Full Melee Party

By Templarion2, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

I have posted the same post in the past forums and now I post it here where all the people are. ;-)

Here is the link to the original thread. I recommend to read it before you start commenting my post. Thank you.

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POST #1

I just played vanilla Descent with my friend. I was the overlord and he played all 4 heroes. We had a speculation about full melee party (do they get enough good items, how about sharing the starting items etc.) before so he give it a try... and it worked like a dream.

There are more advantages in full melee party than in any other combination. Melee characters are not weak and it is more problematic for the overlord to choose a good target. They deal much more damage than ranged heroes and don't have to take care about line of fire.

Disadvantage is that they get less useful items but it really doesn't matter since they are **** hard to kill anyway and deal more damage right from the beginning. On the other hand, if they get a good spell or bow they can use it with a power potion (in expansions) and still use it if necessary. In addition, you get almost all the necessary melee skills since you can draw so many melee skill cards.

We have played only once with full melee party but it looked clearly easier and I hardly even had a chance against him in any moment of game.

What kind of experience do you have about full melee parties? After the game I had a bit sad feeling because this really removes some variety from the game since there is no really idea to use anything else than melee heroes.

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POST #2

After playing a few games with full melee party, it looks like the best combination is the next:

1) Nanok (because he don't armor in the beginning)
2) Tahlia (pure melee unit)
3) Varikas (ability works nice with Ghost Armor)
4) Suprise, suprise: Battlemage Jaes (this is actually the only useful mage because his armor value is 2 and in addition he can wear armors)

Equip the heros this way:
1) Axe, save money so you can buy better skill faster
2) Axe, Chainmail
3) Sword, Shield, Leather Armor, Ghost Armor and/or Ring of Protection
4) Chainmail, Immolation

It really doesn't matter what skill cards you draw because this group will rock your enemies so heavily anyway. Of course, the more suitable skills you get, the easier it get.

I suspect your results may vary significantly depending on what quest you play and how large your party is, but this isn't totally surprising. The Axe is already effectively a copper-level weapon, and Descent is full of monsters that die incredibly easily, so melee heroes can often do reasonably well without any treasure.

However, a couple of points:

1) Saying that melee heroes are the best and saying that the best X heroes happen to be melee are rather different statements. Nanok, Tahlia, and Varikas all have very nice character abilities, and are all worth 4 conquest (admittedly, almost all 4-conquest heroes are melee and vice versa). And Battlemage Jaes isn't really a melee hero (even if starting him with an axe is often a good idea), which seems to undermine your thesis that an "all-melee" party is really the best.

2) Letting players choose their heroes to build a specific party is generally going to be stronger than using random heroes--even if all heroes were individually balanced, which they're not.

I would not be terribly surprised if melee turned out to be the best attack type, on balance, but I think you're a long ways from showing that it's always better to add another melee than to take another hero.

Well, the melee guys are often a) slow b) expensive CT-wise and c) cannot make attacks with Blast.

Often, two mages and two tanks works out fine; most ranged characters are indeed weak, with the exception of Kirga and Silhouette for example, who simply excel.

I simply don't see any reason for more than 1 mage or any ranged heroes at all. Neither I do not understand why would anyone choose anything else than Jaes as a mage. Battlemage Jaes isn't a melee hero but after searching for the best combination he was a must because he can use armor AND his starting AV is 2 in addition to his spell casting abilities.

The mage is there only for AoE-attacks and only because of that. Otherwise he would get dumped. Ranged heroes deal weak damage to a single target and they are themselves weak, too. It is really sad after we realised this because it removes one aspect of the game. Sure the melee heroes don't have 5 movement points but so what? They clear the room in one turn anyway

Even Tomb of Ice feat cards don't make ranged heroes any better because the feat cards bump the other classes as well.

Xandria , I like Silhouette, too. Especially when she has skills like Skilled and Acrobatics but even then she isn't as effective as any average melee hero. I know, it is sad.

