I think the flowing combo is game breaking. It's easy to achieve and trivializes the game. Here is an explanation of the combo, from hawkmoon.
I did miss that a bit. I don't see what would stop you from doing that other then boredom and your fellow players being angry with you. Radillo would potentially have to repeat it quite a bit to get all those Magic trait cards on top. Say...
1. Radillo plays Augury and says "items" and she find 2 items in the top 3 cards, only 1 of which has the Magic trait. She shuffles the non-item back into the location deck, puts the Magic trait item on top followed by the non-Magic item.
2. Radillo recharged Augury.
3. Radillo plays detect Magic and encounters the Magic item. She acquires it.
4. Radillo adds Augury back to her hand.
5. Radillo recharges Detect Magic.
6. Radillo plays Augury, this time says "weapons" and finds 1 weapon in the top 3 cards. It has the Magic trait. She shuffles the rest back in, and puts the weapon on top.
7. Radillo recharges Augury.
8. Radillo adds Detect Magic back to her hand.
9. Radillo plays Detect Magic and encounters the weapon. She fails to to acquire the weapon because she has d6 Strength.
10. Valeros curses at Radillo.
100. Radillo continues the cycle, acquiring some cards and banishing others.So, a couple things will break the cycle.
A. If there are no magic cards or cards of that type in the top 3 when she plays Augury. She can put the non-Magic cards on the bottom of the location deck, but she'll be playing Detect Magic blind. Granted, she can repeat still, but eventually she'll probably give up after 5 or 6 cycles with no magic to detect.
B. Other players ask you to stop getting rid of all the good boons.
But in general, I think you can do it. You'll have to keep Detect Magic in her deck long term. And once you have a turn where you play another spell, the cycle is broken.
Also, Radillo looks designed to tempt you to get yourself killed. She has more powers to encourage you to draw a card, bury a card, and banish a card than anyone I've seen so far. All those things thin out your character deck which pushes you near death, especially with a...
Radillo can go through a location, loot it for all magic boons and leave the henchman/villain on top [edit: or stack a couple valuable non-magic boons to make them easily accessible), and then move to the next location. She can do this using two B spells, one power feat, and getting a +3 bonus to int/arcance/recharege. I think this loop presents major problems and needs to be addressed in some manner.
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I see this the same way as I did the Restoration combo a while back. If you want to break the game and make it most likely much less fun due to no challenge, do it (unless the other players don't want you to of course, don't be a jerk). It really shouldn't get a change just because someone found a combo, this isn't MTG.
Note: Yes, I'm aware Restoration got an errata, one that I disagree with and will never follow outside of OP
I think it differs from restoration on a number of fronts
a) it comes from a character power, not a boon. That makes it an easier fix.
b) because its a character problem, it changes about how designers need to think about all spells going forward. Radillo can effectively infinity cast any non-combat cards she can recharge. Allowing radillo to exist as is limits design space.
c) The combo is FAR easier to get and set up then the restoration problem. You are effectively asking Radillo players to be on the honor system not to us their strongest power for the sake of game health.
d) these are characters built for organized play. I am uncomfortable with the notion that I should be able to tell another play how to play their character, but the combo will reduce fun for other players.
I think it's even worse - as long as she recharges the spell she played and it has the arcane trait, doesn't she get it right back to her hand?
1) Radillo plays Detect Magic
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
3) Having just played a spell with the arcane trait, she examines the bottom card of her deck. Lo and behold, it's a Detect Magic! Since it's a spell, she puts it in her hand.
4) Radillo plays Detect Magic...
I see this the same way as I did the Restoration combo a while back. If you want to break the game and make it most likely much less fun due to no challenge, do it (unless the other players don't want you to of course, don't be a jerk). It really shouldn't get a change just because someone found a combo, this isn't MTG.
Note: Yes, I'm aware Restoration got an errata, one that I disagree with and will never follow outside of OP
Restoration has only gotten more powerful, excluding the errata. Look at S&S Lini.
