Triangles / Tri-force class guide and strategy for Gloomhaven

hey everyone and welcome to my class guide video on the triangles character in gloomhaven there be spoilers ahead folks so if you have clicked on this video by accident then now is your chance to turn back because from here on out we're going to be talking about the class in depth and some items along the way that the character is going to find super useful as well so you don't want any spoilers now's your chance to turn off is that everyone gone or is anybody still left this is going to be quite a long guide folks the elementalist is a very very tricky class to talk about there's a lot of different directions you can go there's a lot of difficult choices and there's a lot of complex play in this character this is not one for the faint at heart i'm afraid uh this character is very crunchy and meaty and other adjectives for types of food that are thick uh but yeah this is gonna be a long one now i can't take credit for all of this video um i've taken a lot of inspiration from other guides that i've read and seen and in particular i would like to shout out femris he's a redditer who put together an amazing amount of information on this class and uh yeah my build is a variation of what one of his builds so if you really wanted to learn a lot more about this class really get into detail about all of the different elements of this class i can highly recommend and i will put a link in the description down to his reddit post for you to be able to check it out as always guys if you do enjoy the content please like and subscribe we are very very close to 1 000 subs on the channel which is just incredible to me i mean maybe we've even reached it by the point in this video goes live i don't know but thank you all so much for the support i will still be doing a 1 000 sub special q a so if there is any specific questions you would like me to answer like shorter questions that maybe don't warrant a whole video please do pop them in the comments below and who knows maybe it'll make the video also i do stream regularly on twitch at twitch.tv manage requests i stream that every monday wednesday and sunday usually gloomhaven so you can always come out and ask me any questions you might have there well without further ado it's gonna be a long one but let's get stuck in to the elementalist okay guys so before we get into the build let's just talk a little bit generally about the elementalists so the elementalists otherwise known as triangles otherwise known as triforce has a lot of freedom compared to some of the other classes in the game and in fact there are up to four different kind of builds that you can go with this card in this guide i'm only going to be covering a damaged base build which is easy to follow and execute in terms of party composition this build is going to work with all group sizes and with mostly any party comp i will say it's worth noting that having multiple element hungry classes playing together can be a bit awkward at times as this character is very very hungry for elements so having other mercenaries that make elements in your party can be useful but we will be pinching them for ourselves so that might upset some other people that you're playing with so ultimately we should really be trying to be as self-sufficient as we can with our play the element list has a lot of element generation through their attack modifier deck as well so perks are actually really important with this character to get our kind of element generation online and we'll talk about that as we go along through the build okay so this build is going to give you a clear combo path for each rest cycle so we're gonna probably have the same order of play on our cards for each rest cycle so we have a very strict order in which we want to play cards we're gonna try to avoid actually using the bottom of shaping ether this is a great card for giving you some flexibility in the build and is also a great way of filling in the void of being able to generate elements potentially so it does definitely make your life a lot easier but it also nerfs some of our damage output that we can possibly do and if we are happy to try and stick to a strict kind of combo then uh then actually we can kind of achieve the elements that we need hopefully without actually having to resort to the bottom of this we also want to heavily lean actually on using the top of shaping the ether anyway we want to use the stun and the target 2 on shipping ether as much as possible and maybe if we're lucky occasionally we can get the plus two attack as well or maybe the push three the plus two attack is obviously a very nice thing to be able to add on but yeah we're generally going to be trying to revolve around getting that target to stun off as much as we can as well with shaping the ether the most important thing with this build and just with this character in general is to be aware of what you want to do not only on this turn but also on your next turn and on your following turns this is a very hungry character for elements and if you kind of fall out of whack with your elements where you don't make the element you need for the following turn or you kind of just end up falling out of sync with your combination of cards then you're gonna have a pretty miserable time so you definitely need to keep engaged with this character and this isn't necessarily a very flexible build we know what we're going to want to do many turns in advance and we're going to play to that this can be obviously a very strict way to play which some people might not enjoy but it is a very powerful way to play and that will ensure that we can maximize our damage potential and our sort of efficiencies with the elementalist a quick note to guildmaster players in digital or anyone potentially starting this character at level one or thinking about starting this character at level one this character can be a bit of a slog at low levels and really does need perks items enhancements and a few levels to really shine and sort of smooth out some of the element problems that it might have if you're playing the campaign and your prosperity is pretty high and you're coming in and you can start at maybe like level three or level four then that is a good place to start with this character i think around that kind of level around level four level five that's when you sort of really start um coming into your own with this character a little bit more so bear that in mind early level problems can be an issue but they do disappear completely if you're able to get a running start with this character because of that really this class will not be for everyone and actually it isn't really one for me personally i'm not a huge fan of this character playing it in my games however this class is a lot of people's favorites and there's some good reasons for that in compared to other classes at level one this character is a bit slow out of the blocks and that might actually end up tarnishing your overall opinion of it early um if you waver from your combos even slightly then you can actually you know end up not being able to uh to execute anything in a long rest turn you know in a cycle of a turn um it can become really odds and can become you know quite frustrating to play really however if you actually enjoy the kind of intricate and focused play nature of this character then you can actually get levels you know fairly quickly and you can get massively rewarded at later levels with some hugely powerful cards with this character this character does sort of morph into being one of the stronger characters in the game so yeah so that there's some definitely some uh there's definitely a carrot at the end of the stick but it can be quite a long stick if you do have some cash to blow on this character nice and early in guildmaster i would recommend it uh also this class is generally just very good for unlocking the sun class and all of the enhancement achievements in general so if you want fast progress in guildmaster then you may actually just want to unlock this character chuck them in your party and just roll with them from very early on anyway okay i think that's enough of a disclaimer about this character because this is a difficult character to talk about it's not one of my favorites it's not one of the ones that i am the best at either so let's get into a nice simple build that hopefully everyone can follow and have success playing with the elementalist okay so let's have a look at the cards we take at level 1 and why we're using them where our starting cards are so we have raw enhancement we have pure augmentation we have formless power we have shaping the ether we have stoking hail we have trimulant cyclone infernal vortex lava eruption ice spikes and we have brilliant flash and i will put these all up on the screen like i do in the board game format now so you can pause the video here if you want to just get a nice easy to view all of the different cards in the board game so let's kind of go through a few of these cards so the most important sort of aspect of this is is the combo nature of it is we're trying to generate an element on on a turn to then use it on the following turn right and the main way we do this is we actually use these move two cards that we have that have these elements on the bottom so these are going to be the ones that will be very important and be a a big role player for us and because of this you need to be a bit more conscious about burning these cards through either through the you know powerful effects or through short rests long rests things like that because you're going to be leaning on these elements uh quite a lot um especially at level one so some of the most sort of powerful things that we can do is uh we've got sort of formless power top here which is just a very nice attack and give us an xp we could potentially just burn any two elements here we could just use any two elements to uh to get an attack four very good at level one we've got shaping ether which gives us a stun potentially we can empower the attack a little bit here but really we're looking for the stun and the target two here so if we can get ice and earth element generated together that would be really really good for us we've got ice spikes which is a very very simple um card to set up we only need one element for this and it's actually quite a powerful effect being able to attack for two and getting a wound effect off is very strong and we should be able to do that fairly easily and reliably using for example uh the bottom of stoking hail to be able to to make that fire so what we're going to be trying to do is we're going to be making elements and we're going to be then using them on the following turns okay we also have a brilliant flash in here this is our only kind of non-burn reliable element generation that we have on the top of a card which makes this card actually very valuable