Mindthief FULL class guide and strategy for Gloomhaven

hey everybody and welcome to my final updated mind thief guide a full in-depth guide which this character really needed some of my earlier videos on the channel if you've been following me for a long time i have lots of short videos that's how i kind of started i started trying to do short and sweet guides to characters but people really wanted more detail and loads of people really like to talk about the characters in gloom here and lots of stuff like the game really provokes a lot of good discussions and lots of interesting discussions and build directions and things like that item builds and all the other stuff that comes in between so a short guide really doesn't always do the character justice so i'm going back now and i'm redoing some of my earlier guides in which i only did sort of more shorter kind of short form guides for i'm gonna flesh them out into the full length guide version like i did with most of the unlockable characters or all of the unlockable characters for the 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right that's enough of an intro let's crack into the mine thief so the mine thief in my opinion the strongest starting character not my favorite that's always gonna be the cracker but i think undoubtedly really it is the strongest starting character this is mainly down to the augment system that it gets and then one augment in particular which is the mind's weakness augments are the mayan thieves special of ability especially unique thing about their character if you like and that is that they have this ability to be able to play a card like this and it's an ability that stays out and on all of your remaining melee attacks while this is active you're gonna get some sort of bonus and my sweetness is incredibly strong because it gives you plus two attack all of your melee attacks as long as you've got the minds weakness up are gonna have plus two power which is obviously very very powerful and incredibly strong and makes the mighty very very good at uh killing enemies quite quickly also this character has a huge suite of control elements at the disposal at level 1 perverse edge and we've got frigid apparition here two really good stuns they've also got invisibility and into the night and they've got scurry which is a move and attack on the top which allows you to set up a lot of different abilities too so an incredibly strong character the mind thief also has a few sort of small abilities to do with controlling enemies or allies as well so there's a little bit of that going on as well too so very very um interesting character and can certainly screw with the enemy a little bit help your team out but also has insane amount of damage and control so let's take a look at our starting hand we have 10 cards we can bring into a scenario that's on the medium size that's not big that's not small that is great for a character like this and also to be honest we don't have that many cars that we consider burning very often so this is actually a really usable hand size it means you're probably going to be able to go quite long into the scenario i don't need to worry about it because there is nothing that we desperately need or wants to burn we have a couple of nice burns but it's not something that we definitely need to do also in terms of health we are kind of on the lower end of health compared to some of the others so you do have to be a little bit careful with this character and we are predominantly a melee character which means that if you have got low health and you're a melee character you do need to be a little bit careful right because there's some opportunities there where you might put yourself into a risky position let's go for the card so we've got uh the highlighted cards are all the ones that i'm gonna kind of suggest as your starting hand so you've got submissive affliction here this is an attack two on the top we'd add plus one attack for each negative condition on the target quite nicely negative conditions are anything to do with stun immobilized muddled poisoned wound those are all different and negative conditions and each one would give you plus one so this can get out of hand quite quickly if you have a way to put lots and lots of negative conditions on the target not something that the mind thief does a lot themselves in the same sort of turn you could for example stun something with perverse edge and then follow it up with submissive reflection if you are right next to it which is quite nice but usually you don't find too much synergy with this like i haven't had submissive affliction go out of control before but there is certainly opportunities to do it and depending on the party that you're playing with maybe if you're playing with a couple of unlockable characters maybe you get a bit more negative conditions like there's a little bit more hands-on and a bit more able to do so this is probably going to end up being like just an attack two maybe an attack three on an attack four at best most of the time but i think it's an okay attack also on the bottom here you've got force one enemy within range five to perform attack two range plus zero targeting another enemy with you controlling the action this is quite nice this is a little bit underwhelming i would say but this is level one so we don't gonna worry too much about it kind of on the slow side because it does say attack two which means that it doesn't scale which is the kind of disappointing thing with an effect like this if for example this just had the enemy performing their attack then the higher level the enemy is the better the attack that is that they could do so a little bit awkward the best synergy that i found with something like this is to try and find an enemy that has retaliate so get an enemy to attack his friend that has retaliated and then they're going to take retaliate damage back that can often be quite nice and then in a way this can kind of work out uh is a almost like a little attack for yourself as well because it is a bottom action so you can do this while attacking potentially yourself so just give you some some sort of opportunities to maybe do almost like two attacks on a turn right or at least two sets of damage with the 48 initiative i don't really like that it's very much middle of the road doesn't allow you to go early it doesn't really go late so miss perfection is a card that just barely makes the cut here for me i think you've got a couple of options at level one where you can mix up a few cards this is one of those cards that i would say is probably on your maybe to cut list or it's very close because unless you're getting a really good value out of the top here i don't think it's particularly great and the bottom is it's just okay it's just fine if you do have an enemy that has natural kind of curse or poison or wound obviously they're gonna get those benefits of that attack potentially which is quite nice but the thing is is that at level one if you're playing on like normal difficulty you don't come across enemies like that particularly so it's uh yeah this is this is quite an easily cuttable card so it's just fine and it kind of just barely makes the car here but to be honest you could maybe consider getting rid of this for a couple of other cards which we'll get into in a minute if the scenarios are warranted a bit more next up we have into the night which is a loot one on the top create dark it's nice to have a loop as a top action because this means at least you can move into a position and then loot on that very turn my main criticism of loot actions in gloomhaven is often there on the bottom of a card which means that you need to move into a position and then you need to loot on the following turn so it kind of like wastes two turns almost unless you manage to kind of sync it up in a really good way unless you you really plan it very well but most of the time you're just gonna end up taking two turns to just loot and that to me is um it's not very good this also generates an element dark which at the time of like this level we don't really care about but that element does become quite prevalent with this character as we level up so that dark element does come in use a little bit later on too but the real reason why we're taking this card is the 14 initiative and the invisible self bottom now this is in my opinion indispensable when you're playing on increased difficulty levels one of the key things that you really need to do when you're playing on increased difficulty is to manage the enemies and really do this by using control cards like stuns and disarms and immobilizers those kinds of things but also by opening doors at the opportune times at decent times and blocking passageways like doors by using invisibility to stop enemies from acting this gives you a very very safe open in which you can just walk into a room go invisible and then make sure that any of the enemies can't act if you go invisible on the door or if you want them to act maybe you go a little bit further in because this is on the bottom of a card it does make it a little bit tricky to do that but that's why we have scurry here which we'll get into later but scurry is a great enabling card for this so basically the idea is is that we scurry into a room and then we use into the night either on the door or maybe either backwards or forwards into the door just to position the enemies how we want them to really this also allows you to just go on a very safe long rest so if you're in the middle of a bunch of enemies and you're like i need to rest if you can go invisible and then you can long rest in safety knowing that they won't be able to target you during your long rest so that's another pretty good option to be honest the loot on the top of this is actually i i don't mind it like i said i don't normally like loot cards but this is the best spot for it you can get very rich on the mind thief definitely a character that can get very very rich and uh you've got lots of things to spend money on with this character so it's not like you're not using that gold like maybe the scoundrel i find doesn't necessarily always need all of that gold mine thief definitely has some really great enhancements and some really really great items that they want to buy into the night fantastic card and at increased difficulty level it is definitely something that you need if you're playing on lower levels of difficulty you probably find that the invisible stuff although it's still obviously useful won't be required so what i mean by that is that you could probably open a door run back and maybe they don't have as much range as they would on increased difficulty maybe they don't have as much movement as they would on increased difficulty therefore the enemies can't kind of pressure you immediately whereas if you open a door when you're on deadly difficulty or insane difficulty any of those then essentially you know the enemy's movement and range might be so high that they could just immediately bust into your room where your other mercenaries are and start pressuring you straight away and start attacking you straight away which is why this is so important next we have fierce and blade which is attack two push three one xp super super good card i really really like face and blade this push on the top comes in use so so often both in in the campaign mode and in guild master mode i would say in guild master mode it's probably a little bit better because in the campaign you have a lot of uh traps but the traps are usually like just like immobilizers or they're a mixture they might not just be damaged whereas in guild master they're often just damaged but the idea here with fearsome blade is honestly just to push enemies into traps that's all you really need to focus on trigger those traps get the extra bonuses either the damage or like i say the the negative conditions sometimes that comes with it and with the mind's weakness which we'll come up to this could be quite a nice attack an attack of four instead also works quite good against retaliate enemies so this character does struggle a little bit against retaliate because you're predominantly melee based this allows you to play around retaliate because if you push a retaliate enemy away then the retaliate doesn't trigger so really really uh nice uh top effect here and super super you saw a really good utility attack and actually could do quite a bit of damage 27 initiative is just fine it's middle early it's probably not gonna make you go earlier than some enemies or most of the time but it means that you're probably gonna be towards the the start of the order the bottom is a move for attack two and this is a burn effect now this is quite nice to have because sometimes at the end of a scenario you just need to move somewhere and you need to finish an enemy off and that's what this does it just allows you to go and get that bit of loot go and finish off an enemy off go get that chest if you want whatever it is you need to do get to xp and when you're kind of farming xp at the end of a scenario you can just do the move even if there's nothing to attack you do the move you skip the attack you still get the two xp so it's a nice way to just guarantee two xp at the end of a scenario too next up we have feedback loop feedback loop is another augment so here's our first augment actually that we've looked at uh in detail so on our melee attacks we can gain shield one attack one whenever another augment is played discard this card so basically what you do is when you play this it goes into your active area and if you're playing on digital that would be uh either sort of like in your hand when you're choosing your pick cards phase but also you can find it on your um your portrait at the top so when your character portraits along the top you will be able to click uh on the different icons up there and if it's something that is in your active area that can be discarded it will you can click it and it'll ask you if you'd like to discard it sometimes a good idea to remember to discard augments to try and get extra turns not super super needed on lower levels of difficulty but something that you definitely need to think about when you're playing on increased this character does have a kind of shieldy tanky build that you can go there are other cards that you get access to that can kind of supplement this in different ways i think it's kind of janky i don't think it's particularly great i've tried it if you were playing two player and maybe someone really wanted to play the mind thief and somebody else wanted to play something like the scoundrel or something and you really needed some way of maybe doing a bit more tanking in some strange way maybe but honestly just characters this is not the strength of the character in my opinion at all uh so you will be doing more of a niche strategy which can be fun and it's something that you can try out but it's definitely the weaker build here maybe a little bit of xp gain because of course you can't just play this to try and get an xp for just playing the augment so 79 initiative is a late initiative and it's one that uh we do need a couple of late i think it's important for every character to have at least one late initiative that they can kind of reliably play when they need to because you don't always want to go early sometimes someone says hey i'd like to open the door and then you look at all your cards and they physically can't go before you because of all of the initiatives that you have might be really low i think there is definitely some merit to having at least