So after recently playing through the latest Saga Box Land of Shadow as well as the new deluxe box The Grey Havens I've discovered a trend that has started for boss enemies in certain quests.

Now we have had some very cool boss mechanics in the past don't get me wrong but the direction they are taking recently is very different and unique to what we have gotten in the past. Lets take a bit of a look at some cool boss mechanics we've seen in the past first off!

We've gotten Troll bosses that either get weaker or more powerful when their friends are defeated and their numbers diminish.

We've gotten boss enemies that you can only kill through quest effects and progression such as both copies of the Balrog (in Shadow and Flame the Dark Pit allows you to defeat it and in Journey in the Dark the Last Bridge allows you to defeat it).

We've had boss enemies you don't actually have to beat or destroy but simply need to race to the end of the quest to escape; Witch King in Massing, Bellach from Celebrimbor's Secret (I think? I don't remember having to beat him to win the quest?), Old Man Willow in the Old Forest and Chief Turch in the Dunland Trap.

We've had plenty of bosses that are immune to player card effects but these days we seem to get a lot more boss enemies that instead just cannot have attachments but are still vunerable to cards like feint and rivendell blade (I love that we are getting these bosses instead because immune to player card effects not only increases the difficulty quite a bit but is just restrictive and nowhere near as fun).

We've seen a few bosses with indestructible that lose indestructible when you progress to a certain part of the quest or achieve something in particular.

We have even seen bosses that come and go depending on your quest stage that then re appear at the end for a final showdown; Guardians in three trials, Ancient Marsh Dweller in nin-in-eilph and Narlhug in ruins of belegost.

We have seen spell casters bosses that make additional attacks and heal whenever certain criteria are met or are even able to make certain treachery effects trigger when dealt as shadow cards to the boss. Saruman and Thaurdir.

These spell caster bosses are often indestructible as well and aren't actually killed or destroyed but are simply defeated so long as you have cleared the last quest stage and have put a certain amount of damage on them.

As you can see we have a pretty wide variety of bosses in this game and the designers do an AMAZING job of making each boss enemy feel unique with its particular nasty effects and specific conditions to beat it.

They have started to create boss enemies of a very particular type now I've noticed.. and so far I think we have at least 3 bosses that are fairly similar in the way that they operate.

Now I am not against the fact that they use similar mechanics as there are plenty of bosses that are similar but they all have a unique feel to them and whats more even when they are slightly vanilla they are featured in a quest that is unique and has its own feel and mechanics.

What does worry me is the mechanic itself, some times it works and sometimes its a bit ridiculous.

So as many of you have probably already worked out I am primarily talking about Shelob, Captain Sahir and Daechannar.

They all have this new mechanic where essentially they cannot take damage or avoid taking damage through some special effect until certain criteria are met. Now this is certainly similar to enemies that are indestructible but can take damage and are only defeated once certain criteria is met and they have a certain amount of damage tokens but at the same time it is actually very different.

I think that Sahir is the best of these three and works really well.

When he first comes out he gets resource tokens equal to the amount of damage tokens on The Dream Chaser and then gets further resource tokens every time he attacks (more if he destroys a character). When you damage Sahir instead of placing damage you must first remove a resource token for each point of damage you deal and he needs to run out of resource tokens before any actual damage can be placed. This is really clever because it requires planning and strategy to beat him. It does still remain possible to kill him in one go however you would just need plenty of attack power to do so. Similarly although he gains resources every turn this doesn't just completely stop him from taking damage on any particular round it just makes him more difficult to damage and beat.

Then you have Shelob who I think is in the middle of these three and still works really well but is definitely A LOT harder to beat and her mechanic works slightly differently and can completely lock you out of doing any damage for a turn. Ok so once you are at stage 3 though so long as you can take her attack during the quest phase she actually has a very decent chance of not obtaining any more resource tokens for the turn. There are a few shadow effects that can give her 1 but you can always cancel those if able and there are not too many.

So yes it will take you several turns to remove those resource tokens from her as she only loses one every time she takes ANY amount of damage (so even if you are attacking for 100 ).

