Irgy

It's well known that a lot of people experience randomness in games as being rigged against them even when it isn't. There's lots of factors as to why, someone else already went over some. Now, maybe this is the one game where they have somehow managed to rig the dice for no clear reason, and you're the one person to have actually realised it. The trouble is, even if you are, there's no way to distinguish you from all of the other people on every other forum for every other game involving randomness on the internet saying the same thing and being wrong. If you want to be different, gather some stats. If you gather some stats, one of three things will have to happen: 1. The game will notice somehow that you're gathering stats and stop misbehaving. Problem solved, for you at least. 2. You'll discover that the dice rolls are distributed fairly and evenly. 3. You'll be the first person on the internet to actually uncover a dice conspiracy and provide proof. Eternal fame will be yours.

Making it party specific isn't an enhancement or balance, it's just flat-out the way it should have always worked in the first place. None of the problems the stash is supposed to be solving require it to be account-global. Making it global introduces a whole lot of issues and abuses while also not enabling anything that people ought to be doing in the first place. Being able to farm AD6 cards for characters in an AD1 party is ridiculous. What's annoying me at the moment though is that I can't keep a separate stash for two different parties even if I want to. I've got one party in the goblin campaign, and went to play another party elsewhere, and all my goblin campaign stash cards are there. So now if I don't want to be swapping cards between entirely unrelated parties I have to either not use the stash at all anywhere, or manually remember which cards belong to which party and just hope I don't get forced to take another party's cards if I don't have enough of a certain type. I'm not such a purist that I don't want to try out the new features at all, but when the way they work doesn't make any sense, and you can't ignore the issues without deliberately and forcibly disabling the feature everywhere (in this case by always selling all your cards and never stashing any), then I'm not left with a lot of choice.

I was playing a game on legendary difficulty, and it picked the additional challenge where whenever you encounter a normal monster a random player encounters a summoned henchman (in this case a scarecrow golem since it was deck 2). While exploring the Warrens location I discovered this challenge did not interact well with the Warrens location power to put a monster on another deck. It hardly did the same thing twice but it never handled it correctly. I was encountering random cards from other decks with different players, never summoned a scarecrow, one time it finished up with the same monster still on top of the warrens and I had to trigger the whole bug process again. I think the gist of it was the were two things triggered on monsters and they mixed each other up.

It might help you to know though that if you manually click on the yellow trashcan icon at the end of your turn you can choose to throw out cards that you don't want. So it at least doesn't clog up your hand. Most of the time that's just as good as not getting it in the first place.

All of the difficulty reduction cards are very unreliable. My advice in general with them: If you're going to use them, use them first. Don't do anything else first. Of course, I still find it difficult to do this myself (I tend to only realise I want to use them when I've already activated a bunch of other powers), but there you have it. When working as intended, they reset the check, except for anything that involves a dice roll (or Seoni's ability that reveals her top card). I don't really know why that is, but it seems to be deliberate. But cancelling is flaky at the best of times, and cancelling a bunch of stuff at once is super-flaky. I've sometimes even found it changes whose turn it thinks it is (I think this can happens when another character is helping on a multi-check bane), or even reset which check we're up to (I once had to make 3 checks on a villain, and I was somewhat unprepared for the third I must say).

Even on legendary/heroic mode where you face her every single time, banished haunts or not, it's still beatable (and by that I mean fairly consistently). Merisiel evades. Kyra defeats and gets to even examine a location. A couple of other characters have a good enough roll that a blessing will generally cover it, as much as any normal check at least. Anyone with armour buries an armour - if you haven't drawn your armour, well guess what you get to draw a whole new hand size worth of cards to find it for next time . Everyone else just takes a hand-dump, and goes and gets a cure at the first opportunity. One thing to avoid: spending all your party's blessings and hoping to get lucky on the check only to end up getting a hand dump anyway. Unlike a monster/barrier that gets shuffled back in or a henchman you need to find again, there's no penalty for failure other than the damage, so be willing to just suck it up sometimes. In general you shouldn't have to face her more than once per character, and one hand-dump per character hurts but it shouldn't be the end of the scenario. Just wait until you get to 4.5 or whatever it is where the whole party takes d4 force on every henchman! (ok again that's only on legendary/heroic) Explore more aggressively with the characters who can actually deal with her. Pack a lot of cures, which is good general advice. I do think overall though that the end of deck 1 and the start of deck 2 is the peak of difficulty for the game. The good news is this scenario specifically is pretty much the end of that run, once you get through it the next two are quite a bit easier, and indeed the only really hard scenario (relative to your growing power) is the flood one (and it won't kill you, it's just easy to luck-out and fail).