1) Lini plays Resto, draws 2 cards
2) Lini plays Toad, gets Resto back
3) Lini uses her power to put Toad on top of her deck
4) Lini plays Resto, drawing Toad and another card.
5) Lini plays Toad...
...
She gets infinite explores by recharging allies, and can move about to any location using the Giant Badger multiple times, and can fully heal herself at the end of the turn using Staff of Minor Healing. Finally, she can do this just by drawing one of her toads and one of her Resto's, regardless of how many cards she has left in her deck.
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So, if you're not going to play with the Errata, what, S&S Lini players who play with you can't play with Resto? Every one of them is going to want a Toad in their deck. And at some point, if they have Resto, they're going to want to use Toad to get Resto back so they can try and draw their weapon or something. Where do you draw the line, even if you're trying to be play Lini politely? Combo or no, most of these cards are going to be desired in Lini's deck regardless, and now you have the combo just sitting there in front of you... You just tell yourself, "I'm not going to use Toad to get back Resto?" And then later, when Robe of Runes shows up, you're back at the original combo and it's dilemma... Again, one of the biggest problems is that the combo is made of cards that are likely to be in your deck anyway.
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The Resto errata is only healthy for the game. It doesn't hurt anything. I don't see why you wouldn't use it.
There's no toad in S&S, so that combo doesn't work.
Edit: Also there's no lesser restoration :P
There's no toad in S&S, so that combo doesn't work.
Firstly, characters are specifically designed to be playable in any of the adventures (some don't work as well, like not having guns in RotR, granted, but they still work). It is completely okay to play her in RotR.
Also, you can add cards from the CD's to the box and get Toads that way... But there's no Resto in them and likely not in S&S, so problem solved there.
But you can totally play S&S Lini in RotR.
I think it's even worse - as long as she recharges the spell she played and it has the arcane trait, doesn't she get it right back to her hand?
1) Radillo plays Detect Magic
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
3) Having just played a spell with the arcane trait, she examines the bottom card of her deck. Lo and behold, it's a Detect Magic! Since it's a spell, she puts it in her hand.
4) Radillo plays Detect Magic...
The "after you play" power happens after you play the spell, but before you recharge. So 2 and 3 are reversed. See FAQ here.
The "after you play" power happens after you play the spell, but before you recharge. So 2 and 3 are reversed. See FAQ here.I think it's even worse - as long as she recharges the spell she played and it has the arcane trait, doesn't she get it right back to her hand?
1) Radillo plays Detect Magic
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
3) Having just played a spell with the arcane trait, she examines the bottom card of her deck. Lo and behold, it's a Detect Magic! Since it's a spell, she puts it in her hand.
4) Radillo plays Detect Magic...
Ah. I had forgotten about that one.
Still, this power is ridiculous. I didn't realize it when I was scanning the characters, but... Wow.
And you guys are thinking too small. Imagine how strong she gets when she gets Haste and Teleport...
(With Haste she can explore into anything, and Teleport lets her change locations)
The "after you play" power happens after you play the spell, but before you recharge. So 2 and 3 are reversed. See FAQ here.I think it's even worse - as long as she recharges the spell she played and it has the arcane trait, doesn't she get it right back to her hand?
1) Radillo plays Detect Magic
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
3) Having just played a spell with the arcane trait, she examines the bottom card of her deck. Lo and behold, it's a Detect Magic! Since it's a spell, she puts it in her hand.
4) Radillo plays Detect Magic...
Right, but that just means she needs to have two spells to set up an infinite cycle.
Still, this power is ridiculous. I didn't realize it when I was scanning the characters, but... Wow.And you guys are thinking too small. Imagine how strong she gets when she gets Haste and Teleport...
(With Haste she can explore into anything, and Teleport lets her change locations)
Oooo, that one is nice too. It might run into problems because of a finite ability to deal with the cards you exploring. But yeah, more indications that Radillo's core powers are terrifying. Tempted to play her yet, orbis?
Following Orbis' challenge to think bigger, I want to illustrate how bad this combo can get. First, think about what happens when she gets arcane collector and gains the ability to evade any bane that she fails to encounter. All of a sudden the detect magic / augury power becomes worse, since she can keep effectively rerolling dice to acquire boons until she succeeds.
