**WARNING: This entire thread is RtH spoilery**

Long post a-coming…

So, over an extended weekend (Thursday-Monday), my gang and I managed to play 9 missions of our (slightly extended with 2 Forced Missions) RtH campaign, and it was sweet, sweet fun Here’s a few observations I made on playing this campaign. (Note that this all comes from a single play-through of most of RtH).

Heroes: Loku, Verena, MHD-19, and Fenn.
Imp Class Deck: Armored Onslaught

Just to clarify, I played RtH pretty much as stated, but with a few minor tweaks.

1) I ran Leia’s Communications Breakdown as a pre-campaign (prequel?) mission – with a slightly adapted map to set the story on Hoth (right as the Imps are landing walkers on the planet, just beyond the Echo Base shield wall). Instead of winning Leia (as she would, timeline-wise, go off on the Millennium Falcon in a minute and could therefore not tag along with the heroes), I gave the heroes extra cash instead (100 extra per hero).

2) I ran Sorin’s Fully Charged mission as a Forced Mission right after the first Story Mission after the interlude. (More on this mission later).

3) I ran Battle of Hoth with IanSolo_FFG’s “Farmer Luke coming in chased by a broken AT-ST” upgrade. (More on this later). And I also ran White Noise with his suggestion to bring in Vader in that. (Again, more on this later).

So, the complaints/worries.
“RtH is too easy for the Rebels” : While this is true for the first half of the campaign, something happened in our play-through ca. mid-campaign when I all of the sudden began trashing the Rebels, even against my will. Sure, some of it was down to lucky die rolls, but more important, I suddenly had bucket loads of activations to counter hero actions; wounding 4 heroes became a piece of cake (especially with the Mortar Class Card), and I had to play dumb not to trash them completely (and I was still winning, btw). My players had ignored the Threat Missions up until this point, which gave me a couple of cute little temporary banes, but these shouldn’t be powerful enough to suddenly swing the campaign, especially since Verena & Loku had both won their private mission rewards to compensate for ignoring my banes.

“Mortar is stupid good” : Yes, it is. Mortar, especially with tons of deployment groups like RtH gives you, is ridiculous.

“Threat Missions are stupid/boring/broken” : Um? Why? We thought they worked pretty well? A nice simulation of the Empire’s mounting power.

“MHD-19 is BROOOOOKEN!” : Nah. Perhaps my gf played him wrong, but his healing powers (and, mid-game occasional wound blocking powers) were nothing compared to the hordes of Imps missions give you… and the DMG from Mortar.

" Verena is BROOOOKEN!” : Nah. While it is awesome to see her wipe out hordes of Stormies a handful of times during the campaign, she rarely have the Strain, Surge, positioning, and luck to maximize her finishing off-ing potential all that often.

“Fenn is BROOOOOKEN!” : Not so much, actually. We found (our second playing with him) that while Fenn’s Blast abilities are great, he doesn’t do much DMG on his own. Perhaps the heroes were just unlucky when drawing Item Cares, but we’re 9 missions in (7 if you count only the Campaign Log missions), and he has yet to get a particularly good shooter to sync with his blast power. Fenn is cool, but he isn’t broken. (And, the Imp can always take blast into consideration when using the Stormies and such).

“Loku is crap” : Yeah, the fish-sticks dude (sorry for the speciesism, ppl) sure has his weaknesses, low Health being his Achilles Heel. His Recon Token actions are cool for sure, and it is VERY handy for the heroes to have a steady extra DMG locked on certain bad guys, but Loku isn’t a particularly dangerous sniper most of the time. Actually, I’ve found that Loku’s strength is not his Recon Tokens, but his Speed (5) and Abilities (Eyeball in particular); Loku is a mission objections toggler! I think his strongest play is to throw Recon Tokens about, and then take on any speed & ability tests jobs while the rest of the gang takes on those badies.

