Lets talk about managing your Gloomhaven campaign. In between fighting monsters, there's a whole lot of decisions you need to make between scenarios. City events, Road events? What items to buy? Do you bother contributing to the Sanctuary of the Oak?
Spoiler warning
Stop reading now if you have not opened Envelope B (Contribute 100+ gold to the Sanctuary of the Oak). Some minor spoilers if you haven't hit prosperity 2.
Starting off, Gloomhaven is still a role playing game but there are decisions that you can make to improve the party's overall campaign success rate.
Road and City Events
First off, with regards to road and city events. Most city events range from neutral to beneficial, but most road events generally (but not always) come with negative effects. Negative effects from road events are not prevented by perks such as "Ignore negative scenario effects".
Naturally, this leads us to conclude we should in general, avoid road events to improve our successful scenario attempts. Minimizing road events is fairly straightforward, check the top of the scenario page for linked events. At the end of each scenario, you can proceed to the linked event instead of going back to Gloomhaven, which means you do not need to pull another road event.
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| No more eating poisoned berries... |
That said, road events have interesting narrative elements to them. So if you're not bothered about the additional potential negative impact and you enjoy the narratives the event cards provide, you can return to town after each scenario just to draw extra road / city cards.
Another strategy for dealing with road and city events is to use the section in your character / party sheet for
taking notes. Certain encounters that describe colors of berries or birds are dangerous, while others are safe - and you should take note as you discover them. Because these kinds of cards will shuffle back into the deck and you will undoubtedly come across them again.
Donating to the Sanctuary of the Great Oak
Each time you visit Gloomhaven, you have the option to donate 10g to the Sanctuary of the Great Oak. Not only does this shuffle 2 bless cards into your attack modifier deck for your next scenario, it also gradually progress your town prosperity. If you aren't saving gold for any particular item, you should generally always donate.
Since most scenarios generally involve killing monsters in some capacity, increasing the number of 2x critical cards in your attack deck is a significant improvement. Classes that have perks who can thin their deck (e.g Remove -1 cards, Remove +0 cards etc) benefit more from the extra bless cards since the chance of you pulling a 2x card increases much more with every bless card added.
Potion-ing up
If you get to the point of the campaign where your party reputation is high enough to get significant discounts, you can buy and or swap potions relatively cheaply
At a 5 gold discount (max), you can sell the potion for 5 gold and rebuy another similar potion for 5 gold. So why does this matter? It means you can gear appropriately for different scenarios. Upcoming boss fight where you need to clear out enemies quickly? Grab that power potion. Big map where exhaustion is a serious risk? Swap to a Stamina potion. You get the idea.
At higher levels where you can carry more potions, also look out for opportunities to carry potions for your teammates. If you have a fast low initiative character, consider taking a mana potion to help out your magic users.
Party composition
For the most part, any party composition will work. However if you're playing at higher difficulties, more thought needs to go into your party composition.
Your party will have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the classes you have. Got a Spellweaver and Tinkerer? Got plenty of multi target attacks, but piercing shields might be tough. Playing with Scoundrel and Mindtheif? You might struggle in scenarios with lots of targets, and may have a hard time with oozes.
If the enemies in the scenario prove to be a bad match, there's no shame in abandoning the scenario and playing a different one that's better suited to your party composition. Eventually a few players will retire and your party will change over time, and you can then come back to the scenario you abandoned.
Great work! Go on!
ReplyDeleteGreat post, as always!
ReplyDeleteOne tip I'd like to add would be to talk with your party at the start of the campaign about the party's alignment (in its D&D meaning - good or evil mostly). One thing I've experienced in Gloomhaven is that if you generally stick to either good or evil behaviour (in your city/road events), your party reputation is going to evolve much more quickly, helping you to unlock a class and add interesting events eventually.
If, on the other hand, you sometimes help other people but at some other times act like an a**hole, you reputation will tend to stay near 0,and won't help you unlock anything interesting.
Hope it helps!