Shackles Class Guide for Frosthaven

hello everyone and welcome to Phoenix gaming today we are going to go into an unlocked Frost Haven class guide that's the shekels class so if you're not interested in spoilers you should stop watching this video more or less immediately quick announcement before you do that though I am going to be doing a brass Birmingham video for the world series of board gaming very soon I'm in the process of doing it but I'm working with someone who's on mountain time and has children so we have to coordinate that whole thing uh but we are getting there it's gonna be awesome hope you're looking forward to that I am looking forward to it myself without any further Ado let's start talking about this pretty awesome very weird unlocked class what we're looking at here is the pain conduit uh the pain conduit is an Acer which is my favorite race in Frost Haven or the Haven Universe I think that the lore behind the acers is very very cool they have this kind of very ethereal nature to them I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correct I'm sure how many people in the comments who are just very upset about the the way that I've said that but it is what it is and it's kind of a class Caster class I can leaning over here it's kind of a Caster class that is mostly about range attacks however the thing that's funky about this class is you kind of like taking damage you like taking negative effects and you can punish yourself to punish your enemies um on the back here when we're looking at the stats of this class we see pretty much what I just said there we were talking about class that is a ranged Class A control class and those Elemental affinities of uh fire and wind are uh I think quite accurate the two of those get used a fair amount so if you've got people in your party that use these or generate these it's going to change the way that you're going to wind up playing this class obviously I think the statement about being pretty low on melee is pretty accurate um the rest it kind of puts in the middle and a kind of a middling complexity I think this is an interesting class to rate as a three complexity class there are play patterns in it that I think are different enough from other classes that I wonder if it sits on the three to four complexity but I guess at the end of the day mostly what you're doing is shooting people for a lot of damage it's not that the cards are complex it's that managing what you want to do is a little bit complex we had to drop the green screen it was getting too much in our face we're actually using a red screen today because the color of this class is very blue which doesn't play well with green screens uh so bear with me as some of the things will look a little funnier on video because of that but hey that's just the way that it is um so what do I mean by things that are more complex to manage well a lot of the cards in this class essentially say hey you should have some negative conditions it allows you to do X Y and Z if you do have these negative conditions but generally you still have those negative conditions for the most part in any of the Haven games you're trying to avoid having those negative conditions so you have a little bit of a more Focus me kind of aspect to it and what's funny about that is that it kind of it lends itself to thinking that this character is going to be a tank and a little bit it is um we will actually talk about that more when we get to the perks but as far as hit points goes is a medium hit point class like it seems like a lot of classes in Frost Haven are so far I've seen a lot more medium hit point classes versus the meaty HP and the low HP classes along the way that might just be because of what I've happened to unlock along the way but to me it seems like medium is kind of the the the thing du jour of all of our classes here uh so that management and the management of your hit points actually kind of like bone shaper is something that is going to be a bit of a challenge with paying conduit pain conduit was a class that my partner played not me so I have a observational experience of this class and then of course just my general Frost Haven what you have it but that's how we're going to approach this we're going to look at this starting with first level go all the way up through levels just like we normally do we're going to break the level one cards down into four sets and the very first of those sets is basically us talking about the ranged attacks which is kind of fundamental to this class as mostly kind of like a Caster type of class and I like this first card because it's pretty indicative of what you do you do awesome stuff at the expense of something and so the top of this is a walloping four attack at range three two damage to yourself um this card is really solid I'll talk about the bottom in a second but the top of this card is I think primarily what you're using it for a big hit on enemies is pretty good you generally are getting I'd say like compared to most Caster classes probably like a plus one to this attack the expensive two damage to yourself right like I think a default Caster would do like a three attack at range three so that is kind of what you're giving up here I think given that you have those extra hit points it's pretty reasonable I would say the blood ritual is like the the standard in a lot of ways like what you can expect to get out of this class the bottom here gets into the really goofy stuff and one of the categories we have later is just goofy cards and the bottom of this is like a goofy card when an ally gets a negative condition you can soak it on to yourself you can soak multiples onto yourself that's a really neat concept and allows you to do some weird stuff if you're really doing the negative soaking uh condition soaking thing but this is a 10 card class so if you're using a lost card it's definitely something that's going to have to do a lot of work and to me this is only going to do a lot of work and scenarios where the effects of those negative conditions are really going to hamper your allies maybe if the enemies are coming in with piles of disarms or piles of poisons or whatever and you're like okay great I'm gonna take all of them and help us all out I can see that generating a lot of value it is probably as you may well know much better at four player than my two player experience and so we did not use this ability very much in our game I can see it pretty being pretty spicy in the like combo kind of approach towards playing this class after this we've got the agony of others um you can't quite see it because of the the red screen but this attack wants a fire element in order to do additional damage and it's just an attack two at range three but if you've got that fire element for every negative condition you have you can soup this bad boy up um pretty easy to make this an attack three having two three or four negative conditions on you I think is a little bit harder to pull off but of course we did just talk about a card where you could maybe just be soaking up your entire party's negative conditions repeats of the same condition and this could suddenly become just an absolute Mega Blast in our two-player party this car did not do a lot of work and I think it eventually got cut uh