Antistone , first we played a couple of games with a full melee party after we noticed Jaes's uber ability and his armor value. Yeah, he isn't a melee hero but this thread got it's start because of "only melee heroes" -idea.

Well, I still cannot imagine anyone but Runemaster Thorn zipping some 25 squares across the level to steal a precious coin pile (RtL, early copper).

Xandria , try melee party. Just try it. Try 100% melee party or the melee party with Jaes.

From this point we get to another... I don't like how this game has been designed. The truth that ranged heroes (when compared to melee heroes) or any other mage than Jaes are useless bothers me.

This game is not a roleplaying game. You don't choose heroes because their roles or "feeling". You aim for the best munchkin party you can think of. You calculate possibilities and select only the best. That's why I use the word "useless". Why there are like 30 different heroes when only less than 10 matters?

Templarion said:

Xandria , try melee party. Just try it. Try 100% melee party or the melee party with Jaes.

From this point we get to another... I don't like how this game has been designed. The truth that ranged heroes (when compared to melee heroes) or any other mage than Jaes are useless bothers me.

This game is not a roleplaying game. You don't choose heroes because their roles or "feeling". You aim for the best munchkin party you can think of. You calculate possibilities and select only the best. That's why I use the word "useless". Why there are like 30 different heroes when only less than 10 matters?

Because the game is designed to work with Random heroes. If you don't like the idea of a completely random draw, I'm a fan of the "draw 3 random and choose 1" start option. It still gives you a little bit of choice strategically and adds much needed variety. I like to think that the key skill with Descent is making the best out of what you have.

You're right- this game is NOT an RPG. NIETHER is it a Heroes-should-win-at-all-costs game. The OL is out to kill the Heroes just as much as the 4 hero players are out to beat the OL.

I echo Antistone 100%!

This type of party gives the OL a big tactical advantage since the heroes only have one option (advance towards the monsters). The OL needs to think of ways to exploit this weakness (ie. hit-and-run attacks, lots of traps, lots of lingering effects...).

So many flaws.

  1. All-melee parties are too slow; the overlord will have an abundance of threat.
  2. Including Jaes basically negates your thesis. You really mean "all 2-armor party", and I'd bet you would be completely unwilling to add other non-2-armor melee types into your party, such as Steelhorns, Lord Hawthorne, One-Fist, and the dwarves.
  3. All-melee parties have a massive weakpoint: must be adjacent in order to attack. It's trivially easy to disrupt a melee character's movement pattern with traps and monster placement, and melee guard actions are pointless against ranged creatures.
  4. Ranged characters are weak starting out, but most of them can easily do 15+ damage at 7 spaces once they get a silver weapon. Ranged characters take care of the weak, fast monsters so that the melee characters can go head-to-head with the heavy hitters: an all-melee party would be too inefficient to handle varied groups of monsters.
  5. High armor and wounds are often not enough to avoid death by monster attack. I've had 5-armor Nanok take 5-6 damage from a master sorcerer's attack before, several times.
  6. All-melee parties are a waste of time in ToI (ghost) and RtL (soar).

lol...

I see you guys haven't even tested 100% melee parties. Of course, our OL tries to kill the heroes and win the game like players in chess tries to beat each other. It is just that playing heroes is much easier if you choose pure melee party or melee party with Jaes. As I have said before, you don't need even Jaes to gain a markable advantag.

For Oboewan , ok. If the game is designed to work with random heroes then it is about pure luck are you going to win or not. I mean... if you get 4 heroes with conquest value 2 you are probably going to lose. However, picking heroes randomly makes more sense because then you would have to use ranged heroes. At the moment, nobody wants to use them...

For Rednek , hit and run tactics?! Hahah. You don't get the second chance once you get near a melee hero. You run near him, hit him and that's it. He kills you. If you stay away he will catch the beastman and kill him and you didn't have even the chance to hit. Razorwings are only creatures that can actually take punishment from melee heroes but that doesn't help much since they don't deal enough damage to hurt a hero. About traps... Traps are useless if you play by the rules. Heroes can always move near the walls so traps cannot be used. Even if you could use traps, they don't deal enough damage.

