Hi everyone. Been having fun with this app so far but some things have been nagging at me, so I figured I'd post here to see what people's thoughts are.

General Questions (I've tried googling these, honest):

How exactly does fame correlate to items you can purchase in the campaign? Suppose I want Iron Claws for a monk build I'm wanting to try. Has the community been able to examine the code or put together a database of known items corresponding to current fame so we could plan on how to get specific items?

For The Delve, how many items should your shop decks have? My play group was running into an issue where we'd get 5-7 shop cards from Act 1 and 4 of them would be weapons, so we'd enter Act 2 with no armor and missing valuable trinkets like mana weave / etc. because we were inundated with weapons we couldn't use. Needless to say we got torn apart. So I was going to go through the Act 1 (and to a lesser extent act 2) shop decks and pull out redundant items and re-balance the categories to better ensure the heroes get a variety of gear, and not worthless gear either (looking at you sling).

For the campaign (spoilers) there was a side quest where you can choose jewels, a scroll, or an idol as a reward. On one of my runs I grabbed the idol and it said I got an idol, but no item showed up in my inventory. Did I run into a bug and I was supposed to get a relic, or does the idol trigger an event that happens in a future quest?

Balance Questions:

Broadly, I'm just going to preface by saying that the change in turn structure for RtL has not been kind to all the classes. Blatant imbalances such as Marshal / Watchman cards having reduced or no effect aside, let's just talk basic turn order design here. Because the heroes don't go all at once, but have to wait for monsters to activate, consider a class like the Hexer. The Hexer is supposed to set up a bunch of hex tokens for either itself or another class to detonate. Where exactly in the turn order is the Hexer supposed to be?

If it goes first, it spends a turn doing a minor amount of damage to a couple of monsters and populating some hex tokens. But then monsters get to go next, and in all probability, every monster the Hexer did''t kill, is a monster that's going to be doing damage to the party. A potentially lethal amount if your group is as awful at rolling defense dice as mine. OK, so given that, maybe the Hexer going first, until it gets its endgame set up where it becomes a full fledged damage dealer (i.e. when the game is almost over if you're playing Delve) isn't the best bet. I'd argue in a similar way that the Hexer going before any monster group is just asking for your group to take extra damage.

In a similar boat are classes like Beast Master. As primary damage dealers, they're fine, and some threads such as: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/233061-road-to-legend-class-balance/
rate them as very strong in that role. However if your party has primary damage dealers already and you'd like to play them as support, then you're going to have a hard time, despite some truly potent skill cards possessed by the class. The reason being that your ability to support revolves entirely on your wolf being alive. But after you and your wolf move up into position to buff people's damage, and you end your turn, the monsters immediately go. Often, they'll kill your wolf immediately, so your party members don't get to take advantage of it. You would think cards like Stalker would help, but that only works if you're adjacent to your wolf, and I've tried this, but what happens is that you and your wolf end up blocking line of sight for your allies, and so they end up trading actions positioning themselves to attack enemies for the green dice you offer them as support. Not good enough.

My overall point isn't so much that classes are overpowered or underpowered as a result of this restructuring of the turn order, but rather certain class cards no longer have a design that makes sense given the new order. Because there is no "heroes turn", you can't have Hexer set up some bombs on enemies, then have them immediately detonated by a damage dealer that goes next, so many skills / strategies just feel needlessly out of place in this mode. At this point I don't know what would be a more difficult task for FFG, rebalancing the skills around the new turn order, or just returning the turn order to classic and making changes to the app accordingly, but something just feels... wrong.

So, I've been broadly alluding to a "proper turn order". This is as far as I can piece it together, and this is where I'd love to know if I'm missing something.

1. Blast is mandatory in your group, especially for Delve hard mode.

If there is a group of fire imps or goblin archers that can activate after your first hero, your immediate job should be to thin that herd as much as you can, because in a game where it's possible they can roll 2 5's and a 6, while you roll a 1 and two 0's for your defense score on your 12 hp hero, preemptive damage saves lives.

