Astral Class Guide for Frosthaven

hello everyone and welcome to Phoenix gaming we are back today to talk some more Frost Haven we are going to be talking about another spoiler class today this class this this class right here the uh I think they call it astral but this sort of like star and moon situation going on here um is going to be the class that we're going to focus on today if you're not interested in knowing any spoilers it's all spoilers today uh you should click away from this video now because we're going to dive into it so I hope you're excited because this class is for me one of the most fun classes I played throughout the entire Frost Haven campaign I mean just check out this art clearly they took some anime and jammed it into my Frost Haven this character jumping around our uh only Orchid that we've seen so far across the um videos that we've done uh and just a giant heaving sword we know from gloomhaven that orchids are often very Elemental in nature maybe not as much as the Savas but they tend to have that kind of naturey theme even if they do or don't use elements this one does pretty strict kind of Sword Mage a Gish build if you will from sort of the the DND world and certainly it lives up to that style of game play this is a melee focused class so let's start looking at that character sheet we're using a red background today because the infuser's cards are green turns out that all my favorite classes in Frost they even have green backgrounds but that doesn't play nice with this copper bronze armor here so you can see the uh character is is bleeding through a little bit um but basically this class is telling us at the front we're going to have these cards called infusions which we will get into in a moment talk a little bit more about how those work but they're kind of uh they're almost like playing The Drifter and that you're sort of like suiting up but every time you actually do the suit up action you get to kind of do like one combo bonus turn so they're not quite as good as most of those kind of like permanent effects that you would get in other classes but they give you a surge of power and the moment that you play them particularly as you do more and more of them and then the other kind of main mechanism is that you'll need lots of elements to trigger your abilities and so you can decrease the power of your abilities in order to generate an element this is a really interesting choice from a design perspective because in theory you could do exactly the same thing with adding like this could say move three generate a wind or don't generate the wind and move four which I think feels a little bit uh which I think feels a little bit nicer because people like to see pluses rather than minuses on their cards there's a certain like design ethos that um taking something away feels less good even though it functionally could be the same however I think from a from a like templating perspective it's easier to to write things as a negative to um take this away to generate this positive effect uh gloomhaven I don't think does it quite as well the other way or the Haven system doesn't do it quite as well either way just to lean into like what we are we are Arcane educated and strong and you can't quite read it but we've got that kind of traditional middle of the the class hit points situation uh starting with a at first level um they call this a medium complexity Class A three complexity class I think that is fair as long as you understand how the elemental board works if you don't understand how that Elemental board works or the kind of like flow and tempo of how to do those things it's a little bit it's a little bit harder and this class is a class that really benefits from communicating with your allies about what elements you are going to use or they're going to be generating um if four like to that point I think that the Orchid is probably a little bit better in a bigger party because more people are going to be generating those elements that you might be able to use uh that being said I was fine in a two-player party though I did have some item support that definitely helped along the way we used three kinds of elements here wind uh plant or Earth whatever you want to call it and uh dark which is a combo that I don't remember seeing across things a kind of fun weird combo and a list here this class is having very high melee very bad range pretty high Mobility decent support High defense and decent control my opinion is that they're correct on most of these I think the melee is very high Mobility is pretty solid particularly due to one specific card in my opinion support I actually agree is middling is a fair number of ways to get some healing on this class primarily healing is your method of support on this class and actually I was I was pleasantly surprised with the Support options there defense I did not play defense build myself I played more of a kind of um glass melee cannon with some support stuff going on rather than defense I can't speak too much to that side but I would agree it's a fairly Defensive class if you chose to build that way I do not agree that control is middling um I guess there is again one specific card that you could argue generates control with this class and maybe a couple others okay so I'm actually I'm coming around there's there's a few specific cards but um it sort of depends I guess on what you end up taking in terms of whether this class can do control um and so actually to that point this class can really do it all except for range um I think that there's a lot of flexibility in how you build this class and your focused on how you build this class is going to dictate more then I think on most classes that I've seen so far in Frost Haven I think that that the trenches of how you're supposed to play classes are a little bit more defined this class I think has a lot more flexibility than other classes so let's dive into some cards all right I had to mess with them out lighting a little bit just because these cards are not too Cooperative so you'll just have to bear with the kind of weirder video production this time around um we're gonna start off by talking about infusions and then we'll talk about the invisible individual cards there we go uh so this icon here this little like kind of flower petal thing represents when you're doing an infusion and so in order to do an infusion I believe this is true for like almost all of the infusions you are paying two elements in the case of the starting elements they kind of have the the least restrictive choices which is one of your main elements be it night um Earth or wind and then any other element of essentially your choice so you pay two elements it will give you some permanent ability on the top of the card and then it will trigger that ability in the middle of the card if it is your first uh infusion plated just that does that ability but then if you play additional infusions you get to trigger essentially all of the infusion abilities that's stacked up but nonetheless your ability at the top is going to be persistent throughout the module so or through the scenario