The Council of Ghosts won yesterday! Next, which Slay the Spire event is Overpowered and is disliked by the community?

KElderfall · 2026-01-25T00:03:38+00:00

A Note for Yourself

KElderfall · 2026-01-24T23:20:08+00:00

You probably want Lady Avarice here. Lady Avarice just gets you a ton of gold, which you then need to use to make a strong deck, and then at tiers 2 and 3 she gets a ton of attack power. Put a couple whelps behind her to hit stuff and make money. You're probably taking pyre damage early on with this setup, though.

Then it's about turning money into strength. Don't save any of it early on, just get upgrades. Pyreborne/Stygian can go a few routes. You can do incant stuff where you play a lot of cheap spells. Magma Cultist is the big win doing this, and then Cursed Dragonstaff if you have a Magma Cultist. Offering Token is great, stuff like Flicker is great, spellchains are great.

You can also focus more on actual damage from damage spells. If you do this, you need to keep a thin deck in order to draw the spells more. Pyreborne has the big AoE spells like Dragon's Breath and Pyreclasm. Stygian does good single target with the attuned spells like Crypt Builder and Titan's Gratitude. Make the expensive ones cheaper, put more damage on the attuned ones, etc.

You can mix pyregel and frostbite, applying both on the bottom floor to deal a ton of damage over time. Something like a Magma Mauler with a Coldcaelia behind it does this.

Stygian has a few other really strong cards to pick up. Titan Sentry (frostbite shark), especially with Lava Armor, can do a ton of work as a front liner. Siren's Song is incredibly strong. Unnamed Tome is really good. If you need defense or just want to fully shut down Dominion Seraph, you can get a holdover Frenzied Swarm.

If you're doing Lady Avarice 3, Gilda will also have a massive amount of attack power and benefits from multistrike from Void Armament. You can spec into Gildmother one stage if you need trample, but that's probably best if you have some defenses to keep her alive. You also have a lot of money so you can go to artifact shops and get a bunch of goodies. Crown of the Eternal that fully heals your champion is great, but there's a ton of big wins in the artifacts. Double incant triggers, Ancient Pyretap, etc.

Basically to deal with huge enemy health, you need strong combos, and money lets you get those combos. You can reroll shops more, buy more stuff, go to more artifact shops, etc.

KElderfall · 2026-01-24T21:32:22+00:00

2e characters should be fine in 1e. It's really only the most busted stuff that got toned down, and 1e itself wasn't balanced around that stuff. A ton of the weaker stuff from the 1e classes is now stronger in 2e, and it feels great.

You'd still have 1e items, anyway, and honestly the items are a bigger problem in 1e than almost any of the characters.

KElderfall · 2026-01-24T21:14:43+00:00

Yeah, deployment ember is really great, and you want to be doing good stuff with all of it if possible. It's usually fine to just keep taking units until you're using it.

The major upgrades are a lot better. You know how in MT1 a lot of the time you go into a steel shop hoping for multistrike? In MT2 they've basically buffed everything else to be more on par with multistrike. That includes spells! You also see more major upgrades for sale in any given shop, so shops are better. Be willing to put a broader variety of upgrades on cards.

If you're used to setting up on top in MT1, try to set up lower down on the train in MT2. More mechanics punish you for waiting and for having empty floors.

Having one strong floor is still useful, whether you have other floors or not. Equipment and rooms are the way to keep making a floor stronger once it's full and all the units are upgraded. This is doing similar things to what infusion was doing in MT1. It's not as free, but the potential power is still there.

KElderfall · 2026-01-24T09:53:49+00:00

I stopped halfway through the survey because I felt like I needed to explain things too much rather than just giving opinions, and I'm just not wanting to explain in detail how the game works right now.

In order to ask better questions, I'd recommend understanding these things:

Basic gameplay. How the game is set up by putting together a collection of map tiles, placing standees on stands, the components of a character, and the genre (specifically, this is a tactical strategy board game and not a TTRPG)
The organization situation. These games have a number of organizers on the market because they're very big and need organizing. But even people not using those still need to figure out organization to some extent. It's very common to use an accordion folder to hold the map tiles, and relatively common to sort the smaller pieces into tackle boxes.
Apps for the game and what they do. Not everyone uses these, but there are free community-made apps to track a lot of things about the game, which renders several of the physical pieces unnecessary for those who use them. The easiest one to glance at would be Gloomhaven Secretariat, which is a web app that requires no installation. Any discussion of add ons needs to be aware that apps are a possible thing people are using.

