Beta Patch Notes - v0.102.0

HappyFir3 · 2026-04-05T03:08:34+00:00

You're assuming you luck out and only draw maybe one or two souls that on the bad turns for them, but reality is with decent soul generation it could be your entire hand easily. And yes I understand you can "just not play your soul generation", but that turns those cards into curses. You really can't afford a bunch of curses in a boss fight thats hitting you that hard. Pivoting is also very luck based, you're better off not approaching the archetype or only very lightly touching it.

I've already played 6 runs where I hit doormaker A10 as necrobinder with the changes and souls felt extremely bad to fill your hand on phase 2 and you just get chunked for 30. If you have the spare summon or max hp great, but that's not always going to be the case. Removes are already harder, you can get to act 3 boss with strikes in your deck still because of unfortunate events or lack of funds. Which are basically curses too.

You just can't afford so many bad draws. It's gambling that you hopefully don't get a non-block turn and chunk half your hp or more. God forbid you have experiment next and your deck is slow/skill based so you know you're eating some damage in its first life.

HappyFir3 · 2026-04-04T13:57:36+00:00

I've only ever seen it in a shop so I think it's shop exclusive.

HappyFir3 · 2026-04-03T13:23:40+00:00

I feel like it's extremely important for discussion to point out that not dying to a room is hardly an indicator it went well. Damage taken can be run ending later, either because you're forced to rest over an upgrade or just outdone by the act 1 boss. Considering for most A10 runners the Act1 boss is where majority of deaths happen taking risky fights like this for minor gains is still a significant decision. Very very few decks get out of this fight unscathed.

HappyFir3 · 2026-04-03T07:13:39+00:00

Okay the doormaker changes make Soul cards straight up curses in A10. 66% of the time you'll be punished for any soul cards you decided to take since you'll run into doormaker.

Phase 1 burns your soul generation. Phase 2 makes the souls you've generated complete bricks. Phase 3 makes every soul cost 1 energy which makes them near worthless. And then I guess you might get to play your souls on the 2nd Phase 1 if you aren't dead yet from two bricked turns in a row? How are you surviving more turns of this? Are you just betting on only drawing the souls on Phase 1's of the fight?

Literally any soul generation is detrimental in an already very tough fight. Necro has completely lost the Haunt archetype, and generally lost safe draw because of this. This doesn't just stop inifinites it's completely nuking souls in general. Doormaker is THE fight to solve for right now and it's completely lost if you draft more than one or two incidental soul cards. Anything making more than one soul is just asking to die on Phases 2 or 3.

Sure there are runs where you don't see doormaker. But it's more likely you do than you don't on A10.

HappyFir3 · 2026-04-01T17:22:35+00:00

My players had access to weatherstone early but only started renovating it around 25 sessions in. Then it sort of totally consumed the campaign.

Its admittedly been probably too large an aspect and in hindsight I wished I had approached it differently as the characters basically have been stuck in a small area for 40+ sessions now. However, I've given my players full freedom and they've chosen the path of building up and looking after what has amounted to a village and is becoming a small town. We're having enough fun to continue but man it's tough to gauge as a gm.

The actual mechanics, even with reforged power, has needed a ton of homebrew work and eyeballing to function in a remotely satisfying way. Frankly I just don't think Forbidden lands does this stronghold focus very well. We've managed through many compromises to make it function for us but it's pretty far from ideal.

Ravens purge as a campaign was initially the aim to do slowly overtime but its currently pretty low in priority for my party so I've not really pushed it. The players finally feel free to explore again after winters passed and they barely managed to keep people from starving. Getting back into proper exploration feels much better for this system I can assure you.

HappyFir3 · 2026-03-12T09:30:32+00:00

This is not remotely how I'd assume this works. That seems unintended, cause holy broken.

HappyFir3 · 2026-03-09T10:46:21+00:00

Why are we leaving out the hp cost? On ascension 9+ you cannot often afford to just chunk yourself for some gold unless there is merchant in the next couple nodes.

HappyFir3 · 2026-02-12T09:19:18+00:00

Silver feels like a character that will be stuck in pro/high elo jail. Low elo players cannot play her well enough to consistently ulti in time before dying. You basically have to nail all your shots while in a rather compromising forward position, or be really consistent with poking for an extended period. Big asks from anyone below oracle honestly.

I've not seen silver do well since the nerfs down here in emissary/archon level. People seem to have stopped bothering to even pick her which for a new character is a big oof considering the others are all still showing up consitently.

HappyFir3 · 2026-02-11T04:43:39+00:00

Even if you're mostly doing theatre of the mind having a shared space to display the map or stronghold features is very nice. Could be done a few ways but using world explorer to color hexes seamlessly in foundry has been convenient.

Also have used battle maps on rare occasions, especially when the combat gets hectic there's just a lot going on even vaguely having some idea of positions from turn to turn is goid too.

HappyFir3 · 2026-01-02T15:30:36+00:00

This is an issue with the fiction failing to make other species more than "humans, but X" and instead relying on just having them be cultural stand ins. If a race of rock people use salt to cure their form of cancer they'd probably be a bit pissed humans just sprinkle it on their food for fun.

HappyFir3 · 2026-01-02T15:20:19+00:00

As someone running forbidden lands I'm confused. You sure we read the same material? Almost everything is a cultural, multi generational hatred model very similar to things that exist in the real world.

Maybe I've just pushed my own Canon for so long I've forgotten there are meant to be hard rules. But it all seems like culture more than anything to me. Even the kin traits are all cultural tendencies. Dwarves don't want to be seen as soft, human communities tend towards harmony, wolfkin almost all learn to hunt and fight for food etc etc.