“HK droids are BROOOKEN!” : Pretty much. I love them… come to papa, y’all murdery, kill-bots, y’all! But seriously, they are, despite a somewhat low Health, insanely powerful. My Rebel players have nightmares about HK droids now…

Observations
--The Imp player gets a hellion of a lot of 3-die attacks in this campaign. Granted, I did bring in my Elite Jet Troopers several times, but it felt unusual to actually outgun the heroes on a regular basis. (Probe Droids, Tanks & AT-STs, HK droids, Jet Troops; these guys are pure evil when armed with the Armored Onslaught cards)

Missions
-- Communications Breakdown (Leia): Cute little run-to-the-terminal mission. I exchanged all forest tiles for more or less corresponding snow tiles, and put this mission on Hoth. It worked out great, but it IS a difficult mission for the Rebels; many Imp deployments, only 5 rounds, and a VERY difficult snow barricade to get to & through made this mission tense and challenging. Even though it is an ally-win scenario, there is no room for mistakes in Com.Break.

-- Battle of Hoth : Here my players focused on mission objectives, leaving the Imps be, and it was gearing up to be a cake-walk for them. Then I sprang IanSolo’s Farmer Luke & AT-ST fix, and everything got more interesting; by pure coincidence, Farmer Luke faced the new AT-ST & the hover tank alone, except for Fenn who had become wounded and was therefore not an interesting target for me, so I retired Farmer Luke right after his first activation... I wholeheartedly recommend people play BtH with this upgrade, which is thematically cool and brings much needed challenge to the scenario.

-- White Noise : This time, due to the role reversion in this mission, the heroes’ only job was to kill the waves upon waves of Imperial Officers spawning to try to run and claim terminals. Realistically speaking, baring insanely bad luck or moronic play, there is no way the Rebels are going to lose White Noise… unless you employ IanSolo’s fix – Darth Vader. The way I played this, the heroes glimpsed Darth on the monitors (slight extension of one of the mission trigger texts) at which time I placed Darth beside the board… where he loomed for about 2 rounds, scaring the living daylight out of the players. When finally I fielded Darth, there wasn’t much time left and I never actually excepted my ImpOfficers to manage to win the mission, especially once Loku dodged Vader’s brutality with his Shadow Silk Cloak (i.e. I wasn’t paying attention to the heroes’ equipment, and when Vader attacked, Loku exhausted his SSC to reduce the Lightsaber attack with -2 Accuracy; VADER COULDN’T REACH LOKU! Hilarity ensued ). In the end, the Rebels won the scenario comfortably, although they – being spooked by Vader now – didn’t realize this before half-way through the last round. There was… even with Vader onboard… no way I was going to be able to steal all the terminals in this mission; couldn’t be done!

-- Snowcrash : Next, I Force Missioned the Echo Base ally mission onto the campaign, tweaking it ever so little to fit it into the Battle of Hoth narrative. This was a quick and guaranteed win for the Rebels, but it did allow me to freak the players out with several Wompas. It was a fun little mission that built Rebel confidence (and won them elite Echo Base troopers since the regular ones were already won in Battle of Hoth).

-- Constant Vigilance & Know Your Enemy : Finally off-Hoth, the heroes next completed two hero missions. Loku’s mission is silly – it felt like the Imperials had missed the memo and showed up in skeleton crew numbers only. There was no chance in hellion, despite my very best efforts (and some sneaky Trandoshans invading Loku’s cosy nest), that I was going to be able to move all 4 prisoners onboard that prison transport ship. Verena’s mission was much more tense, especially since the story was so strong here and, given the high number of droids in the mission, I decided to give Ivan Talos an Elite Jawa sidekick… Bloody Hellion! That 3-point Jawa – hiding in a corner to motivate droids, and popping up with a Mortar in his pocket when needed – is LETHAL! Still, the Rebels managed to defeat Ivan by the skin of their teeth; VERY tense!

-- Return to Echo Base : Here things started becoming weird. All of a sudden, I was trashing the Rebels and my players were not having any fun. It is not that they hate losing – they don’t – but there were not enough activations between them to do half the objections and butt-kicking they had to do to win this mission. I wounded them all in like… 4 rounds, or whatever. This was not a particularly enjoyable experience.

