Prism Class Guide for Frosthaven

hello everyone and welcome back to Phoenix gaming I'm your host Nick Henning this is a channel where we talk strategy about a handful of different games if you're here because you're not into Frost Haven I did just recently release a Great Western Trail video and I promise you I've got a brass Birmingham final video coming out if you are here for frost Haven today we're talking about a class guide for the prism class which is a spoiler class so this is your final warning essentially that we're going to be going into this special unique uh class that you would unlock I would guess maybe depends on what you choose but maybe about halfway or two-thirds of the way through your kind of Base campaign of frost Haven so without further Ado let's get started I'm really nervous for this video it is uh I mean first of all Hive is awesome look at that art look at that kind of like Mech gundam wing-esque style uh thing that's going on there it's incredible but one thing that I've found is particularly with the more uh complex classes the unlock classes people have a lot of thoughts about these classes how to run them and that's totally great I actually am really loving the engagement and the comments um but the reason I'm nervous for this video is that Hive is without a doubt the most complex class I have ever played in any of the Haven universes I am what I would consider to be and I'm going to say this a bit arrogantly an extremely good board gamer I play a lot of D and D so I'm familiar with kind of like those sorts of tactics and and everything as well and this class was was a really big struggle for me and I thought a little bit about whether I should actually make a guide for this and then I realized that the purpose of my guides is not about speaking to professionals that are like oh I'm very very good at this game and I want to see what someone else who's good at this game has to say really I think what my guides are more geared towards are players who are interested in understanding how to play a class and they play it maybe a little bit more organically one way that I approach Frost Haven and my partner does as well is as we level up we say this seems good in this moment and we take kind of what happens as things go on we don't do you know builds or a lot of theory crafting in the background my partner certainly doesn't do Theory crafting and so a lot of it is just kind of like what feels good in the moment and we kind of uh stumble our our way more into into structures and I can't help but wonder if Hive is a class that maybe rewards you for having a very specific build pattern in advance that being said this I did come around to understanding this class but before I even dive into talking about the cards I want to show you a little bit about how this class runs so that you can maybe some avoid some of the like ridiculous pitfalls that I fell into in the first number of scenarios that I was playing with this class the other thing I'll add with this class and maybe it's more of the scenario than the class but we are now at well over 50 60 scenarios played in Frost Haven actually I think we're probably approaching 70 if I'm being honest I haven't sat down and counted it but it's quite a lot and we have only lost one scenario we lost it twice and it was it was while I was playing this character and I think a lot of it has to do with what the limitations are and what you can do with this character in certain scenarios so let's look at the character board first so I'm going to talk more about the rules that are listed on hive when I kind of go into the avoid our pitfalls how does this class actually kind of function but briefly I'll just mention that you are an 11 card class although you're really a 10 card class that takes an 11th card and immediately puts it into play that's your mode if you haven't really played this class or you haven't read this rule set the brief version is that each of your summons has a mode and then of course it's normal summonability and while you are in that mode you get some bonus some persistent effect and a lot of them also give you a negative persistent effect to kind of pair with positive persistent effect and so at the very beginning of the scenario you're going to choose what mode you're in so you kind of have a persistent effect to start play with which is pretty nice I mean frankly it's like you played three cards on your first turn one of those cards just isn't terribly good and then the second thing here is a very long description of what happens when you transfer because when you have summons in play you can swap locations with your summon and then you go into the summons mode and then your old mode becomes a new summon I'll show you more about that in a second but that's basically this class is an entire gimmick and for that they list this class as extremely complex and they are extremely correct in that this class has kind of the normal uh middling progression of hit points which I think is pretty appropriate for the class and it sort of lists at the bottom here that this class is kind of a little bit good at everything not so great with support um not so great with control and that is sort of true I play this class very tanky so I my version of playing The Hive was very high on defense I'm going to talk a little bit about Mobility you certainly have some cards with high movements but there are ways to get yourself jammed up a little bit uh you can be pretty heavy melee class you can be a pretty heavy ranged class it's unlikely that you will be both in a given scenario you'll probably kind of gear towards doing one or the other you can do both I just think that it's unlikely that your bill is going to really support doing both well but you can do both okay um but you're you should plan that you're going to be more one than the other I think the control side of things I don't really agree with that this class does not have a ton of status effects that gives people it doesn't do a lot on the board I suppose that you could argue by virtue of having summons you confuse enemies and uh that inherently creates some control but I wouldn't agree with that rating of this character no Elemental affinities thank God because we've got enough to think about already all right so we've set up a scenario here where we've got a couple snow aims that we're fighting who are ranged enemies in case you aren't aware and we've got ourselves fairly far into this scenario we've got a fair amount of setup here in the sense that I have essentially three active summons or three active persists in play now you might say hey you've got three but I only have two that's because I'm currently in coiled limbs mode I'm in leaper mode so being in leaper mode um here let me actually go ahead and grab the the token for that I get to add jump to all my move abilities which frankly is not that good of an ability uh you can see why I was saying that just being in a mode is not necessarily amazing at least this one doesn't have any downsides um I started this scenario in armored tank mode this was my very first mode that I had in the scenario I know that because it's my first card it's to the left it's the the longest in play card which is going to be relevant later and it's ridiculous that I'm saying that but it is true um and then after that I summoned the coiled leaper and at some point transferred into that coiled leaper and then just last turn I summoned this repair drone here to put me up towards three things now first of all I have acquired a lot of experience class roles and experience because by doing this I've generated six experience um already and I'm gonna start my turn by having of course my summons go and my big dumb robot here is equidistant from these but we'll choose to go towards the one that is lower in initiative order and then we'll make an attack and then this robot here is a ranged one's got three range it's gonna go ahead and shoot this guy with a ranged one attack and then at the end of his turn is going to perform a heel one range three he won't be able to heal this robot um but he'll heal whichever of the two of us is more hurt which is almost certainly going to be me in this instance um now it's my turn and suppose that I've played a couple cards here um I have played maybe these two cards and whenever you see this symbol that's the transfer symbol and so I just want to show that these two cards give me a huge huge amount of options we're even gonna ignore the text on Launchpad and just kind of treat this as the cards that I'm playing of