by Callidus
We recently launched our first Mists of Bilehall campaign and I feel like sharing our impressions so far. I am really interested on how other groups of puny little heroes fare in the Mistlands, as MoB seems to be a place quite different to the amusement-parks that came before it ;-)We consider ourselves a fairly experienced group (went through everything released so far except MoB at least once), use all the expansions, use plot decks, banned the conversion kit, play only 4 vs 1 and rotate the OL role between campaigns. The usual experience is, that the OL is challenged much more than the heroes, due to less total play time in that role and the min-maxing potential in the HE party.
Despite that, we have a healthy 65:35 HE:OL quest win ratio and a 50:50 HE:OL campaign win ratio. We believe, this is due to the fact that we agreed to restrict hero party optimization when selecting character/class combos for a new campaign and we never picked heroes/classes with quest requirements in mind. Optimization is only done after launch of the campaign (situational picking of skills and equipment).
This approach served us well in the past, but with MoB came to a crash landing. So far, we played the intro quest, sanguine lord and read the two successor quests.
The intro was well balanced and challenging and all HE escaped alive with 3/4 searches despite 2 knockdowns scored by the OL. The high mobility of the party and one essential OL mistake made this possible.
However, after a lousy shopping step, it went downhill from there. Sanguine Lord and Song of Bone seem pretty much unwinnable if the OL isn't stupid and the HE party is not optimized and wasn't lucky during the shopping step. The HE lost Sanguine Lord horribly despite some OL mistakes and pretty much optimal play (consensus).
For the next 2 quests in line, things seem to be not much different. The sheer amount of negative effects, quest mechanics acting as pure HE action sponges, almost act 2 worthy lieutenant profiles and the overwhelming amount of monsters and reinforcements simply seem too much for a non-min-maxed group. Never before has the difficulty objectively been so high. Killing things fast is objective number 1. Sub-par HE/class combos are not advisable for this campaign.
Just for reference, the far from optimal party we picked (intent was, to pick stuff that saw none or only minor amount of play before):
- Grey Ker as Treasure Hunter
- Zyla as Hexer
- Jonas as Prophet
- Orkell as Skirmisher
We think, the Prophet and Skirmisher hurt us the most besides the fact, that we did not manage to find any new useful weapons during the shopping step and in the treasure chests Grey Ker unearthed.