-- Rescue Ops : We’re not quite sure why this went wrong, although bad Rebel luck was surely a factor. Firstly, the Rebels fielded Elite Echo Base troopers; the problem here was not just the extra Threat this gave me, but also the fact that there were now 2 extra figures (+the extra figures I deployed) crowding the entry spaces. For the first two rounds, figures were crawling on-top of each other trying to do anything useful, and by the time the heroes got to the facility, a sizable portion of the mission time was already over. Then they opened the door, said “hi” to Leia, who was promptly gunned down by a single squad of regular Stormtroopers… they didn’t even use any of my class deck cards! Just 3 stormies focusing their fire on Leia, scoring 8 DMG between them. That was anticlimactic! From here, the Rebels’ struggle was palpable (“Palpatinable”?). I cheated by not ignoring the last door opening boon from the mission. They fought hard, strategized wisely, found a bit of luck, but when time came to flee the place out the now demolished back wall, 2 heroes (wounded) lacked a single Movement Point each to get to safety. This lose, although demoralizing, felt much more honest and acceptable than the previous one, and the players didn’t complain. Instead, they spent quite a bit of time analyzing the mission and learning from their mistakes; in the end though, the stormies shooting down Leia probably what won me that mission, ‘cause Leia is AWESOME!

-- Fully Charged : I inserted Sorin’s ally mission as a Forced Mission because it made sense for the story here. Having cheated by fielding this mission without buying it etc., I decided to grade the win/lose a little more. Basically, in addition to the mission’s ordinary rewards, I added a 100xheroes reward for defeating Sorin; my Rebels needed a break at this point. Looking the mission over I realized the insanity of the thing and how easy it is to win for the Imps. Knowing this would be our last mission of our extended power-gaming-extended-weekend, I wanted the experience to be enjoyable for my players, and decided to make some changes. First of all, I gave them the regular Echo Base troopers for free and, half-way through the mission I started ignoring mission trigger boons for the Imperials, the most important being the 5 extra Threat the mission awards at the end of Round 5 and EVERY Status Phase that follows. It took perfect heroes coordination, excellent strategizing, wise activations, and consistent die rolling for them to have any kind of chance, even with my self-hamstringing. In the end we had 3 heroes wounded with Verena 2 points away from wounding, and with a scarcity of Pierce abilities in the group, the chances of them killing the AT-ST (which had 25 health due to mission rules & me, unthinkingly having given the beast Reactive Armor as well) seemed very slim. But the Rebels fought hard and planned well, and with my AT-ST down to 2 remaining health, the Rebels had two hero activations (Loku & Fenn) left to go, while I had many. All the signs pointed to me slaying Verena on my next activation, so the heroes had to make their best shot. Loku had Pierce 2 and was lined up to try two shots, but then we noticed a wounded Stormtrooper standing right next to the AT-ST. Fenn, even with his Blue+Yellow attack had a decent chance of killing that stormie, and with his Blast 2, he would take the AT-ST down with him. There were much debate and probability calculating going on – should it be Loku or should it be Fenn – but for the defining moment in our 5-day ImpAss extravaganza, the Rebels gave Fenn the shot. BAM! Stormie dead and 2 Blast on the AT-ST, winning the heroes the mission; a perfect ending to a roller-coaster series of missions!

So there we are, 2 Side Missions, a Story Mission, and the Finale away from finishing Return to Hoth, and we’ve had a blast! I expected, due to all the complaints about this campaign, that RtH would be meh at best, but – with 2-3 exceptions – it’s been a tense, exciting, challenging, and narratively awesome experience. If your group plays for story and Star Wars atmosphere, I do recommend using IanSolo’s tweaks (to make cake-walk missions more interesting), and perhaps alter a few of the Imp-overpowered missions too (to not completely crush the Rebel players’ fluffy little souls), but do play this campaign ‘cause it’s awesome

So far, after 5 campaigns played, Return to Hoth is my second favorite ImpAss campaign, behind Jabba’s Realm and ahead of the Core campaign (which would have been fantastic if I’d known the game enough to tweak it as I just did RtH). Twin Shadows should have been interesting (=good story), but it suffered from crappy heroes [I am contemplating light fixes for Saska & Biv at this point]. Heart of the Empire is alright too, but lacked some more movie tie-ins and felt 3-4 missions too short to manage a nice set-up/escalation/resolution structure. In other words <3 Return to Hoth <3 (and also <3 IanSolo <3 ).

(Sorry for the weird text formatting. I tried to fix it, but my fixes won't stick for some reason...)

Fun read through! One thing to note, I believe the rules state accuracy is not needed for a melee attack, so I think your Vader would have Rogue One’d Loku even with -2 accuracy.