what it is that we could do in this moment so let's just start off by talking about faceless entity over here so I can attack then transfer and then attack again so one way I could end up using this is by you know just sort of using the bottom of the other card to move somewhere then I could attack this amp then I could transfer into this tank which would mean swapping all of that and then I could attack this amp that's kind of the I guess ideal situation that you would do with faceless entity and the attack is that you get essentially two attacks either on the same or different locations and now you are in a new mode I'm in this tank mode and now I am I've got a shield and minus one to all my move abilities uh as opposed to being able to jump anywhere and then next turn some Shenanigans would happen these guys would focus me this would focus here and so on so forth okay um the other thing to note that when you transfer is any damage on your summons or any negative effects or positive effects in your summons become your effects so if this tank had four damage on it and a poison I would now take four damage and a poison um when I essentially switch into that form this is how you keep your summons alive throughout the course of the scenario it is a very very very important component of what's going on but let's roll back to what we had at the beginning here which was me being in jumper mode in the tank looking like this and suppose that instead I wanted to you know use the bottom part of this card to move switch move so I can use this to kind of like command my my minions being kind of better position so maybe I'd move here then I could switch with the repair drone we would be now in repair drone mode and then we could move forward like this that would be a way that we could get the repair drone off the map and then choose to be in repair drone mode which is going to heal us for two at the beginning of our turns but it is going to limit our ranged attacks um so there's a lot of options and that's just me having chosen I mean you could see how essentially wide the decision space can get very very quickly as you're going through this process if you want to you know have a ranged attack and then move and then switch and then move or if you want to switch to someone you know I could have switched for instance with uh this this guy right here to get up into melee and maybe I was worried about him dying so I could have switched with the bottom here healed you know I said maybe four damage and poison so I heal myself for two so I can heal off that poison and now I can attack but these lines are all optional so maybe I don't choose to transfer on the second one and I just double attack to this guy um this card faceless entity is is that kind of the example of how you could have sort of just a zillion options and what to do on a given turn even once you've already laid your cards down the decision space does not stop for this class really at any point in time now all of that is fine and good and we actually have a pretty nice little setup here uh but you can get into situations where you sort of make some clumsy mistakes uh along the way so you know this is one that I think is a little bit this is fine but suppose that I've been in a little bit of a different situation maybe I was back here and my tank was over here at the beginning of the round while I was in jumper mode here you know and the jumper focuses on enemies as farthest away so this is an entirely unreasonable um for this to happen and uh you know maybe what I want to do is support this tank over here and then I end up kind of like switching into this mode and you can sometimes leave it so that your minions are sort of stranded away from you in the case of fighting two snowms that's not such a big deal but it's important to recognize that when you switch somewhere you leave something behind and I don't know about y'all but for me I always was thinking that I would swap positions like I would leave the robo legs here and I'd go over here which isn't the case what you were leaving behind becomes something else so you are teleporting but what um happens with your minions is they end up kind of being staticed or picked up by you and moved along and then dropped off somewhere else and that can create a cognitive load or just a surprise that you sort of think you're going to leave a certain kind of minion somewhere and not somewhere else and I'm using examples of two guys that have Shield uh it's maybe a little hard to see on the glare here but both of these minions have shields so it's maybe not that big of a difference but if I'm in um repair drone mode let's say like let's say that I actually had done kind of that switch that I'd suggested earlier and I was in repair drone mode and we had something like this you know next round this guy owingy jumps over here these guys are fighting maybe they back off and shoot these guys um and all of a sudden I'm back here fighting and again there's no ends so probably we shred them but if they were a little bit tougher and I wanted to try to save these guys I might end up switching into one of these modes but then what I do is I leave my weeny little repair drone behind and now it's very susceptible to being killed so that is um there's a lot of space that happens here and the thing that can be really tricky is that if one of your summons gets killed you know summon classes you expect summons are going to get killed and one of the reasons I like the bone shaper is because I don't care there's a lot of them um with this class though I think losing your summon is more painful than it is with any other class uh it's not just that it's a lost card like it is for anyone else but all of a sudden your options diminish greatly suppose that I had had a plan this turn like let's say that we had this setup and I was going to go before these imps I'm going to switch into the Drone to to save the Drone from getting killed and for whatever reason things get unlucky they draw a really fast initiative I am don't have my initiative 12 card with me anymore whatever um and again maybe not against Ms but against certain things like chaos demons that have a very volatile initiative order you might not have control over what happens and this guy might die because the enemy drew a plus one when you didn't expect them to draw plus one um or you just ended up accidentally stranding a robot somewhere thinking that it would be fine because oh it's got six hit points and a shield it'll be okay and just one or two bad attacks later um that robot has been destroyed um all of a sudden now your options for what to do have diminished greatly anytime I'm doing a transfer now I basically only have one decision rather than kind of forking decisions along the way and that could be something that really ends up hurting you along the way um I know it's a hard it's a difficult it's a difficult series of choices um but the point I'm trying to make is that uh losing a robot is is is worse on this losing a summon is worse on this class than I think any other class that exists uh in my experience in in the in the Haven universe um the last thing I want to talk about is sort of the weirdness of initiative order and that was kind of uh based off of my setup at the beginning here so you can put Cards into your perk deck that allow you to transfer when you draw them it allows you to transfer and you can get into some weird situations with this ordering here where this tank might move forward and attack and draw that card that lets me transfer and so I could then transfer and because this is the second summon this would then immediately get to go so it would go and attack and then this goes and attacks and then I could take my turn as normal so the way that you're you're um initiatives are set up here your summons are set up here can randomly you could draw something that says oh you got to make a decision right now do you want to switch do you not want to switch you can also take cards that let you move your robots and you don't have to move the robot that you just drew so you know in this instance here suppose that this guy had drawn move one of your minions to spaces it doesn't have to be himself so I can move this guy up here so he's a little bit closer to me maybe or maybe just farther back here so this thing does not aggress on it there are a handful of options that I could use to avoid getting my robots killed but those things are not necessarily in my control and you need to adapt to those things I think much more proactively or reactively both really