For Thundercles ,

1. Read what I said to Rednek and sum it up with #3.

2. As I said, we first played with 100% pure melee parties. Later we added Jaes since he can use armor AND his AV is 2. It is still easier to play without Jaes than playing a classic 2 melee, 1 ranged, 1 mage party.

3. Rooms are awfully small so the weak point you define in #3 doesn't actually matter. The melee heroes can always get near enough and usually your units end up near the heroes anyway.

4. Why should you wait for silver treasures when you can be a killer without even copper treasures? Ranged heroes are easily killed by OL because of their low health and AV. In addition, their conquest value isn't even small enough to balance this out. If there is even one weak character in the party, OL knows excatly who to hit. If everyone is evenly equipped, OL has much more problems with his targets.

5. Think what that would have done to a weaker hero? Btw, Nanok is probably the most unbalanced hero in the game. He can achieve armor value of 7 way easier than the others. In addition, his damage dealing capability increases.

6. We have Tomb of Ice but we haven't played it yet so I cannot comment it (I really hope it fixes this thing) . Soar is possible only in outdoor areas and there you can always run away. Smart melee heroes, have a ranged weapon and power potion with them so they can kill a random flying monsters if necessary. EDIT: I just recalled that with Guard you can hit soaring creatures and when you are "in a tree" soaring creatures cannot hit you unless they fly down and hit you from the square next to the tree square. You almost got me there. ;-)

For everyone , I hope I could agree with you that I am incorrect. However, after several games I cannot see this subject arguable. It is really sad to see that the developers of this game didn't pay enough attention to this matter. They did lots of work and published a game with serious errors. It needs house ruling but changing the whole mechanic of the game is a big deal and I really would not like to do that. Maybe we just start drawing heroes randomly as Oboewan suggested.

If I was OL against an all melee heroe party this would be my plan of attack.

1.)I would first off never spawn a melee monster the entire game. i would just discard those cards for additonal threat.

2.)I would add as many ranged/magic treachery spawns to the deck.

3.) I would use my event (green) treachery to get 1 or hopefully two dark glyphs. I'm not sure how many dungeons give you 4 event treachery but I would guess around 40% of them. I would put these in key spots on the board that way when the heroes do die they would have to return from a glyph very far away and with there slow movement would take them a long time to reach the party. This also takes 2-4 conquest out of the game for the heroes. With tanks like these it won't take many kills to wear down their conquest so taking out 2-4 is pretty strong. I would also have some monsters waiting for them at the closest glyph glyph just out of range for him to attack without spending fatigue.

4.) With the trap treachery I would get as many space oriented traps as I could so that I could focus on one hero to wear them down with attacks that ignore armor. Also I would absolutely add the other Dark Charm card to the deck.

5.) Spawn behind the heores!!!! I spawn ranged or magic characters behind the heroes they will either have to just ignore them and constantly take hits from them or back track to try and kill them. And if they are skeletons i'm not sure how you would exactly catch them. Also this may be a good time to spawan some beastmen to get the command from the master and just make sure he is out of range from your heroes. ( I guess this contradicts point #1 but it just seems too make sense).

I'm sure there are alot of other things the OL can do but these were just a few that I came up with off the top of my head.

I absolutely have to agree that while all melee sounds appealing and is very strong, the lack of any sort of range is a huge weakness. Starting 4 armor is just that:4 armor. A master beastman can do 11 damage (4 on the melee, 3 on a green, 1 on the black, +2 ability, +1 command) with a max roll. That's almost half way to death for a character worth 4 conquest! A lot of monsters have pierce which ignores armor and traps...oh traps. Has your OL ever used trapmaster? +2 damage. No way to soak it unless you maybe have ghost armor...in which case why trap that hero? Sure, the OL has to adapt and be smarter about his spawns in terms of type and location, but if your OL can't beat that party I seriously wonder if A)he's a very good OL or B) What quests you guys are playing. I mean, some of the early quests are easy for ANY party. Playing with all melee also leaves the chance that the starting equipment is all you can really use (outside of a power potion, which I'm sorry is not really a good potion at all for very many situations) if you want any black dice to roll.

