My group and I have nearly finished our first full HoB campaign which we purchased and started after doing a full Shadow Rune campaign. We all felt like the Shadow Rune was horribly imbalanced and so after reading lots of comments about HoB being much better we decided to run that as our second campaign. Unfortunately it seems that our gaming experience is almost identical in that the heroes are being absolutely destroyed by the Overlord again, in this case it's 7-1 in favor of the OL. I was hoping I could get some insights or advice about how we are playing, the campaign, rules, etc. in an effort to see if there are things we are doing wrong or if there are things we could do differently to have a more balanced experience next time. I can't remember every single detail but I'm going to list as much as I can to give you a feel for how the campaign has gone, how we play, and the rules we are hopefully using correctly.

Campaign Overview - Heirs of Blood

As a general summary I would say that our group of heroes always felt too limited in our ability to carry out the mission objective while also trying to get a decent amount of searches and fight off the monsters that would constantly spawn behind us and block the path in front of us. If large monsters were an option the Overlord would almost always take them, especially if that open group was able to be reinforced. If the mission involved multiple pathways with objectives spread around the map the Overlord would always choose very mobile monsters such as goblin archers in order to have complete map control. If the first encounter had for example 8 objective tokens, if we focused ONLY the objective at best we could get and/or prevent the OL from getting 4, meaning our best effort was always a 50/50 going into the second encounter. If we wanted searches and to clear a few monsters in order to save hp going into the second encounter the OL would get 6 or more, basically 80/20 in his favor. We as heroes knew that gold was very important going into Act 2 to stand any kind of chance but even with a focus on hoarding some gold for the Act 2 shop we could only get a few weapons and one piece of armor. It felt like even trying our hardest, using our abilities in the right order, using our ultimates each encounter, we simply had no chance to win the majority of the quests we played.

• Group size is 3-4 heroes and 1 overlord
• Player Style: Competitive, Min/Max, Full utilization of abilities, Rule checkers, Game first story second
• Quest Wins: Overlord 7 - 1 Heroes
• Quests: Acolyte (O) - Skytower (O) - Archive (O) - Urthko (O) - Saradyn (H) - Dal'Zunm (O) - Drowning (O) - Dawn (O)

Heroes:

1. Widow - Runemaster - 2H Ranged
2. Mordrog - Knight - 1H/Shield
3. Avric - Spiritspeaker - 2H Ranged
4. Sahla - Berzerker - 2H Melee (We let this player choose any class cause he loves the ninja look)

Overlord: Unholy Ritual, Word of Pain, Word of Despair, Diabolic Power, Rise Again

Main Issues Heroes Experienced

• Overlord routinely won encounter 1 without using cards or would hoard them on purpose, add in a hero death or two and the OL entered encounter 2 with 8-10 cards
• Overlord received multiple relics no matter if he won or lost: Shield Relic, Staff Relic, Bow relic
• Reinforcements are too overwhelming compared to the number of actions the heroes get each turn
• Overlord always reinforces Master Monsters first, meaning the extra time it took kill their higher HP ends up being a waste as they come back next turn
• Overlord saves his cards until he can setup guaranteed kill situations (critical blow + extra surge combo, pit trap on the last space, etc.)
• Overlord can easily block off doors and hallways using large monsters such as Ettins and Dragons
• Heroes often have to choose between moving, fighting, healing, resting, doing a quest objective, searching, and bonus objectives; Not enough actions to advance
• Any quest where the Overlord had to run or escape monsters it was nearly impossible to block his monsters
• Large monster movement seems limited, but using the base shifting rule dragons end up moving 5 spots in one move
• Large monsters effectively shield his other monsters from Blast using their large base and how blast only hits adjacent to the targeted square
• Hero defenses cannot come close to mitigating Act 2 damage, heroes die in 2 attacks (5-10 dmg per hit from monsters), then spend their following turns chain rezzing, rinse and repeat
• Not enough ways to heal more than 1 or 2 hp in a turn, especially with limited actions and our healer running out of stamina almost instantly every quest
• Line of Sight is very open, meaning our fragile characters had an extremely hard time "hiding" themselves from ranged attacks, especially with mobile monsters like goblin archers
• Quests with multiple lieutenants are extremely difficult, they had too much hp and when they were close to dying the OL would run them away
• Some quests had lieutenants that would automatically resurrect next overlord turn and heal a bunch of health
• Even with a focus on getting around 4 searches per quest the heroes didn't have enough gold to each get an armor and a weapon, going into act 2 this was even harder to accomplish
• Time limits on quests meant that the heroes could not go for searches unless they wanted to give away a free win to the overlord
• Travel Events seemed to heavily favor the Overlord, often making us enter the quest with a few damage taken or the Overlord getting a few extra cards