Very interesting read indeed! I think totalnoob is right about melee attack not needing accuracy. I wouldn't qualify the idea behind bringing Darth Vader in White Noise (mission narrative re-written to be happening on Hoth during ESB movie) as a "fix" to the mission. It has never been my intention to perfectly balance that mission (although suddenly having 18 threats for free deployed on the board surely helps!). What I was after (as you already know, but I'm writing all that for others) was a thematic experience. In our campaign I even gave Vader the skirmish upgrade Deflection as, again, I thought it was thematic. It was also meant to be a cameo appearance in a context that let the rebel players visualize themselves really being part of the ESB movie. Nonetheless, Vader shows up early enough to be given a few activations because as an imperial player, it's fun to play Vader for free!! Now I must say, I like (and wished I had done that too!) the idea of teasing/mind gaming your rebels by bringing Vader next to the board for a few rounds

@angelman2 , you know you brought me back into spending almost all my spare times tweaking even further my thematically-altered version of the Return to Hoth campaign? My wife "thank you" for that

Sounds like fun. Too bad you won Rescue Ops, though, because I think The Last Line (or whatever it's called- the siege one) is one of my favorite missions in the campaign.

Thanks guys for nice feedback

Accuracy & melee attacks : I might be wrong, but I think I remember a discussion on this somewhere (a Team Covenant interview video perhaps?) confirming that while melee attacks only requires adjacency (extended by reach), Accuracy penalties still alters the 'range' between figures. Again, I could be wrong, but I sure have a (false?) memory of this from somewhere... (I wonder if perhaps it was a reach discussion, actually?) @a1bert ?

@IanSolo_FFG 's poor wife : Tell her its all my pleasure. She can have you back when I stop writing ImpAss stuff (i.e. never, mowhahahaha)

Unfortunately winning Rescue Ops : It was an interesting learning experience on strategy and activation tactics if nothing else, but yeah, I sort of regret winning this. Oh well, we'll replay the campaign at some point, playing all unused missions regardless of what we actually win, so I guess we have something nice to look forward to in regards to The Last Line

2 hours ago, angelman2 said:

“Mortar is stupid good” : Yes, it is. Mortar, especially with tons of deployment groups like RtH gives you, is ridiculous. .

Mortar is very good, yes. But I'm not sure what the tons of deployment groups have to do with it?

Anyway, my player must be playing MHD differently. He's healing all the time and it's been very hard for me to wound heroes. And it's not like mortar does much to help here, maybe giving 2 damage to 2 heroes each round. MHD heals that without any problems.

2 minutes ago, Eddie said:

Mortar is very good, yes. But I'm not sure what the tond of deployment groups have to do with it?

Anyway, my player must be playing MHD differently. He's healing all the time and it's been very hard for me to wound heroes.

Tons of deployment groups means you will virtually always have several good options for groups to activate to use the Mortar. If you have few groups, you will often have to sacrifice good actions to take the Mortar instead, or you can't use Mortar at all because you're too far away, or whatever. If you have 5-6 groups on the table, good options abound, and Mortar + good use options = nasty.

As for MHD, yeah it is quite possible we're not playing the droid right. In our game, MHD would often heal a point here and a point there, an a few times he came in and saved the day with a power-heal or a wound blocking action, but that was about it. Perhaps the problem in our game was that the heroes tended to charge off to toggle objectives, often splitting up into smaller groups, which meant MHD wasn't always around when a hero took damage. Idunno... can't see what my gf did wrong with MHD really.

2 minutes ago, Eddie said:

Mortar is very good, yes. But I'm not sure what the tond of deployment groups have to do with it?

Anyway, my player must be playing MHD differently. He's healing all the time and it's been very hard for me to wound heroes.

Tons of deployment groups means you will virtually always have several good options for groups to activate to use the Mortar. If you have few groups, you will often have to sacrifice good actions to take the Mortar instead, or you can't use Mortar at all because you're too far away, or whatever. If you have 5-6 groups on the table, good options abound, and Mortar + good use options = nasty.

As for MHD, yeah it is quite possible we're not playing the droid right. In our game, MHD would often heal a point here and a point there, an a few times he came in and saved the day with a power-heal or a wound blocking action, but that was about it. Perhaps the problem in our game was that the heroes tended to charge off to toggle objectives, often splitting up into smaller groups, which meant MHD wasn't always around when a hero took damage. Idunno... can't see what my gf did wrong with MHD really.

Melee attacks with reach require Line of Sight, not accuracy.