This can be a little tedious and if you didn't defend against her throughout quest stage 2 she can start on far more than 6 tokens! (she was on 6 by the time I got to Stage 3 the only time I've played this quest and beaten it, lost the first attempt). Because this is more or less based on the players choices though you can keep her resources relatively low and then with ranged characters different players can also declare attacks on her each round you can even remove multiple resources in the one turn this way.
I think Shelob was designed extremely well and although it can put the pressure on, the way that you have to constantly weaken and take resources from her before finally defeating her is really great and makes the game tense and exciting and is also quite thematic.

Lastly there is Daechannar. In my opinion the most poorly designed boss enemy FFG have made for this game. I seriously hate Dread Realm even more than Carn Dum because of this stupid poorly designed, almost immortal enemy. I actually really hate those last two quests in that cycle and am dissapointed by the end of the Angmar Awakened cycle because of these two quests.

The story, the flavour, even the art for this entire cycle was absolutely amazing but those last two quests are just crazy difficult. Neither quest is fun at all and they are both overly punishing. Carn Dum has other unrelated issues that I won't get into here but to me the issue with Dread Realm is 100% the boss.....

Look at how many sorcery cards are ACTUALLY in this quest... doesn't seem like much but is actually a stupid stupid amount when you are playing. When you play two player there is more or less 100% that you will see a sorcery almost every single turn. Many turns you will see 2 and I have on many occasions had 3 appear in one turn especially considering some of them have surge.......

Ok so any time you do damage to Daechannar (ANY AMOUNT) discard a sorcery card from play instead...

He also has a stupidly high 5 defense... so its incredibly hard to damage him with your second deck (unless you have 6+ ranged attack on characters ready to go) and so quite often you will only damage him once each turn during the combat phase removing one single sorcery from play.... (Because Shelob swaps back and forth and engages different players it is easier to remove multiple resources each turn, she also has 4 defense compared to his 5 which makes a world of difference as well..)

The following turn you will see another sorcery and very likely may even see more than one...

They constantly stack and even when you are able to remove 2 in one turn it just seems endless and unless you have a whole variety of direct damage effects, plenty of threat reduction and condition removal you are going to get absolutely smashed by this quest before you can put a single point of damage on him...

Now if the rest of the quest wasn't so **** punishing and you could focus attacks on Daechhanar a little more safely then this might not be so bad. If there wasn't a stupid stupid amount of sorceries it also might not be so bad. There are some seriously nasty treacheries in this quest, some pretty tough enemies (9 goddamn hitpoints..... on a regular foe... no armour or not is pretty insane) and some awful locations.

Add to this that you are probably reanimating cards left right and center as well due to the treacheries and stage effects. You are constantly swarmed by enemies as there are quite a few in this quest ON TOP OF all the reanimated dead (Cursed Dead Swarm should NOT be in this quest considering how intense everything else already is), there is also a side quest that can just completely shut you down if you see it in the first few rounds and there is very high threat in staging most turns so it is actually quite hard to advance as well. I honestly get just as swarmed by foes in this quest as I do in Carn Dum which is just stupid. This quest doesn't let up in any way, everything has razor sharp teeth. So of all quests it is the worst possible one to have such an intense boss included.

I feel like it isn't very well designed, especially for multiplayer. I have played at least 20+ games of this quest and there is not a single issue other than Daechhanar. Eventually you either threat out or just get too swamped by other enemies and overwhelmed. I've only ever ONCE defeated him and I then lost on the following quest stage just a few progress from victory... (only had one or two locations left in play with just a few quest points). Many of you are going to disagree with lots of what I have said and will present decks that easily beat this quest but no one is going to sway me at all on this point. I think Daechhanar has been badly designed and can easily make this quest nigh impossible. You should not have to ping him for 1 damage multiple times across several turns just to be able to take him down.

