Hey all, I have been playing Arkham Horror for a few months now and recently purchased the Lurker expansion. I am new to this website and still relatively new to this game. Please help me out with a few questions on some of the rulings and mechanics. Thanks in advance!

1. Are spells underpowered? Maybe my group is missing something here, but nobody ever seems to use spells. This is either because the sanity cost is too high to employ safely or a firearm is simply more effective. I find the offensive spells to be particularly weak. I know that certain investigators are geared towards using firearms and others spells, but even when I'm Dexter or the professor I find myself relying on that rifle instead of wither/shriveling. Because of this we tend to avoid the spell deck, and when a spell card is forcibly drawn through an encounter, it is with rolled eyes. Any insight on using spells effectively is welcome.

2. Using the Lurker "Herald variant": when the GOO awakens are the investigators allowed to form Dark Pacts during the "upkeep" phase just before attacking? If so, what is to stop all of the investigators from creating Dark Pacts in order to heal up any missing stamina/sanity to be transferred into power? This to me seems slightly overpowered, but I can't find a rule prohibiting it. On this note, what is to stop an investigator from casting a spell and taking a Soul Pact for a free cast and free sanity to use against the Ancient One? Since no more Reckoning cards can be drawn, there I don't see any drawback to forming Pacts.

3. How do you beat Cthulhu? I've had the terrible misfortune of facing him twice (some may call this lucky D:), both times we didn't leave a dent as his healing factor kept him at 11-12 tokens until we lost. It'd be great if you can share a few scenarios where you defeated him.

Thanks a lot everyone, these are all my questions for now, happy hunting!

1. Are spells underpowered?

Yes! Always have been.

(There are some imbalances in the game which mean that Sanity is a far more valuable stat than Stamina is, so losing it to cast spells is a much higher cost than the bonus would seem to suggest. There is also a lot of specialized rubbish in the spell deck which means it's not really worth shopping for spells. But of course it depends on your playing style. It seems to me that the designers dug themselves into a hole with this one: because a sanity cost of 0 or is too cheap, but a sanity cost of 2 is prohibitively high in most circumstances.)

My insight on 'using spells effectively' is "don't bother using spells". You might sometimes get a good spell by chance ("Find Gate" is the only REALLY useful one), but it's mostly not work seeking out spells, because you're nearly always better off shopping for commons and uniques.

2. Using the Lurker "Herald variant": … what is to stop all of the investigators from creating Dark Pacts in order to heal up any missing stamina/sanity to be transferred into power?

Heralds are removed from the game when the Ancient One awakens, so you'd lose your access to the special decks.

(At least… I THOUGHT that's how it worked, but it now I notice that King In Yellow has that rule, and Black Goat and Lurker don't have it… weird… seems like a sensible version of the variant tho'.)

3. How do you beat Cthulhu?

Feel free to ignore this answer if it's totally wrong, but:

It sounds like you may be making the standard mistake which everyone makes about the FInal Battle: the rulebook is simply wrong about how removing doom tokens works.

Successes in the final battle do not "reset" to zero when you remove a Doom token. Extra successes on the same combat check are carried over to the next Doom token, so really, the GOO just has one loooong track of hit points, and you have to keep chiselling away at it until it's empty. Technically it's measured in 'doom tokens' but in most cases this is irrelevent. So if you have four investigators, Cthulhu awakens with 52 hit points, and will regain 4 hit points every turn.

Of course, if you are already playing correctly then yes, Cthulhu is just pretty tough to beat. (Though, he's not the worst, not by a long shot.)

Thanks a lot for the swift reply! I'm a little disappointed to learn that we weren't depreciating the usefulness of spells after all but at least this way we won't have to alter our strategy to accommodate them. As for the Lurker, I don't believe the rules sheet specifies his removal from the game at any point so I'm not sure :.

Cannibal Bean,

One thing you can try is have the Investigators spend their Sanity only upon a successful roll. Obviously, a spell will take a toll, but in this case, should the Investigator fail, you've only sacrificed one hand (or possibly two) for the round.

Unless there's a Lurker ruling that I've momentarily forgotten about, then yeah, the fact that it sticks around in final combat is one of many exploitable features of the herald (actually a comparatively minor one, but let's not get into that ), and it would be perfectly reasonable of you to house rule it away if you thought it was overpowered or simply unthematic.

I do want to disagree with thecorinthian about spells, though. Combat spells are definitely weak, and, except in emergencies, mostly just see use against ghosts or other physically immune monsters, but there are some pretty badass noncombat spells. Find Gate is probably the best, yes, but Arcane Insight, Call Friend, Control Gate, Alchemical Process, and the various monster moving and healing/damage prevention spells can all be extremely useful.

