Last night I was playing with a friend and we randomly selected the set up. It came up with Gloomweaver and I said "He's so easy, want to try some house rules?" May friends said "Lets see what heros we get and we'll just play advanced." Well it turned out our hero's were Granpa Legacy, Chrono, OX, and Wraith. We looked at all the melee and projectile damage and decided we would win with the alternate win condition of 3 relics in the trash.
After having two Relics out and damaged my friend looks at me and says "We are going to win this by burning down Gloomweaver." He proceeded on his turn to put "Ultimate target" bounty and the +1 damage bounty on Gloomy and use Masaday to hit him for 4 energy damage. OX joined in and hit Gloom for 2 lightning and 3 fire at the start of his turn. While Legacy and Wraith mopped up trash CR and OX went to town on Gloomweaver. Whenever a voodoo pin cam out on a new hero we intentionally left it because each time it made Gloomy damage a hero Chrono shot him with Masadah.
The best part was when OX took some damage with his toxic plating out. My friend said "You are tied with Wraith for the lowest HP, you can redirect that to Legacy via smoke bombs." My response was "Hell no! I want reactive plating subroutine to trigger!" Then Wraith proceded to attack herself so that she would have lower HP than OX for next turn.
By the last turn of the game all six bountyies were on Gloomy, when he hit Legacy Chrono hit him for 8. On Chrono's turn he played Hunter Hunted and did 14 damage. At the end of OX's turn when Gloomy hit OX Chrono hit Gloomy for another 14 damage. So yeah 32 damage that round and next run and every turn after would have just been more (roughly 3x14=42).
What made this game particulary funny was that we were so set up that we started actively trying to help Gloomweaver. Wraith would spy and try to get him to play Vast Following. In the last couple rounds we tried to help him out as much as possible without accidentally winning by getting to many relics in the trash. Now we should have tried to let him get all three out and flip, although having him attack every turn wasn't actually going to help his cause.
There was a game where we used three Mega Computers to make sure the two Obsidian Fields powering up a Velociraptor Pack wouldn't take down GW for three rounds while we whittled down his HP and Relics.
We blew up his last relic and then added insult to injury by promptly reducing his HP to zero. We felt really bad for the guy, and if not for the fact that he's made of card, we would have bought him an ice cream cone for all the grief we caused.
This was my exact reaction too! (I was playing with Sefirit last night.) It didn't help that we started after midnight and were in a pretty silly mood to begin with. My favorite part is that the only thing Wraith did for the last half of the fight was attack herself once. "You guys suck, why am I even here?"
I think I'm going to start calling her Emo Wraith.
I think Gloomweaver is a reasonable challenge for three characters. He puts out rather a lot of minions. Four characters seems to be the breakpoint, though. They happily rip the minions apart. In one game with some bored characters, Omnitron-X started Timeshifting Gloomweaver to see just how many things they could kill. It was pretty sad for the big undead flamey-face.
You should try the alt version of Gloomweaver that comes with the oversized villain cards on my site. It brings Gloomweaver closer to what Richard Launius had in mind when he made him, according to his comments on BGG. I couldn't bring myself to go full-Launius, because that would have been brutal, but my version is definitely a more fun challenge than his normal version.
Maybe I should pull Gloomweaver's alt out and give it its own icon on my site like I did with Mr. Fixer. I think I'll do that this weekend.
Spiff, what is full Launius? I am curious. Honestly speaking, the alt version of Gloomweaver on your site still isn't much of a challenge, or at the very least NOT a level 3 challenge.
When GloomWeaver was first created he was much tougher - in fact too tough, I think he was the toughest of all Villains at one time. Through many play test changes he got easier and easier to defeat, but he can still stand up and take the Heroes down if he enters this plane of existence. I believe the rating is based on earlier plays, but I could be wrong.
If you want to add some teeth back into GloomWeaver, try the following house rules I use for him:
VooDoo Pins: The only hero that can attack a Voodoo Pin is the Hero that it is attached to, and while attached that Hero can attack nothing else other than their Voodoo Pin. Cards that would clear all Villain cards or all cards in play have severe penalties for someone under GloomWeaver's VooDoo Pins. If any VooDoo Pins are cleared by some special Power Card, the Hero(es) they were attached to suffers damage equal to the amount of HP the Pins had remaining.
Zombies: Zombies have (H)+2 Hit points.
