Groven Maden
Her play style forms around her ability to raise immovable Sentinels and a giant guardian to aid her. She can maintain up to 8 Sentinels at a time and these are placed using abilities like ‘Grove song’ and ‘Raise Sentinel’.
Groven Maden is a token based play style character. Although this is one of Oathsworn who I haven’t seen its special ability, I am fairly certain it relates to token generation.
Raise Sentinel states Sentinels are immovable. The card capability of double up and spawning two sentinels with a single card use is a nice option. The bottom option of ranged attack is interesting. If I interpret this correctly, we get double the might, which seems very powerful. Perhaps, types of weapons she can equip are limited to balance.
Once Sentinels are spawned, it’s time to attack.
Nature’s Fury is analogous to swarm attack in strategy card game. It is still unclear if Sentinels attack uses Groven Maden’s might.
Thorns is a counter attack ability. Cooldown value of 3 and defense of 3 require some tactical decision to make for when to use this card as intercept. Since counter attack is based on the damage on the dice rather than actual HP lost, so this may do some serious damage to enemy.
Rot Vine looks like a decent support card at 1 Animus, especially in early chapters.
We have yet to see what a giant guarding is capable of.
Reference: KS Update #15
Huntress
Huntress is a community created/selected playable character from the Kickstarter campaign.
The Huntress comes with 20 ability cards that will allow you to specialist in falconry, archery and melee combat to maximize her utility.
Normally, each class has 15 ability cards to choose from but Huntress and Witch are exceptions. The most class defining, unique mechanics for her is unequivocally falcons.
Her falcons start on her player board but by using various ability cards can be sent to target an enemy or ally. The falcon is moved to the target’s image on the player board where it will be able to be activated by other abilities. The falcons can raise the defense of friendly characters, hinder enemies trying to attack them or gouge at their eyes making them easier prey for the Oathsworn’s follow up attacks. The falcons have an extraordinary range and can target anything on the board seriously increasing the huntress’s efficacy on the field.
Hunter’s call looks to be the primary ability card to move falcons. Its animus cost and cool down value appear low but moving falcons are just tagging target and by itself it does nothing so I think it’s a reasonable cost. I wonder Avi’s Prophetic fulfillment is revised such as if you are just tagging for potential future heal, make the cost just 1 Animus. Then, if one use actual heal have it higher cost.
Death Dive is an attacking order to Falcons. Both thematically and mechanically, I like falcon’s attack can’t be missed. Also, limitation of 4 dice ensure Falcon attack is not overpowered.
Hinder is a way to use Falcon for defense support. Interesting thing to note here is that Falcon is tagging friendly ally on this card; whereas, Death Dive was tagging enemy. So one need to choose how to use Falcon at the time of tagging.
Eye Gouge is an example of supporting ability when Falcon tags enemy.
On top of her many falconry abilities that can buff or hamper others, she also has a set of abilities centered around bow and melee weapon proficiency. Spear and polearm attacks focus on killing blows and combination attacks with her falcons. Whilst the bow gives her a range supremacy that gives her even more ability to control her falcons. Oh and she has traps that can be laid in the path of her prey and even one that can be triggered to explode when shot from range. The huntress embodies versatility in combat and no matter which path she chooses one thing is sure…she will become the master of it.
During the campaign, one of alternative choice to Huntress was Trapper so I am really grateful that developer decided to keep trap mechanics and making into option for Huntress. Overall, it looks like Huntress may be the most versatile class amongst 12 playable characters with potentially taking Ranger, Warrior or Support primary role.
Reference: KS Update #30
Priest
Priest is obviously a healer class, but healing HP in the world of Oathsworn is not a simple task.
Heavy blow is a must include card for Priest. The must include card I believe is a cycle, and every class have one. If you want to use this as a healing ability, it costs 5 Animus and have to be next to the target friendly ally, and costing own HP. However, his special ability regains health point every turn so Priest’s health is not as precious as others.
By the way, Heavy blow shows the fact an ability card in this game can be essentially container for multiple cards. In other games, this card can be divided into 4 separate cards, sharing common cool down and defense values.
One complaint I have here is I wish developer didn’t call this card “heavy blow”. It does not make sense to give a heavy blow to an ally and that heals the ally. I would have personally named card like this where many, un-related options are present on a single card, they could call it with more generic name on top such as “Priest’s Mission.” Then just before text description of each option, they can put actual name of the action. So player can refer to it as “I’m going to use Priest’s Mission Heavy Blow Action.”
Healing touch costs less than a half Animus to heal adjacent ally. The trade-off here is that one could miss it. But the rate of success is inversely proportional to target HP. This is indeed need based as lower the target health is, more you want it to get healed. This is also the first card we are seeing showing a variable cool down position. Based on how the text is written I assume if the healing fails, Healing Touch goes to cool down position 0 so it will come back to player’s hand during next refresh phase, but battle flow trigger at 2 position rather than 0.
Priest in game of Oathsworn is not a typical, standing or perhaps hiding backline, fragile supporter. Weight of Glory shows Priest attack can knock back target. If the target collides with an obstacle or other character due to knock back effect, that’s an automatic 1 HP loss independent of defense value. Now having said this, he still fulfills expected supporter role here via potentially giving defense to ally.
Prayer of Protection is another supporting ability. Priest can give protections to ally. At the rate of 1 protection for 1 Animus with 3 protections, this looks pretty good card.
Baseline attack cost for Priest is 3 Animus. So for 1 Animus, Pillar and Path can get you either re-roll or protection token.
Assuming the hex icon with 3 arrows mean three front hexes, Sanctify is an attack with knock but at the additional cost of 1 HP. Though again, Priest’s HP is not as precious as others due to its self-healing special ability each turn.
Priest does what he’s supposed to do as a classic support role, but he seems well beyond that. In fact, with his self-healing special ability and knock back attacks, I surmise he may take also take a defender/tank role.
Reference: KS Update #22
Penitent
They are no stranger to applying curatives and field medicines to keep others alive and when coupled with the Penitent’s thick armor plates and defensive abilities, he makes an excellent tank and defender of the Free Company. When monsters need killing, the Penitent draws deeply from his suffering, gaining a +2 Empower token for every HP lost. Gathering his strength, he lays blow after blow upon them with weapon and shield alike. Free Companies hold Penitents in high esteem, especially when they finally complete their penance.
I could find only a single sample Ability card for Penitent. Although Repel does not directly incur damage to enemy, one can use knock back to incur damage though max it can do is 1 for the target character. I assume the primary use of Repel; therefore, isn’t as a means of attack card but rather truly taking some advantage of moving enemy.
Reference: KS Update #3