1:
I've heard this complain a lot but I have never felt that it is a problem. Sure the combat spells should only be used in emergency (there might be a lot of those though) or by an investigator with good lore and lots of sanity (I find the professor and the psychologist especially useful for that) in which case I rarely have a problem that can't be solved by going to the asylum once per game. Besides there are other spells (as already mentioned) that can really turn a desperate situation into a neat victory.
And I have always felt that the question about some items being underpowered is not that relevant, the fun part of the game is to make the best of whatever you are given (but I must admit that I very seldom go to the magic shop, except with Carolyn Fern, where I always start by going there).

2:
Hmm never really thought about this.

3:
According to my own experience the trick to beat Cthulhu in final combat is: Don't.
Try to defeat him before he awakens, that will give you a much better chance to win
(He's causes 86% failure in final combat but only wakes 45% of the games according to Tibs' statistics. Check out the "Arkham Horror Statistics Reports" thread on this forum). This goes for several of the GOO especially from Insmouth Horror.
Personally I have only faced Cthulhu in final combat once and we only managed to remove one doom token.

I don't have a great deal to add here, but I am going to have to agree with Subochre on the Spells. Yes, Sanity is precious, but some Spells are quite powerful, and there are a number of good ones that have no Sanity cost (Markings of Isis, Mists of Releh, Revelation of Script, Implant Suggestion, Feeding the Mind, Cloud Memory, Storm of Spirits). But of course, the real issue here is, to be fair, not the overall distribution of useful-v.useless spells but said distribution within the base game, which is packed with a startling number of duds (Enchant Weapon, anyone?). There's not really anything to be done about this but to get more expansions; probably the best, by my estimation, would be the spells from the new Dark Pharaoh and King in Yellow, although others can feel free to argue with me on this one. Dunwich is arguably a contender as well, and, assuming you're interested in the Spell deck merely seeing use rather than being accessible to everyone, Kingsport deserves a mention solely for including Daisy Walker.

Spells are life-savers. I never go to the Magic shop, but I always make use of spells.

What's wrong with enchant weapon? If that's the only spell you have, plus a Rifle, and you have to fight a physically resistant monster, well, it's a life saver.

Arkane Insight, Plumb the Void (try it with Daisy), Find Gate, Mists of Releh (probably THE best), Bless, Forced Learning, Bind Monster etc etc. These are all great, and none is a direct booster for combat checks.

Thanks for all the help everybody , the only thing that remains a little confusing is how the lurker operates during the final battle. Like Subochre said in his comment, it is nothing a house rule can't rectify. The reason this is so unclear is the sheet states that "at the start of any turn, an investigator may make a pact with the Lurker at the Threshold". While it does not specifically state during the "upkeep" phase, I believe it is implied. In the base game, the final battle's I don't know if the "rounds" are the same as "turns" even though they function the same way… :

CannibalBean said:

From a thematic point of view, I kind of like that spells are either useless or prohibitively expensive. Don't get me wrong, it's terrible from a game design point of view, but magic in Lovecraft's world is not something people trip over on their way to get groceries. It's rare, and witnessing it (let along using it ) has a tendency to make people go bleeding-out-the-ears insane. In an ironic kind of way, if magic were properly balanced there would end up being too much of it in play for my tastes.

We don't spend a great amount of time hunting for spells either, and most of the ones that get forced upon us are ignored until such time as we need an item to discard for the hospital or something (Yes! Spells are items! I guess being written on an old scroll or in the back of dusty book counts.) Every now and then we find a use for some of them, and that's about all the meddling with Forces Man Was Not Meant to Know that I'd want to see us partake in anyway.

Heralds originally were supposed to be discarded from play when the AO awoke. I suspect that later heralds, even if expansion rules don't specify, are also supposed to be discarded.

I also suspect that Guardians and Institutions should be discarded.

Steve-O said:

It would be nice if all spells were rare, powerful and very dangerous to the caster…. but tbh they are included on more-or-less equal terms to the rest of the item decks. And they are mostly more specialized, which means it's less worthwhile expending resources to try to get random spells.

@Tox: "what's wrong with Enchant Weapon"? Nothing really… except that you need to have another card in order for it to be useful! Why go shopping for Enchant Weapon when you could go shopping for Unique items and have a greater chance of picking up a more powerful weapon for less money?

