So this came up in our session this past weekend and I thought I would run it by the collective brain here.

One of heroes in our campaign has the new Leviathan (I believe that is what it is called) weapon from Tomb of Ice. This copper treasure is a melee weapon that forces the user to roll the stealth die when attacking. The hero quickly found out that it did really good damage but misses a lot so has not been using it much. He was forced to use it this last session when his normal axe broke due to frost.

So using this weapon he attacks a Wendigo which has the Stealth ability, thus forcing the attacker to roll the stealth die. Since the general prinicple of Descent is that abilities stack, we ruled that the attacker must roll the stealth die twice for this attack. Once for the monster's Stealth and once due to the special condition of the weapon. (If my math is right, it makes it something like a 63% chance of a miss.)

Right call? Comments?

I would play it the same way. (And your math is perfectly right. )

I would say absolutely not. If you look at the ToI rulebook, it specifically addresses the issue of stealth stacking. On page 7 it clearly states:

"Multiple sources of the Stealth ability do not stack. A maximum of only one stealth die is rolled for any given attack."

It then follows with the example that if Okaluk and Rakash, who have stealth, drink and invis. potion, only one stealth die is rolled. I would say one of the few times it does make sense to use the leviathan or that gold treasure sword (Stonecutter?) is against a figure with stealth. Of course, you need Lord Hawthorn or that reach feat if you're trying it against a shade. But if you're going for that wendigo, unequip your axe and hit it with that extra green die.

Feanor said:

That it certainly does. Thanks for pointing it out. I missed/did not remember that.

Descent also has a consistent convention that you never roll more dice at once than are included with the game. You can't roll more than 5 black dice on an attack, a Morph attack can't roll more dice of any given color than are included with the game, etc. This prevents confusion and record-keeping difficulties when you have to reroll dice or when it takes a long time to resolve an attack (due to AoE, lots of surge effects, etc.).

And there is only one stealth die included in ToI. So, in the absence of any explicit instructions to the contrary, I think it would be safe to assume that you never roll the stealth die more than once on any attack (other than to re-roll the same die due to an effect like aim).

Antistone said:

Exactly! Out of curiosity, why would they use the Leviathan? It looks much worse than a shopkeeper axe to me, unless the hero using it has a horrible melee score.

Galdred said:

Well, it's clearly worse if the shop axe is going to one-shot the enemy anyway. I still contend that the fact that monsters die way too easily is the root cause of half the balance problems in Descent.

But I think that for a hero with 3 black dice, the Leviathan has higher average damage per attack. I don't have the card in front of me, but I think it was red-green-green with surges worth at least 1.5 damage, and that is actually enough to be worth the stealth die if the target has enough health and/or armor. Assuming the target doesn't dodge.

Not really, with 3 black dices, and 1 damage/surge, an axe would average 8 damage on a hit that doesn't miss, while the Leviathan would average 10.5, but would turn 1/3rd of the attacks that didn't miss with the red die into miss because of the stealth die:

adding the stealth die + the green die pass the average from 8 to 7 damages, so it is not really a good deal, as the average damages are lower than with an axe.

It gets worse the better the hero get (with mighty or weapon master, it is truely horrible)

so it is only interesting to one shot monsters that cannot be one shotted with an axe, but can be one shoted with the Leviathan, or to attack stealthy monsters.

Galdred said:

That analysis completely ignores armour, which significantly changes things.

For example, against Armour 5 monster the Axe averages just 3 damage, the Leviathan 5.5 not including Stealth die, 3.67 including stealth die (assuming no Red X for either). That gets better for the Leviathon as armour increases, whether we are talking one-shot or many-shot.

The Leviathan further improves if an Aim order is used. And it is not entirely true that the Leviathon becomes entirely worse as the hero improves. With a better surge/damage conversion, Weapon Mastery and/or more/better dice improve the Leviathan as well. Sure, since the Leviathon is missing 5/18 times more often than the axe, the axe is more reliably improved with the character, but reliability is not the whole story.

For example, Hero has Weapon Mastery and a total of 6 dice/trait upgrades (to make calcs easier). Axe averages around 12 damage per hit before armour. Leviathan Averages 16 damage per hit (but an extra 5/18 misses). Against Armour 3 the Axe does 7 wounds per attack. The Leviathan does 7.2 wounds per attack. And gets better as armour increases.

Basically what it comes down to is where the target falls on the approximate number of expected attacks needed for each weapon. If the monster has wounds close to a round number of the expected wounds/attack of the axe, use it.

eg1 no-bonus hero with 3 black dice against monster with 3 armour and 8 wounds is basically 2 hits with axe, fairly reliably (and you can cover bad dice with fatigue bonus dice). OTOH it is basically a one-shot, with a bit of luck and/or fatigue, for the leviathon. So probably worth using the Leviathon but it depends whether you are in a hurry or not.

eg2 a 4 armour 12 wounds monster is a 3-shot with axe, 2 shot with leviathon - tough call.

eg3 a 6 armour 24 wounds monster is 12 shot with axe or 7 shot with leviathon - use the leviathon, and boost with fatigue dice if you don't get any Xs! You should be able to get it down to a 6 shot, requiring 9 attacks pretty easily, vs the 13-14 attacks needed for the axe.

eg4 a 2 armour 12 wounds is a 2 shot for both, so use the axe.

The use of aim, power pots, fatigue boosting (especially extra dice after no Xs) all change things, usually for the betterment of Leviathan. It would be better compared against another bronze treasure than an axe - it is clearly more useful than an axe on nearly all non-one-axe-shot monsters.