Also, I can't believe your OL is letting you pick your heroes. I mean, if I could pick my party every time then of course I'd maximize and customize it with people like Nanok and maybe Jaes (although 12 health on a four conquest hero can go away pretty quickly in my experience) to make it terribly hard on the OL. But we almost never play that way unless we've decided the quest in nigh impossible. What we will do is let the players using heroes separate the cards by class and pick their class and then random draw, allowing to turn one of the 4 in (in case you get red scorpion as your only ranged character). I don't suppose we usually put a limit on everyone being allowed to pick from the melee classes, but we rarely do, and you can always get Hawthorne or someone who's armor isn't quite as high.

While I could agree that a strong party of tanks could be very effective, it also sounds very boring and not very challenging. If you're SOOO disappointed about the balance and the ease with which you are beating your OL (who I once again must question the skill level of), then don't play the game in a way that (at least you clearly feel) is unbalanced...it's that simple.

I see you aren't convinced, and you seem to have answers for everything (except for what happens when you used 1 or 3-armor melee guys), but there's still 2 big problems with your theory:

1) Weapon draw is random. In 2 game instances, my melee characters went without a good weapon and were consistently outclassed by the Magic and Ranged characters in terms of damage: first, in RtL, where most of the Melee weapons were in the bottom half of the deck, and Second, in JitD quest 2, where Silhouette got the Scythe of Reaping from silver and Nanok got some silver-level Other item with ranged bonuses. She was doing 15 damage at minimum, he still had a copper level weapon capable of topping out at 15 damage with his single die upgrade.

This, of course, is fixable: take out ranged items/weapons from the treasure decks. However, this leads me to problem 2:

2) Copper, Silver, and Gold melee weapons are arguably weaker than Melee or Magic weapons. The Sourcerous Orb (Gold), for example, with its sorcery 3, beats out most of the melee gold treasures simply because it has bigger range and +3 damage for free (negating the blue vs red die advantage). The Scyte of Reaping also consistently does more damage than any other melee treasure of SIlver class (again because of sorcery), and the Backbiter and Dwarven Firebombs both have comparable damage to their Copper melee weapon peers, except for the 1-3 damage difference between the blue and red dice. The Staff of the Grave (cursed) and the Staff of Punishment exceed the damage of any other copper melee weapon except the Shadowblade (cursed, matches Staff of the Grave damage with a chance of +1 damage) and the Leviathan (ToI stealth weapon, has extra miss chance), and this isn't even counting the Area of Effect weapons that can be much, much stronger than a simple 1-target melee weapon. Finally, Ranged and Magic heroes have more +Range and Damage skills than the melee heroes do, so they have a better baseline damage than melee heroes. Initially, the Town Axe is great and all, but by the end of the game, Ranged and Magic heroes do more damage with more status effects than melee heroes, and since they do it from farther away, they take far less damage and have fewer problems positioning themselves. It's by no means a coincidence that the most broken combo in the game is Ranged-only: Ranged characters can't take as many hits, so all of their skills are made to keep them shooting from farther away, shooting from behind cover, and doing consistent damage. It's especially telling that the character who does the most damage per attack in the game is a Ranged character, not a melee one (Laurel of Bloodwood). Even in the base set, Landrec the Wise and Mad Carthos will deal more damage than any of the melee heroes, except at the start of the game, because of the Town Axe.