Another hideous combo is haste + dominate + Puppet Master. If you encounter a monsters you can dominate, grab a boon, use your feat to put the monsters back on top of the deck, auto recharge dominate (since it has the mental trait), cast haste, return dominate to your hand, dominate the same monster again, and continue the cycle infinitely until you suck every boon out of the location. As long as you can make a haste recharge roll, you can do this forever, and acquire every boon in the deck without a roll.
edit: If you replace Augury in the first combo with Scrying, it gets significantly uglier, since you can set up every deck in the game with boons you want, or henchmen and villains.
edit2: with arcane collector, she can start to bury the boons she acquires to a) allow her to change boons into cards that she can acquire/are more valuable b) accrue static bonuses to allow her to better acquire boons. She will very quickly reach the point where she will be able to automatically acquire all types of boons, and her party will gain far better cards using this technique than the traditional method of play.
There's no toad in S&S, so that combo doesn't work.Firstly, characters are specifically designed to be playable in any of the adventures (some don't work as well, like not having guns in RotR, granted, but they still work). It is completely okay to play her in RotR.
Also, you can add cards from the CD's to the box and get Toads that way... But there's no Resto in them and likely not in S&S, so problem solved there.
But you can totally play S&S Lini in RotR.
You can, but it's silly to complain about broken combos when you're playing characters not designed for that set. It's also inane to say a card gets better in a new set it's not even in: of course it's better, by default pretty much every card will be, due to there being more characters/cards to interact with it.
Has anyone actually played this combo to see if it "works"?
To be fair, it's hard to impossible to keep the loop going consistently with the higher-recharge non-mental spells (like scrying), but even freely stacking two locations a turn (pre and post move) with Augury and any spammable low-recharge spell is enough to totally break the game, and is possible after the second skill feat (by which point you can have both class deck copies of Augury, making the combo fairly reliable to achieve).
The real question now, I suppose, is whether there's any good way to salvage the uniqueness of Radillo's power of recovering just-recharged cards (I was looking forward to, say, recharging allies with the Puppet Master power, then drawing them back by casting a spell) without enabling the infinite combo.
What would be the negative ramifications of forcing Radillo to Display all Rechargeable cards until the end of her turn and then attempt all the Recharges before Resetting her hand? It feels to me like it wouldn't have a real impact (other than breaking the spell cycle), but I don't have my game here to look for effects or non-exploitative effective play styles that would depend on Recharging at the normal time.
Has anyone actually played this combo to see if it "works"?
Hey, now, if we had the cards in our hands already to play this, we'd be spending our time playing the game instead of looking at character sheets for combos that slipped through playtesting ;).
Seriously, though, are we mistaken that with an extra +2 to Int on Radillo and the power feat to put spells directly into her hand from the bottom of her deck, outside of encounters she can alternate playing two cast-any-time spells of recharge 6 or lower indefinitely (and thus keep shuffling a location deck with each casting of Augury until you've seen every card and put whatever you want on top)?
You can right now print out Radillo and play her in Runelords. We would very much like to hear feedback.
I agree that Radillo is broken as written and every person playing her who takes the appropriate checkbox will stumble into this. The game can't have both take from the bottom to hand and recharge to the bottom without allowing infinite cycles.
As long as there are no Restoration spells or repeatable ways to draw from the top of your deck then putting cards on top is fine. I think that the one checkbox would need to be something different.
What would be the negative ramifications of forcing Radillo to Display all Rechargeable cards until the end of her turn and then attempt all the Recharges before Resetting her hand? It feels to me like it wouldn't have a real impact (other than breaking the spell cycle), but I don't have my game here to look for effects or non-exploitative effective play styles that would depend on Recharging at the normal time.
If she hit a card that forced her to reset her hand she might die since she wouldn't be allowed to do the recharge checks.
A possible alternate power would be
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put it on top of your deck (□ for any other type of card, you may shuffle it into your deck).
