Alright, I know people seem to complain about war monkeys a lot and you guys might be tired of hearing about them, but to be fair this map has crushed my will to live and left me a broken husk of a man, crumpled in a corner crying softly. So here we go. My main complaint about this map is that any "strategy" to beat it is almost entirely dependent on luck. Your card draws, as well as whether the monkey's Duck card activates or not, completely determine your fate. An average try at this map goes somewhat like this: Turn 1: Fire off all your ranged damage, position your characters in a corner or against the back wall to protect their backs. Turn 2: The war monkeys pin you against the wall, tank them and hope you draw enough damage and the monkeys do not roll on Duck. Turn 3: You're still pinned, you can't move without exposing your back. The mantis is in range to dissolve your armors and will do so. Tank the damage again and pray you draw damage cards and the monkeys do not roll on Duck. Turn 4: The mandrill boss reaches you. You're still pinned by the war monkeys, and this guy draws 15 to 25 damage worth of cards per turn. Game over. There's no real way to counter this scenario, and most of the problem with it lie with the 5 war monkeys group. First off, you can't prevent the war monkeys from reaching you by the first or second turn: They have a deck size of 21, and draw 5 cards per turn. This mean on first turn, they get to draw a whole 1/3 of their deck, and will draw 1/4 of it per turn from then on. They will also get free card draws from Simian Reflexes card rolls on top of that. They are guaranteed to have the move cards needed to reach you. All of their move cards are free move. You can't pin them or slow them down with a tank. Cold damage encumbrance will barely slow the group down. There are just too many of them. So if you can't stop them, you have to kill them. If you can off 2 or 3 of them by the time the mandrill shows up you have a decent chance of winning. Easier said than done though: The Acrobatics card means melee damage is all but useless against them. You don't really get any chance to attack them from the back on this map without exposing yourself to backstabbing. There is no way to deal with the Duck card reliably. You can try to trigger it with weak attack cards, IF you happen to draw some. And then Duck can still fail to trigger on the weak attack. And with the monkey's amazing card drawing power, they're likely to have several of them. They also get a 2 power armor. Because why not? Now I have to note that at this point in the game, you've dealt with monkey groups of this size several times before. The main difference here is the presence of the boss characters, which puts you on a timer to deal with the war monkeys. And the only efficient strategies to deal with war monkeys are very slow: You can kite war monkeys around. Not here though, because the space is so cramped and there are 5 of them. You can tank war monkeys easily with armor. As long as you don't expose your back, their attacks are weak so just let them exhaust their moves before countering. You can't do that here though, because the mantis will dissolve your armors from the back of the map. You can focus on making them discard and pushing them back, and slowly bring them down slowly when they're out of cards. But you don't have the time for that here, and once the mandrill and mantis join the fray your discard won't keep up. All of this adds up to create a situation where you play the map to your best and don't make any strategic mistakes, only to realize 2 turns later that with the cards you've drawn, against the cards they've drawn, there was no path to victory. This also happens sometimes in other maps of course, that's just the nature of the beast with a card game. But on this map, the odds are stacked so high against you that all you can do is retry again and again and hope the game decides to give you an actual chance at winning. I think this really sucks, and I would appreciate if you could tone down this map. Thanks to everyone who read this far, stay tuned for my next novel "War Monkeys: bane of all mankind" coming soon.
Map used to have only 3 monkeys, and got upped to 5 in a balance patch (where early content was made easier and later harder). 3 was too easy, since you usually would be able to kill them before the mantis and the monkey chieftain got even close (here's the adventure back then). 4 might be that sweet spot. I wouldn't disagree that it sounds like it got too hard, especially with the general monkey annoyance.
I have tried it several times so far, and never come close to winning. It is also frustrating to play through the whole adventure several times to reach this level, it's just not on the same page as the ones before. Maybe 4 Monkeys would make it more manageable, i can imagine that 3 would make it too easy. I still have some ideas, but they mainly depend on cards i don't have yet (like stone wall) or getting more whirlwind etc.
