I have not played D2e enough to figure this out yet but would stacking surges unbalance the game? For example; you are using a “Yew Shortbow” and you roll 2 surges. By the rules you can only spend 1 surge for the +2 Range and 1 surge for the +1 Damage. Would the Yew Shortbow be to strong ‘unbalanced’ if you were to spend both surges on the +1 Damage, therefore doing +2 Damage?

Let me answer this from a veteran D1e player point of view. Especially that of the OL 1e. In 1e, heroes were allow to stack surges on power-ups like 1 surge = +2 dmg and having 3-5 surges in one roll with dice and skills cards, etc. Resulting in +6-10 dmg on a monster that doesn't scale with the amount of heroes. It got to be insane as the heroes hit silver treasure and up. The monsters were merely speed bumps to finishing off the quest.

Now with D2e and limiting surge usage to once per instance has greatly reduced the "steamroller" effect and game play is really fun on both sides of the table.

This is my opinion and I enjoy playing the game with the rules written. People whine/complain about this and that from 1e to 2e and house rule what they don't like. I feel it takes away from the new experience and they aren't getting the full impact and intense moments of the game by doing so.

I would agree with you Coldmoonrising. As for house rules, our group will do house rules but only when a rule seems to be a bit ridiculous in our opinion. We have not done any house rules for D2e. So far there doesn’t seem to be any reason at this point. This, to me is a well written, thought out game.

That would also make the beserkers starting equipment pointless seeing his axe essentially gives him the ability to spend two surges on adding two damage, I think.

I actually DON'T agree with ColdMoonRising. The reason things fell down in D1 was because once you hit silver or gold dice, the amount of surges you could roll was INSANE. In D2, you're pretty hard pushed to roll more than 3 EVER, so why does it become broken?

This assumes of course that they never release other enhancement dice (and personally, I'd love it if they did - posibly tied into their 4 traits, but who knows), but for now, I see absolutely NO problem with this.

Early in a campaign or a standalone quest it might not be unbalancing. You might go from 5 max damage to 6. If in Act II you had the Latari Longbow, Bow Mastery, Mana Weave, and Divine Fury, you could go from 10 max damage to 20. That's one example; I could probably find something more drastic with a specific hero making a melee attack. I would say that doubling might count as unbalancing. The Overlord might also gain from multiple surges, but doesn't have the same selection of skills, items, abilities, etc.

The Chipped Axe would be less powerful, as it has two identical surge effects.

I would rather follow the "if it ain't broken, don't change it" philosophy.

Robin said:

Simple answer: yes.

D2e has been designed with non-stacking surges. Monsters, and how hard they are to kill, are designed knowing that weapons are limited in the amount of damage they can deal with a single attack. The counter to that is that an extra surge may be spent to recover fatigue. Changing the stacking rule would likely make everything more fragile, both heroes and monsters.

I like the change. I'm of the opinion that even without the Road to Legend silver/gold dice, the weapons available in the standard silver and gold treasure decks allowed for some staggeringly high damage attacks from the heroes. Boss/End monsters would fall to 1, maybe 2 attacks…often times without even getting to activate.