There's an Imperial class card ("Stealth" in the Black Ops deck) that means Melee attacks need 1 accuracy (and so 3 accuracy if the target is hidden). Maybe you are thinking of that?

Just now, udat said:

Melee attacks with reach require Line of Sight, not accuracy.

There's an Imperial class card ("Stealth" in the Black Ops deck) that means Melee attacks need 1 accuracy (and so 3 accuracy if the target is hidden). Maybe you are thinking of that?

Could be... not sure. It is also entirely possible we played it wrong

(...but that's ok since poor Loku was being brutalized by Vader, heh heh).

4 minutes ago, angelman2 said:

Tons of deployment groups means you will virtually always have several good options for groups to activate to use the Mortar. If you have few groups, you will often have to sacrifice good actions to take the Mortar instead, or you can't use Mortar at all because you're too far away, or whatever. If you have 5-6 groups on the table, good options abound, and Mortar + good use options = nasty.

As for MHD, yeah it is quite possible we're not playing the droid right. In our game, MHD would often heal a point here and a point there, an a few times he came in and saved the day with a power-heal or a wound blocking action, but that was about it. Perhaps the problem in our game was that the heroes tended to charge off to toggle objectives, often splitting up into smaller groups, which meant MHD wasn't always around when a hero took damage. Idunno... can't see what my gf did wrong with MHD really.

My players tend to clear most of the imperial units round one. Lots of damage dealers and not that many places to hide. So mortar is harder to use for me probable.

They tend to stay within two spaces of MHD. The droid is usually healing a damage and a strain from everyone, and probably 8 damage from a certain hero each turn. If I don't wound someone and MHD goes before I can finish him (e.g. new round starts), then the hero is back fully healed. MHD hasn't attacked in 5 games in my campaign, focusing on healing.

Discussing MHD with my gf (and player), it is possible we've built him wrong in RtH. She just bought the 4xp card that allows MHD to heal 1 DMG & 1 Strain to all heroes within 2 spaces (or something to this effect); perhaps she should've taken that earlier.

As for clearing Imp units in round 1, the current heroes have rarely been able to do this. Perhaps I'm just a brilliant Imp player (this is VERY unlikely), or perhaps they're playing dumb (not as far as I can tell), but I don't think they've been able to clear out initial deployment groups even once so for in RtH. (This could be down to bad die rolling, of course).

33 minutes ago, angelman2 said:

Accuracy & melee attacks

The Check Accuracy step only checks accuracy for ranged attacks. For melee attack with reach, the target needs to be within 2 spaces and line of sight, Hidden does not affect melee attacks with or without reach. (Unless Stealth adds the accuracy check.)

Could be the other heroes they are using. Shyla gets anyone closer that tries to get away, Vinto shoots and kills bystanders and Jyn always has a target first activation. They also always bring the echo base troopers which are not bad at all for 6 thread. Anyway, different play-styles, heroes, XP spending and open groups probably have a lot to do with making a campaign harder or easier.

Thank you for the clarification, @a1bert ; you sure are a living holocron of awesome!
(I concede victory; we played the Shadow Silk Cloak wrong... but then again, I cheated by giving the Imps a freebie Vader, so it's all good )

Good points there, Eddie. My groups' heroes are divided between close combat and ranged, which, together with heroes fanning out to reach objectives, means MHD is rarely around when a particular hero is injured. Perhaps they need to rethink their strategies (although time, oddly enough for a campaign with few timed missions, is often a factor).

1 hour ago, angelman2 said:

I cheated by giving the Imps a freebie Vader, so it's all good

If it enhanced the game experience and everyone around the table had fun, I don't call it cheating (especially since you lost the mission )

4 hours ago, subtrendy2 said:

Sounds like fun. Too bad you won Rescue Ops, though, because I think The Last Line (or whatever it's called- the siege one) is one of my favorite missions in the campaign.

In my Return to Hoth campaign (which resumes tonight, woohoo!) I utterly threw Rescue Ops for the chance to play The Last Line. I'm really looking forward to that mission.

20 minutes ago, machfalcon said:

In my Return to Hoth campaign (which resumes tonight, woohoo!) I utterly threw Rescue Ops for the chance to play The Last Line. I'm really looking forward to that mission.

I.... may have done something similar. And I'm considering doing it again if I have to for what I think will be a more interesting finale in Jabba's Realm.

But yeah, have fun! It was a bloodbath when we played!