the quest so um that's the part that you really need to be considering the most when you're considering these infusions which is a little counterintuitive to me from a from a visual perspective because this part in the middle here kind of seems like the the main thing that you're focusing on but in fact I think actually the top part is what you care more about when you're evaluating these cards so that's just something to consider as you're looking at them yes this part matters and is cool but this part is is more significant because it's going to pertain to the rest of your moves for the rest of the scenario so let's go ahead and talk through the three of them and we're going to start off by talking about Boon of the Tempest I I'm not going to talk about the difficulty of making these elements because it kind of depends on what other cards you have but Boone of the Tempest is one that I took with me up until high levels and then I retired at level seven or I just hit level eight I actually didn't get to play level eight but I think I leveled up to level eight when I retired so uh this this card is amazing it's just flattered and amazing remember how we said on the back of the infuser that has a high mobility and there's a card that does that this is that card the top ability the permanent boost is plus one move and jump to all your move abilities which essentially just means you're moving a minimum of three more or less unimpeded movement every turn if you want to and you can do even more than that the that that top ability is pretty insane and gets you really far throughout scenarios also lets you just shortcut certain things that you might not be able to do or might need to have grabbed winged boots for you were just jumping around this like a freaking Jackrabbit uh that is a really cool ability and it is paired with one of the best infusion abilities which is a mediocre attack that essentially means that when you play this card you're saying Hey I want this permanent bonus for the rest of the scenario including maybe even the turn that I play it and I get to attack an enemy next to me yeah it's not an amazing attack but it's just fine and it pairs really well with some of the other infusions so Ubuntu tempest's top ability is just awesome not to mention the initiative is decent not amazing but decent and then the bottom ability of move four is like a totally staple fine thing to do in um Frost Haven it can even be a move three generate a wind if you want to which will do plenty of times one of the weirdest things about these Boons by the way is that they generate elements that they themselves need so you'll notice that this one generates wind and then you don't have a lot of other cards that need to use when some yeah but this is the main card that uses wind so you might find yourself in a situation where you are using this card as the last card in a rust cycle short rest and then immediately go to use the win to play Boon of the Tempest at the top of the next cycle which is something that is a little funky I found this class and it's certainly because of the item Loadout that I chose to be one where you are probably going to be short resting more than long resting because of the way elements get generated as you're playing this class let's talk about Caress of the night which is the other actually total Workhorse uh Turtle total Workhorse card this card's amazing again I used it all the time up until the end um it's it's a night to generate and then at the top it makes all of your attacks do wound and muddle which is a very bizarre combination of abilities they also so wound I think is better at low levels when monsters have fewer hit points particularly monsters with high Shields you know your living Spirits your flame demons you can wound them and then just kind of watch them die um depending on what your what else is going on in that scenario you might just ignore them and rush off to do something else not to mention that while they are bleeding to death they're muddled they have disadvantaged to attack you but model is an ability that tends to be better at higher levels because monsters are hitting for more damage so increasing the chance that they draw a Miss with their disadvantage draw those minuses um I think is a little bit better at higher levels although now that I'm saying that out loud you know muddle increasing the chance that someone draws a minus one rather than a zero is more significant at lower levels so I think now that I'm saying it out loud the as you progress these abilities of wound and muddle become a little bit less significant but they're pretty cool honestly all the way through I think this is what the back of the card is referring to largely when we're talking about control because you can muddle anybody that you attack on your turn and this ability right here is a totally solid infusion it pairs really nicely with the one we just talked about because if you play caress of the night after having played um Boone of the Tempest or play Boon of the Tempest that actually really doesn't matter you're going to strengthen yourself then immediately do an attack three with Advantage um and it lasts for this turn and next turn uh there's you have a few bottom attacks not just this one um other cards that are bottom attacks and pairing this with the bottom attack means that you can get a lot of attacks with Advantage you can suddenly just go full like and just like be repeatedly attacking over and over again with Advantage which lets you really churn through your deck pretty quickly which is a nice fun thing to do for a round so when you play crest of the night uh really matters I think on the other cards that you you might have in your hand or when you trigger that infusion you want to be paying attention to what you're gonna be playing next turn as well because of that strength and self ability the bottom here the attack three I will say I I can't think of an instance where I used it because caress of the night was something that I put into Play constantly that is a very very biased perspective because my partner was playing someone that generated knight uh pretty much every turn at the beginning of the game it's the first thing that that she did all the time and then often would generate another element so our our general starting play in the game was her going before me generating the two elements that I needed for this infusion and then me putting this infusion into play on turn ones that I was just muddle wounding people throughout the whole scenario so I can't tell you much about the bottom of this card but a fine attack on the bottom is like totally okay um for a class that's all melee class it's a nice way to shred some extra damage but you do need to be kind of moving around a lot because you're going to be killing people all the time so your melee class you're gonna need to get into the mix with more enemies I think you'll use it here and there but probably not a ton and then you know the trade-off of making it a two instead of a night if I mean the the calculus is really easy if you need the next turn then it's worth it