Rules fix / balance by community

By pella91, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

Did community develop any fix or balancing for the game? after 3 campains the Heroes are Just too strong.

Which campaigns did you play?

Shadow rune, nerekhall and labyrinth of ruin. Now we are up with mist of bilehall but after three quest Heroes are already very strong, the Monster do not offer any challenge and often die without even Attack. We thought about add a 20% of Life points at the Mosters to raise the difficult but se wanna check in the community have already find something

I think that SoN is actually difficult for the heroes and MoB is supposed to be even harder. Therefore it is strange that heroes seem to steamroll in every campaign. Did you try to swap around the OL player? And no, I think there are no community adjustments available to strengthen the OL in general. Most people (including me) think that there is no need for that.

Edited by Sadgit

I find it difficult to believe that the heroes steam rolled in Shadow Rune. I am wondering if you are playing by all of the correct rules.

I truly am not trying to be difficult or accusatory ... it simply is a bit shocking ...

On 13/5/2017 at 5:52 PM, pella91 said:

Did community develop any fix or balancing for the game? after 3 campains the Heroes are Just too strong.

How many times have you played each campaign?

If your OL is systematically in trouble and the heroes are steamrolling so much they are even getting bored, try the following:

  • win or lose, the OL gains 2 XP
  • in Shadow of Nerekhall, if the OL loses the quest, he may exchange 1XP for the quest's reward Changeling card
Edited by lucaster

Yes, I have !

On 13/5/2017 at 11:57 PM, any2cards said:

I find it difficult to believe that the heroes steam rolled in Shadow Rune. I am wondering if you are playing by all of the correct rules.

I truly am not trying to be difficult or accusatory ... it simply is a bit shocking ...

We also roll the OL role beetween us in every campaings and if one of them (shadow rune) was not a great gamer the others are very good. The fact is we are used to play with games like runewars, twilight imperium and forbidden star ( but we like a lot different style games like eldritch horror or mansion of madness) maybe our game approach is too powerplayer and we simply "****" the game system. We thought about drag heroes randomly isteat of choose them..

I think it is very hard to make any community fix when there is a split where half of the community seems to think the heroes are to strong and half that it is the overlord...

I have a few questions too.

First, do you use plot decks? They tend to give the overlord a definite edge (unless he uses them unwisely like spending threat tokens for an inconsequential effect while the heroes make optimal use of their tokens received) and there are some which allow effects that are not based on giving the heroes tokens (Belthir allows to trade trap card for Plot deck effects, Valyndra has Guardian of the horde which gives a damage boost to all of the four and six square monsters, Trytsan Oliven lets master monsters do a couple of things without using threat, etc.), which are very good in my opinion.

Secondly, do you see certain classes always being picked? Is there for example always a treasurehunter or bard in the group? Some hero classes just are a bit too good in comparison with the rest, as are some heroes (Elder Mok is still way stronger than heroes with comparable abilities for example) and maybe the solution is to houserule those classes (maybe weaken the treasurehunter's base skills damage bonus and/or that of sleight of hand or limit some of his search deck manipulation, or make it so that the bard's song tokens get discarded when he is knocked out to avoid some of the stuff a bard can do) instead of any general change to either side that would affect every class or hero equally.

Are there any consistent factors in the heroes "steamrolling"?
Is it that they always get lots of equipment? I can definitely say that this makes a big difference.
Do the heroes use any particular tactics that the overlord is not able to stop? If so, maybe we can share advice on how some of us deal with it.
Which number of heroes do you tend to use? There are at least some people who believe that this makes a significant difference, personally, I find it hard to make a verdict on whether four or three heroes is better for the hero players since one more goblin archer or even barghest are very different in terms of balance from one more shadow dragon or giant (and one more card in the starting hand can honestly sometimes make a significantly big difference too, since you will get the card you really need earlier for sure).
Did you finish all of the campaigns? I ask this one mostly because I see a lot of people quitting early when the game turns onesided and this may preclude any possible turning of the tide later in the campaign.

10 hours ago, Unknown X said:

I think it is very hard to make any community fix when there is a split where half of the community seems to think the heroes are to strong and half that it is the overlord...

I have a few questions too.

First, do you use plot decks? They tend to give the overlord a definite edge (unless he uses them unwisely like spending threat tokens for an inconsequential effect while the heroes make optimal use of their tokens received) and there are some which allow effects that are not based on giving the heroes tokens (Belthir allows to trade trap card for Plot deck effects, Valyndra has Guardian of the horde which gives a damage boost to all of the four and six square monsters, Trytsan Oliven lets master monsters do a couple of things without using threat, etc.), which are very good in my opinion.

