Ok.

So 3 friends and I just completed the second JitD mission, the one with the Giants.

By the time they had gotten half way through, they were hittin on average for 10-12 damage per hit. Needless to say, some pretty fine equipment was to be had.

My question is, "are the spawn cards just delaying tactics?"

The reason I ask is that Beastmen, Skellies, and ESPECIALLY the spiders are nigh useless once the heroes are even moderately equiped. doing 2 damage when everyone has armor 4 ain't all that helpful

I was just spawning creatures to stand in the way.

"Just go throw yourselves on their swords boys. Hopefully your entrails will get all tangled up in their legs."

Is this right? Are the fodder monsters really just that?

Thanks in advance all.

Snort

Are you playing with the errata'd skellies and beastmen? Beastmen have damage bonuses instead of pierce, and skellies have pierce. Just make sure you are spawning when you can get some hits in on a squishy, don't even bother targeting the tanks if you can help it.

First of all, I suspect you of using a great deal of hyperbole. For everyone in the party to have 4+ armor is practically unheard-of, and 2 damage is an incredibly crappy attack roll for any monster unless you're ignoring Pierce and/or Sorcery. Well, except maybe for a razorwing. But Beastmen average around 6 (or 5 pierce 1, pre-errata), skeletons average around 3.5 (plus pierce with errata), and bane spiders average a little over 4, so pretty much every monster in the game should have a respectable chance of inflicting some damage on a hero with 4 armor.

Secondly, heroes' armor typically doesn't go up that much as the quest goes on. Depending on what expansions you have, I think the treasure decks typically have 30+ cards (not counting treasure caches) of which only 2-3 are armors, many of which actually give less direct armor bonus than the chainmail shop armor. The most plausible way you could get a party of heroes that all have 4+ armor is if you've got a 2-hero group and both heroes have 2 base armor plus chainmail, meaning they'd have that from the start of the game. Heroes do tend to get some defensive improvements from chests, but not a huge amount; the chances of killing a hero with a beastman war party probably don't change that dramatically over the course of a typical game.

Heroes' damage does improve dramatically with treasures, but a competent hero is probably reliably killing beastmen in 1 hit with shop weapons, so that's not much of an issue for most spawned monsters, unless the heroes can grab an AoE weapon.

But to answer your stated question, yes, the most important result of spawning monsters is often that it delays the heroes. Especially in smaller games. But the reason the heroes bother killing the skeletons following them around and plinking them with arrows is that the damage from those arrows does add up.

Thanks for the responses.

Yeah, the Caster didn't have 4 armor, but both The tanks did.

And I can blame dice rolling for the miserable monster damage. If there was a blank or 'X' on a die, it showed up, every single time.

Oh yes... to further prove the dice problewm...

I was dropping pit traps, and falling blocks left right and center on them.

"Roll 4 power dice..." avoided all 4 everytime. That's not an exageration.

But I thank you for the info!

Snort