to to do two two attack instead of three attack this is pretty much true for all of these abilities if you if you are going to use the element the following turn you should just do the weaker version of the card so that you can play the cards that you really can care about because right this this these infusions for instance if you don't have the elements to play them they don't do anything special um Bounty of the earth is probably the the worst of the starting ones which is saying a whole lot because it's actually also pretty solid um I can't tell you how many times I put this card up with its retaliate range 2 thing and then I just forgot it for the rest of the scenario I think that bounty to Earth is probably better when you're playing a tank build but I played more like I said a glass Cannon murder build so I think if you're throwing up Shields and extra hit points and things like that probably is a little bit more exciting to be doing one retaliate one retaliate is also just nice throughout the course of lower level encounters and then the bottom here I mean this is actually the infusion here of healing three in yourself you're only going to trigger this essentially when you've you've chosen to play it or you've chosen to play another infusion so it could be a really nice way to pump yourself full of healing that you'll almost certainly need top of this card isn't not good um 2030 is a decent initiative but it's not fast enough that you're going to be guaranteed to get those Shields there here and this is the card that it feels the most painful to do just one shield and get that green because you're hoping that if you got Shields you're kind of shielding a bunch of different people so functionally this doesn't end up being a minus one Shield it ends up being a minus one Shield per attack you're going to take that turn so depending on how you set up or how you're planning on using this Shield that can kind of be the most painful uh you know cost of generating a green so I found myself taking Bounty of the earth and playing the top ability only when I essentially had to and I was almost never excited about it but I did play it for the bottom ability fair amount just for those repeated heels over and over again for the infusions but I was least excited of this of the three abilities I'm sure you can make some very good builds about it so no judgment on it all the infusions are really really sexy um and you could be playing them forever and be completely happy with that all right so we're gonna be moving to a class of cards that I call like the elemental Wombo cards and emerald Edge is my favorite of those um it is not easy to get a green and a black specifically at the same time but when you do the payoff is pretty sweet essentially by loading up or having found a way to load up these two elements at a given time you get to do what I think is the equivalent of a lost card on most classes a five attack self Ward uh one experience point is amazing I mean that you you do a lot with the top of that card you have to plan for it you know you have to set up for this or um that you'll see when we look at the perk deck but a lot of the perks give you extra elements so you kind of need to be on your toes and just keep this card available for when you want to trigger it um but you know the bottom of this card if you can't trigger the top is a completely okay respectable ability to to throw some healing around on a couple of people around you this is great for take it off uh wounds and poisons and things like that and just a few incidental healing along the way is great too I love Emerald Edge I try to make this work for the majority of the time but I did I will also say that I had an item Loadout that particularly focused on generating elements rather than defending or anything like that I was focused on generating elements so I could play these really big cool powerful cards the next of which is a torrential cleave which you know because of the red Dotsy it's a see-through but you tack two spaces there and again this is almost like a lost card not quite in Frost Haven but it would be a lost card I think in gloomhaven but an attack four against two people that pushes them two spaces gives you some flexibility there's a lot of classes in Frost Haven that benefit from their allies being pushing them around this is a very slow initiative but I actually think can kind of kind of be cool I like when melee class has a mix of fast and slow initiatives because going later than enemies trundling into combat and um then kind of going quick on the next turn to slice them again is one of my preferred methods of fighting as a Melee character and I particularly enjoy this one because you move up and then uh if you're they're only a couple spaces away from you you get to generate a green which is nice and then you get to um pin them or immobilize them so they don't run away from you on the following turn if they're a ranged enemy or anything like that so I found myself actually using torrential cleave a lot more for the bottom ability than I did for the top ability I did use the top ability uh but I don't often have enemies piling up in that two formation because we're playing two players so we don't have as many kind of swarms of enemies that will pile on us in those instances but plenty of instances where you can use torrential clay this card is completely awesome and respectable um and like I said the bottom of this card I think does a lot more work than it maybe looks like on paper Unstoppable impulse was the one that was of these three the least impressive to me a top attack four is completely respectable and attack three that generates a knight is fine um but a re a weird middling uh initiative that doesn't you know really asks to be paired with something else um again hard to generate two elements of the specific type but you will be able to do it kind of over the course of the time maybe not necessarily at a time of your choosing which is part of the reason why Emerald Edge and torrential cleave are better because stabbing people is always great but pushing people is usually only good in certain circumstances you know the Board needs to be set up in a certain way you get to do a lot of pushing a lot of pushing and a lot of moving which can really reposition enemies in some nasty nasty ways but the amount of work you need to do and the timing that you need to have to set up Unstoppable impulse I found this to be the weakest of those three cards let's focus on a few cards that are about generating elements or I would I mean they it's mostly what the card does but I think that the the group of this is is other cards that generate elements for you which is really important top of this card is a lost card that um I love the theme of like you do the kind of Samurai thing of like striking in a straight line attacking all the people in that line and piercing through and you teleport to the back of the line very cool very video game very anime um but it's pretty weak for a lost card I mean a three attack on three people that in a very specific formation and I think I use this as a