Borissimo

At this point, Obsidian can't say anything further on the matter without losing face, so I doubt we'll hear another official statement on the Impaler soon (or ever) It's evident that Paizo wants the Impaler to have proficiency. For your home game, play the printed card as is. In the digital game, you get to choose.

Ezren is one of my favorite characters, but I don't quite share all of the enthusiasm Rhygar has for him. Note that if you spend a blessing to help Ezren acquire a magic item, then your party isn't really getting an "extra" exploration. A blessing represents 1 extra exploration, so if you spend a blessing on something else, it's like losing an explore. Thus, playing a blessing to help Ezren explore again is a wash -- you lose 1 explore to gain 1, for a net of 0. Another thing to consider with Ezren is that many scenarios in story mode just don't have that many spells, so outside of the academy, Ezren's reputation as an exploring machine has been slightly overblown on these forums (in my opinion). Regarding Narkon's comment about the C-deck characters: I agree that the C-deck characters are, on the whole, harder to use than the base set characters. Sajan and Lini are "investment" characters that start out pretty weak and gradually blossom into the most over-powered characters in the set. Amiri can hit higher numbers than Valeros but has to lose resources to do it, making her decisions tougher, and Seelah's amazingness is hard to see behind her mediocre stats and card list.

Hey Arch! If you buy the $25 bundle, it unlocks all 11 characters, all of the adventure decks (including ones yet to be released), and the C-deck. That's essentially the same as buying the game. You can then play offline no problem. I hope that helps you enjoy this amazing implementation of an amazing game!

Great write-up, Tobold! Just to clarify one thing, though: Black Magga can (and will) try to eat from closed locations. The real reason you don't want to close locations is that it's not necessary for winning and therefore not worth spending resources. For example, if all the cards in your hard are good, there's no point sacrificing one of them to close the Village House, since an open and empty Village House is no worse than a closed one. That said, you will probably want to close some of the locations in a 6-player party. The Dam won't let you leave if you don't close it, and some characters might have trouble leaving the Treacherous Cave. If you have a spare junk item to toss to the General Store, why not see if any quality items are on sale? At the rate Black Magga eats, time is never going to be a problem in this scenario, even in a max-sized group.

In my experience, the most reliable 2-person party is Valeros + Kyra. Kyra is amazing in 2-player because time is abundant and she can single-handedly make sure you never die. Valeros is self-sufficient and great at taking down monsters. He's also surprisingly good at closing locations: d8 in dex, d8 in con, and d6+2 in diplomacy covers a lot of ground. So in your case, Valeros is a definite buy. Keep in mind that if farming gold is your objective, the two fastest methods (in my experience) are: 1. Solo Merisiel on Legendary Poison Pill. This is fast, but obviously rather repetitive. 2. Duo Kyra + Valeros on Legendary Quest Mode. This gives you some variety and progression, so it doesn't feel as grindy, but you will lose sometimes. Since Kyra and Merisiel come for free, if harvesting gold is your main motivation, then Valeros is the only character you need to buy. If you're buying anybody past that point, then it's purely for your entertainment and enjoyment of the game. It's up to you whether the fun you'll have playing with another base set character is worth the slight delay in saving up 10k for the C-deck. I do recommend getting the C-deck eventually -- it's a great value and certainly better than buying the C-deck characters on their own. So if Kyra, Merisiel, and Valeros are in a party, who's the best fourth? Well, I would not recommend Harsk. Harsk lacks self-sufficiency, which he makes up for by providing support to the party. However, your other characters are probably the three most self-sufficient characters in the game, so it makes no sense to add Harsk. That leaves Lem, Seoni, and Ezren. Of the three, Lem is the only one who makes a good duo with Valeros, but he's also the least self-sufficient. If you want another character who can hold her own (while occasionally needing to be healed), pick Seoni. If you want a character who has as many spells as humanly possible, pick Ezren. Merry gaming!

Uh oh. Has anyone confirmed finding the Legendary healing staff yet? I hope it's in there, for your sake. And yeah, cases like that are why it's not cool to have placeholders for cards that don't actually exist.

Well, that's a bit ... unethical. I figure the whole point of the Daily Gold (which I purchased) is to get more chest so you can collect the Treasure cards. It's a tricky thing. I don't think that Daily Gold has an objective "whole point" -- technically, it's just 6000 gold over 30 days. For someone who bought the season pass, yes, that gold is just for treasure chests, but if I didn't have the season pass, then none of my daily gold would go there. But I do think that Obsidian should have been transparent about the size of the treasure card pool. The community shouldn't have had to figure out which cards were implemented and which weren't. Thinking that the card pool is bigger than it really is might have caused a lot of players to purchase/open more chests than they would have otherwise.

