Hello all! I am a dedicated Imperial Assault player, hosting several campaign sessions a month, and constantly drawing in local players.

I am also a collector and avid painter, owning all of the miniatures and expansions for the game, fully painted and ready for battle.

I say all this to let you know- I'm serious about my Imp Assaulting! With that being said, I am looking for something new and was promptly pointed towards Descent 2nd Edition by my LGS. After looking over the box art and a few reviews, I am eager to take the plunge!

So, my first question is, how different is Descent 2E compared to Imp Assault? How do the two compare in both quality and mechanics?

Secondly, for a player who currently owns nothing for Descent, what products should I start my collection with? There is a considerable amount of expansions and minis packs to purchase and I am not certain, outside of the core game, where to truly begin.

Thank you in advance for your insights and advice!

I would recommend personally, for the best starting Descent experience, to purchase up to 5 things (in order of importance):

- Base Game

- Heirs of Blood campaign book

- Labyrinth of Ruin Expansion

- Shadows of Nerekhall Expansion

- ONE Lieutenant Pack (which one depends on how hard you want to make it for the heroes. e.g. Baron Zachareth = super hard, Lady Eliza = easy)

I also like the Conversion Kit for tons of options, but since you are a painter, the lack of models makes it a poor recommendation for you I think.

The products above will provide you with a great starting array of heroes and monsters, tons of models to paint, and several campaigns to play. Heirs of Blood makes a great introduction to the game because it doesn't introduce new mechanics and is much better constructed than the included Shadow Rune campaign.

The two big box expansions add tons of new Overlord classes and Basic II, which I feel are important to flesh out the strategic options in the game.

The Hero and Monster collections are great, but in terms of gaming bang for your buck, you can't beat the big box expansions.

Lieutenant packs add a new dimension to the game, so thats strictly optional, but they definitely give the Overlord a small edge if the heroes are winning too much. They also make the Overlord job more fun in my opinion, as you get a secondary development path.

As a very subjective additional recommendation, I would say that you should use Imperial Assault line of sight rules and not use Descent's line of sight rules. The IA rules are much better, and they transfer over perfectly to Descent without any real balancing issues. I have played Descent for over a year with IA LoS and it is strategically more interesting for both sides.

The small box expansions provide the rumours and secret room mechanics - might be worth checking those out too (pretty sure those mechanics aren't in the big boxes).

As a very subjective additional recommendation, I would say that you should use Imperial Assault line of sight rules and not use Descent's line of sight rules. The IA rules are much better, and they transfer over perfectly to Descent without any real balancing issues. I have played Descent for over a year with IA LoS and it is strategically more interesting for both sides.

Don't wanna hijack the thread, but do they differ dramatically?

Well, IA has many of the mechanics from Descent, but there are certain changes that make them completely different games.

I love IA Skirmish Mode and their mechanics so much that I’m working on transferring that to Descent, so although I don’t own IA I have played it and looked deeply into its mechanics.

I sincerely hope you like reading, well, here’s my personal analysis of both games.

1) The Imperial Player : In Descent the Imperial players is called the Overlord. However, the Overlord is much stronger because of the following aspects.

1.1) Reinforcements : He can reinforce without any cost (threat/deployment cost don’t exit), the quest tells when to spawn monsters; these leads sometimes to frustration of endless battles without rewards sometimes.

1.2.) Overlord deck : The Overlord may has two decks: the Overlord main deck (some sort of command deck); and the Plot Deck (similar to the deck the Imperial has), that comes from the Lieutenant expansions packs (Villain packs). While the Plot Deck (as Charmy said) helps to increase the fun, it is not necessary to play. The main deck consist in a Basic (I in core and II in the Labyrinth of Ruin Expansion) deck of 15 cards that may help the overlord either boost its monsters, set traps for the heroes or play spells to hurt or control them. If that wasn’t enough, the Overlord may purchase cards from different classes (Warlord [boost the monster combats], Magus [focus in spells to decrease health or status] or Saboteur [increase the power of traps that can be trigger to heroes] there are more classes but I won’t explain them here).

2) Rebels : In Descent they are heroes.

2.1) Archetype and classes : They are divided in archetypes (Healer, Mage, Warrior and Scout) and Classes (Discipline/Spiritspeaker, Runemaster/Necromancer, Benserker/Knight, and Wildlander/Thief). A hero belonging to an archetype may choose any class for that archetype; differently from IA that the character already has his class set.