uh than you would with most other classes now I also said I wanted to warn you about pitfalls with this class and this is one that oh I actually we ended up winning this scenario because it was a pretty easy scenario but I was useless for most of the scenario something like this happened to me is a little bit of ridiculous example um to make my point but it is entirely possible that you have a summon with lower moves and you'll see how badly I was burned I actually upgraded this minion um that is just kind of farther behind because of the way things happen in the scenario you're going to summon minions early and uh people might end up getting stuck a little bit behind you've seen that before as a summer class you know what I'm talking about um however fortunately I am in coiled limbs mode jumping on hibbly bibly here and there and that has allowed me to move forward and so I might do an attack here and then think to myself well I've got lots of movement cards so what I'll do is I'll switch back into this mode and then kind of run forward and I will be in good shape so I switch back here putting this guy up front he's got seven hit points and a shield everything's fine and then I move forward but then I realize oh wait when I'm in tank mode it's minus one to all move abilities that's okay I've got you know let's say I have moved four and I get to here um but then let's say things got unlucky over here and they end up actually deleting this guy well now I am forced to stay in tank mode until I make another summon and I have minus one to all my move abilities and I'm behind where I wanted to be in the scenario um and I just use my move four and so you can get yourself into a situation based on the negative uh aspects of these um various summons that you hadn't intended I hadn't intended on staying in tank mode for very long my idea was that I was going to switch back to the front just after kind of shuffling this guy forward thanks to transfer and movement and uh it could it can lead you into a trap where you're sort of stuck uh and and struggling to keep up so I I think that it it is again I want to I want to caution you so badly against getting your minions killed having one minion in play and having that one minion die um strands you in the form and the mode that you are in and you might not want to be stranded in the mode that you're in so I'll be talking about that as I'm evaluating these various cards let's get into it let's talk about the level one cards let's start with what we came here for summons this is the thing that when you open this character box you're like oh my God look at all this cardboard that's in here the exciting stuff that's going on we're gonna go through piece by piece with the one um starting with the one that I think is the absolute best that you will use forever and it is the repair drone uh maybe you won't use this quite as much in the ranged build I will say again I used mostly a tanking build and this card was absolutely amazing um there's a lot of reasons why this one is amazing it's a ranged minion so it's gonna live for longer it's a flying minion so it's gonna live for longer it's got a good range a range of three and when it's in Minion form it's just always doing playing one point heals which is very very convenient along the way um it doing that along the way means that you're getting rid of all those nasty negative effects and also is just incidentally helping out while incidentally hurting the enemies yeah it only does one damage instead of two damage but its survivability alone and the fact that it just kind of like hovers behind everything else uh makes this a top tier summon for us for a really long time the other thing is that it's mode is really solid and perfectly fine as a negative effect healing would be two at the beginning of each your turns is just slightly better than it being in robot mode and instead you're uh sorry in being in summon mode and then you being in robot mode um it so you get a little bit of extra healing if you need that so this is a great option to start the scenario with this and play and go really low initiative hoping the monsters hit you kind of before you go you can get value out of that right away or you can switch into this in the middle of the scenario when you're struggling you just have a lot of different options with it um it making your range attacks have minus one range is annoying but not that big of a deal most of the time particularly not for me because I was playing melee mode but I don't think that this is something to be too concerned about so as a summon this one is top tier and the bottom of this ability is completely respectable on its own yeah I modified this guy it was probably a mistake but I was so burned by this one scenario that I said never again I'll never let this tank fall behind again um it's just a totally fine Workhorse minion this is just a big fat skeleton that's gonna last for a while uh by the time you get to middling levels six hit points and a shield doesn't go as far as you really want it to so this one can sometimes be a little bit of a trap but it's got pretty solid survivability it just really sucks when opponents draw those criticals against you and you're like well great one Shield doesn't go a long way against that critical and it doesn't do a ton of work itself I was really excited by the idea of being in this mode through the scenario having a Perma Shield one seems really great to me and I love sunkeeper from uh from gloomhaven and so I didn't think that that minus one move would be that much of a nightmare but it really was so be wary it is easy to forget that when you're not in this mode you don't have minus one to move and then you switch and suddenly you do have mine this one to move and maybe you were planning on Switching and then moving but your move is actually reduced by one after you have switched so you just have to be really really cautious about that negative effect because it is easy to forget the overhead of it bottom of this card is serviceable but really if you're taking this card it should be for the minion which is good early and I would say when you start getting middling levels it becomes questionable sniper turret is really cool thematically I want it to be better than it really is and I've used it in a few scenarios where there's not necessarily a lot of moving going on you know there's a lot of like defend the hill kind of scenarios where you can get away with using this minion there are also other ways for you to move this around if there's not a ton of moving in the scenario and I tried a few times to make this work but frankly I just don't think it's worth it uh even on the ranged build I don't think that this lasts for a very long time it also has a weird set of abilities range 4 is great on this thing so if you put it somewhere decent in those defend the hill scenarios it will last for a while doing its kind of effect that bottom attack is is interesting because it gives you a lot of flexibility of something to do but it is only an attack one so I don't often end up using it for that and then it's top when you're in you know sniper turret mode yourself the it's turning it turns your melee attacks into ranged attacks essentially and makes you a little bit slower that is really awkward with this uh minion because one of the things you want to do in theory in a scenario is switch into this minion move somewhere else and then switch out of it so that it can continue turning from the new location but you have a limited flexibility in how you get there so I tried to make this work it'll work in some scenarios for you but I think it is not as um it's it's not very flexible and I think that that's that's to be noted and you can't afford to summon a minion and just leave them behind um it really it really hurts you you need your minions to be able to keep up with you throughout the scenario so I would put this one on the lower list of the minion they just decided that every class needs some way to deal with shielded monsters and this is the answer uh for Hive Hive is pretty bad at dealing with shielded monsters in general so this card's actually more important than it is on some other classes because your primary source of continual damage output is too damage too damage to damage from your minions kind of stacking up plus you're just sort of a big minion yourself in a lot of ways um this one kind of lets you break parity with that in terms of having Pierce and it attacks multiple enemies it's got a huge amount of movement which is actually really really