sooner rather than later but it's definitely got an absolutely huge upside for a level one card you can do more with this than almost any other level one card in terms of like its absolute ceiling of what it can do which is pretty wild for just having a fire the bottom here again kind of is a little little goofy although we I think we've seen things like this before at least in items in previous Haven games when you take damage you basically get to make another enemy take the same amount of damage and the one thing that's that's true about this that you have to be wary of is on the next three sources of damage so you don't get to control what this looks like so it could be kind of like a one one two situation obviously you taking less damage is usually a good thing this is also going to mean that if you are hurting yourself you know you can uh you know that the enemies are going to take a certain amount of damage along the way again for a lost card um you really want something to do a lot and this can do pretty confidently six points of damage and certainly at higher levels actually becomes even more damage and six is a low amount of damage because I'm expecting that you take two three times and you could control that by even the previous card that you played and this card gives you a whopping three experience points if you use the loss ability on the bottom so I can see this being really pretty gnarly but again this is a 10 card class you got to be really careful about how often you're using those lost cards in terms of your own longevity but this really compile on a lot of damage pretty quickly I see this as being especially powerful in a boss scenario where longevity is not really the thing so much as raw power line of transference is going to be a total Workforce for Workhorse for you in a couple of different ways one it's a 25 initiative which is one of the better numbers on this class it's not a very fast class in general you've got that move four on the bottom which gives you a lot of flexibility that you wouldn't normally have you don't need to do a ton of moving on this class so when you do you want to move moving a lot because your range class and then the top there is a pretty easy attack four to trigger you just need to have a wind to do it you get an experience for doing so and you can make your enemies suffer the negative effects that you have this is a really neat card in the sense that this card is on any any Frost Haven or gloomhaven class would be pretty Nutters I think this card is really good no matter who you're playing but it's a little weird in that this is the one class that's like oh do I really want to give up my my pain resource my negative condition and kind of minimize my other effects and so you start to see the beginning of like kind of different builds here there's a little bit more of the like I don't know I'll say like the evil healer build um a lot and then there's sort of the like the suffering Blaster build uh that kind of you get that theme in these range cards that are coming out transferred injury is a card that my partner really liked you saw that she upgraded it um it is especially good I think in a two-player party so you will see why it allows you to heal an ally and then for the amount of healing that you do you get to whap an enemy as well um this quite often if you have the right elements is a heel three attack three which is just a lot of stat block to have on a card you obviously need need the setup to make it work but the other reason that I put this card kind of uh next on this list is because we're about to move into healing cards for this class because this class is about suffering and what do you do to counter suffering as you heal yourself on the other side so in the bottom here being able to do a heel three for any of your allies or yourself and then dropping a wound on yourself is a fine bottom ability I think a number of classes would be okay with playing that bottom ability but this class actually can make use of that wound by then on this following turn giving it away to somebody or adding one to one of your own attacks because you have the wound so there's a lot actually that you can do with the top and the bottom of this card and I think that it actually it ended up being a surprising a surprising Workhorse like if you look at the top and you don't have any of the elements like an attack one heal one is pretty bad so it's if you've got everything set up then you do that if not the bottom is completely respectable um the top ability on cleansing fire here is you know shooting somebody wounding them and everyone adjacent to them getting effects it also generates a fire which is kind of significant um as we've seen there's definitely use of of the materials here that being said I don't think that this card was used for its top very often at all because the bottom is just too good healing yourself moving to and healing yourself again does so much work on this class you will have poisons on you you will have wounds on you so that one um healing dumps them all off and then actually gives you two hit points uh gets you out of the way gets you onto a loot that move on the bottom of this ability does so so so so much work cleansing fire was amazing all the way from beginning until end the healing heads keep coming uh Pleasure and Pain is a card that I think is better for player than it is a two player we don't often find plenty of times we're both hurt but it's not sometimes it's the case that one of us heard the other one's kind of taking a lot of damage something like that so while this is on the top a heal six uh stat block basically um you do need to position yourself in such a way to make it good and it just wound up not being as incredible as we thought it was going to be because heel six on paper is a lot of healing I think that if you have more people in your party there's a lot more opportunities that you're going to be able to get to trigger this which I think makes it a better ability I would definitely try it out because I just think six is a is a big number to see on a card and you can see the the kind of amount of healing that this class has is pretty wild honestly like it plays very well as a support and a blaster class and that's I think something about it that makes it a very uni well maybe not unique but it's certainly quite versatile in terms of raw numbers so one thing that I remember thinking was a surprise on the back of its card is that it describes it as having a lot of control but really what it does is just have big big numbers so I could control enemies by having them dead um the bottom here I don't love that much giving an ally and yourself poison is a pretty severe cost um and making every enemy within three suffer point of damage is fine but I think in a lot of instances this is going to end up doing something like two to five points of damage to enemies and then give you and an ally a poison which I think is it's a lot here I think with the move that you have up there it just doesn't it's not likely that you're going to be very very far from your allies so that you don't have to give them the poison um so I would be playing this card primarily for the top ability I'm sure you could find great uses for that bottom but I don't think they're going