for us because when we're starting to look at things like formless power you know we don't actually have any cards that need the light element um to begin with we don't have any at uh at level one however this just gives us that extra element for formless power top so that we can then just sort of use those two and get the full effect out of that card so performance power is very good when combined with brilliant flash so this is definitely a role player for us in uh in the game we also have uh two kind of fairly simple cards we have raw enhancement and we have pure augmentation both of these just use different elements for different things so you'll notice that they're kind of like re they're very similar they're obviously both the same initiative but they kind of flip the elements and where they are on the cards so you've got them um you've got wind as a move enhancement on the top of this but you've actually got it as an attack enhancement on the on the top of this one so these actually swap around a little bit that's just a good way for us to use one element per turn to just get some extra damage and get some xp going uh also helps our movement out a lot because this character can be quite slow due to the fact that we're generally moving two every single time and you will want to keep that in mind as you're playing you know you should be trying to move closer to you know the next room if possible as you go protect yourself because you're definitely a ranged character that doesn't want to get hurt but that is something to consider that as you're playing this scenario you want to try and move towards the doors because you are a little bit slow you don't have lots and lots of movement so if you just stay you know in your starting spot at the beginning of a scenario you clear a room you've got quite a long distance to move you don't really have any cards at level one unless you can you know somehow make this work you're not really going to have a big movement to be able to shoot across the room so unless you have boots of course so keep that in mind your movement can be a little bit awkward at times so just just keep an eye on it and uh you'll definitely get used to that as you play okay so let's quickly have a look at what an example turn at level one might look like and this is going to be in a really important combination of cards that you might want to write down in reference or just kind of keep in mind that this is kind of like this is a combo that initially you'll just want to to live by essentially and you'll get very used to playing this at level one then you'll have great success playing it you'll get loads of xp in the process and uh this character will actually feel uh very fun rather than perhaps not um you know you getting frustrated on the first turn of the game we're going to be playing brilliant flash and we're going to go late so we're going to use this as our leading initiative card for just the heel that's what we're going to do then we're going to use lava eruption bottom so using lava eruption bottom actually generates us a wind which is an element that we don't care so much about but we'll get into that in a second so going late here at 67 my team perhaps we've managed to heal something but now we are going into our following turn with two elements hopefully in play both light and wind you know if we've done everything properly so then on turn two we'll use formless power because it's not often that we get two elements in one turn so we will use the top of formulas power and we'll actually use the bottom of stoking hail to make fire during the same period just so that we've got fire for our following term because on our following turn we want to use ice spikes as our attack which is going to give us an attack two with wound against hopefully three targets very good but again some more experience points and then our bottom card that we're going to use for the movement and generation is going to be infernal vortex making us ice so once we've got that we can then play the top of shaping the ether this will give us a just a very basic attack one with stun nothing crazy but a level one this is you know an absolute fine uh card to have the tinkerer has stun shot and loves it so we are very happy to just do an attack one uh target one with stun and then the bottom we're gonna use is chemulent cyclone to make the leaf that leaves only two cards left so we should at this point in time have played eight cards so now only leaves us with two cards left which is raw enhancement and pure augmentation and hopefully with just a leaf element left hanging out so at this point in time you basically play whichever one you feel is necessary so if you need to move because all of the enemies are dead maybe already then you can use this one and then just use the move three and use the leaf to give yourself an extra move too so you can move up to five or if you still need to do some damage then you just lead with the leaf on this one you do an attack three using that range three you get yourself an xp and there you go that is an extremely simple uh complete rotation a level one from turn one using all ten of your cards that actually uses the elements in a very efficient way now of course as you kind of go on and you start burning cards through your rests and things like that then there are other opportunities for you to change the way that you're doing it depending on you know what cards you find more valuable also you've got the top of chamberlain cyclone which can have some corner case use that you might want to sneak in but once you've got that core combo down i would really recommend you just play through that combo pretty much uh you know reliably until you are well until you get very very comfortable with that sequence of cards and as we level up we'll start swapping in cards that will make that sequence much easier and will give us more sort of uh variability and flexibility in what we're doing okay so let's move on to level two you've got your level one combo down nicely let's go on to level two and let's see what we get so we have access to boiling arc and we have crystallizing blasts so both of these cards um are very good actually because they both do something that we need which is creating an element with a top action that doesn't burn so both of these cards do that boiling arc is a slightly better um attack makes fire but it is a melee attack whereas crystallizing bars is less so but it could target more things and it's a ranged attack so both of these cards are fairly decent and they definitely actually do um a lot for us now in terms of what card that we want to take we are going to be going more for a kind of ranged damage build so crystallizing blast is definitely something that has ri it also has potential to attack on more things it's easier to pull off because our movement is quite slow so actually getting into a position to use boiling arc can be difficult because we're only moving two every turn plus crystallizing blast makes that ice element which is really really good with shaping the ether right we want to be able to consistently do shaping the e3 in the early turns so this uh this could actually be very very good for us and can help us draw loads of cards as well from our attack modifier deck which is very good once we start getting into perks which we will touch a little bit on perks as we go because they are very important for this character but i will cover perks you know in full towards the end they both have a move four but to be honest the text is kind of irrelevant on both of the bottom of these we don't really care say boiling arc is is an absolutely fine card uh however crystallizing box is just a lot easier for us to use so uh so we're going to be taking crystallizing blast but it helps us make an element with the top repeatable top which is really really important here similar to why we have brilliant flash this just allows us to make two elements in a turn which is something that we really really want okay so the card we're going to be getting rid of here is actually lava eruption the winds we get from lava eruption bottom is most useful for chamberlain's cyclone top however it is our weakest attack and you know the bottom of cyclone makes an element that is actually kind of useful and critical for us when we're trying to use shaping the ether to get that target too which is what we're going to start looking at doing now so we definitely want the leaf element on this which then means that we're very rarely going to play the top which then kind of means do we really care about wind as much probably not so it becomes definitely the weakest attack and the weakest element to us at this point in time so the attack on lava eruption is kind of underwhelming as well so just the attack one so without any kind of buffs it's pretty underwhelming and yeah with wind not being the most important element to us this is actually a very simple swap for us and now we can start to look at making both ice and leaf in a single turn which then gives us that big stun target 2 with shaping the ether on a following turn removing and adding cards with this character is very tricky as just simple swaps based on power level alone could actually really knock you off course this is not a character we can just jam all of the good stuff in so we actually need to look at the bigger picture now having two repeatable ways to make elements on the top of our cards also means we can start to play formless power bottom more consistently to power up our other attacks right because now we may actually have a spare element so that we can actually power up say for example ice spikes if we were to have fire plus another element right in fact if you're feeling pretty bold we can now start to change our combos slightly more we can actually on turn one use brilliant flash and burn formless power which then gives us uh that element from brilliant flash to be able to then go straight into a strong turn two using crystallizing blast and using uh chemulin cyclone to then do a massive attack you know with crystallizing blast and powering up potentially with formless power using that light element that we generated so we're straight away he's starting to get value from formless power bottom and starting to add up damage as we go and then that leads straight into us being able to use the top of shaping the ether to do a stun and a target too and then we can start going back onto playing stoking hail to then get our ice spikes going as well the other great reason the crystallizing blast is amazing is as we get levels we're gonna start to get perks and as we start to upgrade our attack modifier deck we have lots of element generation inherently in our attack modifier cards that we can add so being able to attack multiple things you know essentially we can kind of go on turn two we can play crystallizing blast and then we can you know see