important but this guy gets deleted fast I can't tell you the number of times that I put him into play and he was pretty much immediately killed by enemies um you might say hahaha you're really bad at things nick uh but I will tell you right now it is it is tough to keep this puppy alive um it just takes one bad shot from an enemy to to kill it and if you are like oh well okay I'm gonna keep it alive which is what I've learned very very quickly you need to do switching into him giving you minus one to all your tax yeah you get that that pierce five but the minus one really hurts it's pretty annoying um so I don't love being in Arcane generator mode I want this to be in Minion mode most of the time but if it's in Minion mode it's more vulnerable uh I don't think I ever ever use that bottom ability it seems totally serviceable but if you're taking this card with you it's not for that bottom ability so you might use it one or two times but that's not really the point I think this card is for Mad Lads uh insane amount of respect if you manage to pull this card off but it is even less survivable than the arcing generator is it moves fast it hits hard it retaliates for the one hit that it's going to be able to take before it dies and being in this mode is bizarre as heck you take damage at the beginning of your turns but you get to do a little bit extra damage along the way so you're not excited to be in this mode but you probably constantly need to to switch into it because if it's attacked even once uh that's that's pretty bad so I think I took this with me maybe one time of all the whatever 20 or plus scenarios that I played with this class and it's exactly as sus as you think it would be I please tell me how to play this card correctly uh I I understand that mostly what you probably need to do is play the other cards that um keep it alive and play the the items that keep it alive but I would not recommend running this card unless you really know what you're doing coiled leaper is our coil limbs is weird uh it's very survivable lots of hit points it's your most survival minion and for that reason alone it's worth taking with you it does this crazy thing where it jumps towards enemy backlines so kind of the ideas you summon it so it can move you further in the scenario uh and then switch into it so that you have the opportunity to heal it Get Behind Enemy Lines and fight them take some hits yourself kind of switch back so the idea of this is very interesting and I've used it in certain scenarios you can look at a scenario and tell when this might be helpful for you but it does get you into some funny situations and you just need to be aware that uh you will take a lot of hits if you're going to do this I could because I built a very tanky version of this character but it can get you into trouble so be aware of that also it's mode being add jump to all your move abilities is like not good however the bottom of this card is the best of the bottom of all the cards move forward jump is just always a solid solid card so it could be worth taking this honestly just for the move in scenarios particularly at lower levels where you just need that extra flexibility melee cards are next faceless entity is a card that you can play whether you're playing a melee version or something else because the top and bottom of this give a lot of flexibility I kind of demonstrated that in the beginning the thing that I find goofy about the top of this card is that a lot of times if I attacked two and then switched into a minion I was no longer able to attack two so it kind of kind of depends on what you summoned where things are what's been killed and so just be aware that a lot of times this reads attack two swap or swap attack 2 rather than Attack 2 swap attack two or attack two attack two I think if you're happy with two of these three at the top or two of the three at the bottom you you can be content it's also our lowest initiative card so it does a lot of work that way and the bottom depending on where your minions are can slingshot you across the board in a pretty exciting way faceless entity I think is a card that you're going to take with you for a long time and really should continue to do so the other melee card that we're looking at is Reaper function I don't like this card there's ways to make Reaper function good I get that the idea is you're supposed to like be in Jackal Mech form to add plus one to your melee attacks and then make it hurt more but there are other classes that have attacks like this maybe even exactly like this but they're just strictly better which is just kind of a little frustrating I guess you also get an experience point for this so it's like the designers want you to do this ability but it's just not that exciting it is more exciting certainly in four player if you all don't know already I play two player um so you know that's that's certainly a limitation the bottom of this card actually is really cool though I have dunked a lot on loot in my other videos I don't consider that to generally be a priority of my gameplay or gameplay style I I choose victory over cash um that being said I like picking up lots of cash along the way as well but I tend to do it more incidentally rather than focusly but switching into a minion and then looting around them does give you a lot of options and sometimes you just want to have a transfer on the bottom so Reaper function is a totally solid card to take with you for the times that you can trigger the top but I played it more for the bottom than anything else ranged cards I didn't play higher impact projectiles that often because of the kind of build that I was going and I did test once playing this uh while running the the ranged build and it's actually pretty cool I think that if you have support for that top ability you know an attack two two target range three is like the daggers As Old As Time honey bun get down from there please is is the Tale As Old As Time uh and and if you can give it some extra support it's gonna be worth it hold on one second she fled the moment I came at her um the bottom of this car Grant two of your summons move three is really nice this uh is assuming that you are kind of in full mode you have lots of stuff in play uh and it's only annoying because you yourself can't move along with them which you often want to because you're trying to body block a lot of times for your minions rather than them body blocking for you um the 16 initiative obviously also amazing the other range card is one of the goofiest cards and most exciting cards in this entire kit and it is launch pod a three damage three range attack is just fine totally serviceable but it lets you jam another summon action card out of your hand that you basically fire the Pod hit the enemy and the uh robot summons in front of them thematically this is just the coolest thing that this um this this character class does and it is the reason I chose this mercenary when I read through I loved the idea of this unfortunately I ended up not doing it quite as often as I would have liked a because I didn't give a lot of range support the way that I ended up building and B as I most often wanted to use this at the beginning of the scenario but because your 10 card class playing a third card in your first Loop meant that you were going to be resting earlier caught which took a turnout and because I used so many cards to summon minions I found that I was exhausting from running out of cards a lot and so I didn't love the idea of cutting another turn out of my loop with launch pod so it's really kind of more ideal to have used this in a rest where you have an odd number of cards but I didn't have odd numbers of cards that often because in my first rest cycle I would usually go with doing one summon which meant that I had eight cards going into my next rest cycle and so again I was in this issue where if I use launch pod I'm costing myself an extra turn at the end of the scenario in order for the tempo push of summoning another robot that doesn't mean it's not worth playing this card it just comes with a cost and I am a player who tends to play on longevity I am an incremental value-based player rather than someone who burns fast Burns bright and so one of the was one of the adjustments for me in getting into playing this class and this card lean even heavier into the struggle of that so I didn't use it as much as I quite wanted to the bottom of this card is great transfer and heal 2 on yourself does a lot a lot of work lets you scoop up uh your robots that are suffering healing