I don't want to build a new deck every time I have an encounter

This may be just me, but I highly doubt it. I've never played another deck-building game (virtual or table-top) where that happens. Usually you build a deck and then you use it for more than 10 minutes. Sometimes for a week or a month, other than minor tinkering.

I'm starting to guess that this is why interest in this game wanes after the first 10 or so levels. Eventually the # of items swapped per mission/scenario/adventure goes from 1 or 2 to 20+ (across all 3 chars) very quickly. That's not tinkering, that's torching your deck.

This means that you lose "ownership" of your characters and your decks. Whatever quirky thing you've done with your deck that makes you feel like you did something unique...throw all that away and just put in there what you have to put in there. Rinse. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat some more.

At a certain point building a deck goes from fun and creative and mine, to me just doing whatever the game is fairly obviously demanding that I do to my deck.

I appreciate the challenge of a good scenario, but making it so that you have to have a relatively "perfect" loadout (and good card draws*) to win is too much challenge for too little reward. If you spend 10 minutes of tinkering (or more, possibly) to win a 15-20 minute scenario means you are spending half your time with housekeeping.

So what happens is, maybe you play a scenario/adventure and fail, figure out what to do to win it. Your annoyance is overcome by the thrill of victory and the satisfaction of figuring out a puzzle.

But the problem with puzzles is: they are only fun once. Since the game involves grinding (which is okay with me, that's just what it's called) due to the level/xp caps on adventures, this means you have to repetitively do this equipment-change (i.e., deck-building) and attacking the puzzle over and over, but you only get the satisfaction of "beating" the puzzle once.

A part of this problem is the at-times painful equipment/closet/storage system. It's such a PITA to search through equipment and unequip and requip everything, it just becomes draining and--unsurprisingly--doing this chore is not in the least bit fun. Yet, it's what we will be doing with maybe 25% of our time in order to adventure. It could certainly be more, and it's not going to be much less.

If you could SAVE equipment loadouts for each scenario...that would make the game probably 4-5x more fun for me at this point. It would also mean that my percentage of time spent on this game would be higher in terms of game played versus game maintenance.

Another option would be to give everyone two loadouts per character or party. You have to do two because you can swap between them with a button click, the same way you do in some action RPG's like Diablo or whatever.
Then charge players pizza for more loadouts and the ability to name them. Generally speaking, the best games charge you money for cosmetics and convenience. This would be a massive convenience.

* This is always going to provide frustration in any deck-building game. I understand that. But how many points of frustration do you want players to deal with? You can't (exactly) eliminate the randomness of card draws, but some of the other frustration is arbitrary.

 

Another thing might be access to special (i.e., yellow) equipment a little earlier. My storage is filled with items I can't use. I'm not even talking--directly--about making the game easier, I'm just saying why do I have to look at a bunch of stuff I can't use? Games very very rarely give out loot you can't use within one more level of what you were when it dropped. Maybe two.

This is a fairly minor thing, but would be a pretty easy thing to do.

 

Being able to save party layouts should make the grinding easier. Now you just load the setup for that mission and you are good to go.

If the missions were setup such that there werent specific weaknesses and strengths to exploit and defend against, well wouldn't that make all the missions the same? Then the boredom would be the fact that all the missions are generic instead of having to change gear for each mission. Also, what would the generic mission be balanced against? Armor, no armor, spells, range, a little of everything? However they are designed if they were intended to be beaten by whatever deck was brought to face them, there would still be a best way to defeat it. Like, just being all your power cards and muscle through it, or just bring 3 mages and range them down, whatever. People would find the one best deck and cheese everything. Sure people could use whatever they feel like, but humans gravitate towards the most efficient method. Instead of being able to use whatever fancy deck they like, it would just be easier to use the best deck, and now everyone feels pigeonholed into that and all those other cool cards go unused.

MP is where you can build your cool beat-everything deck that has your own personal flavor. Campaign is where you learn different strategies and see how deep your pack of cool stuff is, utilizing abilities you have collected over the course of the campaign.

 

I agree with this, but it depends on your party.
- I started with three elves, and they didn't need to swap gear much. The main thing was switching out bashing weapons (slimes) and then swapping out slashing and piercing weapons (skellies). Having hit L15, the main thing that gets swapped is boots and robes/armor.
- Then starting a party of 3 clerics, they have more of a problem. I'm inclined to agree with your assessment that you need a "perfect loadout and perfect draw" in some cases, especially where you need a quick win.

Yes, this is a problem with mixing loot between multiplayer and campaign. I found that weird too, when I was just campaigning. Note that you can use those items in multiplayer already. =]

 

I'm in agreement with DragnHntr and Pengw1n. I've not investigated the party archiving system yet, but it sounds like exactly what you're after.

And in completing the campaign I don't recall ever "torching" my deck, preferring to make limited changes to key areas. Usually the only alterations I made were what weapons + skill to take on my warrior, what divine items to take on my priest, whether to go terrain attachments or penetrating attacks on my wizard and what kind of blocks everyone needed. And for any given adventure I would rarely need to change all of these.

Could I have made a better deck by optimising what boots everyone wears? Probably. Did I feel like it was imperative that I do this? No.

Edit:

Although it looks like opinions vary!

 

Same with me, I tend to have a fairly standard loadout and tweak it based on what I'm encountering. Sometimes one change leads to others, of course, but I don't feel torn by an excess of choice.

Partly that could be that I have not as much choice as I could have, though. I've been trying to avoid buying items for gold, though I may change that policy having finally failed a campaign (for those interested, the one that got me was the L13 goblin treasure hunt - I am doing the astral thing with the chess pieces now before trying the goblins again).