lost card maybe once ever it's it's really not worth it however I did take this card with me into a decent number of scenarios because I really love the bottom of this card a move to pull two or move two pull one wind which is what I more often used it for um lets you do some kind of sneaky weird stuff position people in ways that you like and yeah I found the bottom of this to be good it's also one of the few ways to generate wind um once you have put this once you've put Boon of the Tempest into play that's one of your wind generators so I found this is as one of the nicer ways of generating wind I didn't like the other cards that generate wind so I found this as my my primary wind generator throughout my play of the campaign speaking of I've already kind of dunked on this card inherently but slashing Cyclone is the other wind generator I don't like it because the difference of going from a two to attack down to a one attack against adjacent enemies is pretty significant right because like with the shield thing this is -1 attack per enemy that you would have hit so the the cost on slashing Cyclone is quite a lot the amount of time that I'm attacking more than two enemies with this is Trivial the initiative is amazing don't get me wrong and you know the bottom of this card is cool too run really fast again it's kind of got that like Samurai thing to it you run really fast and everyone you run next to you know you do some damage too which is fine but doesn't really feel like it's in the lost card category free slashing Cyclone might have been the one card that I cut every single scenario I might have played it like once ever um but I just think that it it doesn't it doesn't do enough uh from my perspective unless you're building you know as soon as you have items that really support like attacking all of Jason enemies in my opinion Onyx shards on the other hand is a card that I really like I think this is a card that again represents the control side of this class um you'll see later that there is there's a reason you want to have some abilities that are not attack abilities on your top and this card is a wonderful ability that is not attack ability on your top so disarming someone is essentially just all cancel my turn to cancel your turn um Range four is really solid range two sucks but if you can get them in range two and generate a knight that's pretty great I also think that the bottom of this card uh well I will say that the bottom of this card is solid I thought it was totally Nutters like being able to put a bunch of obstacles in play and doing some damage next to people is very cool but I found that the the range three on a turn where you haven't moved is a lot more limiting than I thought I thought I was going to play the bottom loss of this card a lot more than I really did but the top is amazing so you can keep the bottom until it comes into play um or you can just use it as a base like move two if you need to because it's a decent initiative or you know this could be car that you get rid of in a long rest after kind of a few sort of opening salvos of keeping enemies stopped while you're doing other things that your hands might not be available for so you're busy on sharding this card I think was really cool moving on to just a couple basic fighter cards that I think are not particularly interesting in any way stoic vigilance is a fine card going at 12 doing a basic attack and putting up a shield feels like something that a guard in Frost Haven would do um you kind of are like that that's sort of your MPC job is like I can't attack me instead with my windshield um the bottom of this card is a really paltry move but then basically says hey why don't you focus on me instead of my ally in a two-player game I didn't use this so much I think that depending on the party that you're with this ability is good or bad just depending on what it is that you're doing I found myself cutting this card quite often and quite early uh just because it didn't quite do enough it's a totally fine like Workhorse but I think once you level up this card just gets outshined by the other much sexier bigger things that you can do Rising momentum is a card that I definitely undervalued at first so an attack three at top and a move three at bottom it's fine but the number of times that you're going to have a pair of active infusions by mid to late scenario is quite high so an attack four move four with a decent initiative this card just fills multiple roles and it plays nicely you'll notice the number of times that you need to have two elements but you usually are not generating two elements per turn you're often generating one element per turn unless you're lucky based off of your card draws the way that your deck is constructed items that you've to support allies that you're using to support you know like I said this class really wants to communicate with other people but if you are playing More by yourself or it's just been one of those rounds where you haven't really been able to coordinate with other people or hey maybe there was like an earth Elemental that generated a green that you're not prepared to use yet just punting those things over from one turn to the next actually was cooler than I thought I would be so Rising momentum not a not a amazing write home card but I found myself putting this in my deck a lot more than I would have expected these last cards didn't fit anywhere else thematically um and hilariously they are all the X cards you'll know from my other videos that that's not a thing I do I just put the X cards with the one cards um but these three just they live in their own world and I think that's part of the reason why they didn't make the cut into the base cards which are very focused on the elemental side of things crystalline Aegis is a card that you should not sleep in this card is nuts um I didn't give it a respect that it needed at the beginning but that top ability of brittleing an enemy it's like yeah it's fine um but no it's actually quite good uh first of all if you have two enemies that you can brittle with it that can generate a lot of additional damage if you think about you know attacking people as being attacked threes or fours or fives um and specifically like waiting to attack enemies with three or four or five damage this is basically just a free attack that just guarantees that people took damage you get an experience for doing it too and like I said there's a number of cards that um ask you to not be attacking on the top yourself so this is essentially a way for you to be able to attack without actually attacking and I think that is sneakily powerful in this class the other thing is that this initiative is very very good and the bottom of this card is awesome a rejuvenate Ward on yourself is a great thing to do that rejuvenate almost never matters because what happens is you go really fast you're standing next to a monster you throw a word up on yourself and then they Wallop you for half damage and you're rejuvenated is immediately gone every once in a blue moon it will stick around or you know you did the bottom of this card just for