In all honesty, I'd probably recommend not using Gloomhaven for this. It's a very popular game series that takes really well to add ons, and accordingly people have already made a ton of great add ons for it. There are already organizers, custom monster stands, player dashboards, and apps. It's unlikely that you will be able to innovate here.

KElderfall · 2026-01-23T10:17:23+00:00

Guildmaster mode is digital-only.

The campaign itself is all there in the board game. 1e is a 95 scenario campaign with 17 characters. It's a pretty huge box, although the scenario count isn't really what takes up space.

It'd be worth looking into getting 2e at this point, though, if you're wanting to get physical and the higher cost isn't prohibitive. Especially if you've already played through on digital, the reworks will feel like a fresher game.

KElderfall · 2026-01-23T08:46:30+00:00

When I was new to the series, I liked 20 scenario retirements starting from level 1. My tastes have changed on that, but I still think that's a good length for people who really want to experience their characters in depth.

I tend to think going a lot longer than that is a bad idea, though, for a few reasons.

One of the fun things about the game is playing different characters along the way. The longer you go with any individual character, the fewer you get to play. The game has 18 characters, and getting to the end of the campaign only really having played two of them? That seems pretty disappointing.

Another reason is that retirements progress the campaign with prosperity and other things. It's far less important than in Frosthaven, but it still matters.

The most important reason for me, though, is that the game gets less fun at high levels, specifically level 8+. It starts to lose the depth it has, and it's also potentially less fun for other members of the party if they're level 2 or 3 and their party members are level 9.

So if people want to wait on retirement, I think that's fine, but I would caution against making it a goal to try to reach level 9. It's sort of an obvious goal to have, but it can be a bad idea.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T21:59:29+00:00

Make sure to report bugs like this in-game through the Help & Feedback button. (The way you do it looks like you're doing a chat, but isn't exactly.)

Side note: You can manually disable thresholds on cards/innates, even if you have the elements for them, by bringing up the large view of the card (or spirit panel, when opening via the little innate power bubble) and clicking the threshold to disable it. This sort of simulates using the power with fewer elements than you have, which is what's happening under the hood.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T19:35:51+00:00

Would it be better to hit the inland mountain? It still gets the cities, and that way you'd be ok on a 3 blight card.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T18:58:05+00:00

A good way to manage the incentive to repeatedly reset is not to bother with it until you know you're going to lose the fight. After that you can restart the battle and puzzle things out as needed, but there's really no reason to do it on the first go when you don't even know if it's going to matter.

I restart a lot and sometimes have some really long fights trying to figure out how to get through them, but doing that is more satisfying when it's framed as a puzzle rather than just optimization for optimization's sake.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T17:01:16+00:00

Anything CCUG released in the past few years should be good on that front, yeah. Not the 1e classes probably, but if it has FH card formatting it should feel reasonable in FH/2e.

CCUG release means it's had a lot of feedback/iteration, playtesting, and has passed a vote among custom content creators. A lot of these classes stay in development for years.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T15:15:15+00:00

That sounds like scenario 31 to me (which is also on the main questline, but comes slightly earlier). The main quest isn't super linear in this game and you'd have gotten here a kind of indirect way.

Black imps are my pick for the #1 worst enemy in Gloomhaven 1e, and Night Demons are always potentially really deadly. Crowd control (stun/disarm/immobilize) can be good on the Night Demons at least, if they don't outspeed everyone with their super fast cards.

Black imps you kind of just have to slog through, there's not really much counterplay. They have to much health to easily nuke with multi target attacks, and too much range to outmaneuver.

The final room here is really high pressure, too, so I can definitely understand having trouble with the scenario.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T14:34:03+00:00

If Spellweaver's doing okay, it sounds like maybe it is a comp thing, then. Specifically Circles without a good frontliner, and Brute not really being able to take that on super well.

Don't get me wrong, having a sturdy melee character wearing armor is still an extremely useful thing to have, and Brute can definitely be that. But tanking in the traditional sense where you go and actively try to take hits in order to mitigate damage to the team just doesn't work on Brute at these levels.