You have a point, Hannibal, in that following my logic to the extreme would mean I never open my chests at all. At the same time, it's a little weird that there are placeholders for cards that haven't been implemented which look exactly like the placeholders for cards that have been implemented. As the community discovered in this thread, the following cards are not currently in the game even though it looks as though they are: Disrupting Rapier +1, Icy Hooked Hammer +1, Trident +2, Wounding Spear-Axe +1, Steel Ibis Lamellar, Pole, Duelist, Evangelist, Reveler, Flame Cannon, DemonBane Longsword +2, Sniper's Studded Leather, Net of Snaring, Fortified Breastplate, Metal Spikes, Humanbane Gladius +2, Keen Rapier +3 That's a lot of cards. I don't mind missing out on hypothetical future inclusions to the chest pool, but I hope that these cards are not hypothetical and that they'll be implemented soon.

Obsidian has acknowledged that not all of the treasure cards have been implemented. I'm personally going to wait until we have a clarification that all of the treasure cards have been made before opening my chests. If you open your chests now, there's a number of items you literally cannot get, meaning you're going to end up with more duplicates instead.

First of all, thanks to everyone for the spirited discussion here! It's been a pleasure to read. I have two regrets about the original post I made. The first is that I neglected to quote this clarifying reply of Nathan's in Stormbringer's original thread: Having this in the OP would have saved a few folks some time and nerves worrying about whether the % of culled cards will increase as the adventure path goes on. Although Obsidian hasn't stated the percentages, there will be progression and there will be scaling for party size. My other regret is that I wrote the OP before it was pointed out (by Harwin and other users in this forum) that the original box culling method breaks down completely when players replay scenarios. This is another strong reason why PACG's original system would not have been good for the digital version. All in all, I'm glad that all the hours it would have taken Obsidian to implement vault tracking and all kinds of contingency checking ("if this party has played this scenario before, don't remove basics ...") can instead be spent giving us new adventures faster.

When Obsidian says "early," just replace it with "late," and when they say "week," just replace it with "month," and you'll never be unhappy again!

iPad air, Quest Mode, no permadeath, no pass-n-play, Kyra and Valeros, legendary difficulty ... I can't remember what wildcard powers were in effect. Valeros and Kyra have closed 2 of the easy locations and have 2 hard ones left: the Mountain Peak and the Warrens. Kyra plays Augury in the Mountain Peak and luckily finds Nualia, whom she leaves on top of the deck. Then she heads to the Warrens. At the start of Valeros's turn, he has to make a survival 7 check or bury a card, per the Mountain Peak's power. When Kyra plays a blessing of Shelyn (add 2 dice to a non-combat Wisdom check), the difficulty of the check bizarrely increases to 9. I take back the blessing and the check returns to 7. I fail the check, bury a card, and kick the crap out of Nualia anyway, but this is very weird. I can't imagine any reason for the Mountain Peak check's difficulty to be increased after playing a blessing, so I don't think I'm overlooking any rules. I have to figure that this bug is somehow related to Nualia's blessing penalty and the fact that she was scouted atop the location deck. It's worth noting that before the fight against Nualia, Valeros played a blessing of Calistria to help Kyra close the Warrens, and the Warrens closing check properly remained a 6.

If we're lucky!

Ahhhh, okay Brainwave, I see where you're coming from. I actually agree with you there on a personal level. I don't think merging parties is all that important and I wouldn't have minded at all if Obsidian had simply implemented "one save, one box, no jumping across saves or boxes." At the same time, even though I disagree with merging parties, I can see why Obsidian chose to allow it. Say a new player Bob downloads the game, doesn't know anything about it, and plays a few scenarios solo each with Kyra and Merisiel. Then he decides to combine them ... and the game won't let him. We understand why they have to be separate, but Bob doesn't. If the game worked this way, there would be a lot of Bobs. And Harwin, that's a great point. I hadn't considered the impact of farming on the box. You could even farm scenarios just to get all the basic boons out of the box and guarantee a concentration of high quality boons for all future scenarios. That's another great reason why the physical system wouldn't have worked in the digital version.

