by mr18196
Hmmm… Not listening to your good advice, I went at Dol Guldur with the starter decks yesterday evening. Lore and Leadership were destroyed twice without clearing the first quest card. Tactics rescued the prisoner and killed the Nazgul twice, but since Tactics relies solely on Legolas for progress, threat hit 50 on the second quest card both times.Then Spirit. Which I played like in the Anduin scenario, stalling to play the Galadhrim’s Greetings and cycle them back with Will of the West. Dol Guldur makes this take even longer since one of your heroes is out of play.
I got to 9 progress on the first quest card, but with one hero Caught in two Webs and only three allies in play I didn’t want to take one of the objective card penalties yet. So I just stayed there on the first quest card, cycling turns doing nothing to draw the entire deck and play the Greetings over and over. It was then I realized that this is actually not very fun, and also very unthematic. I put my cards down and went to bed, thinking I might finish the scenario today.
Waking up however, I realized that Will of the West actually makes the Spirit deck quite overpowered. I really don’t like to use that word, since it usually gets tossed around to lightly, especially by beginners like myself. But in this case I think it actually has merit.
As long as the Spirit deck survives the first few turns by getting some allies into play, it can just sit there to defend, draw the entire deck and then start cycling Greetings with WotW to get threat down to zero. Then it can put all its allies and attachments into play, and even return a hero if one has been killed. It can always do this, as long as the player has the patience to sit through an endless number of repetitive turns doing nothing but collect resources and reduce threat. Once it has all its cards in play, the Northern Trackers will take care of any locations that have piled up in the staging area, and completing the scenario becomes trivial.
Then I searched the BGG forums for phrases like “will of the west”, “overpowered” and “broken”. The articles I found led me to phrases like “stalling”. It seems I wasn’t exactly the first player to notice this.
Now I don’t know what to do. Complete the Dol Guldur quest with the Spirit deck? It should only be a matter of patience (unless the third quest card, which I haven’t looked at, has some big surprise for me). Doing that will surely take a very long time and not be very fun.
I’m a bit disappointed to spot such an obviously flawed effect this early in playing the game. This really should have been addressed in playtesting. How do people usually handle this? House rule WotW? Don’t play it? Any advice appreciated.