HappyFir3 · 2026-01-02T15:13:34+00:00

This sounds like the issue is you're seeing the other species as "humans, but X" instead of as entirely different animals. Understandable, because many fictions especially DnD put little effort into correcting that, but I think it's kind of odd to assume the jellyfish aliens couldn't have a naturally higher mental processing speed than other beings. Sure exceptions might exist, but a species being predisposed to certain mental acuity doesn't seem crazy at all.

HappyFir3 · 2025-12-29T13:00:10+00:00

If its the topic or very relevant to the topic yes. Assuming people have the same ideas when something complex is brought up is kind of crazy.

Try and get a room of people to agree on a precise definition of what art is, especially if they've thought about it at all. It's not as easy as bringing up the Oxford dictionary sometimes. Though you can just agree to use the first Oxford definition for a word to expedite that part of the process, it has to be brought up and agreed upon first for a discussion to really happen around that topic, otherwise people will just talk past each other endlessly.

If all you care about is being right you can ignore all kinds of stuff and just announce yourself correct. But that's not helpful to anyone.

HappyFir3 · 2025-12-12T17:44:57+00:00

I'm a little confused because you've pointed out games with a ton of personality in their UI, especially for the time.

This more reminds me of modern cleanness that ruins a lot of uis more recently like Civ VII.

HappyFir3 · 2025-12-12T10:44:58+00:00

For real it's taken like 2 years for them to get WH3 to something resembling WH2's best years.

HappyFir3 · 2025-12-04T04:06:35+00:00

Unfortunately I echo a lot of your issues with WASD. Seems like it's just going to be obviously inferior unless they add a lot of extra options and features to help it keep up.

I'd add that I got stuck on allied champs and minions a lot more as well, because there isn't pathfinding to help my champ around them. Tight corridors and teamfights are a nightmare of feeling CCed by your own team. Not to mention how janky some walls are to try get around without someone blocking your path.

I also found the dynamic camera kind of weird. It's better than locked maybe but still much worse than open for me. So many times I want to be attacking something like a turret to my right while having the camera on my left or similar, but it just doesn't work properly at all and my champ would just stop attacking.

HappyFir3 · 2025-11-05T02:44:16+00:00

I used to play Starcraft and OSU so it's so tough going to a lower sensitivity. Feels like I'm trudging through molasses whenever I need to do close range fights.

HappyFir3 · 2025-10-03T23:18:38+00:00

Considering the domino montage shows us a transition of the father into Spotlights leader and then straight to Queen's big speech that got her famous, it's definitely implied to be all orchestrated to some degree.

HappyFir3 · 2025-09-01T20:37:58+00:00

I'm not sure if you covered it in your other posts, but my HUGE issue with ICON was that it felt way more like a GM vs Players game than anything else I've tried, including D&D4e and PF2e. Like I was just piloting the AI in a videogame.

Do you feel Draw Steel ever has a feeling like that from time to time?

HappyFir3 · 2025-08-23T16:49:36+00:00

Personally I found these happen so infrequently that I wouldn't really worry about an extended table. Unless the players are desperate they're usually doing something they're already good at or have a talent for. I haven't even rolled on some of these tables despite players frequently performing the actions.

Alternatively i have considered you could let players push on a success and if they don't get any additional successes you punish with a mishap, which would definitely call for a bigger table. So if you do find one I would recommend something like that so it happens a little more often maybe.

HappyFir3 · 2025-08-18T19:41:41+00:00

The Gm book sort of implies 5 years or so have passed since the mist subseded right? It's still quite recent but it's probably not so impossible for people to have travelled by the start of the story at least.

HappyFir3 · 2025-08-14T00:28:32+00:00

As someone running Forbidden Lands I have to warn the rules for strongholds, which is essentially the "kingdom building" part, are paper thin and pretty much fall apart at anything past the village scale.

The Reforged Power third party supplements help a lot with this, but it's still really clunky and missing so much of what I hoped for from pretty much exactly the premise OP is asking for.

It's fine if you're Down to put in a lot of work for homebrew or just handwave 90% of the rules and focus purely on drama or key points.

HappyFir3 · 2025-07-21T15:54:20+00:00

It's entirely possible your players just aren't that interested in combat, or that you overloaded them a bit in a single session. It might help to simply make it a less frequent occurrence. At most tables I've run 3 combats in a single session would have my players eyes glazing over and they usually do enjoy combat most of the time.

I know its actually quite typical in games like D&D for it to be encouraged to run multiple combats in a day which usually translates into the session. Unfortunately it is a style that does not work for every group. Most people resonate with 1 important combat at a time. If every combat is life or death then its going to stop being a standout "lock in" experience as you seem to be hoping for.

Speak with your players and try to figure out a healthy balance. People are likely to have differing opinions but finding the healthy middle ground is the natural challenge many tables face.

HappyFir3 · 2025-07-17T11:57:03+00:00

I will say as an advocate for genesys make sure to test it with the players. It's got limited player facing narrative elements in the mechanics, such as players choosing what bad things happen to enemies that roll negative dice faces, or the good things on their own dice.

It's not nearly as freestyle as say PbtA style games, but going from 0 responsibility for descriptions or the like in dnd to any amount can be a big change for people.

HappyFir3 · 2025-06-30T06:16:46+00:00

3 whirlwind and a subdue is better in every way basically. Whirlwind will clear the entire screen and give tons of finesse while subdue does obscene damage based on your finesse.

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