Hi. I'm looking at finishing my box expansion collection (all but this and MoR) and have a question about quality.

Obviously the hybrid classes are a big draw, but how is the map/quest design?

Are the maps big?

Are the tiles unique? (I saw a drawbridge ? tile in an unboxing video)

--Big one-- Are the quests unique and interesting?

(A reviewer mentioned a quest featuring Zarihell as being very different- something involving her realm? Could someone elaborate on that maybe?)

TL;DR: Is CTR a good and interesting expansion?

We´ve just started a MoB + CtR campaign.

The tiles are wonderful, and fits the undead theme perfectly. Personally I also love the monsters, again undead themed.

The biggest difference from the other campaigns imo would be the quests. I totally changes the OL playstyle, since the victory condition on most quests is to have all heroes knocked out at the same time.

In our ongoing campaign the heroes won the first quest, and got totally annihilated by the OL in the next two quests. (My play group is very good, and I´ve usually struggled as an OL.) So I suspect the play style of the hero groups needs to change too. Being knocked out now has consequenses, and high mobility might not be as important as in other campaigns.

I was wondering about the loads of sludge, if it would make high-mobility heroes like Zyla and Astarra a bit strong. But if mobility loses some of its significance that sounds okay.

How is CTR flavor/story wise? Bilehall was pretty good (as in not atrociously corny :P) at that and didn't any eye-roll moments for me personally.

The Bilehall/Chains combination is still a big question-mark to me. They're both good expansions in terms of components, art, mechanisms, story, etc. but I'm still not sure FFG thought these out well enough in terms of game balance.

I have to play more of these campaigns in even more different settings to get a clear picture, but from what I could experience myself, the "Descent hardcore-mode" these two boxes seem to imply sort of invalidate more than half the cards in the game, as players are effectively pushed to play cutthroat to even stand a chance. I like playing competitively, but in that case it was more like planning for the best possible action otherwise you're screwed (ie no room for testing the waters, or for recovering from bad luck). That includes the tainted cards mechanism, which I like very much on paper (plus they're funny to read) but that we (all sides) found as causing the game become swingy as hell. The heroes have zero reason not to spec or buy items toincrease their health to unseen levels or to boost their defense, which means the OL has to chew through 100+ shared health with various levels of defense (making Knight awesome for instance) and can do nothing else in the meantime (like denying treasure chest). That means you HAVE to pick the same monsters over and over as your open groups because there are so few monsters that can achieve that required level of attacking potential. Similarly, the OL has zero reason not to hoard every card and then go for an alpha strike; the heroes then get swamped in a area of the map as they lose their revival tactics (a key feature of the game btw) and waste tons of actions trying to heal few points of damage all game instead of evaluating the risk of getting killed when taking a different action.

Strategy has taken a hit in these campaigns, and so has variance in the game, because I think the classes (both heroes and OL) that were barely playable before became stone unplayable in these. Yeah, I´ll add an Infection token on your hero so I can get +1 damage on your 16 health 3 defense dice rolling hero with the cloak that makes damage go to stamina. A bit pointless?

I thought earlier that other campaigns did that too to some extent, but Bilehall/Chains seem to take the cake here. Bluntly put, you can say goodbye to a lot of subpar cards just because you cannot afford making subpar choices in these campaigns, which is a shame. I´'ve painfully experienced a few attempts to test some OL cards and monsters in a couple of campaigns where I was already way ahead of my opposition just to witness how it could swing back to me and put me in a difficult position later in the campaign. It's not forgiving in any way, and I would argue that it wasn't that fun either. In another campaign, Bilehall (famous for being OL favored) was so hard for the heroes that Chains (advertised as being more heroes-favored to compensate for the Bilehall nonsense) became a joke. We were finishing encounters in 30 minutes time, and I think I ended the campaign with 5 unspent XP. The first encounter of the Finale (Profane Nexus I think) was arguably on the same level of balance as Death on the Wing enc 2 with a win turn 2 or 3. For the Finale it was quite a poor experience in our opinion. I played this one three times with the same hero opposition and they tried different tactics that I could easily anticipate.

As standalone campaign maybe it's fine, but with Bilehall involved I don't see how you can recover from the Bilehall heroes-ownage later in Chains.

Bit of a necro... (Lol) but I bit and bought the expansion.

I really appreciate your input, Indalecio. What you mentioned does concern me, since we tend to have OL dominance in our group.

