Inox Brute - Introductory guide to becoming a juggernaut

Inox Brute  

So starting a new character and thinking of picking up the Inox Brute? Awesome. 

What is the Brute?  

Anyone's who's played Gloomhaven will soon learn the traditional fantasy roles of healer, tank, damage dealer doesn't translate directly into Gloomhaven. 

The Brute is as aptly named. He's tough, he hits hard but he's not really suited to being a dedicated damage sponge. He has good tools to disarm or kill his opponents so they can't hit back.

So should you play a Brute? Lets take a look his strengths and weaknesses. 

My painted brute

Strengths

• Has highest health pool of starting characters, tied with Cragheart.
• Has a repeatable non-loss Move 6, Attack 6 Combo available from level 1.
• Not reliant on Magic. Meaning Brute is effective in almost any team composition.
• Can deal damage consistently, without relying on loss cards

Weaknesses

• Not many good tools for clearing groups of enemies.
• Weak healing.
• Reliance on melee attacks means the Brute is vulnerable to retaliate monsters.
• Shielded enemies can be difficult for Brute to deal with in early levels.

Starting Items

There is one item that really makes the Brute into an early game killing machine, the Boots of Striding. 

Get this for 20g. The other 10g you should spend on a Stamina or Health potion.

Card combinations

Your main combo is this: Use Balanced measure (top) + Loot and Go (bottom) to initiate combat. Use this with Boots of Striding for Move 6, Attack 6. 

Top of Balanced Measure for Attack X

Bottom of Grab and Go for Move 4

The other thing Brute can do is use Provoking Roar to go really early in the round to disarm an enemy and keep out of trouble. 

So how does this work? 

In the diagram below, 1 is our hero, the Brute. There's 2 monsters, they are melee enemies, e.g Living bones or an Inox Guard.  

Round 1.

Brute plays Grab and Go + Balanced Measure, going as late as possible (initiative 87). 

Initiative 87 is pretty slow, most of the time monsters will act before that. 

The monsters move up, but can't attack yet. They are still out of range. Now it's the Brute's turn. Move 4, (+2 from the boots). A move 6. Make your attack 6 from balanced measure and hopefully you kill one of the monsters. 

 

Round 2.

We kill one of the monsters, a level 1 brute with attack 6 has a reasonably good chance of killing a normal bandit guard or bandit archer in one hit from this.

Now we play Provoking Roar. We can pair this with bottom of Spare Dagger to get more hits in or a movement card to reposition ourselves (depending on what the situation demands). We want to go as fast as possible and move at initiative 10. 

Initiative 10 is very fast and we should be able to act first. Provoking roar will disarm the target, rendering them harmless this round. 

We also touch on this technique of manipulating initiative in a previous article.

Now this is a narrow example but it shows how the Brute can essentially play 2 rounds of combat, eliminate a monster and not take any attack damage.

Even better is if you have a stamina potion you can chug one down and do it all again (albeit without the boots of striding).

This combination is reusable after each long rest. Long rest recovers your boots of striding and makes sure you don't lose the Grab and Go + Balanced measure combination. Yes, long resting might mean you fall a bit behind your party, but your Move 6 next round ensures you catch up the following round. You want to avoid short rests unless absolutely necessary. 

Sample 10 card starting hand for a level 1 Brute

Amazing cards - Essential to playing a deadly Brute

• Balanced measure (your main card for dishing out damage).
• Grab and Go (for the move 4)
• Provoking roar (very fast disarm). 
• Spare dagger (flexible card, use as ranged attack or to tack on extra damage in melee)

Good cards - Cards you're generally happy to hold

• Leaping Cleave (Top is solid attack, bottom is a reusable jump)
• Skewer (Solid top, even without magic. Bottom is situational, can be used when desperate)
• Trample (Top is useful for piercing shields, bottom is a powerful loss move).

Lackluster cards - Cards you don't mind replacing

• Warding strength (Top is not bad, helps push enemies into traps, but shield 1 bottom on a loss card is not that useful. Killing or disarming enemies is a much better damage prevention strategy).
• Sweeping blow (Top attack 2 on 3 targets is worse than leaping cleave, because it's much harder to position yourself to hit 3 enemies with this). 
• Shield Bash (Good top but it's a loss, considering provoking roar does the disarm without a card loss, Shield Bash is not good by comparison).

So this is our 10 card starting hand. There's an argument for overwhelming assault instead of shield bash (better bottom) or swap in eye for an eye (for the heal 2 and Earth magic) if we have a Cragheart on the team.

So that's it for the Brute introductory guide.

If you've had success with this or a different Brute style leave a comment. 

We'll cover advancement, what items and perks to get in a future post.