So, we Powered through the final missions last weekend and finished Return to Hoth . I think it is a great campaign with loads of fun actions and many tense moments. Here's a couple of updates on my original post.

RtH has a reputation of being heavily slanted in the Rebels favor. I certainly didn't think so at the beginning, but towards the very end the heroes started snowballing like crazy and there was little I could do to challenge them anymore. The finale wasn't even close, and despite my best efforts to boost the tank and protect Sorin, they finnished both off pretty easily (they had more problems with the AT-DP that I brought on for a discount early on, which wounded 2 heroes and damaged a third before it was taken down). I actually won Disaster, but only because the Rebels made a BIG mistake very early on, and I almost scored 5 refugees at the end of the very first round (they opened a door so that I could mortar attack with an Snowtrooper Ordered to make a free move + Probe Droid detonate on a group of refugees), but they came very close to twarting me regardless. Actually, it came down to Verena lacking a single move point so that she could open the last door and keep me from claiming my 7th refugee for free, and had they done that I would probably have been unable to kill any more refugees as my forces were weak at that point).

As for the heroes, Verena remains stupidly good and I wonder if we were doing somethign wrong with her, because OMG! Loku finally evolved into a monster of a fighter, but it took him most of the campaign to get there. MHD also reached his infamous super-healing status, although he was never as awesome as expected (more on that below). And then there was Finn, who is Finn... The Scourge of Imps.

Dengar showed up a lot, and while he is a fun villain, he's not particularly good, I think. In the right moment, he's awesome, but most of the time he's just an annoyance. Still, we love Dengar

Threat Missions: People seem to hate these, but I don't understand why. They worked pretty well for us, although the Rebels ignored them for most of the campaign only to remove two on the last twin-Side Missions slot of the campaign log. To me the threat missions were a fun little addition to the rules.

MHD: Now, having talked it over with my gf (who played him), we are still not in awe of this hero. Perhaps we went into the campaign blinded by the hate/love for him in the community, but he never amounted to a super-useful member of the group in our campaign. Perhaps she built him wrongly, but we thought she did a pretty solid job with him. It is also worth noting that MHD had problems staying near enough the other heroes to maximise his usefullness. Loku stayed in the back while Verena charged forwards, and Finn skulked off to be on his own and reposition himself for raining death and destruction down on the poor Imps, so it is possible MHD was gimped a bit by his fellow heroes not playing into his power, since his healing range varries form adjacent up to 2 spaces, if I remember correctly. Verena wanted to start her round adjacent to Imperials while Finn wanted to be by himself and Loku was usually far behind everyone else, so they never positioned themselves to huddle around their healer to auto-recover at the start of the turn (or whoever that MHD power worked).

As for the plot twist:

2 hours ago, angelman2 said:

Threat Missions: People seem to hate these, but I don't understand why. They worked pretty well for us, although the Rebels ignored them for most of the campaign only to remove two on the last twin-Side Missions slot of the campaign log. To me the threat missions were a fun little addition to the rules.

I love the threat missions too - the first time through the campaign. My only issue is that if you ever replay the Hoth campaign you end up playing the same missions over and over. There's such a limited number of them, but because of the banes and.... other spoilery reasons... it's almost always a good idea to do them over other side missions. And I've still got so many side missions that I haven't played, it feels like a waste to play the same ones over again.

Quote

MHD: Now, having talked it over with my gf (who played him), we are still not in awe of this hero. Perhaps we went into the campaign blinded by the hate/love for him in the community, but he never amounted to a super-useful member of the group in our campaign. Perhaps she built him wrongly, but we thought she did a pretty solid job with him. It is also worth noting that MHD had problems staying near enough the other heroes to maximise his usefullness. Loku stayed in the back while Verena charged forwards, and Finn skulked off to be on his own and reposition himself for raining death and destruction down on the poor Imps, so it is possible MHD was gimped a bit by his fellow heroes not playing into his power, since his healing range varries form adjacent up to 2 spaces, if I remember correctly. Verena wanted to start her round adjacent to Imperials while Finn wanted to be by himself and Loku was usually far behind everyone else, so they never positioned themselves to huddle around their healer to auto-recover at the start of the turn (or whoever that MHD power worked).

