I loved this game and will play again. However, FFG needs to seriously consider errata/ban of The Word of Vaal. It made the game unfun from the point the heroes got it on to the end. Basically go to the end room stun the Giant and keep using it on him with other attacks and you can't defend yourself. It's completely broken.
FFG, I'm calling you out.
I am not FFG, but I will answer nonetheless:
The Giant in the final room (assuming in Quest 1) is a named monster and as such is immune to Stun.
Suggestion: Read the rules, the FAQ and the GLoAQ at least 10 times, play at least all the quests from the base game before you state that anything is broken.
In addition Vaal is a gold treasure. You will find that all gold treasures are broken as hell.
ProtoPersona said:
In addition Vaal is a gold treasure. You will find that all gold treasures are broken as hell.
That's a meaningless statement without explaining your standards. Gold treasures are clearly designed to be more powerful than, say, silver treasures. Unless you have some way of knowing how powerful they are "supposed to be", the only information we have is how powerful they actually are , by which standard they cannot possibly all be broken.
The Word of Vaal is an outlier; it's very powerful even when compared with other gold treasures. Of course, AoE weapons all tend to be outliers.
It is also true that the difficulty of the game for the heroes tends to noticably when they acquire gold treasures, which means that the quests that hand out gold treasures generally do not increase in difficulty proportionately to the power they give the heroes. Whether this is intentional or desirable is debatable.
The Enduring Evil is an option. I thought I did a reasonable job of keeping things difficult even when the heroes get gold treasures. It may be a bit of an overreaction to switch after only one game, though.
I agree with Parathion. Take some time and make sure you didn't miss any little rules before you go judging the balance of the game. The giant should have been immune to stun as a named monster, like Parathion said. Perhaps you missed some other details too?
Personally I've never had serious issue with Word of Vaal. Yes it's a powerful card, even for gold, but it's not broken. It can be dealt with, or in the worst case, Crushed.