the rejuvenate ability that's really really rare but just throwing up a ward on yourself as a bottom action is really nice I cannot tell you the number of times I've been walking around with a Ward and got critical and this basically cancels out of critical which is just a really really good feeling um yeah crystalline this card is is just it's it's very good very very good and view with life is a card that I played with one or two scenarios because I wanted to try it for the memes I think that um this is a card that you can build a little bit more around it is not that great but it is deeply fun um essentially what you do is you animate your sword here it lives you know just going around hacking at people and as long as the sword is animated you are disarmed and that's because the sword is going around and fighting so that's an example of like where crystalline ages where you're you know throwing brittles on people or Onyx shards where you're disarming people or um you'll see soon that some of your tops can heal people and things like that where you're going to be using your other abilities that are not this I think this animated Claymore thing is really good in a tank build in particular because you can kind of just like throw your body into the mix and then this thing might be chopping at people while you're doing other stuff like throwing up the shield two for instance um and just generally getting in the way and making a nuisance of yourself also note that this is it's not a lost card right you just you spend the green you summon the sword and it just goes until it dies or until you disband it but just be aware that you're going to be disarmed for as long as it's in play and then also probably the turn after depending on how it goes the bottom of this card just a like big burst lost heel is like okay um that's a huge amount of healing and you get to do some flexible less healing in order to like guarantee trigger an infusion next turn why poor Knight doesn't give you an experience point but the other two do just feels like an insulting random choice to me but I guess they just couldn't put all three on the card um so that's some be with life I think it's it seems like fun if you want to play around with this that's great I did not play around with it a ton the times that I did it was okay but it was more funny and thematic than it was powerful I thought battle prowess is a card yeah you're pretty much only going to play if you are playing with this imbue with lifeguard because the top of the card says attack someone um and then the bottom of this card is like a move with a gigantic Loop I don't know what that has to do with battle prowess or this class at all this card makes no sense to me design wise I I never played it does it doesn't make sense to me I don't think it's very good um it just it's just a really wild weird card that has like a couple of things thrown in together I can't I can't say anything else about it I just thought it was weird that's level one we get a very cool and I think difficult choice at level two I went with veil of protection because we uh my partner was playing Tanki class which is part of the reason I was playing on glass Cannon and turns out she did not really have healing and I didn't have that much healing so putting some extra healing in our party was great a heel five is a Mondo amount of healing to have on a card um you know what I think people don't like healing I like healing I think more than the average person and five is just a lot um four feels pretty good to me three is usually not enough uh but five really does the work and you can make it three if you need a green and just throw an experience point or if you only need three healing in the moment um like I said there's other instances where you're not going to have your swords in hand so you can't be attacking so a veil of protection gives you something to do with your top and the bottom infusion here is okay I will say I almost never played it for the bottom infusion because I wanted to be playing the top so often the current and maximum hit point being increased by three is pretty funny on a tank build um it this card felt a little to me like the other infusion that heals you at the lower levels bouncy of the earth here because it you know this heals you for three this immediately UPS your maximum hit points by three um but then it makes you even more tanky by giving you a ward every time you infuse you get a ward this class is kind of like a ward sub theme which I think is pretty neat um it's kind of like a magical you know Mage Shield sort of thing going on there um and that's okay but I I didn't like it as much as the other infusion abilities the being immune to curses that was primarily the reason why I would choose or not choose to use this bottom ability in a given scenario if I had enemies that threw around curses I would throw this up because the incidental extra bonus was really good also like I mentioned my bill was really focused on hitting people with a lot by using elements to do things like Emerald Edge for an attack 5 and drawing a miss when you drove an attack five that you spent time building up elements for is miserable so um veil of protection I used it for the top bomb's totally respectable and in the right instances can do a lot of work remote impact on the other hand is a pretty cool if you want to go aggressive and like I said I was going aggressive but I just thought the support thing felt really good on veil of protection being able to attack a spread of enemies you know the odds are gonna get three of them are low I think but you could probably get two enemies just doing a three attack on each of them is respectable you might need to back up for this so it's a little a little bit awkward I think but making it an attack two to generate wind normally would seem very bad but putting it with a push can put enemies into some weird positions or trigger abilities or traps that you want to trigger so I think the remote impact's top ability is pretty cool and pretty flexible the bottom of remote impact requiring a green and a wind is again kind of like a weak loss card right choosing a place where an obstacle shows up that can some Bush comes out of the ground and grabs enemies legs next to them pretty cool ability it just requires setup is a little bit harder and I will say of the elemental pairings green and or sorry plant and wind or nature and wind were the two hardest I had generally to get going just based on the way of what I was playing and what my partner was playing yeah so I thought it was a little bit harder to to get that off but I wouldn't fault you for choosing either these two cards but I I definitely had a great time with Veil production level three is a little weirder both these cards are good I think maybe not to me as exciting as the level two cards I took guide the flow um because like I said there were plenty of turns where there was an element in play and I wanted to be able to roll it over into the next turn there were even instances usually at the end of a rest cycle where there were several elements in play and you