to be so prevalent unending torment just a big block of healing that five healing for yourself is something that my partner used all the way up until high levels especially the bottom part of this ability uh because you know you shoot someone at top and then you restore your hit points on the bottom can do a lot of work there you also get to to make yourself suffer a little bit to generate an element that you might need for next turn the disadvantage of the bottom is that probably you're loading up that win so that you can shoot someone next turn so you are going to have disadvantage the disadvantage of the bottom um is gonna is gonna get there and the top you know when muddling yourself is not going to be that bad so it's entirely reasonable to kind of like use this to move somewhere heal yourself immobilize yourself then your friend goes and opens the door and then you start shooting bad guys as they come in the room the fact that this card is the same on top and bottom gives you an interesting amount of Versatility in what your other card is right there's there's a lot of times in in the Haven games where you set up and you're like I'm gonna play this top and this bottom and when you're playing in a really clever way you're gonna say I'm gonna play this top and this bottom if I have to play this top and this bottom that's okay and I have a backup plan for it and this card sort of says I'm doing this and now the other card that I play I want to consider with the top and bottom do and I actually think that that adds even though it's fewer options it actually adds to your control over the situation and so if you know that you need that pile of healing this card no matter what the other card you're gonna have does is gonna support that we're next going to move into the summons unstable Effigy here is all messed up looking because of the red screen um my partner really tried to make this work uh she just thought it was so funny that it kind of like trundled forward and then tried to explode she really liked the idea of it punishing people it's fine I mean it's very entertaining for sure it gives you a bunch of experiences most summons do uh and the bottom move is a little funny I mean it's a low initiative which is nice and you know whether you can kind of move somewhere and then immobilize yourself and set yourself up to attack next turn because you've got ranged attacks and then you on the following turn can then use that immobilize to give it to an enemy or do some damage so most of the time when you look at a move for immobilize yourself people are like oh that seems really tricksy um but if there's a class that can make it work it is this one so actually the bottom of this card is very respectable and it gives you a wind along the way so we already talked about it let me pull this card back up but this card really sets you up I think nicely for line of transfer reference on the following turn it basically is custom designed to run over somewhere mobilize yourself next turn for damage shoot an enemy they're not gonna move either so the uh inherent combo that's built with those two cards there is pretty nice um the other enemy that or Ally that we had was the scar Effigy here um I played a character that was a little bit more uh uh assassiny I guess and so I didn't want to be taking a lot of hits and so at times we summoned the flesh fiend just to be big meat sack that was in the way it does a good job of being a big meat sack that's in the way because the top ability that you can take the damage that it's taking means that you can kind of just make sure that this extra body is in the way uh for a while the problem of course with with most summons is that if he just stops being able to move in the right places then he's not doing as good of a job of being a meat Shield I do think this is better at two player than it is at four player but it's only okay um the initiative here is also very good it's kind of funny that both of the initiatives on the summons are are quite solid and the bottom here a move to retaliate two on a Caster is not normally something that you want to be doing this is a class that actually can get away with doing something like this because you might have other abilities now or at later levels that penalize enemies essentially for getting in the mix with you so you can kind of lean into that theme I think overall this card is more fun than it is good I think a lot of the fundamental like blasting stuff does more work in this class the blasting and the healing stuff does more work on this class than this card itself does but it is more respectable than I thought it was going to be on paper all right now we're getting into the weird cards and I'll say right up front the weird cards were a part of this class that um that we struggled with I mean it seemed like setting these things up was very cool but also over time we just sort of learned like hurting people a lot and healing ourselves a lot seems to just be more straightforward more impactful I think the Wombo combos you can do with these weird cards are out of control you just need to set them up correctly maybe you'll get in the comments and you'll be like hey every single time I had this set up and it worked just fine like it's absolutely amazing I can see the ceiling on these abilities but the work that you need to do for them is not little I think um again tell me if I'm wrong but the the combination of of many of these lost cards that I see you know you could I could see you putting four lost Cards into play and going absolutely Supernova with this class but you're gonna pass out in about 10 Rounds which isn't necessarily helping your party in the way that I think you need to for most scenarios so let's dive into it this ability here lets you take every every every negative condition you have and just plop it on your enemies not the really nasty ones but the other ones you can this depends on what negative conditions you've been able to pick up so probably like wounded poison pretty pretty default that you'll sort of like have those and just sort of like be suffering and hopefully not get killed and then you can just pile that onto all your range attacks on enemies this could be really really nasty like I could see so essentially like this could be a one card combo where your plan is essentially to get a poison wound on yourself and then go through the scenario you don't tank anything you just kind of support your allies and you slowly bleed to death while you shoot all the enemies and they slowly be to bleed to death altogether um the bottom of this card is also quite solid we we've seen this already with an attack where you can throw your condition on someone else the thing is that if you're playing this card the bottom ability is just a little bit weird in that it's it's anti-synergistic right like you in theory when you play this card want to be set up to like do all these negative things to enemies pretty much immediately afterwards but you have you know on a prior cycle use the bottom of this card to give enemies those adjacent conditions um I just don't know that the bottom of this card makes sense with the top of this card and I wouldn't take this card just for the bottom of this card so I like the combo potential at the top but I just