by Antistone
Went to a preview event yesterday, played as a necromancer in a one-shot quest (A Fat Goblin). Also spent some time looking through cards and quests before and after the game. I thought I'd offer a few impressions. Remember, these are just my initial thoughts after a single game and may or may not be representative.The monsters look really interesting. It looks like they've got more tactical abilities and more to differentiate them than the 1e monsters, especially the base-game 1e monsters (which, admittedly, were trying to cover a large range of power, not just a breadth of tactics). Several of them have special actions they can perform (instead of just move and attack).
The quests seemed more varied than 1e. A large percentage of the 1e quests seemed to boil down to "fight the boss to the death"; I read a random(ish) sample of the 2e quests and saw defending a fortress, an escape scenario, and a race to collect several plot items. Only saw one encounter that looked like a straight-up boss fight.
The game was faster than 1e, but mostly due to the quest design, not the new rules. We spent around 4 hours on the quest, but that included explaining rules (multiple times, as people straggled in) and most of us were playing for the first time. Still, it didn't seem like movement or attacking or anything was really proceeding faster; the quest was just shorter than a 1e quest (encounter #1 ended within 5 rounds, encounter #2 ended within 6 rounds). Basically, removing all character advancement from the quests allows them to be compressed. I don't think the "streamlining" rule changes did much.
Searching seems awkward. The heroes are under constant time pressure even more than in 1e, searching takes significantly longer, and the items looked much less important. And yet, it looks like if we had been playing a campaign and searched thoroughly, we could easily have made twice the gold that the heroes get as a reward for winning the quest--which means that even if you never actually use the potions and stuff you find, searching may be more important than the actual stated quest objective a lot of the time.
I'm worried about game balance. Again, I only played one quest, so my experience may not be representative, but lots of stuff that looks like it should be equal doesn't look anywhere close.
The abilities of different heroes, and the starting skills of different classes, did not appear to be in any way balanced; for example, I felt I made effective use of my reanimate literally every single turn, while our wildlander didn't use his starting skill once in the entire quest. The intrinsic hero abilities on the included mage and scout heroes all looked pretty awesome, and the ones on the warriors both looked borderline-worthless (perhaps the class cards are supposed to make up for that, since it falls along archetype boundaries?).
One "group" of monsters is apparently supposed to be equally powerful, regardless of the monster type (after all, the overlord gets to choose the type for "open" groups)--but we killed an entire group of spiders (4 minions + 1 master) in 1 round, then spent nearly 2 full rounds killing a single master dragon (which still left a regular one behind). And in quests that allow reinforcements, you reinforce one monster at a time, which means that master dragon could have come back in 1/5 the time of the spider group!
Heroes got 3 out of 4 objectives in the first encounter and won the second. None of the heroes was knocked out--not once in the entire quest. And we finished in good condition and with an unused potion that would have restored one hero to full health for a single action (admittedly, we did use one of two such potions we found, and it's always possible we just played better than the overlord).
Player scaling looks rather problematic, too. Some monster groups scale from 2 minions/1 master for 2 heroes to 4/1 for 4 heroes - masters are clearly better, so that's less than a 67% increase (probably less than 50%). Other groups scale from 1/0 to 1/1 - which is more than a 100% increase, by the same reasoning. I can't guess what logic went into these numbers.
Some quests also have reinforcements, which allows a fixed number of monsters to respawn per turn - one respawn could be anywhere from 20% to 100% of a group, depending on game size and monster type. I was not able to discern any reason that this would be more balanced than it initially appears.
Some quests give bonus minions in the second encounter based on how the first encounter went. These do not scale to number of heroes at all.
Out of 4 heroes, we had 3 area-abilities that would all clearly be better in large games.
In the second encounter, forming a "wall" to block the escape of the boss was integral to our strategy (the boss had knockback, so this wasn't foolproof, but slowed him considerably). As far as I can tell, a group of 2 heroes (without a necromancer) basically could not have done this. That seems like it would have changed the difficulty (and the tactics) considerably.
We had rules questions. Some readers will undoubtedly say that's just because it was me, and that may be true, but all of the following came up:
-- How to calculate "within 3 spaces" around corners (you may recall this was eventually FAQ'd in 1e).
-- Was the reanimate familiar affected by monster abilities that affect "heroes", such as the dragons' "shadow" ability? (The rulebook says they're affected by monster attacks and overlord cards - probably an oversight, but hard to be sure.)
-- Master spiders require adjacent heroes to spend a fatigue to move out of an adjacent space. Does this count as "suffering fatigue to move", meaning that heroes can't do it if their fatigue already equals their stamina, or can they suffer a wound instead?
-- There's an OL card that lets a monster perform an attack action in addition to its normal 2 actions. Should this implicitly override the rule that says "a monster can attack only once during its activation"? It seems like it ought to, but by RAW it does not (it's possible to perform an attack in addition to 2 non-attack actions, and cards normally only suspend rules when it's not possible to follow both).
And I also wondered about the following when looking through cards we didn't use:
-- If a monster has a special ability that requires an action and involves making an attack (e.g. elementals have a "fire" action that attacks all adjacent figures), is that limited by the "one attack per activation" rule, or is it an exception because it's not an attack action?
-- Can a hero trade items with adjacent heroes while he is knocked out? (For example, can you grab a healing potion off of a downed hero's body so that you can pour it down his throat?) On a related note, does a search card need to be "equipped" before it can be used? (Rules p.11 say that shop item and class cards need to be equipped to be used, but doesn't say the same about search cards).