I have a pretty nasty case of Con Crud right now, so I might be missing something, but hasn't this exact combo always been possible with Ezren in RotR, if harder to pull off?
Like I said, I'm pretty sick, so I might be missing something. What is it?
I thought about the death potential on a forced reset, but it could be worded such that when you reset your hand you Recharge at that point. Reset becomes "Recharge & Reset" for Radillo.
Ezren works if his deck contains only spells.
I have a pretty nasty case of Con Crud right now, so I might be missing something, but hasn't this exact combo always been possible with Ezren in RotR, if harder to pull off?
Like I said, I'm pretty sick, so I might be missing something. What is it?
Ezren could play a hypothetically infinite number of spells if that is all that was in his character deck.
Radillo lets you play the exact same two spell cards repeatedly.Ezren could do the same, but required that he have no cards in his character deck.
Radillo can do it with a full character deck of cards because she can move the card she just put on the bottom right back to her hand.
I'm not sure exactly how easy it will be with Radillo either, since I haven't tried it. And I'm fairly sure it just doesn't sound like fun. But assuming it is too powerful, I think there is an easy solution.
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put it on top of your deck (□ or add it to your hand).
Make the "add it to your hand" part have a cost. Maybe discarding or even burying a card. It would sill be worth it lots of time to do, and you could still pull off the Augury/Detect Magic combo occasionally, but doing it too much would be too costly.
I don't think there was a way to do it with Ezren without being almost dead. Ezren only gets to look at the top card and there aren't any ways of putting a cast spell on top of your deck that I can recall. If Ezren's deck was empty he could do it, but that is so risky I would never have thought to attempt it. You could probably also pull it off with a few more cards in your deck if you were able to get it down to just Detect Magic, Auguries, Scries & Hastes but it would require a fair bit of luck and high risk play to pull it off.
Actually, I don't think Hastes work that well for this, as they could easily lead to death or at least a broken cycle. The advantage of Detect Magic is that you are only going to Encounter boons. So, for example, if I Augury items and there are none, I'm shuffling the deck. Now I have no idea what that top card is. Detect Magic is a risk free way of looking at it, while Haste is not. With an infinite spell loop, Detect Magic makes much more sense. Count cards and stop once you've seen/acquired all the boons and got the Henchman/Villain on top. It's a brutal way to play the game but it would work.
Class Deck Ezren and Melindra can both have infinite spells if they take a feat, putting them in the same state as Old Ezren. Ezren Transmogrifier can get into this state really quickly by declaring himself to have 10-card hands.
If you take all of your spells as Detect Magic, Augury, Scrying and anything else that can be played without preconditions (Strength, for example) then you will be able to stack decks and suck out the good cards.
This takes some work, but everyone playing Radillo would naturally take the feats and two cards required to make this happen. And it will work as soon as they find both cards in their decks.
Making Recharge part of Resetting fixes this across the board. But it is also a pretty drastic change to the game and could likely have other unintended consequences that I'm not thinking of.
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Guys, we need to know what happens when this gets played. We will also test it. But theory is not helpful. Knowing what happened in play is.
Feiya Hexer can do the same as the Ezrens and Melindra.
Damiel G(r)enadier might be able to join this merry band if everything in his deck has Craft checks to recharge.
Alahazra Stargazer avoids these problems through limitations on two powers. I'm looking forward to playing her :) (Even bought the miniature before they sold out.)
I set up a sample location deck and assumed that I had Detect Magic and Augury* with the suggested feats. I was able to ransack the location for cards with the magic trait and put the villain on top faster than I can read some of the more complicated villains.
My solo location deck control Lini would hang her head in shame at what Radillo can do. (She rarely stack decks more than twice in a turn.)
Getting the two cards in hand is trivial since it just means holding on to one as you play if you don't have another spell to cast.
*: This requires maxing out the int feats, which I totally would do. I assume Reveal for Intelligence items will also be available to make this possible earlier.
Radillo Arcane Collector with Augury x2 is also pretty strong (but not broken) when someone else picks up the boons for her. It cycles until she guesses the type of boon in the top 3 incorrectly and whatever is shuffled to the top is not a boon.