You both seem to have assumed that the Leviathan and the Axe both use surges in the same way. I can't check the actual card until tomorrow, but if I remember correctly, the actual surge abilities on the Leviathan are:

1 surge: +2 damage
2 surges: +5 damage

With 3 black dice, that brings the Leviathan's average damage on a hit up to more like 13-13.5, not 10.5 (exact value is a pain to calculate due to the rolls with an odd number of surges). That makes the Leviathan likely to be better even against a monster with zero armor...if you actually need piles and piles of damage. Against a hypothetical monster with 100 wounds and 0 armor, the hero with the Leviathan can expect to kill it about 5% faster. And, as already noted, armor slants things towards the Leviathan.

But how often do you actually need that much damage? In a 4-hero non-RtL game, here's where the Leviathan beats an Axe in average kills per swing:

JitD: Master Razorwing, Master Sorcerer, Ogre, Manticore, Naga, Giant, Dragon, Demon
WoD: Golem
AoD: everything but Dark Priest
ToI: Don't have stats at the moment

Basically tier 3 and up (things look much worse in a game with fewer heroes). But that's compared to a shop weapon. Compared to the Dragontooth Hammer, another 2-handed copper melee weapon, the Leviathan wins...

JitD: Master Giant, Master Demon
WoD: Golem (immune to Pierce)
AoD: Master Chaos Beast, and Master Troll is effectively a tie (Leviathan is ~0.05% ahead)

Not very often, but it is occasionally useful. I'd still rather draw the Dragontooth Hammer.

As for aiming, the results of that are really hard to calculate, because the dice you choose to reroll really depend on what you're fighting and how much health it has left and what you rolled for the other dice...but based on a first-order approximation, it looks like Aim+Attack is worse than attacking twice with a battle action when using the Leviathan against any of the monsters I analyzed. So while the Leviathan benefits more from an aim than other weapons, that still fails to make aiming a good idea any time but in a handful of special cases.

Antistone said:

Yep, sorry. I just borrowed Galdreds stats.

In that case Leviathan is waaay better than an Axe in a lot of (RtL) situations.

Still not necessarily better than other Bronze items though. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Edit: RtL is a bit different because you often have high armour and high wound monsters to fight. Most upgraded monsters add +1 armour/upgrade and have (1+X)(n-1) wounds, where n is bronze level wounds and X is number of upgrades. And Level Masters are usually +1/+2 Armour and +8 to +12 wounds above that.

Galdred said:

Because the hero's axe had broken due to frost ( ) and did not have time to go back to town to replace it.

OK, turns out I was wrong; my apologies. Seems I was thinking of the Stone Cutter, which is the gold-level equivalent. The Leviathan only gets 1 damage per surge.

That means its wins vs. the Axe drop down to:

JitD: Master Razorwing, Ogre, Giant, Demon, Master Dragon, and bizarrely a razor-thin win on the Naga but not the Master Naga
WoD: Master Ferrox, Golem
AoD: Master Blood Ape, Deep Elf, Master Troll, Chaos Beast
ToI: Wendigo (stealth) and Master Medusa; if you ignore ghost, it also wins the Shade but not the Ice Wyrm

Apart from very marginal wins on the normal Naga, normal Deep Elf, and master Medusa, that's basically just better against creatures with 4+ armor or stealth. And compared to the Dragontooth Hammer, the Leviathan only wins:

JitD: nothing
WoD: Golem (immune to pierce)
AoD: nothing
ToI: Wendigo (stealth)

So the Leviathan only wins against monsters with specialized defenses that specifically favor it. That's pretty sad, I must admit. Looks like the Leviathan could easily be one-handed without being overpowered.

Antistone said:

In that case I concede the discussion to Galdred, although continue to point out that the higher armour often encountered in RtL may sometimes make the Leviathan more useful than an Axe.

Corbon said:

If you care enough to send me some monster stats, I'll run them through my spreadsheet. But it looks like the results are probably pretty generalizable: stealth or 4+ armor to beat the axe, stealth or ironskin and 4+ armor to beat the dragontooth.

I'll also eventually be publishing the updated version of my spreadsheet. Pretty much just want to code up something for the Ripper/Bow of the Hawk special ability and get the AoD weapon stats entered in (it's in the mail).

Corbon said:

You are right about the fact that it can be more useful against heavily armored bosses though. My mind got blurred by the Descent's shoting galore. It's probably better than the knucle dagger too

I would rule that yes, you do roll the stealth die twice. Rolling the stealth die for the Leviathan is not because it imbues every creature it attacks with stealth. (A ridiculous idea... unless it were a cursed item.) You're just rolling the die because its faces give the statistics of hit/miss the creators wanted.

The first roll is because the Leviathan is large and unweildy so you miss a lot. The second roll is because the creature has stealth. If that still bothers your mind concerning only rolling the dice that came with the game, you can reconcile that. The player rolls the die because of his large weapon. Then... the OL rolls the die because his creature has stealth.

EDIT: The forum is arbitrarily screwing up all the quote tags again, so I'm going to attempt to remove them all and just leave my actual post.
EDIT2: This, of course, does not actually work, so please forgive the random and stupid formatting.

And what causes you to conclude that they wanted the miss chance to increase if the monster also has stealth? You're using theme-logic, not rules logic, and it's not hard to come up with opposing theme-logic. Especially because the best thematic explanations for the stealth ability don't actually involve thematic stealth at all: you still know the creatures position precisely enough to walk around it rather than bumping into it, and enveloping the area with a blast or breath attack doesn't reduce the miss chance, so the ability clearly has nothing to do with avoiding being seen.