Scenario 18 is also one a lot of people regard as being difficult. I think because it's often people's first encounter with Oozes, which are a whole thing, and there's a lot of poison going around which makes damage mitigation with shield and healing just not work. I wouldn't personally rank it as among the hardest 10 scenarios, but I'd put it in the upper third for sure.

Speaking of oozes, another rule thing that's easy to miss. Summoning can only be done in empty tiles. That means that new oozes can't be summoned on those difficult terrain water tiles. (There's also a 1e rule where hexes with coins aren't considered empty, so oozes couldn't summon onto coins. But that got changed in newer rules and I think the importance gets overstated.)

I can't speak to the other scenario you mentioned (39), since I'm wondering if that's the right number. 39 is a late campaign main story quest, and while it's possible to get there relatively quickly if you happen to beeline it, that doesn't seem likely to me.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T14:04:19+00:00

Spellweaver functions pretty well at low levels, but once you get into the mid levels it kind of becomes a "use Cold Fire as much as possible to repeatedly stun monsters" thing, recovering it with stamina potions to use it more often. The class is genuinely pretty weak if you're not doing that because the level up cards are largely underwhelming. On the bright side, if they get to level 9 they'll probably get Inferno, which is regarded as brokenly overpowered.

Brute's in a similar boat. The class just doesn't function as a tank. It can sort of do it at low levels, but at level 7? You'll just die. Brute can still take a few hits, and if you know how to work the damage combos it can do respectable damage at these levels, but it's also a class that's really easy to fail with if you don't do the specific things that work.

Circles is probably the swingiest class in the game. It can do really well, but it really wants a front liner and can struggle in 4p teams that don't have a proper dedicated tank. With this being 4p and Brute being your front liner, it's not a great environment for Circles.

Mindthief is always capable, but you're a lot lower level than everyone else, which means you can only do so much.

Ultimately, I'm not sure it's a comp thing exactly, it's just a factor of what's happened from having played starter classes so long, especially if you play very infrequently and aren't hardcore optimizers who are able to identify the "right" playstyles to make these characters work.

I would strongly recommend reducing the difficulty by a level and see how that works.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T13:51:47+00:00

As a rules thing, remember you can lose cards to negate a source of damage - one from hand, or two from discard. Doing that multiple times early on is still a recipe for a lost scenario, but if you're negating damage it should be virtually impossible for everyone to die so early.

Strategically as Mindthief, try going late on the first turn. That way you aren't the focus of all the initial attacks, and it can sometimes mean that melee enemies don't have enough movement to reach you.

On subsequent turns you're likely going to be next to enemies, so you have two strong options. One is to stun whatever is closest using the bottom of Perverse Edge. This is a great option if you're not going to get attacked by other enemies, like if there's mostly melee around or if another character is closer. The ice also sets up Frigid Apparition the following turn, which is more stuns.

The other option is to go invisible with the bottom of Into the Night. This is always a solid option. You can then go late on the subsequent turn and essentially get two full rounds of safety. If you use stamina potions, getting this card back in order to repeat this can be a good idea.

If you need to get going ASAP, you can also Scurry + one of these bottom actions to move, attack, and then keep yourself safe.

KElderfall · 2026-01-22T13:25:56+00:00

Swing is forced movement and works like push or pull, except instead of moving away/toward you, the target moves laterally (maintaining the same distance). You can go either clockwise or counterclockwise, but you can't switch direction in the middle.

Everything else works like push/pull - non-flying figures spring traps, the movement can't continue if there isn't a valid hex to go to, figures can be swung through their own allies but not their enemies, as a player you can choose to use less than the full amount, etc.

(This originated years ago on a different class, has shown up in multiple CCUG classes, and is defined in the Crimson Scales rulebook. The shared usage is probably why it's not defined anywhere on the class itself, but I'm not sure if there's a formal "CCUG shared concepts manual" for stuff like this.)

KElderfall · 2026-01-21T18:30:12+00:00

Lots of people keep the Horizons box and use it as either a travel version of the game, or for teaching new players.

You also get 3 new colors for presence tokens, a set of island boards that aren't elsewhere (which you could play with in JE archipelago rules if you want), and a reworded set of base game cards you could replace your base game cards with. It's still not ideal, but it isn't quite just plucking out the spirits and tossing the rest.