one late initiative just to just so you can see how the board kind of plays out let the enemies do their thing and then maybe you jump in and be the last character to act jump in and then you go early the next turn so you kind of almost get two back-to-back turns which is always quite nice but the bottom of this is really where the action is anyway which is move forward jump if you end the movement in the same hex you started in you could perform muddle target all enemies move through now that extra bit of text at the end there i think nah maybe once every five or six scenarios i might consider doing that you don't play this card for that you you definitely play this card purely for the move four and the jump just to try and position yourself better this character does suffer a little bit to begin with with uh movement you don't have some great move and being a melee character you need a bit of jump i think because that will allow you to get yourself into good positions to be able to actually um attack people properly when you're a melee character you know it's not as easy as it is with range where you can just have range three and just walk up to a hex and then you've got range three and you can attack you actually physically need to get next to the enemy which can be difficult because other enemies in the way or traps in the way or potentially difficult terrain or hazardous terrain so there's lots of things that can affect that so jump very very important on a melee character so that is really why we're we're running feedback loop next up we have gnawing horde which is a summon which is summon a plague rat it's got six health one move to attack and it has poison so it's attack supply poison two xp and it's a burn because it's a summon so once it's out it's out this is actually a pretty strong level one summon i would say it's got six health which is decent which means that lower levels of difficulty this thing's probably going to stick around for quite a while it's got poison which is a really nice effect to add also combos quite nicely with submissive reflection potentially right and just poison in general it's a really good effect blocks enemies from healing also just gives you extra damage against that target so poison is one of the the better uh negative conditions that something like this could have the one movement though does make this really awkward because it means that this guy's just not going to be able to get to the enemy a lot of the time and after the first room it's gonna need some help to move along so potentially you'd have to use another different card like for example possession which we'll get into but you might have to try and give it a help along with either yourself or with other characters one movement is really quite poor i think this is probably one of the better level one summons in the game it really is but it's one movement and being a melee and the fact that i always play at increased difficulty and summons are generally uh especially melee summons are generally completely unplayable at increased difficulty just because a level one summon does not scale so when you're playing on deadly difficulty which is a plus three to the the party level that means that the enemies are three levels higher than they would be normally at that point in time when your party would face them so you know basically summons are already completely outclassed so it makes melee summons completely unplayable range summons can still be playable but yeah melee summons unfortunately not because they're just gonna die to retaliate or just for one hit because the enemy has the potential to hit you for quite a lot uh in one single attack 82 initiative is a nice late initiative who four on the bottom here now this is the the reason why i actually considered bringing this card instead of submissive inflation like this is actually something that i was considering um to sort of uh recommend instead of submissive inflation and also maybe instead of withering claw which we'll get to within claw in a bit movement on this character can be a little bit awkward because you have quite a lot of attacks on the bottom of your cards you have a lot of effects on the bottom of your cards that you want to do which means that you know you need to have a couple of bankia kind of cards really to be able to move with and um yeah i think at level one you do struggle a little bit you could make an argument as well that the move four is good enough and then you just you get two xp by burning the summon towards the end of a scenario that's also very legit and to be honest might actually be the correct choice here yeah annoying horde is a card that i feel like if you're playing on increased difficulty bring it for the move four like that's really what you're gonna be bringing it for you're playing on low levels of difficulty i think this summons actually pretty decent if you're playing on normal or easy i think the the summon is actually pretty decent and pretty fun next we have the mind's weakness which is the hallmark card for this character this is the one that everybody really talks about because it is just so so good on all of your melee attacks add plus two attack uh it's an attack one itself so basically it's an attack three because you put that down and then you do the mine's weakness and you get the um you get the plus two immediately this will attack for three on its own gets you one xp the thing with mine sweetness is is that you play it and quite honestly if you're not worried about exhausting you can just leave this up forever one big kind of negative about the mind thief is the mind's weakness is so so strong that it kind of makes every other augment just not worth it in many ways and it's a little bit of an issue with the character design if this was just an ad plus one attack possibly it might be too weak i don't know i haven't potentially tried with that but it's just really really strong like really really really strong generally speaking the minus venus is the best augment augmented this character gets and you get it at a level one and unfortunately it's so good that all other augments kind of aren't worth playing because you just want to keep getting this plus to attack bonus 75 initiative we don't really care too much about the initiative on this card it's it's a good way of of going late if you wanted to set up so play the mine's weakness an opening turn for this character for me usually looks like perverse edge in the mind's weakness so you use this for the bottom to stun something and then you play the minds weakness and you just get that plus two attack ready to go you just get that buff ready to go absolutely just trying to get the mind's weakness out pretty early is usually just a really good strategy even if you feel like you're having a term where well i'm not attacking anything because i can't or i'm not getting the bonus of it don't worry just keep it up all the time if you're new don't worry about trying to discard it or try and get funky with the playing of your augments the bottom is an attack one and wound which funnily would actually combo really well with the top if you could because it'll be an attack three in wound but this is one of those kind of effects where i don't regularly use it but in certain situations where perhaps you're against like a living spirit it's got really high shield low health so you think just chuck a wound on it and it could die so it's very situational and it's usually when you have a particular enemy who is weak to wound that you would start to consider this but otherwise it's all going to be about the top next we have parasitic influence which is another augment which is on our melee attacks heal to self attack one sort of on the same vein as the tanking build earlier that we saw with feedback loop i don't think this is particularly great i don't think you really needs to heal to like every turn or every attack this is one of those kind of cards where i wouldn't mind it if you were to put it in and just occasionally just play it to get a heel too out of it we do have another way to heal ourselves coming up which we'll talk about a little bit more but yeah this is an underwhelming augment but it might have some situational use in certain scenarios or in certain spots keep an eye on it but i don't think it's strong enough to actually run in your main deck uh your main hand most of the time 71 initiative is yeah or most of these kind of um augments seem to be in the 70s of their initiative so force one enemy within range four to perform move one with you control on the action this is something that i think has um has some fun use sometimes i really wish that it was more than one move i wish it was move two because move two i'd actually consider maybe bringing this in over something like submissive affliction because being able to get an enemy to move a little bit could put you into a trap or put them into a really bad disadvantaged position move them into a group or an aoe or something just the move one just makes this really annoying because it's hard sometimes to get an enemy to do that now there are certain enemies that i think this is stronger against than others so very good against archers because archers like to lay traps and they usually lay them in the hex in front of them you can just get them to move one hex forward and that will probably put them into their own trap so there are there are some enemies that this is actually not too bad against it's pretty much useless against flying enemies though so bear that in mind yeah just it's kind of like this this card is just all too niche to nisha top to niche bottom you might find some place for her in a certain scenario against a certain number of enemies but yeah generally speaking just not impactful enough in the majority of scenarios next up we have scurry which is a move three and attack one on the top now this card is our enabling card like i said before the move three is really what's out with this card the attack one we can take or leave it's the move three on the top because that allows us to play perverse edge bottom or into the night bottom without having to be in the right position to do so we don't have to give up uh moving or not being able to move to be able to play those and that's really really a huge deal the attack one doesn't really matter but if you've got the mind sweetness up that can be an attack three so not too shabby yep scurry really this is our positioning card this is what we use to position our two kind of big um kind of door opening abilities which is into the night which is a great door of open ability and perverse edges also not a bad door opening ability but in some scenarios when your characters start you will actually be more than range two away from an enemy you'll need to play scurry perverse edges your first turn in order to get somewhere to sort of position yourself and stun something on the first turn currency initiative is a nice early initiative nothing too crazy but say generally speaking you you usually pair this with either the eight initiative on perverse edge or the 14 on into the night so don't really worry too much about that initiative there and the bottom is loot to one xp and that is a burn that's a pretty sizable loot there and it gets you an xp so a nice way for you to be able to get super super rich on this character it's just an all-round grey card and that loot 2 will probably be used towards the end of a scenario or to be honest sometimes i find that scurry is a card that i inevitably kind of get rid of through long rests or short rests as the scenario progresses to next up we have perverse edge on the top here we have attack three add plus two attack and game one xp for each negative condition on the target it's like a supercharged version of submissive reflection but it is a burn so that's worth bearing in mind if you manage to get an elite or something that's got lots of different conditions on it this can be a really sweet attack against an elite so definitely something to keep in mind however burning the top of perverse edge i think is a very bad move unless you are towards the end of a scenario like right towards the end and you're going for the win and you just need damage because otherwise realistically you should be using the bottom of this card because it just uh stops the enemy from doing anything and allows you to continue to do damage on the on that turn and on the following turn so you can usually make up the damage so the only time that i like the top of a reverse edge being used is really when you are kind of like down to three or four cards and it's like guys we need to kill this thing because if we don't kill it this round it's going to heal or it's going to do something crazy and we won't win so you really just have to go all in and that's that's the time to burn the top of perverse edge eight initiative is really early nice nelly will allow you to go earlier than the most enemies not all but most enemies and most ability cars enemies can pull the bomb is the attack 1 range 2 and stun and like i said this is just super super powerful create ice is also very important here this is the first card that we've come across to create ice and ice is the main element of the mine thief this is one that you are going to want to create and use regularly so keep an eye on that but very reliable use of uh of ice generation here on this card the main limiting factor of this card is the range 2 which is why i really like enhancing this to range three pretty quick if you can because that does give you so much more flexibility you don't really care about the attack one it's really all about stunning something like that's all it is it's about locking an enemy down stopping them from being able to take a turn so you can set up on your enemies because your allies can start doing damage to that that enemy locking enemies down is the most impactful thing outside of killing an enemy that you can do in gloomhaven so if you can't kill it lock it down and perverse edge does an amazing job of of doing that next we have empathetic assault which is attack 4 range 5 disarm create ice and 2xp and it is a burner probably not surprising that it is a burn that is a huge attack for a level one at huge range i mean range five is i mean that's gonna hit pretty much anything that you want most of the time the psalm as well is not quite as good as stun but actually in certain situations can be better than stun if you want like archers for example to walk towards you because uh dasam doesn't stop them from taking like a move action so they can quite often get enemies to move a bit closer to you so sometimes disarm is more desirable than stun but it's about like 99 as good most of the time so very very strong effect 11 initiative nice and early very very early so we like that the bottom here is a move to heel to self which is quite nice to be honest because it doesn't give up a move action for a heal one thing i don't like is giving up damage or movement to be able to do a heal this is very much like a combat heal so you can keep on going you move too so maybe you kill an enemy but you take some damage but then you can move two towards the next enemy and then you can heal yourself for two and you can keep keep yourself in the fight without worrying too much also this is quite nice just removing like poison and wound if you ever get those two effects onto you it's a very clean and easy way of doing it and the other reason that a lot of people really like this card is because it has the holy enhancement dot next to the heal 2 here which allows you