think it's a very specific build that you got to consider uh when you're getting there Swift vengeance is a card that we pretty much never use this card I think is a lot nastier when you have a lot of enemies on the battlefield so having X number of negative conditions you have cursing on people yeah is not good in a two-player game I've already talked to you also about how much I don't like loot in a two-player game and that bottom there requires more work than just doing the one move there three move Loop one is is really really good but a lot of times we're using that wind to make big attacks on people so uh I do think that this that this card is is much more interesting in a four player game even if you're playing a heavy negative condition build though you need to have a certain number of enemies the certain number of enemies need to be within range and you need to have the negative conditions it's a lot of work to set up the top here and I think they just got really scared about curses after after the gloomhaven experience and so these kind of like big curse combo cards require a lot of work to set up and this is no exception the incredible initiative here is absolutely worth considering and like I said if you have the wind move three elute one even a two player game is a very very good so um I do think that this card deserves some respect I just don't think that it's going to end up getting played very often in comparison to some of these other ones all right explosive wounds is a little goofy this is something that makes one of your allies suffer damage and enemies adjacent to that that um enemy suffered damage we try to use this for a little bit um there was a brief period of overlap where I was playing a tank and it worked okay uh but only okay it wasn't that exciting and then when I switched into a class that wasn't a tank this was never really a thing that we wanted to do um and then the bottom of this is is really designed for those crazy Supernova I'm gonna take all of my allies negative conditions um if you're doing the take all my allies negative conditions I'm assuming that you're kind of you've maybe put that other kind of permanent card into play that we talked about at the beginning so this is I guess the slower way of doing that I think that again kind of like uh kind of like the the first of the shared Affliction you know the the top and the bottom here don't to me seem like they they jive very much in terms of what it is that they're doing um strategically because I think that this is a class more so than other classes where your strategy throughout the the round like am I going to be someone who's collecting a pile of negative effects and then doing some big you know crazy tax on people because of that or giving it to all my enemies because of that um or am I kind of focusing on like big numbers big healing uh this card doesn't I think really fit into either of those game plans especially well and so if you've had more success with this card I'd love to hear about it because we couldn't make it work for us that well um this card I think was played like nearly never you'll notice that like as I went through these level one cards there were a bunch of cards I said I know that these were really great and we struggled with this class at low levels it was when this class started to level up the level up of options on this class I think are Nutters just really really good so if you're having a hard time you're playing this class at first level stick with it you will unlock and it won't take long to do so you'll get to knock out a couple of the cards and you get to kind of decide a little bit more like am I going for like how do I want to to be using my cards because I think at first level this class has bitten off a little bit more than it can really chew and it as you level up you get to kind of hone in a little bit more on what it is that you want to do with the class which is one of the cool things about it so the top here um lets you just sort of like dump all of your negative conditions this is I guess like the emergency button if you uh if you have have like wounded yourself essentially or if you've done kind of all these negative things to yourself and piled them on enemies and you you need to press the I need to get out of here now um ability uh I guess it's it's it's really really good with that I take all of my allies negative effects and you can kind of play this on the subsequent turn dump all of them immediately and then play another card from your hands I think that's intended to be sort of the primary combo with this because that wasn't a big part of our build we didn't play with the top part of this very much um the bottom ability also very very funny uh I think it is pretty clearly designed again for that sort of like Supernova where you really want to like punish enemies you want to collect all these negative conditions and then you're shooting them at enemies based on the cards that allow you to kind of like transfer these over or or make that work along the way but that's a lot of lost cards like let's take a quick look so of this class is 13 starting cards six of them are lost cards and these are the three that you would use to go into like the full insano build the one that seems very combo-tastic and exciting it's that top thing that says when you attack you give the negative conditions to enemies it's the bottom one on the right here that says you take all negative conditions for your allies and it's this bottom one left here it says I don't suffer for those conditions on my allies for the next couple of rounds and I can keep shooting bad guys with it so like assembling all these together does seem deeply exciting but also deeply painful and I don't mean painful in the way that I think the pain conduit's intended to be I think painful in the way like we're gonna get to a certain point in the scenario and it is up to the rest of you to play the rest of this game because I am dead because I think you saw my lost cards so it's very cool and I just think that the longevity issue becomes a very very real problem now there are a few scenes in Frost Haven that are like kind of geared to be like 12 rounds Long and I think when you do those that's maybe a good time to try this bananas build but that that kind of like Arc at the beginning like I said was tough for us when we first started this class but let's look at the level UPS the level two cards I think are are are both very funny and they're very build dependent um I think this is the beginning of what you see as the the fundamental difference between the two Builds on the right we have Reversal of Fate that top lost card is absolutely amazing it's ten stat points plus a bless and a curse but it is a lost card right but that's the kind of card that you want going into the very last room so um extremely respectable Range four is massive so the question is are you gonna be playing the bottom of this card and this is sort of like one of the the paying conduits builds which is the I suffer you suffer thing and we've we saw a little bit about that at first level but making it so that you are bouncing your damage back at enemies can be really good can be really bad um it is it's tough to necessarily say but it does pretty much always work and