2. Have a hero specialized in doing single target damage.

If the stage is full of big creatures, you need a hero with consistent damage, pierce, etc. to clear the way for your party. Whether you or the blast character goes first depends on the monster comp likely to do the most damage to you after the immediate activation, but one of the two will do the bulk of the initial damage and weaken the group, the other will do clean up while your group runs through.

3. Have an early game offdamage character. So what I mean by this, is have a character that scales hard early game, with minimal gear, to get your primary damage dealers into act 2. A great (godlike) example of this would be the Apothecary. Just using its starting weapon and concoction you have a skill that can potentially do: Blue, 2 wounds / surge; Green, 1 wound / surge; Concoction: Pierce 1, 1 wound, then we're using Monk / Apothecary with a scout that adds an extra wound when attacking monsters non adjacent to other heroes.

So that's 8 damage with pierce 1 at the cost of 1 stamina. For reference, a Latari Longbow from Act 2 with an unmodified attack can get 8 and 1 pierce. Obviously you'd then throw in abilities and whatnot for comparison, but I think my point is made. A starting weapon and a level 1 skill is netting you raw damage of act 2 items. This is the kind of early game scaling I'm talking about. Another example would be a Necromancer rushing Vampiric Blood as a way of pumping its damage while funneling gear to primary damage dealers.

4. A heal / scout hybrid, in function not class necessarily. What I mean by this is that having a dedicated treasurehunter is less impactful in the Delve than in the standard campaign since you don't have access to the treasure chest card, nor can you horde gold to buy shop items quicker (more are revealed with more tokens searched in the Delve). Generally searching, in my experience, is for healing potions and stamina potions, and is usually performed by a character that can make efficient use out of the potions. In the fire campaign treasure hunters are still very much useful at helping you get extra gold and relics in some quests, however without the need to thin out the search deck ala Thief / Treasurehunter, you definitely want someone getting those tokens who can multitask in a similar fashion.

To that end, we usually use Ulma (the chemist character) as the Prophet for this task. The Prophet can pump everyone with life and, more importantly, stamina while searching for treasure. Ulma's heroic ability ensures you always get a potion. After the party naturally pauses, such as at the end of a delve stage or after a long fight with monsters, so Ulma can catch up, she usually hands one stamina potion to 2 damage dealers and keeps a healing potion on hand for herself.

When the time is right, she then uses her heroic feat to refresh both damage dealer's stamina potions and her healing potion, giving her a heroic feat that basically says: 2 characters may refill their stamina at any time on their turn, and as an action you may fully heal one character who's adjacent to you. There may be a better combination for this for the fire campaign, but for the Delve I'm convinced this is a pretty solid combination for this role.

So yeah. Due to the turn order, the way the Delve handles the shop cards, LoS making it impractical for lots of classes to bunch up and fight in often tight corridors, etc. this is the result I've come up with for a generalized optimal party set up.

Sorry for the wall of text, been playing for a couple weeks, and this is just me writing down all my observations for feedback.

Thanks for reading.

1. Blast is mandatory in your group, especially for Delve hard mode.

I don't have time to address everything in your post right now, but this stood out, so ...

You are aware that Blast (and many other Area of Effect) weapons/skills in RTL and the Delve are nerfed, right?

That is to say, the space you target takes full damage, but the spaces affected by blast/AoE skills take only half damage rounded up. Given this, often times you don't actually kill anything when using blast, but you may damage many things in small amounts. The point is that you aren't actually killing any more monsters using blast than using a directed weapon against one monster.

Thus, after your one hero with blast goes, you still usually have all of those monsters on the board attacking you.

The value of AoE weapons/skills in RTL/Delve is greatly diminished (RTL Rules, Page 10, bottom left paragraph - Attacking Multiple Monsters).