Guys, we need to know what happens when this gets played. We will also test it. But theory is not helpful. Knowing what happened in play is.
I played Radillo* in a three person group (with Valeros and Lem) against Jorgenfist and Black Tower. The combo works as advertised. She sucks all magic boons out of the deck. If it's possible for her to roll high enough to acquire the magic boon, she does. In practice, she gets arcane spells and items, and can't get most other things. However, the math on that would change with another feat power or two, when she could start swapping boons and acquiring bonuses for burying cards (I could test that if you really need it, but I can already see how it will work in the end game.) She can go through all of the magic boons in a turn and leave either allies/blessings on top, or the villain.
At this level, scrying doesn't work repeatedly, because of the recharge check of 12. She can get close, but has a chance to fail, even if she had cat, which breaks the cycle (you would need +4 int, cat, and a +2 int item to get scrying working. That's doable, but it thats a FAR harder to assemble combo). With scrying you could finish the game in 4 or 5 turns. With augury it takes longer since you hit every location with radillo, but it means you get a shot at all of the boons.
Its no fun and requires a lot of shuffling. Turns take a long time, but the game is relatively quick because their are so few turns, and everyone besides Radillo focuses exclusively on beating henchmen, closing locations and defeating the villain.
* For play test purposes, I cheated in building Radillo. I have her all the feats she would have at that point in the campaign, and built her deck from B/C/1/2 cards. The only exception was scrying and cat, since I wanted to check Radillos interaction with that card. I want to stress that all the combo really needs is scry/augury and detect magic, it's trivial to build even if I hadn't selected the cards of my choice.
I'm curious why you think the order isn't:I think it's even worse - as long as she recharges the spell she played and it has the arcane trait, doesn't she get it right back to her hand?
1) Radillo plays Detect Magic
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
3) Having just played a spell with the arcane trait, she examines the bottom card of her deck. Lo and behold, it's a Detect Magic! Since it's a spell, she puts it in her hand.
4) Radillo plays Detect Magic...
- First you play the spell
- then you peek for a spell
- then you attempt to recharge the spell
These sorts of loops are still possible with multiple copies of the relevant spells, of course. There's a (large) degree to which my gut reaction to a character's investment into finding boons can reasonably be rewarded, especially if it doesn't actually make the game easier to win.
Chad, that was fixed elsewhere in the thread. As long as you have two spells, they each put the other into your hand. So one copy of Detect Magic and one Augury is all you need.
Oooo, that one is nice too. It might run into problems because of a finite ability to deal with the cards you exploring. But yeah, more indications that Radillo's core powers are terrifying.
As long as she's using spells to deal with it, it's not finite.
Tempted to play her yet, orbis?
Hey hey hey. I don't just play the most broken characters. Auto wins like this are boring. Remember, I asked for the Restoration Errata... And I don't like Lini because she's arguably the strongest character from RotR.
Regardless, I wouldn't have too much fun playing Radillo in a similiar, but less broken, form either, I don't think. Drawing is fun, but not when it's the same card over and over. That's not really drawing, that's a recursion engine...
You can, but it's silly to complain about broken combos when you're playing characters not designed for that set.
I disagree. Keeping things from getting out of hand from just interchanging characters should not be too difficult, nor do I think it's too much to ask when the characters are designed to be playable in multiple adventure paths. I don't know about you guys, but a solid close to 50% of my excitement for the class decks is the influx of additional characters to play through the adventure paths with.
I'm curious why you think the order isn't:I think it's even worse - as long as she recharges the spell she played and it has the arcane trait, doesn't she get it right back to her hand?
1) Radillo plays Detect Magic
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
3) Having just played a spell with the arcane trait, she examines the bottom card of her deck. Lo and behold, it's a Detect Magic! Since it's a spell, she puts it in her hand.
4) Radillo plays Detect Magic...