to add strengthen to this card if you want to which is a completely busted enhancement as a just a role playing card this is quite good i like this it's just keeps you going gives you a nice low initiative keeps you um keeps you topping up your health keeps you moving along and then if you really get yourself into trouble you've got the top of empathetic assault here to just get you out of a bind if you've got like some really horrible archer at the back of a room that you just can't get to or for whatever reason so yeah really really like this card it's an all-round it's a it's a great package of a card next up we have a withering claw this is another augment and this one is on our melee attacks add muddle and poison and do an attack one quite nice this actually adds the kind of negative conditions right for submissive reflection or potentially perverse edge top this is a way for you to add negative conditions to the enemy the problem with this is that it's pretty much always going to be better to just hit them for three with the mind's weakness that's the kind of problem like the setup required is just not really there for me so weathering core is okay but really it's not that good model is one of those effects where it can occasionally uh help you out stop you from drawing you know additional damage but sometimes it does absolutely nothing model is just like not an effect that i really value in the game it's more of just like a it's a nice additional thing to have maybe it'll do something but unless i'm playing some kind of really prevalent cursing strategy model is very much just like a it's nothing that i would choose it's just something that hey if it's there it's there we can use it so really you're focusing on the poison here and uh this will obviously allow each extra attack after this to uh to have plus one against the enemy but i mean you've got the mice weakness so why don't you just attack it for you know an additional two which is basically two charges of poison withering claw definitely goes down in value a lot when you're playing with just two characters as well but could potentially go up in value if you've got four mercenaries or if you're playing like a summon heavy strategy or something like that in which case like poison obviously becomes better because more people can benefit from that poison 77 initiative another 70 initiative augment and the bottom is why this card just about makes the cut for me which is immobilized target one adjacent enemy and then move three so this will allow you to disengage from an enemy if you want perhaps you can attack them and then move away the other good thing you can do with this is you can actually just use like fierce and blade with this so you could theory go on 27 initiative you could just immobilize them decline the move and then just attack them and push them away there are some nice little things that you can do there and immobilize this quite nice way of just disengaging if you need to run away and uh still keeping an enemy locked down maybe i think this is one of those other cards that i think maybe you could switch this out like if you wanted to run nor horde instead or if you wanted to get rid of submissive reflection like i feel like these uh so this card this card i think this card is is probably not really ever ever playable it's gonna be very hard to play this i think this card's sometimes playable i think possession which we'll get to in a minute sometimes playable so so within chloro's on those cards again it's on the fringes it's on the fringes and it just about gets there because it does some level of control and it's got move three stock on it too so speaking of possession possession which is one adjacent ally may perform an attack six two xp and it is a burn so quite nice here and attack six is a huge attack but it's not outside the realms of something that you could do without burning which is what makes this kind of a little bit awkward i think for this character because you've got the plus two and the fact that this is adjacent ally not you so you don't get the benefit of the mice weakness but if you think about like a really good submissive reflection this could easily attack for four maybe even five if you really really um planned your turns out well you're starting to get into the realms of this so is it really worth a burn i'm not so sure the other thing is is that at level one you have a pretty miserable attack modifier deck so this attack six you could easily you know flip your minus two your minus one you know your ally may not have a great attack modifier deck so it might not be strengthened so they could miss like it just to me this is a very all in attack and i've never been a big fan of single target big attacks like this because if you whiff for whatever reason draw your miss or you get a minus two it just feels so bad so you need to be strengthened for this kind of effect really and that's really awkward so make sure that your ally is strengthened so that when you get them to attack they get the advantage attack like it's just awkward so if this was on the bottom of a card i think it may be it would actually be very usable and very playable because then it gives you potentially the double attack like i've talked about but the fact that it gives you're giving up your own attack to give somebody else an attack six because of the position on the card because it's on the top of a card i think that really um devalues the action even more so yeah just unfortunately not particularly playable 51 initiative right bang in the middle of the initiative so pretty rubbish to be honest the bottom is one ally within range three it may perform move four so this is a way that you could help somebody catch up that maybe is really far behind you give it to a summon they can do it importantly though this does say one ally within range three may perform move four this is one of these kind of cards that almost slips into the gray area of rules in gloomhaven so this would actually be the ally would be taking the movement themselves which makes sense if you're giving it to for example a another mercenary right you're giving it to your friend who's playing sure they would want to decide where they get to move however if you give this to a summon the summon decides where it wants to move and if there is no focus then the summon won't move so this is a bit awkward it it can't really be used to help a summon catch up at the end of a room it doesn't really do exactly as you may think it does so you can use it on a summon as long as there's something for them to go and attack or for them to go focus on that they could get to with unlimited movement but if there isn't then yeah it's uh it's not going to do anything i think maybe granting the move to your allies at the bottom could be could be situationally good in some scenarios but realistically again a bad value top burn and uh very niche bottom here so probably not gonna make the cut finally and last but not least we have frigid apparition which is an attack three consume ice to add a stun to the attack super super good so so useful and this is how you lock down an enemy for even longer so the turn before you stun that enemy with the bottom of perverse edge create your ice perhaps you play the mine's weakness to get that up like is your first two turns of the game i absolutely love this as a turn so you go perverse edge mine's weakness so eight initiative you play the bottom of this stun something then you play the top of the mine's weakness you've got it up you're ready to go on the next turn you use a frigid apparition and you could even use something like empathetic assault to go on like 11 initiative if you wanted to move in with 11 initiative stun them with frigid apparition and then they've been stunned for two whole rounds which is just an insane amount of value just really really um helps you gain a foothold in the scenario and plus because the mice weakness up this is actually going to be an attack five an attack five with stun which is just like off the charts good for a non-burn at uh at starting level it's it's actually insane so do not pass this up do not sleep on this card if you manage to pull this combo off reliably i guarantee you will win scenarios because of it this is really where the strength of this character lies in increased difficulty in my opinion is constantly just ensuring that you're hitting this and then hitting this on the following turn if you do that on increased difficulty you will uh you'll have much better success the bottom is a move four stun target one adjacent enemy you don't really want to be playing the bottom pretty much ever unless you have a very specific situation where you need to stun something and you don't have the ice unconditional stun element to this card so that is quite nice to have you know just to have something in the back pocket where you don't need to have ice and you can move and do it and then you can attack something else so that does give you some nice um kind of situational play here which is good for a burn you don't need to stun an adjacent enemy to get the one xp so similar to the bottom of fierce and blade a good card that you can just burn for one xp at the end maybe run off and get yourself some loot or a treasure tile okay so for you board game players out there i will now put up on screen the overlay with all of these cards on that i've selected for my starting hand i know in my last revisit of the spell we've actually forgot to do this because i uh i haven't been a while since i've done this style of video so apologies for that one but in this one i'll remember to do it so all of the cards are up here now so if you would like to pause it because you would like to rearrange your own cards if you're playing the physical game now's your chance okay great so now let's go to our level ups and let's go to level two so at level two we have a wretched creature and we have hostile takeover so wretched creature is summoned giant rat is four health three move and three attack for two xp and a burn of course and yeah this is actually quite a good melee summon really just have a summon that has three movement this early on at level two i think is actually really decent these stats on this summon are quite aggressive in my opinion for for this kind of level this is above the curve from what you can expect to see in other summons for other characters at this kind of level so this is quite nice it is a melee summon so again like for me that kind of makes it pretty much unplayable at increased difficulty levels especially considering it only has four health compared to the six health that gnawing horde has but that three move will mean that it will be able to move an attack move on attack movement attack pretty regularly and won't get left behind so you're playing on lower levels of difficulty and you want to go for more of a summoning type build you can't go too wrong with summoned uh summon giant rat and getting this giant rat so yeah not something that personally i will recommend and i will play with for kind of consistent uh consistently good play but certainly if you're going for a more of a summon build or you're just having some fun and you just want to you know choose whichever card like appeals to you this is actually above the power level for for summons at this level 84 initiative is is nice and late and all summons generally have late initiative and you've got move three on the bottom consume dark to curse target one adjacent enemy so this is uh our first use of that dark element that we can uh create here with our into the night ability not too bad being able to curse something is a nice little bit of extra value not gonna blow blow you away with the value here but it's something and uh yeah it's nice to at least have something something extra on the bottom here i don't think this card's particularly very useful it doesn't it doesn't really do anything when you're playing on increased difficulty unfortunately so for me i usually pass this card up but yeah as i said before i think the summon is actually quite playable at normal difficulty and can be fun so if you are going for a summoning build you can do a lot worse than uh than wretched creature the other card is hostile takeover now this is much more in the vein of what i'm looking for when i'm looking for cards to select uh for my builds so you've got attack two range four and immobilize create ice and one xp so we've got another really nice control tool here and the important thing about this one is it's actually on the top so this can actually change our first turn of the game so our first turn of the game might have been you know mine's weakness perverse edge potentially now it could be hostile takeover and perverse edge and now we can immobilize that awkward melee enemy who's going to be coming up and attacking us or pressuring us and then we can stun maybe something else as well so potentially you can lock down two enemies nine initiatives this card has as well so super super nice early initiative too really like the type of hostile takeover gives you another piece of control in your back pocket for when you need it the bottom is force one normal or elite enemy within range three to perform its turn this round as if his allies were enemies and his enemies were allies basically make them a traitor for for one for one round and not a bad effect actually situationally can be useful occasionally like if you have an enemy who's really doing something terrible like i've had it before like you're against a sun demon for example where they're going to be attacking everybody or you're against a living spirit and they're going to be cursing everybody if you do something like this this is gonna actually just like make them turn around and just curse all of their own uh allies or they can make them attack them all if it's the sun demon thing it actually can work out um kind of okay in certain situations they don't come around too often and in good kind of methodical play you're probably gonna get more use out of the top but for a bottom burn effect that could get you out of a bind or like a unique situation where you find yourself like you find yourself in a really awkward place and you just need some sort of unique way to get out of that problem hostile takeover might do that for you so i i really like hostile takeover i think it's a very solid level two card does a lot makes that element as well ice so we don't necessarily always need to use perverse edge to get the ice for frigid apparition now we have a little bit more flexibility with our ice we're definitely going to start creating ice by like the bucket load so more ice them area and uh yeah hostile takeover for me is the is the clear pick like i said before if you are playing on low levels of difficulty and you want to go for more of a summon build you could do a lot worse than uh summon uh wretched creature so the card we're going to be taking out here is submissive affliction it just doesn't really do a lot in my opinion this additional plus one attack is really hard to get going because usually you immobilize them right and the beginning of the turn and then the immobilize wears off by the next turn it's really hard unless you have poison or wound which are the only two negative conditions that actually stick around for multiple rounds unless you have those two in abundance that's going around i don't think submissive reflection is ever really going to become anything more than an attack to maybe an attack three if you play it like with perverse edge or bottom or something like that