[Is there any kind of level scaling in the game?]

Thanks for the infos, it helps to have an idea of how it works.

[Quest mode character experience]

Do you still get that individual XP if the adventure runs out of time? Or in the case of a forfeit? Reason I'm asking is I thought at one point I had guys who were super close to leveling up and I failed a couple missions in a row and it didn't seem like the bars were moving so I thought the game might be negating that XP since I failed in some way.

[Legendary 6 man difficulty]

Borissimo, if you read the middle paragraph of my last post I hope you realize that my main issue isn't that it's just "too hard."

 

I've been playing on Legendary with Kyra and Meri almost exclusively as a 2 man group and only fail about 20% of the time, mainly due to that one wildcard being such a problem that even with a 2 character group I sometimes run out of time when I get it, which should say something about how much of a difference it makes on the blessings deck. That was starting with brand new decks, never playing at all on an easier difficulty.

 

Compare that to trying it with a 6 character group in which I gave up after 4 fails everytime I got that wildcard in which none were even close. Since I'm not the type of player to abuse the forfeit option (which unbalanced wildcard powers also encourage) I decided just to stop.

 

As I said above if it was just an impossible difficulty for the amazing players out there, ok fine, I'd leave it to them. But it's not that, it's incredibly swingy depending on whether you pull one or two specific wildcards, and more importantly the size of your party. And while 6 man has always had its challenges, I always felt like intent of the game was to be roughly balanced between different party sizes.

 

And I disagree that an over leveled party makes that much of a difference. That wildcard is about acquiring boons which is never going to be something you've got the resources to spend on more a few times throughout the adventure. You're still going to fail a fair amount on those cards regardless and 6 fails on boons, which is more than a reasonable assumption for any group, is an entire round of turns lost in a 6 man group, which is pretty critical when you've only got 5 turns each in the first place.

 

Btw Z, I believe you can still repeatedly get gold on lower difficulties in quest mode, just not in story. I could be wrong about this though, haven't really experimented with it.

[End of Scenario boosts?]

Try checking the completion tab on each character's skill/power "character sheet." I haven't really messed with it myself but I believe it shows which missions are complete for that character.

[Quest mode decks availability and character progression( til card role selection)]

Ok all is clear now. And that does explain why it took awhile to find the deathbane crossbow, probably wasn't available until recently, and why I still haven't encountered the ever elusive Father Z. However I still think you'd be better off renaming the party tier levels because when they are the exact same as the deck descriptors, it's easy to make the incorrect assumption that they match and I'm doubting I'll be the last person confused by it.

 

Plus I'd been entertained if my starting party said "Tier Level - Noob".

[Legendary 6 man difficulty]

All I'm getting at is that Legendary seems vastly harder with 6 than with 2 and while 1 and 6 player games after probably the hardest in the card game, I have multiple 6 character playthroughs and never felt like I was playing on super difficult mode or anything. So while I might expect it to be slightly harder, the difference on Legendary is more like fairly winnable with 2 to completely unwinnable with 6 with certain wildcards in play. Which also encourages repeated forfeiting until those aren't drawn. It's not so much that I'm saying that this power is too hard (well I am saying that) but more that it specifically punishes big groups vs smaller groups which as far as I knew weren't inherently supposed to be massively harder to win with in the game.

 

In other words, it would make more sense to me if Legendary was basically unwinnable period rather than being easier or harder based on the size of the party. Now whether I'd play it if it was like that would be another discussion.

 

Anyway appreciate that you're following our comments. I know I probably come across as critical but it's only because you've got a really good game here.

[Legendary 6 man difficulty]

Interesting. I've only played RotR and Skull and Shackles and it could have been the groups I was in, but they felt about the same in terms of difficulty for 6 characters. I would agree though that while there's arguments about balance between smaller and larger parties in this game, 6 characters has always felt like one of the harder modes. But it still felt doable which is why (combine with the idea that to some it's already harder in the first place) I don't really get putting in wildcard powers that specifically punish those groups.

 

I mean you could easily modify the -5 card wildcard power to be remove X cards from the blessings deck where X equals 7 minus the number of characters in the party. That way it scales with party composition appropriately (since removing blessings hurts more with more people you don't need to remove as many to have the same effect). Not sure about the really bad one, but the easiest fix there would be to make it so you could pass on acquiring boons and if you do that, it has no effect. Implementing a needed feature in the process. Otherwise I'll probably just play on normal because while I like a challenge, I don't really like the idea of just forfeiting every time one of those comes up because there's almost no chance of winning.

