The problem you’re thinking around here is that combat doesn’t actually win you the game. It’s a defensive stat. A high combat value and damage options just keep you from dying. And only stop you dying from a minority of encounter cards. DerBK has a very thorough scenario breakdown on his blog, and enemy density tops out at a third of the encounter deck in a small minority of scenarios. Most of the time it’s closer to a quarter of the deck. Why rank an investigator high if their only job is managing a small of the obstacles to winning? Clues win the game; not bodies. I blame Night of the Zealot for our collective overvaluing of combat. Defeating the Ghoul Priest immediately is the best option, and beating up cultists actually advances the win condition in Midnight Masks. Where else is combat so valuable in this game?
One small problem is that an unanswered Hunter can defeat investigators very fast. If you're pass or pin on an evade you might go from having a dozen turns left to 2. That's the risk people are concerned with. In the modern era I'm trying to get my Fighter types to compress their tools required to effectively fight down to as few slots as possible that they see as easily as possible. But I really don't like losing a scenario to getting pinned after the first Mythos phase. It's happened before.
@@Swekyde I agree with this too. Even though the vast majority of mythos cards aren't enemies, the enemies are disproportionately more threatening and have to be dealt with. It's the flip side to "Enemy management is purely defensive." It's not a defense that can be ignored. It does have to be addressed, but it still doesn't win the game. It's just a necessary step to not lose. Fighting with the minimum number of tools might be a big part of why I like the new Dirty Fighting + Underworld Market + Knuckledusters combo so much. It's 6 exp and no card slots within the deck to (almost guaranteed) fight very effectively by 5th turn at the latest, in addition to other effects like consistency on lockpicks.
@@RatherIncoherent The Market is very nice, it only needs 4 weapons to be >92% to see at least one by the second turn. You need 6 in your deck and a hard Mulligan to have similar odds without it. (Though the odds get a bit better for the standard deck if you're willing to concede spending your entire turn digging, it starts to fractal out into needing to care about the odds of drawing weaknesses etc.) Depending on the nature of your weapons extra weapons might be just single icon commits, so you trade the occasional blank market offering in the future for only having gas in your main deck. And it's not even that likely to brick; in a 5 card market (assuming you bought something offered every time and skipped every surplus weapon) it's something like a 30% chance you will be offered a double weapon sale on the second run. But it's derived information, you can actually know if you're even going to have that happen. You need to have rejected a double weapon sale on the first go or rejected a weapon twice in a row. Setting aside that this is almost certainly not even the most powerful way to use the market, you have at least managed to solve the "chores" of playing enemy management by making your tools pretty reliable to find. And that leaves ~36 slots for econ and other proactive cards, instead of the ~24 someone without needs to have comparable reliability. I consider it a feature if my market can trap some undesirable cards outside of my deck where I won't draw them.
This is a really, really good video. With a single 15 minute video, you've shifted my perspective on investigator evaluation, and on goals in this game. I'm very glad I've found this video, and your channel in general. Now seriously looking forward to watching more of your videos!
This is a really great video with a lot of insight that I'd love the rest of my group to understand. From my experience, most fighters I've seen played have focused solely on being as powerful as possible in regards to dealing with enemies, because players often don't grasp the concept of performing tasks/supporting their team outside their specified role. I've recently changed my opinion on Calvin due to the exact problem you've described - once he's taken his horror (which usually corresponds to the crunch time of the scenario) he's able to assist the group with clue finding via his four-ish flex cards that I like to run, whether they be Winging It or Sharp Vision. IMO, assisting your team outside of your role is the most enjoyable thing about Arkham and its the thing I take the longest to consider when I'm deckbuilding. All in all, great video - keep it up, loving the Arkham content!
Yeah, playing with the full collection we also realised that almost all the main fighters are able to just kill things, what makes them different in terms of our power-rank is also how they contribute to the team with doing other things besides killing. The same goes for cluevers, since they all just clear locations like insane if you build them right, but that is more a reason of Seekers being the most broken class since the start of the game. It is also the way that the new campaigns are made, you have many things to do on a map and a lot of "small tasks" if i can say, so it really is nice if your fighter can help out a bit, which is why i like seeing cards like Breach The Door etc.
