Good point, her boost is fixed, but it's not limited for how often she can use it. Of all the readying effects to get double duty out of Arwen-ally, Spare Hood and Cloak is best because it gives her a handy way to exhaust again. Readying her with Ever Vigilant after she quests won't help you if you have to wait for player attacks to be able to exhaust her again.

Well, she could target herself twice and defend as a sentinel with 3 defence after questing. Maybe add in an Elven Mail, a Cloak of Lórien and an Ancestral Armour. Though whether this is practical is another question.

I agree as mentioned previously that the problem with Dori is Beregond. In almost every case, swapping out Dori for Beregond would be a straight upgrade to the deck. So the main reason to run Dori is because someone is already running Beregond. But this means that in solo, almost every viable Dori deck is going to be Beregond/Dori/Questing hero.

So he's not useless, but from a solo deckbuilding perspective he is pretty restrictive and boring.

I would widen the possible viable solo decks to Quester/Defender/Dori -- Grimbeorn is probably the best choice out there, but Dori might pair well with any of the heroes who are lesser defenders than Beregond (without Dori's help) but have their best stat in defense. For example Quester/Eleanor/Dori might be more interesting, if less powerful, than Quester/Eleanor/Beregond. Either version of Dain, Erkenbrand, both Denethors, Fastred, LeGimli I question whether the deck would necessarily be better (or more fun to play) with a Beregond instead of Dori -- though in all those cases swapping Dori out for an attacking hero probably would make the deck better.

I think Dori is best for solo two-handed play, because without other players involved there's no moral obligation at all to field the most efficient deck possible, and I think Dori's more fun to play than Beregond.

I had thought about it, but no I still I think Quester/(3 defense defender)/Beregond is a better deck than Quester/(3 defense defender)/Dori. I value the ability to start off the game defending for 3 and 4 more highly than defending once for 5 (or twice for 3 and 2), especially since Beregond will quickly get to 6.

If it's not too much trouble, could you guys continue the Dori conversation in another thread? It's helpful and interesting, but mostly off-topic. Thanks!

It's quite possible that a Quester/(3 defense defender)/Beregond is a better deck in general than a Quester/(3 defense defender)/Dori. Beregond's so darn good he's tough to beat when it comes to defense, but I was addressing viability rather than best possible -- and also the more subjective question of "interesting", which matters more than power level for one-deck play since there are no other players to affect. What I like about Dori is that he can turn a lot of heroes into my primary defenders, whether it's a counterattacker like Grimbeorn, or attack/defense heroes with a Destrier, or a 2+ defense elf with Light of Valinor, or defenders like Fastred or LeGimli that *want* to defend but start with inadequate defense to do it regularly. Not terribly efficient in a solo deck without someone readying -- but for that matter, a Quester/(3 defense defender)/Beregond solo deck is usually going to be inferior to a Quester/Attacker/Beregond deck. The superiority of an attacking hero to a backup defender is the big reason Dori isn't popular for solo decks in the first place, I think.

Sorry for the topic drift -- although to be fair, Heirs of Numenor quests are *excellent* for defense-minded heroes. Siege questing for the win!

Back on topic: for me Heirs of Numenor doesn't pack the punch it once had, but I think it's more due to my own improvement at the game and experience with those particular quests rather than having an expanded cardpool. I've gone back and played the quests in minimum purchase mode (using cards just from Core+HoN) and beaten them without too much trouble, whereas when I first played the quests I found them challenging even with a much bigger pool of Core+Mirkwood+KD+Dwarrowdelf+HoN.

Heirs of Numenor hit me like a ton of bricks when I first played it, which was at release, playing 2-player. However, my experience seems to be different than others at the table here. I considered and still consider Peril in Pelargir the easiest of the bunch and the one I'm most likely to come back to from time to time. Into Ithilien was absolutely brutal for me, after my one win against it I did not come back to it for a very long time. The next time I did, it was a 5 player game (yes 5) and we got trounced in 1 or 2 rounds. Haven't played it since. Siege of Cair Andros was the most interesting for me mechanically and my win was satisfying, it was very hard and took many attempts, but fewer than Into Ithilien. I won with pre-errata Thror's Map trickery, I haven't come back to it since then, so it's been years and I haven't beaten it with the card pool as it currently exists. (Same for Carn Dum actually, I relied upon pre-errata Boromir to win and I haven't returned to it since)

That's really interesting! how/why did you manage five?