[The hook mountain massacre is locked but purchased]

Maybe popular is the wrong word but if quest mode is intended as an alternative open ended game to be played while waiting on additional content, then whether people like it or not and thus actually get into playing it, is huge in terms of whether this game is successful while story mode is still unfinished.

 

I didn't say that Obsidian could or should have released it all at once. Im just pointing out that this is different than a game being released with expansions to come later - the additional content is still really part of the core game. It would be more analogous to playing Fallout 4 and after the first couple "areas" you can't go any farther until more content is released, but you can continue to kill mole rats, improve skills, craft gear, within that area. You can make all the comparisons to the card game that you want but the card game price is pretty irrelevant and people expect different things from video games than they do from tabletop games.

 

I actually don't agree that there's "surprisingly little content" in this game but I am pointing out that it's possible that many may feel that way due to how quickly the content that does exist can be played through, which unfortunately is a side effect of a digital product. Especially if quest mode isn't "popular."

[Quest mode decks availability and character progression( til card role selection)]

So it's not an exact line up of party tier B - deck B, tier 1 - deck 1, etc?

 

Ok well, I'll just conclude by saying that it seems like you've got to get through a lot of missions seeing the same cards over and over then to get to anything new. Maybe that's intended but after playing 12ish missions with my guys and not getting an upgrade in forever, when in comparison in the story you get access to new cards after 3 missions, that seems like a lot. Also if I at least knew that at mission X this card that I wanted was going to unlock instead of it being a mystery, I might be more motivated to shoot for that level.

 

And making the party tier being the same as the decks (B, 1, etc) sort of implies a correlation there. If it doesn't really match then you might consider renaming the party XP tiers to something different.

[Legendary 6 man difficulty]

I don't mind the challenge, but challenges that are so heavily stacked against you that it's almost impossible to succeed can be rough. I still enjoy it, and still intend on running with my fresh 6-player party, but I think losing a blessing for failing to acquire a boon should be removed as a Wildcard Power. The others are still tough but fair, while that one is overly extreme compared to the rest.

This.

 

Was sort of the point of my post. The other powers are tough but fair and somewhat equally punish different groups. With the card game I never felt that playing a 6 character game was any more "hard mode" than a 1-2 player game. But that power (and to a lesser extent the one that takes 5 cards off the blessings deck) specifically punish big groups. And frankly to the point where winning is next to impossible beyond being crazy lucky. And I don't really think having better cards fixes it, because the thing is you never have the resources to allocate to boons. It just doesn't work that way. If you want to succeed at the game, about 75% of boon cards aren't going to be acquired. You just don't have the resources to acquire them without then failing every combat check. And as I said earlier, it's not just Legendary. You can get that wildcard on Heroic as well.

[Quest mode decks availability and character progression( til card role selection)]

 

 

Where I was at, I get the impression that deck 2 boons are like likely to appear than deck 1 .by the time I was at lv 20s deck 1 boons are getting quite common .

From my experience if you want to obtain deck 1 boons you will have greater success as you hit lv 20. I haven't found anything bugged about the loot table though. As you near lv 20 (tier 2 ) you should get more of deck 1 boons and after which

 

Having to hit level 20 to unlock Deck 1 boons (so levels 1-19 are just deck B and 20-30 is deck 1 and 2) doesn't sound bugged to you?

I don't see why it wouldn't be 1-10 deck b

11-20 deck 1

21-30 deck 2

And at level 12 I'm not seeing a single deck 1 boon. That's either a bug or a decision that needs some serious re thought, especially since it takes like 3 missions to level up past level 10. Having to run 30+ missions to get to the deck 1 boons isn't my kind of fun.

I just checked the deck boxes, can you guys give me examples of what you guys are seeing? It might be something else but without more details (Specific cards etc) its a bit difficult to tell.

I've literally never seen a deck 1 boon and my guys are level 12 (tier 1 for the last 5 or 6 games) which would be sort of like playing through Burnt Offerings without ever even seeing a boon from that deck. Also I saw tier 1 villains and henchmen when I was still a tier B party, in fact was seeing them much more often than the deck B guys. Now most of my games are on higher difficulty but I'm assuming at least with the boons that that wouldn't matter.

 

I've seen both deck B and C cards so those seem to be unlocking fine.

[Quest mode decks availability and character progression( til card role selection)]

Its not an exact science but Tier one is roughly deck 1 in terms of what you can find to expect and tier 2 is roughly deck 2. etc.

if this isn't the case I'll poke our designer.

