Campaign Final battle with Overlord's Avatar and Threat? SOB or RTL

By player223259, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

Once the Avatar shows up the Overlord discards his cards, Hero's reset, ect,ect. The Heros all fight for their lives to kill the Overlord Yay!


What about the Threat?


Can the Overlord use Threat in the final battle like in a Lieutenant Encounter? IE, use two Threat to move or add power dice to his attack.


The Rules seem to skip over talking about the use of Threat in the Final Battle.

If the Overlord can't use it: that seems to make him weaker than his LTs, and there is no sense of urgency for the Hero's; if the Overlord stops getting Threat each turn and when he rolls two Surges.


Thank you for your thoughts.

The OL still gets threat as usual (four per turn, two per surges rolled) but he has nothing to spend it on. There is some FAQ or GLoAQ answer that says you may very well skip the "Collect threat" phase of the OL turn.

The use of threat to move extra spaces or buy die upgrades is restricted to outdoor encounters (although it might give the OL a much needed edge in the final battle, so feel free to try that as a house rule).

Parathion said:

The use of threat to move extra spaces or buy die upgrades is restricted to outdoor encounters (although it might give the OL a much needed edge in the final battle, so feel free to try that as a house rule).

At first glance that looks like a very ...iffy... house rule.

If the OL simply saves most of his threat throughout the 4 levels, and discards any cards before the final level he could easily have 50+ threat going into the final battle.
That will see several successful attacks immediately being upgraded to 5 gold dice if they hit, which makes a big difference in the expected rate of damage dealing.

That might even be a good thing, but it sure as heck changes the proscribed balance enormously. So it would be some careful analysis before implementing.

If the OL saves all his threat and doesn´t play cards he might miss out on some substantial HP, especially in RtL (in SoB it won´t matter much), so that tactic should be carefully thought through.

In addition, the amount of threat tokens is limited to something near 30-40, IIRC (nothing in the rules tells us to use substitutes (yes, I know it´s in the FAQ proposal ;) ). This means 15-20 extra movement and/or die upgrades (merely the equivalent of 3-4 power pots) - and then the boost is gone. And with no way to spend surges for extra damage or effects, it would mean 15-20 extra damage with optimum rolls - not really game-breaking IMO.

If you want to avoid possible major balance swings, you could houserule to discard all threat and cards at the start of the FB, then start collecting it as usual with the option to use it like suggested. That would be a really tiny edge only, though...

So if the Overlord gets no benifit from Surges in the Final Battle because the Avatar's Threat have no effect. This makes his Power Dice effectivly have two more blanks and all Sugres on the other dice useless. Where as the Hero's get extra damage and effects from all their Surges.

During the entire Campaign the Overlord has wanted to slow down the party so he/she can gain more threat and power and converly the Hero's want to speed through as fast as possible, but in the Final Battle there is no sense of urgency for the Hero's they can now take their time (Rest if they can) because all Threat is gone. That is pretty weak for the Overlord.

I do see the point of if the Overlord hardly spent any card or spent threat during the five levels, but that doesn't seem likely to get out of hand because the Overlord still wants to play cards and use Threat to kill the Heros to gain more Hit Points for the Final Show Down. And if you use the limited tokens avalible.

Thank you both for your comments.

Cheers,

Erik

PoohHandLuke said:

During the entire Campaign the Overlord has wanted to slow down the party so he/she can gain more threat and power and converly the Hero's want to speed through as fast as possible, but in the Final Battle there is no sense of urgency for the Hero's they can now take their time (Rest if they can) because all Threat is gone. That is pretty weak for the Overlord.

If the Overlord is serious about winning, he wants to slow the heroes down in order to complete his chosen plot before they ever get to the final battle. The Overlord didn't start this whole "world conquest" thing just to bait out a group of heroes and try to kill them. I don't deny that the final battle is anti-climatic and flawed in some pretty obvious ways, but the Overlord does have things to do besides toy with the heroes until the end. He should be as focused on his "big picture" strategy as the heroes are on theirs when playing an advanced campaign.

Steve-O, I agree that the Overlord should be trying to end the campaign well before the Hero's make it to the final battle.

But I feel that the Overlord shouldn't be a cream puff in the end if the Heros make it to him. Why should the Overlord be less skilled than his LTs?

Erik

PoohHandLuke said:

Steve-O, I agree that the Overlord should be trying to end the campaign well before the Hero's make it to the final battle.

But I feel that the Overlord shouldn't be a cream puff in the end if the Heros make it to him. Why should the Overlord be less skilled than his LTs?

I don't disagree with anything you're saying. My point was just that the Overlord's strategy need not hinge on winning the final battle.

Hopefully, if the 2e campaign mode has anything akin to the final battle, it will do a better job of keeping things even throughout the length of the campaign.

Steve-O said:

I don't disagree with anything you're saying. My point was just that the Overlord's strategy need not hinge on winning the final battle.

Hopefully, if the 2e campaign mode has anything akin to the final battle, it will do a better job of keeping things even throughout the length of the campaign.

Hi there,

I don't know the AC gameplay because I've never had a shot at it, but I wanted to ask a side question.

It seems that the Avatar has no chance of winning the final battle, because if the heroes were able to bring the campaign to this climax they should be powerful enough to bring him down at a glance.