[No, and in fact this can be a good point, we only have the plot deck from the core set leutenants thouh, we nevere used them because in the first matches overlords seems to us pretty strong already. Then we kinda forget about plot cards. I also read somewhere they are quite useless, just adding some rules to game, but now if you say so i think they can worth the try]

Secondly, do you see certain classes always being picked? Is there for example always a treasurehunter or bard in the group? Some hero classes just are a bit too good in comparison with the rest, as are some heroes (Elder Mok is still way stronger than heroes with comparable abilities for example) and maybe the solution is to houserule those classes (maybe weaken the treasurehunter's base skills damage bonus and/or that of sleight of hand or limit some of his search deck manipulation, or make it so that the bard's song tokens get discarded when he is knocked out to avoid some of the stuff a bard can do) instead of any general change to either side that would affect every class or hero equally.
[Looking into explore every class we have roll them in every campaings so, we never used the same party. Up to now we have bard (Avric), hunter ( one fist) geomancer ( zyla) and shadow walker (grey ker) . Bard and hunters seem to us very powerful and the other are also pretty though. In last party we have marshall (girl from raven manor) treasure hunter ( logan) disciple (avric) and hexeter ( quellen).. :exept for the prologue we win every quest of the campaign without great challenges. ]

Are there any consistent factors in the heroes "steamrolling"?
Is it that they always get lots of equipment? I can definitely say that this makes a big difference.
Do the heroes use any particular tactics that the overlord is not able to stop? If so, maybe we can share advice on how some of us deal with it.
Which number of heroes do you tend to use? There are at least some people who believe that this makes a significant difference, personally, I find it hard to make a verdict on whether four or three heroes is better for the hero players since one more goblin archer or even barghest are very different in terms of balance from one more shadow dragon or giant (and one more card in the starting hand can honestly sometimes make a significantly big difference too, since you will get the card you really need earlier for sure).

[The winning conditions change a lot so there is't a standar strategy that heroes alway do. However they can always thake adavdages thaks to their superior mobility and attack power. Monsters barely attack once... they used to fall like zerling. We have alwayes played with four heroes]

Did you finish all of the campaigns? I ask this one mostly because I see a lot of people quitting early when the game turns onesided and this may preclude any possible turning of the tide later in the campaign.

[Yes we did. To be honest Shadows of nerekhall was hard, we lost every encounter but the last one. That was the olny exception though.]

Edited by pella91
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[Yes we did. To be honest Shadows of nerekhall was hard, we lost every encounter but the last one. That was the olny exception though.]

Hmmmh, it does not sound then though like Balance was a problem there.
Unless the finale somehow was totally onesided, this actually sounds like a good case in favor for acceptable balance.

Quote

[No, and in fact this can be a good point, we only have the plot deck from the core set leutenants thouh, we nevere used them because in the first matches overlords seems to us pretty strong already. Then we kinda forget about plot cards. I also read somewhere they are quite useless, just adding some rules to game, but now if you say so i think they can worth the try]

Hmmmh, you say heroes are too strong but at the first matches, the overlord seems to be pretty strong already?
This, confuses me a bit...
may there be an issue of the overlords just going too easy on the heroes at the start and then never really recovering?

But even the base game plot decks are rather good.
Belthir adds a lot of versatility and enhances already strong cards, the Baron is often said to be one of the strongest decks (but I think he has few if any zero cost cards, so maybe he is less good for beginners at least).

I think the newer ones are overall more powerful though, at least in terms of zero cost powers.

Quote

[Looking into explore every class we have roll them in every campaings so, we never used the same party. Up to now we have bard (Avric), hunter ( one fist) geomancer ( zyla) and shadow walker (grey ker) . Bard and hunters seem to us very powerful and the other are also pretty though. In last party we have marshall (girl from raven manor) treasure hunter ( logan) disciple (avric) and hexeter ( quellen).. :exept for the prologue we win every quest of the campaign without great challenges. ]

Erh, which class do you mean by "hunter"? Given that it is onefist (a warrior), i think beatsmaster could be the only class that at least somewhat fits. I assume you are not playing this in English?

Though it does not sound like it is all about optimal teams then.

Frankly, I think your overlords are doing something wrong if heroes can both exploit mobility AND kill the monsters quickly.

There are a good couple of tough monsters which the heroes should take a good while to kill. Furthermore, the monsters should usually be placed so that heroes can maybe quickly decimate one group, but not more than that (and then they should be low on fatigue). Other monster groups should get to do hit and run tactics or otherwise force the heroes to expend the resources to get to them. You should be able to quickly defeat heroes as well and ideally make them waste actions and have even less fatigue.

There are many monsters which, with the right cards, can wipe out an entire party if everyone is already a bit weakened (Hybrid sentinel targeting a low strength hero with critical blow and dark might can potentially do 7.77 damage on average to up to four heroes).

This to me sounds like how a friend of mine plays the overlord, he rarely saves up cards for big combos and he throws monsters into the fray too quickly and positions them so that they can often be defeated way too quickly.

Of course sometimes you can just have bad luck, but if it is that consistent, it really sounds like you may not be using what you have to it's best effect.

Maybe you are making some kind of small, easily overlooked mistake with rules?

It is easy to do even a big one. I, for example, during my first campaing as an Overlord was thinking that I got overlord cards only at the begining of a scenario. And I felt little underpowered :D