Personal Goals?

[Carda NL]

Hello gloomers,

I just bought the game and I like playing campaigns in most games with party members I level up from the start. Now with personal goals... at the moment I dont want to unlock new characters and I wanne keep the party I start with and play the campaign on a bit easy difficulty but the personal goals make my partymembers leave halfway if I reach one?

Any way to disable this mechanic or tips for me how to handle this? Thanks

[Stelas]

Retiring is an integral part of the game - without doing it, you won't unlock other classes and you'll lose out on a significant portion of Prosperity, which is used to unlock more items and a fair amount of scenarios. Depending on your enhancement settings it's also a primary way to modify the deck for all versions of that class going forwards. It's not really a mechanic you should ignore.

That said, there's nothing to stop you immediately picking up a character of the same class again. I just name mine Bob, Bob2, Bob3, and so on.

[MrPyro]

The other option is to play in Guildmaster mode, which does not have retirements. It's not the same as the core campaign story wise, but gameplay is basically the same

[pitiflauticus]

As Stelas mentioned, retiring characters unlocks a lot of new content, plus it gives future characters bonus perks, plus let you experience the game as intended. Keep in mind that you will not play that many scenarios - maybe 60 in total? So even if you retire characters often, you will likely not play all classes in any single campaign - which is not a problem, on the contrary, it's an incentive to play another campaign playthrough ;)

And once you have finished the campaign twice, you still have the full guildmaster mode, where it makes more sense to keep characters for longer period of time because there are some mechanics in guildmaster that allow for wild experimentation with classes and parties :)

So embrace retirement!

[Kwic]

Well, other questions with retirement :
- do you lose all the stuff the guy has ?
- what about leveling ? Do I have to get a new level 1 member in my, let say, levl 4 or 5 party ?

(I started with GuildMaster, and after getting all mates 4ish, I tried the campaign. The GuildMaster scenarios are not easy, but wtf, the campain ones are so hard !! I had to really struggle jusye for the second one, this with the tree to save...)

[RonJonJovi]

I feel the same way, to an extent, and just recreate the characters I really enjoy playing after they retire. I have to re-level them up to get the higher level cards, but it lets me experiment a bit with the cards I didn't choose on my previous play-through of that character.

[Slow Dog]

On retirement, you lose the character and all their items go back to the shop (thematically, the character is cashing out).

In the campaign, you can immediately level a character up to the wealth level of Gloomhaven (though you don't have to, and I don't. Level 3 is my current limit). It's absolutely not an issue having characters of disparate levels in a party. It's entirely expected. Monster level scales to the average party level.

[Carda NL]

Thank you all for the great answers you provided. Personal goals is still something I want(ed) to switch off for my first campaign run but I'll take it as I go and learn to 'deal with it'. I'm afraid it's quite confusing for me, not being skilled/aware of even the base characters I'm running with now, to switch to new ones or repick the same one but with no items/gold.

On the other hand, this game is really good, don't get me wrong. I am really enjoying my time learning the characters and trying to get through the frist dungeon atm :) . Failed twice due to running out of cards (yes on easy mode, but without the HP boost enabled) but that's also the learning curve. I was very conservative on burning cards but used way too many long-rests.

[Stelas]

To be clear, new characters won't start with 'no gold' - they'll get 30 gold plus 15 per level above 1, so you'll be able to get them gear. They'll also start with bonus perks - +1 per character that has previously retired in that slot.

[Jo]

I personnaly very rarely long rest. Yes you get to choose the card you burn but you also completely loose one turn. I often prefer to short rest and to position closer to the door, grab a pile of gold maybe in the process and throw a little heal.

Depends on gear however, making a long rest that will "recharge" your boots and weapon for instance can be highly valuable.

[pitiflauticus]

Originally posted by Carda NL:

. I was very conservative on burning cards but used way too many long-rests.

Keep in mind that each rest (long or short) will reduce your character's longevity considerably if you take them when you still have cards in your hand. So theoretically, you should only rest when you have used your entire hand (unless that's going to leave you in a very vulnerable position). A character should easily last around 25 rounds on average, but a single rest "out of cycle" can cost you 2-4 rounds, depending on when do you exactly take it. So be conservative with rests too, and optimize your hand playings :)