On occasion we end up with 5 people coming in for a LotR night, and several of us want to play together rather than split into groups, so we end up with 5. Works OK with some scenarios and not OK with others. On the evening occasion we were actually having a get-together at my place and doing LotR as a drinking game, so we did 5 player games all night.

15 hours ago, Seastan said:

Back  on topic: for me Heirs of Numenor doesn't pack the punch it once had, bu  t  I think it's more due to my own improvement  at  the game and experience with those particular quests rather than having an expanded cardpool.

My experience is that HoN benefits from decks specifically constructed to beat each missions; the battle and siege keywords can wreck a lot of generically decent decks.

What we did (originally) was play the mission on easy with whatever decks we had, then come back for the next session with decks designed to beat the mission. (We played two missions per session: the old mission on normal, the 'new' mission on easy.) That really helped push our deck building skills.

This thread has really encouraged me to go back and try it again with two games a session, doing normal / nightmare this time.

This discussion make me want to go back to HoN and try it again progression stile (with no blocking warg errata) and see if present I find Into Ithilien still crazy difficult.

I have improved a lot as deckbuilder and player since then but still...

On 1/30/2019 at 6:05 PM, TwiceBorn said:

Just for the fun of it, give Into Ithilien another try in progression mode with the pre-errata Blocking Wargs. It's definitely beatable, as many here have done it, but I'm just curious to see if your own personal experience would change significantly.

Okay, so I've played quite a few progression style games of Into Ithilien with pre-errata Blocking Wargs now. It certainly did make the quest significantly harder, but not enough to change my stance. I did lose many more games over these playthroughs, but due more to stage-one Mumaks than Blocking Wargs. It was a good learning experience, though, and I have more insight into Into Ithilien's initial reception.

Maybe it's not that Heirs of Numenor isn't the hardest expansion anymore. Maybe it still is, but everyone had a perceptual shift and repeated loss is now considered standard so Heirs doesn't seem so hard

Has anyone played the Nightmare HoN quests?

1 hour ago, Green Leader said:

Has anyone played the Nightmare HoN quests?

I did for my blog:

https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/thematic-nightmare/

What did you want to know?

On 2/9/2019 at 11:44 AM, Authraw said:

I did for my blog:

https://darklingdoor.wordpress.com/thematic-nightmare/

What did you want to know?

I was just curious, but thanks for the link to your blog. It looks fantastic.

The overall gaming fun went from 9.8 to 1.1 in my first dozen plays of this expansion box.

Publishing something that only attracts 2% of the nerds in what is supposed to be a MAIN production line is commercially stupid or silly at best.

Publishing hardcore mode with special small box expansions is smart !, but doing a complete shake up and shedding 90% of your more casual player base who go from the basic box and a few small box expansions and then doing something like this is simply not done, not fun, not commercially smart.

It is PRETTY clear they managed to roll back afterwards and tried to avoid some of these huge mistakes in the AH LCG with superb different playing difficulties to choose from from the start...

I have this game 9 years now and never stumbled into this Numenor expansion while still having played hundreds of LotR card sessions... All I can say now is that Marvel Champions actually is far smarter and more fun at its start to cater for ALL buying players.

Far more designers control is a necessity these days and frankly Heirs of Numenor is probably the worst box published in my LCG fandom (LotR, AH, SW LCG and now Marvel Champions).

As a counterpoint, I love the Heirs of Numenor quests, both thematically and mechanistically. Granted, I haven't been playing that long and I only play Normal non-progression style, but I've enjoyed the box set in both 1-Handed, 2-Player, and 3-Player experiences without directly counter-building decks toward the set (e.g. the Grey Wanderer deck I've taken through HoN was the same deck I took through Mirkwood and Dwarrowdelf).

These quests are indeed hard, and frankly the fact they removed power of Mordor from the siege quest in nightmare mode is an admission that the quests had some issues, but personally I really enjoyed the boxes challenge, specifically on nightmare mode. Into Ithilien and siege arent overly complex but still present a challenge which I really appreciated.

As for the non nightmare version, you can deck build around the encounter and trivialize a lot of the cards, such as usually making the masters malice whiff etc.

I don't envy people who played against the quests at release though.

On 1/26/2019 at 8:00 PM, Wandalf the Gizzard said:

I have a bold statement to make: HEIRS OF NUMENOR IS NOT THAT HARD! I

I've been going through each scenario in the game in order, and my impression is that each scenario is harder than the last. That's only a very general tendency, and there are certainly some exceptions (every once in awhile there's an unexpectedly easy one). But I think there's some truth in there somewhere.