For The Delve, how many items should your shop decks have? My play group was running into an issue where we'd get 5-7 shop cards from Act 1 and 4 of them would be weapons, so we'd enter Act 2 with no armor and missing valuable trinkets like mana weave / etc. because we were inundated with weapons we couldn't use. Needless to say we got torn apart. So I was going to go through the Act 1 (and to a lesser extent act 2) shop decks and pull out redundant items and re-balance the categories to better ensure the heroes get a variety of gear, and not worthless gear either (looking at you sling).

If you have all expansions as we do, the current Act I deck has 67 cards in it, and the Act II deck has 57 cards in it.

I personally do not like the idea of "cherry picking" the Shop Item decks, and creating new, smaller decks with just "the good stuff". Part of the challenge of this game is that you simply may not received the latest and greatest equipment to buff your characters in just the way that you want. Nevertheless, you have to find a way to make do, and win, if possible.

I guess my group is all about the difficult challenge of winning, despite the circumstances, and what we may achieve/gain during game play.

Since getting Shop Items is based on following game directions (e.g. deal 7, keep 3, no more than 1 weapon), why even go through the trouble of pulling cards out?

Why not just take exactly what you want?

@ any2cards: For attacks affecting multiple figures in RtL the player may actually choose which of the affected figures receives the full damage. In a Blast attack e.g. the targeted monster does not necessarily receive the full damage.

Here is the relevant rule from the RtL pdf (bolded by me):

"When a hero performs an attack that targets or affects multiple monsters,
the monsters gain an additional advantage during the “Deal Damage”
step. Choose 1 monster to which you will deal damage first and resolve
the step as normal. Then halve the Heart results (rounded up), and apply
that value to each of the additional monsters, before applying Shields."

My group has been playing it wrong, too, until I was forced to carefully read the paragraph again for the CRRG.

@ any2cards: For attacks affecting multiple figures in RtL the player may actually choose which of the affected figures receives the full damage. In a Blast attack e.g. the targeted monster does not necessarily receive the full damage.

Here is the relevant rule from the RtL pdf (bolded by me):

"When a hero performs an attack that targets or affects multiple monsters,

the monsters gain an additional advantage during the “Deal Damage”

step. Choose 1 monster to which you will deal damage first and resolve

the step as normal. Then halve the Heart results (rounded up), and apply

that value to each of the additional monsters, before applying Shields."

My group has been playing it wrong, too, until I was forced to carefully read the paragraph again for the CRRG.

I knew this, but was trying to keep my example simple. The major point is that AoE attacks are definitely nerfed, and lessens the overall value of things such as Blast.

No matter who takes the full damage, everything else is taking 1/2. So the results remain the same ... most, if not all, of the monsters will still be alive, so in the OP's example above, the heroes will most likely STILL be attacked by all of the monsters. True, more will have damage on them, but their numbers will most likely not have decreased, so it doesn't reduce the overall attacks the heroes will take after the first hero goes (the one with blast).

Basically, any monster whose base health is at least 4 (arguably even 3 if you assume a gray defense die for that monster), is going to be very difficult (if not impossible) to kill if they are affected by Blast, and you are using any base skill weapon, and most Shop Act I weapons. After all, you will have to do 8 damage to the primary figure, to kill any other monster. And that is assuming that monster's defense roll (most often a gray) is blank. If you assume the average shields rolled of a gray die (1.33) and round it down to 1, you will have to do even more damage to be able to kill anything.

To further elaborate, most initial weapons and many Shop Act I weapons roll Blue-Yellow or Blue-Red (with a few Blue-Green).

Blue-Yellow Max Roll: 4 Damage, 2 Surges. Even if a Surge is +2 damage (normally only +1 for this level), you still, on average, are not killing a 3 health monster affected by Blast.

Blue-Red Max Roll: 5 Damage, 2 Surges. Even if a Surge is +2 damage (normally only +1 damage or perhaps Pierce 1), you still, on average, are not killing a 4 health monster affected by Blast.

I guess I was just trying to address the OP's strategy of saying that Blast (or any AoE) is mandatory, and often should go first.

Sorry, if my comment sounded patronizing, just wanted to clarify that nerf to multiple-target does not hit harder than intended. Choosing the target is clearly in favor to the hero players.

