Game is too hard with 1 or 2 players!


Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion

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Scarab Sages

Boons to the bottom does seem steep when you only have the base set and AD1.

Then you see the cards in ADs 4-6, by which point Seelah might be able to get a role that doesn't shift boons to the bottom, and her whole game changes. You also realize that those B-3 boons you gave up probably weren't all that good.


Hawkmoon269 wrote:

I'd have to disagree with her being a bad character overall. I thought the same thing, but then my wife picked her. She can be great. The problem is, at first glance she has two powers that appear to have too high of a cost: Her examining power moves boons to the bottom of the deck and her check assistance costs her a discard.

But boons to the bottoms aren't as bad as you'd think (and she can mitigate after she gets her role card). And the discard cost can become a recharge for spells and blessings, which if you max out can be a sizable chunk of her deck. Always use her 1d6 power when trying to recharge Cure. Better to have another card in your discard than have Cure in your discard.

My biggest problem is hand size 4, favorite card armor. I've played her myself, and I still think she's bad in the sense that I'd rather have any other character with me instead of her.


Mechalibur wrote:
Hawkmoon269 wrote:

I'd have to disagree with her being a bad character overall. I thought the same thing, but then my wife picked her. She can be great. The problem is, at first glance she has two powers that appear to have too high of a cost: Her examining power moves boons to the bottom of the deck and her check assistance costs her a discard.

But boons to the bottoms aren't as bad as you'd think (and she can mitigate after she gets her role card). And the discard cost can become a recharge for spells and blessings, which if you max out can be a sizable chunk of her deck. Always use her 1d6 power when trying to recharge Cure. Better to have another card in your discard than have Cure in your discard.

My biggest problem is hand size 4, favorite card armor. I've played her myself, and I still think she's bad in the sense that I'd rather have any other character with me instead of her.

By AP 5-6, I've begged to have armor drawn in my hand. One armor alone is quite handy, given the abilities they have on them by then, and if you can pick up several in a scenario, you're burning through armor to prevent all the nastiness that comes your way.

Focusing on adding blessings and spells for card feats (adding Spell to the recharge ability), I'm getting D6+3 on almost every check, rarely risking recharging the wrong thing, have armor to take damage from almost every source, and have some of those amazing end-game weapons to just destroy everything. Seelah's been the easiest solo character I've beaten RotR with so far (haven't been many) and is always a great, flexible character in any group I have with her.

And despite the scouting ability moving boons to the bottom, there are plenty of times that it can absolutely turn a blessing run-out loss to a win because you just have to push to get through those decks.

Seelah was my absolute least favorite character when I first picked up the game. I've learned a lot since then.


Mechalibur wrote:
My biggest problem is hand size 4, favorite card armor. I've played her myself, and I still think she's bad in the sense that I'd rather have any other character with me instead of her.

I will concede that getting hand size 5 is the absolute first thing I will ever do with her when I have the chance.


Deekow wrote:
Mechalibur wrote:
My biggest problem is hand size 4, favorite card armor. I've played her myself, and I still think she's bad in the sense that I'd rather have any other character with me instead of her.
I will concede that getting hand size 5 is the absolute first thing I will ever do with her when I have the chance.

This is the first power I take on ANY 4-hand-size character, bar none.


We played Kyra+Merisiel (sp?) through the whole thing never being threatened really. We were purposely not closing things all the time so we could loot more.

Kyra's 1d6+2 melee is fine really. It averages the same as a flat 1d10 with a higher minimum so it's more consistent. You will need blessing until you can put more into STR and get magic weapons.

The key to Kyra (especially in a small party) is not to try to make her a caster. She needs max +STR not WIS. Take 2-3 cure spells and a few utility things like augury and such and just cast your cures every time they come up. Your "skip explore" ability is your safety net. It's not to actually be used regularly because you are going to be chain-exploring with all of your blessings.

For my ally with her I ran the cleric father guy that is basically a one shot heal with a bonus that it buries so it gets out of your deck and helps you get more blessings faster. The first item you need is thieves tools because you suck at barriers. You will likely run thieves tools forever...masterwork later, sure, but until the end of the game that's in your deck pretty much.

For cards get the second item. You will need it. Then get more spells and more blessings in the order that you feel is right. At some point you will need a 3rd weapon as you wont reliably get one early enough. You do not need more armor or more allies. Allies are just terrible blessings in RoR (they are better in S&S).

Once you get exorcist (because the other class is terrible) you can destroy a location deck in a couple turns with Serenrae blessings. Don't overdo them though. You will still need a couple Gorums to beat people with and one of the one that helps you close locations.

For Merisiel(sp?) um...well I didn't play her but just get a lot of spyglasses and decent crossbows, maybe a couple daggers, and destroy everything in the face. Didn't seem hard.


Oh, and I forgot. We played "hard mode" and it was still never a challenge, really. Somehow we didn't realize that blessings could be played on other chars. Seriously. We thought they were self-only.

We played the entire game this way.

Now that we started S&S and we understand that blessings work on friends and moreover are global in range...it's almost trivial to beat the bosses in a three man party with a blessing from everyone and a few random powers or spells. I sort of wish the villains scaled with number of players. Most banes in general aren't as threatening, really, as someone can always help out.