So, I guess your basic theory is that 2 armor + 12+ wounds = best heroes ever? That's simply not true: a party with 2 mages, 1 ranged, and 1 melee will completely overpower any monster force the overlord sends their way, whereas a party of 4 melee heroes will never be able to move, attack, and cover line of sight without taking significant damage. Even Nanok at his most powerful (10 armor, skull shield) is not going to survive the kinds of massive beatings a good overlord can dish out with a few monsters and a few treachery cards: Ranged and Magic heroes are rarely if ever within range of that kind of damage, because they hang back and kill everything from the rear. Lastly, 4 melee heroes will never be able to do as much damage as a balanced party because there are about 4-5 melee weapons per treasure tier, and the bottom 3-4 of those weapons are not as strong as the top 2 ranged and magic weapons of the same treasure tier. If you really want to munchkin this game to the max, you'll find that having two mages with Blast is simply too much for the monsters to handle, and that a ranged character really lets the party keep control of the positioning within the dungeon, as well as taking care of anything in tiers 1 and 2 at the start of the game without much trouble.

As for trying melee heroes, I tried it: it's much easier to do with the extra weapons from the expansions (AoD weapons are great) but in the end, I always had at least 2 heroes without current-tier weapons and at least 1 weapon they couldn't use, as well as a serious lack of armor for someone (usually Jaes). It was nice being able to mostly ignore tier 1 creatures, though (except Beastmen...always except Beastmen). Oh, and except Master Bane spiders! With Vanilla Descent rules, those things are freaking ******* . I lost, mostly because of web and because I was playing the WoD spider level. Stupid web.

quartersmostly said:

If I was OL against an all melee heroe party this would be my plan of attack.

4.) With the trap treachery I would get as many space oriented traps as I could so that I could focus on one hero to wear them down with attacks that ignore armor. Also I would absolutely add the other Dark Charm card to the deck.

Don't forget the second Trap Master card. +4 wounds (ignore armor) combine with 2 poisoned pits for 3-treachery mayhem.

And as a more general reply: I can imagine it feels good to do it like this, but I would get bored (as player) after playing two or three times. I like the aspect that you must do with what you get. My last draw for the campaign resulted in the +2 movement dwarf,Laurel and mad carthos for a total of 3 8-hitpoint characters (And Okaluk as 4th character). Even though it is a pretty bad party to start out with I am having loads of fun trying to get the best out of it.

EDIT: Thundercles posted at the same time as I did, but I have to say his post is the better one. Thumbs up!

Templarion said:

About traps... Traps are useless if you play by the rules. Heroes can always move near the walls so traps cannot be used. Even if you could use traps, they don't deal enough damage.

OK, I have to ask: how did you ever come up with the idea that moving near walls will prevent traps from being used?

There are a variety of restrictions on the use of various different trap cards, but I can't think of a single one that could possibly be read as being restricted by walls. Trap (Space) cards usually require that the hero moves into an empty space, Crushing Blocks can't be played adjacent to existing obstacles, Drugged Darts can only be placed in a "corridor" (whatever that means), but I have no idea how you could possibly come up with the idea that being next to a wall makes you immune to any trap printed to date (unless maybe there's a weird one in RtL, I don't have that expansion).

I assume that he is thinking that walls are obstacles and therefore you can not play traps against them (block traps anyway). I know that initially I was under the same impression (unitl I did further research / pondering).

double post .. sorry

Templarion said:

For Rednek , hit and run tactics?! Hahah. You don't get the second chance once you get near a melee hero. You run near him, hit him and that's it. He kills you. If you stay away he will catch the beastman and kill him and you didn't have even the chance to hit. Razorwings are only creatures that can actually take punishment from melee heroes but that doesn't help much since they don't deal enough damage to hurt a hero. About traps... Traps are useless if you play by the rules. Heroes can always move near the walls so traps cannot be used. Even if you could use traps, they don't deal enough damage.

...

For everyone , I hope I could agree with you that I am incorrect. However, after several games I cannot see this subject arguable.

I guess you miss the "run" part of hit-n-run tactics.

And I have no idea where you came up with traps being unplayable next to walls. That's just not the case!

The only thing your "several games" proves is that your OL hasn't figured out the weaknesses of this party composition. It does not even come close to proving the point that an all melee party is unbeatable.

Funny that this topic stirs feelings so much.

