Long or short rest?

[Floyd R. Turbo]

Relatively new player (45 hrs) here, and I understand I have a long way to go before the mechanics of this game settle in for me. I'm curious to know from more experienced players whether they prefer to take regular short rests to maintain a larger active deck or wait and then take the long rest to gain more cards back. I'm at the stage where I exhaust (way) too early most of the time and I'm trying to find a way to fix that.

[The_Mell]

First:
You try to prolong a rest as long as possible - so 1 or 0 cards in hand.
Whenever you rest, you burn 1 card and that is bad because you will lose easily multiple rounds to play and become exhausted earlier.

Plan ahead to maximize the use of your hand of cards!


Second:
The decision whether to long or short rest, when you rest, depends on equipment and combat situation.
No enemies before entering a new room but everything used? -> Long rest.
Right in combat with no one helping you or even threat of being killed while long resting? -> Short rest.
Those are the two extremes - in between there's a grey zone.


Yes, a short rest can bring back an important card to your hand but that's a very special situation which should only be used if you must take that action or lose.

[Quizzical]

Don't rest if you don't need to. You usually want to wait until you have no other options besides resting in order to rest. I sometimes have all mercenaries long rest the same turn before opening the next room, even though this might be a turn early for some of them.

If you do rest, then make it a long rest unless there's a good reason not to. Sometimes there are good reasons not to, and that's fine. But even if you're actively fighting mobs in a room, once the room is mostly clear, it's usually okay to go long rest rather than short.

[Pokey]

The best advice I can give you on not exhausting early is to simply not burn cards until the absolute best case scenario appears for using them or you are in the final room. If you can take out an entire room of enemies by burning one card then go for it but many times your allies and you together can do the same thing without needing to burn.

I would also advise looking up the stamina calculator. If you play around with it you can see how many turns you lose by burning a single card at any given point in a scenerio. http://www.boardgamemath.com/boardgames/gloomhaven/gloomhavenStaminaCalculator.html

Now, as for rests, resting depends on your situation. Resting does in fact grant you a turn in which you aren't really using any cards but you also are simply just standing there not doing anything. Sometimes it is good to rest if you are burning cards early so that you can maintain pace with the rest of your group who are short resting. I can almost guarantee you though that resting isn't your problem when it comes to exhausting early.

[KoboldUtopian]

I only short rest if I need to. Long rest gives you +1 turn, +2hp, refresh items, and lets you pick which card to lose. Even in combat, if I think the rest of the party can handle it I'll long rest. Really only short rest if you need to act in the round, or if you are doing well and don't need to recover, or occasionally it's better to synchronize the party.

[Slow Dog]

You gain exactly as many cards back when you short rest as you do when you long rest. You should delay resting of any type as long as possible. There are reasons to rest early (to get a specific card in hand; or you're going to be hit lots without cards in hand; or if you're a low level Angry Face), but they should be exceptional.

Then, always long rest unless there's a reason to short rest. Here, though, there often is a reason to short rest; you're in the middle of a fight, and not acting would cause problems; you've got a higher card size than the other players and you're synching up; there's a scenario turn iimit.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

Looks like it's unanimous, then. Thank you all very much, interesting reading and a change in my strategy (it actually gives me one ...)

[Loswaith]

To me it feels like the game is designed around mostly long resting as default (when you cant play any more cards as others have mentioned), with short resting being one to use when really needed.
I did feel the tutorial kinda made it feel like short rest was the default, over long resting however.
Short resting can be viable, but often means gear has less use.

[KoboldUtopian]

Originally posted by Loswaith:

To me it feels like the game is designed around mostly long resting as default (when you cant play any more cards as others have mentioned), with short resting being one to use when really needed.
I did feel the tutorial kinda made it feel like short rest was the default, over long resting however.
Short resting can be viable, but often means gear has less use.

In GH my mentality was to mostly short rest unless I really needed the items/health or it were really convenient. FH feels like it has more opportunity to long rest and taking that long rest mentality back to GH seems to work much better.

[InvalidError]

Originally posted by Loswaith:

Short resting can be viable, but often means gear has less use.

Short-resting makes you burn one random card and gives you one chance at burning some other card instead by sacrificing 1 HP. If you are unlucky, you may lose 1HP saving one important card to lose an even more important card instead. When you long-rest, you choose which card to burn, regenerate 2 HP (or clear poison) on top of refreshing items.

I short-rest only in case of emergency. Not much short-resting is being done in my tabletop group either, save for cases such as when have to rush the boss/final room to get away from add-spawning tiles while mowing stuff down.

[David]

It's situational which works best. Long rest is far better on paper but there are plenty of times where remaining active will save you or your team a bunch of health and generate enough overall progress that you finish more than one turn faster. You always want the items refreshed, +2hp, choice of card to burn and an extra round but if a short rest can prevent 10 damage to the group and your healing is limited it becomes an acceptable trade-off.
Personally I lean towards caution so I tend to avoid short rests and burn cards in general, but even then there are characters I almost never long rest on.

