by Nathyr
I’ve been playing Descent for about a year, exclusively RtL and either solo or coop with my two boys. When I play with my boys, which is most of the time, I always play a healer and try to keep them both alive so they can keep killing monsters (their favorite part). From my available heroes, though, Avric seems so much better than the others that I feel there isn’t any reasonable alternative choice. So I’m looking to add one more Descent expansion or H&M pack to add a healer hero and provide myself some variety or even some strategic decision-making to picking my hero.I currently own Base 2nd Ed., SoN, LoR, and just bought LotW. So I have 4 available healer heroes: Avric, Ashrian, Ulma and Rendiel. Rendiel’s HA seems quite weak, as you can’t have too many KO’s or you lose. I don’t know how Ashrian plays in OL games, but RtL it seems most monster instructions are: 1. Engage or Spot, 2. Attack or use ability. Since my understanding of Stun is that you lose one of your actions, this doesn’t seem a big penalty for the monsters in RtL. Fist action discards stun, and because they are already adjacent to her, they skip the Engage or Spot action and use their second action to attack. Ulma’s HA lets people grab potions from the search deck, which doesn’t seem bad on its face as it provides more healing options, but again doesn’t seem as efficient as Avric, and needing to be so close to the hero doing the search action isn’t always a good use of movement (why send two heroes toward that search token?). Please let me know if I’m overlooking a benefit of these heroes.
So I’ve read that Elder Mok is a really good healer, often listed along with Avric on a lot of favorite healer lists. Plus I like some of the other heroes that come in his H & M pack (Trenloe and Laurel). The single side quest as only new RtL content is a downside, though. Alternatively, I’ve considered Chains the Rust, as that opens up all my Scout heroes as potential healers, plus adds some additional RtL content (side quest, levels for Delve, all the other hybrid classes). Admittedly the Scouts probably don’t have HAs that synergize with healing directly, but at least they have HAs that are useful in other ways (movement, fatigue regen, defense).
So, assuming I don’t just get both, which would you recommend? Or is there a third option I’m not considering?