So i OL'd this and the dragon Death which the only way to survive his 666 bolt is w/ the Shield of the Dark God relic. The guy was in there and he was unaware of the bolt as of yet because it's our first play through, so i made my first attack which did 10 damage and he chose to negate that w/ the shield, tapping it. I then blasted him w/ the bolt and hit him for 666 damage instantly killing him. Now their argument (the players) is that the wording says that the shield protects them from this beam and there is nothing about it needing to be un-tapped to prevent damage to this character.

Am I wrong in assuming they have to tap it to negate the damage? So if they tapped it that turn already for the 10 wounds attack that would have been inflicted, my next attack w/ the bolt would kill them right?

Can't find this answer anywhere searching here or anywhere else...

Via the FAQ:

Q: If an item such as a shield is exhausted, are its passive abilities (if any) disabled?
A: No. The only limitation is that the item cannot use any ability that requires it to exhaust until it has been refreshed.

I don't have the text in front of me right now, but my guess is that the players are right, and the attack does no damage to them. Really depends on the wording, though - if you have to exhaust the shield to block the special damage, then you're right, if you don't, the players probably are.

"Exhaust to cancel any number of wounds being dealt to you. This cannot cancel wounds that ignore armor" is all the text on the card.

Their argument is that the other items have effects on their respective rooms beyond what is on the card(staff vs lightning room, dice vs animated weapons room). My counter argument(which may be even agianst me) is that it says 'cannot cancel wounds that ignore armor' when the Death dragon's attack obviously ignores everything(including armor) and does 666 damage(per description in OL portion of the quest) and should kill him even if he tries to tap it. Yet makes mention that the hero could survive the attack if he has the shield.(But does not say that he would need to tap it and not that he wouldn't need to either, doesn't get specific).

So either it is A) they have to use the shield to negate it, and the text was really meaning that in the OL book, therefor it only works for 1 attack. Or B) the exhaust effect does NOT work on the 666 damage attack due to it not working on attacks that ignore armor like this does anyway, indicating that if the book DOES say it it can be used for this attack then it must mean the item in general negates the attack, not the exhaust effect.

Could you post the relevant text from the quest book? (Descent stuff lives at my brother's house, & quest books aren't online...) It could just be a reminder that using the shield would negate the damage, but it's hard to say without seeing exactly what it says in the book.

mahkra said:

Yeah i don't have it with me right now i'll have to check in a few hours when i get back home to see exactly what it says.

It's been a while wince I looked at this quest, but as I recall the shield is just a macguffin you need to protect you from this attack, just like the staff and the dice work in the other rooms. You don't need to DO anything with the item, you just need to HAVE it. I think your players are correct.

Steve-O said:

So logic aside, where a 666 damage attack being blocked by a shield that negates all damage seems like a perfect puzzle piece fit. We will just go with "He has the shield, no block necessary, he's immune"? Even though the Bow has no 'negating effect' for any other rooms. Or the fact that the other rooms negate space by space actions made agianst them, and this last room is entirely different, except that the one relic involved must operate the same as the other two different rooms.

Just having a hard time following the logic of it blocking the attack without blocking the attack, which it's ability specifically states it is for and fits like a puzzle piece for as well.

"The dragon here is Death. Death attacks twice a turn, once with a normal master dragon's attack, and ocne with the Bolt of Death . The Bolt of Death is a special attacks that has the Bolt ability. Any figure underneath the bolt template is hit automatically (no die roll) and suffers 666 points of damage. The only thing that will allow a hero to survive this attack is the Shield of the Dark God. Death's stats are..."

There's nothing in there about the Bolt of Death ignoring armor, just that it can't miss. The Shield of the Dark God is entirely capable of stopping that attack without any capabilities other than what's printed on the card.

The statement that only the Shield of the Dark God would allow a hero to survive might simply be an observation that nothing else that exists in the game would allow a hero to survive 666 points of damage (it's not possible to get wounds + armor that high, even if you throw in Ghost Armor, other shields, etc.). Even if you interpret it as meaning that the hero isn't allowed to survive by any other means, even if you got some weird power that didn't exist at the time of printing or found some odd loophole, there's still nothing there that says that a hero carrying the Shield is immune.

It's a really arbitrary quest, though, with its difficulty highly dependent on the heroes' prior knowledge of the quest, as well as their characters and skill draws. It's not especially clear what information the heroes are supposed to get when, and it looks probable that if the heroes don't win within the first 4 or so turns that you'll end up with a bunch of heroes sitting around doing nothing while one hero tries to battle his way through the room where the overlord focuses all his card. I'm not especially tempted to try playing it.

Trueshot doesn't protect you from any of the three rooms because it is "required" for the final room with all the lava...even though it's actually completely plausible that a hero with no special powers could get to the other side of the lava alive, if you have a couple spare turns for him to run and catch up to the heralds. It also allows a fourth hero to sit in the start area and snipe monsters in the other areas to provide support to the other heroes.

Hmm reading it agian, yeah there is nothing other then the fact it can't miss printed about the Bolt. So the shield 'will allow' you to survive this attack is the speculative part of the sentence. Will in use instead of the word Can indicates Will or will always. Can would imply that it could if you use it(hence exhaust), but as it says "Will allow" and not "Can allow" that would lead someone to believe that it's not a 'use' but a 'just have it in your possession' clause.

