one of my heroes is playing brother gyr and got taunt at the beggining. he is rolling around with 6 armor base. Chainmail, ring of protection, +3 armor base. and then a shield on top of that, taking the grand total to 8. Any ideas on the best course of action? i use traps but they get negated often by feat cards.......

hoduken said:

Well - you can always just kill the crap out of the other heroes.

I would also - and am more than happy to be corrected on this idea - but upgrade Eldrich first. Skellies have higher pierce at silver. And the sorcs and dark priests would also have better boosts at silver.

Otherwise - just leave him alone and kill all the other heroes. Save all your traps for him if he is hits really hard - things that if they fail to stop will interrupt and end his turn.

hoduken said:

hoduken said:

1) Don't make the mistake of counting the shield as armor. Its not.

2) Get Crushing Blow and start peeling away his equipment

3) Skeletons. Upgrade Eldritch as soon as you can and use long range Skeleton hits with Pierce to knock him down some.

But honestly this is probably the best advice I can give....IGNORE HIM. Don't attack, don't go near him. Focus on the weaker, less armored heroes. Taking the easy kill a weaker hero that only is 2CT multiple times is far better in the long run that spending a bunch of resources to kill Glyr for 4CT.

Big Remy said:

OOOHHH yes... how could I forget crushing blow! You'll need to spend some XP on one green treachery point and get this added to your deck.

descentinthedark.com/_c_/crushing_blow.php

This is a great card - as it'll come up once or twice in a dungeon - and you can put it in your hand for each LT encounter... making it riskier yet for the heroes to attack your LTs.

I appreciate all the comments so far. But im afraid the ignore him ones that at first seems the most logical at first are obviously being posted by people who haven't read taunt.

SoylentGreen said:

Thanks for that advice! will do. ill report this weekend to let you know how it went.

hoduken said:

Oh yeah - I forgot about the taunt.

You just need to get really creative with your spawning and your range. Eldrich will be really important - so you can use the three ranged monsters I mentioned. You also need to put stuff in the way (blocks) do whatever you can to keep the attacking monsters out of LOS of him with taunt. Also if you have options - split up your spawns. Slow the heroes down - try to get them to go backwards for monsters you spawn behind. That way if the heroes are leading with him to pull all the attacks - pop them behind - try to keep LOS to your advantage. You can't draw LOS to him and he's only 3 spaces away - you don't have to attack him.

You also cannot shoot through your own monsters. So spawn things that spawn enough multiples that you can simply run one of them RIGHT up next to him and leave that monster there. Use that monster to block LOS for all the other monsters you want to attack with.

Oh - one more thing.

You could also think about upgrading a melee heavy monster class... I would still go with the Eldrich personally and do my other suggestions - BUT - you can attack other heroes with melee all day even if he is within 5 spaces and it won't pull with the taunt if you aren't adjacent.

Wow thanks for the LOS advice didn't think about that. Hey i have one more question a little off topic.

So i noticed that i need to destroy tameryl to win. and unless im missing something the players can teleport back to the city whenever they please. As they have unlimited lives with no detrement when killed how am i supposed to actually destroy the city? I mean cant the just teleport back and have a 100% chance (because of unlimited lives) of killing any lutenant at the city?

Second, My lutenants are finit.... so if they repeat this step 4 times im all out of lutenants and can no longer destroy tameryl right?

hoduken said:

Well... you either need to destroy Tamalir to win - OR - you defeat them in the final dungeon - OR - complete the requirements for your evil plot.

Personally - I'm in it for the full ride of the game (as all my heroes are) so I do not plan on destroying Tamalir. I will try for my plot or have a go at the final dungeon. But that is my personal preference. I kinda want the final showdown.

Ya im going elderich ASAP.....one point short from are last dungeon *RAGE*

so i am doing the tameryl thing correct then?

Its called the Tamalir Rush. Do nothing but buy Lts, and the transport gem. Move all the Lts onto Tamalir, so that each Lt can place a token. You'll hit the defense rating quickly and be able to start rolling for razing the city.

Even if the heroes do get back there, if you have 2-3 Lts on the city and you've hit the defense rating, they are going to have to kill/drive off all three of them in one game week to prevent the roll. That is not an easy task, since they can't do anything between Lt battles in a given game week, so by the time they get to that third one they are going to be almost all but dead.

As for Taunt, I saw it. You can still ignore him, its just takes a bit of extra work.

hoduken said:

It does seem you are missing something.
The heroes do not have infinite lives.
In fact, when they fight a Lt, they don't have any lives at all . Check out the rules for encounters. There are no glyphs so a hero that dies cannot come back (in that encounter). If all 4 heroes die, they lose the encounter, they get sent back to Tamalir (no big deal if they are already there) and their week ends (so they can't attack again that week).

That is how you stop the Heroes breaking a seige.
Lts with a decent amount of treachery to back them up are quite fearsome.

SoylentGreen said:

I think you can shoot through your own monsters. Correct me if im wrong bu friendly's can shoot through each other.......

hoduken said:

Ok, you are wrong.

There is nothing anywhere in the rules to suggest that you can shoot through friends.
Contrary, shooting requires LOS and friends block LOS - DJitD pg10 " Line of sight is blocked by walls, closed doors, other figures , and blocking obstacles."
'Other figures' does not exclude friends - it includes all figures except the attacker, which is the subject of the preceding paragraph.
Just remember that there is a specific exemption for any figures blocking LOS in the case of spawning.

hoduken said:

From JiTD page 10. "Line of sight is blocked by walls, closed doors, other figures, and blocking obstacles. Thus you cannot, for instance, shoot directly through one monster to hit another monster behind it."

