The new preview is out and it takes us through the Mage and Necromancer classes. Enjoy

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp

Unclechawie said:

Sorry Runemaster, not Mage.

Looks pretty cool to me. Runemagic looks like it's being expanded in some interesting ways (the ability for mages to add the "Rune" keyword to weapons implies a level of control over rune creation that was previously unknown in the world at large.)

Necromancer also seems to be nicely "fleshed" out. =P I'm a little sad to hear that the Necromancer's reanimate is the only familiar in 2e (besides those in the conversion kit, of course), but I'll still find a way to enjoy this game, I imagine =)

This game can nevner come out quickly enough…darni it all!!!!!!!!!

Runic Sorcery's conditions i wonder what are thous (1+ damaga 1+ range or something special like stun target or knockback …). Any guess?

Lupin89 said:

pretty much everything that is a condition in the game. stun, immoblize, rage maybe, bleed maybe, daze, (mind you I'm going based on 1st ed. on some of these), burn and bleed, . wouldn't KO'd be a condition too? hmm…….

The four conditions included in the 2E base game are Stun, Immobilize, Disease and Poison.

Gotta say, I'm loving the Necromancer. Probably my favourite class seen so far.

A pet zombie. Awwwww….

Something I not completely clear on (may have missed it somewhere):

Are spells (Runes) considered weapons?

In other words, is Arcane Bolt considered a Magic and/or Rune weapon for the purposes of say, Runic Knowledge ?

klempad said:

Yes, runes are weapons.

Sausageman said:

Same here. But then again, I love playing the undead (Runewars, Warhammer).

Here's a question: exactly when and how does the reanimate activate? Does the necromancer have to spend his/her actions to make it do stuff, or does it have its own turn? An extra, more or less full-strength turn every round seems a little too powerful, while just an extra option for attacking (which doesn't really add much) seems rather useless. So I'm not sure. And what's with the "It may perform 1 attack action during its activation"? Why would this need to be specified? At first I thought that familiar cards might specify all the actions the familiar could take, but that would mean the reanimate couldn't move, which not only would make it pretty hard to use effectively but would render its movement characteristic purposeless. Could the phrase really mean "It may perform no more than 1 attack action during its activation"? If so, that's some pretty terrible word choice, but then, I suppose that wouldn't be altogether surprising….

Walk said:

Presumably this is all in the rulebook.

I would guess that the very fact that the familiar has a Speed rating enables it to move, and the special text allows it to attack (once per activation). I would also guess the familiar takes its activation after the controlling hero.

Bleached Lizard said:

i think about same as you two

Reanimate: (i call him Skull Jack and his clan) it is like OLs monsters: 1 move 1 attack and stays on the board

Raise Dead: to call Skull Jacks Ugly uncle Bob for time to time for Jack to collect his bones from ground and repair himself (i think you need to remove current one before to summon. Not sure though could be that you can summon new one to place around you spot)

Dark Command: give you use monster you killed for make 1 move and 1 attack (if knowledge test pass)

For person that asked about on this

klempad said:

It might have been better if there were a "Weapon" keyword for weapons, but I'm pretty sure the Arcane Bolt is a weapon card. It's got hands in the corner, indicating it needs to be equipped like an item, it's got attack dice down the right side like other weapons do, and it has the green bow icon which presumably indicates it is a ranged weapon. It certainly looks like a weapon card, anyway.

Apparently "Magic" is a keyword now instead of a third attack type, which is probably better in the long run. If nothing else, it opens the door for "Melee" magic attacks that don't require range to be counted, which is a good thing IMHO.

Steve-O said:

Or monsters/lieutenants who can't be hit by any attack without the magic keyword.

…and I can already spot things that I'm pretty sure are going to have to be FAQ'd.

Runic Sorcery adds a condition to "the target" of an attack. Maybe there's no possible way to ever perform an area attack when using that skill (and maybe they'll have the discipline to maintain that in expansions), but it sure looks like they simply failed to learn their lesson from Flaming Fury . We know from Exploding Rune that Blast still exists (though you can't use those particular two skills at the same time), which probably means that attacks still technically target spaces and not figures, at minimum.

(On a side note: one fatigue to add Blast to an attack, potentially usable with any weapon in the game , as often as you want? That would be comically overpowered in first edition. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be overpowered in second edition, but it's one of the first things I would try.)

Writing the fatigue cost for all skills in the bottom corner of the skill might sound like a good idea…until you realize that there are some skills with multiple separate uses. So Undead Might gives your reanimate +2 health and it can be exhausted to enhance your reanimate's attack. And it has a fatigue cost. I'm guessing that fatigue cost is intended to apply only to the second effect, but it's written in a way that implies it applies to "the whole card", which is misleading at best.

They seem to be using the heart symbol in all the places where in first edition they would have used the word "damage" or "wound" or "health". So when a necromancer gets attacked and uses Dark Pact to transfer the "heart" to his reanimate, who's defense pool do you roll on that attack? I suppose it's possible that they've rigorously defined the word "suffer" in a way that will make this clear…

Walk said:

In first edition, there was a core rule saying that a familiar could activate after it's owner's turn, and move its speed each time it activated. Most familiars didn't attack, so when they added an attacking familiar (Furr the Spirit Wolf), it needed a special rule saying that it could also attack once during each activation.

The reanimate card seems to make perfect sense if we assume familiars work the same way in 2nd edition, so until we get more info, that's what I'd assume.