what elements we get and then perhaps we can tailor what we want to do slightly around what we've got but as long as you still keep yourself a nice clear path into what your kind of combos are going to be obviously a turn two you're only going to have one perk maybe you might have two perks because you've managed to do three check marks or perhaps you'd manage to do the achievements in guild blaster mode so keep that in mind you know perks are very important with this character for sure so try and work towards your perks as much as possible it is also important to point out that the move four on crystallizing blast is just a really nice sort of gap-fill movement you know and that is a huge amount of movement for this character so we're gonna be mainly using it for the attack top of course but if you ever find yourself stuck between rooms or you need to move then using this as a move for is actually uh it's actually pretty decent and uh yeah can help us move around quite a bit okay so let's have a look at level three all right so we have burial and we have chain lightning two very good cards uh these are just you know really fun cards to see you know at level three we have a great pick to make here so burial the top is attack four range spend an earth element and spend a night element to get an extra attack each piece and we can also get the immobilized from the earth and the curse from the knight very strong attack being able to attack for six potentially three things that's an incredibly uh strong attack so yeah that's a that's a really good top and uh yeah definitely worthy of a burn but really why we're most interested in this card is actually the bottom effect which is just attack three range four and make a knight element for us so this is just you know really really great for a damage build being able to potentially play double attacks so an attack on the top and an attack on the bottom is always very very strong the fact that this makes an element as well is obviously just exactly what we're looking for even though at the moment the only card we actually use the knight element for specifically is burial it will come into more play later on down the line so that knight element is definitely one we're interested in uh you can obviously short rest or use a stamina pot to potentially make the knight element with burial on one turn then use a stamina pot get it back to then be able to do the top action and use that nighttime burn as well so there is potential there it's a little bit harder to do but yeah the bottom is just um you know very reliable element generation and it's attacking things it's just everything we want to do really so chain lightning is a really fun and interesting car it's actually one of the kind of most fun cards i think i've come across in gloomhaven it's yeah i absolutely love the theme of this card it does exactly what it says on the card itself i just really really like this card problem is with this build is that it doesn't quite work or do enough for this particular build so in this instance we will be going with burial however absolutely card hate on anybody for picking chain lightning here uh the top is actually very easy for us to achieve with what we have going on currently with brilliant flash we can you know easily make that we have actually got rid of the wind element already so being able to add that wind isn't really going to happen for us unless we decide to to like change our cards around and bring lava eruption back in which you know we don't really want to do in this build however it's possible so chain lining i absolutely love the top of this thematic win really strong card uh you know can be very very good in certain situations you're also you know with chain lightning you're more likely to be able to hit all of the targets because you don't really care about specific patterns right burial has a very specific pattern that you need to get all three chain lightning not necessarily so you can definitely make chain lightning work in different situations however if you're playing at lower player counts chain lightning may start to fall off a little bit because you know you might not often be against four enemies in a room you may only be up against you know sort of three or two or three or things like that so the problem that chain lightning has for us is that the bottom you know which is going to be the main use right because we're not going to be using this burn just solely all the time we're going to be using this card for the bottom a lot and the heel 3 range 4 is an effect we already have access to we already have a heel um it is on the bottom which is nice however we can't make double light in a turn right we can't play chain lightning and brilliant flash in a turn and make double light to then give us you know two uh two elements we need to be creating unique elements with each of our cards and burial gives us access to creating an element that we're not using at all with anything else right now you know it's a fresh element into the mix which helps power up formless power as well as just being you know strong enough as it is in itself so we're very simple choice for us here burial but i absolutely love chain lightning and i can't hate on anybody for taking it in certain builds or you know to have fun it's it's a really fun card so but we're taking burial here so the card that we're actually going to swap out is we're actually going to swap out raw enhancement here now the reason is is the raw enhancement we're generally looking to do as much damage as possible and raw enhancement we were looking to do the uh the attack with this with the element we've now kind of dropped our wind so we we don't have lava eruption anymore to make wind so it's not very likely we'll ever be able to use this for the top and we want to be trying to do as much damage as possible so although this is some good movement we do have move 4 on our crystallizing blast that we now have so we can quite comfortably drop war enhancement here we want to keep your augmentation because this still gives us the kind of leaf and ice combo here that we're actually creating for shaping the ether but if we ever wanted to pivot if perhaps you know an ally then kills everything and we go oh okay well now we just need to kill one enemy we can go all in with pure augmentation to do that so we keep your augmentation we drop war enhancement and we bring in burial so now with burial we have another way of kind of creating an extra element so with burial we can then start to hopefully try to power up some of our other attacks right to be able to ensure that potentially we can get uh an extra kind of uh bit of damage using formless power and our aoe attacks like crystallizing blast and ice spikes so you're gonna try and basically filter in burial before you want to do one of your aoes which is at this point in time ice spikes and crystallizing blast okay let's go on to level four okay so at level four we've got a real doozy we got primal duality and we've got gravel vortex let's talk about gravel vortex uh slightly to begin with so top of gravel vortex is attack two target all adjacent enemies it is a melee attack and we can make wind and earth now that is an effect that um you know it's very nice to be able to make uh two elements with an attack in fact that is you know um like you know very very powerful indeed however it is a melee attack which is just you know not really what we want to be doing it's not very likely we're going to be able to do it the initiative doesn't let us go super late so potentially we could you know play this very late you know move into range attack then go early the following turn and move away so that we're not in in danger it's not really kind of possible with this character so the top of this card's a little bit at odds as to how we're playing but you know for certain builds maybe they might find it interesting the bottom of this is loot one or we can actually consume two elements to just loot two instead and honestly uh the down this bottom side of this card is pretty much garbage so even if this was like a loot three i don't think i would recommend it that's a heavy heavy investment to be able to just do a loop two loop one will get most of the things you want most of the time as people who follow me will know i'm not a huge fan of the loot effect i think that it slows the game down i think that it is you know quite often you can just run around and get the loot yourself however this character does absolutely thrive on money this character loves money so you know there is an argument to be said getting rich with something like this might be worth doing however unfortunately for gravel vortex it is opposite primordiality which is which really should get you very very excited mainly for this bottom here so you can see it's going to move to create two elements and it's just a fact at this point in time that it creates two elements but these two specific elements are very important to us to moving forwards so move to create light and dark gives us plenty of formless power fodder for the time being primal duality on the top as well has attack five range four target two uh make ice fire one xp that's just an incredibly strong attack being able to attack two things for five ten damage range four as well ensures that you're you know probably going to be able to do it so yeah that's that's a great burn effect on the top as well and 15 initiative to boot yeah this card is is pretty nuts so we absolutely love this card uh for us and you know the good news is the gravel vortex is kind of a bit trash for us so it's not even a hard decision to make so we just sort of slam dunk primal duality here and we're very very happy to do so so now we're at level four i think this class does start to turn a little bit of a corner so now we've got you know potential access to primordiality you've got some experience under your belt playing the character hopefully you're starting to really kind of find your groove with playing the combos of the different cards to ensure that you can kind of maximize your xp and damage every single uh sort of rest cycle also we now should have some perks going for us so level four we should have four perks and potentially an extra two maybe even three through um the achievement system or through the check mark system if you're playing the campaign so we are now starting to find our groove and we're starting to see some sort of rewards uh for our sort of study to play if you like now this isn't a huge huge power spike for us not like some other level four cards that you may see it doesn't suddenly transform our character and make us incredibly strong or at least not quite yet but it is a great role player and certainly just makes things a lot easier for us and can uh yeah can basically mean that you can pull off some very easy formless power you know combos with with your aoes just yeah very