In the last map of Lord Stafford's treasure, one of the most amusing things about it is that Stafford has apparently barricaded himself in with furniture that acts as halting terrain. Part of the trick to beating him comes from crawling over all that stuff before the timer runs out. However, I've noticed that terrain attachments seem to spoil the spirit of this map a little too much. Namely, I can build a lava bridge using wall of fire, and scoot right across it in one turn with any sort of preparation at all. I think it's kind of great that I can use firewalls like this to pave my way across terrain, but for just this map it seems to work a little too well, and you might try spacing out that halting furniture a bit, so that there's gaps between each of them. That might slow the dogs down a bit, but if I'm not mistaken, don't they have one of those movement abilities that gives them free move anyway? At any rate, I actually thought this was a bug when I first saw it, because for some reason it never occurred to me that attachments that don't have Halt on them cancel out whatever they cover up. In other words, I didn't feel like this wasn't working as intended, until I played this particular map to get some quests done armed with a bunch of "blister stones".
I'd say having that tactical option is fine and doesn't really need to be changed. Plus it's great from a story standpoint: The fighter cursed as the lord's laughter echoed in the narrow hallway. 'Lord Stafford has barricaded himself behind piles of furniture! It'll take ages to get past those!' The wizard just laughed in response. '... Know what happens when wood meets lava?' After a moment's silence the fighter's puzzled frown turned into a wide grin. 'Ah.'
Well, whether or not the lava thing is a problem, Whirlwind and Whirlwind Enemies make it much worse. You don't even have to go down the hall, you can just bring him to you.
Maybe what I'm really asking for, then, is that certain kinds of blocking terrain be destroyable in this way, and removed from the map after the fire wall clears up? That would be kind of fun too. I can totally understand the frustration that probably led to the decision why lava doesn't block movement like acid, mud, or rubble, or do damage as you pass through it like path of knives. I can also understand why it would be a bit of a shock to try and fire-walk across lava only to get stuck in the middle of it because of... an upturned piece of furniture hidden beneath it. However, I'm already imagining PvP strategies in maps full of blocking terrain where people use this thing like a bridge. Imagine accidentally handing your opponent a free path out of harms way when you try to hit them. It's funny, and sounds tactically complex, but it's gotta be one of the more unintuitive spells that I can think of. I thought about mentioning something like this, but at that point in the campaign, a player probably isn't going to have access to that spell as much. As a result, I didn't have that option as I leveled and unlocked the campaign one step at a time. Sure I can hit him with it now, but there's an extraordinary amount of OP stuff I now have access to that I can also use in lower level maps too. Thing is, now I'm just talking about farming him, and not experiencing the map for the first time. Does that make any sense? I had plenty of lava early on, so I definitely could use it even on my very first attempt, if I knew what it could be used for. Alternatively, if WW and WWE are random, then just make his room way bigger, and the entry smaller. WWE would then have a huge chance of just whisking all the enemies into the treasure room along with Lord Stafford, which is probably exactly what you wouldn't want. Basically, if there's an equal chance you'll move to any one tile in particular, then just make sure 90% of those tiles are in the room where Stafford wants to camp his victory point. Use a WW, and you'll just join him there prematurely for a big rumble involving most of the units on the map.
And yet you worry about Wall Of Fire? Lord Stafford's Treasure is a level 8 adventure and the smallest level item that has Wall Of Fire is Bloody Bracelet which is a level 12 item and its epic...
Yes? I've got enough blister stones to cover my entire party, so I suppose from my personal perspective wall of fire is just super easy to get my hands on? It's not like I was power leveling on my first party to the point where I couldn't have one blue skill orb by level 7... I also had a ton of the little bangles that let me drop single square lava pools, and if you're running dwarves that's all you really need for a move 2 walk anyway. Walls just aggravate the issue helping it stand out to me as something I felt needed to be looked at. After all, I'm only concerned about this one thing anyway. I know everyone (hyperbole) seems to have a personal beef with WWE, and that's fine, but I feel it's causing me to look like the bad guy because if I care enough to worry about this I must not care about the WWE debate. Sure, it probably can be seen as an exploit, and I even made a suggestion about map design for that problem on this map too, but it was never really what I wanted to talk about here. :/ If we think it's cool to use lava as a bridge, then that's great. It just seems like this is something that wasn't taken into consideration for this map.
Well if you consider new terrain attachments overwrites the older one this could be the reason it does this. It does not work on blocking / impassible terrain as you cannot place this on them.
Using Lava or Smoke to clear the way gives nice feeling of "beating the game". Nothing wrong in that, adventures are designed to be beaten after all.
