Gloomhaven - Ultimate Stamina Guide - When Should you Really Play Loss Cards?

managing your stamina is an integral part of playing gloomhaven and making sure that you don't exhaust too early especially on those really hard scenarios so in this quick guide we're going to talk about all the factors that contribute to whether you should play a lost card early or late how many lost cards you should play you know we're going to talk about how starting hand size affects your choices we're going to talk about assessing maps and how different maps you know affect your stamina and and how much longevity you're actually going to need we're going to talk also about the effectiveness of a card and how that impacts when you should play it and then we're also going to talk about how many turns do you really need do you need max turns and if you don't how many do you actually need so stick with me we're gonna be uh using a program created by a site called board game math for you know some of our calculations i'm not an actuary so it's nice to have this really great tool so shout out to them for creating such a great tool i'm going to link it i'm going to link to it down below in the description of the video and let's get started all right let's talk about potential turns max turns for starting classes based upon their hand sizes this is not taking into account um long rests which we'll talk about in a little bit it's not taking into account cards or items this is just based upon playing cards if you only played cards that you discard from start to finish tinker is going to get 36 rounds of longevity craig hearts gonna get 30 rounds of longevity brute and mind thief are each going to get 25 rounds of longevity scoundrel is going to get 20 rounds of longevity and the outlier and the reason i've put it last is the spell weaver is going to get 28 potential rounds of longevity using reviving ether but only if you use it exactly right at the exact right time so what do you want to do you just want to be careful of that hand size pay attention to you know which class you have and really think about how the longevity is going to impact your total turns and we'll dive way deep into this coming up okay after we've you know looked at our starting hand size and planned accordingly we're going to go out and we're going to assess the map and your mileage on this may vary depending on whether you can see the whole map or not um you know some people are playing with full information and then something like jaws of the lion you can see all the monster placements but gloomhaven you know if you're playing on tabletop simulator or something you can have hidden rooms so you're only going to be loading up one room at a time but do your best to assess look at the special conditions look at the special rules etc do you have an npc you know how big do you think the map is and then use that information to help guide your decisions you know if you've got a lot of tough objectives and you're going to have to move a lot you may have to be more careful about playing a loss early than you would if it's just a one room you know kill everything that spawns and you know you can just blow cards to you know keep enemy numbers down um so yeah consider all those things and let's move on to the next part the next thing i want to talk about is playing loss cards early and should you do it so let's talk about effectiveness you've got a multi-target attack you can kill a couple enemies you can damage another it's turn one should you play the loss yes you should maximum impact is the biggest determining factor as to whether you should play a loss or not and let me explain why so let's take the craigheart for example craigheart has 30 potential turns of longevity given the conditions we talked about before only short resting no items nor other cards nothing 30 turns for the craig cart you play a loss on turn one your longevity drops to 25 turns however you think oh five turns that's a lot yeah okay that's fair but if you play the lost card on turn 14 you're only getting 26 turns of longevity so you've waited 13 rounds returns i'm using them interchangeably hopefully that doesn't bother anyone it only costs you one more round of longevity to play that loss card on turn one versus turn 14 and i think that because of that because you're only losing one round in this particular example it's much better to just play that loss card when you're gonna have that maximum effect because i think a lot of people they get caught in this trap of going oh i can never play lost cards early and then you get near to the end of the scenario and you're using those lost cards in a less effective way and i think you know at certain points in time that can cost you the scenario so for the spell weaver if you play a loss card turn one it's gonna cost you three rounds of stamina if you have a hand size of nine or ten so we're talking brute mind thief or scoundrel it's going to cost you four rounds of longevity and then if it's hand size 11 or 12 which is craig heart and tinkerer it's going to cost you five rounds of longevity but just remember that if you use it turn one or turn five it doesn't make hardly any difference even out to like i said to the credit card turn 14 it's only one round of longevity better and so don't get too caught up in the trap of waiting late to play your lost cards play them when you can really just you know hammer the monsters or you know do a great healing effect or whatever it may be do you really need max turns no you don't tinker can go forever but is not really very effective if you don't play any of his loss cards so do you want to just run around and you know spend seven hours on every scenario or do you want to have a good balance of you know risk management and you know doing some more damage but playing some of those lost cards in this example here i've got a credit card and the credit cards decided to lose to play a loss card on turns one two three and four and so we can see here that by playing just over one third of the craigheart's cards four losses here out of a total hand size of 11 that we've actually reduced the credit card stamina from 30 rounds down to 14. so over a 50 reduction but still if you're in a one-room scenario or a small scenario and it's you know kill all enemies or you have to protect an npc or something like that you could potentially burn a loss card your first four turns and still have a reasonable amount of stamina to finish the scenario and sometimes you really need to burn bright and then flame out to have to give yourself the best chance of beating some of the really hard scenarios or when you're playing on really high difficulty sometimes the enemies are so dangerous that you've gotta trade you know some longevity to kill them before they can get to you or you won't make it at all spell weavers because of reviving ether it gets ridiculously complicated around stamina and you know how many lost cards you can play in a row and stuff like that go ahead play around with the calculator so that you've got a good idea it's especially important for you to understand how reviving ether interacts with your longevity and your overall strategy and just remember that in the calculator when you change some things and