so it's a pretty easy cut for me because i just never really find this doing anything more than just being like an attacker or an attack three and and hostile takeover is a much more useful uh piece of kit for us okay on to level three so here at level three we have brain leech and we have silent screams so brain leech is attack four range for heal for self create dark and 2xp now i quite like the top of brainage because it's really just like a bit of a reset card if you get yourself into trouble and potentially the enemy attacks you you know you mess up your positioning a little bit or the enemy's focus switches to you for whatever reason you've gone really really early on initiative quite often so you might start drawing some fire brainleach is a really good reset card just attack something for four maybe even kill it and uh get yourself healed back up before get yourself back into the fight really really nice uh creates that dark element which we're not using a lot at the moment but we will be in the future and it you get 2xp as well to boot so yeah this is a good example of what a what a burn for this character should probably be which is like just uh oh i'm in a bit of trouble i need to burn a card and you're gonna have like a couple of different cards that will get you out of different binds if you like and uh yeah i i like the top of brainlead sure i think it's a it's a good value kind of card and and effect 16 initiative pretty early not super early but but nice and early in general and you've got attack one of strengthen itself on the bottom here now this is really what sells this card to me the top is good but the bottom is really what makes it very very good now this combos really nicely with the mine's weakness so if you have the mice weakness up this is technically going to be an attack three not an attack one which is super super nice the strength itself as well is very very important because this character can attack so much and to get yourself strengthened you will start just outputting damage like crazy especially once you've got some perks and that attack modifier deck becomes much better because it's just insane the amount of damage that this character can pump out sometimes in the space of a very very short amount of time so strengthening here will allow you to also have a another strengthened attack on this turn so strengthen will apply for the till the end of your next turn so you can play the bottom of this attack something for one maybe then strengthen yourself up then play a top half of a card that turn to attack something and get the strength and effect so you get advantage on that then on the next turn you could potentially do another bottom of attack and another top attack right you could use like perverse edge or something like that i know it's only an attack one but hey every little helps getting advantage on right yeah brain hr really um helps you output so much damage with this character it's really really important combos incredibly well with the mind's weakness it's just everything that this character really wants so yeah so hard to pass up bray and lynch bottom for sure on this character the other card is silent scream which is an augment so this is the first augment that we've seen um from leveling up and it's on your melee attacks here to range to and this has actually got an attack two on it rather than an attack one so most of the augments usually have attack one but this is actually attack two but heel two range to so you could use this to heal yourself which very much makes it the same as parasitic influence or you could use this to help heal an ally now this i like a bit more than i like parasitic influence because of course it has that flexibility which is that range too which means that you can actually give it to somebody else which infinitely makes it much much better than parasitic influence because you're not always going to need to heal yourself so it does make it a lot more usable but still does not do as much as plus 2 damage and that is gonna be the story of this character to be honest situationally okay if you are playing the tanking build i think you probably do want this because it is gonna do quite a bit uh for you 73 initiative again another 70 initiative because it's a augment for some reason they're all 70s you've got move three push two with target all adjacent enemies consume ice to add plus one push now this is kind of interesting to be honest because this can actually do quite a lot of work in certain scenarios being able to push all adjacent enemies is a big difference to just being able to push one i quite like the bottom of silent scream i think it's actually very playable every party in my opinion should have access to a little bit of push like just a little bit of push because if you don't have it boy do you miss it when when you get to a scenario where there's lots of traps yes there's going to be scenarios that you go into where there's no traps or the traps don't really do a lot or there's not you know any hazardous terrain or whatever like this there's gonna be scenarios that push does not favor or the enemies don't have retaliate for example but there's gonna be other scenarios where uh push is just gonna win you the scenario so i do feel like having a bit of it is always good in any party now we do have fierce and blade already on this character which does do a lot of work so that is something to consider and it is a bit of a shame that silence scream is up against brainly cheer because i do think the bottom of this is actually quite playable it's so hard for me to give up brain leech at level three so we're going to be taking brain leech here but silent scream actually has a really usable and bottom in my opinion and just let down by a top that's probably not going to be useful for most mine thiefs and uh brain leech is just useful for every mind thief and it's got damage and strengthen and attacks and yeah just so so good so swapping out a card for brain leech can get a little bit tricky now this character certainly gets set in her ways with her combos and she also has some really great enhancements that you can get to make those combos even better which does make this character some somewhat unique in some ways because you're very strong at level one and you don't get particularly much stronger in the kind of first few levels that you level up so like level two level three even level four in my opinion there's not really any card there that makes you insanely more powerful feels like though they make you maybe a little bit more well-rounded in certain elements apart from maybe the bomber brain unleash here which can obviously output a lot of damage there's really like not that much really that you're super super excited about and also it's really hard to upset your hand because you have so many cars that you really want to play together like you want to play into the night with scurry if you're not playing into the night then you still need scurry for perverse edge but if you're not playing into the night like do you always want scurry like there's so many different kind of permeations of how you really want to set this character up now i'm going to be a bit controversial potentially and i'm going to be taking out empathetic assault here pretty much based off of the fact that uh the bottom of this is gonna be mainly just used as a move two for me i'm gonna make sure that i don't get hit as the bind thief i'm gonna make sure that i've got a tank when i'm playing on increased difficulty i don't really need to worry about that however this enhancement to strengthen on the bottom of this card is undoubtedly one of the strongest things you can really do with this character so it's a bit of an awkward one because i'm kind of taking a card out here that ultimately you probably want to enhance with strengthen and will probably come straight back in again and just be really really useful so it's really quite an awkward one another card that you could consider getting rid of here is is withering claw but gonna be basically taking out a movement card for something that doesn't move that's something you can consider so i mean i've got a burn on the top here and a burn on the top here so these attacks are pretty similar they do similar-ish things i mean empathetic assault top is better than brain lynch top definitely it's really really hard to make a choice here sometimes i i swap out fearsome blade but then i immediately regret that i don't have any push so it's it's going to be really difficult for you here to come up with a choice at level three i think this is one of the hardest choices that this character has is actually swapping your cards out between different levels because your cards are so strong and you have such a set kind of combo in the way that you want to play and i could quite honestly happily play this character almost at level one forever because at level one you kind of got everything that you need to be successful with this character and at the increased levels just kind of gives you some few extra little tools and things that you can use to kind of really get crazy good outputting damage i'm going to swap out empathetic assault here but honestly this may not even be the right move here it may well be that you should be dropping weathering claw it may be that you should be dropping fierce and blade if you're playing on low levels of difficulty you might not even want into the night because you might not want this uh this invisibility so but i personally find empathetic assault bottom not particularly usable at high levels of difficulty because i get hit by one thing i'm probably dead so i have no reason to heal and also i can usually just get myself invisible and and the disarm on this is nice but i don't really find myself in a bind to do that all right on to level four so at level four we have a pilfer and we have a cranium overload so pilfer is uh probably one of the most interesting loot cards in the game it is loot one gain one additional gold pile for each adjacent enemy so kind of like a pickpocket style card here thematically really really cool i really love pilfer probably one of my favorite thematic cards in the game actually really really cool idea be able to get extra gold because of the enemies that you have however in actual gameplay sense it's i've never found it to be particularly great mainly because i don't like going for loot cars as i said before so perhaps i've never really had the dream pilfer that other people have had where they've managed to loot so much gold off of an enemy but personally i just don't find it to be to be that good it's uh maybe you end up getting yourself an extra one or two gold piles and uh yeah i mean that adds up over time but it just never feels good to me to be picking a loot card level up you know i want to be i want to be picking powerful cards that allow me to do really you know big damage abilities or you know big controllabilities or something fun you know the pilfer is kind of fun but it's also kind of like weird because why would you want to give up an attack to then take like extra loot i guess you'd probably stun them with perverse edge then play the top of pill first so stun them then play pilfer but it's just a little bit a little bit too cute for me but thematically a huge win so i'm glad that a card like this exists but it's just not one for me 68 initiative is not good on uh on this kind of thing i mean luke i guess maybe looting is better to do at the end of a turn but you also want enemies to be alive so i don't know it might be better to go early on this kind of thing kind of hard to say really the bottom is attack two move three attack two is two xp and a burn that's actually really solid with the mine's weakness this could be attack four move three attack four very very good and uh actually a pretty a pretty decent kind of burn effect here i like the fact that it allows you to kind of go crazy and if you're trying to kill something very very fast like an elite or a boss for example then this you could you know do worse than this it's just a shame to me that the top of pilfer is maybe not something a little bit more usable but i i mean i love the card and the bottom is the bottom is f is really fine and uh something that is actually a usable burn sort of tool but the top just doesn't do anything and you're not going to be really wanting to play the bottom early on in the scenario that's for sure next up we have cranium overload which is kill one normal enemy within range four attack two target all enemies adjacent to the killed enemy gain one xp for each enemy targeted kills if they just kill and do nothing else and it's normal generally i don't like them however this does allow you to do a little attack too around that enemy that they die so it's like their brain has exploded their head is exploded and popped and everybody around them takes damage right this does not use your augments so don't get too excited that you can use the mice weakness here and do something crazy five initiative super super early that is the earliest initiative we've seen out of this character so far and yeah this will basically guarantee that you go first aside from a couple of tricky enemy cards but most of the time this will this will allow you to go first and move five on the bomb here just a default vanilla move five but that is a hell of a lot of movement and that is really really welcomed at this point in time because i said this character can struggle a little bit with movement early i do think you want to get yourself a pair of boots of striding as your boot item right out of the gate this will actually help you solve some of those movement problems cranium overload to me is pretty similar to brain leech in the same way that brain leash was like oh yeah we've got a top here which is kind of gives us a tool to use when we need it creamy mirror goes exactly the same it's giving us a tool on the top something that we need when we're going to need it and then we've got the move five which is something we are going to want loads of and we're going to want to use a lot and it's always going to be useful for us and the five initiatives easy pick for me sorry pilfer thematically awesome but unfortunately just the weaker card here so cranium overload is easy pick really simple swap for me here i'm just going to swap out withering claw and i'm going to put in cranium overload just because essentially we are now um just replacing this move 3 into a move 5. one thing we do need to start being careful with though and i am very very guilty of it on this character is overloading myself with early initiatives as you can see here i have begun to do that so i've already started to really skew my initiative to the early now we do have the minds weakness and feedback loop the minds weakness is a card that i play i actually do cycle quite a bit by cycling what i mean is is that i make sure that i discard it when i go to rest to ensure that i can then play it again on the next turn just to give myself the 75 initiative but also to potentially give myself an extra turn if i i'm on an odd number of cards or something like that depending on my burn but if you're playing on low levels you probably will play this early on and you'll actually just leave it up like i encourage people to play like that if you don't want to have to worry about managing that side of the game just play the minds weakness and forget about it and just enjoy it which means our only late initiative is feedback loop so worth keeping an eye on making sure that you're not struggling so if you do