2.2) Heroic Feat : In IA Rebels have two abilities in their sheets, and can be use until they are wounded . In Descent, Heroes have two abilities too, however, their second ability can be used only once per encounter. That’s because the Heroic Feat is an extremely powerful ability and because that Heroes don’t get wounded, they get Knocked Out (remove the figure from the board, put a token instead and can only revived either by using the whole turn or when a friend, as an action, does it for you), Knocked Out Heroes don’t lose any stats or abilities.

2.3) Attributes : Heroes have four attributes instead of three as Rebels; also, in order to pass them you roll a defense dice and hope to get the number of shields equal or less to a number you already have.

3) Mechanics :

3.1) Activation : In a round, Heroes always take their turn before the Overlord does. There’s no ping-pong activation for miniatures, its either all the heroes or all the monsters the Overlord has in board.

3.2) Dice : IA has the same dice for attack and defense, but they differ just a bit. The attack dice is always a blue die, meaning that if you attack without a weapon, you still roll a blue die. The problem is that this die has a X on it, meaning the attack misses (dodge but in the attack dice). Then there are the three power dice: red (mainly the damage dice), yellow (range dice) and green (surges). For the defense there are only three: brown (very low defense ratio), gray (normal defense) and black (highest defense), however, defense dice do not cancel surges.

3.3) Side quest : In Descent, side quest are name Rumors, which are drawn at the beginning of a campaign and played in any time the Overlord wants.

3.4) Plot Deck : As I said before, this deck comes when you buy a Lieutenant monster (Villain). However, its just the deck, the miniature, the threat tokens (used to buy the cards from the plot deck) and the monster version of that Lieutenant called Agent.

3.5) Number of players : Instead of boosting the Heroes, the Overlord is boosted when more heroes come to play (kind of Diablo III stuff). In a two hero-game, the overlord uses some of all the available figures; on three hero-game, he adds some other and so on. Moreover, there are two type of monster in a group, the minion and the master, the second one is usually the strongest. In conclusion, Heroes do not gain any extra health nor activation.

3.6) Shared information : Heroes and Overlord have complete access to the quest guide at any time, no information (aside of the Overlord hand of course) is hidden from the heroes.

3.7) Monster per quest : That been said, the Overlord does not have a hidden group and cannot call any figure at will. Instead, the Overlord picks a group that fits with a trait and add it to the quest. In addition, an Agent can be part of a group, meaning that you can bring big powerful bosses to play.

4) Miniatures : Descent runs a lot of sized miniatures, just the core set has 1 massive, two huge and 1 medium. You will love this when painting them.

5) Factionless : Well, there are no Mercenaries, Imperials or Rebels, only Overlord and his monsters against the heroes.

6) No Skirmish Mode : It’s sad but Descent it’s not as competitive as IA. However, Descent features a dungeon crawler mode (Coop-mode) that eliminates the Overlord player and make all the Heroes play against a system, allowing you to even play alone .

7) Descent’s community : I don’t know about IA here, but Descent’s community is very united and creative, there are a lot of fan creations in almost every aspect of the game (I sincerely recommend you take a look to the post of Index of Useful Links for a better understanding).

I hope I helped and I hope that an Imperial descent and join our evil plots... muahahaha

[Edited the mistake about "Knocked Out"]

Great post, but I think you mean 'Knocked Out' and not 'Knocked Up'..

You should buy this: http://r.ebay.com/A8Otz3

Plz keep in mind that new copies of the base game come with the Heir of Blood Campaign, so by an extremely cool move by FFG you get a very good campaign in the base game instead of the worst one, so no need on purchasing that.

Also Descent is a blast to paint because of the sheer variety in monsters heroes colors and textures, much more fun than IA imo.

As a whole Descent has a slower but imo strategically richer pace than IA. It's a little bit less streamlined and possibly more frustrating than IA, if the skill-difference between heroes and OL is quite high.

So here are the most significant gameplay differences:

In a turn first all heroes activate, then all monsters activate. This basically opens up a lot of tactics, skill combinations and strategies, which imo gives you a much richer strategic expirience than IA. It also makes every turn extremely impactfull. It's not uncommen that the heroes kill a lot of the monsters in the first turn before the OL has the chance to react, but the sheer number of monsters that move at the same can cause the heroes to be cut off from one another very easily and be focuse down before they can react.

As you see, while this opens up a lot of possible combinations it can also lead to high frustration if you perhaps missjudged the movementcapabilities of an enemy and now can only wait until everyone has hit you.

Also Descent has a lot of downtime because of that, but imo it's well worth it and I prefer this to IA from a gameplay perspective.

You can't move through enemy units: You just can't. This leads to situations where the OL just crams monsters into a hallway and you have to fight them to advance. However there are a lot of skills that let you deal with these situations, you just have to keep that in mind when choosing your skills/monsters.