there are some enemies that this is better against than it is against others because it ignores Shields and things like that the low initiative is nice too and the number of times that you need to move on this class again is pretty low because it's got decent range abilities both on its heels and on its attacks so you'll be standing there a lot and you can put this into play and then just kind of like sit there until you get hit with it this is the card that my partner took I don't think she regretted it at all it was pretty awesome meanwhile infection Purge is cool again very high upside but takes all of that work you really need to be you know on the top here collecting all those negative conditions and then you could find two enemies and you could do quite a bit of damage to them you take the damage too so I said the kind of like you suffer I suffer thing this is put in some work in advance to get those negative conditions have those negative conditions not be killing you then have two enemies within three spaces and all of us are gonna take a bunch of fun damage together um it's repeatable right which so so again the upside of this is is potentially very very cool but it's a lot of work and it's something that you need to consider if you've played this class at level one um you should try to see how many negative conditions can I collect because originally my partner's plan was to do this like weird negative condition build I took my other class because we thought that we were going to be like a negative condition party and turns out that it just it was too hard to figure out so by the time we hit level two uh she ended up grabbing Reversal of Fate instead and didn't look back the bottom of this card is at the bottom of the left card the bottom of infection Purge I think is a bad lost card it's a neat idea for a tanking ability that like I can keep all of my allies alive but the party still takes a certain amount of damage as a whole and it being a lost card I am struggling to imagine why I would be playing the bottom of this card maybe in a four player game where I'm playing some kind of weird like beefy eat everything kind of build I could see a weird build using this but I just don't think it's fundamentally good so if you're taking infection Purge take it for the top level three kind of continues with the I suffer you suffer theme maybe that's just the class so I should stop saying that but here we have burned at both ends which is the card that my partner took the top there on paper to me looked really bad suffer up to four damage to make an enemy suffer up to four damage or if you've got fire you can make them take two more damage I thought that this just didn't seem like worth what it was doing and boy did she prove me wrong the number of times where you don't have to draw from your deck and you just guarantee that XYZ enemy with shields dies so long flame demons I am not concerned about you anymore is actually pretty cool there are a lot of times in certain scenarios where it is like that box needs to die this certain thing needs to die like stuff like things that weren't specific enemies that had specific Heavens a lot of scenarios with objective goals and this was just like yeah I'll take three and make sure that it dies I don't want to risk it I don't want to waste another turn on it I'm just gonna incinerate them and then move on with my life when we get to perks you'll also see kind of a little bit more about the hit point game but it it surprised me on paper I think this is really bad I just don't think that it's worth it but the the control the guarantee is worth something very very tangible the bottom of this card is also pretty good again on paper looks really bad to me three damage to disarm and adjacent enemy in yourself um first of all a couple things about this my partner did not play a build where you know it was like remove your things or give the things to the enemies which so you can suddenly make this disarm chain into like multiple disarms even still she used this card plenty it would be a move three disarm herself she was planning on healing herself next turn anyway using one of the top cards so by taking that enemy out and then basically allowing me to just beat them to death um this bottom could end up being really nasty making that fire would sometimes come in handy as well although I will say oftentimes you use the fire for attacks so the fact that you're disarmed means that you probably can't use it in the way that you really think so so I would really treat this card as the move three disarm thing um yeah again burned at both ends looks bad on paper to me but in practice actually I was I was really really impressed reprisal like heal two and put a pile of um retaliate in play seems like a funny theme with this class you don't often want to be retaliating uh with a ranged class and this is an initiative 70 card with a retaliate on it so you gotta pair it with something that's like low and and moves you somewhere that doesn't seem especially good to me um the bottom ability also is weird because it says when you take damages turn enemies are going to take damage too so again it's a it's it's fine ability but the fact that this card's initiative is 70 for both the top and the bottom means that it needs to be paired with something of a lower initiative so if you're taking this car you should be looking at the other cards that you're playing and making sure that you can get underneath what your enemies are doing because otherwise it's going to be kind of disappointing because of that I don't and at my experience I would actually recommend taking burn to both ends it does something unique that that a lot of characters in The Haven games can't do and reprisal is just it demands I think uh it demands of your other cards and doesn't do enough without having a very low initiative all right I know I keep switching between which one my partner took but we're gonna start with down to the dirt which is the one that uh that she took and the reason is that the top of this card is just great um it is not too hard to wait until you're at half hit points especially when you're punching yourself in the face or letting enemies punch you um to then shoot somebody for Five Points of damage that's a really really powerful attack um at range and the bottom you'll also notice that up until this point we have had one other move four in the entire kit so having another move four in the kit that gives you a little bit of extra kicker Health along the way whether you're the negative conditions build or not um is is pretty significant I do think that the bottom of this where like the x is the number of negative conditions heal you have is pretty funny because if you are stunned you can't use it unless of course you use some of your other cheaty abilities if you're poisoned then the x is irrelevant so a lot of these like negative conditions that you're gonna have are just gonna say hey this could just be heal one and that would be it and don't get me wrong that's fine a heat a move four heal one is already good on its own but I just think that it's a kind of funny um I I legitimately wonder if it would be better if it just said move four heal one mirrored misery is a wild card so the the top of mirrored misery is a lost