The only thing that will allow a hero to survive this attack is the Shield of the Dark God.

I read this as the heroes have to expend the shield to block the attack, just like any other attack. It does say "will allow", but it doesn't actually tell us the condition for that. If there's no required condition, the Shield could allow all heroes (even ones not carrying it) to survive, simply by its mere existence. In the absence of any specified condition, I'd assume it works the way shields normally work in the game. But that is just me making an assumption.

On a side note, lucky die rolls could theoretically allow a hero to survive with one of the various cloaks that cancel wounds, though this is statistically virtually impossible.

mahkra said:

Yeah i suppose that is true as well, when in doubt assume the basic fundamental of the card, which is exhaust to get the effect. and LAWL at the rolling to cancel wounds w/ the cloaks. Imagine how ridiculously lucky someone would have to be? and 666 power die rolls to mitigate it all.. that's just wrong, LOL! Statistically only 219 of those would be power enhancements going by the 33%~ chance to get a power enhancement even on the best cloak, meaning they would still get hit for over 447 damage anyway

Power enhancements are 50%. Surges are 33%.

Antistone said:

If your heroes act clever, they won't be sitting in the room, doing nothing. I think the key to win this quest is to give that trueshot-bow from one heroe to the next, giving all together rear cover to the lone hero who has to run through the room. Even a Not-Archer will be able to do enough damage with this bow to wipe out some enemies that are blocking the path. You simply have to arrange your heroes in a formation that allows to pass that bow in a chain in a single turn, allowing every hero to shoot at least one or two times.

Given the text, it seems to me that you'd have to exhaust the shield to survive the attack. It's kind of sketchy, but as others have said, the quest book is more saying "this is the only way we can think of to survive this attack" rather than "the special ability of this shield is to let you survive this specific attack."

Eh, seems to be about 50/50 in here on which it means. If only there was an official ruling, lol

Gatsuh said:

By my count, it's actually 3 to 1 in favor of "the shield must be exhausted, as normal, to negate the damage." And that one vote against came before the relevant quest text had been posted.

yeah i guess Antistone's comment after posting the text was a bit confusing as the sentence was hard to read. 'The Shield of the Dark God is entirely capable of stopping that attack without any capabilities other than what's printed on the card' - reads to me that The shield can stop the attack without using the exhaust effect.

Which is why i was saying 50/50

Just for kicks, I decided to optimize a hero and then see his chances of survival against that Death attack without any relics.

Hero:
Lord Hawthorne (16 wounds, 1 armor, 4 fatigue)
Skills:
Tough - 4 wounds
Bear Tattoo - 2 wounds
Shark Tattoo - 2 wounds
Equipment:
Elven Cloak (gold armor) - 2 armor, 50% chance to cancel wounds
Shield of the Warrior (gold shield) - cancel 4 wounds
Shield of Light (silver shield) - cancel 3 wounds
Ghost Armor (shop other/rune) - 1 fatigue to cancel a wound

• Lord Hawthorne is hit for 666.
• Armor 3 (1 base + 2 from the cloak) reduces this to 663.
• The cloak must cancel at least 629; at most 34 wounds remain.
• Shield of the Warrior cancels 4, leaving 30 (or fewer).
• Shield of Light cancels 3, leaving 27 (or fewer).
• 4 fatigue used with Ghost Armor cancels 4, leaving 23 (or fewer)
• Hawthorne can survive 23 wounds with 1 wound token remaining. (16 base + 8 from skills)

So we need to determine the odds of the cloak canceling at least 629 of 663 wounds. We'll use a binomial distribution to calculate the probability. (See the link below for the math. n = 663, k = 629, p = .5, q = .5)

faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html

According to the calculator at that link, the chance of getting 629 or more successes in 663 attempts is 3.377757312550789e-143. Or, in non-scientific notation (assuming I counted zeros properly):

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003377757312550789

(For comparison, there are estimated to be between 10^77 and 10^82 atoms in the observable universe. So the chance of Lord Hawthorne surviving the attack is more than 60 orders of magnitude lower than the chance of choosing one particular atom at random from the observable universe.)

EDIT: I neglected to consider Lord Hawthorne purchasing extra skills, which could boost his wounds or fatigue even more. I think he'd still die from the attack, though.

Gatsuh said:

Sorry if it was confusing, but that reading is completely wrong. It says that, IF the quest rules didn't mention the shield at all, it would still allow a hero to survive the attack, by exhausting the shield to use the effect on the kind. That sentence doesn't say anything one way or the other about whether you need to exhaust the shield, it just says that exhausting the shield would be sufficient . You said in an earlier post that the shield couldn't be used against the Bolt of Death because it can't cancel wounds that ignore armor; I was saying you were wrong.

The next paragraph of my post is arguing that the hero needs to exhaust the shield, because the quest rules don't ever say that he can survive if he doesn't.

Graf said:

Eh...that just means that the overlord should probably make his stand in the room with the animated weapons. Trueshot still needs line-of-sight, and most of that room is around a corner.

Most of the dragon room is also around a corner, but there you can potentially go inside the room as long as you're not in range of the dragon's Bolt of Death when the overlord's turn comes around.