Rules Overview

As a group we try to follow all the rules as best as we can, often re-reading them in complicated situations and referring to the FAQ's and forums to clear up any disagreements and confusion that arises. Our group consists of very competitive players who will exploit the rules to the fullest legal extent in order to win the quests as effectively as possible. That said I'm going to list the important rules as I understand them and how our group has been using them so that you guys can see if there is anything we are doing wrong that is creating such a large imbalance in our quests.

• Monsters are activated in groups, each monster must finish its activation before moving to the next group
• Monsters can use both actions to move if they wish
• Monsters can only attack once per activation
• Using Dash means a monster can move up to three times in a turn
• Using Dash and Frenzy means a monster can move twice and attack twice
• There is NO limit on the amount of cards the Overlord can have in his hand
• There is NO limit on the number of cards the Overlord can play at a time (respecting the rule of not activating two cards in response to the same triggering condition)
• The Overlord uses relics by equipping them on lieutenants, one per lieutenant, and loses the relic ability if the lieutenant dies
• The Overlord is restricted in what cards he can buy - Two L1 cards to get a L2, and 3 L1 or L2 cards to get an L3
• The heroes HP is carried over between encounters
• Heroes can freely trade items during the shopping phase (not starting equipment)
• Heroes can give and receive items during a quest only during a move action (not fatigue movement)
• Healing abilities can resurrect fallen heroes, including health potions used on the fallen hero
• Roll Attack and Defense dice at the same time, then do any re-rolls, then decide how to spend surges
• Pierce abilities stack, Pierce 1 + Pierce 2 = Pierce 3 Shields from the defense dice
• Figure cannot be affected by the same condition multiple times
• We are not restricted by the number of dice available and you can re-roll the dice as many times as your abilities allow
• Heroic abilities can be used once per encounter
• Line of Sight is defined as any adjacent space and any space you can draw a straight line too from a corner of your square to any corner on the target square (Can't go along or through blocked spaces)

Summary (TL:DR)

Heroes got destroyed almost every quest trying their best to get gold and complete objectives: Limited in their actions per turn, extremely high incoming damage especially in Act 2, very few ways to heal effectively or raise the number of defense dice rolled, monsters reinforce too much and are usually master monsters, fragile heroes couldn't break line of sight, heroes often blocked by large monsters and forced to fight.

Overlord won nearly every encounter often with time and resources to spare. He had a seemingly endless supply of Overlord cards which would carry through to the next encounter where he would use them in an onslaught to kill us and/or complete his objective. He gained multiple relics for free with no way for the heroes to stop him from getting them.

The group of hero players is pretty upset at how this campaign is going, we expected a much better and balanced campaign but perhaps there is something we're missing. We have a very competent and competitive Overlord which I though would be balanced out by the hero group also being that way, but perhaps this game just isn't balanced for this kind of play? Any advice or insights anyone can give us would be greatly appreciated, we really like this game and we play it every week but that might change soon if this is the way every campaign will play out.

Sounds like your OL knows what he is doing.

The issue that I can see is that your hero group is... bad.

