Glaurung said:

sure it works. the solution is easy because it's good.
sometimes it seems to me that people want really hard quests but they never want to lose. a hard quest should feel like a real victory when you finally beat it after losing some times :)

i agree adding cards for 1 player the balance can be too hard to maintain. but for more players, especially 4, adding 1 card in staging is just 25% more cards in a 4-player game as opposed to 100% more when playing solo.

kennoastic said:

But that is like giving AI extra money or units in games like Civilization or Total War, or cranking up your experience requirement to next level in MMORPG.

By tougher challenge gamers meant improved AI or better quest/content, not stacks after stacks of units or hours after hours of grinding.

I made it solo. 86 points. But was lucky a lot. Crazy difficult quest i love it!!!

Well in multiplayer we have in every deck spirit hero and in every deck there is maximum number of changeling cards…

So Lore/spirit, Tacktic/spirit, Leadership/spirit Spirit/something is normal way of buiding decks against heavy treachery decks… This reguires guite many core sets, but is very viable way of making good multiplayer decks :-)

Ouch… my first experience with this quest tonight was painful.  I was reminded of Journey Down the Anduin -- instead of a troll, you get a couple of Southron Companies in the first turn.  But there's no sneaking around those Companies, so the standard strategy for JDtA (low starting threat and build allies) isn't going to work here.  Oh, and here, have some threat in the staging area.  Maybe we'll see a hero in this cycle who can swap out the active location under certain conditions -- game changer for the early part of this quest.

At least Into Ithilien make me consider cards I've never considered is viable.

At this moment I am thinking of Thicket of Spears with Hama, Out of the Wild, Shadow of the Past and a whole lot of other cards allowing encounter deck manipulation.

The player cards are becoming very strong that makes nearly all of previous scenarios too easily, at least this is a challenge instead of beating the scenario ten minutes after it come out and wait for next one.

revolution.hk said:

Agree with you 100%!!!

The problem that I think many are missing, though, is that Into Ithilien is too reliant on luck.

Not just hard cards like the Mumak (which I have no problems with but question its inclusion in an apparently "Difficulty 4" scenarion) but broken cards like Blocking Wards.  If Blocking Wargs is the last card in the scenario deck, it's game over.  Not "it suddenly gets a lot harder", the game enters an infinite loop.  Even the idea of Blocking Wargs is ridiculous - wound every questing character and there are four copies of the card in the deck.  How many characters can take all four without dying or healing?

This is a different play experience from the difficulty of the Mumak - it's not difficult, it's just cheesey.  There's no skill involved, no tactics, just luck.  I would happily take out all four copies of Blocking Wargs out of the deck in exchange for 2 more Mumaks.

I have no problem with genuine difficulty but Into Ithilien is not it.

I don't think this scenario is "unfair" or purely luck based. If you're having trouble with really difficult treachery cards, remember that we have ways of dealing with bad treachery cards.

I just had a great game with Imrahil/Eleanor/Boromir(New) where I scored 86 and it would have been ruined by Blocking Wargs if I didn't have Eleanor and Test of Will.

We also have Denethor, Out of the Wild, Shed Some Light, etc. to help avoid Treachery cards.

I've had the hardest time with 2 players against Into Ithilien. My brother and I played 6 games in a row and lost every one. I simply take this as an awesome challenge, re-tool our decks and get back in there!

As it the case with most things, the truth is probably on neither end of the spectrum being discussed.  The scenario is not totally broken (with the designer-acknowledged exception of the Blocking Wargs infinite loop, an admitted oversight).  Neither is it aptly-described as simply a challenging scenario which rewards players for thoughtfully constructing their decks.  That description fails to capture the heavily luck-dependent path to victory of any successful attempt at this scenario.  

I think at present, even the perfect deck will fail at this scenario more than 50% of the time.  Can anyone claim better performance?  Or even a 50% win rate?  There are some very smart players on this board (many who are pleased with this scenario, I will add).  However, even with their insights, there has not yet arisen a strategy for tackling this scenario that does not depend on optimal draw from both the player deck and the encounter deck.  Therefore we can only describe Into Ithilien as a challenging scenario which requires both advanced tactics and a lot of luck.  And honestly I think if you sit down and play 7 games in a row, winning only 1 of them, you cannot credit yourself with great tactics or deck construction for the win.  You have to credit beating the odds and pulling just the right cards, which is little testament to the skill of the player.  However, that skill has to -- has to! -- be present for the perfect victory conditions to ever present themselves in the first place.

I like what Valryian Steel said over in this thread: "Every card in this scenario is just brutal and there is absolutely no breathing room."  Very succintly put.

Yeah i think that the only way to beat this scenario right now is getting the right cards at the right moment and hoping the encounter deck shows a little mercy. I think that if there were 2 blocking wargs instead of 4 it would be more doable because generally you want to cancel blocking wargs but there are other treacheries that can really ruin your day.

I didn't say so above, but I don't really have any problem with this scenario.  It's super hard, and that caters to people who like super hard scenarios.  Good for FFG!  I'm not really in that crowd, but I will certainly play this scenario until I beat it at least once :) 

I don't think the difficulty rating of "4" is even a valid talking point, really.  Obviously FFG's system for determining difficulty is busted in a big way.  No one in this thread is arguing that it deserves the rating it got.  I would really love to see a "making of" segment from FFG and to hear how they determined this rating -- for this scenario, specifically.  Anyway, I'm happy to consider it a typo.

But yeah… hard scenario.  Stupid elephant!!

I agree with Narsil0420, we have some tools to deal with real bad treachery cards, and there's bad ones in a lot of quests. I will say, if anything, I wouldn't mind just a couple more cards to deal with treacheries for the other spheres though.

GrandSpleen said:

You will EASILY beat this quest over 50% of the time with the Erebor Hammersmith loop deck. But I don't think we want to count that. ^_^

attempted the scenario 3 more times today with 3 players…got steamrolled each time.  Blocking wargs into blocking wargs.  We succesfully cleared ithlian road first turn too each time.  rough stuff

@Mattr0polis -- no way.  Impossible to set up that 5-card combo in this quest!  And, if it didn't happen in at least 2 separate games, it's an accident of fate! :)  Seriously though, I really doubt you could achieve the Erebor Hammersmith loop in even 50% of Into Ithilien attempts.