Orchid Spellweaver Tactics - Guide to blasting everyone before you exhaust.
The introductory Orchid Spellweaver guide.
There's a special allure about playing a crystal skinned lady swinging fire and ice.
Should you pick up a Spellweaver? Let see.
Strengths
- Spellweaver is the strongest starting characters for dealing multi target damage. She is explosive 💥!
- Access to an extremely strong summon from level 1.
- Flexible magic user, can make use of any element generated by self or teammates.
- Levels up quickly.
Weaknesses
- Lowest health pool of starting characters, tied with the Mindtheif.
- Low card pool and dependency on loss cards to be effective means the Spellweaver is susceptible to exhaustion.
- Not many options for piercing shielded enemies.
- Short resting is risky, due to dependence on Reviving Ether card (more on this later).
A textbook definition of a glass cannon, or in this case, a crystal cannon. If this is how you like to play, then you want the Spellweaver.
Starting Items
For newer players, I'd suggest the Cloak of Invisibility + Stamina potion. It provides the Spellweaver with a Get Out of Jail Free card, and allows you to position yourself to pull off some awesome moves without dying.
Reviving Ether
This card is so critical to the Spellweaver's game plan, it needs it's own special mention.
At a quick glance:
Initiative: A bit on the slow side, useful for manipulating initiative.
Bottom: A solid move 4 jump. Any class would love a card with this bottom half.
Top: Makes this card a must pick in every Spellweaver's hand. It extends your exhaust timer by allowing you to recover ALL of your lost ability cards. That's right, ALL. You always want to play this as your last 2 cards in your hand/discard to make the most of it.
It's also worth reminding everyone how the resting rules work:
Short rest : During the cleanup step of a round, a player can perform a short rest. This allows that player to immediately shuffle his or her discard pile and randomly place one of the cards in the lost pile, then return the rest of the discarded cards to his or her hand. If the player would like to instead keep the card that was randomly lost, he or she can choose to suffer 1 damage and randomly lose a different discarded card, but this can only be done once per rest.
Long rest : A long rest is declared during the card selection step of a round and constitutes the player's entire turn for the round. Resting players are considered to have an initiative value of 99. On the players turn, at the end of the imitative order, he or she must choose to lose one of his or her discarded cards, then return the rest of the discarded cards to his or her hand. The resting character also performs a "Heal 2 Self" action and refreshes all of his or her spent item cards.
When you short rest, you run the risk of "Losing" Reviving Ether randomly. If it does happen and you choose to reshuffle, you're taking 1 damage for a character that doesn't have a big health pool. Not great either way. This means the Spellweaver is pressured to take long rests over short ones, when she needs to recover cards
So in short: Long rest with the Spellweaver.
Using the invisibility cloak
Important reminder, status effects last until the end of your NEXT turn. How do you exploit this to your maximum advantage? The obvious way to do it is stand in a doorway and go invisible to block enemies. But you can leverage invisibility nearly anywhere by playing fast, then going late. Let me draw you another example.
Grey lines = walls
Green hex = obstacle
Here we have a bunch of mean looking Inox Guards. Our friends the Cragheart and Tinkerer are about to take some hits. What can we do to help them take less hits without the Spellweaver turning into crystal sashimi?
Your Cragheart and Tinkerer are going late, so they are unlikely to move before the Inox Guards do.
We could block the one in front or try block the one further back. If we have freezing nova we could potentially stall 2 guards. We have initiative 21 and will likely move before the guards do.
We move up, attack and immobilize the guards and turn ourselves invisible so they can't hit us back.
One Guard moves up and focuses on our friend, Cragheart. The other 2 guards, not being able to target the Spellweaver, cannot move and have no other viable target in range. They do nothing this round.
Onto round 2.
Going into the next round we want to move as slow as possible. Since we get to keep our invisibility until we end our next turn, we want our next turn to come as late as possible. We could use reviving ether for the Move 4 and the slow initative of 80, and combine it with the top of any other card to attack these guards.
For the sake of this example we'll throw some fire orbs at them.
The guards Move 2, the one in the front closes into our friends. The one in the back has to awkwardly move around our invisible body. By going slow, with initiative 80, after the Inox Guards activate, we avoid getting pummeled into tiny crystal shards.
We throw some fire and finish off the weakened guards. Our invisibility wears off. If we didn't immobilize the guards in the first round, the situation might look alot different... maybe even like this:
 |
| This is what trouble looks like |
To beat Gloomhaven scenarios, you need to tactically reduce incoming damage by disarming, displacing and crowd controlling your enemies. Even a tough 10 health Cragheart will start bleeding cards after a few hits. Stalling enemies so they can't all attack at once will help keep your party alive and save you a bunch of unnecessary healing.
Another use for the invisibility cloak is for securing treasure chests. Some might say dashing for treasure is selfish but I disagree. If the rewards are item or scenario unlocks, the treasure benefits the whole party. You can use Ride the Wind to snatch the treasure and pop your Cloak of Invisibility to keep yourself out of danger.
Other notable cards
Aid from the Ether:
The bottom is an incredibly powerful summon. It's a level 1 summon that has Range 2, Attack 3. Think of it this way, Mana Bolt only does Attack 3 if you consume an element. This friendly summon does Attack 3 every turn at Range 2, with no special requirements.
Big important note. You can cancel summons and other active effects at ANY time by placing the card in the lost pile. This is super useful if you are going to cast Reviving Ether and wish to reclaim Aid from the Ether back to your hand to re-summon it in a different location.
Pg 25 of the rulebook: If there are no conditions specified or positions marked, the card may remain in the player’s active area for the rest of the scenario and can be removed from play at any time by placing it in the lost pile.
Impaling Eruption:
This one always confuses new players. Isaac, the creator of the game has confirmed the Range 4 line does not have to be straight. Note you still have disadvantage on attack when hitting targets adjacent to you. Example diagram below.
Sample 8 card starting hand
- Reviving Ether (You need this, bottom is amazing, top is class defining)
- Aid from the Ether (Bottom is arguably strongest level 1 summon in the game)
- Mana Bolt (One of the fastest cards in the game, flexible ranged attack)
- Impaling Eruption (Move 4 on the bottom, devastating at clearing groups of enemies)
- Fire Orbs (Top clears hordes, bottom is decent Move 3)
- Flame Strike (Bottom attack effects are generally good)
- 2 of the following: Ride the wind (Good for larger maps / treasure hunting before you exhaust), Frost armor (Top is slower mana bolt, bottom is a loss that can keep you out of trouble if you've already burned your invisibility cloak) or Freezing Nova (Useful trick to immobilize melee monsters, but has underwhelming bottom).
Hardened spikes is not a good card, retaliate is not good on a class that can't take hits.
Crackling Air is OK but reliable wind magic is hard to come across with the starting characters and it's setup heavy which is not good for a class that has a low card pool.
Item Advancement
Without getting into spoilers, you want to work towards getting Eagle-eye goggles. Advantage on your multi target attacks will help you secure more kills. A piercing bow can also help you with dealing with shielded enemies.
Leave a comment to share any other tricks you've come across with the Spellweaver.
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