i'm going to put a graphic up here when you change some things it doesn't necessarily remove all the lost cards so you've got to unclick those cards so that the calculator is showing you the true result so you're sitting at the table and you're like i want to calculate how many turns i have left maybe you don't have your phone with you maybe you don't have access to a computer a quick way of doing this is just counting it down and i'll give you an example so starting with an even amount of cards let's say we have eight cards divide it by two and that's four and then you just count down it's four plus 3 plus 3 plus 2 plus 2 plus 1 plus 1 for a total of 16 turns remaining let's say you're at 7. it's 7 divided by 2 and you always round down because you're gonna have one card left over so it's 7 divided by 2 is 3 and then 3 and then plus 2 plus 2 and plus 1 plus 1 and that's going to be a total of 12 turns so you can see how by going from 8 cards to 7 cards you lose four turns of longevity and hopefully that helps you when you're at the table and you're just trying to figure out how much longevity do i have to finish these next three rooms or whatever it may be at this point if you could please go ahead hit that like button it really helps me out a lot and subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications so that when i publish content you're notified i've got another video too i think you're really gonna like it it's nine essential tips for beginning gloomhaven players i'm gonna put a link up right here so you can go ahead and check that out i think you're really gonna like it and also down in the description i've got a link to my recommended product pages on my website i've got glam haven gear in there i've got some 3d printing stuff i'm adding more stuff to it every day go ahead check out all of my recommended stuff and clicking on those links helps support my channel so please go ahead click on the links and thank you so much when you take a huge hit you can mitigate that damage even if it's not fatal by throwing away a card by losing a card but should you actually do it i want to give you an example here and we'll talk kind of about the conventional wisdom that i hear out there on the interwebs and see if it actually holds up to some scrutiny so let's take an example let's say you have 14 hit points and it's turn one and you take 12 damage from one attack should you lose a card to prevent that damage or not i think most of the wisdom i see out there is you should never lose a card unless you're forced into it and i agree with that somewhat but not always let me give you an example you've got lots of healing in your party go ahead take that 12 damage don't throw away a card however if you don't have a reasonable amount of healing then you should actually throw away a card at that point and here's why now you're gonna be left with two hit points couple rounds down the road you get hit for two damage you throw away a card now you've thrown away a card each time and it's probably only cost you one round extra of longevity to throw it away early and you're at two hit points whereas if you'd thrown it away in the beginning you'd be at 14. so you don't want to get stuck in a situation where you're like no i'm not throwing away a card because i don't want it to impact my longevity and then down the road you're at low hit points and you're always in a precarious position for the rest of the scenario and you get hit for a couple times at two damage each and here you are throwing away cards each time and then that's really destroying your longevity so just you know think about your party composition and how much healing you actually have when you're deciding whether to lose a card to mitigate damage early on especially long resting changes some things and the first is that you don't play any cards when you long rest so it actually increases your longevity so if you're playing the scoundrel or somebody who's got you know a low hand size or you've gotten yourself in a situation where you've had to play a couple losses early make sure you're thinking about long resting because each time you do you extend your longevity so maybe instead of picking up one extra loot if you're in a hard scenario you rest in the room and let your friends take it from you and then you get that extra turn so that you're there at the final battle to really make a difference and don't forget that when you're on your very last gasp your last possible turn you can long rest and act as a meat shield for your friends instead of just exhausting because you either long rest or you choose to play two cards one more piece of advice be very very careful when you are playing your last two cards in a turn so that you make sure you don't take fatal damage so before you act on your turn the two cards that you've decided to play are neither in your discard or in your hand and so if you take damage at that point you're gonna have to throw away two cards out of your discard and you're gonna have to lose them to mitigate that damage and if you take a couple hits like that throw away two cards four cards six cards well i don't have to tell you your scenario is pretty much over the rules on page 28 and it is exactly as false before a character acts in a round the two cards chosen at the beginning of the round are neither in the player's hand or lost or discard pile and so cannot be lost to negate damage keep that one in mind let's talk about our favorite potion the minor stamina potion so a minor stamina potion gives you back two cards or depending on if you're playing with the new rules they were nerfed you can play to get back one discard for a minor stem they're gonna affect your longevity two cards is going to give you an extra turn but that's not the main benefit that's helpful but the main benefit is playing your most powerful discard card within the same rest cycle more than once and just remember if you are playing by the new rules and you're only getting back one discard with a minor stamina potion that you play it when you have an odd number of cards in your hand so that it actually gives you an extra turn of longevity i recommend you go ahead and play around with this stamina calculator so that you understand the relationship between when you play a loss card timing wise and also whether you short or long rest it's really going to help you improve your game and make sure that you've got a better understanding of when you're going to exhaust or how not to exhaust and thank you so much for watching the video please if this video helped you hit that like button it helps me out so much it helps youtube promote the video thank you again for watching

Channel: Neural Net Games

Views: 5,740

Keywords: board games, table top games, gloomhaven, gloomhaven how to play, gloomhaven review, gloomhaven boardgame, gloomhaven playthrough, gloomhaven gameplay, gloomhaven tutorial, how to play gloomhaven, gloomhaven help, gloomhaven tips, gloomhaven game, gloomhaven rules, gloomhaven campaign, gloomhaven guide, gloomhaven walkthrough, gloomhaven mistakes, gloomhaven missed rules, gloomhaven digital, gloomhaven pc, playing gloomhaven wrong, gloomhaven before you play

Id: iv0jUgwy2a0

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021