Gloomhaven update – it’s been a minute!

Hello! I haven’t updated our group’s progress in a while here. We played I believe 3 sessions with that group since the last update. They went well, and at the end of the third session two of us retired. I retired ole Triangles (thus the guide I posted) and got to unlock Circles, while my buddy retired his Angry Face and unlocked Eclipse. Yesterday was our first outing with our new characters and overall it went pretty well.

I’m going to keep this first part spoiler-free so I’ll just say that Circles is a character type that I was hoping existed in Gloomhaven and when I opened the box and found out not only did it exist but I would get to play it I was super excited. I loved playing Triangles but it was definitely time to move on. Since I was 9th level I didn’t care about XP, since there weren’t any more perks I wanted I didn’t care about battle goals, and I didn’t need to buy anything so I didn’t care about gold. Definitely time for a new character 🙂

!!! FROM HEREON THERE BE SPOILERS FOR CIRCLES !!!

Circles is generally considered one of the worst/hardest to play characters but I didn’t care; I just wanted a character that was fun to play and at least somewhat effective. And after our first session I can definitely say it was fun, and even pretty effective. I think it’s one of those cases where it’s not that the character is bad or weak, it’s just more difficult to play effectively. People get frustrated because they play cards willy-nilly, it doesn’t work, so they decide the class “sucks”. And it’s true that you’re never going to have the raw power to crush things like some other classes do, but Circles can do a lot of good stuff.

So the actual name for Circles is Summoner. Summons in GH are a little hard to use: they’re very fragile and you don’t have direct control (or any control really) over them so they don’t always do what you want or what makes sense. But I really like the idea of summons; one of my favorite, if not my very favorite, classes in Final Fantasy is the summoner. The whole time we’ve been playing GH I’ve always wondered if there was a character that was more effective at using summons and if they could be good when played by that character.

And I think they can be! The Summoner has some cards that allow you to directly control your summons, so you can move them or have them attack or both, with you making all the decisions. Those cards, combined with some smart deployment and positioning, can make them pretty productive and longer-lived. The ranged summons are much easier to deal with because they can hang back and not run into a melee attack and die. Their issue can be keeping up; there’s a level 1 ranged summon that is great but it only has 1 movement, meaning it’s going to get left behind quickly. Obviously I have lot more to learn about the class, but I’m looking forward to playing it more.

And right now the rest of the group is so powerful it almost doesn’t matter what I’m doing; I’m free to experiment since the rest of the team can handle things. When Angry Face and I retired we were at Prosperity level 5, so we started yesterday with this lineup:

• Circles (me, level 5)
• Eclipse (level 5)
• Three Spears (level 9)
• Sun (level 8)

Level 9 Three Spears is just ridiculous. He’s essentially immortal at this point; he’d have to get hit really hard a bunch of times in one round to die. Anything else he can recover from pretty quickly, and he can do it over and over again. Level 8 Sun can take it and dish it out as well. With those two around the two noobs were free to mess around a bit, but we did decide to go back to normal difficulty (instead of hard) since we had two new characters.

But even having those two powerful characters wasn’t enough for the first scenario we tried. Instead of a “kill everything” objective it was something that seemed simpler: open all the doors. There was a large map with 8 doors spread throughout that needed to be opened to win. It seemed simple enough but it was not. We tried to play it like a regular scenario, taking out monsters and slowly advancing, but that didn’t work at all. Too many monsters, too much damage, not enough time. We died pretty quickly. So we replayed it and instead just bum rushed the doors. Well, Three Spears and Sun did. Eclipse and I hung out at the beginning taking down monsters. In our first two scenarios neither of us made it out of the first room :p But it was a good trial run, and I got my first taste of how to play the Summoner.

Our next scenario was a little more typical. You had to get to the end and kill any monsters you revealed. There were two paths to get to the end, one much shorter than the other. We figured that meant the short path was much harder but we were going to go that way anyway. But then I pushed a monster onto a trap, opening up the longer path, and we decided to go the longer way, figuring it would be easier. And I think it was. There were a billion traps along that path, but we were able to lure some monsters in and have them set off a bunch of them for us, which worked out well. My summons did pretty well, surviving for quite a while. My healing summon did really well. He does a small ranged attack, but he also does a Heal 2 Range 2 at the end of his turn. He did a ton of healing for us, and he went all the way from the very beginning of the scenario to the last room. Everyone was pretty impressed with him, and we won that one without too much hassle.

And I leveled up! One thing about the Summoner is she gains massive amounts of XP. So I’m already level 6, and the high level cards start getting really good. The 7th level summon is quite awesome…

OK, I think you’re mostly caught up now. Thanks for reading and commenting!