- First you play the spell
- then you peek for a spell
- then you attempt to recharge the spell
I forgot about the Ezren ruling that says you activate abilities that trigger on activating a spell BEFORE you recharge it. It IS counter-intuitive.
The Ezren case probably didn't come up in practice for a few reasons:
* players recharged Staff of Minor Healing, Acolyte, Masterwork Tools, Wand of Enervation or Poog; non-spells break the chain
* decks were full of awesome attack spells so they ran out of things that that Ezren could do
* cards that you can always cast (and display) such as Strength, Speed and Glibness are really unpopular, so people would probably be close to death if they got an all-spell deck with small size
If I wanted to solo with Ezren, I might try to build his spells to something like
2x Detect Magic
2x Augury
1 Strength
1 Speed
1 Glibness
Haste at deck 2
Attack spells to taste, preferably including Swipe at higher levels
The highest recharge for the core set is Augury at 8, so take feats and boons to make that work.
As long as I'm not forced to reset my hand, I can have a healthy deck. The buffing spells should always be cast since they shrink the deck and might help with a check later. Use Augury and Detect Magic to pillage boons and set up the henchman/villain. Once my weapon, items and allies are either in my hand or discard pile I can complete a location every turn. Before that, I just recharge as many cards as I can so that I draw the chaff out of the deck when I reset my hand.
You can, but it's silly to complain about broken combos when you're playing characters not designed for that set.I disagree. Keeping things from getting out of hand from just interchanging characters should not be too difficult, nor do I think it's too much to ask when the characters are designed to be playable in multiple adventure paths. I don't know about you guys, but a solid close to 50% of my excitement for the class decks is the influx of additional characters to play through the adventure paths with.
I guess we'll just have to disagree then. I think it just puts way too many restrictions on the game developers (not to mention a crapload more work), and will result in less variety of cards if they have to cross-check the cards of every new set with every other card ever created.
Ran "Black tower" a second time today, but this time I took the feats that let me gain a bonus from buried boons and redraw a boon by burying a card instead of the power that lets me evade boons I fail to acquire. The net result was that I missed out on some boons at my first location, but by the time I hit the second location I had sufficient bonuses that I could grab everything I hit (as a side note, Lem and the Scenario rules acted like accelerant on a Grease-fire. In most scenarios I wouldn't expect to hit this state until I got to the third location.)
It also became clear that the problem isn't restricted to boons with the magic trait. As long as I have an extra explore, Radillo will also vacuum up all blessings and allies that grant additional explores in a single turn. She accrues such a high static bonus that she reaches a point where she can grab these cards 100% of the time.
I guess we'll just have to disagree then. I think it just puts way too many restrictions on the game developers (not to mention a crapload more work), and will result in less variety of cards if they have to cross-check the cards of every new set with every other card ever created.You can, but it's silly to complain about broken combos when you're playing characters not designed for that set.I disagree. Keeping things from getting out of hand from just interchanging characters should not be too difficult, nor do I think it's too much to ask when the characters are designed to be playable in multiple adventure paths. I don't know about you guys, but a solid close to 50% of my excitement for the class decks is the influx of additional characters to play through the adventure paths with.
They only need to cross check the characters (by my argument).
Ran "Black tower" a second time today, but this time I took the feats that let me gain a bonus from buried boons and redraw a boon by burying a card instead of the power that lets me evade boons I fail to acquire. The net result was that I missed out on some boons at my first location, but by the time I hit the second location I had sufficient bonuses that I could grab everything I hit (as a side note, Lem and the Scenario rules acted like accelerant on a Grease-fire. In most scenarios I wouldn't expect to hit this state until I got to the third location.)
It also became clear that the problem isn't restricted to boons with the magic trait. As long as I have an extra explore, Radillo will also vacuum up all blessings and allies that grant additional explores in a single turn. She accrues such a high static bonus that she reaches a point where she can grab these cards 100% of the time.
I don't think this is too big of a problem. There are only so many boons that she actually wants and many characters can virtually auto acquire any boons they actually want.
Nah, it's just strong. It's her ability to just play spells indefinitely that worries me. And heaven forbid we ever get an arcane spell that lets you draw a card...