I don't think that choice is always a positive. Let's imagine that Obsidian changes their minds and decides to handle box culling in the digital game like in the physical game. Now, every time you banish a boon, a window pops up saying "Banish permanently?" and you have pick Yes or No. This doesn't only happen when you fail to acquire a boon you've encountered. When you close a location, the game has to show every basic boon remaining in it and have "Banish permanently?" pop up for each one. When you're done with the Pit of Malfeshenkor, the items don't just go away; you have to "Banish permanently?" for each one. When you banish a basic card to close a location, the game stops as you must "Banish permanently?" Now I bet a lot of players -- not just me -- would get pretty annoyed by this. I gravely doubt that I'm the only person alive who, if that was how the game worked, would prefer that boons be automatically banished just so that I didn't have to "Banish permanently?" every Dagger that comes my way, even if it means losing some Cures. Now I know that not everyone would agree, but surely you can't dismiss as completely unreasonable a person who would like to be freed from the burden of choosing "Banish permanently?" As for my example with Lini and the Mace, I know that what I'm about to say is heavily subjective, but again, I doubt I'm the only one: I consider that choice a burden because it's (in my completely personal and not objective opinion!) a stupid choice. The idea that, "If I don't pick up this Mace, then I'll never find another Mace, but if I do pick up this Mace, then I might find more Maces in the future," just breaks all sense and logic. The decision feels "gamey" because the game is rewarding me with X for doing Y when X and Y have absolutely no natural connection to each other. I totally understand why some, maybe even most players enjoy this choice, but I love the idea of not having to make it anymore. When you hate making a decision, not having to make it anymore is indeed like being freed from a burden.

Desperate? Come, now, there's no need to insult my skill at the game just because you disagree with me. In my live game, the Lini player never took a card feat for weapons and was often running with just 2-3 combat spells. Using a weapon found on the fly was incredibly helpful, and I understood why he was doing it even as I cursed under my breath that the Mace wasn't going to go away. Since you don't understand, perhaps you'd like to hear an explanation. The solo play presents exactly the same problems as online play because characters can freely move around parties. If I play solo with Merisiel, solo with Kyra, and solo with Valeros, I have to store an instance of the vault for each of them. Then if I play a scenario with Merisiel and Valeros, I have to store another instance of the vault for that pairing, and another instance for my scenario with Valeros and Kyra, and another for all three together ... it gets prohibitive very quickly. Dynamically generating the vault at the beginning of each scenario bypasses the need to implement such a cumbersome system.

So I'm curious, Brainwave. What exactly do you think is happening here? Do you think Obsidian lied when they said it was a technical necessity, and they're really just doing this for some nefarious reasons they don't want to share with us? Or do you just think they're incompetent and don't understand the programming of their own game? Perhaps you are a genius software developer, so I have a puzzle for you. I'm playing solo Merisiel and, halfway through AD3, I decide it's just too hard. So at that point, I add her to my game with Kyra and Valeros, who are the same point in the adventure. Before Merisiel gave up her on solo career, she found and banished two Maces. Kyra and Valeros haven't found any. Are the Maces in the box when Merisiel joins their game? No, of course not -- we're using Kyra and Valeros's box, not Merisiel's! But wait, what if play 1 scenario solo with Kyra, banish my first Siren ever (yay), and then I add Kyra and Valeros to Merisiel's party, rather than adding Merisiel to theirs -- then the Maces should be missing from the box, right? But not the Siren. But if I add Valeros and Merisiel to Kyra's party, then I do need to lose the Siren, but not the Maces -- so wait, tell me again how I'm going to do all this without storing a unique instance of the vault for every single character on my iPad? Look, I'm not a software developer, so I don't know what's happening here. But if the people who are writing code for a project tell me that something is a necessity for technical reasons, I'm inclined to trust them. They might be wrong, but having actually seen (and heck, written!) the code, they're more likely to be right than I am.

After seeing way too many questions and misunderstandings about this, I've decided to make a thread and hopefully settle this issue once and for all. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/87122-confused-about-how-box-thinning-will-work-read-this/ At the risk of repeating myself, I feel compelled to note here that it simply would not have been feasible for Obsidian to do in the digital game what Paizo did in the physical game. The decision to handle box thinning in the way they did is not a "gaffe" but a necessity.

