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It’s not that I don’t understand what they’d do mechanically. But when I stare at the list and think “do I want this?” I have different reactions.

Heal – 1 is not a ton, and the way I tend to die is facing big dice that for whatever reason end up on high pips and I don’t feel like I die much to 1s and 2s. Plus if heal is on a lower number, often the way I’ll get it to trigger is by having to take damage. So the way heal is valuable is if (1) I’m taking small damage regularly, and (2) I can get the heal side up, adjacent to an enemy, and that enemy either will die to my heal side directly OR it does less damage than I’ll heal.

This dynamic is at play with all of them in different ways. How much do I value a shield? Poison? Sleep? The situations where those are impactful are kind of marginal. So I value them a lot less than I value “do more damage.” Which is why I love ranged; it is both intuitive and always straightforwardly good.

Blink and speed feel almost … bad to me. If I was good, they might be powerful. But I’m already struggling to get on the right side, and speed in particular makes that harder to think about. It may be good, but for a new player it contributed to my feeling of “it’s hard to plan moves.”

I see your point about taking away the hardness. I would personally experiment with projecting the pip you would be on in the spaces around you and just see. Sometimes making the mechanical state of the world explicit can reveal deeper strategies faster. Your brain is not doing the basic prediction problem and then is doing deeper strategy. That may not be true. But it could unlock the item issues I’m describing if I can see clearly “oh I could maneuver myself into a state where I could hit poison on that big guy and get away cleanly” and then I value poison a lot more.

It’s not that I don’t understand what they’d do mechanically. But when I stare at the list and think “do I want this?” I have different reactions.

Heal – 1 is not a ton, and the way I tend to die is facing big dice that for whatever reason end up on high pips and I don’t feel like I die much to 1s and 2s. Plus if heal is on a lower number, often the way I’ll get it to trigger is by having to take damage. So the way heal is valuable is if (1) I’m taking small damage regularly, and (2) I can get the heal side up, adjacent to an enemy, and that enemy either will die to my heal side directly OR it does less damage than I’ll heal.

This dynamic is at play with all of them in different ways. How much do I value a shield? Poison? Sleep? The situations where those are impactful are kind of marginal. So I value them a lot less than I value “do more damage.” Which is why I love ranged; it is both intuitive and always straightforwardly good.

Blink and speed feel almost … bad to me. If I was good, they might be powerful. But I’m already struggling to get on the right side, and speed in particular makes that harder to think about. It may be good, but for a new player it contributed to my feeling of “it’s hard to plan moves.”

I see your point about taking away the hardness. I would personally experiment with projecting the pip you would be on in the spaces around you and just see. Sometimes making the mechanical state of the world explicit can reveal deeper strategies faster. Your brain is not doing the basic prediction problem and then is doing deeper strategy. That may not be true. But it could unlock the item issues I’m describing if I can see clearly “oh I could maneuver myself into a state where I could hit poison on that big guy and get away cleanly” and then I value poison a lot more.