Is there no point for the OL to focus on Avatar Upgrades instead of other upgrades? I mean, can't he play a campaign in some way, that he still has a fair chance to win the final battle? Has anyone tried this before?

I thought that I could just simulate a final battle between 4 Gold Heroes and a fully upgraded Avatar and see what happens... but I don't know exactly how powerful Heroes can be if they are not strongly opposed during a campaign. The outcome would be biased in some way, at least "not authentic".

The_Warlock said:

I don't know the AC gameplay because I've never had a shot at it, but I wanted to ask a side question.

It seems that the Avatar has no chance of winning the final battle, because if the heroes were able to bring the campaign to this climax they should be powerful enough to bring him down at a glance.

Is there no point for the OL to focus on Avatar Upgrades instead of other upgrades? I mean, can't he play a campaign in some way, that he still has a fair chance to win the final battle? Has anyone tried this before?

I thought that I could just simulate a final battle between 4 Gold Heroes and a fully upgraded Avatar and see what happens... but I don't know exactly how powerful Heroes can be if they are not strongly opposed during a campaign. The outcome would be biased in some way, at least "not authentic".

You'd think so.
But experience tells us not.

And the changes they made to the final battle for SoB show that FFG recognised the problem, belatedly.

Best chance for a final battle looks to be to use the SoB rules. But the SoB rules aren't battle-tested either because SoB is broken and the heroes can't get to the final battel without the OL playing badly.

Problem is, the heroes can only win through a final battle, whereas the OL has plot and raze win options. So you don't actually want the OL to have a fair chance of winning the final battle, you just want it to be climactic and awesome. But those are almost mutually exclusive asks.

The_Warlock said:

Is there no point for the OL to focus on Avatar Upgrades instead of other upgrades? I mean, can't he play a campaign in some way, that he still has a fair chance to win the final battle? Has anyone tried this before?

Well, I've only played a handful of AC games myself (owing to the incredibly long time it takes) so I can't really answer that question authoritatively. There might be one or two Avatars who can put up a fight with the right upgrades. However, I have yet to hear any stories of Final Battles that were even close to a fair fight from anyone on this board or BGG.

The problem, the way I see it, is that well-equipped and fully healed heroes can win just about any single fight, toe to toe. The way to beat the heroes is to wear them down slowly (or crush them quickly before they get good gear.) In vanilla that works out pretty well if the OL is serious about winning, but in AC the heroes don't ever run out of CT. Wearing them down doesn't really work (except as a stalling tactic while trying to complete your plot.)

The best the Overlord can do is build up a significant lead in CT, which in theory gives him more upgrades and them fewer, but he still has to fight toe to toe in the end, no matter how things play out. It's also worth remembering that the primary boost in hero power is gear. Not skills, not health/fatigue upgrades (although fatigue upgrades ARE pretty sweet), not anything that denying them CT would actually prevent them from getting. Gear can be found for free and, if necessary, it can be bought with gold, no matter how the heroes are faring CT-wise. And gear is what gives them the edge in late Gold level.

It all boils down to the fact that Descent wasn't designed for campaign mode, originally. The AC did its best to give fans what they were demanding - a longer, more continuous adventure. I think it succeeded reasonably well over all. But the core mechanics of the game were designed to be single-session power-up and then start over next time. The AC stretches out the process, but it can't change the fact that Copper heroes are weak, Silver heroes are just noticeably above average and Gold heroes are awesome. There's only so much that could be done without altering the rules so much that it becomes a completely new game.

This, I think, illustrates my best hopes for second edition. It's cutting off the old mechanics and building something entirely independent. Similar in many ways, no doubt, but free to make the changes it needs to make in order to become the game fans seem to want it to be. The fact that it's going to have a campaign mode in the base box is also good for the same reason - it's part of the design process from square one. People can moan about how they don't want to upgrade and its so much money, etc, etc, but the truth of the matter is if FFG had continued making 1e expansions, the whole **** thing would just keep getting more bloated, more confusing, and not really addressing some of the larger core concerns. Starting anew is not always a bad thing.

Thank you Corbon and Steve-O, I appreciate the insight of people who have played this game a lot more than me and always gave competent answers or comments on these forums and BGG.

I was quite sure that the Overlord won't stand a chance in the final battle, because Descent game system is too much focused on overkill. You don't wear down the enemy until he falls to the ground, you usually wipe out the enemy. This is true for almost any boss battle and if the Heroes cannot strike hard and fast, they will be wiped out in return. So, no chances for having a fair chance for everyone, after such a long campaign when the OL had other winning strategies that the party tries to vanify. The only bad thing is that an Avatar without upgrades will be quite a ridiculous opponent for a party of Gold Heroes.

Corbon, did you try SoB rules with a standard RtL final battle? Do they work fine, at least to give the campaign a more exciting finale?

I also hope that 2nd edition will fix the whole system by cancelling the obvious flaws which we got used to. I'm not going to preorder it, I'm going to read the rules first and wait for players comments. Now I just started the awesome work of painting Descent miniatures and I'm not in a hush to upgrade (= a ton of extra work that could be saved for later). Still need to go through my first Advanced Campaign, then perhaps...

The_Warlock said:

Corbon, did you try SoB rules with a standard RtL final battle? Do they work fine, at least to give the campaign a more exciting finale?

No, we'd done RtL enough by then (4 complete and a couple of incomplete campaigns) and moved straight on to SoB.