Monstergroupstructure: Monstergroups usually consist of one master monsters and several minion monsters. While the monsters are much more individual than in IA imo, the master monster even gets extra abilities and is usually all around stronger. Also monsters are reinforced by unit and quest rules and not payed for with a resource.

Quests: The mission objectives are much more varied in Descent than in IA imo. Often the heroes and the OL have a different objective to fulfill and killing heroes/monsters is in most quests just a mean to an end and not the goal of your quest.

Defeating heroes : If you defeat heroes another hero has to use an action and revive the hero or the defeated hero has to sacrifice his whole turn to stand up again. Regardless the hero often comes back with only half his life or less and no fatigue(strain) effectivly making knocking out heroes very impactfull even if it's not the goal. Then again you can't kill heroes completely, they always keep standing up and going on.

No IP class cards : the OL has no skill cards that are open on the table like in IA, but draws from a Deck of OL cards, which basically are discarded after played (on your discard pile which gets shuffeld back into your drawpile once you have no cards to draw). Usually consisting of around 15cards you use your XP to buy new and stronger cards from OL classes. It's possible to get cards from different classes, but powerfull cards need a number of cards from the specific class.

At the beginning of the game you draw ~4cards, then 1 card on the start of every turn and 1 card if you knock out a hero.

These cards have very impactfull effects and can be played all in one turn to really give you a major boost for this turn or one by one to slightly edge out the heroes, however you may see fit.

Different Item and monster powerlevel : You basically play 5 quests with act I items and monsters and then switch to act II which features stronger monsters and better items (act Ii features 3 quests and an epic finale). There are no item upgrades and of course runes, bows and swords.

More conditions: Conditions work a litlle different and there are more conditions as a whole (even without every expansion adding one condition).

There are a lot of guides about the expansions, however I found Shadows of Nerekhall to be the best (best content, best setting and campaign, sadly not the most detailed miniatures, but good enough). At some point Labyrinth of ruins makes sense, because it features another basic OL deck (his starting deck).

I found that adding a lot of monsters made the game for the OL much more strategic, so while it features no miniatures, the conversion kit comes with 25 monstergroups which effectivly gives you at least 4 monsters to choose from in each quest than 2. These monsters all got re-released with the Hero and Monsterpacks with miniatures, so if money is no issue, getting ~3 of these is also worth it.

Thank you for all the great feedback! It has really helped shape my expectations for Descent and I couldn't be more excited!

With all I've seen, I have decided I'd like to collect the entire line eventually and get it painted up. I had some Christmas cash squirreled away and have already made my first purchase. It includes-

*Descent 2E Core Box (hoping it is a newer edition that includes the "Heir of Blood" campaign)
*Labyrinth of Ruin
*Lair of the Wyrm
*Manor of Ravens
*Trollfens

I looked for Shadow of Nerekhall everywhere, but every copy I found was over MSRP, I am guessing it is between printings.

I'd like to purchase two of the Heroes and Monsters packs and two of the Lieutenant packs to get started. Does anyone have any suggestions on which ones to start with? I'd like viable monsters and neat heroes to begin with as well as two very different types of Ltns!

Thank you again for all your help- Really enjoying the community here!

You don't need to rush buying Nerekhall if you get all this other stuff. You will have plenty of hero classes to choose from and imo the Nerekhall campaign is an ideal second campaign, maybe a bit too involved for a first campaign.

Here are the H&M packs I would recommend (although I lost track of the newest releases):

Crusade of the Forgotten

awesome monsters, a bunch of cool looking female heroes and qualitative miniatures

Some ideas:

Guardians of Deephall - Strong heroes and decent monsters, cool minis

Crown of Destiny - Good heroes and monsters, cool minis

Crusade of the Forgotten - Strong monsters, ok heroes, cool minis

For gameplay:

Zachareth - Strong plot deck focuses on overlord cards

Raythen - Plot deck focuses on denying hero searches, also comes with alternate mini and card to play him as a hero

For minis:

Valyndra - Best mini, plot deck focus on large and massive monsters

Bol'Goreth - Another great mini, plot deck focuses on poison and disease

As said, Crusade if the Forgotten is a good option. It has Golems! I also think the Ogres and Trolls from Visions of Dawn look pretty cool sculpt wise. It also has Ispher as a hero, which also looks great.

Other than the ones mentioned in other posts, Splig is also an option you could consider as lieutenant pack, since he appears in multiple campaigns.

In IA you create an agenda deck from several agenda sets, in descent you choose a single lieutenant for an entire campaign.