card so it's got to do a lot of work and I think it does you look at a an adjacent allies difference between their hit points and their maximum it sort of calls back to a little bit of gloomhaven spoilers the Berserker class except for instead of counting my own negative hit points against my allies negative hit points and uh I just think that's hilarious honestly like if you were playing this character up until higher levels I would take it just for that because at higher levels you have more hit points you can get a lot more out of this now we were playing a team that uh I didn't really want to get hit that much and I wasn't any tougher than than my partner was so uh the top of that did not appeal to us quite as much and then the bottom there is that kind of like collect negative conditions and dump them on enemies um build you know it's only a move to though so I think that down to the dirt is the more more straightforward pick here but mirrored misery seems like an awful lot of fun if you have a way of making it work level five for a lot of classes is the payoff class I don't think that's necessarily the case with this one but I do think it's funny that they're both initiative 15 which is better maybe the best of anything that we've seen so far let's take a quick look actually uh we've got a bunch of 20s in here 15 is the best initiative that we've seen so far so there's something about that um that that's respectable here my partner took uh chained by Spite I'm going left to right left right left right and um use that top ability a handful of times uh taking because of the burned by both ends had impressed her she took this card because she wasn't using many of the other lost cards that did the kind of negative conditions build so I figured kind of if she throws this into play I can just keep picking enemies to take damage at the expense of my health over and over again again on paper that seemed really bad to me but in the right scenarios where you're fighting enemies that are low hit points or even better High Shield low hit points this allows you to just kind of like delete people in a way that you normally couldn't and it's essentially a second attack that you compile on at the beginning of your turn so um it costs a lot of Health like you need to be managing your hit points a lot with this class if you're going to use the top ability Chain by Spite but it can do a lot of work in the right scenarios against the right bad guys it's really bad against swarms of guys with hit points that don't do a lot of damage so you just don't put it into play in the scenarios where you're fighting those people and instead use the bottom of this card which is totally okay move three put a fire into play retaliate two at range I'll add um does fine work it's not the best most amazing card by any means but um I think it is a completely respectable card Chain by despair is more on the negative condition build um the top of this card ah I I like the idea of it right like you need these negative conditions so if you're going to build up your Wombo Combo um the top of that card lets you build up your Wombo Combo however we already have talked about how many lost cards we need to do these Wombo combos where we really want to be doing to do these Wombo combos so again the longevity of this kind of build is a really significant part of it and so you are probably giving up one of those cards that you're using for this one and without the experience to say which ones do and don't matter I don't have a confident thing that I could say about it except for it just seems a little tough um I will say one big advantage of the top of this card here is that you can get one of the perk masteries I think much easier by having this and then the other thing to consider about Chain by disparity is that if at this point you've taken all the cards that are like when you move give it a negative condition to an enemy you can kind of just be piling negative conditions on enemies left and right so that is the control build of this class right is that you do this and you keep taking disarms like here have a disarm here have a disarm like that allows you to knock enemies or stun even better you know knock enemies down in a way that that I think no other class can do but you really need to be built towards that you can't kind of sort of be in the build whereas Chain by Spike does lie to just sort of be however you want to be as long as you have hit points the bottom of Chain by despair uh the an enemy giving you negative condition they get one as well is respectable I guess at a 15 initiative it's not a card that you're super excited to play I think if you're taking Chain by despair is for the ability at the top and you might not use it in every scenario so I guess you can use the bottom or you might be you know waiting to use it to the mid scenario so that bottom is like first good to use and kind of like a first round or something like that but it's not the most exciting card so if you're taking it hopefully you know a lot more than I do and you have a plan well we didn't get to level six of this class so uh I can't even tell you which of these I would take after looking at them so hopelessness just bathes yourself at the top which is the dumbest thing that only works on a class like this I think the intention I mean because right you're going to take this damage or maybe it's at the end of your next turn that you'll take the damage but it's essentially it's saying look you Bane yourself and then you play one of those other cards that you know moves next to someone and gives them the Bane ability it's it's one of the easiest ways that you can trick your Bane probably the entire game I think that's pretty you know it's essentially an unblockable 10 damage for a lot of bad guys so if you have those cards you're running those cards hopelessness seems pretty awesome and frankly I don't think you even need to take that many of them you you get them at level one so even if you didn't take it as part of your build there's there's cards that you can take that give them to enemies anyway so um maybe not with the move part of it so I yeah I just but but you can set it up and it takes only like really One support card to make this card work it just then says You must play these two cards together or you must play these cards one turn after the other and I did learn this from my other class but but Banning bad guys is good because 10 damage is a lot but it also you know you're gonna get hit by them so it's not as good as just taking them out on the spot so is is a bane for 10 damage as good as a five damage attack tough to say depends totally on the enemy if they're a higher Point enemy of course the bottom here move six and four damage to yourself seems like quite the pain but hey sometimes you need to move six um I think if you're taking hopelessness it's because you're doing the top combo more often Phantom limb is a little funny uh it is a very nice combo with our friend from the earlier level level two the nope level three level three burned at both ends um suddenly you can start using the bottom of this card and you can use it the same turn right if you use the bottom to move first or if you uh kind of used it on a prior turn and you are still disarmed on the following