reliably now the choice to replace it might seem obvious you might think well let's get rid of brilliant flash because this now makes the the light element right that this makes however having this element generation on the top is a relatively free and easy action does mean that we can then play you know in combination this with one of our other generators that actually makes an element that we can consume for that element to get the the good effects right so brilliant flash plus the bottom of stoking hail for example gives us an ice spikes plus we can then use formless power to boost this up an additional attack to make it an attack three that's not actually possible uh using primordiality so although primordiality gives us two elements and it seems great there is kind of another story unfolding here it also really hurts our turn one play of just playing you know formless power bottom plus brilliant flash top you know as just a grand opening for every single scenario that we play to then just lead into a powered up crystallizing blast ultimately i think this decision is going to come down to your party composition and your access to different elements either through items that you have yourself or through your teammates being able to generate elements for you because if your teammates can go early and generate you an element then there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't even just go straight into formless power and straight into crystallizing blast as your turn one play if you know you're going to have an element kicking around from your teammate you could also just consider dropping pure augmentation because it's the weakest of our attacks you know it's not often that we actually get to use anything other than you know attack three with this card so it's you know pretty underwhelming really compared to other things so you could swap out pure augmentation for primal duality here you could swap out brilliant flash for primorduality here i think you're going to have to make that decision yourself um however i think either of those two cards are fair to swap out i also think it's absolutely fair to just sideboard this card for later now if you're playing in uh if you're playing actually in gloomhaven digital and you're playing guild master mode then sideboarding cards doesn't really make too much sense considering that we can just reset our mercenary whenever we like so you could consider actually going back and taking something like boiling arc instead if you wanted a usable card take boiling arc and actually just use it as the move four and then uh and swap out for example pure augmentation just use this as a move four because this card probably isn't doing too much for you or of course you can just use it for a little cheeky attack as well so you've got other options in guildmaster because you've got the reset mercenary here and you've got no penalty for doing so however i'm gonna take it from the basis that i'm playing a party i'm playing this honest i'm playing this from level one to level nine i can't go back and and you know change my card choices as we go so for me i am going to swap out brilliant flash for prime modulity and this is purely on the basis that my mind thief is going to be able to make me an element on turn one which isn't too much of a stretch you know using perverse edge for example as a stun on early initiative that's something that the mind thief does a lot so i'm pretty sure that i can actually just drop formless power and crystallizing blast as my sort of turn one play if of course you find that the wheels are starting to come off at this point in time you find that after making this change you are struggling a little bit because you are really benefiting from just having that extra element with brilliant flash on the top then honestly just drop primordiality and just leave primordiality in your sideboard for later use okay on to level five okay so at level five we have obsidian shards and we have winter's edge obsidian shards uh attack two range three target two we can consume earth and fire to get an additional plus three attack very very strong attack being able to attack two targets for five ten damage total yes please you know if you can reliably do this this is great considering that the top of primordiality does you know pretty much the same thing but it's a burn and this is you know repeatable really really really strong at the bottom is shield one self not something we really care about because we shouldn't really be putting ourselves in harm's way with this build and we can make uh ice and night element which is again you know that's that's just good cheap easy generation to get though although it isn't tied to a move or anything like that but it's it's it's cheap and easy uh element generation the other car we have is winter's edge which is attack five range two that's just flat no elements required and if we spend air and ice we can actually get an additional plus two range range four now and ps4 this is oh this is this is a good one so this card uh helps you deal with loads of like enemies that are just really difficult for for this character to deal with uh up to now so things like imps living spirits flame demons anything with high shield low health living spirits it just cuts through them in a really really efficient way and the good thing is as well is it's just a base attack five you know in any other situation or if things sort of don't go to plan for you this is just a great card where let's say you're having a bit of a rough time and you're in a particular scenario where you know perhaps the enemies are consuming elements which is really science like you know screw up your plan at least you have you know winter's hedge giving you the ability to be able to just do a good attack at range you know not a great amount of range but you know it's at range uh to be able to actually do something rather than you know rely on your elements every time incredibly strong and those two elements to be able to get you to get the pierce is a you know it it is much better than maybe it looks on the surface just trust me when you get against certain enemies it will absolutely melt uh with the top of winter's edge the bottom is heel two range two and you know make two elements so some more free element generation here i like this a lot more than the shield that we get with obsidian shards because the shield really does do absolutely nothing whatsoever it doesn't do anything at all whereas uh heel two at least you know could remove poison remove wound you know give us a little bit of incremental value as we push through the dungeon so yeah this heel is you know yes it's a tiny heel it's a very small heel for this level but it's very useful and we get two elements as well off the back of it so i think uh on balance here unless you had boiling arc in your deck then i think that it's very difficult for you to reliably always activate the top of obsidian shards and um yeah most of the time it will probably stay in your hand being a very sad you know attack two range three target two which is not really where you wanna be and the bottom is yeah it's it's good but the shield just doesn't do anything and we have quite a bit of ice generation already uh we have quite a bit of night generation already we did lose that light generation um you know with brilliant flash we swapped in prime modulity instead and also can't be understated that winter's edge is just a one sort of turn enabler for ice spikes plus formless power so it does power up ice spikes and it gives us that extra element to use with the bottom of formless power if we've already played that so it's got a very good combo with this card so we are definitely taking winter's edge here so the astute of you viewers out there might have noticed that we just took a card that uses an element that we no longer make so that wind element we actually got rid of lava eruption at level one which was the card that made wind for us and was the kind of reliable wind generation that we had at our disposal we don't actually have that anymore so we can't actually play the top of winter's edge you know unless we've managed to uh to get some perks going so it's very important here that we actually make a few other changes so we're not only just bringing in winter's edge and we're losing a card we're actually going to be bringing in lava eruption too so we're actually going to be getting rid of pure augmentation this was a card that was already on the fringe of being cut because it's uh quite underwhelming it's really just an attack three for us most of the time so we're going to get rid of that and we're actually going to get rid of infernal vortex as well because we have ice generation through our crystallizing blast and to be honest we can start flipping more cards to get ice as well and the only kind of ice element top that we really really care about is shaping the ether so we're not playing stoking hail for the ice on the top that's very rare that you'd want to do that because shaping ether is just strictly better so we should really be aiming to using uh stoking hail bottom for making fire and shaping the ether top um for using the stun uh hopefully with the target too as well this is quite a simple swap we're gonna swap this out as well and we're gonna get lava eruption and we've got winter's edge so now we've got nice and easy access to that uh wind element if we need it okay on to level six okay so we've got i have the hurricane and we've got simulacrum i think that's how you pronounce it i can never be quite too sure so let's talk about i have the hurricane first so it's a heel three range four attack two target all enemies within range two of the healed figure so this is you know more of a supporty card but it does have some some attack upside it makes two elements which is really nice the two elements we need for winter's edge as well which is convenient um but the attack two is kind of on the low end and it's only all enemies within range two and would you know also need you to have some kind of tank uh ally that's in the middle of the mix of enemies as well so i think the top of this for a burn effect it's not a bad burn effect by any means i think it's you know in terms of um of burn effects it's pretty good i think uh however it doesn't really fit into what we're doing we're trying to do lots of attacks and also we don't like to have too many burn cards that are attacks you know we want our want every card in our um in our hand to be fueling us with uh reliable elements and spending those elements reliably so so this is kind of like you know burn to get one you know decent effect maybe and two elements it's not it's not really worth it the bottom moved three and then we can booth stood up with fire to get plus three move or wind or air to get an additional jump not really that great again we're going to be using that fire really