by StormKnight
Not sure if this should be in rules, variants, or what.Immobilize. It's...really damn nasty in the right situations. Unfortunately, there are a lot of "right" situations.
We just finished our first campaign, using the Runemaster as one of the characters, and the key tactical part of most of the quests came down to whether or not the Runemaster could successfully immobilize the key monster - if she could, the heroes had a sure win. And she usually could.
The finale was especially bad. (Spoilers for the finale - Gryvorn Unleashed)
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Encounter 1, the Runemaster moved in with fatigue and immobilized both Alric and Belthir. The heroes absolutely slaughtered the lieutenants - they never even got a single objective token past the door to the exit, and only got in one turn of attacking.
Encounter 2, Syndareal tried to move Leoric into position, but was stopped with a Tripwire. No problem - 2 fatigue to get into position. OL used another card to block the first shot, but the second one immobilized Gryvorn, then all the heroes got out of LOS of the Baron. Runemaster was able to repeat the immobilize every turn. Baron was immobilized and took 16 damage in one attack from Syndareal, who could still pull back out of reach. No hero was ever attacked in the entire encounter (though the Baron did get to smash the necro's reanimate once).
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This was a pretty dull encounter!
Based on past games, I'm guessing FFG will "fix" the problem by making lieutenants and "objective" monsters immune to status effects. I personally can't stand that as a fix. The old "you can never use the status effect on anything you really want to" syndrome. This should never wind up needing to be errated into a game these days - it's way too well known!
However, I can't help feeling that the real problem may not be immobilize at all, but simply bad quest design. Quests that depend on one key critter will be very "fragile", since any ability that is highly effective on a single target will skew it.
In the final battle, for example, many hero and OL abilities are useless as they are based around multiple monsters or having things to reinforce. Even a single group of monsters would have made the encounters a lot less one-sided and made immobilize less dominating.
So...
Does Immobilize need a change?
Does just the Runemaster power that adds status effects need a fix, as its too cheap and good?
Do "special" monsters need immunity?
Do we just need to design better quests that avoid the problem?
Thoughts?