Out of curiosity, what quests were these several games? I simply can't believe that 4 melee heroes would be a good idea in the larger expansion quests in which 'hit and run tactics', by which I assume the poster means by ranged monsters, would be easy to do. One point which I don't think anyone's made yet, is how crucial Nanok would be to this mix. With 4 speed, 4 fatigue, he could almost cover the runner's position, and without the need for Chainmail, three of the party can be heavily armoured. Without him, a three armour hero with 4 Conquest is a tempting target.

Random or semi-random heroes for me all the way. If a group were truly terrible, we might redraw them but playing with a mediocre mix is, well, just more fun.

For Thundercles , good that you tried melee party. Strange that you didn't feel it unbalanced. Treasure cards are not a problem. It is enough if the heroes get even one good melee weapon since the starting weapons deal so much damage anyway. Difference between blue and red dice really matters. What comes to starting weapons: You don't even need expansions because axes and swords are just enough.

I know that the basic idea of ranged/magic heroes is that you keep them behind the front line. The problem is that monsters find too often a way to get there - either they run past the melee heroes or simply spawn behind the party. A few beastmen are enough to bring down any archer or mage (except Jaes). We have done the same calculations as you and noticed that ranged/magic heroes do more damage in the end but that really doesn't matter since the overkilling doesn't give you anything extra. Instead, keeping your heroes alive is much more important from the beginning to the end.

By the way, we do not remove ranged/magic treasures from the decks. This was actually one of the first things we were thinking about before we actually tried the melee party. We have played games where melee party doesn't receive more than one good copper weapon and games where everyone gets a good weapon - it doesn't even matter since the starting weapons deal enough damage anyway.

My basic theory is: 2 armor + 12-16 wounds + can wear armors + does NOT use ranged weapons = heroes you can think of using

For Rednek , you could have read this from my previous post as well: Monsters don't move enough to run away heroes. Only creep that does that is razorwing but it doesn't deal enough damage to melee heroes.

Callistan said:

I assume that he is thinking that walls are obstacles and therefore you can not play traps against them (block traps anyway). I know that initially I was under the same impression (unitl I did further research / pondering).

Since we have not used trap rules correctly I have to withdraw from this interesting discussion and play more. Could someone, please, link here a page/document where trap rules are explained clearly? Thank you for noticing errors in my play.

EDIT:

inle_badger , yeah. Nanok is **** useful but not crucial. As I said before, Nanok is the most unbalanced character in the game.

Templarion, I certainly do agree with you that a full melee party of heroes with all starting armor 2 can be quite tough and hard to kill, especially when Nanok is involved, freeing up equipment for the other guys.

However, from your remarks it seems that the Overlord in your sessions doesn't use his monsters to full effect: for example a skeleton patrol could fire at the heroes from 4 spaces distance and then retreat to say 6 or 7 spaces away from the nearest hero.

Having only melee heroes it is going to be almost impossible to kill all three skeletons from this spawn: it would take 3 heroes all advancing and using all of their fatigue, plus the fact that none of the three should roll an 'X'. The same trick can be done with Dark priests and Sorcerers and also with hell hounds and bane spiders (although admittedly these are harder to manouvre and bane spiders should probably shoot from 2 spaces distance).

By manouvring your ranged attackers like this, you are either going to completely break up the party formation, allowing for more spawns and more time to cycle the OL deck, or they ignore the ranged creatures but then they can snipe away repeatedly for little damage per attack, but many times a little is going to count very quickly. Finally, ranged creatures make it a lot easier to concentrate fire on only 1 hero: as noted before, if he dies, he immediately takes 4 conquest away from the party pool...

Furthermore, traps + trapmaster are going to be absolutely lethal, especially since you can use crushing block to create spaces where you can spawn very close to the heroes if you want to.

Let us know how thing go when you use the correct rule for traps!

Cheers

Templarion said:

For Rednek , you could have read this from my previous post as well: Monsters don't move enough to run away heroes. Only creep that does that is razorwing but it doesn't deal enough damage to melee heroes.