find yourself often always like going before your allies you're playing with friends and maybe you're trying to or you're trying to come up with a particular combo with with certain characters be a bit more aware of your initiative okay on to level five so level five we have mass hysteria and we have a frozen mine a bit of a whiff here i think at level five i do think that these both of these cards are not particularly strong and i will kind of go into the reasons why so mass hysteria it's an attack one range for target for muddle create ice one xp so targeting four things here that is a lot of enemies to target if you're playing two player then maybe you won't even get the max value of this target four out of it but certainly if you're playing three or four you're probably gonna find yourself some decent situations to target four different things with this range four as well means that actually you've got a good chance of getting four things if it was only range three then i think it would be very hard to do so it creates ice which is great model which is just a nice added upside so i'm not gonna sell model as something more than it is it is just some minor upside but that attack one is just miserable so just just miserable you don't get any benefits from your augments here because this is a ranged attack not a melee attack but it's just a really really a weak attack in my opinion now the mind thief does have a really really strong attack modifier deck like really strong so it's a good chance that you can pull plus twos yes to make this like an attack three which can be quite good but if you're playing on increased difficulty and at this point if you like level five they might have like shield three and master stereo does not get through shield three so i found mast hysteria i increased difficulty levels to be much more underwhelming than it is at lower because of that attack value it really holds this card back now if you do get strengthened you know which is quite easy to do right you can get brain leads you can get strengthened and then hit them with the mass hysteria i think it's quite good and if you are against enemies that just don't have any shields it's just free damage across all of them and that's actually really quite flexible it's a little bit of an underwhelming card and also the ice here you already have many ways to generate ice felt like now you're just creating ice for the sake of it so i don't feel like you really need this for the ice generation you've already covered all of that with hostile takeover and with perverse edge i think we've we've got that and also with our perks we'll get to those you can get some ice there it's one of those cards where i've played with it on and off and sometimes i find it to be completely useless and i just really wish i didn't have it and then other times i played it and it's been decent and it's done some work so it's a really hard card to judge it's going to really come down to what difficulty level you're playing at and ultimately like what you kind of want potentially in the sideboard too because i think probably at this level we're going to be taking a card to go potentially in our sideboard might not even make our our main cut right away 12 initiative is nice and early again so we're not wanting for low initiatives with this character the bottom is you may have two augments active at once if a third augment is played discard one of the others now this is not as good as it sounds so a lot of people like well hang on a minute mine's venus is the best one right so now we can actually get another one alongside it that's gonna be good i honestly don't think that this character can really support this because what's gonna happen is you're gonna use this and this is a burn you're down to nine cards so you're already straight away down to nine cards then you're gonna potentially put the mine's weakness up and then potentially you're gonna put something else up like on a feedback loop or perhaps you did take silent scream if you are going to go down this route you should probably know about it ahead of time so that you could maybe take silent scream you're losing so many cards just to be able to have two augments you're gonna go down to nine cards then you're gonna have two in play until you know it's a seven plus you have to play the two augments as well so that's extra turns that it takes you to get things set up i just think it's way too janky if the mice venus wasn't as strong as it was as just a stand-alone augment maybe the conversation would be different but i just i think this taxes your hand too much by immediately dropping you down to nine cards it asks you to take sub-optimal turns for a little while where you're trying to play these these arguments out it's also kind of encouraging you to maybe carry a lot of augments that are situational right that it says okay well actually maybe what you want to do is you want to play the minds weakness and maybe you want to have two or three other augments in your hand and you just play the one that you want to kind of keep yourself going top is usable in certain situations bottom i think is is just no too too cute doesn't really work the next card is a frozen mind which is another augment which is on your melee attack so we can consume ice to add stun attack too now this is pretty decent actually having a stun effect on an augment basically turns all of our attacks into frigid apparition we no longer need to play frigid apparition we've got this which turns every single attack into it which is which is nice however again we are giving up playing the mind's weakness in order to play this so we are lowering our overall potential damage output just to be able to stun things to basically elongate the game i don't really think that that's what you want to be doing i think if you want to be trying to kill enemies first and then secondary you want to be stunning them and i think that this is prioritizing stunning over killing which i don't really advocate for you want to try and kill enemies as quick as possible like that's route one to success and if you can't kill them that's when you stun them you don't want to be choosing this card over the mind's weakness because you you kind of want both which then means like okay do you want to play mass hysteria you could make a good argument here that the bomb of mass hysteria the best situation is with frozen mind on the minds weakness a little bit too awkward for me potentially maybe in some situations in some scenarios it might be a little bit stronger when you just need to survive so you just want to stun things because it doesn't matter if they die you just need to survive anything competing against the mind's weakness is always going to have a hard time the bottom is enforce one enemy within range five to perform a move two with you controlling the actions a little bit better this is what i really really wished the initial one at level one was right i really really wanted it to this to be that so it's taken to level five just to get an additional range and an additional one move that is not worth it in my opinion really not i i honestly feel like the bottom of this could have been on this and it wouldn't have been too good this is a really awkward level level five in my opinion is is the worst one for the mind thief at every other level after this we're gonna have some good choices but at level five it's a little bit it's a little bit average personally i'm probably gonna take mastasteria but what i will say is i think it's absolutely fine here to go back and take something like silent scream to try and get this push or to potentially to get pill fudge if you want to just try and get loads of money at some point most of these cars are actually just gonna be going into a sideboard like we're gonna be picking a card here that we're not maybe immediately going to be running we might be thinking about running it in the future but we aren't probably going to be running it every single scenario maybe i'm going to be taking masters theory here but i absolutely feel like silent scream is a great pick here i think pilfer if you really want to just go crazy and farm loads of money also a good pick frozen mind possibly if your intentions are to have master syria and frozen mine at some point so stopping a card out like i said is not really something we're gonna consider doing here we're really happy with the way that our kind of uh hand is right now we've got everything that we could possibly want so we don't really want to upset that if i was to drop one card here i would probably consider dropping hostile takeover just so that we've got something here that it's kind of a similar type effect but i really really value the immobilize here when i'm playing on increased difficulty because it's just more control which is really really essential when you're playing that but if i was just playing normal difficulty and i wasn't really too worried about the immobilize the fact perhaps you're playing with like an all-melee party or something so everybody just inevitably ends up next to enemies so mobilize kind of becomes useless then i feel like you can get rid of hostile takeover and being massive stereo but for me i actually value this effect quite highly and i play around it a lot uh but if you don't and you're just playing lower level and you're just trying to maximize your damage and uh draw a lot of modifiers and stuff then i think it's this this is an absolute fine swap right here okay on to level six so we might have had a bit of a stinker at level five but level six makes up for it so we have corrupting embrace and dark frenzy two absolutely excellent cards and we're gonna be taking both of these spoiler alert so we'll be taking the second one at level seven however the ordering that you take these will come down to personal preference in my opinion but let's talk about them so corrupting embrace is attack one poison then attack one model on the top this combos so well with the mine's weakness turning both of them into an attack three so you're gonna attack something for three then poison it then attack it for three and muddle it and because of that poison you just put on it's actually gonna be an attack four right so it's gonna be attack three then an attack four and then you add that model on there like i don't really care too much about muddle but it's a nice thing to have so so strong also let's get to the bottom of this card too 39 initiative move forward jump poison a target all enemies move through great dark that on its own is just insanely good in my opinion just being able to move around poison and just poison a load of enemies up and then just focus on it just really helps out your allies one thing i love to do is in a new room is to kind of open the door and then use bottom of corrupting embrace with a pair of boots and just poison everything in the room as much of the room as i can crafting embrace is absolutely everything that this character wants as well as we can get strengthened remember with brainlead so you use the bottom of this you get strengthened then you get two more attacks off with the top of corrupting embrace with that strengthened you're killing enemies so fast with corrupting your brace like it's the enemies just absolutely melts to you if you have strengthened on corrupting race and if you have managed to do some battle goals as well as your just regular perks that you'll have at this point in time from leveling up yeah it's just it is actually insane so prophecy embrace incredible card 39 initiative is kind of like the weak point of the card i guess but everything else is so so good dark frenzy is next that is 10 initiative so much earlier on this one the top is attack two we can consume i start plus two and gain one xp we could also consume dark to add an additional plus two and get one xp as well so this could potentially be an attack six as it is then with the mind's weakness and additional two it's gonna attack eight if we manage to consume all of the elements now that is a very very strong attack doing that against a boss for example you know that that's gonna really uh hurt them and you know that's gonna do a lot of damage so the bottom of this as well is actually i think the secret power level of this card too top is very strong but the bottom is like i end up finding myself using the bottom of this card more often than the top quite quite regularly and it's move three attack three range three so it allows you to move and do an attack and create your element and gain an xp not a burn on tele initiative just nuts because again we're gonna be strengthened up right we're gonna have advantage that's gonna happen we are definitely gonna be having advantage with this character we also just have a really good attack modifier deck this is just allowing us to kill something or do some damage to something else you know that maybe an ally is focusing on some other one you can just chip in some damage while focusing on your own one in front of you as well and it gives you the move to allow you to move in it's just everything it just combines two really good actions together on a great initiative so efficient just so so efficient in doing damage and movement around the scenario i love it so both of these cards are just insanely good really for two different reasons really i think corrupting embrace is probably the more complete package top to bottom as a card but dark frenzy is really really hard to pass up that move three attack three this really is going to come down to personal preference right what card you want to pick here which one you want to go with first i felt like dark frenzy the move 3 attack 3 is super useful especially on increased difficulty to begin with because you just want to start like finishing enemies off any extra attacks you can get are just so good but corrupting embrace unless you're against something with retaliate it's just far and away the better effect i think so it's just really it's really really a difficult pick here between the two which one you go with first personally i think i'm probably gonna go with corrupting embrace first just because of the fact that i actually find myself doing this moving and poison jump thing quite regularly i really really like corrupting embrace here and then yeah we're gonna be coming back for dark frenzy for sure okay so the card that you might consider swapping out here you probably initially think hey that makes sense like i alluded to would be hey feedback loop right because this is just a straight like for like swap here this is giving you the move forward jump with the poison gonna do everything that is true but there's a couple of issues with doing this so the first one being this initiative again like i've shown you this initiative creep here we started to get very very early in the initiative with only the minds weakness being our late one here and we might have that up and active and we don't want to discard that every time maybe so potentially we're not gonna be able to go late very often at all we're gonna be going very early in this but the other problem that we do is we're essentially resigning corrupting a brace to only be used by the bottom if we take feedback loop out because we're basically saying feedback loop was a card that we only used for the move4 jump right that was really the only reason why we had this card and if we're going to swap that out to this that means that well chances are we're going to need to use this because we're used to having a move forward jump now it is a great bottom so i've got no kind of problem with that