Been going through Kindred fire, and by FAR, the most frustrating and infuriating monster activation special ability is "during this activation heroes cannot exhaust cards or voluntarily suffer fatigue".

That's just stupid.

Basically this event makes planning worthless, shields worthless, abilities worthless, the knight worthless. This is a cheap way to increase the difficulty and needs to be reworked. I don't know how many times we have purposefully set the knight in front to trigger guard, and then that stupid activation completely negates any strategy we had. Or we have our mage up front with plenty of stamina left for use with ghost armor, and then he just get's KO'd from inability to use his own skill. Not only that, but the ironbound rune can't be exhausted to help with defense with our helpless mage.

I can't understand anything thematic about, suddenly, you are naked and have no abilities. The other modifiers have been ok, frustrating at times, but ok. But this one is just game changing.

Anyone else frustrated by this modifier?

Think of it as an overlord playing a powerful card. Yes, it can be frustrating, but it's part of the challenge.

To be honest this one never bothered us much. But I guess it depends on your skills and items.

I also have never been bothered by this ... as DerDelphi said above, we just assume that it is the apps' version of a strong OL card, a plot card, etc. All part of the game.

Now that you know this is one of the possibilities, you need to include it in your heroes' advanced planning ...

2 minutes ago, any2cards said:

I also have never been bothered by this ... as DerDelphi said above, we just assume that it is the apps' version of a strong OL card, a plot card, etc. All part of the game.

Now that you know this is one of the possibilities, you need to include it in your heroes' advanced planning ...

But see, how do you "plan" for this? The only way you can do that is keeping your heroes as far away from any monster as possible. Since you can't exhaust any cards, most items and skills are completely useless. There is nothing you can do to react to this activation, you just take the hit. You can't use skills, you can't use items, you can't trigger abilities that you exhaust, nothing.

I mean, literally, how do you plan for it besides just staying away from the monsters? Our situation was that there were 3 groups of monsters on the map, we didn't know when they might activate, and the 3 groups were surrounding our heroes. If we send in any melee user ever, we have to "plan" by pulling him out afterwards? And if that's the case, that's counter-intuitive for the knight since you want him to get engaged by monsters for an additional attack.

I understand the idea of just expecting that it will come up eventually, so take it on the chin when it does, but there is no planning for it. There is no playing better so it doesn't affect you, it's sacrificing the objective and the characters way of playing, for something that may come up that is hugely devastating. It KO'd our mage who had a shield, exhausts for defense through Ghost Armor, and no damage. How do we plan for this other than making sure we are always out of range of any monster? The problem is we DID plan, and that's why we failed. The game used it's own rules against us, we built a character, knew what it was capable of, counted on being able to play the character as it was allowed, and then for no good reason, the game decided to say, take all of the damage with no recourse.

1 hour ago, BruceLGL said:

To be honest this one never bothered us much. But I guess it depends on your skills and items.

Can't use skills or items since you can't exhaust cards or spend ANY fatigue voluntarily. Sure you played that right then?

Because it only affects a handful of skills that can be used during monster activation. Many classes aren't affected by this at all.

In terms of random events that stuff you up no matter how you plan this is way worse:

* Drop Gobin archers out of reach

* All minions engage master

* Master gets +3 + minions range, ignore line of sight and +minions damage

That is how you one shot a hero with no recourse.

It's not totally accurate that there is nothing you can do. After all, this kind of situation is what armor was made for. It's a passive bonus that always applies.

This event effectively forces you to not just rely on your skills, but also on your armor as well as consider it while positioning your heroes. After all, if you have a knight he often wears the strongest armor and shield and stands besides other heroes. If you could always guarantee that he will be targeted, the game just becomes predictable. This event forces you to also consider spending gold on armor for the other heroes instead of just buying them weapons and trinkets.

Yes it may suck if this activation comes up in a bad moment, but if the game could never surprise you, and thus put you in a dangerous situation, why play it at all?

8 hours ago, DerDelphi said:

It's not totally accurate that there is nothing you can do. After all, this kind of situation is what armor was made for. It's a passive bonus that always applies.

This event effectively forces you to not just rely on your skills, but also on your armor as well as consider it while positioning your heroes. After all, if you have a knight he often wears the strongest armor and shield and stands besides other heroes. If you could always guarantee that he will be targeted, the game just becomes predictable. This event forces you to also consider spending gold on armor for the other heroes instead of just buying them weapons and trinkets.

Yes it may suck if this activation comes up in a bad moment, but if the game could never surprise you, and thus put you in a dangerous situation, why play it at all?

What I mean in there being nothing you can do is, there are no choices you can make for that turn, and nothing you can do in response. I agree that armor is great, but we have only had access to light armor, and the other armor we have that allows us to roll a grey die, requires the hero to suffer a fatigue. The knight can't use any skills to reroll dice or to direct the attack to him, the wildlander can't exhaust fatigue to move away, the runemaster can't spend fatigue to absorb the damage. Basically when we have that specific monster activation, it negates everything except for the armor. No rerolls, no items, no skills, nothing except for the armor and standard defense dice.

There is so much that you buy and invest into your character, yes, I agree that armor is helpful, but if armor never comes up, this one monster activation negates EVERYTHING else.

I agree with positioning your heroes strategically, but in our situation, the spiders have a movement of 4, do we keep EVERYTHING out of reach of EVERY monster EVERY turn because maybe they will be able to hit us with everything while we have nothing? What about our melee heroes? We would have to keep them so far away in order to protect them from this one monster modifier that they have to either fully exhaust to get in range to attack, or waste an attack action by moving in, and then as soon as they move into attack range, they are then susceptible to this modifier. Do we just keep our knight away from the monsters at all times to avoid him taking a full on attack?

The problem is that this one monster modifier completely throws all other strategies out the window and instead just hits you hard, without warning, negates all of your skills and items (except for armor). I get the whole surprise of a powerful event, and the idea of not knowing what may come, but if the monster activation just simply said, "if this monster ends next to a hero, that hero is KO'd" that wouldn't be fun either. This one activation has the capability of completely doing that. Our hero was in range, but had no damage, had armor, was ready for the attack, and then died with one monster activation, AFTER he attacked, killing 1 of them, and wounding all of the rest of them down to around 1 HP each. The only other "strategic" move we could have made was to fully fatigue the mage to get him out of range, and then make him much less effective next turn, forcing him to rest as an action next turn... and if the monster didn't do that one specific modifier, it would have been a complete waste. I don't like the idea of planning by taking an incredibly sub-par movement choice just in case this one broken modifier comes up.

I could understand if the modifier was either no fatigue or no exhausting items, but not both.

This is only an issue with certain group setups. In my group this monster activation ability have seldom done much.

I agree with BruceLGL, open a door, the room is filled with goblins. Monster activation is that the gobbos bunch up around the master, he shoots through walls with +7 range and hits with +2 damage.

Got that a few games ago, 7 damage on my Leoric with nothing I could do about it! Now we always try to put a reanimate or something in front when facing goblin groups, just because of that ability.