I don't quite like Shalelu as a good ally here, I find her prety niche. Very useful for some characters but not an ally I'd consistently have in my character's decks. My points are: - Allies, along with blessings, are the main sources for extra explores for almost all characters. If you're not going to use an ally for the explore itself that ally should have a powerful enough "alternative skill" to be "worth" dropping the explore. - Characters with small hand sizes and ones unable to either quickly cycle or reshuffle their decks will probably not recover Shalelu in time to play her a second time when recharged, so essentially she becomes a "recharge to look at the top card of your location deck" card when played that way. I'd say that's a really low value for an ally slot when a spyglass (item card, consistently considered of lesser value) shows two cards and let's manipulate their position. - The more characters in your party, the less turns each character will take and getting extra explores becomes way more important, decreasing alternative skill value. Still, as said, she is very useful for "some characters". And for me those characters are ones that can actually combo her scouting with some sort of manipulation. Merisiel (she can evade to get a location reshuffle), Seelah (in case is an uninteresting boon, she can send it packing to the bottom of the location deck) and casters (except Lini) that can scry or augury that card. A more supportive Sajan may also be an option (he is probably the fastest deck cycler in the game so has decent chances to run her several times). For all others, there are better choices. In my opinion you're playing her wrong. You do know you can encounter the card, right? Don't think of her as a scout that you occasionally use as an explore instead. Think of her as an explore with the option to unpreventably evade-to-top. You expect to explore with her, but on rare occasions you can pre-emptively evade it instead. The end result is not that you explore less with her, but you explore more with her. Because any time you have no weapon in hand, or the party has no blessings, or any other reason you'd be unwilling to explore with a normal ally, you can explore with her, because it can't possibly blow up in your face (unless you choose to let it of course). You said yourself you want to explore with allies most of the time, so how is the one ally who actually explores better than any other not a top pick? Oh and she also recharges for a bonus to anyone's ranged attack, so you can give her to the character that sometimes runs out of steam to make the most of the pre-emptive evade option while still being able to make use of her other ability with the ranged characters. What's not to love?

Randomness, particularly with regards to finding the villain, has a large impact, but it's still possible to win quite consistently in spite of it. You can spend less time by exploring more aggressively. You say you like to keep 1 blessing on hand, but if you explore with your last blessing you still have your friends to back you up, and then if you've emptied your hand well enough you can draw a new blessing instead. Pack enough cures and the aggressive exploring costs you nothing. But time itself might not be the real problem. Time is basically the only way to lose most scenarios (technically there's character death but that should be extremely rare), so saying you're running out of time doesn't really explain what's going wrong. If you fail checks and especially if you fail to close locations that costs time. But if you're overcautious and spend all your blessings helping and none exploring that costs time. Just generally making good choices, having good cards and making the most of characters' abilities will save you blessings and therefore time. So although finding the villain may look like it's the problem because it's the visible point of failure, improving any part of your play will result in finding the villain more often.

Happened to me too so probably a consistent thing.

The skill feat is the reward for completing the adventure path "Perils of the Lost Coast", which is the entire set of 3 'B' scenarios. You have only earned it when you complete all three. The Black Fang's Dungeon scenario has its own separate reward, which is to choose a type of boon other than loot and draw a card of that type from the box. So if it works correctly Ezren should get to choose a card but should not get a skill feat. If you want to catch him up, just select the first scenario from the map interface and play it through.

Well my revised complaint was that it's not at all clear you need to sell things from unclaimed in the first place, since there's no reason to expect to be forced to use those cards in place of basics from the box. Thus a large proportion of people will get cards shoved down their throat at least once before they realise what they need to do about it. I also find the whole idea that you can get cards from AD6 in your AD1 party distasteful. I'm fairly militantly anti-scrubbishness in general, and even though I believe this to be a different sort of thing I still feel uncomfortable deliberately refusing to take advantage of the cheesy strategy available to me. Also, at least people buying chests to "cheat" is funding the game, but repeatedly farming AD6 cards with a strong party and giving them to a new party via the apparently global stash just feels like a needless exploit.

The calculator that displays the probability of the roll succeeding doesn't take into account the effect of the Death Zone (specifically that it makes all 1s and 2s into 0s). For example if the check is a 5 and you have d4+4, it will say 100% when it's actually only 50%. It's clearly just a case of no-one really having considered (or *cough* tested) this case, not really a bug as such. And of course I can make my own estimates without it like everyone always used to do anyway, it's not critical. But... * It's annoying seeing the wrong value there. * It's going to stuff someone up at some point. * Whereas I now have a pretty good sense of the odds for typical rolls, I'd actually be quite interested to know what they are for certain rolls in the death zone. It's the one place where it might have been telling me something I don't already know. So it's a shame no-one's thought to implement it.

FYI there's still some checks that aren't getting 0s, as of the current version (VER-973-20170628). I really wish I could remember exactly what though. They were non-combat checks I'm sure of that, but whether it was closing or recharging or acquiring I've forgotten. Happened more than once though in just a single play-through, so wouldn't be that hard to reproduce.

Ok and apparently you can take cards from your stash from your party that just completed the whole game, and give them to your new characters that are starting out for the next run. In a totally new and separate party. Why on earth do you let people do that? That's ridiculous. And it looks like I'll be stuck with all of it until after the first mission, so again I can get stuck with these cards even if I don't want them. Edit - ok fine I could get rid of them after sorting out the deck...

People keep saying things like "near-vanilla" if you follow all those steps. What are the remaining differences? Just the various bugs? The fact that it's not a physical card game? Also I'm amazed so many people want to replay scenarios. I'd much rather just play through the whole set more times. Though I do get a little sad when I get to the end and my party isn't useful any more. Maybe what they should do is make an extra game mode where rather than progress through a story you just grind through automatically generated scenarios, to suit that style of player. There aren't, but there are two additional difficulty levels that can provide that compensation instead. Which of course you also don't have to do. But I also find they compensate for the fact that the original game was way too easy in the first place (at least from the perspective of an experienced player). Also be careful with permadeath. Personally I treat it as on but don't actually turn it on. In the real game, if you drop a d4 on the table while you gather your dice it won't kill your character. But in the app, misclicks, misunderstandings* and even occasionally (though generally indirectly) bugs can lead to character death. * As an example of a misunderstanding leading to character death, I once saw a wisdom check when encountering a monster and assumed it was one of those "before you act, succeed at a wisdom [x] check or [a thing happens]", and just rolled it without bothering to try and pass it. Turns out it was actually the check to defeat. My own stupid fault, sure, but I'm just saying there's no way to make that mistake in the paper game.