There is no need to buy more than one lieutenant for each campaign you play, just choose one that best fits your play style.

In IA each hero has their own set of upgrade cards, in descent each hero chooses a class and that class provides the upgrade cards that can be used for the campaign.

The available classes are:

Beastmaster

Berserker

Champion

Knight

Marshal

Skirmisher

Conjurer

Geomancer

Hexer

Necromancer

Runemaster

Bounty Hunter

Shadow Walker

Stalker

Thief

Treasure Hunter

Wildlander

Apothecary

Bard

Disciple

Prophet

Spiritspeaker

The choice of classes that you want to play should probably affect the order in which you buy expansions.

Thanks guys! Great info!

I received my first wave of Descent goodness and we played a few missions. I'm a bit torn with some of the rules differences, however. Here are the 2 big changes I'm looking to make, but I'm not familiar enough with Descent to know if this will throw the mechanics out of whack.

1. Line of Sight- I prefer Imperial Assault LOS rules to Descents and so far it's what we've used. Does this houserule work in the long run?

2. Moving through enemy models- In IA, you can move through enemy models at the cost of extra movement points, but in D2E, you cannot. If we switch to IA rules on this, will it screw up the balance of the game? Will it overide special abilities or items?

I'm sure we will come up with a few more differences as we continue to play, I'll post them here as we come upon them. Thank you dungeon delvers!

I have heard of a number of people implementing IA LOS rules in Descent. This will decrease the effectiveness of ranged attacks somewhat, and it will be especially noticeable with abilities which affect certain spaces in LOS ("Army of Death," "Radiant Light," and "Sweep," to name a few.) That being said, it shouldn't mess things up terribly. If that's how your group wants to play, have fun. One potentially huge impact I see of this rule change comes not necessarily from LOS, but from space counting- in descent, two spaces separated by diagonal obstacles are adjacent (look at tile 4A- a figure can both see and move from one side of those obstacle spaces to the other.) However, in IA, those spaces are not adjacent. This significantly effects many hero and monster abilities which set a space requirement (adjacent, within 3 spaces, etc.)

The movement rule change will do a couple things:

-decrease the allure of certain hero abilities significantly ("Tumble," for example. Durik's hero ability will be completely nullified.)

-remove the OL strategy of hallway blocking, which is sometimes his only hope to win a map.

I am not as familiar with implementation of IA movement.

Why not playing with the Descent rules for LoS and movement? Why not playing the game as originally designed for all intents and purposes to get an idea before you enforce house rules with (arguably) large impact on the game? How would you know you need said house rules to be implemented into your game sessions before even trying these rules?

It's not like we have this huge banner on top of the D2E forums stating how LoS and movement are broken in that game and strongly advising people to play with IA rules and whatnot?

What is inherently wrong with the LoS rules of Descent? They do feel intuitive to me, and I´m obviously not the only one playing with them, then fine of course if some people prefer the IA rules over this, but suggesting to new players to use the IA rules before they even get to play their first game sounds a bit exagerated to me?

Also bending the rules might affect balance in the game, as Zaltyre pointed out. You cannot evaluate that risk until you have played the game. Some abilities are strictly worse with the IA rules, some are probably strictly better. Even if I was in the IA-rules camp for the LoS rules, this reason alone would have certainly refrained me from actually playing with said IA rules because it would make other parts of the game unbalanced. And even if it looks "fine" at first, you never know which situations would actually depend on that very change, and how critical these situations can become.

Obviously people do as they want with their game and their playgroups. If you want to play with the IA LoS rules, if you want to port the Chewbacca hero to Descent or replace Zachareth with Palpatine then by all means if you think that'd be fun. I´m not even joking, it'd be actually awesome if I could witness such freedom taken by players while having the game still function despite all that. So yeah I´m not trying to judge people for that, but as a player in a group where the rules master plainly stated we would play with house rules for our very first game, I would seriously roll my eyes over a few times wondering what utterly broken game would warrant such thing.

Have you thought of the opposite, e.g. IA players really enjoyed the "new" D2E LoS rules? My opinion is that you should try them in any case.

I am very reluctant to make any changes to the rules of Descent, as I believe the game is for the most part well designed and balanced. As a competitive game, it is also intricately tuned, and 'fragile' as a result.

So I understand Indalecio's perspective of not changing things until you've played the game as intended. There are also far reaching implications for every single thing you adjust - implications that may not be visible for a long time but will negatively affect the experience.

Given this, I would absolutely not use IA's movement rules. They will break and invalidate many aspects of Descent and ruin many quests. Blocking is extremely important, and without this ability to wall off the heroes barring certain special abilities, things just fall apart. Similarly, I would not introduce a 2-fatigue limit on movement like there is in IA. Again, would break many quests/abilities/characters/etc.