some off of them um it's also as I mentioned on the last card just beneficial to have a transfer on the bottom of a card available to you all right healing and weird cards we're going to start with just a healing card this card does not have rejuvenate that's a bonus that I put on it um this card uh is your is a Workhorse card I use this card for my entire um kit and build having a move four or heal for uh you just are going to be playing this card I didn't mention this earlier but this class is not a support class because you um don't support any of your other fellow players however you do have a fair amount of healing that you can administer to yourself the idea and Theory here is that you transfer into your minions you take the damage that they've taken plus the damage that you've taken and then you heal it all up and then you kind of send them out again to go fighting which is really cool um and you and you need it uh that's it's a nice way to to play um through this class there are I think builds for this for Hive that really focus more on just your modes I don't think the modes are exciting enough that that makes sense I think you really want to make sure that you're using them as summons as minions so you will need to pick them up and probably heal yourself along the way but just the move forward here um is important in and of itself the other heel card here is interference which lets you swap in and heal immediately so that can be a nice kind of button pull at the top this bottom ability the adjacent allies and enemies suffer one damage is one that I've normally liked on classes especially in a two-player game because it's really easy to manipulate because my freaking robots are everywhere I don't really want to be punching them because it's like punching myself or making it so they're more precarious towards dying so I ended up not using the bottom ability of that interference as much and then as you can see that essentially is just a version of the card that we just looked at which I'll find um It's Just Launch pod but at the top instead of the bottom which feels not great so interference is fine but I didn't use the top of that card very often the bottom is cool however and essential because of what I ranted about earlier it's moved to and then all enemies that Target one of your adjacent summons with an attack choose you to attack instead no matter where they are so you basically are just taking all the damage for a certain minion I didn't I it's important because you want to save your minions but most of the time when my minions had died it was unexpected it was on bad initiative roles 21 is a good initiative but it's not an amazing initiative and so interference I think is very important but I struggled to make this work in the way that I wanted to I see the theory of how it's supposed to work I'm sure people have wonderful stories about how effective it has been for them I just didn't find that it did what I wanted to when I wanted to I always had regrets that I didn't play it on the turn that I was supposed to play it maybe I just need to be a little bit more nostradamusy uh but this card did not work for me in the way that I wanted it to reassemble was a card that I avoided for a while and that was a huge mistake I think reassemble is a very very important card in your kit because I was talking before about longevity being a a big issue with this class because you are using so many of your summons to make it through each of the scenarios you're going to run out of cards because you're using a lot of lost cards along the way so reassemble at the top lets you transfer into someone and then instead of placing the mode that you were in and play as a robot it goes into the discard pile this is I think one of the very few classes that exists in the game that allows you to turn what would have been lost Cards into cards that now go into your discard pile that is really neat um also you can do some janky stuff with getting experience points I guess with this so if you're feeling cute just be aware that that's a side effect of this but the real reason that you do this is for the longevity also it's to not like leave behind you know a sniper turret somewhere where it's like well this is going to be useless the only thing I will warn you about with the top part of reassemble is that there were a lot of times where it's like oh I want it's the thing that you are leaving behind that moves into the discard pile not the thing that you are transferring into which again just a cognitive switch that for me was difficult to pull off at times and then the bottom here is you know a move and a transfer but essentially what it is is a lost card that summons something out of your uh lost pile so a robot that you didn't mean to have die this is an emergency button that allows you to have not killed it the problem of course is that it's a lost card in the bottom it would be a lot nicer that if there was a version of this card that said transfer move to and then play one card from your lost pile of the performer summon action on the card if you do this card becomes a lost card I really wish that that was the case here because I would have taken reassemble with me a lot more often uh because it being used is just a move too really sucks and there are a lot of times even when I was taking this card even when I moved it up my ranking where basically was just a base melee 2 or a bass uh move tube because I didn't want to you know decrease the number of robots that I had in play I didn't have any robots that were dead I'd succeeded at keeping everybody alive and all good and then this card ends up being a total dud in that case which makes reassemble a little bit difficult to recommend for that reason and your last level one card is remote control which is just a basic Workhorse card this card is totally okay you could take it if you're just looking for something else to do it's nice to command your summons around but just moving one of them sort of sucks the bottom so you're mostly using it for the top and its best combo at the top is with your Arc generator because allows it to attack again and Shred through shielded enemies so generally if it's a scenario where you're taking the arc generator remote control is a nice card to take and support it but there aren't a lot of other cards that I think really need that remote control support to be worthwhile so I tried it a few times I don't think it's necessarily worth your time unless you have the right minion you know exactly what you're doing with it this might be the hardest choice that you make in Frost Haven the level 2 cards here are both really good for this class and I think pretty essential in a lot of ways um I have seen some folks recommend just taking your level three and going back to pick up a level two card I think that's completely respectable for me the choice was a non-uh a non-issue my partner loves Turtles this is a turtle robot so I took the turtle robot I thought the turtle robot was going to be better than it really was first of all bottom is move five is really nice I told you that story about how I got so burned on the robot not being able to move that I wanted to take higher flexibility and movement but the problem is like am I summoning this as a robot or am I using it as a movement and most of the time I wanted to summon it as a robot I like being in robot mode gaining two shield for the first attack that damages you each round is great uh especially when I'm playing two players and there are not that many people who are hitting me this was my default starter mode for the beginning of each scenario pretty much all the time um I it's the the the the robot mode of this card I'm struggling the robot mode of this card is basically the same as the healing one right it kind of trundles behind it's got a ranged attack uh instead of doing it does one Shield to Jason allies instead of doing one healing um it doesn't fly it doesn't have the same range that the other robot does and for that reason I actually liked the healing robot more than I liked this robot they're really the same in a lot of ways and I thought that the healing robot ended up being better most of the time which is sort of a shame um this guy being two range away from people just meant that he would get into enemies eyesights more often than I really wanted him to and he does not have any Shields himself even though it feels like he should and so he would get shredded in instances that were pretty bad five hit points is nice but it's not quite enough to really live through