The way I beat it was to reroll as a 3 wizards party (Human, Elf x2). The idea is that since tanking/melee is useless and healing just wastes what precious time you have in the first few turns, I would just damage race the monkeys will a full DPS party. The human wizard was using a Wall of Fire/frost damage deck (literally 25% of the deck was Wall of Fire, it's the most important card). One elf was using a discard/lightning damage deck (discard mainly in the form of Perplexing Ray and Short Perplexing Ray, also had a few Walls of Fire), the other elf was using a pushback/lightning damage deck (focusing on Winds of War and Whirlwind Enemies, also had one Improved Telekinesis I think and a few Mazes). The basic idea is to go huddle in a corner using a triangle formation ASAP and surround yourself with a sea of lava to abuse the fact that the AI won't move onto a damaging square, even if it has enough cards to move in, strike and move out. A single Wall of Fire in a diagonal line can be used to block 3/5 of your adjacent squares with that formation and your back cannot be exposed. From there just focus on killing as many war monkeys as possible to reduce their card draws. Make them discard or use up their move cards then cast lava under them or move them onto it. If you can get your hands on staves with the Freeze card, it pins war monkeys in place for 2 turns, long enough for lava to kill them from full HP. I ended up beating it on first attempt with this setup, but it was really messy as my draws in the first few turns were not optimal, even with the redundancy I tried to build into each deck. The mandrill reached me with 2 war monkeys still alive, and since it has spear skills with a range of 2 so I had to sacrifice the human wizard to kill one and let the elves escape and start kiting. Then one elf had to be sacrificed to kill the last monkey and the mantis. The last elf killed the mandrill by kiting him around with 1 HP left. It was as close as it was going to get, and too many things can go wrong (looking at you Duck and Simian Reflexes cards) but I think this setup gives you the best chances to cull the monkey swarm before the bosses roll in. Not really eager to try this mission again to find out how (un?)reliable this strategy is.
This map has just absolutely killed my interest in playing this game. I've had my share of troubles with earlier maps, needing several restarts and attempts in order to beat them, but I always manage to figure out some combination of cards or tactics that allowed me to win. Part 3 of Temple of Terror, however, has just beaten me down to the point where even the mention of the "m" word sends me into a sputtering incoherent rage. I've tried different groups, different races, different equipment, different strategies, and every single time I get stomped on. It's horrific.
Keep the faith Stargazer, this is probably a map that needs to be tuned down. Just take a breather and pray...
Heh, I went back and even leveled up a completely new set of characters. Blew through all the previous missions I had done due to the gear I already had. Even had a much easier time with a variety of missions that I had quite a bit of trouble with the first time through. Then I got back to Temple of Terror. It was like hitting a brick wall at 50mph. Except replace bricks with monkeys.
This level is wayyyyy too difficult. I have probably gone through 60 gold and 15 attempts at this point. I have tried all the advice above but am unable to take down even two of the monkeys. The combination of two really good block rolls that both have side affects (move you, or take your card(!!!)) makes them difficult to hit. Then they have armor. In addition every attack they have is high in value and difficult to block or prevent damage. They have a huge hand and cycle through cards quickly as well (Simian reflexes). Given what I mentioned above, 5 monkeys is almost unstoppable. Like I said, I've only been able to take down 3 max before my whole party falls.
Since this thread has revived, something worth pointing out: I since found out that there are ways to beat this map reliably, one of them hinges on the things I've outlined in this post. This lets me beat this adventure consistently without trouble, however achieving this consistency with the gear accessible to a new player stumbling on this map is unlikely. For example the 2 wizards I use for this stack multiples of Firewall Amulet, Hasek's Icy Ring, Blister Stone, Sub-zero Staff and Chillwood Staff. The priest is a Focused Healer build with access to Bless which combined with triple Advanced Flexibility make the deck(s) out card cycle the war monkey group easily. None of these options are likely to be available to a new player, and assembling 3 viable decks for this adventure from scratch means hounding the shops for several days at the very least. Based on this I still think this map deserves a few hits with the nerf stick, especially since later maps are generally easier.