Sorry, if my comment sounded patronizing, just wanted to clarify that nerf to multiple-target does not hit harder than intended. Choosing the target is clearly in favor to the hero players.

No worries. Quite frankly, our group chooses to increase the difficulty of our challenge by playing AoE as if it were under the base game rules, where you do target a space, and affect others around it. We want more of a challenge, so that is how we play it.

I never have an issue with someone clarifying rules, as others who may not be as knowledgeable, may learn from it. Quite frankly, I have been wrong about things in the past, so this forum, and users such as yourself, are very welcome to any discussion.

Thanks for the replies. I had a more thorough response made up but the forum ate it, but the summary is this:

Shop cards: I'm not trying to ensure I get what I want, but am trying to return a proportion of offense / defense items in general closer to the levels of the classic shop deck (where I think delve was balanced around). Currently I have 12.5% armor in an act 1 shop deck that started with 21%. Something doesn't seem right about that. I was just inquiring about what model shop deck the rules had in mind of the Delve (Classic tweaked by expansions, or everything in your expansions stuffed into a single pile) to determine what kind of changes should be made to ensure we aren't drawing all weapons 2 rounds in a row.

Blast: I never said blast should always go first, and never said blast should try to blast everything. I clearly stated the types of situations in which blast can be mandatory. Low hp enemies high in number, able to all attack you after one hero activates. Very niche, but something that has killed my party in the Delve before. Just 3 goblin witchers in Act 2 were enough to kill 2 party members in a single activation with good rolls / overlord ability against a couple 1's and 0's on defense.

Blast rules: Yes, I'm aware of them. The Runemaster is largely the exception to them since his surge is 2 pierce which isn't wounds, thus unaffected by the halving mechanic. Thus all it takes is 3 wounds -> halved 1.5 -> rounded 2, to kill minion goblin archers / imps in one attack 5/6 of the time. Otherwise it acts as a single target damage dealer.

First, let me state that I hope my previous posts did not come across as too aggressive, attacking, belligerent, etc. That was not the intent. I am only trying to provide some constructive thoughts ...

Shop cards: I'm not trying to ensure I get what I want, but am trying to return a proportion of offense / defense items in general closer to the levels of the classic shop deck (where I think delve was balanced around). Currently I have 12.5% armor in an act 1 shop deck that started with 21%. Something doesn't seem right about that. I was just inquiring about what model shop deck the rules had in mind of the Delve (Classic tweaked by expansions, or everything in your expansions stuffed into a single pile) to determine what kind of changes should be made to ensure we aren't drawing all weapons 2 rounds in a row.

If you are going to include expansions in your RTL/Delve selections, which will automatically include the appropriate tiles, monsters, heroes, etc., I feel you should include all of the Shop Items as well. It is all part of game balance.

Blast rules: Yes, I'm aware of them. The Runemaster is largely the exception to them since his surge is 2 pierce which isn't wounds, thus unaffected by the halving mechanic. Thus all it takes is 3 wounds -> halved 1.5 -> rounded 2, to kill minion goblin archers / imps in one attack 5/6 of the time. Otherwise it acts as a single target damage dealer.

Some additional analysis. Act I minion monsters have the least health of all monsters, lieutenants, etc. So, I will provide my analysis based on them, and you can assume that things are worse for Act I master monsters, and all Act II monsters.

Health Act I Minion Monsters

2 4

3 9

4 13

5 15

6 5

7 4

8 5

9 0

10 1

So, out of 56 possible monster types, 13 or 23.2% have 3 or less health. 43 or 76.8% have 4 or more health.

I must say that I didn't think the number of monster types with 3 or less health was so high. Still, the majority of monsters have at least 4 health, if not more. It is for this reason, even with skills/weapons that can add Pierce and/or additional damage, I find less value in AoE (Blast) skills/weapons in RTL/Delve.

