 grey dice + the extra shield from Elixir of Stone its not that hard to roll 3 or more. In fact its almost always. So we were chipping away maybe 1-2 damage per round. And then when he finally went down Rune of the Phoenix kicked in, reviving the Ettin back to full life and so putting us back right where we started for another 2 rounds. I dont know how to be more efficient if damage for heroes is so low in Act I and these monsters have so much defense/hp.

Anyway, by the time we got to where the plague worms were, our only option was to focus on merrick as much as possible, there were maybe 3 villagers so our only real ranged charachter Leoric summoned a stone next to the pit space closest to merrick so he couldnt drop another one in this round, instead of attacking the plague worms. Avric was knocked out, and I had to get silhouette with mordrog who was already dangling in the pit. The thing is, we couldn't stand back either because then the master Etting could just throw us in with his Throw ability.

Hahahahahah!

Ok, actually it's not that funny. Quests like this make me want to quit descent and never take it out of the box again. Seriously, who comes up with these?

We just finished this quest, and didn't stand a chance. I mean, at all.

Our game:

Mordrog - Knight

Leoric of the Book - Geomancer

Silhouette - Stalker

Avric Albright - Prophet

Overlord - Basic II, Bol Goreth plot deck, focusing on the Enchanter OL cards

http://d2etracker.com/campaign_overview.php?urlGamingID=31018141

Encounter 1, Overlord chose Plague Worms as open group.

The overlord can just put the ettins side by side so there is no way around them. He plays Elixir of Stone (+1 defense), Dragonbone Pendant (attack +1 damage) and Rune of the Phoenix on the Ettins (if a monster is defeated, he heals 5 instead).

I takes us at least 2 rounds to take the minion ettin down, at which point he just respawns at full life. In the mean time, Merrick is able to drop as many as 2 villagers per turn!! into the pit, since they are so close to the pit to begin with.

We are finally ablte to kill the minion ettin, ignore the master, and move to the next room (4B). Since pit spaces work in a special way here, thh only way to the other side is via the bridge, which is blocked of by the plague worms.

We try to kill them, but of course fail, Avric is downed by the master ettin. The overlord does the burrow action of two of the plague worms to drop the 3 remaining heroes into the pit. At which point the only action is to climb out of the pit and end their turn, at which point the ol just burrows again and drops them back in. So basically, the game was in an infinite loop at that point, until the OL got all the tokens.

Encounter 2, Overlord choses Flesh moulders as open group.

So basically, the master barghest starts with 38 health, and all it needs to do is to survive for 8 turns. (it needs to get 8 tokens, which are given at the start of the OL turn)

It has at least 2-3 tokens before you get to it and then you have to somehow manage to deliver 38 damage in those remaining 5 turns.

So the OL draws all the blue tokens to give to the master barghest, which means he has +4 on each attack, so he usually hits for 11 damage, Enough to instakill some of the heroes. Which happens a few times.

On top of that the flesh moulders can easily use both their actions to heal him a few times and the OL also plays the secrets of the flesh OL card which lets him heal all his monsters.

(Even without that, I still don't see how we could have won)

I think in the end the master barghest still had 20 HP, and this was after 2 turns of all the heroes hitting only him.

So easy victory for the OL again.

Seriously, I'm not sure anymore if I love Descent, or if I just love the idea of what Descent could be.

Day in day out I'm reading on these forums "Omg, give some love to the OL, the heroes have it way to easy", yet during our campaigns, with 3 different people playing overlord, its has just been win after win for the overlord.

(And one of those those people playing overlord barely cared about strategy and went 'just select some random open group, or just select the influence token at random i don't want to know either' half the time, and still won.)

I just don't know what we are doing wrong, but half the time, just looking at the quest objectives makes us go 'how are we ever going to make that?'

I'm perfectly fine with losing, if it's at least close. but that has maybe happened twice in all the games of descent we've played.

Sorry about the negativity, but i'm just a bit pissed off with how this evening went. It's supposed to at least be fun you know..

Your hero team is indeed not the strongest, so I am not saying it could be easy for them. However, it seems to me they could have played better. For instance, I checked your heroes' skills on the campaign tracker, and I noticed they did not focus enough on damage-enhancing skills.

The Knight has no Challenge (1 XP). The Stalker has neither Exploit (1 XP, +1 green die), nor Hunter's Mark (1 XP, adds a surge), nor Easy Prey (2 XP, gives Pierce 1 to anyone's attacks against a monster). Especially after the OL bought Elixir of Stone, the heroes really should have bought skills that add surges or green dice because they want to force him to discard that card as quickly as possible (any attack with 2 surges discards it). Not doing so is simply bad play.