Antistone said:

Based on the smaller monster counts we've already seen in 2e, I'm guessing monsters won't be quite as easy to knock over as they used to be. Also, none of the cards I've seen so far discuss anything like "Blast 2" and Blast 1 doesn't seem that overpowered. I suspect there will be a lot less cumulative stacking of bonuses in 2e.

Antistone said:

For your first paragraph, the fatigue cost is to exhaust the card. The reanimate bonus is a permanent ability.

For your second paragraph, you suffer damage after you've rolled for defense, not before, so there's not confusion about which dice to roll.

Steve-O said:

To go along with what Steve-O said and quoting from the preview "Spoiling for a Fight," roughly 6th paragraph down:

Another symbol that the attack and power dice have in common is the surge ( ). You might think of a surge as a sort of currency, which can be spent to trigger powerful abilities on an attack. It’s important to note, however, that each available surge effect can only be triggered once per attack, so a Knight cannot, for example, Shield Slam multiple enemies just because he’s rolled multiple surges. It’s also important to explain what might be called the “universal surge effect.” Any hero can spend a surge to recover one fatigue, but as with all surge effects, this can only be triggered once per attack.

Also, if you look at this die representation:

Surges are very infrequent (this is not taking into account surges from skills or or hero abilities).

So a rune weapon with blast will only be allowed to blow up once per hero turn.

Columbob said:

Sorry, I don't recognize your name. Are you on the design team? Where are you getting this information?

Coldmoonrising said:

The preview article says that the use of a surge ability is limited to once per attack , not once per turn . But the card I was referring to doesn't even involve the use of surges; it's a skill that requires a fatigue and an action to make an attack with the Blast ability.

Since you're spending an action to make a special attack, rather than adding Blast to just any attack you already happen to be making, there's no question of being able to use it multiple times on the same attack. Though there's also nothing to stop you from using it more than once during a turn (as far as we know), as long as you have enough actions and enough fatigue to power it. And if there is a weapon in the game that has "blast" inherently, there's nothing (as far as we know) to stop you from using both at once - though that wouldn't necessarily do anything extra (getting the same ability from multiple sources wasn't useful in first edition unless the ability had "ranks").

But the main issue is that just a single rank of Blast changes your attack from hitting one square to hitting nine squares (or at least, it did in first edition). Those 9 squares need to be in a specific pattern, but still, finding a way to hit 2 opponents at once was rarely a challenge (even in my Enduring Evil variant, which tended to have a lot fewer monsters on the board at one time). So whether monsters go down in 1 hit or 100 hits, you're still basically spending 1 fatigue to double (or more) your total damage output in a lot of cases.

There's still a lot we don't know, and a lot of possible reasons that it might not be nearly as good in second edition - starting with the fact that it sounds like dealing damage is probably a lot less good in second edition, in general. But if you told me there was one broken skill in second edition and asked me to guess which it was, this would be pretty high on my list of guesses.

As long as I haven't seen the complete rules, I am not going to guess about anything being broken or not. I hope that the designers have learned some lessons after issues of the first edition, so I remain optimistic that this time everything will be better balanced. And after what i've seen in the previews, I am convinced they at least learned some lessons

If I would have to pick one worry I do have, is that there has been very little shown of what the OL can do. The heroes seem to have a very nice bag of tricks. But what of the OL? What will he get when he does kill heroes? In quest without reinforcements, will he really be confined to the handful of monsters he starts with? From what I've seen so far, killing heroes seems a bit pointless, they can just stand up… Hopefully they will give us a bit mor info on this.

Antistone said:

If an ability on a card doesn't require an action to use, why wouldn't it be used permanently? How would you apply +2 health on the Reanimate otherwise if it wasn't permanent? How would you apply the Brute berserker ability (+4 health)?

Just use your head. Or do you need the design team to hold your hand every step of the way? How old are you? You're also asking questions before you've even read the rules. Seriously.

Columbob said:

Abilities requiring an action are clearly labeled with that curved arrow symbol. Neither of the abilities on the card in question require an action to use. There's still a fatigue cost listed.

Yes, I do need the design team to hold my hand every step of the way, because I am an adult with enough maturity not to assume that something will be intuitively obvious to all 7 billion people on the planet just because it seems obvious to me personally. If the designers want me to pay them for the game, then designing it is their job, and that includes clearly communicating the rules. Reading the designers' minds is a sucker's game, and I have no need to give the designers my money in order to make up my own rules.

And with a game like Descent, it is likely that fewer than half of their players will ever read the rulebook. I personally introduced at least a dozen different people to first edition, and as far as I know none of them ever read the rulebook cover-to-cover, instead relying mostly on my oral explanations. If the skill cards are significantly and unnecessarily misleading to someone who has received only an overview of the rules (like I would give to a new player), that is a genuine problem with the game's design that will lead to actual problems at the table, whether or not there is some footnote on page 20 that clears it up. (Why do you think they're giving us cards for the status effects this time instead of just tokens like in first edition?)

But I'm also reasonably sure that the rulebook does not instruct us to distinguish between "permanent" and "transient" abilities on skill cards and apply the fatigue cost only to the "transient" ones, because once a designer has gotten that far along that path, it is virtually inevitable that the abilities on the skill cards would be labeled with some word or symbol to indicate which category they fall into. Asking players to guess and argue about which is which would be dumb even if 99% of players end up reaching the conclusion you intended, and it would cost almost nothing to prevent.

But I see you don't actually have any more information than the rest of us do and have chosen to use mockery as a tactic to distract from the fact that you are answering questions before you've even read the rules. Seriously.