Hello,

I wanted to get your feelings toward the Promo Hero Tobin Farslayer and Cannons in SoB.

The new FAQ states that Heros can use their skills and abilities while shooting cannons in SoB. I'm cool with this for all the heroes save Tobin Farslayer. His ability to add range to damage will sink the encounters ships almost in one shot everytime.

I'm thinking of a house rule that blocks this one ability from use with cannons.

What do you think?

I think this is a good fix for the problem. Another good fix might be: "Ships are Immune to Tobin Farslayer's hero ability".

Blasto said:

Just don't use him. He wasn't designed by FFG, he was designed by a foreign language disributor. Him and Kel are very badly designed, completely broken (Tobin more so for the campaigns than vanilla) by inept designers. FFG only brought them out due to fan demand (and of course the opportunity to make a buck, which is their aim after all). Kel was so obviously broken for all forms of the game that she has been 'fixed', though she remains one of the most powerful characters out there. Tobin is not so broken in vanilla so didn't get fixed.

I mean, have you really played so many campaigns that you've used run out of heroes and need a new one?

The house-rule our group has used for Tobin is that he can only add the range rolled on dice and provided by skills.

Malaidar said:

Erm...just to clarify, you're aware that Tobin's normal ability is that he adds the distance to the targeted square to his damage, not the range he actually rolls? If you just let him add all of his rolled range to damage, that's strictly and significantly better than Laurel of Bloodwood's ability, and her ability is arguably broken.

Here's an interesting thought-experiment: consider the hypothetical ability "+2 damage when attacking from a distance of 4 squares or more". At shop level, this would let you use a Bow to fairly reliably inflict more damage than a Crossbow, and with significantly better range; a respectable ability, surely, perhaps on par with Bogran's (+2 damage vs. monsters that didn't have LOS to you at start of current turn) or the Marksman skill (+3 range). As you pick up treasures and start to get weapons with really good range, it slowly turns into "+2 damage most of the time," which looks a lot like Mad Carthos' hero ability. Mad Carthos' is generally considered one of the better abilities, but not the best. So I think this hypothetical ability would probably qualify as a medium-power hero ability overall.

Now think about how that compares to Tobin's actual ability, and try to tell me that his ability is anything but a bad idea.

Incidentally, if you have run out of heroes and need new ones, you might consider using this .

Corbon said:

Thanks for the reply,

No we havn't played so often that we've run out of heroes yet. For our Sea of Blood Campaign we did remove all of the ones we've used in our 4 campaigns so far so the whole campaign felt "new". The hero players drew three heros for each spot and Tobin came up. I picked up Kel and Tobin during FFG's Black Friday sale and I didn't know what promotion they were part of. The campaign is almost to Silver and the Overlord (me) is sitting at 54points ahead at the moment so they havn't been breaking the game.

Tobin does a large amount of damage, so if he's on guard you need to go smack him with a crappy monster to either draw out the guard token or hit him and lose it before showing the larger monster out. Tobin with being able to use his ability with a cannon would make the ship encounters almost pointless. We'll see how he does in Silver and Gold, when those ranged weapons really up the power he might go though the roof. If thats the case we'll just remove him for our character stack for most games.

Luckly my game group mains focus is to have fun so we're all for not having a run-away game.

Thanks again for the reply and the info on Tobin!