I don't think this is too big of a problem. There are only so many boons that she actually wants and many characters can virtually auto acquire any boons they actually want.
I don't think that ability is a problem on its own, but I do think it makes the ability to infinitly chain augury and detect magic worse.
Nah, it's just strong. It's her ability to just play spells indefinitely that worries me. And heaven forbid we ever get an arcane spell that lets you draw a card....
It's not infinite, but she does have another feat which lets her draw a card every time she acquires a boon...
I just noticed - with the appropriate feats, she has an auto-recharging haste that the problem power then can let her draw. If she takes the feat that lets her draw allies from the bottom of her deck and a Puppet Master feat when all her allies can discard to explore (usually the case with any character) then any time she wants to explore she can discard an ally and recharge an ally; which ally doesn't matter if they can all be discarded to explore.
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An interesting suggestion for a fix to her problem power:
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may you may shuffle your deck and then examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or add it to your hand).
Or, like Hawkmoon suggested, add a cost:
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or discard a card to add it to your hand instead).
Or perhaps:
Once per turn, after you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or add it to your hand).
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It's not infinite, but she does have another feat which lets her draw a card every time she acquires a boon...
Wow, I'm just missing things left and right on how strong she is...
She's ridiculous as she is, in my opinion. Infinite spells until you fail a recharge is a major issue, I think... but drawing a ton on top of that can get things out of hand real fast.
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They only need to cross check the characters (by my argument).I guess we'll just have to disagree then. I think it just puts way too many restrictions on the game developers (not to mention a crapload more work), and will result in less variety of cards if they have to cross-check the cards of every new set with every other card ever created.You can, but it's silly to complain about broken combos when you're playing characters not designed for that set.I disagree. Keeping things from getting out of hand from just interchanging characters should not be too difficult, nor do I think it's too much to ask when the characters are designed to be playable in multiple adventure paths. I don't know about you guys, but a solid close to 50% of my excitement for the class decks is the influx of additional characters to play through the adventure paths with.
Yes... With every single card in every single set. However it's irrelevant whether she is playable well in other sets (they've already said before that while you can play any character in any set, they don't all balance right to other sets than they came with), because the combo primarily in question her is available not just with the cards she came with (the class deck), but in Organized Play. Things should be scrutinized more when possible in OP.
Yes... With every single card in every single set.
Oh come now, it's not that bad. There's only so many cards that could possibly cause a problem.
For instance, looking at S&S Lini - she does nothing to break spyglass, leather armor, emerald codex, disentegrate, Shelelu Andosana, dagger... I could literally list over a hundred cards (just from memory) that could never possibly be broken by any character that doesn't break something else far worse. No, you look at what makes her special - in this case, animal allies. Even then, you don't have to look at crows, or saber tooth tigers, or hawks. Just the ones that suddenly get stronger, like toad and giant badger. And I guarantee you that someone has already considered what balances toad. Similiar questions had to have come up with Robe of Runes - what spells are too powerful when they recur multiple times, and/or what allows you to get robe/toad back from your deck?
The point is, there's not THAT much to look at to see if a character breaks something. Most of the characters would have a hard time breaking anything in the first place. And usually you know your problem cards ahead of time.
I think you're overstating the problem. And this comes from someone who has spent a great deal of time actively looking for things like this in many different card games - most of it gets caught, and what does slip through is typically easly fixed with a simple errata (like Restoration).
Things should be scrutinized more when possible in OP.
OP class decks only determine your starting deck for a scenario - you can still acquire cards during the game whether you get to keep them after or not. Even if the Druid class deck if/when it comes out has no toads or Restorations, there's nothing to keep a situation coming up where she plays in a scenario using a base set + expansions that include both toad and restoration (such as one using RotR AP 4+).
I just noticed - with the appropriate feats, she has an auto-recharging haste that the problem power then can let her draw. If she takes the feat that lets her draw allies from the bottom of her deck and a Puppet Master feat when all her allies can discard to explore (usually the case with any character) then any time she wants to explore she can discard an ally and recharge an ally; which ally doesn't matter if they can all be discarded to explore.