I'm in the same boat with MHD - I've never been able to make him work very well. I've always figured it was because my play-style is so aggressive, but I'm also perfectly willing to accept that the people who think he's so great are just much better at playing with him than I am

4 hours ago, angelman2 said:

RtH has a reputation of being heavily slanted in the Rebels favor. I certainly didn't think so at the beginning, but towards the very end the heroes started snowballing like crazy and there was little I could do to challenge them anymore. The finale wasn't even close, and despite my best efforts to boost the tank and protect Sorin, they finnished both off pretty easily

It's funny, my own RtH campaign was the reverse! By the end, wounding heroes became so easy I had to be careful not to do so even when I was trying to let up a bit and keep the game close. It was tech superiority vs Jyn, Mak, Diala and MHD. The combinations and permutations created between imperial class deck, selection of heroes, selection of deployments, strategies used and player ability creates so much variability!

4 hours ago, angelman2 said:

As for the heroes, Verena remains stupidly good and I wonder if we were doing somethign wrong with her, because OMG! Loku finally evolved into a monster of a fighter, but it took him most of the campaign to get there. MHD also reached his infamous super-healing status, although he was never as awesome as expected (more on that below). And then there was Finn, who is Finn... The Scourge of Imps.

Powerful group. By the end game, three of those characters have a lot of killing power. I think my own players were a bit gimped in terms of being able to remove my deployments fast enough.

4 hours ago, angelman2 said:

Dengar showed up a lot, and while he is a fun villain, he's not particularly good, I think. In the right moment, he's awesome, but most of the time he's just an annoyance. Still, we love Dengar

Agreed! Dengar made the most impact in the very first mission but after that was largely a non factor.

4 hours ago, angelman2 said:

Threat Missions: People seem to hate these, but I don't understand why. They worked pretty well for us, although the Rebels ignored them for most of the campaign only to remove two on the last twin-Side Missions slot of the campaign log. To me the threat missions were a fun little addition to the rules.

My heroes mostly ignored them as well. Partly because the banes weren't very impactful. MHD's bacta radiator basically neutralized the one that gave strain, and since my heroes largely ignored crates the bane that took a crate away was only a minor annoyance to them.

4 hours ago, angelman2 said:

MHD: Now, having talked it over with my gf (who played him), we are still not in awe of this hero. Perhaps we went into the campaign blinded by the hate/love for him in the community, but he never amounted to a super-useful member of the group in our campaign.

Same. My heroes needed more killing power, but with MHD in a healer role (and Diala mostly providing support as well), it was harder for them to clear threat. Also, having to group around him often slowed their progress towards objectives and held them back in terms of positioning.

4 hours ago, angelman2 said:

As for the plot twist:

Despite my best efforts to roleplay him as a lovable and thrustworthy patron-like character, my players smelled Benex' betrayal a mile away... or more correctly, half-a-campaign away. Of course, this was not the first betrayal twist in an ImpAss campaign, so they have come to suspect it by now, but still. But everyone played along and it was alright

Ha ha. Sounds like you really invest in the story and atmosphere. I'm sure your players appreciate it! Nice job ?

15 minutes ago, TeethAlmighty said:

It's funny, my own RtH campaign was the reverse! ... It was tech superiority vs Jyn, Mak, Diala and MHD.

I should've mentioned that I played with Armored Onslaught, which was fun except the Mortar is insane!

15 minutes ago, TeethAlmighty said:

Ha ha. Sounds like you really invest in the story and atmosphere. I'm sure your players appreciate it! Nice job ?

Oh yes, we play for story and immersion. That's the only thing that really matters

6 hours ago, ManateeX said:

I love the threat missions too - the first time through the campaign. My only issue is that if you ever replay the Hoth campaign you end up playing the same missions over and over. There's such a limited number of them, but because of the banes and.... other spoilery reasons... it's almost always a good idea to do them over other side missions. And I've still got so many side missions that I haven't played, it feels like a waste to play the same ones over again.

Came here to say the exact same thing. High five!

Really though, all four threat missions are pretty cool, and I like how they interact with the campaign itself in ways that other side missions cannot.

But as ManateeX said, the heroes are so heavily incentivized to do these threat missions and with the amount that come into play in a given campaign, it's pretty unlikely that you wouldn't have missions repeat if you replayed the campaign. And while obviously this is likely to be the case for some story missions when you run through a campaign again, one of the main reasons side missions exist is for replayability. It's just so weird to see the game systems work so hard against its own advantages like this.