I did, I just don't agree with you. Let me help you out with this. If the OL is simply charging monsters into the heroes every turn, they are wasting their time. The heroes typically move towards some goal in each quest. So the OL knows in general which way the heroes will go. Keep the monsters in front of the heroes just out of charge range of the heroes, or keep a few traps to stop/slow the heroes' charge. Let the heroes get close enough that the monsters can go in during their activation, then retreat a few spaces, never ending next to a hero. Some melee monsters can follow about 2-3 spaces behind the heroes (keeping them spread out) so that if the heroes want to engage them they have to go backwards. Monsters will die, but all they have to do is slow the heroes down and inflict a few points of damage from time to time. Time is on the OL's side.

But here's the bigger point: just because you don't see how to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.

I must say that out of pure luck I tried this once. We do the random hero draw as explained in RTL rules. I ended up with Nanok, Steelhorns, Talhla, and One Fist. Well I will admit that at first we started easily walking through the dungeons. However that lasted about 2 dungeons. Then the OL figured out several stratigies and we were getting our selves stamped in the ground several times by the time we got to the silver level the OL was averaging 3 kills per dungeon.

The OL just upgraded Eldrich and Beast monsters first and dealing with a red skeleton that can move 6 spaces and has plus 3 range, and pierce 3 that makes them hard to get trapped in a corner and by that time damage has been done and heros are getting weaker.

I would agree with the others that posted this question "What quests where you playing" that makes more of a difference than the heros. It is true that several heros are stronger than others however I find best combination, from personal choice, is 2 melee guys, 1 range, and 1 magic.

Try playing same quests with a full range party of 4 CV or a full magic party of all 4 CV and see if you have same feelings.

Templarion said:

For Thundercles , good that you tried melee party. Strange that you didn't feel it unbalanced.

What do you mean? I found myself hard-pressed to deal with Web, and none of my heroes (Nanok, Tahlia, Varikas, Glyr) were able to use backup ranged weapons effectively. Indeed, I did feel it unbalanced, but definitely in the overlord's favor.

gecko23 said:

Try playing same quests with a full range party of 4 CV or a full magic party of all 4 CV and see if you have same feelings.

Unfortunately, no such party is possible, because there's only a single 4 CV magic hero, and I don't think any 4 CV ranged heroes (certainly not a full party's worth).

Templarion, if you want useful and convincing data, I recommend the following:

  1. Make sure you've decided exactly what your thesis is. Originally it was that you should always favor melee heroes, but it seems to have turned into "heroes with 2 armor and 12+ wounds," which has some overlap, but is definitely different. Pick a single thesis and state it clearly.
  2. Choose a party that meets your thesis, but that is not the best possible party that does so. Try to remove Nanok and Jaes from your line-up, since they are both anomalous characters that seem to be helping a lot. If you want to prove your thesis, you have to test the cases where it's likely to fail, not the ones where it's likely to succeed. If you think your results apply even when you do not have a 4-hero party, consider playing with less than 4 heroes, or playing multiple times with different party sizes (I happen to think that an all-melee is likely to do worse relative to other parties in smaller games, though making the game smaller is also an inherent disadvantage to the heroes).
  3. Document your results thoroughly. Definitely say what quest(s) you played, how many times, and with which heroes, which expansions, and whether you used treachery. Consider also recording down your skill draws, treasure draws, and maybe a round-by-round summary of major events and tactics (e.g. "on round 3, the overlord played a bane spider nest and got two web tokens onto Varikas..."). This helps establish how lucky/unlucky you are, and whether your players know what they're doing, as well as helping the reader visualize how the game is going and understand the tactics involved.
  4. If you have time, do this on more than one quest, and play other parties on the same quest(s) for comparison.

You also may want to re-read the rules before you start, since it sounds like you had at least two major misunderstandings (both thinking that walls were obstacles, and thinking that the special restriction from one specific trap card applied to all traps). I know the rules are rather poorly-written, but there's no way that we forumgoers can guess every misunderstanding you have and clarify them all for you, you just need to be careful and learn the rules, and ask questions if anything is unclear.