You should poke or at least have someone test it real quick. Have run maybe 5 missions since it showed tier 1 for my guys and haven't seen any tier 1 boons. There were some others in another thread backing this up. Also in addition I was seeing tier 1 villains henchmen the right away (level 1 guys - Tier B party). Now I might have been on Legendary for those games but unless that affects the boon/bane distribution I wouldn't think it would matter. In the 15 or so missions it took me to get to tier 1 I never saw the Bringandoom guy, saw Black Fang once, Pillbug a couple of times, but mostly was getting tier 1 villains (and henchmen).

[The hook mountain massacre is locked but purchased]

The price isn't a great argument, but I agree with you about the content being different for an online vs physical game. Because of how much was involved in setting up and playing the physical game you'd get a couple weeks of gameplay (or more) per adventure pack release. But digitally it's easy to burn through that content in a day or two. I think the reality for a game like this is that until the whole adventure pack is released, people may be a bit dissatisfied with the partial story since the current content is so easy to stay caught up on.

 

Now that said, quest mode may alleviate that to a certain extent, depending on how popular that turns out to be. And I completely get that it's a lot of content to produce so releasing it with only some of the adventures initially makes a certain amount of sense. But it's not like the additional adventure packs are just extra expansions, they are part of finishing the main story, so I can also get the attitude that you can't really finish the game with what currently exists and the frustration associated with that.

[Farmhouse closing and Ghost]

Also to add to this, the game could use more pause breaks/explanation in a couple additional situations that come to mind.

(Or at least an option for the game to pause in these situations in options)

 

When using Augury or a similar effect to examine a deck you have all the time in the world to look at the selected card type cards, but if you Augury for monster and there's a barrier that pops up for a second as one of the 3 cards revealed, you only get about 2 seconds to look at (and no option to zoom in) that barrier before those cards (other than any monsters revealed) are immediately reshuffled. You should be able to take what time you need to examine all 3 cards before the non monsters are reshuffled.

 

In addition there's a location that places a monster on top of a random location deck when you encounter one there. When this happens, you get a very brief map view that often doesn't focus in well on the location where the monster is being placed. Basically when this happens the player should know what location is getting the monster added and currently it's often hard to tell.

[Quest mode decks availability and character progression( til card role selection)]

Where I was at, I get the impression that deck 2 boons are like likely to appear than deck 1 .by the time I was at lv 20s deck 1 boons are getting quite common .

From my experience if you want to obtain deck 1 boons you will have greater success as you hit lv 20. I haven't found anything bugged about the loot table though. As you near lv 20 (tier 2 ) you should get more of deck 1 boons and after which

Having to hit level 20 to unlock Deck 1 boons (so levels 1-19 are just deck B and 20-30 is deck 1 and 2) doesn't sound bugged to you?

 

I don't see why it wouldn't be 1-10 deck b

11-20 deck 1

21-30 deck 2

 

And at level 12 I'm not seeing a single deck 1 boon. That's either a bug or a decision that needs some serious re thought, especially since it takes like 3 missions to level up past level 10. Having to run 30+ missions to get to the deck 1 boons isn't my kind of fun.

[Legendary 6 man difficulty]

Has anyone had any success with this, either questing or story mode? Specifically I'm concerned about the difficulty bump (with 6 man groups) with the wildcard powers that take 5 cards from the blessings deck and even more difficult - the one that discards a card from the blessings deck when you fail to acquire a boon.

 

To give some perspective, I've completed all the story scenarios and quested up to level 12 with a 2 man group on Legendary and while there are some fails now and then, it's not too bad. So last night I tried a 6 man group story mode on Legendary and couldn't even beat the first scenario. I haven't even gotten the harder of the two wildcard powers, this was just trying to beat Brigandoom with only 25 turns with 6 characters(not even mentioning adjacent movement and whatever the other wildcard power is). I mean I know it's *possible*. But it seems extremely luck based and MUCH harder than with 2 characters.

 

And honestly Heroic isn't going to be much easier because it's all about those two powers drastically increasing the difficulty, which is also additionally magnified with more characters since time matters more there, as none of the other increased difficulty legendary stuff is nearly as bad.

[Bug: Goblin Warchanter makes every character roll the Wisdom 8 check]

Agreed and while I can understand how they might not want to errata a whole bunch of physical cards, for the video game I wish they'd made some changes to wording like this.

 

And considering I've already seen a number of people asking this same question, maybe that will happen just to save themselves having to answer it over and over.

