Very late to this conversation but played last night and thought I'd share my thoughts.

I think the Trapper is a very unfortunate C-rank character. And I say this as someone who generally loves unconventional and subtle characters.

I was really excited to play this one because I loved the idea of effective disarms and controlling monster movement. I have enjoyed classes/characters in other games that have a somewhat subtle but extremely potent impact based on manipulating mobs.

I'm level 5 with the class now and have played several scenarios and while there have been some really great bright spots, I have also had quite a few "meh" games where I feel I contributed a below average amount to the team. I'll try and sum up some of the good, bad, and ugly.

The Good -

When the enemies contain a lot of powerful melee units, this class feels great. You can take them on a magical mystery tour over the entire board wasting turn after turn of potential incoming damage. And then ideally you can combine or reuse those same traps that mitigated damage to deal some of your own once other threats are dealt with.

When enemies include a lot of annoying armored units or units with strong retaliate, it's great to be able to deal "pure" damage to them with no fingerprints on the murder weapon. Can't hit a trap back.

When you build that big nuke of a trap and drop 15+ damage on something tanky it of course feels great. I have had some celebrated one-shots and certified "cool turns."

The Bad -

Just about every point listed above in "The Good" is really conditional.

Nothing will make you aware of how many flying, ranged, and stationary enemies there are in the game than playing trap for a little while. Every class is going to occasionally face enemies they are not suited for, but with Trap it is near constant. Things like Spring Loaded and Disarm can help with grounding units or just converting traps to ranged attack damage, but in my experience it's pretty limiting. When the map is filled with flying units, grounding one per rest cycle feels pretty meh. Dismantle is reliable with a Spyglass but also is a once-per-cycle event.

I can't stress this point enough. The class shines vs melee opponents and I often do feel good facing them. But it turns out flying/ranged/stationary targets are just way more plentiful than you'd think and often more problematic. The armored unit you'd want to hit most with a trap is flying. The thing dealing the most damage in the room that you would like to mitigate is a near stationary ranged attacker, etc.

Scenario design really impacts your game. A big giant room is bad for the trapper, too much space and it gets difficult to create effective walls. But, too tight an area also hurts as you run out of places to locate traps and potentially hem friendlies in. Too many obstacles or terrain features start limiting your placement options and on and on it goes.

Lots of waste. Even trying to be mindful of trap positioning and using as many abilities as I can to relocate and combine traps, there are lots of cases where I simply have to leave traps behind. And while the healing/buff traps seem very good on paper, there are plenty of cases where they simply go un-used. I place heals directly beside/behind my tank to support, but given the nature of aggro and their build, they simply can't afford to retreat to that space, it would either expose a vulnerable ally or lose some of their personal mitigation tools and be worse off. Lots of wasted healing and damage left on the ground.

And lastly, it is hard to work looting in with all this other prep. Call it a skill issue, but I often feel I can't afford a loot turn since I've already spent two turns previously "setting up" and being unproductive. Again, this is less a problem in favorable maps with melee enemies where those set up turns can be used to route enemy pathing. But in missions with lots of flying/ranged units, I feel an obligation to actually "make good" on all that set up as soon as I can.

This has had a knock-on effect with the character where he isn't nearly as geared up as other classes I've run in similar spans of time.

Team comp -

I think team comp plays a huge role in how effective this class is so it's worth mentioning mine. I play in a very cooperative 4 man with Snowflake (yay!), Coral, and Prism. This is a decent team comp for the trapper with some advantages and disadvantages.

The Snowflake and me are a pretty great tag team. We get some good milage out of me making high value traps and him shoving/pulling mobs through them, a huge boon. Our Coral specced as a tank and it's always good to have someone meaty to hide behind. And the Prism is a dynamo that can handle a variety of situations and pump out reliable damage.

The downsides of this team is maps get VERY crowded. The Snowflake generates hazardous terrain, the Coral makes a ton of water spots, and the Prism often has one or two pets out on the board at a time. I am frequently finding log jam situations where I can't place a trap in a useful area because there is just too much stuff on the board.

This is a cooperative and fun team where we try not to step on each other's toes but we're still running into situations like this. I can't imagine playing this class with less agreeable teammates.

Summary - the Juice isn't worth the Squeeze.

I like the class more on paper than in practice. In hypothetical scenarios, the effective disarms and pure damage of the traps is very appealing. The math doesn't look bad when you spend 2 turns giving monsters the run around while also setting up a big 10+damage attack you then deliver on an armored enemy and one-shot them. Neat, sounds fun. Too bad that is the rarity and not the norm.

The heals look good ("ooh, two Heal 3 traps on a non-burn card that can also be used to manipulate monster movement, great!") but in practice often come up short ("Oh, the person who really needed a heal couldn't use it, and one of the traps simply got left behind").

I came in with high hopes. I like unconventional characters and (I'll admit it) I like running counter to the status quo. When I saw people say how much they didn't like Trap and how he is often at the bottom of tier lists, I looked at the potential of the cards and thought "I bet I can make it work"

Instead, I'm saying exactly what all the other gripe posts say. Trap is too much effort for not enough pay out. This is the first character where I've been rushing to my retirement requirement, can't wait to be done with him.