more than essentially one attack at any time and then um and then that's about it so I think if you're playing this card you're mostly playing it to be in that Shield 2 mode or for the move 5 at the bottom it is a good card don't get me wrong I'm just talking it down because I want to encourage you to maybe consider taking long-range missile I took long range missile in a test run and I was very impressed with it paired with a specific level three card the top of it is totally fine you're gonna see why I think that it's a lot better but an attack 3 range 5 just gives you a lot of flexibility the bottom here is really cool though it's a it sticks and played the difference between this and the interference card that I was talking about before is that interference only works the turn you play it whereas this lasts until you want to trigger it and it could be something that you you know put up at the very beginning of kind of your lap so you've got three or four rounds before you short or long rest uh to make this happen and you just take the damage for your minion transfer into those spaces um and and that can be very very helpful for keeping your minions alive which is a huge huge problem with this class the only thing that I think is bad and something to be wary about with this is that this is not an option you can be forced to transfer into a minion in a situation that might completely screw up your card play and that's one of the things about this class is that there are certain situations where the transfer ends up hurting you as much as it does helping you so just be aware that the bottom of this can backfire I think which one of these you take depends on which build you're going for the build that I went for the melee tank build I would still take force field going back and doing it again but long range missile is very very respectable and I would have to think about it for a long time let's talk about why when we hit level three no commercial break here we're just going right into it the card that we're talking about here is a machine Bolter it looks a little funny on my green screen background machine Bolter is like the uh sniper turret from the very first room and that it has no movement um and actually it's got a shorter range than the sniper turret does but it does Target two people but I don't think that machine Bolter is good for its summon I think the machine Bolter kind of like the turtle is good for its mode it adds one extra Target to your ranged attack abilities but it does decrease their range by one well heck what if we had some card with some ridiculously long range that we would probably never even need all that range and then we could use it to shoot two people that's amazing hey what if we had other cards that are like that I mean it's not like uh launch pod has that big of a range but we do have plenty of options to go along with this card along the way and this is probably not something that you can do with three targets and shoot at range too but it's hilarious that you can there is support for this card and I underestimated it the one time that I tested it out it was pretty respectable um and a lot of fun so you can be the death dealer yourself I think the ranged build is probably entirely predicated on having machine Bolter in your deck and then every once in a while you can drop it down and it can just shoot a couple people itself and you can move on with your life the bottom of this card is completely respectable I complained before about the card that did move to minions three spaces now you and your minions can move which is really nice for repositioning in a way where you can say I'm body blocking for you or you're body blocking for me or I wanted to set it up to attack in this or that way next turn I ended up taking hijack which uh in retrospect I honestly think I would maybe go back and take the level two card uh because hijack was pretty disappointing for me I know that people have done cool stuff with hijack I just always found it to be fine I took hijack because the bottom part of this card was really relevant for my partner um they were playing something that manipulates the board and puts things on the board that does damage to enemies so the move one make them attack two ended up doing a fair amount of work as just giving me a bottom ability that allowed me to manipulate enemies and I used it for that reason if your teammates care about this then this card is worth it for that reason alone the top of this card though always always always frustrated me I transfer and then I'd want someone to attack but it's the summon placed by the transfer ability which means back where I was before so a lot of times what would happen is that I would need to be somewhere precarious transfer elsewhere so that my minion could attack and then that minion would get the crap beaten out of them uh or I was somewhere where I wanted to transfer so that I could Vault into a situation where I was in melee where my minions were in melee already and I was behind so I was using this as kind of like an additional move thing and a hijack just was so frustrating for me because it never really did what I wanted it to I think the amount of times that you need to set up for this card is more than it feels like and so I ended up just using the bottom of this card most of the time which doesn't feel like what you're supposed to be doing with this card but more power to you if you have succeeded with this I made another mistake at level four which you might understand the theme of like I looked at the cards of this class and said Oh I thought this was going to be the good thing and then it wasn't the good thing it's been a tough road y'all I took a plague protocol why did I take plague protocol I liked the idea of the summon that could put poisons on enemies I wanted I I had a melee build but I was a melee and lots of summons built that was kind of my idea was that I have a little swarm and I'd take their hits for them and they'd just be like bopping on enemies essentially like playing the bone shaper again um and I know that putting poison on people when I've got a bunch of people who are doing one and two attacks like my turtle like my healing guy um really can pile on the problem is that keeping this stupid dumbass alive is such a huge pain in the butt he's got no Shields he's got a fair amount of hit points but when you switch into his mode you can't heal yourself and it's so frustrating and I'm so desperate to heal myself while I'm in this mode that I don't even get the opportunity to attack people and give them poison um I the the downside of this is just too bad to make this card work and I don't I don't know why they felt like this poor guy needed this this penalty um I was really frustrated by this by the handful of times that I used it and I switched to just using it as this bottom ability its bottom ability is cool moving somewhere moving just a little bit like a mild reposition swap into a Target that I want to throw a pack of shields is great but it's a horrible Initiative for that ability so I just wish that this card had one of several things either the negative on the toxin distributor was not quite as bad it had a tiny bit more survivability or it had a better initiative so you could use the bottom of this card more successfully that being said I ended up just pairing this with my high initiative cards that faceless entity card 12 at level one I just paired with this all the time constantly to move somewhere slice and dice some people throw up some Shields I just kind of felt like I was a bad fighter while I was doing that but it was better A lot of times in summoning the toxin distributor don't get me wrong there are some scenarios against certain kinds of enemies in particular where summoning this was well worth it I just wish that i instead taken Divergent destruction I'd didn't take Divergent destruction because up until this point I'd been frustrated with faceless entity and the number of times I was not able to attack to transfer attack two and I said well this is only slightly better and I'm just doing one extra point of damage and I'm not getting full value out of that card so why would I do this I think the bottom of Divergent destruction though is pretty good transferring moving and then after you move doing damage to allies and enemies means that you're a lot less likely to hurt people um or hurt your robots in a way that you uh uh don't want to be doing and so I think Divergent destruction is probably just a better version of a card that I use plenty with a