to be you know making ice spikes better so it's not often that we find ourselves with the fires which then means that it's it's just jump that we might be able to get from it and you know do we really really need jump i mean we could also just enhance jump onto something if we really want to jump so you know i just think this guy is generally a bit overwhelming for us in this build it doesn't really fit into our our combo or our use of elements now simulacrum is a card that we are very excited to see because this kind of brings the whole primal duality card uh kind of round into the fold now so prime modulity has been a little bit awkward up to this point you know we've you know it may even still be in your sideboard at this point in time uh however now it's definitely the time to bring primorduality in because simulacrum we can actually you know do a lot of work with this card for sure so with the idea with this is it's an attack two range three and then you can do any number of these so you can do you know with four elements you can activate two of these with six you could activate all of the top of this card but essentially we can add an extra plus three attack we're gonna add a target two and we can immobilize and muddle now ideally we're gonna be looking to hopefully do the plus three attack and hopefully the target too i mean that's really where you want to live with this card then it becomes you know an attack five uh target two and if we can actually get ourselves to you know five elements then uh instead of six we can then use formulas power to boost that up as well and actually do an attack of six so sort of like what obsidian shards is doing right except we are kind of doing it we have to generate more elements in order to get the target too but it's not too far away and it doesn't really care what elements we have which is important because the idea with this card is that we're going to want to play this after we've probably played crystallizing blast you know you're at level six now perks you should have quite a few perks we'll get into the specifics of the perks in a bit but you have lots of ways of generating elements with your perks and you should have been taking them up to this point uh i'll get into the strict order of perks it's quite hard to kind of not talk about perks as we go but essentially you know after you kind of get your first two perks of removing your minus ones from your third perk onwards you're going to be getting the ones that make you elements so the idea here is that we're going to be flipping a lot of cards with crystallizing blast um we're going to be playing uh probably primordiality so let's say we play prime modularity and crystallizing blast that is three elements right off the bat on the next turn we could then consider playing a simulacrum which we've then got three elements and hopefully because we play crystallizing bars and we attacked let's say four or five targets we've managed to flip another element along the way as well getting us to four i know maybe even five right so it's not within the uh realms of possibility to consistently be playing this you know with four elements um that's that's pretty reasonable i think so yeah really exciting card to play with and definitely one that we want uh for our combo and primordiality just suddenly got a lot better for us we should really talk a little bit about the bottom of this card um ignore it just ignore the bottom of this card please it's not for this build it's sort of for like a melee build you could argue but with 10 health i don't think this thing will stay around for long enough you could obviously just tank with it as well like there is the option for that but to be honest you're you're never really going to find yourself playing the bottom of this unless you're in some sort of spawning scenario where you need to stay away and stay alive for so many turns and dropping this down might absorb a few attacks from some enemies so just ignore the bottom of this for sure the card we're going to be getting rid of for this is going to be stoking hail which is a little bit awkward because we've been relying on stoking hail to ensure our eye spikes can work but i think on balance you're probably going to end up finding that you know you can use winter's edge to do that or hopefully we're getting the flips from crystallizing blast we are now starting to enter the period where your choices for which cards to lose um are going to be heavily heavily driven by your party composition and by the items you know that you've managed to uh to accumulate because you may find that actually no i can i actually struggle with fire but i can get leaf whenever i like it there is definitely um a little bit of work you need to put in yourself here i can't hold your hand on all of these decisions because they are going to be you know party specific in this particular instance we're actually going to get rid of this because you know the top is never used the bottom is just make fire and we do have a way to make it with winter's edge um if we if we want to do that as well so i feel like we can we can either get the flips that we need or we can generate it through winter's edge if we really need to so soaking hell is going to go i'm going to bring in simulacrum instead okay so let's go up to level seven oh level seven so here we go so level seven uh we get i mean access to possibly one of the most busted cards in gloomhaven why this isn't a level nine card i do not know but this card is what you've been waiting for really and what all of the kind of setup and the hard work and the tears in learning your combos and playing this character has been building towards and it's this card here vengeance so vengeance is just incredibly strong so we've got an attack to range three uh potential aoe nothing to write home about there right but this is what we really care about so we can spend night and any other element any other element at all to kill all normal targets instead no hex so potentially this could be an execute three and it's repeatable this is not a burn primal duality creates two elements and one of them being knight so this is just a very simple way for you to get those elements whenever you need them extremely easily this card is just bonkers good it is so so good it's pretty busted there's pretty much no reason why you wouldn't take avengers but let's have a look at the other card so we got pragmatic reinforcement which is a heal three range three we've got shield we've got heal two potentially and we've got a recover one of our discarded cards this is actually like a pretty nice effect you know if you could um get all three of these together you know i think it's pretty decent i mean the shield one is probably i mean unless you're doing it on an ally i guess but even then i don't i don't think it's that great but being able to heal for five and recover a card not bad you know hill five is a good amount of heal definitely and the bottom is an attack three range three and we've got some other options here we can add knight get an x plus two attack uh fire to add poison and wound which is you know a very you know nice effect to have access to and we can increase the range probably less less likely so yeah this card is not a bad card by any means um it's definitely got some versatility and some use i think it's a bit shoot the moon to expect that you're gonna be able to reliably you know get three of these elements that's probably a bit out of the realms of possibility unless you have lots of items backing you up uh but it's just a shame that is opposite vengeance which is just unbelievable being able to kill one two three enemies per rest cycle or use stamina potions to be able to recur this combo you could you know with a major stamina potion you could get back both primordiality and vengeance just yeah i mean this does lead to some very cheesy scummy play and the game will become significantly easier for you from this point onwards with vengeance but it's just too powerful not to take could have been a level 9 card it's not but we're gonna take vengeance here i mean it's just yeah it's it's just absolutely nuts the only downside and weakness of this card is it's not very good against elites or bosses because otherwise it's just an attack two range three the bottom move three retaliate effective one adjacent ally is uh you know pretty pretty crap to be honest i mean the move three is okay being able to maybe use the light and another element to give three retaliate to an ally at least does something in boss fights you know to the point where even if i was going into a into a boss fight i think i would always still bring vengeance just because it could kill the minions and even though it doesn't directly affect the boss you know it kills all of the minions which just buys you a lot more time to just you know wail on the boss so yeah i just yeah just vengeance vengeance vengeance so we are faced with a difficult decision really on what card to get rid of uh for vengeance it's not a clear-cut one again like i said from this point onwards you're going to be you know probably trimming these a little bit to your you know to your party specifically you must keep an eye on what elements that you are generating which elements you are using you know make sure that you don't accidentally cut you know the generation card for you know the powers one of your other cards make sure that you know almost group your cards up if it makes it useful for you to be able to see you know that car powers this card this card powers that card so you kind of get a a rough understanding of what it is you're going to do so we have kind of a couple of cards here that are on the chopping block for us we have tremulone cyclone which you know mainly being used as a move to to give us the leaf which then kind of gives us this target too on shaping the ether uh which is really where we want to be um at this sort of stage just having an attack one with a stun a range three i think we can do better with this character and certainly vengeance allows us to you know delete characters from the game delete enemies from the game so we don't necessarily maybe need to run as many stuns so we can start to see like maybe what we would do personally here i'm actually going to drop shaping the ether because i feel like dropping chemium cyclone kind of nerfs shaping the ether enough anyway and having just that move to make an element to give us just some more fodder for formless power i think is just worth it really um so i'm going to be dropping shaping the ether here we are very sad to see you know this has been one of our main kind of combo pieces from right from level one um we're gonna see it go um but you know it's either cutting this or it's cutting this and i feel like having just a card that is just attack one range three stun one is useful but uh i think we want to sort of you know make the