"because players often don't grasp the concept of performing tasks/supporting their team outside their specified role" They may, but the problem is if you are depended on for a task in your group composition and cannot perform it things come off the rails very fast. Clues mostly will give you a bit of wiggle room, but an enemy in your face will end the game very fast if unanswered. If you brick and draw all of your off-role stuff, enemies start to pile up extremely quickly. One of the best ways to improve reliability is to increase the percentage of your deck that is dedicated to succeeding at your primary function. When my group runs 3p it's possible the main fighter will have only their two best weapons, and 0-1 back-up weapons (if your signature is a back-up weapon, congrats). They may have pseudo weapons like Beat Cop or Guard Dog. Okay they usually do, those cards are extremely good--but they won't have things like random Enchanted Blades still in their decks at full build. They will have everything they can to find those weapons more quickly and ensure those weapons are able to keep going. We usually run 2p these days, and typically that makes it a bit better as it's difficult to get 3 enemies on the board when we only draw encounter cards per turn. Listening to the criteria RaIn uses for setting the initial tier list it's interesting how different it is from mine, when ranking solely "as fighters". He puts all of the characters capable of "burst damage" (and Cho who usually has to resort to +0 damage Fight actions more than any other fighter in our experience) in S tier. In my tier list S is where investigators who can fight bosses even if the bag is 18 crit fails belong, or have incentive to take the cards that enable that deck. That's Daniela who's ability enables it, that's Yorick and Tommy who have recursion for Guard Dogs and Beat Cops who do testless damage, and that's Leo who has an ability that makes it easier to deploy multiple Dogs or Cops. I also actually sometimes put Carolyn and Vincent into S tier as well; they can use Surgical Kit to heal Guard Dogs; though it may be considered off meta for them to do so. My A+ tier is where people like Tony and Lily exist, who can compress more damage into one turn but still have to make honest skill tests at the end of the day. Agnes does have testless damage, but she struggles to do enough of it to completely avoid skill tests so caps here too. Mark's here too thanks to PMP Home Front but this isn't really the core plot of this video. This is one of the bad things about playing on Hard. The symbols are bad. You do not want to draw them, some of them do bad things to you even if you passed the skill test. Some of them make hitting 4 Fight enemies very hard. Killing Hastur with a +1 damage weapon? You can when the Skull is -2, -4 if over max sanity. But it's a lot harder when the Skull is -X where X is the amount of Horror on you and that number is 7+. The Skull keeps the Seeker honest, but the Skull forces the Fighter to join them in degeneracy if they want to succeed. Almost makes me want to give the Seeker their own Chaos bag that is +1 difficulty from the rest of the team to see how that changes things. Fighters have a lot of room to branch out on Standard. When getting to 6 or maybe 7 skill value is enough 90% of the time you can stick with low impact weapons like Machete longer. You can have a deck that only needs to plop a Switchblade (2) into play and then can spend the rest of the slots on answering the other problems via Intel Report or other nice effects. They don't need to take 2x 5 XP weapons and then spend XP on Backpacks and Stick to the Plan Prepared for the Worsts to make sure they find it. This problem unfortunately gets worse as difficulty gets higher, and difficulty going higher is one of the ways you might want to fix winning too much because the Seeker types are too easily stripping locations bare and staying ahead of Doom clocks.
I hope you make a follow up video about the "flex problem" you mentioned in your previous video. I know a part of the problem is just the deckbuilding, but I feel like everyone has run into the issue at some point. Unless your character has built-in flex attributes (i.e. Duke), it can be really difficult to have the consistency. On another note: I honestly think parallel Roland has been a complete underdog with TSK's release. I think Runic Axe has been the missing link, since there wasn't any high impact weapons besides Timeworn Brand. While +3 to hit and +1 damage is pretty unimpressive, Scriptweaver at scenario 1 lets him fight pretty efficiently. Hunt and Glory is where he really shines, giving him so much action compression with free moves and engages, as well as healing and card draw. At a Crossroads has definitely been the sleeper hit though. It has tempo without actually playing a card for the purposes of Red Tape. It can save you from playing a Deep Knowledge when you really need to get two other cards out. Or you just support your teammates by giving them the cards/action. Include testless clues and Breach the Door, he can actually clear locations consistently. His mythos protection is still his weakness, but he can power through the damaging ones. You have to hope take the initiative and logical reasoning can deal with the treacheries that stick around. I know he would be a pretty bad pick for EotE, but I hope you give parallel Roland a shot at some point. He may not be apart of the best, but I found him pretty unplayable before TSK. Nowadays he has been my favorite to play.
