BEST party size for Gloomhaven with comparisons and difficulty explained

hey everyone just a very quick video today about the different player counts that you might consider playing with the different difficulty level modifiers how really the game works out what the difference is between playing with two with three with four how the difficulty scaling works in terms of insane normal hard easy these things might not be completely obvious if you're a brand new player so today i'm going to explain them hopefully for you so you can understand exactly what the best setup might be for you when you're just starting out your campaign or how the game is really working things things out in the background so that you can kind of understand how the game is really processing this and what the differences really are i personally really like playing with three and i get a lot of people coming to my chat and say hey why are you playing with three mercenaries the game supports up to four mercenaries that's a bit strange well in quick terms really i really like the fact that three player i can play pretty much any mercenary i like without having to worry about any kind of characters that might not be very good in a two-player situation perhaps they are hard support characters or perhaps they don't have a great mix of abilities they're not very well suited for playing just in a two mercenary party pretty much have any composition i like within reason also it gives me just enough decisions to make that the game is still very interesting for me and i can play on increased difficulty and it's still very very challenging for me if you get to four mercenaries dungeons generally become longer you've got that extra mercenary to worry about that extra battle goal that extra personal quest that you're working towards it can really bog you down as a player and i like to try and make decent progress as i go i like to try and complete a dungeon within about 40 minutes to an hour on stream which you know if you're playing without streaming i'm sure you can do them much quicker if you like but for me that's a really nice sweet spot and many other experienced players and other experienced players who stream also like to play with three it's just a really good sweet spot as a solo player in terms of difficulty number of enemies to deal with and the mercenary options that are available to you this does not mean that playing four mercenaries isn't possible as a solo player at all not at all it's just that for a personal preference reason i don't see the payoff for going for an extra mercenary to basically play dungeons for a little bit longer have more things to worry about yes you might unlock things a little bit quicker because you'll have another personal quest but then you've also got a personal quest maybe pulling you in a different direction to the direction that the other three maybe are pulling you so it just becomes a little bit more of a convoluted process but if you are playing a full co-op run-through then four-player is definitely the best experience because all of those administration issues of having to worry about four mercenaries personally goes away you're just figuring out your one mercenary and how best you want to to use that and you can keep track of just that information so co-op four player definitely the best solo three i think probably the best or at least it is for me okay so let's talk about party level and let's talk about the difficulty settings in the game so here is my current playthrough that i'm playing through on stream on insane which is a plus two scenario modifier as you can see my party level up here is three this is calculated by taking the average character level in the party divided by two and then rounding up this is then used to determine the level of enemies the damage of traps and the value of loot in the scenario i will put up on screen now a little chart for you to look at this is ripped straight from the board game this is to do with the kind of scenario level you want to play with so this is how the difficulty of the game also works so think of it this way the party level is your baseline level this does not include any difficulty modifiers that you may be playing with so if we go over to the difficulty screen you can see here that i'm on insane that gives me plus two scenario level or modifier so essentially when i go into a scenario the game is actually marking it up as if i'm a party level five when i get into the scenario however my party level baseline is always going to be three as you can see here as well you have easy which allows you to go down one but you cannot go lower than minus one on your party level so there is a floor created here you can't go below that floor also there is a ceiling which is level seven there are no monster stats above level seven you can also change this i've had people ask me before you can change this as you can see in between scenarios if you really want to so if you find that scenario is particularly difficult you can abandon it you can then change the difficulty in the world map screen then jump back into the scenario you are unable to change the difficulty and mid scenario but that's pretty obvious because that is to do with the amount of health the enemies have the attack damages their stats how much gold's in the scenario what the traps do so it does really require you to reload a scenario in order to change that so now you understand how the difficulty level and the party level are kind of working together let's take a look at scenario one black barrow and let's have a look at the differences between running it with two three and four mercenaries bear in mind there are going to be some spoilers in this for this scenario i'm going to show you all of the rooms in this scenario and all of the enemies in the story it's a very very minor spoiler i will say some players do really like to keep this stuff to themselves though so i thought i would give you a warning just in case you really don't want to be spoiled on this but it's very very minor it is only the first scenario i need to demonstrate this somehow and the first scenario is probably the best one to try and demonstrate it with this is what room one of black barrow looks like when you've only got two mercenaries as you can see you've got an elite bandit guard at the front here and two bandit guards at the side for two mercenaries three enemies it's pretty standard pretty easy for you to do you can see if you're playing at two players certain things might not be quite as good when you start looking at very large aoe based attacks like dirt tornado these things start to trail off you've only got a maximum amount of three targets which may mean that the value of these kinds of abilities starts to drop off doesn't mean that they're all necessarily going to be bad but it just means that some of these kind of signature aoe abilities that some characters have can sometimes start to just be less useful when you're playing at two player so here is