All figures block LOS, no matter if they are friendly or enemy, meaning heroes cant ignore other heroes for LOS and monsters cant ignore monsters for LOS. There is a skillcard named "Precision" making it possible for ranged/magic attacks though( http://www.descentinthedark.com/_p_/precision.php ). If the OL is the Sorcerer King in rtl he can get the same advantage for skeletons(I believe it is Sorcerer King only).

Looking better for you as OL now?

The heros in our campain have a tank in the party with armour 7, so I dont attack him, unless I can play 4 trap cards in a row, with trapmaster out. Other than that I always attack the weakest heros, those 2ct really add up. I have taken 16 ct from the heros in 2 dungeon levels, they have taken 8 so far. having said that the last 2 dungeon levels did suit the OL more than the heros, in the 1st dungeon (3 levels)it was more even, 16 to the heros 14 to the OL.

We've started a new campaign with me as the Overlord, carrying out the Ascension plot with the Spider Queen. A great avatar, actually. Trap treachery is sweet and she's got a good special ability(basically Trapmaster/2) and a cool special lieutenant. Playing against Kirga, Landrec the Wise, Grey Ker and Lyssa, all controlled by my brother(he's quite experienced with the heroes),I'm still ahead of him with 52 more conquest in my favor(101 to his 49).A pretty tense game, but it's lots of fun, as we've drawn some interesting dungeons.

Frostgate is razed with Greyhaven and The Forge awaiting similar fate on my next overland turn, once we complete the current dungeon.

Overall, I'm really pleased with RTL. I like the minor balancing that the developers had done for the creatures in the campaign. For instance: downgraded the Beastmen somewhat as they seemed fairly overpowered to me in the base game for such a frequently encountered monster, and improved Razorwings and Skeletons(Pierce is great).

.

Corbin is our hero with effectively 8 armor in Copper (his native 2 + Plate Mail's 3 + his natural -1 to all wounds ability + cursed shield that blocks 2) but with his 8 health, after the first dungeon and he got a curse token, I started gunning for him. I found that I was routinely killing him, about 2 or 3 times in a dungeon, and with Divine Favor coming into play, it made it worth my while to kill him rather than trying to kill Runemaster Thorn (the other squishy of the group). 7 armor is not invincible. Most of the times I was hitting him with upgraded Dark Priests (man what power horses!) but the Copper Beastman with a couple masters near by usually got a few hits on him, and hitting him 5 times in one turn would nearly if not completely kill him.

-shnar

I played against a Nanok with 7 armor during copper and was able to kill him. Ironically, I was playing the Beastman Lord with upgraded humanoids. The damage Beastmen can deal is staggering when they are upgraded. All it took was one war party with a couple traps and he died. Granted, that was kinda rare, but when it happened, it was cool.

If I didn't get that combo, I ignored him as much as possible. He just has too much health to make it worthwhile to focus on him.

I've never played with the Beastman Lord, but I see he's an expert on monstery treachery, and he's the only one who can summon a total of 5 lieutenants, which is great, especially since one of them commands Razorwings.

Yeah, one lieutenant is awesome, the other sucks hardcore. Gata the White, the lone assassin, is great in concept. Doesn't do well because he's got no backup. Though he is the only lieutenant that can ambush (5/6 times too). I could never figure out how he was supposed to do anything because he is alone with rather poor stats.

The other one, Kratz the Plague, is almost cheating if you play it during copper. It soars and has breath, poison, pierce 10. It also comes with razorwings.TPK much? I think I will. Only downfall is the dice he rolls. Blue YYB. Yeah, not much damage. I think he had decent stats for a flyer too.

That campaign stopped in mid-silver because the heros were sick of dealing with Gold Master Beastmen. They were too common and made all my copper monsters deal the same damage as their silver or gold counterparts. The heros would litterally go in a dungeon and lose 3-4 people on the first level. They didn't want to go deeper cause I'd kill them more often. Nanok's armor wasn't even a challenge at that point. That and they made it to the bottom of a rumor level and it was just beastmen. Lots and lots of beastmen. I was past the figure limit for most of the level. I told them before hand they should ditch it and get a different rumor. They didn't listen.

Solairflaire said:

We had one of our first campaigns finish early with the heroes conceding in disgust after they got butchered by a single spawn of gold kobolds . Very early slver and the mage and ranger simply couldn't kill a single kobold when battling, so they quit.

But generally speaking we find that humanoid spawns, including beastmen war parties are really relatively easy to counter simply by not letting them spawn in places where they can attack more than one hero (if any!) in the same turn. Spawn coverage is mostly a very very effectively counter.

One of the things we like most about SoB is that the dungeons generally have some rubble scattered about that makes anti-spawning much more difficult. Humanoids are back in the game so to speak.

Clever hero placement can stop a lot of spawning, and having to spend threat to flip the reinforcement counter in RTL slows the OL down a bit as well.

In vanilla 2nd dungeon as I recall the hero had Boggs the Rat and the Dungeon and by leaving Boggs at the cross road, he blocked 75% of the spawning places. Boggs is horrible for the OL to deal with, would be even worse in RTL give the small size of the levels.