Ok, the new preview is up http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4646

and my first question is why does the changling card art look nothing like its figure? It looks like a clockwork city guard on the cover, and the figure looks like a city guard, and on the card art, it looks like a demon. I'm not entirely sure even now that those city guard looking guys are changlings and that there isn't a surprise 4th monster.

My second question is since changlings rely on corrupted citizen cards, would there ever be a good reason to use them outside of the nekerhall campaign? Like if you play them in Shadow Rune, would you be able to choose one corrupted citizen card to help you out there? Or are they a monster resigned to show up and be usefuly in only this campaign.

it seems like they should have some additional text that reads like "If used outside of nekerhall, choose one card to use in act 1 and an additional card in act 2." or something like that. Or maybe even able to buy it with threat or exp?

First - in SoN we wil have 4 monsters: Changeling, Ynfernael Hulk, Rat Swarm and Ironbound of Nerekhall.

The figure examined by heroes on the cover is a Ironbound, and the Chageling is hiden behind a column in the back.

The demons that where not show in preview so far are massive Ynfernal Hulks, You can see there card in the first preview - it stands on the left of the box.

The other minature shown is an Ironbound but we did not get a look at it card or abilities. He will be some kind of golem.

Second - You can summon Chageling in every campain but it looks like You will not have the chance to get corrupten citizen cards (as those are rewards in SoN quests).

I hope this clarified everything.

Cheers

still a black/brown defense roll isn't the baddest and hideous laughter looks really cool. it will open new possibilities in some quests.

at least the red changeling becomes a MUSTKILL in every attribute related encounter - buying time and actions. the lack of a crit on surges seems a little uncool - as you need damage to get bleeding on (wonder what that will be about... .) but the highdamage monster appears to be unrevealed.

cool fact: rats cant miss! love it!

Chageling seems a bit op, (i play OL btw) the only thing thay lack is damage dice, only the master have 3 dice tho, 4 move and black and brown armour 4 units, and not bad hp, good abilities aswell, if u compare whit beastmen. Hope thay buffing beastman atleast whit one hp whit the new Descent Hero and Monster Collection - Oath of the Outcast

Hideous slauther from the master changelin is really cool skill, and it will help to overcome powerfull heroes.

maybe the monster I will take the more often.

Chageling seems a bit op, (i play OL btw) the only thing thay lack is damage dice, only the master have 3 dice tho

I think it's a mistake to judge something as OP before you've had a chance to actually use them. I find that a lot of times, abilities and combos that sound OP on paper aren't really that insurmountable in practice.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/descent-second-ed/news/shadow-of-nerekhall/preview-3/DJ07-Cards_Overlord-08.png

Treacherous shadows looks dangerous, play it with lord merrick farrow plot deck to get the card back in your hand every turn for only 1 threat... I wouldnt wanna be the heroes playing against that.

OP, power creeping and game breaking i tells ya steve-o;)

Looking at some of these cards, I look to this next expansion with uneasiness. Our OL (Kunzite) happens to beat us rather handily as it is, and some of these OL cards -- a Level 1 card that can potentially sap ALL heroes of their fatigue? -- seem like it'd get table-flippingly frustrating to play against rather quickly. Considering how heavy the thematic set relies on willpower checks, only the healer class has any willpower worth mentioning; the Warrior and Mage both have 2 and the Scout has 3. I can foresee a lot of frustration for heroes playing a Nerekhall-themed campaign:

In battle-oriented maps, the rats and their 'unmissable' up-to-6-damage attacks can easily finish off any hero. If anyone happens to be left alive, they have to go through a Master Changeling that basically works (with corrupted citizen cards) as a Lieutenant-tier monster that reinforces. Any late game quests will often have the Warrior and Mage (and sometimes the Scout) killing each other via Treacherous Shadows before the OL's monsters even activate, thus spending precious actions standing fallen heroes up and getting shanked by Out of Darkness . I can see the sheer frustration of spending a rest action to recover fatigue, then either getting killed by an ally thanks to Treacherous Shadows , or a Changeling's Whisper ability moving that adjacent hero into an Imploding Rift and robbing the hero and potentially all his adjacent friends of all their stamina. I don't know how heroes are supposed to compete with 'race' quests when all these OL cards leaving them constantly at a loss for fatigue, either. I can't really see Nerekhall being saved from the inevitable shadows that threaten to consume it the way these cards are going.

While I agree with Steve-O in the sense that it looks like doom and gloom on paper but may not be as insurmountable in practice... He doesn't have to play against Kunzite . On top of being a very clever OL with access to all the Lieutenant Decks, she's incredibly lucky with the dice to boot.

OP, power creeping and game breaking i tells ya steve-o;)

Well, okay. In spite of what I just said, it is true that power creep is to be expected in any product that expands continually. However, if OL and heroes creep at the same rate, they hopefully remain balanced against one another.

That's an unavoidable downside of expansions. "Balance" has to be measured with a sliding scale because the constant influx of new material is also constantly shifting the balance.

