Gloomhaven Classic Jobs Part II

[freshfeeling]

These next couple of scenarios were played between June 12th and June 15th, 2024.
To start, embarrassed of my difficulty choice, I decided to rank the difficulty up to medium.

I had a road encounter where a criminal escaped from transport. I decided the right thing to do was chase him down, which had fairly favorable results.


5) Scenario #14: Frozen Hollow

I think the enemy level may have gone up, but the gold piles weren't any better. Furthermore, I think I was noticing our reduced HP. The first turn against the small cluster of Hounds did not treat us well.

 

This scenario didn't go excellently, but considering the sudden rise in difficulty and our suboptimal builds, it was pretty good. Knight the Brute took a lot of damage, and White Mage the Tinkerer's healing ended up being quite an asset. Perhaps my biggest misplay was using White Mage's Harmless Contraption early where the only effective thing it did was take a single hit from a Hound in the first room... after which it constantly moved in the way of my characters.

Perhaps partly because of this - as well as White Mage's battle goal - White Mage burned a lot of cards very early on and was the closest to exhausting at the end of the scenario. The final room didn't feel dangerous, per se, but there was somewhat of a race for Thief the Scoundrel to get to the final treasure chest before either someone defeated the last living spirit or the team exhausted - where although White Mage was most at-risk, everyone would've been in a tight spot in 1-2 more turns.
 
It happened that I had Thief walk onto the trap in front of the treasure chest without realizing it was a stun trap, and thus wasted a full turn... during which someone vanquished our last opponent and ended the scenario. D'oh.
 
 

Anyway... we unlocked the enchantress, and enchanted a few of our low-level cards in useful ways.
 

White Mage's character quest is to complete four "crypt" scenarios, and I have done three already. I figured that heading for retirement would probably be a good idea for the benefits that brings to the game at large, but White Mage wasn't able to afford an enhancement yet. I realized if I sold most of White Mage's things, I'd be able to give a little enhancement like a Strengthen or a Bless to a healing card... so I did that. So we'll go into our original White Mage's final scenarios a bit lighter on items.

 

To the Decaying Crypt! We got a nice little bonus by watching some deer.
 

6) Scenario #6: Decaying Crypt
The Decaying Crypt was good. We had a lot of curse cards, but also a few blesses from watching deer, so it felt like the luck balanced out. I had never seen the weird battle goal that Black Mage got, and it was hard to be mindful of. Ultimately I failed that, but I got all of the other ones.


I had one great turn where Thief and Black Mage entered the second room, wrecked a bunch of starting enemies in there, and then both used their Cloaks of Invisibility to hide until the end of the next turn.

Black Mage may have been the MVP, although there was a long part where White Mage was sort of handling the Living Corpses in the first room by themself.
 
We won, and then we were asked to kill Jekserah... which is probably the Light Warrior-ish thing to do.
 
 

White Mage has now completed four crypt-based scenarios. Seeing as I've prepared for this somewhat, I figured I should follow that through to its conclusion. We got a city encounter that opened some other quest but we'll table that for now.
 

7) Scenario #52: Noxious Cellar
I had never played Noxious Cellar before. By the look of it, I thought it might not be super fun. The enemies are a handful compared to the few scenarios we had done so far, and the objective is a weird one.
 
It turns out that the four characters are all starting in completely different little zones, seemingly with no way to reach each other. This may not bode well for some of us, like, say, White Mage.

I figured that for some characters, we could use jump to just rush the end of the scenario. My only character without any way to jump? White Mage.

 

It ended up that the only character who really struggled here was Black Mage. We were poisoned pretty consistently by the nature of the enemies here, and thus had little means to mitigate damage, even with a round of cleverly-timed invisibility.

 

At the start of round 7, after being pounded and while standing on the ornate chest we needed to loot, Knight the Brute ended up exhausted. We had a situation where he had to burn multiple cards to negate damage twice. This meant we lost.
 

I actually forgot the rules around what happens when you lose a scenario, and I don't know at what point the game makes the scenario "end". I figured I may as well try to gain as much experience and loot as much gold as possible with the other characters regardless.

The defeat was flagged at the end of the turn. It was pretty annoying that in the same turn, all of the oozes that had been bullying Knight died by attempting to multiply.
 

 

I decided to retry. For attempt #2, I wanted to make the difficulty easier again, actually, but the obvious "retry" option immediately restarts the scenario and thus doesn't allow you to change the difficulty. I figured we would see how this goes regardless. The second attempt was better, with everyone cleanly getting their chest with turns to spare other than White Mage... who has very little offence and is generally pretty hopeless on their own.
 

 

This time, I left entirely to find a way to get White Mage some Winged Boots. Since we left the scenario, it also turned out that Knight levelled up, so we went through with that and got Hook and Chain, replacing Spare Dagger.

For attempt #3, I didn't adjust the difficulty after all: I really thought Winged Boots would make the difference. Well, it turns out Knight reaching level 3 boosted enemy levels further. Uh oh.

 

While the Winged Boots certainly helped the Tinkerer, overall this third attempt was waaay worse... mostly on account of the terrible barrage of unmitigable status effects. It wasn't long before I said the F-word aloud and decided to exit, drop the difficulty, and try again.

It might be worth a reminding note here that although we've got some constraints in play, I'm not calling this a "challenge" playthrough. I'm not going to keep banging my head against this scenario that my team clearly isn't designed for - not for too long, anyway, and not when we've got options. This is part of why I prefer to use the term "variant playthrough", or "themed playthrough".

 

Attempt 4, lower difficulty. I find myself no longer having fun here, but at least I'm not setting up tokens on a physical board game for the same scenario repeatedly. It went well, if its still fair to say that... and this time White Mage made it to their chest several turns before our now barefoot Black Mage.
 

 

Let's not split the party anymore.

Black Mage the Spellweaver and White Mage the Tinkerer both levelled up again. Black Mage earned the excellent Cold Fire card, and by the analysis we started with, unfortunately, they need to drop the ever-useful Mana Bolt.


White Mage's white mage-iest card available is the level 2 Disorienting Flash, but, by the numbers, it's not white mage-ier than anything else they have, so their hand will stay the same.


Putting the characters in separate rooms was nasty. These very role-based characters are not built for it. I hope we don't have to do anything like that again. The harder monsters aren't so bad when we can benefit from teamwork!

The one thing that felt novel about Noxious Cellar that I didn't completely hate is that since all characters are operating independently, initiative matters less. Initiative plays into order, but not enemy targeting/focus, so you really want to go for low initiative almost all of the time. Perhaps there's something to say for that.

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