it is definitely a better bottom than the feedback glue but i just feel like this card is such a good dual use top and bottom card feels like a bit of a shame to say like okay well we're gonna have to use it for the bomb because we just don't have anything else going so what i would maybe consider doing is actually swapping something like hostile takeover we've discussed that a little bit as well earlier that this is a card that you may want to swap out depending on the difference scenario that you're playing the same can be true for fierce and blade you may not need this push maybe you've got lots of other allies that have push so they can push things as traps or perhaps the enemies don't have retaliate so you don't necessarily need to worry about that retaliate sort of damage that you might take as the mind thief so this is another one that you could get rid of but what i'm trying to say here is really you want to try and keep a late initiative and feedback loop is great for that but also you you want to try and use corrupting embrace for the top as well as the bottom so in the best strength of this guy is nuking down an enemy very very quickly with this the minds weakness and brain leech right you have the mind's weakness up then you go brain leech attack for three strengthen yourself and then you go absolutely to town with this and uh and just just destroy an enemy and potentially just kill an enemy outright in a single turn so there's some really really powerful things you can do with that so i think we're probably going to end up dropping um fierce and blade here for feedback loop i think that's fine i do sometimes miss this though because of that retaliate like i said so keep an eye on it this might be a card that you might need to bring back and if you do i think the cards you're going to be looking to swap out of stuff like hostile takeover maybe even cranium overload here because the move five say it doesn't really do really you're using this as a move five predominantly this is a move four which does most of that for you so another fair swap here would actually be to just get rid of cranium overload uh keep fit some blade in and do it this way this is another absolutely fine way of doing it because really you know the cranium overload is mainly used um for the bottom i said compassionate braces has got a good bottom but yeah maybe maybe again you get the same problem though with feedback loop where you end up needing to use this for the bomb not so sure but yeah i think any of these swaps are fine okay let's go to level seven so level seven we don't care about any of these two cards we're going to go back and take dark frenzy uh yeah true but let's talk about them so that we can actually see why that's the case so vicious blood is an augment on your melee attacks gain retaliate 2 attack 2. this is actually kind of spicy and has some fun interactions at times because you have lots of attacks so for example if you have this up and you play corrupting embrace you're actually going to end up getting retaliate four because you're gonna build up stacks so this is retaliate ii on each of your melee attacks for that round so you can definitely stack up this retaliate and it's kind of cute it's kind of fun but unfortunately you don't have much sort of health so even if you like pair this with another augment to get shields it just it feels very long-winded you know and also retaliate right it says gain retaliate too well why don't we just attack for an additional two instead it's kind of like the same thing except one way we get to kill an enemy before they get to do anything back to us whereas this one we hope that an enemy is gonna hit us or we need an enemy to hit us in order to do the damage yes retaliate goes through shield so it can be better it is like pure damage it's just go straight through that but ultimately it's much worse than this in most instances this is an active aggressive way of playing which i really advocate for i think you should try and be aggressive take the enemy on take the battle to the enemy try and kill them quickly whereas this is very passive this is okay let's sit back let's let's get this retaliate on and let's hope that they attack me or let's let's try and encourage that also doesn't do much against ranged enemies if they try and move away because it's not ranged retaliate so interesting and kind of fun for an odd build and you can certainly do some funny things with it but it's not particularly strong 83 initiative late again for these augments this one's actually an 80 initiative augment look at that breaking the trend there of the 70 initiatives and on the bottom you've got move two attack two which is okay i would say mine's weakness obviously turns us into a move to attack four potentially so not bad but we have dark frenzy here which is a move three attack three at range create ice and you get one xp so it's an attack three yes it's could potentially the bottom of this could potentially be an attack four so potentially one more but this creates an element that you like it's ranged which gives you flexibility as a character unfortunately vicious blood up against the competition doesn't really kind of cut it really psychic projection is the other card this one's a doozy so here five self shield one self stun self 92 initiative why would you want to do this on 92 initiative i do not know if you want to try and benefit from that shield 92 initiative is not it you're definitely going to want to go early for that stunning yourself is a massive massive massive drawback the only time when it's not a drawback is if you intend to long rest on the next turn so there is that you could use this at the end of a at the end of a room potentially but in my experience you never get to the end of a room in a very very clean way or at least not in the campaign usually in guildmaster you might have a little bit more flexibility because in guildmaster you can quite often clear a room a bit quicker and the rooms are a bit smaller the number of enemies is a bit different i found guild masters just be a bit of a quicker shorter easier experience so possibly you might clear rooms a bit quicker realistically you don't want to be doing this in the middle of a room which is full of enemies because you're just giving up your next turn which is not really the thing to do unless you plan on going invisible so maybe you go invisible then do this i guess that's an option so you could do like into the night on 14 go invisible then do this and then essentially you're going to be invisible until the end of the next turns then just play late initiatives or long rest whatever it is you want to do i suppose you could do that there's also some synergy with a unlockable item which i don't want to spoil but there is some uh synergy um that you can do there's a workaround here i think it's very cute and i've tried it and it's not been very good unfortunately pretty unplayable top the bottom is all your ranged attacks and gain the effects of your augments this round but it's a burn if this wasn't a burn i think this actually would be really neat this would actually be selection worthy it's almost as if they were really really concerned that this would immediately break mass hysteria so they just went okay we're going to chuck a burn symbol on it because then suddenly you're going to be attacking you know four things for three potentially with the top of mass hysteria you also have no way of changing one of your ranged attacks into like an aoe easily without the aid of an item or something so there's no way that for example you could break this by making brainly super super super good or for example empathetic assault like some like stuff like i just don't get why it's a burn uh we're gonna be going back and we're gonna be taking dark frenzy very very easy pick for us here okay so swapping out a card for dark frenzy we definitely want to swap one out to use regularly here i think this is the time we let hostile takeover go away now i think we're gonna be able to kill things hopefully fast enough we've got another way of generating our ice through this i think it just makes a lot of sense just to swap here said i don't really want to get rid of the late initiative on feedback loop i'd like to keep that plus i think the move 4 jump is quite useful so fierce and blade is another card you could consider here getting rid of the 27 initiative is maybe not so great yeah you're going to have some flexibility here in the end but i really like having uh having these kind of things together i feel like keeping basically the holy trinity if you like of perverse edge scurry and into the night is the best way of playing on increased difficulty in my opinion and frigid apparition too i guess so maybe for the holy foursome if you like uh i think those four cards are really really needed and that might actually be a bit of a criticism against this character i feel like some of the cards are you get so used to playing with them and they're so essential to playing the character in a set way you don't really get any cards that actually affect that or change that until much later on that you end up kind of needing to keep those cards because they are like what's keeping you going and the play style for this character really does not change too much as you level up you really you just get to output more damage you don't really get any better at like stunning things for example your stunning is just as good as it was at level one like it doesn't really get any better unless of course i guess you go hard on frozen mind but even then that's a little bit janky so like those elements of your game don't get better but just your damage output gets much better as you level up okay on to level eight so at level eight we have shared nightmare and we have domination so shared nightmare is attack three range for target two and we can consume dark to add poison and curse to the attack create ice one xp this is a really really solid attack that consume dark is something that uh we have a few ways to consume dark now right we have top of dark frenzy so this as well is gonna compete with that a little bit i think that this is probably the the better use of of dark over dark frenzy it's just it's close but i think it probably is being able to add poison and cast to two different enemies i think is really really um good here cursing is one of those things where you really care about doing as much of it as possible like you want to get max amounts of curses in because then you know that things are going to start shifting in your favor at some point just the odd curse here or there might might not affect the game but it could come up in a big way for you and you do certainly have some ways to model the enemy with some of your cards so there's maybe more chance that curse is going to come up so really like the top of shared nightmare i think it's a very strong seven initiative really really early initiative again and then you've got move five and consume ice to shield one's self on the bottom here now this is probably the worst use of ice that we have in our uh our current kind of selection of cards so i would never consider consuming ice to actually get the shield here unless you're just trying to get an xp and it happens to be hanging around we know moving a lot is is important and strong and on a low initiative too so it's a very a very good card that kind of improves the cranium overload style card for us here so sad nightmare top and bottom just very very solid strong card the other card is domination which is one adjacent ally may perform an attack for this attack against the effects of your augments so this could allow them to do an attack six sort of like possession but it's non-burn and they can make it an attack six if they if they use the mind's weakness right i think this is all right it's kind of okay but again it's in the wrong place of a card like possession if possession was on the bottom if domination was on the bottom we would be having a completely different conversation but because it's on the top it is taking away from you doing an attack and it's much easier for you to be able to move do your attack move away whatever it is you need to do it's much easier for you to position and do your attack than it is for you to try and sync up with another ally to make sure the allies in the right place to attack the right thing for you to move up to them to them to do the attack it requires too many hoops to jump through and the board state might not allow it that it just doesn't really end up being great in my opinion i like the idea and i think it's definitely a good improvement over the possession effect because it's a non-burn and it still gives you the potential to get that six which is which is pretty cool however why are we not just attacking ourselves that's that's kind of like the the question with these with these cards the bottom is force one normal or elite enemy within range five to performance turn this round as if his allies were enemies and his enemies were allies with you controlling the action so the difference here between this and i believe it was the hostile takeover is this is range three and this is range five right i think that is exactly the same except this is range three and this is range five so it's just like a strict upgrade on that effect i don't think that hostile takeover needed an additional range but considering that this is a bottom effect so unless you're using scurry to move in to position yourself to be able to do the bottom in a good way which is quite unlikely really then yes the range 5 does make it easier to land makes it so that you can actually maybe get the thing that you want or the best most impactful thing it's okay but to be honest we haven't been using hostile takeover at this point we're not really missing it so i don't see why we would take a card at level eight when we have a card that we took at level two that we're no longer using that does a very similar thing i do like this card though if you're playing more of a summon heavy build because then you can just get the summons to do the attacks so it's a little bit better in that respect like i can see it having some use in that particular style and that particular build but no in the average mind thief build definitely not we're going to be taking a shared nightmare it's it allows us to attack it does a lot of different things it's a useful card so we're taking shared nightmare okay so the card we're gonna swap out here is gonna be fearsome blade i think we can quite comfortably get rid of this push now it's still gonna be something that you might consider when you're against something with a retaliate or if there's a lot of traps but hopefully you don't really need it now that we've got some ranged attacks here that we're going to be able to use i feel like it's a very good um sort of swap very simple swap here because we we now got plenty of ranged attacks with dark frenzy and shared nightmare that we should actually be able to like meaningfully do some damage to some things with retaliate we don't necessarily need to worry about it so much fierce and blaze one of those cars has been kind of probably in and out if you've been playing you've probably found that this card's been in and out for you anyway maybe you've even swapped it out much earlier than me i mean that's i would think that's that's fine if you don't think you need it for traps or for retaliate but i find that having it on increased difficulty quite late into my um my character growth it's usually good so but so yeah i think that's that's