switch onto damage now and realistically i mean once you have vengeance the game the whole game becomes warped around vengeance once you get vengeance so i think we're we're happy to drop shipping ether here and uh we'll pick up vengeance okay not that we need it but now we're on to level eight because we are already as overpowered as we really needed to be but level 8. okay so at level a in gloomhaven digital we actually only have one card available to us at the moment because the other card hasn't made it into the game quite yet but i will talk about both cards because for posterity stake and for this guide to live on the internet it's important that we talk about all of our options so we have elemental aegis we'll talk about that first and that is shield to self and then we can consume four elements to uh to give ourselves an additional four shield um if this card doesn't kind of give you an indication about what an alternative build that might be available for this character is i don't know what will uh but but yeah uh is to say this is not an effect that we are looking for ourselves but uh it's a pretty crazy effect nonetheless uh 14 initiative as well which is what you want to see on a shielding card right and we have heel five self on the bottom which is just a really nice heel and it makes a light element elemental aegis not a card for us uh definitely a card for a very tanky build but not what we're doing today so uh not one for us uh the other card i will put up on screen now is called volatile consumption and that says that once per action if we consume an element during the action we may cause one enemy within range two to suffer one damage or we may perform a heel one range two action two xp you know persistent ability and it's a burn so uh this is kind of underwhelming really because it's adding value to what we're doing because we are consuming elements so it's almost like just sort of giving us an added benefit to everything that we are doing but consuming elements every turn you know so being able to do extra damage is is obviously good but it is a burn and it does take up a slot you know in our hand which is reserved for creating elements you know so if we were to bring this in we're having to get rid of a card that either does damage outright itself or is creating elements which is what this card needs in order to be good so i find this card to be in a little bit of a weird spot um i guess if you had elements running rampant like absolutely rampant and you weren't struggling at all with your generation because your other mercenaries were doing it or you had loads of items that just supported you in order to be able to do this then and yeah maybe it could be a consideration but like i think it's a little bit win more you know it's kind of like one of those cards where you know you're you're already doing a very very strong job with vengeance do you really need another card um to allow you to do that that's gonna and a burn card as well at that that um that takes your total hand size down and it's kind of messes with your combos and your efficiencies i'm not so sure and the bottom of that card also says move three with jump that's actually quite nice you know we don't have jump or on any of our other cards unless we've enhanced it so jump can be very useful thing to have and we can spend fire on any other element to get a plus two move and we can wound all enemies moved through very nice effect or we can spend ice in any other element to get plus two move and we can immobilize or let me move through and importantly similarly to uh simulacrum we can actually uh you know do both of these so if we had four elements we could actually you know move uh a total of seven and we would get the wound and the immobilized so yeah pretty good i mean immobilizes um you know one of the weaker uh control uh conditions that we can apply because it's only really good against melee enemies however it is still a control condition so that's worth sort of talking about i think really you're excited about the wound on this more than anything else but it is a lot of elements to sink into a card and like we say we have simulacrum and this card really is you know the card where we're sinking all of our elements into after we play crystallizing blast and hopefully drawn you know a bunch of cards i don't think either of these two cards are particularly great so at this point in time i'm actually gonna go back in this instance i'm actually gonna go back and pick up boiling arc the reason for this is is that it's got a move four on the bottom which is you know efficient for us you know extra movement is always good it's a level two card so it's cheap to enhance as well so if we wanted to we could do a move four we could put an element on the bottom of there which i think we will do to be able to uh to keep our elements flowing and also the top is an attack that generates an element as well so if we find ourselves in an awkward spot you know it's another way that we can make fire potentially which is uh yeah can be very useful for ice spikes so i think that going back for boiling arc here is absolutely fine and that's actually what we're gonna do seems weird that we're at level eight and we're going back to a level two card but this is just like a role player type card and uh i think we're very happy to have another move for and it will uh yeah it will just help us sort of position ourselves much better so the card that we're going to get rid of here is we're going to get rid of tremulent cyclone you know it's uh we're going to basically be upgrading this move 2 to a move 4 and this move four we can then enhance with the element of our choice now we are losing the earth element we don't really have a use for the earth element now though i mean the only real use is burial top and you know to be honest we're not really doing that uh in a hurry so you can always use items minor mana potions things like that to be able to to get the earth element as and when you need it so i would actually advise you uh obviously if you can afford it getting the any element of your choice that would be you know ideal but i think getting wind here would would also be absolutely fine of course in guild master mode you can actually refund your enhancements so you could just enhance it with you know leaf if you wanted to now and then uh and then actually change it over to to wind later or whatever at a later date so so anyway that's our swap for now okay so on to level nine so at level nine we get access to another car which is pretty good um spoiler alert it's not this one the car that we're looking for here is eternal equilibrium another amazing card and and this is definitely power level worthy of level nine i do think that potentially vengeance might be a bit well it is a bit better uh than eternal equilibrium so a bit ironic that these are not swapped but uh eternal equilibrium is a fantastic card and we're really excited to see it so i tell equilibrium says attack two target all enemies within range three we can spend night element to get an extra plus one attack and curse we're gonna spend a light element to get plus one attack and model so this can be attack two three four and if we use formless power which you know is not within the uh you know that's not too crazy to think about having an extra element kicking around as well because of the amount of cards uh element generation that we can create uh you know we're going to be potentially attacking enemies for five cursing them which is just fantastic and then you know the muddle effect ensuring that those curses get drawn hopefully you know very soon so yeah just a incredibly strong attack um you have an enhancement slot here so you know you could we have lots and lots of money you can go to town you can add things like disarm onto this you know just purely very silly broken things can be done uh with enhancements in general but you know in this this card anything that can target multiple things or says just target all enemies within a range can be can be usually abused so yeah love eternal equilibrium i think it's absolutely great the bomb is heel four range four level one heel would be heal three range three level nine here probably would be a bit better than this maybe uh however you know we're playing this for the top mainly and having just another heel that we can use between rooms to just support our team or ourselves as we go forward it's just useful to have we don't care at all about the other elements on this card ignore them don't think you ever want to do that again unless you are in a spawning you know style mission so we should really go a little bit back over ethereal manifestation although it is definitely not the card that we take um so the top is summoner manosphere which is a summon three health two attack and it makes an element has movement of three and a range of three which are two very good stats that does mean that this thing's going to be able to follow you around the dungeon you know pretty reliably and it's going to have range of enemies fairly reliably so that's good and the fact that it makes an element for us at the beginning of the round of our turn right because our summon always acts before us means that we're gonna be able to create the element that we want and always kind of plan around that it's like a free element for us you know every single every single uh round however the problem that this guy has is that it's the only three help this level nine is one attack away from being dead and that's not great to have a of a summon that you've played out at level nine and you know some kind of crazy situation you know comes up either with you know night demons going really early you being caught out of position all of these different things you know trap placements you know and things like that just weird and wonderful things that can happen in a game of gloomhaven can often mean that summons just end up being focused you know target twos for example you know living bones having multiple targets on their attacks and and just you know attacking these things it's too hard to keep this safe in my opinion at level nine so it's just going to end up dying you may get some value out of it for you know a room maybe even two rooms worth i me but i just i just don't think the investment of of not only a card choice but but also a burn card in your deck um is is really worth it and the bottom is perform any of the following abilities attack three range three we can move three loop one heal three range three blur thematically i like what is going on here i like having it like this kind of tool box type effect you know it seems like it's very cool because you're like okay well i could really do with doing this and uh and then i can do that you know like oh i i really need to move this turn and oh actually i could also loot and oh all i could do with giving somebody a heal this turn in theory