DirkSJ wrote:
Once you get exorcist (because the other class is terrible) you can destroy a location deck in a couple turns with Serenrae blessings. Don't overdo them though. You will still need a couple Gorums to beat people with and one of the one that helps you close locations.

Nah, Healer role isn't terrible. Especially if you're like my group and literally never encountered a single blessings of Sarenrae in all 6 adventures (like, seriously, what were the odds of that?). The huge hand size is awesome.


Mechalibur wrote:
DirkSJ wrote:
Once you get exorcist (because the other class is terrible) you can destroy a location deck in a couple turns with Serenrae blessings. Don't overdo them though. You will still need a couple Gorums to beat people with and one of the one that helps you close locations.
Nah, Healer role isn't terrible. Especially if you're like my group and literally never encountered a single blessings of Sarenrae in all 6 adventures (like, seriously, what were the odds of that?). The huge hand size is awesome.

Terrible was somewhat hyperbole. But not too much.

If we examine powers in healer:
- Add +1 more default heal, add card draw
Her healing ability frankly just isn't very good. It's a fallback for when you botch all your cure recharges or need to emergency heal a teammate and don't happen to have a cure handy. Skipping an explore is simply too expensive.

- Add 2/4 to acquire Divine
Er...who cares? You really have no trouble acquiring Divine things by deck 4 when you are picking your specialization. You pretty much auto-acquire blessings and none of the late deck divine spells are worth running.

- Blessing power
Almost as good as exorcist equiv power. But not as good.

- One extra card
Frankly you just don't need it. Even at SIX cards she's a raging power house that destroys location decks in a couple turns without anyone's help.

The "free 1 card heal when you kill an undead" feat is better than all of those combined. It keeps you cycling and even more importantly it keeps you shuffling.

If you didn't get Serenrae blessings I blame you, mostly. You should force more blessings until you do...RotR is very stingy with them...S&S seems a lot better in that respect. Use spyglasses and augury's to find the boss as soon as you can, don't close if you run into any henchmen, kill the boss, and don't temp close so you get lots of extra blessing pulls. Use those same tricks to make sure you don't encounter him again until you've looted your extra blessings.

When you are running Kyra you have all the time in the world in most scenarios. You should make sure to get (or at least see and decide you don't want) all the boons in all the locations. Unless we were pushing for more blessings (as above) we were always really sad whenever we saw the villain. We considered house ruling that the auto-close for villains was a "may" instead of a "must" because we just felt robbed. Several times we botched our villain defeat rolls on purpose, not playing weapons, etc, just because we didn't want to close the place. The reward was great: more blessings in the decks!

Unless it was a really annoying location or we already had all the boons from that deck we wanted we never attempted close after a henchmen either. Kyra is just so good at burning through location decks.


DirkSJ wrote:
Kyra's 1d6+2 melee is fine really. It averages the same as a flat 1d10 with a higher minimum so it's more consistent. You will need blessing until you can put more into STR and get magic weapons.

I found Kyra's 1d6 + 2 Melee acceptable at the start, as you say it's comparable to a d10, but it was when Blessing of Gorum only added 2d6 rather than 2d10 that I found myself wishing I'd gone the spellcasting/Pharasma route for combat.

I was playing Kyra in a solo game and by AP4 she was struggling to beat combat checks with her paltry pile of d6s.


Nefrubyr wrote:
DirkSJ wrote:
Kyra's 1d6+2 melee is fine really. It averages the same as a flat 1d10 with a higher minimum so it's more consistent. You will need blessing until you can put more into STR and get magic weapons.

I found Kyra's 1d6 + 2 Melee acceptable at the start, as you say it's comparable to a d10, but it was when Blessing of Gorum only added 2d6 rather than 2d10 that I found myself wishing I'd gone the spellcasting/Pharasma route for combat.

I was playing Kyra in a solo game and by AP4 she was struggling to beat combat checks with her paltry pile of d6s.

I went straight STR, only popping stats in WIS when I ran out of STR slots. With a heavy STR investment and decent weapons I never had too much trouble. My flat modifier plus one per die often nearly won and I only needed to roll a moderate number. Really heavy combats saw me dropping a swipe for the extra 3. Once you get Mok's club (end of 4 I think?) you are set forever.

Kyra will never be a top tier melee person, obviously, but I didn't fail too many fights really.

The problem with spellcasting Kyra as your primary monster slaying technique is that you won't have an attack spell most of the time. She doesn't have a way to put her spells directly back in her hand (like Lem) or force-draw them (like Ezren) or have a power-spell (like Seoni). Plus she just doesn't have very many spell slots. You will have a lot of scary turns where you have a weapon but no +STR/Gorum, and no attack spell coming up for several turns. Top it with the fact that Divine just doesn't get many "boom" spells in RotR and...I'm not seeing it work well.


In my 6 player group, my Kyra is basically full on Support. We play a bit reckless as you need to do with a larger group, and I've kept people from dying in several cases. Her having heavy armor makes up for not being a combat powerhouse.


DirkSJ wrote:
Once you get Mok's club (end of 4 I think?) you are set forever.

Perhaps I would have been, but unfortunately Mok's club got me first. One bad Fortitude roll and she was done for...

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