However, I have tested IA LoS rules in Descent for more than a year now, and play Descent alot, through multiple campaigns, mini-campaigns, co-op adventures, custom quests, etc. The IA LoS rules work, and they work well!

The reason I recommend them is because I found them more fun and strategically interesting than the original LoS rules. They allow for far better use of cover, and the ability to protect targets through good positioning of your other forces. They also just feel more intuitive, with less, "Oh come on, how on earth could you make *that* shot?" But yes, as Zaltyre said, certain abilities are weaker as a result - particularly skills that affect everything in LoS, such as hero skills Army of Death and Break the Rune, as well as the Giant's Sweep ability, and multi-target skills like Merriod Flail.

As I said in my recommendation, this is a highly subjective opinion. I posted it here because the OP is specifically coming from IA, and I think they will like this variant. They should know that it has been thoroughly exercised by a member of the community, and that it has improved their play experience.

Thank you for the helpful replies! As stated, we've only played a few intro missions and used the IA LoS rules mainly due to the group being familiar with the mechanic.

I have no intention of making the Descent experience a mess, I was just curious if some of the IA changes translate well and if they enhance the game.

As it stands, it looks like the rules for not moving through enemies is a must for Descent and should remain the same. As for LoS, I think we'll try both ways and see which my group prefers!

Sorry to necro, but I'm in a very similar situation- avid IA player looking to get into Descent.

I think I have a bit of a grasp on the rules at this point, and I appreciate the buying advice here, but I have two three questions-

1) I've read that there are restrictions on open groups in this game, more so than in IA. Could someone explain how these restrictions work? For instance, using an IA analogy, would a restriction be faction based (such as, "no Mercenary units"), are they type based (such as "Only Troopers and droids"), or are they specific (such as "Only Jet Troopers and probe droids")?

If it's type based, is there a list of types that I can read somewhere?

2) Also, when I first started out with IA I found this buying guide: http://boardwars.eu/ally-and-villain-packs-for-star-wars-imperial-assault/

I found it to be incredibly useful, in that not only did it rank and describe each unit, but it also informed me of the expansions that I needed to buy before getting the ally/villain pack- for instance, you need Twin Shadows before getting Boba Fett.

Is there a similar site for Descent?

Also, are there restrictions on the expansions (I believe they're called "Lieutenant packs").

3) Finally- can/do units from older expansions show up in later ones? Are lieutenants linked to a specific expansion, or could they theoretically show up later, too?

Thanks everyone! Hoping to get this some time around Christmas- and if opinions have changed recently on what expansions newbies should get first since the last post here, let me know!

55 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

1) I've read that there are restrictions on open groups in this game, more so than in IA. Could someone explain how these restrictions work? For instance, using an IA analogy, would a restriction be faction based (such as, "no Mercenary units"), are they type based (such as "Only Troopers and droids"), or are they specific (such as "Only Jet Troopers and probe droids")?

If it's type based, is there a list of types that I can read somewhere?

Here you go . Monsters have traits, as do the quests. At least 1 of the monsters traits must match one of the quest's traits in order to be used as an open group.

55 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

2) Also, when I first started out with IA I found this buying guide: http://boardwars.eu/ally-and-villain-packs-for-star-wars-imperial-assault/

I found it to be incredibly useful, in that not only did it rank and describe each unit, but it also informed me of the expansions that I needed to buy before getting the ally/villain pack- for instance, you need Twin Shadows before getting Boba Fett.

Is there a similar site for Descent?

Also, are there restrictions on the expansions (I believe they're called "Lieutenant packs").

This thread on the official forums has a lot of the info you want, and more besides.

55 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

3) Finally- can/do units from older expansions show up in later ones? Are lieutenants linked to a specific expansion, or could they theoretically show up later, too?

Thanks everyone! Hoping to get this some time around Christmas- and if opinions have changed recently on what expansions newbies should get first since the last post here, let me know!

Generally only as open groups in a quest. FFG has a habit of assuming the only things you own are the base game and the expansion you're playing. So monsters from a given expansion are common in it, but seldom seen outside of it.

The opinion on what expansions to get now really depends on if you're playing the OL vs Heroes mode, or the Road to Legend app. Though in both cases I personally think Shadow of Nerekhall is your best first purchase.

Thanks!

I like that traits are seemingly linked to location- seems like that would help with thematic play (not unlike the apparently dropped idea of "habitat" in IA).

I'll look into everything else. I appreciate it!