might be surprised by that in a given instance because enemies prize generate elements or you just drew an element thing from your deck although I guess that doesn't matter because you'd have to have drawn it you drew it on the previous turn you drew it from your deck so it's sitting in play right and it's down to waning that's that's what I mean um and you want to save those elements so actually guide the flow was a card that is best to be played as the very last card of your rest because it allows you to kind of save things before kind of rolling over into your short rest and moving forward from there having a bottom attack totally fine I primarily pay paired this bottom attack with doing an infusion because I would you know trigger the crust of the night so I would have strength and then that then maybe do an attack three as well and then a bottom attack three so um by having Advantage the bottom attack three becomes even spicier that was primarily what guide the flow was for but every once in a while where you need to like move five or seven or nine spaces on a turn the top part of guide the flow just lets you fling yourself across an entire room which for certain scenarios can just do nutty stuff reinforced for post I'm not generally a big fan of retaliate I love the idea of a pin cushion build and one of my favorite classes in gloomhaven rather than Frost Haven was I built in a pincushion way it's fun but it's hard to make sustainable doesn't work against certain monsters and it doesn't scale very well as you get higher levels this one is essentially just a retaliate one that could be a retaliate two I guess it could be retaliate three but it's deeply unlikely that it's that I think if you're taking a reinforced for post you're probably primarily taking it for the bottom of the card that move to wound move two or if you've got that jumping card in play Move three wound move three but I didn't find that I needed a movement as a thing with this class so I took guide to flow and I don't regret that choice I would recommend the same for you but maybe you have a build that uses reinforced better than I did the level four cards are both very cool um but they're very build dependent or at least one is very dependent I took desperate throw which you can take no matter what when you're playing this class and it's awesome um an attack five that actually is your only ranged attack ability um up to four hexes where you just throw your giant sword at people is very cool but you disarm yourself for the following turns you need to do something like brittle them or disarm them or long rest or heal people um which I had in my deck plenty of options to do so kind of depends on if you have taken some of those other cards that give you some other options as your top actions but I thought the desperate throw I mean I use the top of this card all the time it was just it's a lot of damage with a lot of flexibility about who you target the bottom of this card is also good two loot one move a waning element to the strong column like that that does a lot of stuff for this class all three of those things are just fine on an amazing initiative uh for this class like desperate throw is is all around just a gray card at the bottom of this card is good and I never used it because I used the top of this card just even more often coalescing darkness is a card that I think you it's a build around card this is a card where you're saying I'm playing a tanky version of this class and as enemies attack me they get curses I muddle them because of my you know original ability my infusion from the beginning um I'm also disarming them while I'm playing this card which is probably the best single infusion ability that exists across I think all of the levels honestly um so a really fun build right where you can just punish enemies for attacking you this is this is one of the classes that I think can put 10 curses in the enemy deck depending on the scenario that you're in so if you if I was playing this class in a four player party I would maybe be considering doing a coalescing Darkness build throwing up Shields and retaliates and then just like muddling enemies and having them have piles of curses in their deck seems very very cool bottom of this card is fine I think it's mostly for generating the elements more so than the actual ability itself but the ability itself is you know totally respectable right here's some more model I think it's funny that the muddle on the bottom of this card will never benefit from the curses that you gave them at the top and you don't have other mechanisms for making curses so like there's a bit of a mishmash there in terms of like the one thing wants to play well with the other but is never going to um so I think that's a little bit of a whiff just I guess mechanically but um I think it seems like a fun build if you want to try that the level five cards in this class are absolutely insane they're both really really good you can't go wrong taking either I took gemstone resonance um it's a crap infusion you know putting rejuvenate on your heel abilities and healing two people and it's basically like a heel to rejuvenate for the cost of a green which is an easy infusion to trigger but the thing you need to realize is this is not a lost card it only stays in play as long as you want it to which in most instances is going to be this turn only and then you're going to get it reshuffled so you're gonna get it reshuffled into your deck and it allows you to trigger all your infusions so when you have you know your sort of Base just your base infusions your caress in the night and Boone of the Tempest in play this card suddenly now reads strengthen yourself make an attack three heal an ally two and give them rejuvenate suddenly that's a really really spicy text block um bottom of this card is fine whatever I'm not going to talk about it because it's so boring you should be playing gemstone resonance for the top uh obsidian spear is a card where both the top and bottom are good the top is a totally fine attack that gives you some options sometimes you'll be able to attack two people great if you do congratulations but the bottom of this card is a Mondo attack you have to do some setup for it with the elements but a huge bottom attack with a stun on it um four range three I mean that's crazy that's just that's just that does a lot of work it just requires you to do some setup for it you already have so many cards with this class that you need to do setup for that I chose the gemstone card I also enjoyed the infusion gameplay a lot but I wouldn't fault you for taking either of these cards they're both great I think the level six cards are not as flashy as the level five cards but they're both totally nutty still Gail barrage Shores up a weakness in this class that we've not addressed and it's that you are a melee class with almost no Pierce abilities the only pierce ability you have is a lost card at level one so Gail barrage the top of this card all of a sudden says yeah I can ignore most shields on most enemies and I do it multiple times and by the time you're level six is