a pretty fine swap now we've got plenty of ways of interacting now with uh with enemies that have retaliated so all right then so on to level nine so at level nine we have a many as one and we have phantasmal killer so many as one the court is in session summon rat king so nine health this is a summon move two and attack x range no range this is melee and x which is the attack is equal to half of rat king's current health rounded up so stars of nine health that means it is basically going to be doing five damage to begin with and then obviously it will it will go down there is an enhancement slot here for you to be able to enhance the health from nine to ten not that that really matters racking is one of those scott summons that has a special place in a lot of people's hearts it's a very cool summon it's uh very fun i will say i've really enjoyed playing racking and a lot of people have and it's got a reputation quite rightly as basically the king summons so it's it's very very cool very interesting summon very unique way to do damage it's a shame that there's no way to maybe kind of artificially enhance this even higher like i kind of wish that there was some way that we could like augment the health even higher through some other means than just enhancing it and uh yeah that's a little bit of a shame but i guess then it would be maybe too good at that point in time but ultimately is it a really really strong summon probably not but it is a really fun summon to play and then wants to take some damage you want to heal it up because you want to keep it alive but also because you want to increase the damage that it can do the bottom of this card is aura all allies within range two will add plus x attack to all their attacks this round where x is the number of your allies within range two of you there's two xp and that is a burn quite a mouthful but to break it down you do not get this effect it says all allies within range two you are not an ally of yourself kind of weird i know but whenever it says all allies it's referring to everybody but you that's on your team summons would get the benefit here obviously other mercenaries would get the benefits here but you yourself do not range 2 is quite restrictive it's not a huge area so you would need to make sure that you are kind of in a really good position to make this work and potentially say if you were playing four player and you had a couple of summons you know this could be like a plus less could be something like a plus five a plus four or plus five right in an ideal world and that'll be all of their attacks will get that now that can be completely broken it really can be in certain situations this will just pop off and go crazy definitely something to consider but ultimately as is a burn and it's a single round effect i don't think the average player and the average party is really going to be able to use this in a good way it very much requires a lot of setup it requires you to potentially combo it off with another card so no i'm thinking you'd combo off with inferno the level 9 spell weaver card you'd be basically trying to build a broken one round combo is what you're trying to do with this card that's fun when you're playing like in guild master and stuff but it's not gonna like win you the campaign for example so it's maybe not a good thing to try and do when you're trying to make good story progress and complete scenarios but if you're trying to just mess around and have fun could be a lot of fun the next card we have is a phantasmal killer now this is a bit more practically good so this is another augment and it is on your melee attacks consume dark to kill one normal target instead this is attack two so this is a non-burn way for you to be able to instant kill normal enemies now this is always broken and way too strong in gloomhaven so if you see this you pretty much always bite uh their hand off you know laugh about it because really this is you know what you really are looking for as a damage dealer you're looking to not even have to deal damage just kill things out brightly and you have plenty of ways to make dark on this character very easy ways for you to do that only being able to kill normal targets is a shame but honestly if this could allow you to kill elites 2 it would be way too strong on the level nine scale of brokenness i don't think that this is you know really as crazy as some other level nines are i feel like this is this is strong and obviously meant to make you feel very powerful but it is not going to just instant win you scenarios like maybe some other level nines do this is probably the only augment that is better than the mind's meanings but again it's only better than the mind's weakness against normal enemies right and when you have that dark element to spare the bottom is move two loot one and invisible self create dark 67 initiative on this card in general so yeah so so initiative kind of late but not really the invisible on the bottom here very very useful this is just a straight upgrade in my opinion to into the night because into the night you're mainly using it for the invisible effect here on the bottom and this actually gives you a move and invisible so this actually kind of covers off almost two cards for you here this actually frees you up from maybe not needing scurry and into the night because now you've got that move invisible whereas before you're having to go move on the top of scurry invisible on the bottom here right you are playing two halves of a card this now basically gives you both halfs of them together in one single action so now you can just do whatever you want with your top action which i think is super super useful and also gives you some flexibility at level nine to maybe drop scurry uh and into the knight together and then maybe go with something else because you may enhance uh the range on perverse edge so maybe you don't really need that scurry anymore these are like the things that you can start to do at level nine it like opens it opens that up for you phantasmal killer is gonna be the pick here for me invisibility is incredibly strong killing things is incredibly strong it's not the funnest of cars many as one is definitely the funner of the two cards but if you're looking at pure power level and trying to compete and win the majority of scenarios that you play i don't think many as one will help you win as many scenarios as fantasmal killer will so swapping our card like i alluded to really this card actually allows us to drop maybe two cards because now we can get rid of into the night and potentially we could get rid of scurry here because we don't care so much about getting into that door and going invisible on the door by using scurry to move on to the door and then into the night to go invisible so now we've got phantasmage this means you can start to look at bringing some other cards back so that fearsome blade could come back you got the cranium overload could come back hostile takeover mass hysteria could come in you've got lots of cool options here that you can start to kind of mix your cards up right at the very end i really like actually that but fantasma killer does give you that bit of extra flexibility actually allows you to swap two cards out you may have already got rid of scurry to be honest because maybe you just sort of realize that you didn't need it anymore if you're playing on lower difficulty so that might have gone a long time ago but for me i generally play the into the night scurry combo until level nine pretty much and uh also potentially scurry perverse edge combo too but hopefully you've got some enhancements here hopefully this now has plus one range on it makes it a little bit easier for landing so really you don't need scurry anymore okay so i will put up on screen now all of my level 9 card selections for you board game players so if you'd like to pause the video here if you're playing the physical game and get a glimpse of what the cards look like in that version then you can do that now okay then let's go and take a look at perks so perks for this character are pretty straightforward and very very powerful we're going to be able to get our attack modifier deck into a really really lean mean fighting machine one thing that you do need to uh look at though and in digital if you don't scroll down you'll miss it is the ignore negative scenario effects perk down here there are some really nasty negative scenario effects you will come across and i mean really nasty ones that will make the scenario much much harder for you so i do really advocate for taking this now actually pretty early i never used to i when i initially played through the campaign i actually didn't really value this particularly that much but the more i've played actually the more that i see that this is uh this is actually just very strong at mitigating some of the issues that the certain scenarios will pose to you so in fact as early as scenario two so if you were to manage to get yourself to level two by the end of black baro a barrow layer actually adds in three curses into your deck so if you had this you wouldn't take those three curses so worth maybe bearing in mind if you have struggled a little bit with black baro so you've ended up actually like leveling up before you got to scenario two i know a few new players who are just learning the game have maybe played that scenario a few times over found themselves at level two so if that is the case then actually wouldn't be a bad idea to do this because that immediately mitigates those three curses that you get at barrow layer but otherwise you're probably looking to basically just thin your deck in this kind of order so you're going to go for consistency next up you're going to go for intensify after that you're gonna go for meditate then i think you want to go for dust because now you should be probably around about level four you might be like level three but you're getting towards brain leech level so once you start getting strengthened reliably that's when you can really with confidence use dust so once you know that you're going to have that strengthen and you're going to be able to reliably get that strength and effect off then you can basically start to remove these because you're going to be less worried now and now you're really going to be just trying to draw hopefully like this plus this or this plus this this plus this like that's what you're trying to do right if you're strengthened you just want to get a very thin deck with lots of plus numbers in i'll finally go down and take this if you haven't taken it before but like i said really up to this point you could have taken this at any time next we're gonna go for freeze getting some extra plus twos to improve our damage output and also create ourselves some ice potentially you know when we uh when we flip a card instead after you've done freeze really you want to the rolling cards here i think i'm gonna go for the rolling damage first these are all pretty close stuns obviously really really good so a rolling stun is always going to be really really good you're never going to uh be sad to see that same with the disarm here the model's not not great but the disarm is pretty similar so both of these are quite good i do like the plus damage though so we're going to go for plus damage first but then i think in the order of this you're going to be looking for a plus then you're looking for stun then you'll be looking for disarm then you're probably going to be looking for a mobilize um or model potentially model might actually be slightly better than immobilized because mobilize doesn't do anything a lot of the time but model will always do at least something so possibly muddle before immobilize then immobilize and the pull really is yeah you don't really care about the pull so paul is easily the last here okay great let's go and take a look at items so before we go fully into items i do want to do a short spoiler free item section here just for people who are playing the board game who maybe don't want to have spoilers on items because unfortunately once i click on the items in gloomy digits so it's just going to show you everything that i've unlocked which is everything in the game so i'm including character spoilers too so there'll be item spoilers and character spoilers so this is uh a way for us to just like talk briefly about starting items so i think you want an invisibility cape i think you want booster striding i think you want a minor stamina potion the invisibility cape is just so that you can go on visible on a turn when you don't have into the night for whatever reason it's either in your discard pile or you just don't have it available or you want to play something else instead of the bottom of into the night just helps keep you safe really boost of striding is really good for just adding movement on because you do struggle with movement on this character to begin with and uh it's nice to be able to always add move to an effect that has jump so feedback loop change that to a move six that will definitely get you to wherever it is that you need to be and a minor stamina potion really just to be looping that um looping that perverse edge stun really so you can continually do that and make ice and stuff like that whenever you need to it's really good other items that you might consider as you might consider the poison dagger to be able to add poison to an enemy that can be quite good you can use a minor mana potion potentially to be able to create ice when you really really need it or dark in the future when you really really need it there are some head slot items that you get unlocked and you find later that are very very useful this character is all about card recursion that's all i'm gonna say it's all about just recurring cards so stamina potions and anything that allows you to recover cards is always gonna be a winner so just keep an eye out for that okay great so now we're going to head into the spoilers section so turn off now if you don't want to be spoiled on any unlockable characters or extra items in the game so if a head slot item really you're going to be looking for something pretty crazy empowering talisman is really really good or a pendant of dark packs so you're looking for ways to be able to get small items back on this character hawk helm can be useful in certain situations i've seen hawkeye be quite good with perverse edge for example being able to increase that range out can be quite good with like you know um hostile takeover as well so there are situations where a whole camp can be can be quite good for this character so that could be one that you have in the interim eagle eye goggles is something that i don't think you really should go for because i think you should be able to manage your own strength and stuff like that uh heavy bassinet is the item that i alluded to with uh psychic projection the weird synergy that you have with this card so you can make yourself immune to stun so by making yourself immune to stun you don't take the stun effect of that card i've tried this it's still not very good plus you don't have the perk to be able to wear armor so those minus ones do go into your deck so that kind of sucks so but that's why it's bound here it's because i have been trying that out and uh i can report back that it is not very good yeah pendant attack packs is probably your um your kind of go-to really i would say this is like your high level top tier item that you're looking for you're going to be able to get two small items back hopefully like big potions big stamina potions or star earrings things