Now, one point in your favor is that typically, the less health a monster has, the more of them you generally get. If they happen to be of a type that has less than 4 health, and with the proper skills/weapons, I guess an argument can be made for making Blast somewhat of a priority. If you can get a lucky roll, you could do major damage (pun intended). At least within Act I. Once you get out of Act I, I think AoE skills/weapons fare even worse.

"First, let me state that I hope my previous posts did not come across as too aggressive, attacking, belligerent, etc. That was not the intent. I am only trying to provide some constructive thoughts ..."

"I must say that I didn't think the number of monster types with 3 or less health was so high. Still, the majority of monsters have at least 4 health, if not more. It is for this reason, even with skills/weapons that can add Pierce and/or additional damage, I find less value in AoE (Blast) skills/weapons in RTL/Delve."

Agreed. I don't take Blast as mandatory because its usage is common. I agree its quite niche, and ineffective against things such as Reanimate. But in my testing, the only things sure to kill my party have been 3+ archer / imp / witcher types having free reign on the board to attack the same 1/2 characters, combined with unfortunate defense rolls. Everything else, I can generally plan around. So Blast, to me, feels like packing that one niche item against that one thing that can assuredly wreck your party, rare as it might be. What helps is that the rune master's "blast' attack only costs a single exp, so it doesn't go too far out of your way to build it. Admittedly I don't know how to efficiently get blast on anyone else, in which case, I hope their defense rolls are better than mine.

"Now, one point in your favor is that typically, the less health a monster has, the more of them you generally get. If they happen to be of a type that has less than 4 health, and with the proper skills/weapons, I guess an argument can be made for making Blast somewhat of a priority. If you can get a lucky roll, you could do major damage (pun intended). At least within Act I. Once you get out of Act I, I think AoE skills/weapons fare even worse."

True, once you get to act 2, the only thing that's going to reliably save you is having access to sufficient damage mitigation, which is precisely why I brought up the shop deck. Too many times I've gone rounds without any defensive items whatsoever, which means, even with +hp skills, you can get ripped to shreds out of the gate in act 2. Having access to both, to some degree, seems crucial to me. Maybe your party just has overall better defense rolls than mine, but I tell you, those witchers / archers / imps in act 2 can drop a tank in a single activation, and pick off another low hp character with the way we roll defense. It's truly awful, which is why I've taken to building parties as aggressively as I have.

But it's kind of stale having such pre-determined slots, but I don't know of anything else that works on the Delve hard mode (almost anything else works on normal due to the health recovery between rounds, but normal is almost too easy)

"If you are going to include expansions in your RTL/Delve selections, which will automatically include the appropriate tiles, monsters, heroes, etc., I feel you should include all of the Shop Items as well. It is all part of game balance."

What is your party supposed to do if it gets 5 weapons two rounds in a row?

That about sums up my frustration. Also, about the Fire campaign, do you know of any database that links fame with what items are able to be bought?

It's funny that you mention point 1 above. We actually just finished a Delve where after round 1 we drew 5 weapons, and after round 2 we drew 5 trinkets.

This is despite the fact that after each round we completely shuffle the shop item deck. If you think getting all weapons stinks, trying getting all trinkets, with having to choose 3, and only 2 of them having a certain value (at least to our party).

Still, my group actually likes this diversity, as it increases the challenge significantly. We did make it to the final boss level (round 6) but got our asses handed to us.

And as for Kindred Fire, I am not aware of any database that equates fame levels to what is offered. I can say that we have played 25+ Kindred Fire campaigns, and have seen a wide variety of stuff provided to us in town. There are several things that get shown regularly (especially early), such as Leather Armor, Bloody Dagger, Corpsebug Brooch, Elm Greatbow, etc.

Still, across all 25+ campaigns, we have seen a huge diversity items. It probably isn't a true random spread of items, but it at least has been a reasonable amount of variety.

For the record the idol deals two damage per round to shadow dragons. The app will tell you.

For my the biggest balance issue, particularly with delve is that it gets easier not harder. If you do well in the first stage the next two will be easier. If you do well for all of act 1 act 2 is not a challenge.