if you have the silver chest "ice storm" weapon equipped, do you have to make the attack as a blast attack. Or can you choose to use it as a focused attack on just one monster. The card says it has blast 1, and 2 surges may add +1 blast.

Thanks

Yes. All Blast/Breath/Lightning weapons (and monsters) can choose to use that effect or not. With that weapon you can have Blast 1+ (depending on surges) or no blast at all.

-shnar

Breath and Blast have been modified to be optional in the FAQ. Bolt still has not.

All 3 abilities used to be mandatory, but people discovered and complained about various problematic situations involving the Grapple ability; you can't hit someone grappling you diagonally with a Breath attack, and you can't hit someone grappling you orthogonally with a Blast attack without also hitting yourself. But they were mandatory for a long time, and were changed separately, in different releases of the FAQ, based on what people were complaining about at the time.

I think it's kind of stupid that Breath is optional and Bolt isn't, but Bolt shows up much less frequently and doesn't have a specific bad interaction with Grapple , so I suspect it will remain as it is for the foreseeable future.

Sea of Blood changes Bolt to be optional as well. Maybe the next version of the FAQ will change that for non-campaign Descent, too, then.

Does that mean there's a leader with bolt in one of the encounters or dungeon levels?

haslo said:

Interesting. I see Sea of Blood is continuing Road to Legend's tradition of making a bunch of abilities subtly and arbitrarily different from normal Descent for no explicit reason.

James McMurray said:

Nope, I was talking about the rulebook's comprehensive list of abilities. Bolt is on page 39 of the SoB rulebook .

I just checked, and there's no monster with Bolt in either of the encounters, dungeon levels, or rumors

Antistone said:

Guess so In this particular case however, I find it to be more consistent, since Breath and Blast already were ruled to be optional before and Bolt was the odd one out.

Antistone said:

Or, more likely, they have listened and noted things the community have said and made changes that will be reflected in th next FAQ as well.

Probably...

FWIW I don't think most of the subtle changes in RtL were either arbitrary or pointlessly different. All the ones I can think of off the top of my head were good changes that either reflect the differences in the Advanced Campaign monsters and/or hero capabilities (eg Undying) or the realities of now having multiple sources in previously unranked abilities that reasonably could/should stack (eg Reach).

Corbon said:

Multiple sources of Reach have existed since Well of Darkness (the first expansion to allow heroes to get it at all), and AFAIK Road to Legend didn't add any new ones. Then they added yet another independent source of Reach in Tomb of Ice, but didn't carry over the stacking rule. All evidence points directly away from your theory on this one.

They changed Ironskin so that it eliminates damage from all area attacks, instead of just Blast, Bolt, and Breath.

The Undying change looks like a philosophical change to me, not a change due to different monster/hero capabilities. If they were just worried about heroes being stronger, for example, they could have simply increased monsters' health; instead, they seem to have decided that weak, low-level undying monsters should have a chance to survive even extremely powerful hero attacks (even though low-level monsters without undying are given no such privilege), while they explicitly made the opposite decision in vanilla. Or maybe they decided they should force heroes to golf bag weapons with different special properties (like "ignores Undying") because heroes have the opportunity to acquire more treasure, though only if they didn't care about screwing heroes that don't own all expansions.

I haven't played RtL, but those all seem awfully arbitrary to me. Even if they're not arbitrary, though, it's poor writing to make them subtly different without calling attention to the differences.