I've just finished recording EotE, so this won't make it to the channel for a while, but I think you're absolutely right about Runic Axe (3) being a huge buff to Roland (and any other fighter with access to it but not higher end weapons). I've got a video slated for a "Berserker" Roland list designed to dual wield Runic Axe (5) using bandoliers, which is outside the scope of the parallel, but many of the same reasons that build is good still apply to why (3) is great in parallel. More so actually, since you don't have access to Flamethrower for competition there. Here's the final decklist ahead of time if you're interested: arkhamdb.com/deck/view/2656077 Oh, and I'll definitely make a video talking about the strengths and pitfalls of flex at some point in time, but it's going to take a while for me to really sit on it and try to put it in concise and meaningful terms.
@@RatherIncoherent I love the build, I always had trouble figuring out how to use Ancient Power without destroying your charges. Turns out the answer was to just use two Runic Axes. I always love to Flex when given the opportunity. I think the role gives you a lot of wiggle room to make creative decks without going full on meme. They might also be the most challenging to play, because it requires you to look around the board to figure out what your group is failing at. Especially before it all goes to shit. You need to try and see what the game will look like two turns ahead. Cards like Ice Pick (1) and (3) were certainly cards that helped the survivor flexes. IMO, the triple class talents (like Sleuth (3)) should've been the epitome of flex cards. Where you're paying a paying a decently high cost between XP and resources, but you get this versatility of making a large swath of cards cheaper or become better at tests. Best example being Crafty maybe, where Tools, with some exceptions, help you investigate. Tricks are pretty balanced between investigating and fighting. Insights are focused on utility. And then there's Bruiser. Just makes you fightier. That's it. There's also the problem that a lot of traits have very few tests related to them, so you're ignoring an entire portion of the card. It just feels bad to play unfortunately.
@@danielscarpace But... But... It's a generic item :( This is a travesty. It's true magick all over again! They can't keep getting away with this! Seriously, thanks for the heads up. It never even occurred to me to check that my non-specific, two handed asset might have an asterisk. My hype is crushed, and my video is cancelled, but I appreciate the info.
What's your take on Parallel investigators? It seems they would fit as an absolute different character for this list, like P. Skids being more efficient in killing. Or Agnes having a different built (maybe a worse one than the original for this video's purpose)
The problem you’re thinking around here is that combat doesn’t actually win you the game. It’s a defensive stat. A high combat value and damage options just keep you from dying. And only stop you dying from a minority of encounter cards.
DerBK has a very thorough scenario breakdown on his blog, and enemy density tops out at a third of the encounter deck in a small minority of scenarios. Most of the time it’s closer to a quarter of the deck.
Why rank an investigator high if their only job is managing a small of the obstacles to winning? Clues win the game; not bodies.
I blame Night of the Zealot for our collective overvaluing of combat. Defeating the Ghoul Priest immediately is the best option, and beating up cultists actually advances the win condition in Midnight Masks. Where else is combat so valuable in this game?
Ice and Death part 3! Jokes aside, you're absolutely right, and this is a very concise summary of the problem I'm rambling about in the video.
One small problem is that an unanswered Hunter can defeat investigators very fast. If you're pass or pin on an evade you might go from having a dozen turns left to 2. That's the risk people are concerned with.
In the modern era I'm trying to get my Fighter types to compress their tools required to effectively fight down to as few slots as possible that they see as easily as possible.
But I really don't like losing a scenario to getting pinned after the first Mythos phase. It's happened before.
@@Swekyde I agree with this too. Even though the vast majority of mythos cards aren't enemies, the enemies are disproportionately more threatening and have to be dealt with. It's the flip side to "Enemy management is purely defensive." It's not a defense that can be ignored. It does have to be addressed, but it still doesn't win the game. It's just a necessary step to not lose.
Fighting with the minimum number of tools might be a big part of why I like the new Dirty Fighting + Underworld Market + Knuckledusters combo so much. It's 6 exp and no card slots within the deck to (almost guaranteed) fight very effectively by 5th turn at the latest, in addition to other effects like consistency on lockpicks.
@@RatherIncoherent The Market is very nice, it only needs 4 weapons to be >92% to see at least one by the second turn. You need 6 in your deck and a hard Mulligan to have similar odds without it. (Though the odds get a bit better for the standard deck if you're willing to concede spending your entire turn digging, it starts to fractal out into needing to care about the odds of drawing weaknesses etc.)
Depending on the nature of your weapons extra weapons might be just single icon commits, so you trade the occasional blank market offering in the future for only having gas in your main deck.