I've seen a bunch of posts from people who are dazed and confused about the box thinning system that will come into play once AD3 arrives. Obsidian did explain this clearly, but that was back in the closed beta forum, so I don't blame most people for not knowing. First, some background for people who aren't familiar with the original Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. When AD3 begins, a new rule is introduced: cards with Basic trait, upon being banished, are permanently removed from the game -- not just put back in the box, but put away in a separate place entirely, never to be seen again. This is mandatory for banes and optional for boons (so you can tell that Potion of Hiding to **** off and die but let Cure stick around). In the digital game, none of that is going to happen. Instead, here's the relevant text from this post by Stormbringer: Once you get to the point in the game where you can cull cards the game will auto cull x amount (what percentage feels good here? 20%? 30%?) of those cards, basic or elite depending on where you are at in the game, before it makes the location decks for the scenarios. While this may seem like you have less control over what is in the box, with added difficulties and multiple parties it was necessary. Also we needed to make this work for online play. So the vault is dynamically created each time you play a scenario. If its time to cull basics it'll random cull some in the box for you, elites same thing. I've seen a few repeated (yet wrong) complaints about this system. Here are the complaints and some more explanation (from me ) Complaint: "One of the most annoying things about the physical game was tracking the permanently banished cards. This would be so easy to do in a video game! Why doesn't Obsidian just do that?!" Response: Because it's actually not easy and is in fact borderline impossible. If party X merges with party Y, what do you put in the box? When multiplayer is implemented and 6 different people play together for the first time, what do you put in the box? The app would have to track a copy of the box for every single story mode character, which is prohibitively taxing. Generating a box dynamically for each scenario circumvents this issue. Complaint: "One of the best things about the physical game was being able to pass on crappy boons and know you'll never see them again. Now that we can't do that, the game is ruined. Literally unplayable!" Response: It's true that, yes, you won't be able to permanently rid yourself of those delightful Mendings and Burglars and Darts. But it's not all downside. In the physical game, when e.g. Lini encounters a Mace that would help her in the moment, she has to weigh the value of the Mace in that scenario against the future value of not having the Mace in the box anymore. In the digital version, whether you pick up or banish a boon has no effect on the future, so you're freed from the burden of making this annoying decision.

Per an official Paizo source, the Impaler of Thorns IS supposed to require proficiency: "The change was accidental. Weapon proficiency is desired." It seems there was some miscommunication between Obsidian and Paizo. This change isn't a big deal, as the only character routinely affected by it in the base set is Ezren, but it's still nice to know that whatever ends up happening in the digital version, players should not ignore the Impaler's proficiency requirement in the physical game.

Ah, the good ol' Wand of Enervation! Or as it was affectionately called in my gaming group, the Wand of Totally Balanced.

I get where you're coming from, Pink, but your comparison to the Holy Candle actually proves my point rather than yours. 1) Mike Selinker is on record saying he hated the Holy Candle, but he's on record saying he's fine with the Impaler. 2) Obsidian was clear from the get-go that the Holy Candle was nerfed for the digital version with Paizo's permission. The equivalent for the Impaler would have been to say that they are buffing it for the digital version with Paizo's permission. But they didn't say this -- instead, they said that the printed card was wrong and that the digital version is how it's supposed to be. So whereas the Holy Candle change falls under the "Obsidian makes changes with Paizo's permission" blanket generalization, the Impaler very blatantly does not. If Obsidian says the printed card is an error, then that absolutely needs to be confirmed by Paizo for players of the physical game.

Could we please get some clarification on the Impaler of Thorns? Not that I mind it losing the proficiency requirement, but merely saying "the original printed version was wrong" is eliding quite a lot. As recently as October of last year (2015), Mike Selinker was on record as saying, in response to the direct complaint that the Impaler is the only spear that requires weapon proficiency, "I have no problem with some Spears requiring proficiency and others not requiring it. This one has thorns!"

Not sure if this is helpful, but I actually caught a related bug on video. Link Seelah, having just defeated a Goblin Warchanter at the desecrated vault, discards a blessing to explore again. She finds a haunt. A d6 is rolled twice in a row, both times to see if the bane is undefeated. There is no roll for Ms. Foxglove and she does not make an appearance.

My advice would be, time permitting of course, to check out some playthroughs on youtube. Seeing an experienced player, even one who makes mistakes sometimes, talk through his rationale for deck-building choices and feat selection will help you see how all the different pieces of this game come together. You'll find a few video series (including my own ) in the videos section of BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/133038/pathfinder-adventure-card-game-rise-runelords-base/videos/all