So overall I am really loving this new approach to boss enemies as a whole but I absolutely HATE the way they did it with Daechhanar as I don't think it works quite as they intended and is far more powerful than I feel they meant it to be and makes that quest far far harder than it would be if that effect had been worded a bit better.
I do hope they continue this trend in various ways but I really hope we don't get another stupid boss like Daechhanar and am definitely worried about them going forward with this trend as one of the main things it does is it forces you to take far far longer to defeat bosses which means turtling decks are even further punished in this cycle.... we already have crazy amounts of surge in some quests and we already have time counters punishing slower decks, do we really need bosses that force you to threat out or run far more threat reduction simply because you HAVE to take several turns to beat them regardless of what your actual damage or defensive output is or regardless of how well you have built up your board/game state simply because you have to jump various hoops to be able to damage the boss (no resource tokens left on the boss, no sorcery cards in play etc) to begin with.

It's not Daechanar himself that's the real problem (direct damage wrecks him pretty good, and between Mighty Prowess, Dwarrowdelf Axes, and a Spear for Beregond, you're covered), it's that gosh dang Altar of Midwinter.

(Also, this is the only quest in which Watchers of the Bruinen are extremely effective.)

Hmm I still reckon it's mainly Daechanar and the abundance of sorceries that is the main problem but the altar most definitely doesn't help because you are either revealing a third card every round in two player which massively increases the chance you will see a sorcery (or two) or you have to reanimate the first players top card of his deck which is another enemy on top of whatever else appears during staging and if you get something like Dwimmerlaik and then Cursed Dead bringing back 3 or 4 other cursed dead you end up with like 6 extra enemies appearing in the one single turn.... How are you even meant to have enough characters to dispatch all these foes AND then attack Daechanar and get past his 5 defence to do some damage and discard a sorcery.

I don't know man I played a two player game in which I had mighty prowess in play. I was using it to do 1 damage to him each turn and most turns was able to attack him as well so this is two sorceries removed each turn. I would either have way too many enemies appear out of nowhere resulting in me only doing damage to him through mighty prowess as I needed to clear other foes just to stay afloat or I could remove two sorceries in one turn but not do damage and then the following turn I'd have two more sorceries appear.

Plus the sorceries themselves are just stupidly powerful. Two Heavy Curses and goodluck playing anything whatsoever almost.

More than one copy of death and calamity? say hello to multiple new enemies coming straight off your deck. A fell dread shuts down your questing and can instantly take away like 3 or 4 willpower from you and then you have possession.

Did they really need to make this highest cost ally? like really? It couldn't have been random or your choice at least or something else? anything else? highest cost ally being instantly discarded (bye Legolas/Beorn/Gandalf/whomever) and you cop a new reanimated dead AND you have another sorcery in play fuelling Daechanar....

Maybe I should give it another go and make sure I get Mighty Prowess set up on someone with readying (put it on Aragorn when I totally should have put it on Elladan...) or on someone with UC also attached so that they can ping him twice each turn before I actually attack him..

I totally see your point though and without Altar triggering every single round Daechanar would certainly be easier to handle.

Maybe I've just had horrendous horrendous luck with this quest.... I'm actually quite psyched to play it tonight now and finally beat it....
I bet that I won't though...

On average, with two players, I've been revealing 1.5 Sorcery cards per turn with this quest. It gets ridiculous at a certain point. Okay, if we just reveal one sorcery card this turn, we can still win! Cue 3 sorcery cards.

I kind of agree, it is silly. The only change I had to make to my Dain, Thorin, Ori deck was adding two Mighty Prowesses. Then, Thorin (with Narvi's Belt) gets one Mighty Prowess, kills three reanimated dead cards per turn with Erebor Record-keepers and deals 3 damage per turn to Daechanar. My friend added that doomed Spirit card that lets us each discard a condition and with my already included Miner of the Iron Hills we were able to remove the few Sorcery cards in play that are also conditions without having to damage Daechanar.

I think Dwarrodelf Axe would be more consistent than Mighty Prowess, in hindsight, as I can get multiple in play with just one Narvi's Belt, although this would be less effective at clearing reanimated dead while still damage Daechanar. Maybe a combination of the two. The problem is that even if you include these cards in your deck, there is always a possibility they get reanimated and you just lose because of it.

I do think it is kind of silly, and a bit tedious, even if there are decks that can do well versus it.

I also think they may have made the scenario just to make Straight Shot insanely useful

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you damage Daechanar, you get to remove a Sorcery card from the game; not from play. Which means it'll never be shuffled back in again. 16/48 cards in the standard encounter deck have that trait, so it is a lot, but with direct damage effects, you can essentially wipe the encounter deck of Sorcery after 3 turns, even after you cycle through.

