by Galandil
I wonder why on this forum sometimes people need to address any kind of criticism with personal remarks such as "you don't want to win all the time, do you?".Some of you brought to the table other arguments, like other new abilities (Elusiveness, Assassinate, Cumbersome, Multiple Attacks), which are imo perfectly fine, or the obvious fact that new monsters bring with them the new abilites.
I have no problem at all with all the new monsters, except the ones with Arcane Immunity. It's not a matter of dialing up the difficulty (even though expansions should bring more variety primarily), it's HOW it's done that, at least in this case, it's done wrong.
Let's not kid ourselves. The base game had a precise curve during a game, which ended with assaulting city, with a bunch of powerful monsters. Scaling up the power of the single enemies, without bringing a huge number of them (quality, not quantity, of monsters, every city has, at most, 5 enemies).
In the new Volkare's scenarios, the paradigm has shifted to quantity primarily. The highest level of Volkare's base army (that's it, without additional gray monsters from Indecisive Units) is composed by 12 enemies. Add to this that you can't discover in advance the actual tokens just being adjacent to Volkare, and how block must be played (no grouping of monsters) and you can see that the whole thing is really bad gameplay wise.
As Scott points out, now the best approach is just: ranged, ranged, and more ranged. That's it. Combats against V's army must be thought as "kill most of 'em during ranged phase, before you get knocked out". Arcane Immunity monsters just worsen this aspect.
In the base game, even if blocking was not the best way to approach final combats in cities, it was sometimes viable and useful. Now, block is just useless because, even if you would play it to some extent, you just CAN'T per rules and size of the armies. Grouping enemies during the Block phase would correct this problem, ofc. It's not enjoyable to play a game and then discover that you lose just because you draw the "YOU LOST" token (Grim Legionnaires, for example). It remembers me some videogames that approach the "high difficulty" concept with just "give the bosses more HPs" so the combat doesn't become harder, it just becomes longer and plain boring.
And the advice about using Firestorm/Blizzard/Mana Thunderbolt against the Dragon Summoner, apart from being really obvious and not useful at all (unless in every game you always get one of those Spells), just confirms the fact that the metagame is ALL about Ranged/Siege attacks, now a lot more than before. Volkare's army is the "coffin" why we should go always for ranged/siege attacks, Arcane Immunity is the nail on that coffin.