I just had a couple of games where a couple of annoyances came up today. 1) Dodge does not really explain what it does effectively on the card. Sometimes if Dodge procs you do not take damage and sometimes you do. It was explained to me that you have to dodge out of the range of the attack in order not to take damage. If that is the case.. it's not very intuitive with how the card is written up. Especially since a similar card (Hard to Pin) does not work this way at all. 2) If you are halted, why are you prevented from using step attacks if you are adjacent to the target, or in the case of surging bolt, unable to unleash said bolt without moving? Since it's not necessary to move in order to attack normally you shouldn't be prevented from attacking just because you can't elect to move.
1) Notice how Dodge is not a block card, while Hard to Pin down is (blue+green). There's your answer, Dodge just moves you, while HtP blocks (negates damage) and then moves you. 2) Agree, however I guess the game can't skip the movement phase of these actions - and since they're partly movement cards (red+blue), we're not able to play them due to mechanical reasons.
I don't think anyone really explained how Dodge works to the AI, either. I see dogs and things stupidly dodge straight into me (even on killshots!) and die all the time.
That would be very problematic, since step cards are already deemed overpowered by some - I guess this is the reasoning they were left out from being effected by the auras. I mean, adding a +2 move to a nimble strike - probably not a very balanced thing.
I think the ai is set for a "preferred range", which can cause this issue - the ai isn't smart after all, it follows instructions about wanting to get as close as possible.
Dogs are pretty good at constantly trying to get behind you. It seems to me that if you're going to take them that far (paying attention to attack ranges) then teaching them to use their blocking ability correctly by taking my attack range into account wouldn't be that much harder. Like Gary's random passing, it wouldn't need to be perfect. Dogs with full health could just ignore it if they had higher priorities, or whatever. Right now the dogs don't seem to get any benefit from that skill at all, while hard to pin down allows some of them to do silly things like dodge a room full of... firestorm. The guardsmen who pal around with them are obnoxious with their parries, so having the dogs get too good at dodging as well would probably be too annoying anyway, but for me, the dogs just served as learning lesson on how not to ever use dodge. If that was actually the plan, to demonstrate it's use/misuse through examples, then by all means leave them how they are.