I did have one question, but if you Thror's Map Altar of Midwinter to the staging area can you use Thror's Key and put it on Altar of Midwinter? I am not sure because Thror's Key says when a location is "added" to the staging area.

If that doesn't work, Path of Need deals with Altar of Midwinter relatively effectively.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you damage Daechanar, you get to remove a Sorcery card from the game; not from play. Which means it'll never be shuffled back in again. 16/48 cards in the standard encounter deck have that trait, so it is a lot, but with direct damage effects, you can essentially wipe the encounter deck of Sorcery after 3 turns, even after you cycle through.

You're not wrong, but like I said, sure you can build decks to beat this quest (ones with lots of direct damage), but this quest is tedious if you don't do that.

To his point about this type of boss, I killed Shelob after something like 17 turns because she had so many resources. It became so tedious that my friend and I just left all our questers, attackers, and defenders exhausted since we did the exact same thing 17+ turns in a row until we won...at that point, it's not really a game anymore.

I think it would be better if massive damage could still break through so many resources or sorcery cards. Something like "for every 5 points of damage (rounded up) dealt to boss in a single instance remove 1 resource/sorcery card instead of dealing damage". I don't know what the right number would be, or how it should scale based on the number of players, but making repeatable direct damage the only efficient way to reliably deal with these kinds of bosses really limits deck-building options. But maybe that is the intent.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you damage Daechanar, you get to remove a Sorcery card from the game; not from play. Which means it'll never be shuffled back in again. 16/48 cards in the standard encounter deck have that trait, so it is a lot, but with direct damage effects, you can essentially wipe the encounter deck of Sorcery after 3 turns, even after you cycle through.

You're not wrong, but like I said, sure you can build decks to beat this quest (ones with lots of direct damage), but this quest is tedious if you don't do that.

To his point about this type of boss, I killed Shelob after something like 17 turns because she had so many resources. It became so tedious that my friend and I just left all our questers, attackers, and defenders exhausted since we did the exact same thing 17+ turns in a row until we won...at that point, it's not really a game anymore.

I think it would be better if massive damage could still break through so many resources or sorcery cards. Something like "for every 5 points of damage (rounded up) dealt to boss in a single instance remove 1 resource/sorcery card instead of dealing damage". I don't know what the right number would be, or how it should scale based on the number of players, but making repeatable direct damage the only efficient way to reliably deal with these kinds of bosses really limits deck-building options. But maybe that is the intent.

I wonder, if he were treated as engaged with each player, like some boss enemies have been, would that enable each player to attack each turn and thus remove more Sorceries?

I did have one question, but if you Thror's Map Altar of Midwinter to the staging area can you use Thror's Key and put it on Altar of Midwinter? I am not sure because Thror's Key says when a location is "added" to the staging area.

Yes this totally works. It's an efficient strategy for dealing with nasty locations that Quest effects force to be active.

Wait a minute...... WAIT A MINUTE... you remove the sorcery from the game???? I've just been discarding it to the discard pile.. how did I miss this...

HOLY HELL THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!! I need to play this quest again asap...

Wait a minute...... WAIT A MINUTE... you remove the sorcery from the game???? I've just been discarding it to the discard pile.. how did I miss this...

HOLY HELL THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!! I need to play this quest again asap...

Well, it still takes a while, but yeah, it's not limitless

Yeah I just want to echo the advice of using Mighty Prowess. Throwing in just a couple copies is often enough as every time you kill a Reanimated you get to remove a Sorcery. In a 4 player game, I've seen a ranged attacker with Mighty Prowess and Hour of Wrath clear out what must have been 8+ Sorceries in one go, it was quite spectacular.

Power of Orthanc is another card the can be really effective in multiplayer, although it discards the Sorcery rather than removing it from the game.

yeah, you probably wont hate him so much if you start playing it right =D.

With regards to the mechanic though... I guess I like it. Having crazy attack and wiping the floor with the boss in a single round sort of dampens the epicness of the whole "boss encounter" thing.