sounds great in principle not gonna happen because we are generating our elements for very specific purposes we're not generating our elements to oh now i need to give you a heal you know this character is not a versatile character in the sense that you are playing two cards and just you know oh maybe i'll play the top maybe i'll play the bomb absolutely not this character does not do that and i hope by this point in time you've come to that understanding of playing the character this is not what they do so unfortunately this is really quite an underwhelming level nine card i think i think it's an interesting idea would have been nice if maybe seen this at a lower level because maybe then we could have used it um for something else i felt like maybe we could have you know instead of going back for boiling arc we could have maybe considered this but certainly between this and eternal equilibrium hands down there's there's a clear winner here and it's eternal equilibrium so as i alluded to before the card we're going to be dropping here is lava eruption and we're going to be bringing in the eternal equilibrium i haven't done it on this but essentially what we would be trying to do here is making sure that we're upgrading boiling arc bottom with the wind element so that we still have access to winter's edge uh because we may not get it or we have to rely on our drawers from our attack butterfly which is not really what you want to be doing you don't want to rely on the attack modifier draws you just want them to be able to add that extra little little bit you know and um and certainly the the ones that you draw through the attack modifier cards are much more useful on something like simulacrum because you don't care what they are right you know you don't want to be digging for a very specific element for a very specific uh use so yeah very very simple um choice there and there we have our sort of finished full level nine uh elementalist build okay so i will put up on screen now um all of the board game cards like i usually do so you can just take a look at the cards in the board game format take a look at them i can pause the video here if you need some time but as you can see we've kind of evolved um from what we were initially but we are still a very combo uh heavy character we're generating elements on one turn to use them on the following turn we need to always have this in mind keeping in sequence because we can still fall out of sequence even at level nine you just don't have the ability to just you know slack with your playing of cards you definitely still need to have an eye on what it is you're playing because you really need to maximize the use of these elements like you have been doing all the way up to this point in order to do things and to be honest once you get to level seven and you unlock vengeance this character you know warps the game around it becomes very very simple to play the effects of just immediately executing you know two enemies maybe even three the fact that you can enhance this to actually add a fourth hex not that i think you're ever gonna uh actually actually get four things but i think you can at least make getting three a lot easier right that helps you to get two or three even easier it just completely warps the game and once you do that you walk into a room you delete half of that room very simply then the rest of the dungeon becomes a cakewalk really so so yeah this character is slow to ramp up but man when it gets going and you get a level 9 elementalist it is insane uh the damage and i mean how simple this character makes the game to play okay so let's talk about perks because we've talked a little bit about perks and perks are a really important thing to think about with this character okay so for perks uh the first two perks you're gonna get are gonna be the same ones you keep with every character you're gonna want to get consistency so definitely get rid of your minus uh ones here the fact that you can get rid of four minus ones makes us even better super good you know we've now made our deck pretty efficient uh we've only got one minus one minus two and a miss so very very nice however this is when we kind of pivot and this is when we get into our of very specific cards that we want for this build and that's going to be down to magma so we take magma here over blizzard because we can kind of reliably make ice and wind is not an element that we particularly care about in the first you know in the early levels at least so the first perk that we take after we remove our um four minus ones by doing this twice is we're then going to go over to magma and we're going to take that next up we can then go down and take blizzard the good thing about this is that because we're actually removing um the zeros here you know this is not increasing our deck size at this point in time it is keeping our deck size exactly the same which is which is what you want we want to be able to draw lots and lots of cards get lots and lots of elements okay so once we've done that we can then start to add uh the plus zeros in we use fire for uh ice spikes more than anything else so having extra fire is going to be great for just doing ice spikes and or powering up our other attacks for example allowing us to potentially instead of having to play stoking hail um bottom we can actually then uh do something different so conflagrate get these i think that's very very strong then we can start to look to do um adding the ice element for us or the wind element i think on balance here i think i would actually go with wind first off because like i said we actually removed a lot of wind and again this is an element that we don't generate ourselves um so because we don't generate it ourselves um it could be a fresh element which is which is really good right if we make like you know fire three times in a turn right we still only make fire whereas you know and we maybe spend that on on ice spikes right whereas you know if we make fire and we make wind then we've got the wind to spend on formless power so we should be trying to add the um the cards that we don't actually make so readily because they're actually going to be used as just the additional plus one for our next attack with formless power so we'll get storm here so we could at this point in time go and take you know quake because we don't actually have too much access to the earth element so this could be a decent thing you could also go back and take focus potentially as well to remove this last minus one give yourself a plus one i'm kind of okay with it i don't think you want to go for um glaciate with this particular bill because the fact that we are using crystallizing blast means that you know we have one guaranteed ice generation and also we have already upped this um already so i just don't think that uh that we need three of these at this point in time i'm pretty happy to just say let's use focus here just to get rid of this minus one we definitely want to take it at some point then you know it's pretty close between this one and this one i think and then we'll just take quake at this point you should be you know pretty pretty much sorted with your elements you should have um all of your kind of elements sorted uh there's definitely no real benefit with this build into adding this like i said before so we won't be doing that so we can now start to look at some of these other effects that we might have access to stun is a very good effect to just randomly draw so i'm absolutely a fan of that so i think we can look to maybe take stun here so we'll take that wound is also a really nice effect sweater plus one we do also have uh you know height in here where we can replace this i do think that i would rather have the wound over this that's that's pretty fair so let's take lacerate now i think is a good time for us to do heighten and we can do that twice and that pretty much tops you out um for what you can probably reasonably expect to actually get through like a playthrough you're probably gonna get to to around about this level right how many perks have we spent one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve so that's probably about right that's one per level and maybe three through the checkboxes if you do need to do any more then you know glaciate is is a fine one to pick up again just more elements right and as you level up certainly uh crystallizing blast you know you're not going to be uh using it as regularly so like for example for simulacrum you might not set that up with crystallizing blast every single time so so this can be quite good uh certainly this isn't very good we are actually missing a perk on digital here we're missing the add a target perk out of target's not great for this character because you don't actually have too much like single target you have a little bit of single target but it's not uh you know you're trying to draw the single target at the right time at the right thing it's it's a bit awkward so i mean i'd be happy to if you have one more like spend it on glacier and yeah yeah that probably will round about sum up where you are and then you can kind of pick and choose the other things as you want okay let's have a look at items for this character so there are a few items that you can use um let's start off with kind of head items that this character would be interested in there are a lot of items that um are kind of spoiler type items that this character might like so um i mean you'll be able to get whether or not um an item is great for the elementalist as you play you want items that give you elements you know that's a given right so just keep that in mind there's not um you know we'll go over some of the some items here but you can definitely be a bit adventurous with this and figure out uh things that give you range are obviously very good for um you've got quite a lot of ranged attacks so really happy with getting something like hawkhelm you don't actually want something like eagle-eyed goggles because your deck is very flat compared to other characters so advantage doesn't really do a lot for you on this character because really you're you know your advantage will be drawing a plus oh fire versus a plus oh wind so it doesn't really do too much so getting an item that extends your range or getting something like empowering talisman to get back your stamina potions can be very very strong but uh yeah for the purposes of this let's just say we're going to go for hawk helm now robes v vacation is a really really spicy item to get on this character and in guild master mode you can get it early however in playing the campaign or tabletop that might take you a while to get it so rosy vacation is a terribly strong item it's essentially acts like a formless power that you can use once per cycle so imagine using this along with your eternal equilibrium right just you can see that this character can get very very uh crazy