A good example would be if you're playing Cragheart and there's a bunch of low health shielded monsters that are putting out Curse tokens. If you short rest you can then use one of your direct damage abilities to bypass the shields and take out most/all of them in a single turn, but if you long rest the group will get bogged down dealing with them and it'll slow down progress later as you all fail attacks from Curse tokens. In that case I'd be annoyed I couldn't refresh my boots but I'd be happy I negated the room's key threat.
With one of the unlock characters there's been plenty of times where I've had to short rest so I could go fast and stun all the enemies in the room. I don't get to refresh my useful equipment items but it prevents a ton of damage to the party, let's me put up an appropriate buff to help my team generate damage and ultimately let's us get through the room way faster/more efficiently because my team mates can make optimised attacks knowing the enemies won't be moving or dealing damage that round.

You should try to anticipate a rest at least one turn before you have to do it so you can avoid potential hazards that will force you to do a short rest. When you've got three cards in your hand you might have a really powerful combo, but after thinking about where you'll be standing at the end of that combo round you realise going init 99 next turn will mean taking a bunch of hits while you have nothing in your hand. So at that point you choose whether you're ok to short rest or if you need to do something else that lands you in a safe space to long rest.
A big part of the game is avoiding putting yourself in positions where you're forced to do something, while at the same time putting enemies in positions where you've restricted/controlled what they can/will do. You should be in control of what you do not the enemies.


Also people forget to say it when talking about early exhaustion, but a lot of new players don't realise they should be doing everything they can to avoid burning cards to negate damage. Sometimes it's luck of the draw and even the best player can get backed into a corner. Every now and then the stars align and that enemy with one health that everyone drew the auto-fail attacking hits you for an Attack 5 with a x2 token. It's bad but you burn a card and the world keeps turning.
Even in those scenarios though try and take a second to think about what you could have done to not be in a position to take that damage, or what you could have done to make it so that damage wasn't so vital you have to burn for it.
If you have high max health and you have to burn to avoid dying to a 6 damage attack ask yourself why your health was so low that 6 damage is enough to exhaust you. If you're a low health ranged character like the Spellweaver ask yourself how you ended up in a position where enemies were able to reach/attack you instead of going for the thicker skinned characters.
Importantly it's not always your fault. The person playing the Scoundrel may have drawn the Invisible token from the bag and accidentally opened you up to attack when you thought they were going to take it. Don't hold a grudge if you think they made a mistake by not standing in the optimal place or something. It's true you can prevent an entire group of enemies from doing anything by going Invisible in a doorway but at the end of the day it's just a (complicated) game and the scenarios are all designed with bad luck and mistakes in mind.
The only time you ever really intentionally discard to negate damage is super late in the scenario when you know you'll exhaust with one card in your hand anyway. At that point it can be handy to jump on the grenade to open up options for everyone else.
Sorry if that all seems obvious, I'm sure you've considered that burning cards less will cause you to exhaust slower, but the tutorial presents it casually like it's as normal as doing a base attack/move so some people don't realise it's an absolute last resort to be used under extreme circumstances. It doesn't emphasise the impact it has long term.


Lastly stay aware of how many cards you've got left in your hand. Losing a card from resting causes you to flip between even and odd card counts. If you've got an odd number of cards in your hand, and you return one from your discard to your hand with something like Minor Stamina Potion, that buys you an entire extra round before you have to rest.
The flip side of that is if you do think you'll be short resting you can use a Major/Minor Stamina Potion to put your most important card(s) back in your hand at the end of the turn before you need to rest. A short rest randomly selects a Discarded card to burn, which means stuff in your hand is safe. So with that in mind if you're considering short resting on an odd cycle make sure to plan ahead so that the card you'd choose to get rid of isn't in your hand (preferably your most important should be safe in your hand, but if it's good you're probably playing it).
Minor Stamina Potion seems very straightforward at face value but it does a lot of hand/rest manipulation for a very low price tag. Stuff like card count is a bit much to keep track of when you're starting out and have so many other things to consider but if you're aware of the general concepts you'll notice the impact and factoring it into your decisions becomes second nature pretty quickly after that.

Playing Spellweaver is a good way to learn most of this stuff fast. You'll accidentally exhaust yourself a bunch of times but it's a fun character to play and pretty soon you'll know ever mistake you can possibly make regarding burning/discarding and how to avoid them.

[aghakeshmiripp]

I use long rest in several cases: 1. when there are no enemy around me otherwise I use short rest so that I can attack the enemies in the next round. 2. when I'm stunned bc even if I use short case I can't use my cards and just add 2 more cards to my discard pile. 3. when one of my mercenaries have only two cards except burned cards and if I use short rest it will get exhausted before the round starts so I use long rest and I can waste enemies attack on that mercenary for one more round before it get exhausted.

[UnknownFox]

The upside is once you get into later levels, can carry around card retrieving items more like Stamina potion, you can find yourself almost having to force yourself to exhaust. Really is just a matter of learning your cards to make the most of them and your team (if you are playing with a group) to know if you are good to long rest even in the middle of a swarm to avoid tossing out a much needed card. As with my luck it is always one of the 2 I want to keep.