turn Phantom limb allows you to to hit someone for Five Points of damage I'm sure my partner would have taken this one to combo with with burned at both ends um and making a wind along the way it's a pretty decent attack the bottom here not exciting at two players but the upside of this being at uh Grand all figures whose who points were increased okay um the bottom of this ability the upside of this in a multiplayer game or a multiplayer game of summons is while you can just have a sudden I mean this is this is a a straight up like hold the line uh Lord of the Rings ability that just can do Insane stuff if you have the right situation it seems hard to have the right situation but because it's a lost card you can kind of wait till that perfect situation and pull it off so what you're doing here probably depends on your build I think that Phantom limb really requires you to have burned at both ends to be kind of most excited by it and then hopelessness can work with a handful of your other cards but you really are hoping that you took let's see yeah you know mirrored misery or the other one along the way level six was about conditions level seven is just strictly about damage and Punishment um let's talk about Penance first all adjacent enemies suffering three or four damage and then you take X which is the number of enemies which is a pretty small price to pay frankly um so basically every enemy takes three or four and you take one um in response to that you're going at 12 so there's a good chance you have control over what the board looks like this again is probably better at four players than it is two players that guarantee damage is nice sort of depends on if you have other guaranteed damage the value of guaranteed damage I think goes down the more guaranteed damage that you have because the advantage of guaranteed damage is finishing people off especially by the time you're at level seven so if you have a lot of other guaranteed damage I do think that Penance is a little bit weaker for you the bottom of this is a pretty nice bottom I mean you're at 12 and three retali it's pretty nice moving one is kind of paltry but you can use this and pile on some incidental damage on on people if you're willing to take a few hits along the way so um pendant seems solid to me particularly for that more like Bank tanky pay attention to me build rejected the gift is uh one that just seems fun to me so first of all with the 20 initiative there's a really good chance you can trigger the top of this ability when you're going to take damage you don't take it damage but the enemy suffers it instead well really enemy any enemy is suffers it instead so you know if you know that like big Archer is gonna attack you and hit you for a bunch of damage then it might actually Ricochet off to someone else the problem with this is it's totally dependent on what the enemy initiatives look like so you are hoping that you go before them but you also don't want to go before them and then get hit by the guy that's doing an attack too and then the guy with an attack eight comes in and slaps you that hardly feels worth it so it depends a lot on the context of the room and what kind of enemies are in there having a couple of the same you know having a couple froze big frozen corpses or something like that probably is going to do some work for you but it's hard to control you're really really dependent on the um on the enemies and then the bottom here is not so exciting uh moving three and then preventing negative condition on most on most classes I think this would be so much more exciting it's just that me preventing it a condition I feel like is not as good in this class because I want to take those negative conditions um so I'm really not sure what the call is at level eight I think that if I I think that reject the gift does enough different things that that would maybe be the one that I would try that top is it's kind of funny that both of these cards are sort of I think for the more tanky like take damage and then heal yourself builds and reject the GIF basically does that all in one package but if you don't have that guaranteed damage maybe Penance is where I'd be leaning I love I I couldn't tell you I'm realizing that I had a lot more couldn't tell yous than in any other video that I've done and I just think that's because this is one of the wackier classes you remember I talked about I didn't think that it was a three complexity class this kind of stuff is why it's really hard to evaluate these things you might be like why are you doing a video about this then and that's fair criticism but I did want to talk about it I do have opinions of other pieces so hopefully it's been helpful even if I don't have strong opinions or I'm not quite sure what to make of the things um react with pain here we know that stunning people is just great uh it's kind of funny that that was a lot more prevalent in uh uh gloomhaven at here in Frost Haven you need all the weight all the way into level eight and then all you get with it is a piddly uh wound you don't even get to do any damage with it maybe you're brittle along the way that seems like a fine thing to just kind of shut down an enemy I think that that sort of ability is always uh valuable and is better in two player than it is in four player because we have fewer enemies to contend with and yes they're tougher at level eight but that actually means that the stun is even more significant more impactful at this point in time stun also just allows us to stop enemies from doing things like summons and things like that that disarm doesn't allow us to do at lower levels and then the bottom here with a pretty good healing for yourself I've already talked about how our our build was certainly more focused on the lots of hit points you suffer I suffer kind of approach so I imagine that react with pain would have been the card that my partner would have taken that being said wave of Anguish is pretty cool attack six is a lot of hurt and you basically get to just plop all your negative conditions onto the enemy unless you have a zillion of them so there's a really good chance that if you just happen to pick up some negative conditions you could pass this one over and in the bottom move five when yourself is like is like okay I think that probably you're taking this card so that you can play the top more often but you know you don't have other abilities to move five so there's something very nice about that both these cards seem pretty respectable to me and a two player I probably take rack with pain and four player I'm probably leaning a little bit more towards wave of Anguish because I think a single stun is not as good in a two-player game or even a four player game yeah I mean what the hell is this class we're gonna start with Redemption because end of everything is just too weird um Redemption so uh when you take damage bad guys take damage we've seen this theme along the way that's fine I don't know that I am so excited about this card because it's a lost card there's a good chance you already have other stuff that does this um that being said this can really machine gun down enemies if you have if you're being attacked by swarms but you know you're level nine so they have probably a lot of hit points so that top of