Generally speaking, on the heroes' side, brute force wins in Descent. I usually am a hero player, and whenever our Overlord complains that his monsters never survive, it is music to my ears because I know we heroes have chosen our skills and equipment well. And unfortunately heroes have to go that way, because if the monsters survive, the heroes lose.

So with a few exceptions, most of the skills that don't add actions or damage like Guard (that the OL can easily avoid), Poison Barbs etc. are more or less rubbish.

Your hero group did not buy enough damage-enhancing skills - a tragic mistake that is leading them to their doom.

Without saying your hero party was poorly skilled or played badly or anything, I have to agree that your damage output doesn't seem right for that stage in the campaign. I haven't checked your particular team composition as the previous poster did, but I cannot deny what he/she said would kind of explain your difficulties in clearing that encounter. Then sure, nobody's exempt from the magical X moment which seems to occur from time to time, but basically your heroes had 8 attacks to get rid of that Ettin, which should have been plenty enough.

Now our group might play this quest next time (we´re slightly behind you in the campaign), and again we´re in a vaccuum here in terms of how team composition will look like and other factors. So by the looks of the quest, I can definitely see Merrick get a couple of tokens out before the heroes storm in. But I can also definitely see the heroes kill an Ettin on turn 1, and not doing so would be really unlucky (or lucky on my side I guess) therefore they should have plenty of time to knock at the door before Merrick gets more tokens out. I´m not trying to say the quest looks easy on the heroes, but that Ettin has got to die turn 1 (if not both Ettins, really) and then Plague Worms should be sniped from distance or whatever. If we play that quest (and assuming I have the same choice of monster group) I would expect myself to toss maybe 2-4 villagers.

Plague Worms can be kited to some extend, and if you kill 1-2 of them then the overlord cannot easily chain the Burrow ability to get you into that pit. This being said I agree with you they are a very nasty choice of open group given the implications of that pit in that particular quest, so it might not be as easy.

Then I haven't checked the second encounter, so it might be it is slightly geared towards the overlord if you just look at the win ratio stats, but that doesn't prove anything obviously.

My conclusion is that if you are getting very unlucky on a critical moment of a quest then it can mean you lose on the spot. I have experienced this a lot of times as the overlord, but I definitely see it happen from the heroes side too. This said you can always run for the search tokens too and still come back strong from a lost encounter/quest. To be honest, while I understand the frustration of losing a challengeless encounter, it doesn't look to me like there is major unbalance in that encounter for the reasons stated above. But you can still steamroll and win obviously, which tends to feel like unbalance, but so is every quest of Descent, sadly.

Ispher, thanks for the useful feedback. I suspected we, or rather I since I play both the Knight and Stalker, were doing something wrong.

The reason that it might not be the strongest is that we have a sort of house rule that classes and heroes that were picked before can't be picked again, just to at least play with every class once.

Otherwise I'd never have picked the Stalker class Still, that's no excuse for the poor skill choices. Guess I'm too used to being the OL.

I have both the archaic scroll, I guess I should use it on the Stalker? (Even though poison barbs is the only skill the OL complains about)

Indalecio, even though you're not saying it, I wouldn't be surprised if we were the most terrible heroes out there.

The heroes are always having a hard time (no matter who of us are playing heroes), so I guess we must be doing something wrong. Not rules wise, but just, not making optimal choices when it comes to skills or whatever.

And that the OL has a bigger chance of winning if both sides don't know what they are doing?

I wish it was possible to be a spectator of a game where heroes destroy the OL, just to see what it is we are doing wrong. (Or that youtube had some good videos, but that's not the case either)

And yeah we might have had 8 attacks on the Ettin. I have no idea what you guys roll on average, but just to give an example, this is what an average roll looked like:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qaznq1aea6kzdd/2016-02-07%2010.56.18.jpg?dl=0 (I didn't place them like that, I actually rolled these as an example)

Please tell me how to get an Ettin down with that? I don't think the OL never rolled less than 3 shields (+1 from the elixir), and when the only surge ability of my weapon is 'force defender to reroll one die' and he just rolls another 3 shields for the 3 shields you had him reroll, then what are you going to do? And before you say "you should get a better weapon", in the 3-4 shopping steps before this quest not one weapon was revealed.

Also, I bet you can get more than 2-4. Like I said, some are so close to the door that Merrick can pick one up, move to pit, drop it in, go back, pick one up, move to pit, drop it in, and move back, without using dash/blinding speed.

I still had 2xp left for the stalker and 1xp for the knight. I have now bought Exploit and Hunters mark for the Stalker, and Challenge for the Knight.