a good chance that your deck is really good so this could be upwards of like in a 9 10 damage attack um you know you do need to do the elements for it but yeah it does a lot and if you can't do the elements the bottom of this card does a lot of work too just to move one plus two to your melee attack which is often a like move to jump um plus two tier melee attack or plus one if you want the wind that's completely like something you're pretty happy to play in most instances so if you can't trigger the top and you're triggering the bottom of this card you're not happy I love gal barrage it was always good proposed of Tailwind is really fun um there's something unique about a character that can attack and then back off depending on the enemy AIS you can just avoid so many instances of enemies getting to attack back against you and do nonsense it's not entirely clear to me whether this allows you to ignore enemy retaliates that's something that I think I would have to go to the Internet for to understand so if you know let me know in the comments but that could be a cool side effect of that if I'm understanding this correctly um the the uh infusion ability on this card is also pretty solid you know this is a in a lot of instances against a lot of enemies just a weak Jank disarm right push immobilized means you can't touch me um I think that that is a pretty cool ability so a a neat a neat uh a neat infusion at the top here I think quite similar though to to the other tanky one that we looked at at level four bottom of this card is actually also very good like you moving in an ally moving and generating a lot of elements is pretty sweet and I'm noticing this pattern now with the higher level infusions that you know they have you know the need for two specific types but the bottom also generates both of those types so again doing these infusions kind of at the end of a rest and then short resting and picking up this card again or doing this and then using like a stamina potion to pick up his card again lets you do some kind of goofy stuff and set yourself up to trigger these infusions if you're having difficulty with those elements all right I was wrong before when I said I hit level eight I hit level seven and this when I retired which I'm not too unhappy about because the level 7 cards are not as spicy as the five and six cards malachite Shockwave is a great attack but it is a lost card so it's one that I'm fine to have in my deck but not super excited for and the bottom of that card is like a solid enough move with enemies taking damage this card seems like a fine solid card all around diamondization is a defensive card probably for if you're playing more of a defensive build um it's going to be a one or two Shield very unlikely to be three plus a ward along the way I think that shield and Ward interact not the best because I think you reduce the damage and then you cut it in half but I guess I would have to I have to double check that in the rule book and see if I'm correct about that the loss on the bottom of diamondization seems only okay to me by the time you're level seven throwing wounds on people is I think just fine immobilizing them is still is still great but you know it is a lost card the initiative on diamondization is obviously amazing I don't really get why being a diamond makes you go really fast but sure I'll take it both these cards seem okay I honestly might go back to six or fifth level card to take just because they seem only okay to me and I really like the idea of the six outfit level cards I think for what I was playing I would have taken malachite's Shockwave at this level I really like these away cards they seem like a lot of fun Swift pivot is the card I would have taken I think negating a melee attack and doing four damage that is a lot of stuff that that step or that text block does for you I think that some people who play like are very good Haven players don't like cards like this that are sort of dependent on the enemy AI but there's a lot of enemy eyes you can kind of count on to do a melee attack and if they don't do a melee attack you're like okay you're putting up Shields instead sounds good I'm gonna go do something else so you can pair Swift pivot with a different card where you're happy to do the top ability in case the Swift pivot isn't needed but I think most of the time the Swift pivot is going to do a fair amount of work going at eight means your problem before any enemy except for maybe chaos demon doing some nonsense um and yeah it's uh it generates an element like this the top of Swift pivot just does so much and the loss on the bottom is really good move attack move um attack multiple people like a strong attack that's a completely respectable lost card as a bottom I mean that would be a lost card you would play as a top card um and I think it's even better on the bottom so yeah Swift pivot I think is an easy choice for me that being said under the shackles is really fun and would be something that I would be going for kind of like a One-Shot build bottom of this card is just a really solid move jump but you're playing this card because you want to have the swinging sword at the top that lives forever if you have all the right infusions this could be like a nine hit point monster that you can heal that like attacks with like wounding and nonsense like that like you could really set up a nice tanky situation where this sword is as nasty as a member of the party because it's affected by all of your infusions if you could try to keep it alive for a really long period of time at this kind of just be fighting alongside you for the majority of scenario and that is really cool that you can have kind of an alternate build that's focused on this um for this class so if you have done that let me know in the comments how it went for you because it seems like fun and I'm very curious go all right level nine level nine is just totally insane here uh I love both of these cards yeah and let's let's start with ancient Rites of power ancient rights of power is like a tough infusion to put into play but adding plus one target to your melee attack abilities means that you can be just doing tons and tons of damage like even just triggering your attack threes your attack fours on multiple enemies the amount of additional targets that generates over the course of the scenario is insane if you can get this into play Early the ability to put a blast in your deck is like okay I don't think that that's such a great infusion ability but it's because of the top of this card that really matters and then the Bottom's like a pile of healing that does some stuff totally respectable card Sky splitting strike is very sexy though and attack six is always good throwing on some extra elements to do more damage wound a disarm huge amount of peers for the right enemy that is a very flexible card that can just do piles of damage and then the bottom of this card where you throw gigantic rocks somewhere do a pile of damage to enemies and give them stun yeah that's that's a great lost card that then gives you all of your elements so you can then trigger any