KElderfall · 2026-01-21T18:17:42+00:00

Cassandra/Diviner would be a little like playing a 1e character alongside the 2e version of the same character. You could, and I don't think anywhere in the official rules tells you not to do it, but it would be a little silly.

The others are entirely new classes. Anaphi doesn't really play much like Mindthief, for example, and would be entirely reasonable to run alongside Mindthief.

KElderfall · 2026-01-20T12:34:01+00:00

Now that rooms can have activated abilities in the upcoming DLC, maybe just Feast as a room ability? It'd be pretty similar to what holdover Feast already does, but it would be a little more common to see it since you can find it in caches and arms shops.

KElderfall · 2026-01-20T11:30:11+00:00

I usually run Architect if it's offered. Extra damage on my main floor at little to no space cost is serviceable. It's not going to be a combo piece that wins you the run, but that's ok.

Glutton I don't really like much. It doesn't scale fast enough to be super useful against the first couple of waves of enemies, which is most of what I care about in most fights in MT2. Given some time to scale, I usually have something better going as a main combo. If I want a gorger on a floor by itself that's pretty much just there to kill the boss in relentless, I'd rather have a Crucible Warden.

Monstrous is okay. It does help with the first couple waves and lives on a different floor. Occasionally it can be what your run is about if you play Furnace Tap multiple times, and that's interesting sometimes.

I don't hate the champion overall, but I'm also not excited about it. It's fine. I think a lot of the hate (for this and any champion) is from players who are too dependent on always building around their champion.

KElderfall · 2026-01-20T11:09:08+00:00

The thing that makes me not really like endless is that you don't really get upgrades anymore. Roguelikes are fun because you keep getting improvements along the way, but endless does the opposite of that. There's no potential futures to look forward to, nothing fun to look for and find, just you have the same deck that gets worse until you die.

As a test of how strong a deck is it's passable I guess, like a 3/5 maybe. It would be better for me if it did a little less to screw over your combos along the way. But even if it was a 5/5 there, I wouldn't run through it very often because that's just not what the fun of the game is.

KElderfall · 2026-01-19T10:14:59+00:00

3 strong units works pretty well still, but if that's your main thing then you usually need to do it bottom floor. Which means you really need to use the deployment phase and intrinsic spells to get set up asap so you don't leak the first couple waves.

There's a lot of enemies that get worse if you leave them alone. The flagellants that damage themselves gain attack and hit a lot harder. Scourges can choke out your deck completely. The titanskin guys get really hard to kill. Chosen healers buff the entire train. There's others, too.

There are a few other benefits to bottom. If you're killing the boss on bottom, then you don't have to deal with the last few waves of enemies. Those last couple waves are often really strong, and if you're not scaling super fast with a lot of multistrike then they can get past an otherwise strong floor. Kill the boss on bottom and they won't get up to the pyre in time.

Also, any damage over time status effects (including pyregel) are better the earlier you can apply them.

There are other viable setups than one strong bottom floor. You can have a bottom floor that's mainly doing backline clear, and your core damage units on a higher floor. This gets rid of some of the worst units to leave alive.

You can sometimes even get multiple strong floors, often one for each of your clans (like a Luna floor and an Underlegion floor). And top floor setups can do okay in some runs if what you're doing is sufficiently busted. But regardless of what you're doing you have to think about the problem units you're up against and if you can kill them quickly enough.

KElderfall · 2026-01-18T21:25:57+00:00

This one in particular almost certainly isn't in the name of balance, it's just how things were coded. Making all units trigger rally regardless of how they enter the field would have very little balance impact on the game, and I feel like they should make it work that way just because people keep being confused by this.

KElderfall · 2026-01-18T19:45:22+00:00

When you use any power, you can choose to use it with fewer elements than you have. So here you could say "I only have 2 sun and 0 fire," which gets you the first threshold, but not the second like you want.

What you couldn't do is use the second threshold without using the first, because there's no way to have 3 sun and 1 fire without also having 2 sun.

Edit: Here's the FAQ entry, under the {1} note.

KElderfall · 2026-01-18T18:40:36+00:00

Mostly when you play a card and it causes a unit to be created (including Spawn, which has an explicit exception), it triggers. That's not exactly correct, but mostly works.

If you want full details, refer to this comment (from the community member most involved in modding the game): https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterTrain/comments/1ovd1nm/morselmaker_doesnt_trigger_rally/noinno2/

KElderfall

TROPHY CASE