We just beat Nyarlathothep in the final battle, which was our first final battle. Woohoo! Two players, so we needed 22 hits on the elder one to banish it. During a few turns, we adjusted our characters to have the maximum amount of fight and lore skills. We were lucky to have 5 clue tokens each at the start of the battle, I only lost one during the whole fight. You're immediately devoured if you don't have any clues when Nyarlathothep attacks. I was lucky enough to have Professor Armitage as an ally, he removed Nyarlathothep's magical resistance when I attacked him. The fight felt easy, so I began to wonder if we did everything correctly during the fight. We traded items during upkeep which was allowed. I had two bullwhips to re-roll two of my combat check dice each turn. My brother gave his shrivelling spell to me when he was down to 1 sanity, I could use it to full effect (because of the professor).

Where I think we went wrong is with casting spells. If I cast Shrivelling during final battle upkeep, does the effect last long enough for me to add the 6 dice to my attack?

Here's the card text:

Shrivelling

Casting Modifier: -1

Sanity Cost: 1

Any Phase: Cast and exhaust to gain +6 to Combat checks until the end of this combat.

Having read it again, I guess I should have used one hand when attacking the elder one to cast the spell… it didn't do a huge difference, I only used a bullwhip in my other hand so I would have attacked with one less combat die per turn.

During Final Battle, whenever an Upkeep phase begins, exhausted cards are refreshed, so spells require to be recast. After recasting, Shrivelling lasts until the end of this combat round, which means you can use it to attack Nyarly with your investigator. And you need to devote one hand to it in order to have it working. So, yes, one Shrivelling and one Bullwhip. But for some strange reasons (not even death may reveal) even if you don't use the Bullwhip, you can exhaust it to reroll one die

In any case, well done!

Julia said:

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. What I meant was I had an enchanted blade in one hand and a bullwhip in the other, and I used all of the combat dice from Shrivelling. I shouldn't have been able to use the bullwhip (+1 combat die), since I casted Shrivelling. Not a huge difference. I still had 4 clue tokens, my brother 5, so I'm positive we would have defeated Nyarly even if we had played 100% by the book.

Rexor_80 said:

Yep, sure, you had a large victory, so for sure nothing'd have changed!

As a smuggler once said, "Don't get cocky kid!"

Nyarlathotep is one of the easiest AOs to battle along with Yig. Try Cthulhu and victory will not come very easily…

Poor old Nyarlathotep. A fairly major presence in the Mythos, the only Ancient One to ever speak in the original stories (from what I've read, at least), and he goes down quite easily. In fact, if you prepare for the final battle by stockpiling clues, it's almost impossible to lose. Here's hoping he's the next to get the Arkham Nights treatment….

Walk said:

A little less conversation and a little more action please! ::laughter::

Julia said:

It's a bit disturbing that he's so easy, I really like him otherwise.

I guess one could play with only the monsters from the original box and then add all mask monsters from all expansions (there are 10 of them) and use the dark pharao as herald.

Has anyone tried this?

Tbla said:

You should try Avi's demigod variant (buried somewhere in the fan creation thread), Scenarios 13 to 16 of Avi's Advanced Players League (link in my signature) or my Coming Chaos herald ( here )

Ah, Julia, you never disappoint. However, I haven't won in the longest time, so for the moment, I think I'll pass….

Walk said:

Thx :-) Sorry for your bad streak!