I suppose I bought it for the following reasons:

-it might function as an OL easy mode, because there are players in my group who are experienced, but not the strongest players, could have a solid shot at winning against stronger players in a non min-maxer group.

-The tiles. I know they're tied to Act 2 but the pretty tiles. Come on.

-Hybrids. Mostly to make Lyssa, Ashrian, and Dezra solid choices.

-items.

And lastly, the story. Bilehall's story wasn't bad, and the lieutenants were somewhat intriguing characters.

Balance does concern me, though. I just hope this works with non min-maxers.

On 5/28/2017 at 10:03 PM, Lightningclaw said:

Obviously the hybrid classes are a big draw....

Um...that's not obvious. These classes are not what many people were hoping for.

16 hours ago, Bucho said:

Um...that's not obvious. These classes are not what many people were hoping for.

Just curious; why do you say that?

I mean, I did see some negative feedback about the hybrids leading up to CtR's release, but most posters seemed interested in the possibilities they opened up.

From my point of view the main issue is that removing the 3 point skills from the existing class breaks the most useful combinations for almost all of them. From a power gaming angle I think there are few combinations that are worth considering.

2 hours ago, BruceLGL said:

From my point of view the main issue is that removing the 3 point skills from the existing class breaks the most useful combinations for almost all of them. From a power gaming angle I think there are few combinations that are worth considering.

While I agree that the 3xp combos are good (as they should be) l believe that the hybrid skills offer a lot of power to the classes. In many cases, I find the tradeoff worth it- also for the increased versatility of heroes (it's great to use a hero like Lyssa as a knight.)

This is just my humble non min-maxer opinion, but I think only 6 or 7 of the classes become much weaker with the loss of the 3xp skills.

I don't expect the hybrids to become the most common choices, or the best ones (Trenloe as Geomancer, anyone? No?), but I do except characters like Lyssa, Dezra, Orkell as a non-skirmsher, and the like to see more play.

I think, when my copy arrives, I'll post my impressions of the box in a new topic.

23 hours ago, Zaltyre said:

While I agree that the 3xp combos are good (as they should be) l believe that the hybrid skills offer a lot of power to the classes. In many cases, I find the tradeoff worth it- also for the increased versatility of heroes (it's great to use a hero like Lyssa as a knight.)

After watching a couple of people doom their party by taking these classes, I've taken them out of their respective decks and only show them to very experienced players.

I can't dispute your own experiences, Bucho, but I can offer my own exposure to these classes as offering some very useful (sometimes superior) skill/ability combinations.

The monk, for example, compliments the disciple exceedingly well.

Battlemage berserkers or beastmasters let you round out one of the weakest aspects of a mage (health).

Watchman is a treasure hunter's dream class (not that treasure hunter needs a boost) but also aids stalkers or thieves with lackluster 3xp skills or even shadow walkers for high mobility.

Shield caster impresses me the least, though a shieldcaster/runemaster is a force to be reckoned with.

In any case, hybrid classes are not the best part of the Chains expansion (in my opinion). That'd be the soulbinder OL class and those dispossessed monsters.

15 hours ago, Zaltyre said:

I can't dispute your own experiences, Bucho, but I can offer my own exposure to these classes as offering some very useful (sometimes superior) skill/ability combinations.

I'm not saying that there aren't good combinations here. But the game wasn't designed for these hybrids and as such they break a lot of synergies not just for the character using the class but for the whole party. And not just anyone using these classes but the whole party as well REALLY needs to grasp how things are changing and compensate for the game to be playable.

For example, the first time I saw the hybrid classes used. It was four players, each picks a different hero type. But the guy who picked a healer did not pick one with healing as it's ability. Normally not a problem, he'd be railroaded into being able to heal the party. But in this case he's gotten himself all set up to be the scout but everyone else thinks he's the healer. That he's got the healing taken care of so they don't set themselves up to heal either and the result is a party where three of the characters have lower health and no one has any ability to get health back. It was a complete meat grinder.

15 hours ago, Zaltyre said:

In any case, hybrid classes are not the best part of the Chains expansion (in my opinion). That'd be the soulbinder OL class and those dispossessed monsters.

I haven't played either yet, the Dispossessed seem quite cool, I just wish FFG would use translucent plastic for their incorporeal undead like other lines of miniatures do.

I also haven't played the soulbinder yet, I'm also looking forward to seeing what the scourge has to offer.