Spirit speaker is a pretty poor healer, especially early game, which can lead to the OL amassing XP from early quest wins. You don't have any synergies in the group, no scout to help you gain search tokens (many scout classes allow searches for free, or searches from further away, which saves actions). Other classes, such as the beastmaster, bard or shadowstalker add a huge amount of synergy to the group, which can greatly affect how quickly heroes can take down monsters.

The other consideration is that your group is unwilling to accept a loss. In many scenarios, heroes have a choice to spend time going after search tokens, or completing objectives. If your overlord is playing well, you can only do one or the other. Sometimes it is far better for the group to focus on grabbing all the tokens possible, maximizing their equipment and gold for later quests, rather than trying to 'Win' the encounter.

Also, Quests are won through the use of the Heroic Feats (OPE). Make sure your heroes are using them and to maximum effect. By choosing large monsters, the OL is basically shutting down the Runemaster.. both her OPE and skills excel with multiple targets available, but work poorly against a single high armor target. The knight class with Mordrog is OK, but the knight also excels at groups of small easy to kill monsters, and has a terrible starting weapon (which also does nothing for his heroic feat until it can be replaced).

Allowing Sahla as the Berserker was probably a bad choice over-all. The berserker is the only member of your group capable of dealing with large monsters early in the game. But by using Sahla, he is basically 4 health short of a decent tank, and has no offensive feat or abilities to help him do his job. In this respect, your OL rightly saw a weakness in your party (ie Large Monsters with high armor) and exploited it. Also guessing he took down Sahla as often as possible.

fwiw in my campaign the heroes only won 1 relic and the overlord has 3 or 4. On the other hand it feels like at least half of the quests don't even have a lieutenant in.

Also, the heroes have often had to leave a lot of search tokens behind to have a decent crack at winning. Towards the end of act 1 the heroes got quite powerful and there was at least one mission where they gained every single search token. However in act 2 so far the heroes don't seem to have reached the same power level that they did in act 1. We just did the penultimate quest where they bought a shield and sword upgrade for the knight which may improve their performance in the finale. We shall see!

Thank you for your insights. I forgot to mention this in my original post but as far as classes and characters go we only have the base game and the one small box add-on that contains Sahla/Hawthorne/Mordrog/Silhouette meaning that we only have the base classes, so we don't have access to beastmaster, bard, or shadowstalker.

Our healing was a definite weakness, I thought both of the blue classes would be decent healers but those are my least familiar set of abilities, it appears that the Disciple can at least heal for up to 3 with 1 stamina which is great compared to the spiritspeaker's high stamina low heal spells. Seems like next time we play with 3 or 4 heroes we need to take a disciple for sure.

As you guys mentioned we really lacked that mobile/searcher/looting style character, but we really did try to get as many searches as possible especially once it was clear that we were going to lose the encounter regardless. Even so we never had enough gold to get the equipment to challenge the current act monsters/lieutenants effectively, we felt like we were always behind.

As far as the Overlord getting free relics, I can see how the game designers wanted to create more opportunities for relics to be used and spread between Heroes and the Overlord, it just felt a tad bit overkill when he had his choice of 3 before the interlude, and now 5 before the final mission. I realize that the Overlord is limited in the number of lieutenants in a mission to use them, if the mission has any at all, but it seems like he has a few too many which he really didn't even have to earn.

I would really like some more thoughts about the 3 main things I feel like we couldn't combat as heroes:

1. Overlord Hand Size and Hoarding - Our overlord saw almost no benefit or reason to playing any cards in encounter 1, not only making it fairly boring for us heroes but also making the second encounter extremely difficult. Do we need to implement a house rule limiting the number of cards that carry over? Seems like an oversight in the rules.