totally respectable initiative and would be the card that I would take on a melee build if you're doing a range build here I honestly don't even know what you go with here um neither of them seem especially great for the range Builds Me Maybe someone has an idea of that that focus on the Range build in the comments I don't like level five level five is like the payoff class or uh level for a lot of classes and they are exciting but they're weird I took code Gemini because I loved the idea of having two active modes I could put like turtle mode on with a shield I could put my heel mode on and just be like an Unstoppable tank or I could you know have some robots I'd switch into the the toxin distributor mode so I can give people some poison while I myself have some Shields and then I would switch over into healing and blah blah blah in practice though using a top ability just to put an additional card into play was was not great it's kind of like the launch pod thing you have to play a card from your hand it was summon action from your hand in your active area so you play a card from your hand which is going to maybe cut a turn of mine out of the game and if I'm doing this in my first cycle I'm definitely cutting a turn out of my hand but maybe I've summoned certain number of things so you have to like figure out when it works best for you and because you have to figure out when it works best for you it becomes real pain you hope that you haven't played those cards for other reasons or that you don't want them in play as a summon or that if you do want them in play as a summon you're going to be doing a transfer shortly afterwards um probably what will happen you know in most instances is you want to have by the end of the scenario three or four active summons in play I think in a scenario that has been successful for you that you've managed to keep alive and code Gemini doesn't change that it just says that instead of three or four active summons I have three or four active well I sorry three or four active summons one of which is your mode code Gemini says now two of those are your mode which is fine but I don't think that the modes are necessarily more exciting than having the robots themselves and the work to do it I don't think is quite worth it bottom of this card is very good though move 4 is nice Grant one of your summons move four gives you a lot of repositioning so I played this card and took it with me into every scenario because I wanted that additional ability to move my robots around but I often was this was often one of the first or second cards that I would lose upon a long rest which doesn't feel good for your level 5 card net dispersal is another really bizarre card um it straight up does away with the you have minus one move to you cannot perform move abilities but all your attacks have have uh pin or we call it pin um whatever I'm gonna keep calling a pin uh add pin to all of your attacks that is very clearly to me designed to be a ranged mode person if you're in if you're using a ranged attack and you throw a pin on it um you essentially have stunned the enemy as long as they're not arranged attack themselves so you can use the mode here just fine the top of this ability though is not supporting of being kind of a ranged build character um it is just a pile of hit points it moves pretty quickly so it's going to get into melee with people um and it's kind of tanky if they have negative conditions then it takes fewer damage I think probably this is friends with certain other classes in uh Frost Haven you might take it based on what other classes folks are playing um I did do a video of someone who I think would play very nicely with this card so you can use it kind of as you are I guess tank minion while you're playing a ranged character and then if you go into its mode to save it you now have a pretty nasty way of making your you know you're not gonna be doing two range attacks anymore because of the bolts are but you instead uh will be adding pin to it what I think is funny though is that if you could do code Gemini and net dispersal um you could do the Bolter and this and just be firing tons of pinning attacks on enemies and that would seem really cool the bottom of this card also seems respectable I mean the number of times that you have three people within range three that are not already in melee which is the ideal situation when you're pinning enemies or maybe they're ranged enemies um is very limited but when you can pull it off it's good I don't love either these level five cards but I did try the net dispersal when I did my little uh ranged character run and it was fine uh going back in time I couldn't tell you which one I was going to take I think because I had taken the toxin distributor I did not feel the need to have another robot if I did not take toxin distributor I might feel the need to have this big boy along with me but code Gemini is okay for the movement neither of them super excite me you're violage may vary triage program saved my life I don't know if it's because I understood this character finally or just been a like a long road but this card single-handedly um first of all allowed me to unlock one of my masteries which was exciting and does a lot of healing does a lot of transferring on the top and bottom a low initiative just it does so much for the Tanki have robots build um that it it it made it made the class from a real struggle into something that was really fun so this card really saved me highly recommend spinning blades as bizarre as all get out it tries to kill itself every turn with its paltry one hit point and then goes leading itself across the room towards a new enemy if you uh are not in the mode so essentially what this says is every turn you must turn you must turn into me or I will die so I guess mostly what it's for is for you to be in spinning blades mode where you are blundering them more than blendering yourself I don't love that bottom of this card does seem cool though uh but I just who cares triage program I think is better I think no matter what build you're doing I I want to hear about weird sword propeller stuff it just seems too whack to me level 7 is a money level for a hive um let's talk more shells and Bombardier first which is the one that I took this card is absolutely incredible yes it only moves one space but you generally have some support like code Gemini to move it into other spaces range for attacking in a bomb area means that you're often attacking two enemies uh and you know even with a move won that range for really Range Five because of the way that the attack pattern Works um this thing is just shooting from downtown constantly in a two-player game the downside of this car does not that big a deal and pushing just matters uh it just depends on how important that is to you but I think this is primarily for the minion version bottom of this card is fine but um I think really summoning the Bombardier at the top is what is exciting about mortar shells recall is pretty funny the top of recall essentially says everything has gone really poorly for you I'm so sorry play this card to to make make it all better um I don't know how I feel about that at seventh level you're hoping that you're playing in such a way that you don't need to press the emergency button so if you're taking this card you're taking it for the bottom which is okay I mean move three and then must teleport to you is a kind of a limited option and it's not like it's a good initiative or anything so it's not like you can say oh my God it's the beginning of a round like this guy is gonna die how do I save him oh I can have him teleport next to me by going somewhere else if this card had a low initiative I think that it would be a lot more playable than it is as is I think not taking mortar shells as a mistake no matter what build you're on they really rub some respect on the high levels of this class I took burning slash because I was kind of melee-ish anyway I talked about how I didn't like Reaper function but upping it significantly sure I'll do that um the bottom is okay too but mostly I played it for that top attacking thing totally fine Workhorse card swarming bulb work is a really interesting and weird card it is as tanky hit points and movement wise as the net dispersal guy from earlier but what it does is it makes it's even more tanky because it makes warding every turn this is a class that has a lot of warding um benefits I had an item an item Loadout that really ended up giving me a lot of wards along the way so I didn't need to prioritize