These 2 changes alone should make the Hero's battle a lot more challenging.
Keep in mind, this is only for those that feel he is too easy. The VooDoo Pins originally were very vicious and could hold a Hero in check for several turns - same if you use these rules, but He will be much more frightening and thematically I wanted the Heroes to panic and fear the dark magic that he cast on them - this change will do that.
I kept everything except the part where if you're pinned, no one else can hit your pin but you, which seemed unnecessarily deadly to heroes who don't do a lot of direct damage on their own, and the part where you take damage if someone clears your pin away. In both cases, those seemed to penalize teamwork, which I didn't dig, so I left them off of mine.
That is just so beautiful *brushed imaginary tear from eye*. My Lord. That second suggestion is just killer. I think I'll try a mix of Spiff's and one suggestion from the post he linked to: shuffle Vast Following back into the deck. I just love how, after all yoru hard work, it could suddenly all come undone in the last few cards. The increasing probability of getting it just rocks.
I know during early playtesting when the forum playtesters first got GloomWeaver he was pretty challenging there awell. The Pins were still immune to damage dealt by other heroes, though the hero stuck with the pin could still hit other targets aswell. A card such as End of Days would of cleared it without any bad effect, other than all the hero cards would be destroyed.
The three relics had 30 HP instead, also GloomWeaver had 100 HP. Cursed Acolyte dealt all targets X fire damage where X = the number of cards in that player's hands. GloomWeaver had an additional Ongoing that increased GloomWeaver's damage by the amount of Relics in play.
Vast Following was also insane bringing back all Cultist and Relics from the trash into play and revealing the top H cards of the villian deck and putting all revealed Cultist into play and reshuffling the rest. All while restoring relic's HP by H.
I really enjoyed him during playtesting, probably my favorite villian from Infernal Relics at that time, though after it's release and playing with him it was a big let down. Now I typically play against him when I want to see how well a particular group of heroes compliment eachother...
"One-Shot Shuffle the Villain Trash and reveal cards until H Cultists/Relics have been revealed. Put them into play. Put the other revealed cards back in the trash. Play the top card of the Villain Deck Reshuffle Vast Following into the Villain Deck
The first change there was exactly what I thought the card should have said the very first time I played it. The first time we played it, it completely missed and I thought of cards like Forced Deployment and I wondered why vast following was so week.
If everyone seems to think that Gloomweaver back in the day was so much awesomer, does anyone have any idea how he got watered down? Was there a huge cry against his toughness, or was it just a judgement call by the designers?
I remember one specific limitation was the amount of text they could fit on Gloomweaver's card. What they had for him was too long, so they had to hack a couple of cool lines. I recall one of them was about three cultists sacrificing themselves to summon relics. (Not sure how much that particular one contributed to difficulty, but it was thematically awesome.) I don't recall a huge outcry about him, though. Some specific aspects, like Cursed Acolyte's hand-size attack, sure. I think some people complained about the pins.
Altogether, perhaps these things were enough to get where we are today.
DUDE. This sounds awesome! It would instantly make battling GW different. Normally, once a relic is out, we ust ignor eeverything else and bash the stuffing out of the relic; the cultists can be ignored for a turn or two. But with THIS… Whoa. GW could actually flip.
I'm not sure how much the three cultists rule really impacts difficulty. It's cool thematically, but I've never played a game where three cultists were out at the same time, I usually do my best to kill them as they come out, and even with Vast Following, as long as you make sure the trash is stuffed with zombies, you're not likely to get too many cultists.
I love gloomweaver thematically, and I've always been saddened by how easy he was.
Is the "pin may only be damaged by the hero that it is attached to" rule really so brutal? I know, spiff, you said that it would hurt the champions that dont really do damage, but since they rarely damage the boss anyway (and would be limited to only hitting the pin) does it really hurt them?
I played Gloomweaver for the first time last night and I feel bad for the guy.
I played Unity, Omnitron-X, and Absolute Zero. Within 2 turns Unity got Stealth bot out, and in a H=3 game this essentially shut down all of Gloomweaver's damage for the game. I will admit, I got lucky and Gloomweaver was really unlucky, but I ended the game only losing Bee bot (due to a nasty environemnt card), and with Unity being the lowest hp Hero with 18 hp left. If it hadn't been late, I might have left the bag of bones in play and just taken the guy down by hp instead of a relic victory