So with the latest reprints over at Gamezenter, i bought my copy of novella investigators as i was missing Gloria and just kinda like the replacement signatures of most other investigators, so finally in the last couple of months my group was able to have Gloria at our table. Oh boy, where do i begin?
This has got to be THE most broken investigator in the entire game, by far. When SK campaign got out, Darrell Simmons was showing signs of absurd combos with dropping clues or 0-difficulty tests, as any of those 2 decks was soooo powereful that it reminded us how Rex Murphy was back in the day with Dr. Milan Christopher and Higher Education. But our grandma over here takes the word "broken" to a whole different level. So the only way that you loose in this game is through the encounter deck throwing things at you, and you try to race the agenda and finish your act sooner. Kinda neat concept, but it all breaks down if you remove the encounter deck from the game. That is what Gloria does basically. With only a couple of cards like Scrying, Alyssa Graham, Scroll of Secrets, Parallel Fates etc. you are able to completely nullify the only threat to your group. There's a reason why cards that mess with the encounter deck get either taboo or the designers overprice them, like Hallow is very pricey but A Watchful Peace was so broken that it removes itself from the game now. With Gloria, you basically have that every single turn if you just do your job. If you take seeker offclass and put Practice Makes Perfect into your deck, you will refill your Scrying 4 times in the game with hitting Enraptured, and just put in all the good seeker stuff like Deduction and Crack the Case and that is basically it.
She takes the game to another level, and i mean it as if you look what every investigator gets every single round, you naturally give them things that they can easily pass or just don't harm them, and that way you neutralise the entire game. I even took her solo through Dunwich and TCU, and she was so absurd that after i won Dunwich, i retired her after half of TCU as i was just not having fun. That is the worst part of this pretty cool character i think, she just makes the game not fun. I hope her signature weakness is completely brutal, otherwise if she gets released with a couple of cards to support her in her cycle, she will probably get banned at my table.