Hot Spot is so good early. Enemies draw so few cards that you just hang onto it until you see an opportunity to end someone. It can't be blocked, makes a mockery of early armour, and is not hard to land. And it just gets better. Sometimes, the map lets you drop a single Wall Of Fire and cover every square adjacent to your party in lava (this requires a 3-square wide choke), but you can do it with two walls on any map. If it's already standing in range, the AI will tend to dump it's attacks before it gets clear, but once it's off the lava it seems very reticent to stand on it again. Even enemies that are clearly nimble enough to get back off in time (like the monkeys), or big enough to just ignore it and kill your party (like many bosses) will back off. It's not too hard to hit a critical mass where the ground around your party is going to be lava forever, rendering a good number of enemies impotent. Cold effects plus lava seem a little OP. I hit that poor yellow dragon with Cone Of Cold, Cold Snap, and then dropped a Wall Of Fire underneath, and it couldn't even do anything about 60 damage out of it's 75 hitpoints. Large enemies in general don't stand a chance. It's just too easy to box them in and land multiple squares per turn of lava damage. The only thing that might save them is good armour, but wizards are good at shredding that too - The Firewall Amulet, for example, has 2 x Wall Of Fire and a Perplexing Ray to get rid of armour or moves as desired Did anyone else find it a little over the top?
Its certainly powerful used well (you might be surprised how many people havent worked out how to use it - this week someone posted in the forum complaining that its a pointless spell) but I found it a required part of progressing. There are equivalent big hit attacks for melees - and those will always land (unless blocked - but use them from behind) whereas lava can be avoided with a move or a move attack. I have found later in the game that move attacks become more common - so using lava becomes a little trickier. Building for some synergy makes for a powerful deck though - lava, acid, elvish insight, perplexing ray, telekinesis - despite using these, I cant quite guarantee winning every battle first time It might be fair to limit large enemies to a maximum of 10 lava damage a turn (I actually havent yet put multiple lava under one large enemy - so hadnt realised that it would work that way). Gray
It's an issue that Jon has said they intended to fix, since . . . they first created the Greenfang demo. It absolutely needs to change.
