by StormKnight
A lot of these have been discussed individually. It's getting challenging to jump around all the threads, so I thought I'd make a list of stuff I'm seeing to make me nervous about getting 2e.Things that I hoped they improved from 1st edition, but I'm not sure:
1) Dice fiddliness. Often in 1e it took less time to decide what action to take than to figure out what dice to roll, gather the dice, count up all the stray symbols, fiddle around figuring out what you needed to spend as range and what you could use for damage, etc. Is it smoother now?
2) Rocket tag. However, often all the rolling obscured the fact that mostly what mattered was whether you hit or not, since you killed most monsters in one shot. And monsters took only a few hits to kill heroes. Has this gone down?
3) Endless spawns. Ugh, this made the game drag. It sounds like the OL still usually gets unlimited spawns, but only one monster per turn. Is the spawning less of a slog now?
4) Poor scaling. Balance varied wildly depending on number of heroes. Sounds like 2e may not be any better.
Things that people have listed as problems (or potential problems) with 2e. How bad are they? Do they really exist?
1) Whack-a-Mole. A hero goes down and just keeps going down, leading to a bored player and a huge advantage for the OL.
2) Super Whack-a-Mole. The whole party goes down in Encounter 1, and the OL, instead of just winning the scenario, just keeps pounding them to build up a huge hand of cards for Encounter 2.
3) Unbalanced options. Some people have listed concerns that the hero skill cards and monsters aren't well balanced, which will lead to the same choices being made every time. That would be very dull.
4) Poor one-shot play. A lot of people seem to agree that it doesn't play well unless you are playing a campaign.
5) Recycle, recycle. The OL reinforces one monster per turn per group, no matter what the monster is, so a group with few big nasty monsters is much more dangerous than a group with several small ones. (The game could be balanced around this - perhaps more small ones overall have more attack power). This could also lead to it being pointless to kill a big monster since the OL just immediately replaces it with no "cost" to the OL player.
6) Point saving. Are the 1 XP cards for heroes worthwhile compared to the higher cost cards, or is it always just a short term/long term tradeoff?
7) Replayability. Are the scenarios heavy on hidden info that will make them less fun to replay? I don't like how they went with a "story" style campaign rather than a more open system...is it at least a campain you can reasonably play multiple times?