this myself words are pretty cool on this class because they allow you to save yourself a lot of damage or save your minions from a hit you know usually taking a half damage from an attack means that minion is not gonna die even on a surprise critical this guy I just be aware throws a shield on himself first if he doesn't have it and then throws it on someone else and then of course at the start of each return performing award on yourself is like totally great as well so I think that if I did not have an item Loadout I would have been a lot more interested in considering this card I did so I didn't need to the bottom of this card is also pretty amazing in the right circumstance a move six is crazy uh so you can do a lot with that I think swarming bulwark is probably the choice for most people at eighth level it just didn't go with the way that I had set myself up so I ended up with burning slash which is also totally respectable and you know level nine is is bananas which is appropriate but actually is appropriately bananas I think for this class we're going to start with heavy metal um this thing actually hits for a lot of damage which we've kind of been waiting for it's fairly survivable with its hit points and its Shield even though we're at a pretty high level at this point so enemies are gonna be hitting us for a lot back but being in its mode is also amazing I mean you hit for a ton of damage and you get to mess around with your initiative values which is great just everything about the top of this card is really good there's a bottom of this card too and it seems totally fine and nice and tanky it's the card that I probably would be taking if I had hit Level Nine before retiring this character uh but yeah I mean it just it just seems very cool plus I mean like look at that Sledge driver thing like a like a hammer like a jackhammer on legs yeah let's do it let's go disassemble the top of that card is just a a an even bigger uh uh you know attack transfer attack transfer attack transfer again like I'm gonna say you're not gonna run all five lines of that code uh I mean if you do Kudos but I think most of the time you're going to be running some of it and it's a level nine card that's fine but the exciting part is certainly the bottom here where you get to Nuke your summons at the end of this is not a lost card by the way right like that's really funny it's not a lost card but it kind of is a lost card because it makes your lost cards lost uh right all your summons that are killed by this uh get to suddenly just do 20 damage to various enemies so that's a really fun way to delete people and I guess actually going back to level seven I could see taking a recall with the idea of repeatedly disassembling your robots that must be what recall is for um because that's pretty hilarious but to me that doesn't feels very uh me it feels like more like the meme build rather than the the kind of structural build and I'll say it's also pretty interesting at level seven eight nine there really isn't any more support for that range build that I was talking about at the beginning so things are kind of running on itself and I think in general when you play this class you do need to be thinking a bit more broadly in terms of I'm not doing one thing I'm doing several things because I am several robots at once um but having the flexibility to keep them alive is just really so important let's wrap up it's already over an hour because this class is just so freaking weird but let's wrap up by talking about some perks all right for masteries I did accomplish the switch into four different summons in one round the way that you do that is with triage program and then drawing randomly and luckily off top your deck why you have a bunch of robots in play I think it's hard to set up for you just need to make it so that you are open to it when it possibly arrives transferring each round is a lot more feasible you can certainly map out what that looks like but it really really means that you can't put your guys into any situation where they die I suspect and I never tried this one because I was struggling enough with this class as it was but I suspect this is going to be one of those kinds of masteries where you are a significantly weaker to your team while you're trying to go for that Mastery because you're just so focused on flipping around that you might not be doing the most effective thing on any given turn so probably a little bit easier to pull off in a larger party game let's talk about these um perks uh totally fine but unexciting these two perks are the ones that I would recommend you just put a bunch of powers in this one and this one both increase the strength right negative one to zero and zero to one of the cards having a surprise transfer could be a really really big deal having a surprise move too could be a really really big deal don't get me wrong when I flip them about 40 of the time I would say I didn't end up using them or didn't need to end up using them but the incidental bonus of this move could be really significant and sometimes this transfer saved an entire um bought along the way uh these right here are totally respectable options these two right here I normally don't like the um uh the rolling modifier ones just because don't like how they interact with Advantage disadvantage but actually because you're doing so many little weenie attacks I like adding the poison and the wound to the deck it depends on what cards you take if you take toxin distributor for instance taking this one is like not as exciting but I think they're both well worth taking I wouldn't take them over this entire kit like I just jammed these and I don't regret that at all because once I had these was in line with when I started to actually feel like things were going well with this class but no matter what your first two checks should be this long one I don't always like the two and three check mark ones this one is absolutely backbreakingly good and really fun even when I was sucking at this class it was the most unique power I have seen in this game choosing your initiative value meant that you could tank when you wanted to you could run away when you wanted to letting it so that your robots was completely under your control meant that they didn't do dumb things while you were long resting so take items that you can use every long rest and then just long rest and have as good a turn as you normally would anyway because yeah you're not doing anything except for healing too but you get to tell your robots exactly what to do which is nearly as good as taking a turn yourself anyway amazing amazing perk I think makes a difference between this class um honestly in a lot of ways I never tried any of these two bottom ones I think this one at the individual short rest you may switch is literally just there to support you getting this mastery and I guess to give you options I don't know didn't seem worth it to me and then the bottom here I had plenty of healing anyway that I didn't feel the need to ignore wounds but maybe I just really really value that heel bot more than you do so if you don't value the heel bot I guess it's a little bit more respectable I just don't think you need it I think there's cooler stuff you can do and there we have it 65 minutes of talking about just the most bananas class that I've played I I can't recommend playing this class to anybody I'll be honest I I just think that it's a lot of work the moments when it's frustrating when Things Fall Apart they really do but in the end I'm glad I played it it was a very unique play style it was fun I don't think it's as powerful as the other classes that I've played so far in this game and I know part of that is because I sucked at playing it um and maybe that's part of the reason why I'm I'm struggling to say yeah I recommend you play it but I did stick with it and I did come into it and it was neat um the the times when things pop off are very cool it just also has moments where things just kind of crumble and you become a bad fighter with a bad pet and those moments did not feel worth the amount of work that you had to put in um where other classes I think can can do a lot of what you do without the same amount of overhead but let me know how it works for you thanks for watching everybody I hope you had a nice time good luck playing The Hive uh and we'll talk soon thanks ciao

Channel: Phoenicks

Views: 2,962

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Id: 9YBHDk7CFgo

Length: 65min 54sec (3954 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023