that ability doesn't seem so I mean it's good it's it is good don't get me wrong but at the in the context of being level nine in the context of it being a lost card I'm not sure that I love that ability so much the bottom here is just so much text and three curses in a line which is just cuckoo bananas um letting you sort of just reshuffle your decks remove all your curses and then give them to all your enemies that's really funny I don't know that enemies are more inclined to give you curses at higher levels so um I I don't think I've missed anything where this class takes a lot of their own curses onto themselves and I don't think I've seen a class that takes a bunch of curses onto themselves uh so I'm trying to imagine the context in which the bottom of this card is is good so I'm not so impressed by Redemption it's not a card that I um when I have a lost card I want to see what the other side is going to be but I guess I'm going to be doing it mostly for that top ability and I just don't think it's good enough at level nine that being said I don't know that I want to play end of everything either I mean 25 attack is it absolutely patently Google gaga bananas ridiculous amount of attack but you have to die for it to happen there are a number of scenarios in Frost Haven that say if one player exhausts you lose so this card is unplayable in some number of scenarios it's not a huge number of scenarios but it's not zero either um 25 is a lot of attack I mean it's well worth a lost card for a 25 attack right uh but you also need to die well it's really not 25 attack what am I talking about you need to die in a situation where you're surrounded by five enemies and I'll tell you right now if you're playing a two-player game you're surrounded by five enemies and you've exhausted you've lost there's a really really little chance that your uh your ally is good after that because you have too many enemies in this room that being said this also might be the only card that could win in that situation so uh it does something really truly miraculous um the bottom of that card basically just says I could do whatever I want to I go where I please I walk on water um and so that's actually that's a that's a pretty good bottom I I'm taking end of everything for sure if I hit Level Nine um just for the meme of the one time that I get to make that top of that card work uh but the bottom is is totally respectable and and I like I said I wasn't so impressed by Redemption all right so it's kind of been a weird guide because I just there's so much stuff that's so weird about this class but um I think fundamentally if you're someone who's struggling with the weird insane combo build just focusing on big attacks and healing yourself I take damage you take damage um you can't go wrong with it the numbers are big the numbers are nice and that's solid if you are someone who is a little bit weirder and wants to see what you can pull off by all means go for that negative condition build the ceiling of that negative condition build is absolutely bananas um it's just hard to pull off especially against certain enemies where it's like yeah we don't give you negative conditions you figure it out yourself when you're fighting algox they're not gonna help you with that so um that's something you just have to take on a little bit speaking of let's look at some of these perks I just want to talk about some of the the highlights in here um first of all this one right here that uh puts two curses in anime deck is just really funny it's a funny way of drawing a negative of two or you don't feel so bad about drawing a negative two I don't know that this is better than removing a negative 2 replacing with a zero but it's certainly unique and I will say that by the time my partner put this one in her deck I was playing a class that threw a couple curses on people as well and so this ended up being really spicy where suddenly enemies would have five six curses in their deck and we hadn't really built for it so if you're building kind of more on the curse model side there's a lot upside to that that change there I think replacing a negative one with a zero disarm is just incredible and absolutely should be something that you do these are obviously just great on their own just for improving the quality of your deck we've already kind of talked about cursing I I mean it depends on how much you like to to curse people um if you're drawing a plus one there's a decent chance that you're killing someone if you kill them you don't get the curse them anyway so I'm not so excited by that perk I I don't think that I would be running that personally very much myself healing yourself is probably pretty relevant because you're gonna be damaging yourself a lot um this one right here I can't evaluate for you because it is for that really weird negative condition build I I think that it probably can lead to some of the highest most ridiculous moments in this class I mean imagine that you have three or four of these on you and you use that level one card that adds you know plus one for your negative conditions and then you draw this card your level one attack card that's repeatable might have just done like 10 points of damage so you can do some very goofy stuff there uh the ace there one of ignore scenario effects and add two plus one cards is one of the best ignore scenario effects that you can have so that's well worth your pickup pretty early along the way anyway um I don't these like long resting short resting ones I think are really interesting but I just don't know that you do it enough that I would be choosing that over some of the other upgrades up top obviously it's controllable when you have it but uh it doesn't seem the most exciting to me I don't like this one afterwards when you become exhausted you get to curse some people I mean hey it's funny to to get them to to suffer on the way out but um it's just it's at a point in the scenario where you're pretty much at the end and so you may never even draw those curses I don't like it this bottom one I alluded to earlier when I was talking about it is probably the best two perk thing I've seen in the game that is extremely biased because we've mostly been playing lower level Frost Haven right like levels two through five and plus five hit points at levels two through five is a lot of extra hit points on a class especially where you are spending your hit points to do damage to enemies this unlocking this perk was the thing that kind of I think made the difference between this class being difficult to play and easier to play for my partner let's talk masteries these are both goo goo Gaga's bananas I think they're probably the hardest masteries I've seen in the game if you pull them off you're awesome you're Cooler Than Me thanks for watching everyone hope you had a nice time talking about the fan conduit uh get in the comments I know there's already a lot of people who are going to tell me I'm wrong about stuff or I'm undervaluing things this class especially is one that I just really struggled with so love to hear what you have to say thanks everyone ciao

Channel: Phoenicks

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Id: h8B89ICHSBI

Length: 54min 55sec (3295 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023