If you want something that's absolutely perfectly balanced in all conditions, you need to look for a game that comes all in one box with no add-ons.

So Chess?

Agreed that Treacherous Shadow looks to be very powerful (especially if you stack some attribute test penalties to multiple heroes... like with a Master Changeling for example). Looking at all the level 3 cards available so far, I'd say TS feels like the strongest. (Barring pre-errata Reinforce)

I'm always a fan of aligning cards/skills/abilities to temporarily (or completely, if the setup is strong enough) remove luck , so the Rat Swarm is a welcome addition, as is the Master Changeling. Hideous Laughter joins Baron Zachareth's Nefarious Power, Saboteur's Wicked Laughter and Basic 2's Befuddle as additional ways to make trap cards hit more reliably.

Thinking either Baron Zachareth or Queen Ariad as your Agent (Queen Ariad seems Trap driven) alongside Basic 2 with Shadowmancer/Saboteur cards could make for a very powerful combination, also while using Master Changelings as often as possible.

So Chess?

Agreed that Treacherous Shadow looks to be very powerful (especially if you stack some attribute test penalties to multiple heroes... like with a Master Changeling for example). Looking at all the level 3 cards available so far, I'd say TS feels like the strongest. (Barring pre-errata Reinforce)

I'm always a fan of aligning cards/skills/abilities to temporarily (or completely, if the setup is strong enough) remove luck , so the Rat Swarm is a welcome addition, as is the Master Changeling. Hideous Laughter joins Baron Zachareth's Nefarious Power, Saboteur's Wicked Laughter and Basic 2's Befuddle as additional ways to make trap cards hit more reliably.

Thinking either Baron Zachareth or Queen Ariad as your Agent (Queen Ariad seems Trap driven) alongside Basic 2 with Shadowmancer/Saboteur cards could make for a very powerful combination, also while using Master Changelings as often as possible.

Chess isn't balanced, White is IMBA. The new cards seem strong, but against my current group I wouldn't use it even if I could, the lowest willpower in the party is 3, and all 3 of the other characters have a willpower of 4.

So Chess?

Agreed that Treacherous Shadow looks to be very powerful (especially if you stack some attribute test penalties to multiple heroes... like with a Master Changeling for example). Looking at all the level 3 cards available so far, I'd say TS feels like the strongest. (Barring pre-errata Reinforce)

I'm always a fan of aligning cards/skills/abilities to temporarily (or completely, if the setup is strong enough) remove luck , so the Rat Swarm is a welcome addition, as is the Master Changeling. Hideous Laughter joins Baron Zachareth's Nefarious Power, Saboteur's Wicked Laughter and Basic 2's Befuddle as additional ways to make trap cards hit more reliably.

Thinking either Baron Zachareth or Queen Ariad as your Agent (Queen Ariad seems Trap driven) alongside Basic 2 with Shadowmancer/Saboteur cards could make for a very powerful combination, also while using Master Changelings as often as possible.

Chess isn't balanced, White is IMBA. The new cards seem strong, but against my current group I wouldn't use it even if I could, the lowest willpower in the party is 3, and all 3 of the other characters have a willpower of 4.

Whoa, haven't seen a group with that many high Willpower heroes.

Although now that I think about it, you have Reinhart for Warrior, Roganna for Scout, Astarra for Mage. Guess there are options...

So Chess?

Agreed that Treacherous Shadow looks to be very powerful (especially if you stack some attribute test penalties to multiple heroes... like with a Master Changeling for example). Looking at all the level 3 cards available so far, I'd say TS feels like the strongest. (Barring pre-errata Reinforce)

I'm always a fan of aligning cards/skills/abilities to temporarily (or completely, if the setup is strong enough) remove luck , so the Rat Swarm is a welcome addition, as is the Master Changeling. Hideous Laughter joins Baron Zachareth's Nefarious Power, Saboteur's Wicked Laughter and Basic 2's Befuddle as additional ways to make trap cards hit more reliably.

Thinking either Baron Zachareth or Queen Ariad as your Agent (Queen Ariad seems Trap driven) alongside Basic 2 with Shadowmancer/Saboteur cards could make for a very powerful combination, also while using Master Changelings as often as possible.

Chess isn't balanced, White is IMBA. The new cards seem strong, but against my current group I wouldn't use it even if I could, the lowest willpower in the party is 3, and all 3 of the other characters have a willpower of 4.

Whoa, haven't seen a group with that many high Willpower heroes.

Although now that I think about it, you have Reinhart for Warrior, Roganna for Scout, Astarra for Mage. Guess there are options...

Current group is Avric Albirght as Disciple, Reynhart as Champion, Roganna as Wildlander, and High Mage Quellen as the Runemaster. The group as a whole is pretty weak on Might and Awareness (and everyone but High Mage on knowledge) but their willpower is pretty impossible to break. I'm not even bothering with disease (went with basic deck 2 so dark charm isn't a thing) or other willpower based effects, but my web traps are amazing .