2. Act 2 Monster Damage - Is there any way, with the base classes and shop cards, to effectively mitigate a reasonable amount of damage from Act 2 monsters? For two examples A) Our runemaster would die in two hits from any regular monster, even with stoneskin and leather armor, and as mentioned found it almost impossible to break line of sight B) Mordrog had 2 grey defense dice, Defense Training, and the Act 2 Shield, and yet the Overlord killed him in one turn with one master monster attacking twice with frenzy. The damage on monsters just seems out of control compared to how much defense you can get.

3. Overwhelming Reinforcements - Pretty much every mission has monster reinforcements of some kind but we really struggled when the quest would allow monsters to come back at the start of the Overlord's turn and/or allowed him to reinforce his open group that contained a master dragon (shadow/crypt) or a master ettin. We simply could not kill enough monsters in a turn to allow us to advance, and if we tried to ignore the monsters and move for the objectives we would either be killed by the reinforcements or get blocked by the large monsters which the Overlord can still move through with his smaller creatures to take pot shots and then hide. How do we deal with this as heroes? As far as I can remember only one class (Thief?) can move through enemies but in our first campaign that meant that one hero got repeatedly killed with no one to raise him.

So far it seems that playing with this type of Overlord we heroes need to:

1. Improve our class composition. Need a tank, a mobile searcher, a healer, and THEN consider the other classes as a 4th option depending on if we are facing hoards or large monsters.
2. Focus more on getting as many search tokens as possible, especially in Act 1, even at the cost of losing the encounter/quest.

Other than that are there any rules we aren't using correctly that I posted above? I don't think we are doing anything wrong but the large imbalance in our campaign seems to suggest something isn't quite right.

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2. Act 2 Monster Damage - Is there any way, with the base classes and shop cards, to effectively mitigate a reasonable amount of damage from Act 2 monsters? For two examples A) Our runemaster would die in two hits from any regular monster, even with stoneskin and leather armor, and as mentioned found it almost impossible to break line of sight B) Mordrog had 2 grey defense dice, Defense Training, and the Act 2 Shield, and yet the Overlord killed him in one turn with one master monster attacking twice with frenzy. The damage on monsters just seems out of control compared to how much defense you can get.

I think the best you can do there is make sure that you kill many monsters before they get to do damage.

Alas, if you do not have good weapons, that is going to be hard.

Both Runemaster and Berserker get a skill for an extra surge. This can make both of them deal rather well with high defense big monsters.

Do keep in mind that at the start of Act II, you are at a disadvantage. The overlord just received an upgrade while the heroes will not have act II gear for the first quest and not much of it for the second. If you get bad items, you will suffer for it.

But even in the base game, there are rather strong weapons for act II and those kill monsters fast - and dead monsters deal no damage.

Honestly though, my impression is that it really boils down to gold.

When heroes get lots of items, they become really strong and steamroll the overlord, when they get few items, they loose much more often.

I think if a game is that one sided, it might be a good idea to give some extra gold to compensate (or in the reverse case, cut the gold supply down a bit).

Basic rule of thumb I use is that a (full) monster group can easily kill one hero in one turn. This is pretty much always true.

However, the good news is that heroes are FAR more mobile than monsters. Monsters have very predictable movement and attack ranges, if a monster has a movement of 4, it can move up to 4 and attack, any range beyond 4 and you are basically safe from that monster. Heroes need to use this to their advantage. Never end a turn with a hero within attack range (within speed) of a monster group, if the group is made up of several monsters, you may be able to get away being within that range of 1 or two, but if it is a large monster, never ever ever end your turn within its speed + base size.

Heroes are in a much better position, a hero with 3 speed can move three, fatigue to move another 3-5, and still attack. This gives even slow heroes a threat range of 6, vs monster threat range of 3-4. You want to use this to your advantage and make sure the initial engagement with any group is on your turn, with plenty of attacks left over to clear as much of the monster group as possible.

> Do we need to implement a house rule limiting the number of cards that carry over? Seems like an oversight in the rules.

A rule of this kind exists in the finale - so its been thought about a bit at least.