very very quickly at level one though you're not going to have access to this at all so at level one i think you are you know you're probably a cloak of invisibility user to be honest that's probably where you're going to be with this character uh club of invisibility is just yeah absolutely fine sacrificial robes is another one which i which i don't mind uh it's kind of like easier in the start of the game to use compared to robes because robes becomes much better once you um rose of evocation becomes much better once you obviously have loads and loads of elements generating all the time whereas sacrificial robes you don't need that extra element but you do have to spend the three life you have heals to compensate for it so not too bad but yeah road suffocation is the ideal item however yeah clog of invisibility at level one i think uh so hand items so you got a couple different here so in an art in a ideal world i think you would absolutely love to have a staff of eminence this is a bit greedy i will say that these items are all very greedy and you may not find yourself being able to do this so being able to again just do another you know cheeky formless power essentially with this staff is amazing however early game absolutely do not want this i think early game you're actually going to be looking for the ones so i would recommend that you get uh ones as well because this is a um this is a two slot item this is also a two slot item so staff of elements is also something that you could consider but this creates any element it's two slots you could actually just have two different ones instead i mean it's gonna cost you ten more however i think it's much more beneficial for you to have two ones that create specific elements that you want to use rather than you just having you know one big item that fills that slot keep your eye out for ones for sure onto the leg item you just want some boots you know any kind of boots that you can get your hand on that gives you plus movement that's all you want on this character you don't need really anything more for small items you know it shouldn't shock you the mana potions are incredibly strong on this character also mana potions in general are just very good um for your allies as well so if you can convince your allies to be running uh mana potions for you that's going to be a big big help so definitely recommend those power potions are very strong with this character too because you're going to be doing big attacks especially with eternal equilibrium at level 9 but just any kind of aoe attack right is always going to have the benefit of a major power potion stamina potions allow you to recur some of your most broken combos so being able to get back vengeance being able to get back primal duality as well so if you had a major stamina potion i don't think i have one on this character yet but um major stamina potion being able to get two cards back that's very good if you're playing in the board game obviously there hasn't been this nerf yet so uh there is a nerf um you know two stamina potions in digital where it is only recover one card which is you know generally considered uh nowadays to be the updated ruling for stamina potions is the miner gives you one major gives you two so uh yeah miner is not quite as good in digital as it is uh with the elementalists uh in physical uh gloomhaven but uh yeah definitely you want your stamina potions too and of course any items that allow you to reoccur that so star rearing is very strong being able to get your boots back being able to get your wands back being able to get your cards back coming to do a heel i mean this yeah this this item has a lot of synergy with this character because we will be spending a lot of our items and we have a lot of tap items that we can get back being able to use them multiple times between rests is very very good okay so let's take a look at possible enhancements for us so enhancements kind of goes without saying that just enhancing some of our bottom moves with additional uh elements can be very very strong we spoke a little bit already about boiling arc which is one we were going get at a later time it's 125 gold that is a lot of gold uh but maybe not so much gold when you're playing guild master mode but i definitely recommend that so we'll be getting that on this character this one being able to stick anything you like really on the top of crystallizing blast so um sticking curse for 175 seems like a lot of gold however man this is this is pretty good being able to stick curse on this we all know what the crack heart is possible with theirs i mean this is basically like dirt tornado but for the elementalists so you can create your own cursed nado or wound nado like i'm i am a big fan of of wound as an effect we do actually already have wound with ice spikes though so probably in this instance i would lean towards poison or curse between the two probably curse is better than poison uh so yeah you mean you you can make your own personal choice here uh we do a lot of cursing you know with eternal equilibrium at level nine so once you're at level nine i don't think you necessarily need curse on crystallizing blast maybe poison would be better so let's stick poison on there for now speaking of ice spikes uh ice bikes is another one that we should definitely look to upgrade the area on simple to do can definitely increase our damage potential only 66 so this is actually like a very early enhancement you can do certainly not like a really pressing one um you definitely want to concentrate on enhancing your moves with additional elements if if that's you know if you're struggling at this point in time there's not much point at level 9 me doing that right because i've kind of you know got rid of most of my my small moves and things but definitely getting an extra area on ice spikes is great that you could use primordiality and add an additional element to this to allow you to create three elements which basically just gives you that plus crystallizing blast gives you four elements for simulacrum straight away without you without you even needing to to draw any elements but i think that's quite an expensive an all-in-one i think most of your gold ultimately is probably going to end up going on probably going to end up going on items to begin with if you play through the character multiple times though then definitely enhancements are worth doing and if you're playing on guildmaster you can definitely just start to look to increase um the number of hexes on different things adding additional hex on vengeance is 260 gold but damn well brilliant so yeah i mean again any of these ones that you can really add to like i said you could in theory add a disarm here for 500. now we're talking about you know kid in the candy shop style stuff but uh yeah if you've got lots of gold then why not i will say that this character is not one that really benefits from the strengthen effect so you know quite typically an enhancement that most people would try and do would be to add strengthen onto any kind of heel effect because especially on the bottom right because then you're going to get strengthened for this turn attack and then you're going to strengthen for the next turn but the elementalist doesn't really care for that the elementalist has a very flat attack deck like we talked about before so strengthen doesn't really have much benefit here so i'd be much more likely to you know maybe you'd do this on an ally it would be a nice thing to do to an ally but it's certainly not something you need to really worry about actually quite a good early game enhancement while we're kind of really doing the shaping the ether combo you know where we're doing our stun and our target 2 is to try and add on like fire on to chevrolet cyclone because if we can add fire onto here it's 100 gold uh we can definitely kind of ensure that when we lead with our tremulone cyclone and crystallizing blast turn we then have a follow-up of shaping ether you know attacking three stun and target two which is you know very very good okay guys there we have it there is the elementalist guide it was a long one and a long time in process i really had to think about this one do a lot of research and again i would really like to shout out femris his post over on reddit was really helpful in kind of collecting my thoughts and sort of vindicating some of my reasoning i'm not the best elementalist player out there i'm certainly not one of my favorite characters to play myself so i did need to lean on other resources for this so absolutely his guide is amazing so i really do encourage if you want to do some further research on this character to check it out and links in the description below if you'd like to do that if you did enjoy the video you know the drill toss it a like and subscribe i've got many more gloomhaven guides coming one for every class eventually and also if you click on my channel there's some guides already up so i have uh six guides no eight guides up now so eight guides in total and uh the next two guides coming will be the sun class and the lightning bolt class so they will be coming i'm trying to do them in the order that they get released in gloomhaven digital so because most of the people who kind of watch me on twitch watch me playing gloomhaven digital so we're going to be kind of doing the natural progression until we get all of the mercenaries out in digital if you want to be one of those people who watches me play on twitch you can always come over to twitch.tv slash manage requests where i stream every monday wednesday sunday gloomhaven so yeah be one of those people in the chat and uh yeah we can talk about the classes together don't forget to pop any questions that you may have for the 1000 sub special q a in the comments below and you know if it's a good question maybe i'll answer it also we do have a community discord server so you can always ask me questions there if you want so i'll put a link to the community discord server below there are people in there looking to play gloomhaven digital and looking for other people to play with and we just talk about gloomhaven and just anything really so come hang out in a nice chill fun discord community too well that's about it guys for the dedicated few that may have got this far thank you all so much for watching i'm going to catch you in the next video bye i think so [Laughter] isaac at this point can we get your approval to add an additional attack modifier deck for allies in the digital version

Channel: MandatoryQuest

Views: 27,783

Keywords: Gloomhaven, gloom haven, digital, steam, pc, co-op, multiplayer, online, guide, strategy, tips, tricks, how to, tutorial, cards, advice, playstyle, elementalist, elements, power, damage, attack, ranged, elementlist, class, mercenary, character, build

Id: 4UDdWBDFroM

Length: 86min 36sec (5196 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020