But yeah, vs. a group like this I wouldn't even consider the new cards.

If you want perfect balance play Go. This game on the other hand is balanced enough, and your choices affect the balance quite a bit.

The dice can always sway the game in any scenario. Don't ever be too shy from performing some house rules tweaking if required. There are so many combinations of events that play testers can never run through them all.

Don't forget it costs Threat to re-pick up the card as well

The dice can always sway the game in any scenario. Don't ever be too shy from performing some house rules tweaking if required. There are so many combinations of events that play testers can never run through them all.

Don't forget it costs Threat to re-pick up the card as well

Yeah that is the concern, however if you saved enough threat to spam it on the last encounter of a campaign the reward to benefit ratio is not very great for the heroes.

When a hero can save 2 threat to get an extra shopping card, that I think is a very big thing and something all overlords need to think about strategically. Ideally you want to go strong on threat spending when you know the heroes are low on gold. The right shopping cards can totally make or break a campaign for the heroes. There is a lot to think about when spending threat to utilise it to its maximum effect, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the heroes and think strongly about if those valor tokens you have given them will be enough to help them win the encounter/campaign.

OP, power creeping and game breaking i tells ya steve-o;)

Well, okay. In spite of what I just said, it is true that power creep is to be expected in any product that expands continually. However, if OL and heroes creep at the same rate, they hopefully remain balanced against one another.

That's an unavoidable downside of expansions. "Balance" has to be measured with a sliding scale because the constant influx of new material is also constantly shifting the balance.

If you want something that's absolutely perfectly balanced in all conditions, you need to look for a game that comes all in one box with no add-ons.

This is a weird thing to say. Power creep is expected, sure, but it's a failure on the part of developers, not a necessary part of game design. Magic is the best example of a game that overcame it as a problem... but then again, Magic is a high standard for any game to try to live up to. (Like the game or hate it, it unquestionably has the best development process in the industry.)

Then again, when you're pumping out new product on a monthly basis, OF COURSE power creep is going to happen. It's 95% likely that it's happening on PURPOSE, rather than simply because of bad development, because you want people to buy your powerful new stuff.

Like others menitoned, you're thinking of Ironbounds, which look pretty cool
Changelings look very competitive on their own without the transforming cards. Those cards (which are said to be quest rewards) are not necessarily their "true form", but are a flavor element of the campaing. With that said, we still don't know all the details.

This is a weird thing to say. Power creep is expected, sure, but it's a failure on the part of developers, not a necessary part of game design.

Based on the rest of your response, you seem to agree that it is to be expected, for the same reasons. I apologize if my wording confused you, but we appear to hold the same position at the end of the day.

As for Magic: the Gathering, I readily admit it has been many moons since I played that game, but as I recall from my glory days, it was no stranger to power creep. If it overcame the problem, it was only by creeping all the colours at a relatively even pace, which is what I was saying is the best case scenario for expanding games.

That may indeed have been your intention, but you said "unavoidable", which seems more like "necessary" than "expected" to me. But yeah - seems we're on the same page!

Magic absolutely had power creep issues during the first 5, maybe 10 years of its existence. This was partly because many of the earlier cards were badly designed and, frankly, weak - for a huge period of magic's history creatures kind of stank, and spells were just flat-out better. So creatures became more powerful over time, spells got more powerful too, but then weaker, and today there's a baseline power level that things fluctuate around. Individual cards - even entire sets - may be above (or below) the baseline but over time, nothing strays too far. So, if you were to take a deck made of cards from 2010-2013 and a deck made of cards from 2005-2008, they'd be balanced. Magic's rules used to be the same mess Descent is in, as well, but again, over the years they've evolved into a model for what game rules should be.

But again, Magic is the gold standard - it's been around for 20 years in large part BECAUSE they've put so much effort into their development process. That's clearly not what FFG does.

A lot of the oldest cards in magic are absurdly overpowered: Many cards from Urza's Saga, and even Alpha are downright broken. All of the power 9 are old cards (lol original ancestral recall, black lotus and time walk). The weakness of the next series of sets were a kneejerk result of how ridiculously broken cards like this were. They realized eventually that the new cards they were making were just not good, and the game wasn't interesting enough as a result: the average bad card wasn't much worse than the best cards at the time. They wanted to get people to really go out of their way to buy a lot of cards to make sure they got good cards, so they introduced power creep back into the game and released Modern as a format (they essentially rebranded the game).

Magic solved their power creep issues with formatting. You have different formats for deck building: the most popular is standard, which includes the current edition set (m14 atm), the current block and the most recent previous block. The fact that the most current sets are better than the sets from a few years ago is irrelevant, since those cards from a few years ago aren't allowed to be used.

Draft is currently my favorite format.

Other formats allow for them, but WOTC cares a lot less about balance in those formats. Legacy and Vintage are downright dumb, for example.