by FakeMaker
Warning: long post.Me & my group have been playing Descent2 with a 4-hero party and we find it impossible to win for heroes with a "professional" OL.
(So far we have D2+conversion, expansion is still on its way to us)
Any playthrough goes like this:
The OL goes for the Warlord skill tree and follows "stock cards in Enc.1, use-em-all in Enc.2".
Heroes win FB & get to pick fist quest.
Whatever they pick, they loose, unless they get extremely lucky (which they never did so far).
Case:
Fat Goblin: not enough DPS to push through dragons in the cave (enc.2), to get to the leutenant. Splig easily uncovers the goal-token and rushes off.
Death On the Wing: Even if the heroes win the first encounter (and that is pretty hard with sweeping Giants as an open group), in the second encounter elementals prevent heroes from 1-shotting (i.e. on their first move) Belthir. Open group: Merriods.
On the OL's turn Red M. goes left /w frenzy and flails 2 peasants who must be very lucky to survive these two attacks with possible (+surge & +3wound for surge cards). the white one goes "right" and takes out another peasant. Belthir takes off to the surviving peasant(s). And there is another frenzy in hand and at least one blood rage. Nothing survives that. Heroes done in 1 turn, with zero loot.
MasquaradeShades & Goblins in the open groups. lucky heroes get two guests in first room and stand a chance for guests result: 3heroes/1OL. Ours got zero. Last play ended up with 0heroes/4ol in two moves. And we got 3/4 loots because OL saved a dash card for 2nd enc, otherwise we'd have zero.
Cardinal's..3-4 zombies raised = OL win. We cant heal good enough in enc2.
Castle DaerionVery much discussed here
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/833278/castle-daerion-encoun...If we save a lot of villagers in enc1, OL has a hand and with a setup like:
http://boardgamegeek.com/article/11051250#11051250after fist OL move we had 22/25 _already_ dealt to Palamon. Lost in 2nd move.
Assuming out tanks gets to the Palamon and he can use his "defend" (which is contested by us and OL) on him, Lieutenant just moves tank away with Overpower (tests for 5 are hard to fail and he can do a few of them).
Whatever the first hero choice.. (not Castle Daerion 'cos it's obviously OL-win),
OL choses Castle Daerion second quest, wins it, and we are already facing a lost cause in a "hard for heroes interlude" and a same sacking in the upcoming two quests in act II (both lost in 1-2 moves, OL-chosen, pro-overlord quests ). 3-dice mons TOOO STRONG. And we never get past this. Too demotivated to continue the campaign.
After all this "upsetness", heroes are sad and dont want to continue, OL is also sad - despite winning, heroes give up and we never get to the finale.
It is an option to rush to encounter two by skipping loots (to prevent OL from getting a huge hand of cards), but this will leave us very undergeared for act 2 monsters.
Taking into account all mentioned above, what can be done by 4-hero group to win Shadow Rune campaign?We are looking for:
Class tips, hero choice tips, quest choice tips, house rules tips to balance this.
Also we'd like to hear about successful (= interlude won by heroes) 4-hero sessions. How did that happen for you.
Please help.
p.s. the only time we got to an "easy" interlude was one of our first games when OL was not so experienced. but so where we and heroes failed interlude and got _destroyed_ in 1-2 turns in 2 act II overlord-chosen quests.
! Any advice/commentary would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
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In the second encounter I picked Fire Beatles as my open group. Spilg was unlucky though and took 5 turns to find the paladin, by which time the heroes had cut through everything else and only two goblins remained. They made short work of the hungry goblin.