infusion you like on the following turn I think the only downside of the bottom of that card is that enemies are not always set up in a way where a three hex obstacle goes in a nice spot um so there's there's certainly limitation there I think for me in a two-player party I'd be taking Sky splitting strike but it could be that ancient rights of power is the one that's better for a multiplayer game that's probably what I'm thinking at this stage that's what I think about the upgrade cards this class is just so cool let's talk about these um these perks and masteries let's start with Masters actually so uh this first Mastery have active infusion bonuses you can't do until you get to four or five if you take all the infusions but this is certainly the easiest of the masteries to do you're an 11 card class so five active bonuses is a lot but you can trigger them essentially at any time so you can put two into play in your first cycle which I think is pretty normal when you're playing this class and then just kind of throw a bunch of extra in like near the end of the scenario kind of playing them like lost cards you have a lot of control over whether you get to trigger this so I think it's one of the easier masteries in the game as long as you get to the level that you need to because you just literally can't at lower levels um that bottom ability was one that was impossible for my build kill at least four enemies but never attack I think this is essentially focused on essentially doing a defense build where you have retaliate um and or your uh floating swords going around slicing and dicing enemies that is for a very specific kind of style of play and I find this to be the case with a lot of classes masteries there's one kind of like more generally easy one to do and then one that's like did you build this wacky build you can do the wacky build if you do this Mastery seems like fun but um again it's really it's really there if you're building that kind of version of this class four perks on this card um I just jammed elements into my deck I really really liked the element cards I like element Management in this game it's one of my favorite mini games so I just jammed all these cards in my deck no regrets whatsoever then I focused on upgrading you know pluses you can make just a totally nutty deck by throwing those things in there I found this rolling modifier which I put in a little bit later to be not that great um I would definitely wait to put that in these are okay but I did underestimate them rolling a rolling plus one is good and like I said most of the time I put two infusions into play before the end of the first cycle so rolling plus one is is pretty solid you have your own opinion about ignore scenario effects I don't like it um this one is funny I normally love ignore item negative one effects and I almost always take it on a class I did not take it on this class in part because my player partner was playing a tank I had just finished playing a tank myself and so I wanted to do a little bit more glass Cannon build so I did not lean into that but the other part of this text when you become exhausted all your active bonuses in play stick around basically keep attacking at 99 so all your floating swords are there that's definitely more for your tanky build and I like that the Tanki build also incentivizes the sword build because I think those two go hand in hand with each other pretty nicely so a very neat idea one that I myself did not use I also did not use this one when you short rest you can spend an element to retrieve an item I just decided that I would only take items that I could use one time because I knew I would be short resting more often so that might be a little bit better if you are I think playing a a long rest based build and you want to have the flexibility to not long rest either way I think the identity of this is is I don't know that it's worth your perk but you probably maybe you have some item that you really love on the other hand this bottom ability here once each scenario during ordering initiative just generate an element after the ability cards is revealed lets you just cheat an element into play when you need to don't be afraid to use this really early so you can jam an infusion into play on turn two because you generated one element on turn one it gives you a lot of flexibility and you never have to worry about that instance because it's after the ordering of initiative of oh is it is the XYZ enemy going to use the Knight that I make this turn so it gives you flexibility in doing that which is neat this is uh this is I think a high priority take for just about anybody playing the infuser class I think the organ infuser is totally totally fun class like I said there's a handful of different ways to play and build this class you can do the more Tangy side the more stabby side you can go more on the magic side Less on the magic side and still be respectable um there's lots of different ways to decide when you're making elements you make elements incidentally from your perk deck if you've got yourself built that way you communicate with your allies about how you're going to be generating elements and just managing the board kind of along in that way and for doing that you get to you get a payoff of cards that are like you know again weaker tier lost cards that are not lost cards you just needed to do the work for the elements there so the the power level the power ceiling of this class is really high it just requires you to accept that some rounds or some turns you're going to be doing something that's not as exciting and sometimes that means literally just base move base attack but I think that if you play it right it might just mean those turns you're doing things like disarming a bad guy instead of making any kind of attack or healing my Ally instead of making an attack and then setting up for a turn where I am going to do a big hit so that running around and like you know charging up and then going Goku on people and stabbing them was a lot of fun I really recommend um checking out this class if you enjoy element Management in any way I just I thought that the flow and the run and run out of it was really good so I hope you have as much fun with this class as I did uh but yeah let me know in the comments if you have any any other thoughts or if you did do the Tanki build um let people know like what it is that you focused on this is a class that I think benefits from having more perks so if you've done this after a few retirements I think this is also a class that really changes and benefits a lot from item builds more than in any other class that I've played in this game so far so I think later in the campaign is kind of The Sweet Spot to play this and likely you've opened this later in the campaign anyway so naturally that's going to be the case but yeah the infuser is pretty cool hope you enjoy it thanks for watching everybody have a wonderful day ciao

Channel: Phoenicks

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Id: MlAJamm61KA

Length: 54min 45sec (3285 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023