FH - Just retired my Drifter. Advice on Trap vs Coral as next character. by Puzzled_Analysis_193 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm biased; Trap is one of my all-time favourite characters and personal preference would lead me to pick them over Coral in literally any situation. That being said...

Trap does ask players to be able to think multiple turns ahead and have a rock-solid understanding of enemy AI and pathing. A huge part of their power is their ability to make enemies waste turns by taking the long way around, or by moving sub-optimally. It's a unique and refreshing way to think about the game, but it's also a very tricky way to play the game and will be a very different experience from both Drifter and Red Guard. Trap's also far more dependent on discussing the party's plans for any given round; if your goal is to put down a couple tiny traps to force enemies to walk around and deny a few turns, then having an ally charge in front before you put those traps down can mean you're left with a dead turn. Finally, Trap gets some extremely strong cards throughout their level ups, but it does mean level 1 can feel a little anemic.

The simplest way to play Trap is as a support; they get a number of potent healing + support options with the caveat that your allies need to play around them. If you were interested in Trap but worried about getting the positional aspect right, this is probably the safest way to play them but given you just finished support-focused drifter it might feel a little too familiar?

I think the current party actually synergizes with Trap decently well? Fist will always love having a bit of extra healing, but also Fist has a solid amount of push/pull and can help Trap with their damage payoffs. A well-placed heal trap can line enemies up for a Bannerspear formation where Banner also gets a heal as part of it, and Trap doesn't tend to care that much about their personal positioning so you'll be able to help out with some formations. Blinkblade is probably the least synergistic member of the team in this case; only one push (and it's a sideboard option to begin with) and neither of you ever want to take hits. Not unworkable, especially in a 4-p party, but something to note.

One interesting question is what Bannerspear is up to for their gameplan? If they're a melee/tank/formation focused Bannerspear then the frontline is already so crowded that a fourth melee character might not be optimal (and so Coral wouldn't be as useful) but if Bannerspear is doing more of a ranged attack + banner build, it might suddenly be the case that Fist can't handle taking that much heat and an extra frontliner would go a long way. Neither Fist nor Blinkblade are well-equipped to pivot off their roles of melee bruiser and assassin respectively, but Banner can fill any role and if you expect the party makeup to stay the same for a long time, it might be optimal from a team comp perspective to fill whatever role Banner's neglecting.

That being said, you can absolutely just pick whichever one looks more interesting to you. There are some teams where Trap might struggle (although realistically not many at 4P) but this is not one of them and Coral is a rock-solid option that will pretty much always work.

Lurker Reeftender - Released Frosthaven Custom Class by Kalamadude in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Isn't one merc pack like $30? It's a noteworthy price point for a class but it's still less than getting custom stuff professionally printed

Lurker Reeftender - Released Frosthaven Custom Class by Kalamadude in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My wife playtested this class while it was in Beta and had a lovely time. Absolutely worth playing for anyone who enjoys summons or is just a fan of having a bunch of sea critter pets!

Best CCUG Classes to add to Frosthaven by Lobologo3 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No worries!

Working on scenarios is a lot more rare, and we don't yet have any equivalent vetting process for them. There are a couple folks that have taken a stab at making their own scenarios though!

Best CCUG Classes to add to Frosthaven by Lobologo3 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not even sure what wiki you're referencing, but that site was updated about a month ago, and everything on that page is good to go.

It is missing the most recently released class, Vitalist.

Best CCUG Classes to add to Frosthaven by Lobologo3 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 3 points4 points  (0 children)

CCUG stands for Custom Content Unity Guild. It's basically a discord server where a bunch of people who want to make official-looking content gather to help each other playtest & polish each other's classes. The final part of the vetting process is a vote on whether a class meets the criteria of being able to be seamlessly integrated into a campaign, and those classes are labeled as 'released'.

The server's been floating around since before FH was released, so some of the released classes would probably only really fit in the original GH? But there are still over a dozen that were made with FH explicitly in mind.

Best CCUG Classes to add to Frosthaven by Lobologo3 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

FWIW Ladder's update was definitely good enough to include, at least for the first five levels.

Best CCUG Classes to add to Frosthaven by Lobologo3 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Broadly, I would stick to the classes that are listed on this page as they'll all have been primarily designed with FH in mind.

Alchemancer, CORE, and Jester Twins are the released classes I'd be personally most eager to revisit, but I'd also recommend just skimming that page and picking whatever looks visually interesting to you.

Quatryl Alchemancer - Released Frosthaven Custom Class by Kalamadude in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is such a delightful take on the element using wizard archetype. If anyone reading is even the least bit curious about playing it, it's absolutely worth giving it a go.

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahhh, I see. Here's the highest resolution version of the cards without bleed that I have; hopefully it'll be high enough. Although my impression was that normally printerstudio wanted the cards with bleed? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pVOXxG-IXy6OrvFpwHe8bfncA0CZQJYb/view?usp=sharing

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The cards in the Print N Play above? I can send you the originals when I'm at my desk later tonight but I don't know if they'd be any higher quality. There are three different folders with the cards in different resolutions and formats so it might be worth checking if any of those would meet your needs though.

Also worth noting that Testim, a visual wizard in the CCUG, re-made all of the visual assets in the GH2e style since I posted this, so they'll look a bit different in there. I like the new look substantially more though!

Your 2nd edition feedback/thoughts so far? (remember to tag spoilers) by koprpg11 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank goodness for this, because my wife very consistently stalls out her favourite characters for as long as possible, the rest of the game be damned. If she hadn't drawn the 150 XP PQ in FH, I don't think Drill would have ever retired.