[Evasion please let me know how it is benificial]

I have 4 main situations in which I like to use evasion -

 

1) Risky explorations. You can explore without much in hand pretty much risk free. If you encounter something nasty, just evade, otherwise you haven't given up that explore that you might not otherwise want to use.

 

2) Encountering the villain. Now this depends on the game and the villain but some villains are the type (like the guy who resets the combat if you roll a1-2 on a d6 after you defeat him) that you only want to have to fight once. If you encounter him too early then just evade, close or set up guys for temp closing the other locations, then explore and fight him again.

 

3) Encountering a good upgrade card that you don't have the resources to get at the moment. If I run into the deathbane crossbow or father z or something similar without good cards available to make acquiring the card likely, evade and try to find it again with better cards in hand.

 

4) Summoned creatures. For example, one of the deck 1 villains summons a wrathful Sinspawn that someone has to fight before the villain, that can be evaded with no penalty. The skeleton horde barrier is the same way, it gets banished no matter what happens to the skeletons, so anyone that can evade, should. There are some other barriers and villains that require defeating the summoned stuff to defeat the barrier or villain card but if so it will specify on the card.

[Completing scenarios awarding no gold]

I think it's intended. One of the comments in the patch notes was about limiting gold in lower difficulties.

[Quest boons and banes]

I have noticed this as well with my level 11 characters. I'm assuming it's a bug but hard to know for sure.

["Bugs" I have encountered]

You should be getting 2 dice. I've been getting 2 dice when using an erastil on Meri using a heavy crossbow or a Gorum on Kyra with a mace for example, so if you're not, that's a bug.

[Full Equipment screen? Am I missing something?]

Yeah, I've thought for awhile that a sideboard (even if was only 3-5 cards) could simulate your stash in town and also make picking up one use cards more appealing since you could just temporarily stash the card it's replacing instead of losing it back to the box/vault. Also it would make setting up decks for a particular scenario more strategic.

 

But it doesn't seem to be something the developers of the game are interested in. In addition to the full Rise of the Runelords adventure, there's two more full adventure sets for the card game and it still works like this where everything that won't fit in a deck is just tossed at the end of the adventure.

[Kohl of Uncanny Discernment: higher level weaker Spyglass?]

1) Examine the top 2 cards, if one is X type you may encounter it.

 

2) Examine the top 2 cards, if neither is X type you may put the cards on the bottom of the deck.

 

3) Examine the top 2 cards. You may then choose to shuffle that deck.

 

4) Examine the top 2 cards of any location deck.

 

5) Examine the top 2 cards of your location deck or your character deck.

 

6) Examine the top 2 cards of a location deck on another players turn. If that player encounters any of those cards on that turn, add a d4 to any X type checks regarding those cards.

 

7) Examine the top 2 cards of your location deck. If one of those cards is a henchman add a d4 to any closing rolls this turn.

 

8 Discard up to 3 cards. You may examine and rearrange the top X cards of your location deck where X equals the amount of cards discarded plus one.

 

9) Bury up to 3 cards. You may examine and rearrange the top X cards of your location deck where X equals the amount of cards buried plus two.

 

10) Bury this card to examine the top 3 cards of your location deck, rearrange and encounter the top card.

 

None of that even gets into making the first ability of the "spyglass" more useful.

[replaying adventures with new characters]

If you are looking to start a new group I think the intent is to pick a new save slot. If you just want to add a new guy to an existing group, add to an already existing save (although currently some mission rewards seem to be bugged when completed with guys who are different "levels").

 

The main actual in game difference is that I believe the missions that give set card rewards only give those once per save slot. I'm not talking about mission rewards like "all characters get a random weapon card." Those at least should (barring bugs) give it to a guy who completes it for the first time, regardless of save slot. But missions that give a specific card (like one of the Burnt Offerings missions gives th Sihedron Medallion) I believe only give it the first time a party in a given save slot completes that adventure.

 

Overall I'd recommend just starting a new save with a new group. There's no real downside to this that I can think of, all the cards you have available to encounter from your "vault" will be the same and mission rewards will definitely be awarded with a new game (barring weird bugs).

[help with Brigandoom]

Yep, put characters in appropriate locations for closing rolls, and more importantly, prioritize adding dice to vital rolls such as henchman/villain defeat rolls and closing rolls. Quite often I'll add a little overkill for rolls like that because even though rolling a 9 on 4 dice might seem likely, the penalty for failing that roll (having to clear the entire rest of the deck in some cases) just isn't worth the risk.

 

In addition, yes with more characters, exploring more is very important and covering all those locations is super important so you can temp close when you find the villain.