As someone relatively new to the beta, this map pretty much made me stop playing a couple of times out of sheer frustration. I think part of it is not just that it is hard (though it is), it is that it is *annoying*. It is one thing to get beat down by a dragon. It is another thing to, with every new turn, try to figure out how to use your one move card to get behind five monkeys with tons of free moves, flips or whatever. I see some people are advocating stacking mages or whatever. Not really an option for a new player (and is that even something you want people to have to do on a 'first playthrough' Love the game, but the monkeys are just not fun.
I'm not really sure why there's so much hate for this map. It's challenging, sure, but it didn't strike me as being significantly more difficult than the other maps in the area. I was able to beat on my second attempt without changing my build in any way. The only special strategy I used was to make sure my characters never had their backs towards adjacent monkeys (because otherwise Pickpocket and Cowardly Attack cause major problems). After reading this thread, and another thread on the same topic, I decided I'd play the map again and record a video of it. I've now done that, but I haven't yet uploaded it anywhere. Would anyone be interested in watching a 15 min gameplay video of this map? There's no commentary, and I didn't do anything particularly impressive - but if this map is really such a big deal, then maybe the video would be helpful to someone. (Since I've got the video already, the only hassle for me is that I'd have to reactivate my youTube account to upload it. Presumably the video would be too big to attach it to a forum post...)
Yes, would love it. Also, could you post your team? I'm definitely feeling like I'm banging my head against the wall on this one. Would love to see it done well!
Ok, I've created a new youTube account and uploaded the video. Here is the link. It isn't a very exciting video. I'm a bit slow on a couple of the turns, and I wouldn't claim that it was really well played. But it was a win nevertheless. I'll edit this post to include the build I used shortly. [edit] Here's the build I used in the video. The items I've got here are a bit better than what I had when I first played the map, but it's essentially the same general idea. Human Wizard (specialized to inflict damage using terrain effects): Tangerine Staff Sour Staff Glowing Jewel Wand Of Seared Air Asmod's Telekinetic Chain Booming Ring Grimson Robe Mithril Mesh Slippers Trained Command Advanced Teleportation Dwarf Priest (specialized for healing and tankiness): Long Axe Of Repentance Field Medic's Pike Rusty Buckler Crafted Healer's Mail Goblin-hide Boots Healing Talisman Broken Charm Saint's Tooth Superb Stoutness Advanced Medic Elf Warrior (specialized for raw damage and mobility): Bejeweled Shortsword Weighted Shortsword Hefty Stout Club Steel Shield Shifty Skin Hat Tarik's Heavy Plate Disintegrating Boots Advanced Footwork Angry Attacker
Nice video, I think you played it well. The issue I take with it is that it's "hope you draw enough damage and the monkeys do not block". Someone could try this map just like you did and loose, depending entirely on the draws of the first few turns. Someone could try and get the same draw you did, which are really good by the way (2 Powerful Hack, 1 Hot Spot, 1 Stone Spikes and 1 Muscle Through in opening hand, that's 38 damage and a move/slide card), and loose just as well. You didn't get blocked and flipped even though you hacked the first monkey from the front for example.
It's true that there is definitely luck involved, and I did get a pretty good set of cards to start with there. But ultimately if I had started with different cards I would probably have played it differently with them. eg. if I had a bunch of blocks instead of a bunch of attacks, I might have moved my warrior forward to tank up some of the monkey's attacks. And if I had heals on my supposed healer, again I might have tried to tank with whoever had the best armour and then use the heals to keep them healthy. Also, the first monkey did flip me on the first attack. I attacked with my weakest move first in anticipation of that.
I look at it this way: you had all those damaging cards and also weak attacks to go through the blocks on top of that. That's a very good starting hand. You used them all smartly and when the time came to attempt to damage a monkey, it had to be done from the front and they still had 3 hidden cards at that point. What if another flip was in there? Your damage would have been negated, your warrior would have gotten flipped, then the monkey might have stolen your other Powerful Hack or backstabbed for 10. Yet you made no mistake. What could you have done to prevent this scenario? Nothing, you had to take the chance.