I think, since I have just got the Serpent Dagger (+2 against poisoned enemies) I'm going to keep Poison Barbs for now.

In the previous quest and the quest before that the OL had a lot of creatures bunched together, so I feel it might be useful.

I'll use the archaic scroll when I get an Act II weapon to replace the Serpent Dagger. Or should I use it to return Guard for the Knight?

It seemed useful since it does give a free action. Ok, it can be avoided, but at least that means that the overlord can also be forced into moving a certain way to avoid it.

What would be the best choice?

I like guard better than challenge-but iy works best when the knight has a good weapon.

I still had 2xp left for the stalker and 1xp for the knight. I have now bought Exploit and Hunters mark for the Stalker, and Challenge for the Knight.

I think, since I have just got the Serpent Dagger (+2 against poisoned enemies) I'm going to keep Poison Barbs for now.

In the previous quest and the quest before that the OL had a lot of creatures bunched together, so I feel it might be useful.

I'll use the archaic scroll when I get an Act II weapon to replace the Serpent Dagger. Or should I use it to return Guard for the Knight?

It seemed useful since it does give a free action. Ok, it can be avoided, but at least that means that the overlord can also be forced into moving a certain way to avoid it.

What would be the best choice?

I hadn't noticed the nifty Serpent Dagger/Poison Barbs combo. I think your plan to keep it until Act II is reasonable.

Since now you bought damage-enhancing skills, I think you did the best you can with the team you have. Let us know how you fared (hopefully a little better).

For the Knight I like Advance, Challenge and Inspiration (and Defend for quests with NPCs treated as heroes, and when I have Defend, I also like to get Defense Training). Gaining fatigue is like gaining about 1/4 of an action for every fatigue gained. Your Stalker will use quite a lot of fatigue now, so he would welcome staying close to an Inspired Knight. Using Archaic Scroll to exchange Guard against Inspiration for the next quest could be an option (but the Poison Barbs exchange in Act II is also a good plan).

Good luck with your dice rolls!

Just played this quest the last day and got stomped hard as heroes (though I'll admit I may have been a little unlucky).

Two hero campaign using the bonus attack/heal mechanics.

Manage to kill merick after he had collected 3 villagers, so +6 hp.

To be fair the barghest was beastly but I wasn't overly concerned...

...until I was getting hit with Howl three times a turn for 3 damage each.

So the OL had the green/white token (whichever lets them use howl once for free), and she was then using both actions for howls too, this and having two blue tokens faceup.

Very quickly I was wittled down to max fatigue on both heroes and which then resulted in 9 unblockable damage to every hero within 3 spaces.

I only had a 2 value for the star attribute (willpower?) on each hero so they almost always failed the attrib. test.

This was fine for a round or two, where I would run in, attack with my bonus attack and run back. But even being able to move and howl twice was just overpowering.

Eventually it got to a stage where both heroes were downed, and the barghest sat happily between them howling them to death after the stood up. So for the last 3 rounds I could do nothing.

I'll be honest, it was pretty hilarious, even being on the heroes side; but it was a blow-out, especially after doing pretty well in encounter 1.

So far each quest has been a very close game for us, and this was the first major blowout so I'm not complaining.

So far really enjoying the campaign.

Take this as you will, but 3/10 groups seem to have played that quest with hero victory- so it seems to be possible. That sounds like it was a really rough session, though.

Hi all,

We're about to play the 2nd encounter tomorrow and I was looking for strategies as the heroes - it's not looking good.

http://www.d2etracker.com/campaign_overview.php?urlGamingID=47237058

Our heroes:

Alys Raine - Marshal

Tetherys - Wildlander

Serena - Spiritspeaker

Challara - Necromancer

OL managed to get 6 tokens in the 1st encounter, so the master barghest has (4x6)+6= 30 hp. He's chosen skeleton archers as his open group to counter Serena's Tempest. Search tokens in the 1st encounter yielded the following: Alys has a stamina potion and a elm greatbow (which'll likely get passed to Tetherys), Tetherys has a fire flask, and Challara has a warding talisman.

Anybody have any suggestions to how we should tackle this? The ettins shouldn't be a problem. The skeleton archers will likely delay us a fair bit since the OL will likely use fight in formation to toughen them up. But not sure how to deal with the howling barghest (up to 3x a turn?, dealing up to 5 stamina damage to 1 hero within 3 spaces and 1 stamina damage to all other heroes within 3) as well as Sir Alric Farrow with his Shield of Zorek's Favor. Most likely not until turn 5 before we reach the barghest - seems like a long shot to do 30 damage in 3 turns through double gray, with the other barghests and the lieutenant running interference.

TIA for any help!