This doesn't quite loop since she needs to play a spell with the Arcane trait so she will eventually run out of spells despite her ability to get them back quickly. (2-for-1 trade instead of 1-for-1, not boosted by encountering boons since that is on a different role.)
She can do this with Haste and her abilities. I don't think that infinite explores is much of a problem since she needs to encounter all of the banes. It is infinite Augury/Scrying that is the problem, although Haste combined with evasion (Invisibility?) would be as effective in solo play.
An interesting suggestion for a fix to her problem power:
I think that anything that lets her put a card in hand from the top of the deck without a limiter is a problem. My suggestion (above) was to let her shuffle non-Spell/Ally cards into her deck.
I just completed Attack on Sandpoint playing as Radillo (adventuring with my buddy, Valeros), so maybe I'm not far enough along for this to work. Could someone please explain why
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magic
is considered a given for this combination to loop?
I've never succeeded a recharge check on it, since it requires an outcome of 14, which is only possible (without any buffs) on a natural 12 after gaining your first skill feat and assigning it to INT.
I do have 1 copy of each Detect Magic and Augury in the deck, and, though, I've been able to loop augury for use on consecutive turns, I haven't been able to cycle it with Detect Magic.
I think she's pretty fun to play, btw.
Could someone please explain why
2) Radillo Recharges Detect Magicis considered a given for this combination to loop?
I've never succeeded a recharge check on it, since it requires an outcome of 14, which is only possible (without any buffs) on a natural 12 after gaining your first skill feat and assigning it to INT.
It is only supposed to be a 4. It got updated in the FAQ.
An interesting suggestion for a fix to her problem power:
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may you may shuffle your deck and then examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or add it to your hand).Or, like Hawkmoon suggested, add a cost:
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or discard a card to add it to your hand instead).Or perhaps:
Once per turn, after you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or add it to your hand).
I thought about the shuffle idea today too. The one thing to note with it is that before you take the feat to add it to your hand, it basically makes her power only useful once per turn, because you'll undo the work of moving the previous card to the top. Not sure if that is too undesirable or not.
I'm going to try out some various setups with her tonight including:
1. As written.
2. Pretending it gets shuffled before she examines without power feat to add to her hand.
3. Pretending it gets shuffled before she examines with power feat to add to her hand.
3. Pretending she has to discard a card to add it to her hand.
It is only supposed to be a 4. It got updated in the FAQ.
Well damn, that's a game-changer. Thanks for the link!
Shuffling lets you handle the case where you recharge non-spells and want to actually see them again.
Recharge non-spells (non-allies with feat) several times
Play a spell
Shuffle the deck
Spell recharges to bottom of the deck
Play several spells, top-decking the previous ones
The last spell you played during your turn won't be recovered until the next turn, so one spell will get shuffled in each turn if you want to mix your deck.
It is a bit of a weak power, but given how slowly you go through your deck when you top-deck all your spells it will help you recycle useful boons (Wand of Enervation or Staff of Minor Healing, for example).
I think that you would only use the power a couple times per scenario.
Until you get the power that lets you draw. Then you'll do that every time you play a spell, hoping to shuffle a spell onto the bottom of your deck.
The more I think about it, though, the less I like this fix. Most people will be taking spell card feats, and it's a reasonable strategy (with this power) to try and empty your deck of non-spells - once you have pretty much all or actually all of your remaining deck being spells we're right back where we started, shuffle or no.
Discard a card to add it to your hand seems like the best solution so far to me.
Or, perhaps, if the game devs want her hand size to stay large as she does this, it could be fixed so:
After you play a spell that has the Arcane trait, you may examine the bottom card of your deck; if it is a spell (□ or an ally), you may put in on top of your deck (□ or add it to your hand; discard the top or bottom card of your deck if you do).
(I'm unsure whether the top or bottom would be better; they both have their merits) This way Radillo still keeps her hand size large while she's playing her spells and can still have the sam type of feel, but she must be cautious and not kill herself.