And it's not even that likely to brick; in a 5 card market (assuming you bought something offered every time and skipped every surplus weapon) it's something like a 30% chance you will be offered a double weapon sale on the second run. But it's derived information, you can actually know if you're even going to have that happen. You need to have rejected a double weapon sale on the first go or rejected a weapon twice in a row.
Setting aside that this is almost certainly not even the most powerful way to use the market, you have at least managed to solve the "chores" of playing enemy management by making your tools pretty reliable to find. And that leaves ~36 slots for econ and other proactive cards, instead of the ~24 someone without needs to have comparable reliability.
I consider it a feature if my market can trap some undesirable cards outside of my deck where I won't draw them.
This is a really, really good video. With a single 15 minute video, you've shifted my perspective on investigator evaluation, and on goals in this game.
I'm very glad I've found this video, and your channel in general. Now seriously looking forward to watching more of your videos!
This is a really great video with a lot of insight that I'd love the rest of my group to understand. From my experience, most fighters I've seen played have focused solely on being as powerful as possible in regards to dealing with enemies, because players often don't grasp the concept of performing tasks/supporting their team outside their specified role. I've recently changed my opinion on Calvin due to the exact problem you've described - once he's taken his horror (which usually corresponds to the crunch time of the scenario) he's able to assist the group with clue finding via his four-ish flex cards that I like to run, whether they be Winging It or Sharp Vision. IMO, assisting your team outside of your role is the most enjoyable thing about Arkham and its the thing I take the longest to consider when I'm deckbuilding. All in all, great video - keep it up, loving the Arkham content!
Yeah, playing with the full collection we also realised that almost all the main fighters are able to just kill things, what makes them different in terms of our power-rank is also how they contribute to the team with doing other things besides killing. The same goes for cluevers, since they all just clear locations like insane if you build them right, but that is more a reason of Seekers being the most broken class since the start of the game. It is also the way that the new campaigns are made, you have many things to do on a map and a lot of "small tasks" if i can say, so it really is nice if your fighter can help out a bit, which is why i like seeing cards like Breach The Door etc.
"because players often don't grasp the concept of performing tasks/supporting their team outside their specified role"
They may, but the problem is if you are depended on for a task in your group composition and cannot perform it things come off the rails very fast. Clues mostly will give you a bit of wiggle room, but an enemy in your face will end the game very fast if unanswered. If you brick and draw all of your off-role stuff, enemies start to pile up extremely quickly. One of the best ways to improve reliability is to increase the percentage of your deck that is dedicated to succeeding at your primary function.
When my group runs 3p it's possible the main fighter will have only their two best weapons, and 0-1 back-up weapons (if your signature is a back-up weapon, congrats). They may have pseudo weapons like Beat Cop or Guard Dog. Okay they usually do, those cards are extremely good--but they won't have things like random Enchanted Blades still in their decks at full build. They will have everything they can to find those weapons more quickly and ensure those weapons are able to keep going. We usually run 2p these days, and typically that makes it a bit better as it's difficult to get 3 enemies on the board when we only draw encounter cards per turn.
Listening to the criteria RaIn uses for setting the initial tier list it's interesting how different it is from mine, when ranking solely "as fighters". He puts all of the characters capable of "burst damage" (and Cho who usually has to resort to +0 damage Fight actions more than any other fighter in our experience) in S tier. In my tier list S is where investigators who can fight bosses even if the bag is 18 crit fails belong, or have incentive to take the cards that enable that deck. That's Daniela who's ability enables it, that's Yorick and Tommy who have recursion for Guard Dogs and Beat Cops who do testless damage, and that's Leo who has an ability that makes it easier to deploy multiple Dogs or Cops. I also actually sometimes put Carolyn and Vincent into S tier as well; they can use Surgical Kit to heal Guard Dogs; though it may be considered off meta for them to do so.
My A+ tier is where people like Tony and Lily exist, who can compress more damage into one turn but still have to make honest skill tests at the end of the day. Agnes does have testless damage, but she struggles to do enough of it to completely avoid skill tests so caps here too. Mark's here too thanks to PMP Home Front but this isn't really the core plot of this video.
This is one of the bad things about playing on Hard. The symbols are bad. You do not want to draw them, some of them do bad things to you even if you passed the skill test. Some of them make hitting 4 Fight enemies very hard. Killing Hastur with a +1 damage weapon? You can when the Skull is -2, -4 if over max sanity. But it's a lot harder when the Skull is -X where X is the amount of Horror on you and that number is 7+. The Skull keeps the Seeker honest, but the Skull forces the Fighter to join them in degeneracy if they want to succeed. Almost makes me want to give the Seeker their own Chaos bag that is +1 difficulty from the rest of the team to see how that changes things.