like that really really big broken items you can get back you don't really care about the curse because to be honest you're going to be strengthened so much that you're probably going to be fine and you'll destroy it alongside something else so don't don't worry about the curse too much in terms of body item realistically i haven't found anything much better than cloak of invisibility on this character blinking cape might have some good use because you can actually then just make sure that you get into that position to use a bottom attack you don't have to move so it kind of takes away you know needing to play scurry for example to move into a position you can get away you can immediately just move next to an enemy and then brain leech blossom and corrupting embrace top so it's a way for you to be able to do a double attack can be really really nice so picking cape is pretty good but i think cloak and invisibility is it's just fine it just does everything that you really really need i've tried like things like leather armor before it's been okay something that maybe you could use if cloak of invisibilities are all sold out which could could be a potential there if you've got something like a scoundrel or a spell weaver or something that they've taken them from you so there is maybe some potential there so another armor is is an okay thing see there's some high level stuff here that you can play around with like steam armor but i don't think it's particularly great realistically it's going to be about blinking game for you cloak of pockets isn't bad on this character depending again on what items you have so i really only recommend cloaker pockets on characters who are very very high level and they have a very high prosperity level because in order to make local pockets really good and worthy of the slots you really need to have some some crazy items to work with and most people won't find themselves in that position for a hand item i absolutely love long spear on this character just being able to turn frigid apparition into a stun two which is what it does essentially you can position yourself and you can use this to target two things that will stun both of them i find it to be incredibly strong really really good i love long spear i've tried lots of different items so i've used like frigid blade before which which can be quite nice because you do generate a lot of ice on the turns you don't need to use it you can get some extra bonuses you know black knife again cursing enemy not too bad poisoning an enemy not too bad by using things like the poison blade the poison dagger here you've got other things like you know creeping scythe could be interesting to be potentially done three things but honestly long spear i really really have enjoyed this i i always feel like this is now the best the best item for this character it really is because you have so many impactful attacks and with the mind's weakness as well being able to just get that extra bonus on something else i think it's just too strong and it's only a 30 gold item yes it uses both hand slots but i think it's worth it so yeah long spear is actually going to be my kind of like my final build recommendation and you actually can get it fairly early on because i think it's like a prosperity two or three items so you should be able to get that fairly early for leg items i think really you just want plus movement so you're going to be probably looking at like boots of striding really you're not going to need much more than that early on i think as you level up you actually get access to some really really nice big moves so you could potentially actually use something like endurance foot wraps here so something that can give you a little bit of value off of your moves you could also actually consider using some of the boots of speed or the boost of quickness to potentially increase your initiative if you really need to it's not often that you need to decrease here but maybe occasionally you might want to increase it but yeah chances are you're just going to have boosted striding and you're probably just going to roll with them for the entire time and maybe upgrade yourself to some of the better ones as you as you go along i i like interested raps if you find them because certainly at high levels you're actually going to going to get this heel one fairly regularly so for small items really you're just looking for all of the card recursion that's really what you want and anything else situational that could help you so you're going to want major stamina potions you're going to want minor stamina potions you might want a minor mana potion i don't think you need to worry about power potions in any way they're more for aoe style characters that can target multiple things you're also definitely going to want something like a moon earring to be able to refresh some of your items especially if you've got long spear this will actually refresh the long spear that can be really really strong on this character and of course all of the top top end tier stuff is going to be really good ring of brutality is quite nice because you can actually play the mind's weakness using this without having to give up you know so you kind of like you can kind of play the mind's weakness on your turn and then you can actually get another attack out of it so it doesn't like sometimes you have to waste the turn to play the mine's weakness and ringer brutality kind of smooths that out so you don't necessarily have to star rearing is of course just insanely good for you uh because of all of the card recursion the healing and just refreshing all of your items this is gonna be super good in terms of like one shot little items i do like stun powder because i feel like you do have a couple of good little attacks that you can do here works quite well with like mass hysteria or hostile takeover where you can just stun something because maybe it's like a ranged enemy so the immobilizer on hostile takeover isn't doing anything so you just need to kind of like you just need to stun something i like stun powder as a utility item that if i have a free slot fairly early on in the game i usually end up rocking a stun powder because it's just yeah just it comes in useful it really does and uh also you've got at the top and you've got doom powder which is kind of like the similar kind of thing which is another thing you might consider this one adds stun poison and curse so again like the upgraded version of stun powder really something that you that you probably want so our completely pimped out mind thief is probably going to look something like this and this is obviously very very far into the game you would uh have to have uh completed the game most likely to have uh to have gotten this item so the chances are that most people won't ever find themselves like this but this would be what kind of like the maxed out my thief would look like okay let's take a look at enhancements so four enhancements if you are playing the campaign mode with the new adjusted costs then i think strengthen is a little bit out of reach initially for you to begin with so i think we'll be looking at upgrading perverse this is like the first one that i usually get on every character i go here and i get the plus range now bear in mind that i'm playing in guild master here so my prices will probably not reflect what your prices are so bear that in mind that this is not accurate but i would go here absolutely first this is like the best quality of life in my opinion enhancement that you can get early on in the game for this character it seems so simple but just so that you don't necessarily need to play scurry to make perverse edge work every time is really really good frees you up a little bit to be able to play the mines weakness or play like a different card at another point so yeah easy easy enhancement here if you are looking to chuck a second enhancement onto perverse edge i can really recommend chucking on wound here as well i think that's really really good it's expensive but wound plus stun is always just a really really good combo because you stun the enemy and then they're gonna take a point of wound damage while they're stunned and at the beginning of the next term before they take their turn they're going to take another point of wound damage so it's like a guaranteed to pure damage if you lie to an enemy as long as they're not healed by an ally or something like that so yeah i think like adding wound is incredibly strong to this kind of card too if you are playing on the guild master mode or you are playing on the original campaign enhancement costs it's really really hard to not just recommend you get this for 50 like i in a way i really wish this didn't exist for this character because i feel like this really enforces a build on this character that i i don't really like i think it it makes you less um flexible because you as soon as you get this enhancement there is nothing better than you can do than to just move and strengthen yourself all the time and that becomes really hard as a player to detract from because you're just constantly basically strengthened and it becomes incredibly strong it's a problem that i think that this character quite uniquely suffers from yes there's some other characters that get it that's quite broken like the spell weaver for example on the bottom of manabalt it's incredibly strong but this character has such a flow to the way that they play their cards that i think just you know having to you're basically keeping empathetic assault in your hand all the way up to level nine just because of an enhancement that you might have bought on it at like level three or four and that's you know in my opinion i don't think the rest of the cards are very good but as soon as you put this enhancement on it it's incredible so it's a really odd one but i can't not make a guide without recommending that you do this if it's 50 gold even if it's the increased costs it's probably worth it at some point other enhancements that you might consider is you could actually consider chucking the wound up on the top of frigid apparition i think that this is this is really nice it's actually uh gives you the same kind of effect as on perverse edge right being able to get that stun and that wound on i really like the pairing of those two kind of conditions together i think it's super synergistic and they work really really nicely together so you could chuck a quick wound on there you do also have the opportunity to upgrade the move and the attack on scurry it's quite a nice idea to add an additional move on to scurry makes it a little bit easier for you to be able to to get in there if you are playing in the campaign and and you are hopefully playing with the new costs remember that you can refund costs so if you do find yourself in a position where actually i'm not really using like i don't feel like i'm using scurry anymore or you you kind of side the card out same thing with empathetic assault right if you actually find yourself siding these cards out not using them anymore then actually you can just refund the enhancements which i think is really cool once you've got all of the basic enhancements done really you're gonna be looking at you know wish list kind of stuff where you have like hundreds of gold to spend and you're gonna probably be looking at upgrading corrupting embrace either like the move or the attacks on the top here you're talking about crazy money here but if you do play on increased difficulty and you you know play the character a very high level certain scenarios can actually you know can result in you getting out with 40 to 50 gold per scenario so the this is within reach of certain mercenaries and in certain scenarios and at certain difficulties so this could be done and uh this is probably what you're going to be looking at you could look at maybe upgrading some of the smaller things like on hostile takeover i wouldn't really worry about it i don't think that's a particularly great use of of your stuff to enhance i think it's great use of your money really then you're probably saving up for like broken items or like i said really really strong enhancements for corrupting embrace so there it is my final updated mind thief guide a really interesting character one character that i've played actually a bunch of because it is my favorite character to play on increased difficulty so i always play with this character and increase difficulty because it's just got so many stuns at the beginning of the game such a useful character so much damage as well it is the best starting character in my opinion although you know craig is probably gonna hate me for saying that but crackheart's always gonna be my favorite character but objectively i think the mind thief is probably the strongest character out of the starting bunch or at least right out of the gate it is for sure to be honest there's a few things about this character that i would change in the future like that empathetic assault kind of enhancement on the bottom i think really does make this character kind of more restrictive in the build because when you have something like that that is just so so strong that might be just a small oversight by you know the developers in terms of allowing that enhancement to exist you know you've now kind of warped the character to be i want to keep all of these cards and one thing this character really suffers from is their starting tool set is pretty much perfect you don't really need much more so whenever you're bringing cards in and you're unlocking cards it always feels like you're having to sort of take out a good card to put in maybe a good card or maybe a not so good card like there's so many like awkward kind of moments when you're trying to figure out like which cards do i drop here because i have so many good cards and i've got a set way of playing and that's one thing about this character it never really changes the way it plays it plays right at the very same from level one all the way up to level nine really with just a few different changes in terms of like how much damage you can do and stuff like that it just doesn't really drastically affect this character which is a bit of a shame because i think this character is very very strong it's very thematic it works really really well it's just a shame that yeah there's a few cards here and there's a few things especially that empathetic assault enhancement dot that really kind of throws this character into uh it's a bit of an awkward space at times when actually do you really want to take those level up cards if you did manage to get this far thank you all so much for watching and soldering on i really appreciate it don't forget to like and subscribe the video if you did it helps me out so so much here on growing the channel on youtube and i do really really appreciate it also come over to twitch.tv manage request every monday wednesday and sunday where i'm streaming gloomhaven live so come hang out maybe play some gloomhaven live with me on a sunday because that is when i play multiplayer with viewers all right then all that's left for me to say is thank you again so much for watching i will catch you in the next video bye i think so 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: 57,254

Keywords: Gloomhaven, Gloom haven, Tutorial, Guide, How to, Level up, Abilities, Enhancements, Perks, Items, Starter, Inferno, Damage, Build, Steam, PC, Digital, Co-op, Mac, mind thief, mindthief, starting class, starting character

Id: BRpR3dvKuY4

Length: 113min 38sec (6818 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022