the opening room in a black barrier for three players as you can see we've lost that elite guard and we've actually got more regular guards so as you can see with player count our possibilities may be to do larger aoe attacks because there's more enemies to attack starts to become better and here is the first room if you're playing with or mercenaries as you can see the actual number of figures has not changed over three players here still the same number of enemies to deal with however two of them have been upgraded to elite so offer a little bit more of a challenge to defeat this is what room two looks like in a two-player run through of black barrow as you can see we've got two guards at the front here and we've got one elite archer at the back right over the back there again three enemies here for two mercenaries so here's room two in a three-player scenario as you can see we've now got a elite guard instead of two regular guards at the front but we do actually have two additional archers at the back of the room archers are definitely more of a difficult enemy to deal with than a guard because the guards have actions in which they shield up they retaliate they don't actually attack the players so they have abilities that they can play that either moves very slowly or moves barely at all and some actions that don't even attack that is not true of archers archers have attacks on every single one of their cards so they will always attack sometimes they won't move but they will always attack so that does make this room a bit scarier so in room two we actually now have some additional bandit guards here so the archers remain the same we've got one elite and we've got two regulars at the back there from three player but this elite guard has now been joined by two regular guards not too much of a trouble to deal with said the guards are one of the easier enemies in the game to deal with because if their abilities are generally not as dangerous as or they're easier to avoid than compared to say an archer or some other enemies in the game however still a reasonable boost here more enemies you're gonna have to deal with some more time you're gonna have to spend dealing with these enemies in this room and here is the final room in black baro if you are playing with only two mercenaries so as you can see you've got four enemies to deal with instead of the usual three like we've had in the first two rooms here archers are probably the most dangerous in this room i would say living bones are more dangerous than bandit guards though purely because they have target two which means they can attack two people which is kind of like doing a double damage although their attack values are a little bit lower than the bandit guards so maybe that's not so bad but they also do have heel which can mean that they stick around a little bit longer they tend to kind of just they're just a bit difficult to deal with they can heal off poisons they can heal off wounds they can just heal off that little bit of damage that you might do so it they just kind of get a bit annoying and sometimes they can hang around but the arches are definitely the most scary thing in this room and for room three as you can see this is pretty similar to two-player not too dissimilar you do have the chests and all of the goals that will always remain the same and obstacle placement traps obstacles gold piles and treasure tiles will always remain in the same places regardless of the number of characters you are using so here is the final room in full play and as you can see there is a lot of archers in this room i actually think this is a very difficult room for brand new players to the game because archers are sneaky dangerous they're not necessarily the most obviously dangerous enemies but because they attack every single turn they don't have any cards in their deck that don't attack they will hurt you very very quickly and can become a problem very very quickly especially in multiples and you've got four here also because of the layout of this scenario and the fact you've got two big obstacles here sort of splitting the room if you like so you've only got one hex in the middle here to move through if you can't destroy these obstacles in some way maybe with your crack art then there's really not much you can you can really uh do about this um sort of funnel that you've got going on here this is definitely a bit of a problem these uh skeletons are going to gum up this scenario very very quickly they're going to gum up this middle hex here and you're going to struggle to be able to get to the back to maybe get these archers so this is going to be a very difficult room i think for brand new players especially if you've already burnt cards and you're just exploring the game for the first time this is a normal difficulty i have this set to as well so this is not insane difficulty this is normal all that would change would be the health value of these enemies in this room and their attack values and their move values and of course the value of these of this gold in this room but it doesn't really affect at all the number of enemies that you're going to have to deal with so this is actually a really difficult room i think and one people are going to probably struggle with at four player and yeah this will hopefully give you a general idea and i won't show you any more scenarios i just wanted to show you the first one because i don't want to spoil future scenarios for anyone this will hopefully give you a good general idea as to what the kind of scaling is like in the game in terms of if you're playing with two three and four and the different kind of ways the game kind of mixes that up with elites regulars and just more enemies or less enemies okay hopefully you found that information you saw just a nice short and sweet video again for you today just to answer a few questions that i get on stream i'll probably do a few more of these if these questions keep rolling in and people keep asking me them then if they think it's a good idea to do a video to just summarize it so that we can just send it to people if they pop in and they really want to know the answer then they've got the answer so hopefully you enjoyed the video if you do toss it a like and subscribe i really appreciate it if you do it helps me out so so much or come over to twitch.tv slash management request where i might even be streaming right now as this video goes live so come hang out and if you've got any questions you can always ask me live but if not i will catch you in the next one bye i think yeah [Laughter] isaac at this point can we get your approval to add an additional attack modifier deck for allies in the digital version

Channel: MandatoryQuest

Views: 15,608

Keywords: Gloomhaven, Gloom haven, Digital, PC, Steam, Co-op, Multiplayer, Campaign, Tutorial, Guide, How to, Best, enemies, characters, party size, best party, number of players, Gloomhaven Digital

Id: t7eg6RuOcTs

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021