Fighters have a lot of room to branch out on Standard. When getting to 6 or maybe 7 skill value is enough 90% of the time you can stick with low impact weapons like Machete longer. You can have a deck that only needs to plop a Switchblade (2) into play and then can spend the rest of the slots on answering the other problems via Intel Report or other nice effects. They don't need to take 2x 5 XP weapons and then spend XP on Backpacks and Stick to the Plan Prepared for the Worsts to make sure they find it. This problem unfortunately gets worse as difficulty gets higher, and difficulty going higher is one of the ways you might want to fix winning too much because the Seeker types are too easily stripping locations bare and staying ahead of Doom clocks.
I hope you make a follow up video about the "flex problem" you mentioned in your previous video. I know a part of the problem is just the deckbuilding, but I feel like everyone has run into the issue at some point. Unless your character has built-in flex attributes (i.e. Duke), it can be really difficult to have the consistency.
On another note:
I honestly think parallel Roland has been a complete underdog with TSK's release. I think Runic Axe has been the missing link, since there wasn't any high impact weapons besides Timeworn Brand. While +3 to hit and +1 damage is pretty unimpressive, Scriptweaver at scenario 1 lets him fight pretty efficiently. Hunt and Glory is where he really shines, giving him so much action compression with free moves and engages, as well as healing and card draw. At a Crossroads has definitely been the sleeper hit though. It has tempo without actually playing a card for the purposes of Red Tape. It can save you from playing a Deep Knowledge when you really need to get two other cards out. Or you just support your teammates by giving them the cards/action. Include testless clues and Breach the Door, he can actually clear locations consistently. His mythos protection is still his weakness, but he can power through the damaging ones. You have to hope take the initiative and logical reasoning can deal with the treacheries that stick around.
I know he would be a pretty bad pick for EotE, but I hope you give parallel Roland a shot at some point. He may not be apart of the best, but I found him pretty unplayable before TSK. Nowadays he has been my favorite to play.
I've just finished recording EotE, so this won't make it to the channel for a while, but I think you're absolutely right about Runic Axe (3) being a huge buff to Roland (and any other fighter with access to it but not higher end weapons). I've got a video slated for a "Berserker" Roland list designed to dual wield Runic Axe (5) using bandoliers, which is outside the scope of the parallel, but many of the same reasons that build is good still apply to why (3) is great in parallel. More so actually, since you don't have access to Flamethrower for competition there.
Here's the final decklist ahead of time if you're interested: arkhamdb.com/deck/view/2656077
Oh, and I'll definitely make a video talking about the strengths and pitfalls of flex at some point in time, but it's going to take a while for me to really sit on it and try to put it in concise and meaningful terms.
@@RatherIncoherent I love the build, I always had trouble figuring out how to use Ancient Power without destroying your charges. Turns out the answer was to just use two Runic Axes.
I always love to Flex when given the opportunity. I think the role gives you a lot of wiggle room to make creative decks without going full on meme. They might also be the most challenging to play, because it requires you to look around the board to figure out what your group is failing at. Especially before it all goes to shit. You need to try and see what the game will look like two turns ahead.
Cards like Ice Pick (1) and (3) were certainly cards that helped the survivor flexes. IMO, the triple class talents (like Sleuth (3)) should've been the epitome of flex cards. Where you're paying a paying a decently high cost between XP and resources, but you get this versatility of making a large swath of cards cheaper or become better at tests. Best example being Crafty maybe, where Tools, with some exceptions, help you investigate. Tricks are pretty balanced between investigating and fighting. Insights are focused on utility.
And then there's Bruiser. Just makes you fightier. That's it. There's also the problem that a lot of traits have very few tests related to them, so you're ignoring an entire portion of the card. It just feels bad to play unfortunately.
@@RatherIncoherent unfortunately Runic Axe is unique 😕
@@danielscarpace But... But... It's a generic item :( This is a travesty. It's true magick all over again! They can't keep getting away with this!
Seriously, thanks for the heads up. It never even occurred to me to check that my non-specific, two handed asset might have an asterisk. My hype is crushed, and my video is cancelled, but I appreciate the info.
What's your take on Parallel investigators? It seems they would fit as an absolute different character for this list, like P. Skids being more efficient in killing. Or Agnes having a different built (maybe a worse one than the original for this video's purpose)