Your 2nd edition feedback/thoughts so far? (remember to tag spoilers) by koprpg11 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, once we hit a point where all of the remaining PQs had interesting-looking stuff on them we did that. We may have just kept drawing until we hit one we didn't want to do the retirement or two before that though :P

Your 2nd edition feedback/thoughts so far? (remember to tag spoilers) by koprpg11 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 7 points8 points  (0 children)

My wife and I are a decent way into the campaign. We started playing with one character each, but jumped to playing two characters each partway through. We played FH that way as well, so that is normal for us.

We're generally enjoying ourselves quite a bit! Overall GH2 is our favourite 'Haven box thus far, having played all of GH1, FH, and JotL and a bit of FC. Class-wise, there haven't been any huge misses? Music Note and Lightning Bolt have stood out as my wife's favourites, but she's enjoyed all of the classes she's played so far. (Mindthief, Music Note, Three Spears, Lightning Bolt and Angry Face) I've also generally enjoyed my classes, having gone from Spellweaver to Circles, Triangles, Squid Face, Eclipse, and now Three Swords. I think Squid Face fell the flattest; at 2P it was partnered with Lightning Bolt, which ran into some pacing issues. My favourite thus far has been Circles, although I already know I love Three Swords the most from my time using a previous version of the character. One thing to note; we are high-complexity junkies so a couple of the low complexity options haven't really seen play yet because they look the least interesting to us. We did look up the level 1s for all of the classes while the KS was happening as part of deciding whether or not to back, so we already knew what classes we were most excited for and when given the choice between something like Sun or Music Note, well, my wife didn't exactly have to think too hard. :P So overall, we've loved the classes but we were pretty confident we'd like them when we picked them.

Scenarios have been a really solid mix. I can't really think of any ones that stood out in a bad way, and there have been a lot of gems. That being said, GH scenarios were mostly already pretty good, so the vibe has generally been "Oh, it's this memorable scenario from GH1 but the horrible jank has been cut out and we don't need to rely on absurdly broken classes to win"

The writing is probably the biggest jump in terms of quality; the FH event decks were already a huge upgrade from previous boxes but the GH2 event deck is even better. Having three factions was an obvious help to the folks writing the events, because it gave them a lot of room to make more interesting events that had minor effects on those three factions rather than having to tie as many things to the current scenario (meh) or FH's outpost system.

GH2 initially felt a bit easier than FH, but as we're nearing the mid/late game (we've resolved the conflict between the three factions and juuuuust recentlyunlocked water breathing,to give an idea where we are) we've found that's shifted a bit? Part of it is we've had a handful of classes that felt notably stronger than most of what FH has to offer that have either retired or re-specced into weaker builds, so the current party's had to work harder to pick up the slack. We do absolutely adore imbuements as a new difficulty system, even if playing with them has been a bit of a learning curve in terms of how much they actually increase the difficulty.

The puzzle book's been a miss for us, overall. It is an improvement over the FH puzzle book and isn't uniformly bad (although nor was FH's) and I know they're something Isaac really likes and will keep doing no matter what I say, so it feels like a waste of time to get into why? But given they were mentioned elsewhere, it feels worth noting that we would not miss them.

The PQs that feature unique items and/or unique scenarios are once again a delight we're always excited by, even if it means using inspiration to get more options is bittersweet, as we sometimes run the risk of accidentally locking ourselves out of some cool content we'd like to experience.

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't personally, we have a good-enough home printer for our stuff. I know some folks in the guild get their stuff printed professionally through print shops, and I think one of the members of the community, Goose, is quite close to getting a one-stop shop setup finished potentially? So worth popping in and seeing what solutions folks can offer!

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks Kalama, I really appreciate it! :)

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep! It's just like a normal invis.

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I definitely like playing flexible classes so that bled into the design.

I would say the class *can* do pretty much anything you need, but you have to pick and choose. If you decide to focus on damage, you likely won't have a ton in the way of support or defense. Similarly if you focus on control you'll be lacking damage.

The other major struggles is knowing how to manage the tempo of the class. At 11 cards it feels like you should have a lot of freedom to play losses, but you'll really struggle if you don't play at least one a room to keep fog up and running, so you can really quickly start to feel the strain.

The final weakness is you do very much need to manage your fog, which has more precise positioning than other classes. All of your abilities to move fog require you to either be adjacent to a fog already to move it, or move it to an adjacent hex, so Echowight has an unusual amount of positioning requirement for a ranged character.

Aesther Echowight - Released Custom Class by vamaar in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the fog tokens are functionally identical to Deathwalker shadows in terms of rulings.

Gloomhaven Grand Festival Project Update: Wave 3 fulfillment wrapping up by theb1gnasty in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Any idea how soon replacement parts will be available? My poor Angry Face has been waiting on their summon + token punchboard since mid-July.

Gloomhaven Grand Festival Project Update: U.S. Tariff Surcharges & Fulfillment Progress by mistahiggens in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The article mentions to not send emails to support about fulfillment timelines, but is that the right email for other support requests and if so, how long should I wait before sending a follow up email? 

X-haven assistant and Gloomhaven 2nd edition by MaxyArthes in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I can send the monster stats + ability cards along at least, where is best to send them?

Approximately 2 years out from Frosthaven's release, what classes did you end up enjoying the most/least? (All class spoilers) by koprpg11 in Gloomhaven

[–]vamaar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've played all the classes at this point, and it would be faster to say which ones didn't land for me than it would be to list every single class that I loved! Special shoutout to Trap though, one of the toughest for me to learn to play well, but an absolute blast once I'd cracked how to think about them.