(To clarify my earlier thing: it does depend on your tactics, and the problems with the spell deck are really just a symptom of the general imbalance between sanity and stamina, which is mainly caused by the way combat works. Stamina loss from encounters is much rarer than Sanity loss; and because Stamina damage from combat is unlimited if you can't defeat the monster - whereas Horror damage has a maximum which you can know in advance - it's usually better to max out your Fight track and ignore Will completely, then only ever enter combat if you know you can pay the Sanity cost of failing the Horror check. Occasionally a monster will jump on you which will drive you mad straight away, but this is relatively rare and there are other things you can do avoid it. I honestly think this is the optimum way to play the game, and a consequence of it is that you will almost never have spare Sanity to spend on spells; the proportion of the spell deck which is actually useful to you, and the ease of your access to it, are sufficiently low that it's not worth trying to acquire spells.)

thecorinthian said:

Ok, it's because I play it differently. I always focus on having a chance at passing the Horror check - unless impossible, of course. And I fight if I'm sure I have the means (weapons, spells) to defeat the monster - sure, freak accidents do happen from time to time. Doing this has really cut down on my visits to the Asylum/Hospital. Other World encounters and encounters in general always find a way to make me lose sanity, so if I can avoid it, I prefer to keep a healthy amount of it on all investigators.

So, nothing's wrong with Enchant Weapon, because: I never go shopping for spells, I rarely go shopping for anything else and if it comes my way (I've seen the spell maybe once or twice), it's always welcome, because I didn't really spend anything to get it

Call me stupid, but I don't care about maximizing every little aspect of the game. I enjoy the rush to get sufficient clues for the next seal

I didn't mean to say that Enchant Weapon is entirely useless, it's just, well, bad. It stacks up very badly against other spells. Compare it to Shrivelling; they both have the same Sanity cost. Now, most of the time, Enchant Weapon is useless, but let's imagine you're in the (very specific) scenario in which it's useful: you're facing a monster with Physical Resistance or Immunity and you have a physical weapon but no magic weapon (or the magic weapon you do have is sufficiently weaker than the physical one that you think it's worth spending 1 Sanity to use instead). Even in this situation, the one that Enchant Weapon is designed for, you'd still want to use Shrivelling most of the time. +6 in one hand is very powerful, and it's extremely unlikely that your lineup of physical weapons can best that unless you don't have a one-handed magical weapon or Wither, and even then, +6 is quite respectable even for two hands. Yes, alright, the modifier on Enchant Weapon is one better, but that really doesn't make up for the rest of its flaws. And Shrivelling (as CannibalBean points out) isn't even that good in the first place.

Tox said:

Oh yeah, no argument here. 'Walk' is right about Enchant Weapon, but of course it's not the type of game where it matters if some cards are objectively weaker than others - if anything, the biggest loss is in terms of 'theme', i.e. it's a shame that spells don't really live up to the sort of effects that we might expect from them based on the stories. In my experience the game is usually about fighting against the Cthulhu Mythos using rifles, pistols and dynamite, rather than any supernatural weapons.

Thanks for the great replies! So, if the Lurker is discarded at the GOO's advent, what happens to the pacts and power currently in play? Are they null? or can they still be used as they were obtained at an earlier stage of the game?

Well obviously the Bound Ally cards remain in play. I don't know where I sit with Blood and Soul pacts.

There's no reason RAW that they shouldn't remain in play, though there's a potential for exploit when you gain power. I have ruled that you can no longer gain power (similarly to how you can't gain money or clues).

Spells are like insurance: most of the time they just sit there in your inventory, never getting a good chance to shine…until that ONE TIME you're SO GLAD you paid to have the **** stuff in the first place.

With my Cult, I have the two extremes:

Zebra loves Spells, because they're so fascinating. A gun may more be useful, but it's quite boring: "+X to blah." Zebra will cast stuff just to cast it. If he has Call Friend, he will check EVERY TURN if someone wants him to use it. He will cast Summon or Lure Monster just to make his Movement Phase more exciting. He digs gambling on the Fist of Yog or Spectral Razor. He loves Dexter, Harvey, Agnes; he adores Carolyn and Daisy.

On the other hand, Wings HATES Spells. She will collect guns and blades like the Punisher, but won't even hold onto a Spell for discard fodder if she can trade it away. Sanity is for Horror Checks, not giving away for the chance to roll the dice. And for what? A one-handed +6? She's got a sword that guarantees five without a roll. A quick out of an Other World? What if that second OW Encounter is for a free Unique Item? She does like Intervene and Sigil of Hermes…so long as YOU'RE the one casting it.

I'm somewhere in the middle, I suppose. I do prefer the "toolbox" Spells over the combat ones, because that's the one area weapons can't go, and they make the game more interesting. I also love playing a Spellcaster if that's how my Investigator shakes out (like Amanda or Vincent with the right cards). But I have only once or twice ever shopped at the Ye Olde Magic Shoppe (and only with Dexter).

Bottom Line: Spells potentially do things other cards can't, and that's just never a bad thing to have that around.