The six character classes, available to the players from the start of the campaign. They seem to be designed as simple Skill Gate Characters to familiarize new players with the game mechanics, and neither one is suffering from the Crippling Overspecialization.
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Brute
Inox Brute
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Frequents these, seemingly due to his overwhelming strength.
- Barbarian Hero
- The Big Guy: The Brute fills this role among the starting characters, being the largest, strongest, and most suitable for the frontline.
- Horns of Barbarism: As befitting to an Inox.
- Lightning Bruiser: For a defense-oriented warrior, he's surprisingly quick on his feet.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me
- One-Hit Kill: Quite a few of his abilities remove the target from play outright, without even considering their health or defenses. Several others just deal a ton of damage at once to a single enemy, which often provides the same result in practice. Unlike the similar attacks of other starter characters, his usually do not require certain conditions or elaborate set-up to work.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Between the two playable Inox characters, Brute is the one focused on the defense and protection, and is represented with the blue color.
- Sinister Scimitar
- Skeletons in the Coat Closet
Cragheart
Savvas Cragheart
- Anchored Attack Stance: In the Cragheart's ability deck there's a number of cards that significantly boost the power of all their attacks for a turn - though, you usually have to forgo moving this turn in order to use them.
- Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: After retiring from the party, the Cragheart tends to just sit around and drink, not having much else to do with themselves.
- Dishing Out Dirt: Despite being described in the lore as being magically inept, Craghearts manipulate the Earth as no other character can, utilizing it for many different purposes, from healing their allies with the energies of nature itself, to throwing really large rocks at people.
- Mark of Shame: Their chest was shattered when they were exiled - hence, the class name.
- Jack of All Trades: One of the best examples in the game. Cragheart's ability deck allows the player to use them as a melee fighter, rock-throwing ranger, or a decent healer. On the other hand, their main focus seems to be on Splash Damage and Area of Effect attacks, so they are rather lacking against elite enemies and bosses.
- Mechanically Unusual Class: Cragheart possesses not just one, but two unique mechanics that force them to stand out among the rest of the character. For one, a lot of their abilities deal "true" damage, which bypasses shields and negates retaliation abilities, and does not use the modifier deck (notably, they're also the very few characters that can harm their own allies by these effects). The other specialization allows Cragheart to interact with the obstacles you frequently encounter on the scenario map, either creating them at will, or destroying them, or using them as weapons against the enemies. Depending on the circumstances, Cragheart can either lock a group of enemies in a tight bottleneck, or bulldoze through a labyrinth of rocks or bookshelves, essentially Sequence Breaking the room.
- Mighty Glacier: Cragheart has a high HP growth and can take the Fortitude perk to benefit from heavy armor without the drawbacks, but their deck has very few options for going early in a round, or for moving more than the standard two hexes without items.
- Muggle Born of Mages: as far as the Savvas are concerned. Most of them are powerful magicians who can develop an affinity with a certain element of nature, or even several of them; Craghearts are considered failures for being unable to find it.
- Rock Monster
- The Exile
Mindthief
Vermling Mindthief
- All of the Other Reindeer: Other Vermlings aren't fond of the Mindthief because she spends too much time with the other races. As such, when she looks for aid for her town, they are not that receptive and so she must go to the humans.
- Elemental Powers: Mindthief is aligned with Ice and Darkness.
- Fragile Speedster
- Mind Manipulation: Mindthief uses many varieties of this, from enslaving hordes of sewer rats as her servants, to boosting her teammates, to directly controlling her enemies, forcing them to walk into traps or to fight each other.
- The Minion Master: the most prominent example among the starting classes. Not only the Mindthief has several summonable allies to choose from, but she can also use them directly through her other abilities.
- Pest Controller: She is able to summon Swarm of Rats, Rodents of Unusual Size, and a Rat King.
- Status Buff: Mindthief's unique mechanics. She can use one of the several different abilities to augment all of her melee attacks - including the simple default one - making them much stronger, or inflicting a nasty status ailment with every hit, or doing something else. Once applied, the bonus remains active for the entire scenario, until replaced with another one or voluntarily turned off by the player to retrieve the card back.
- Status Infliction Attack: Another specialization of hers. Mindthief can, and usually does, overwhelm her opponents with a number of various Status Ailments (Poison and Muddle are the most frequent, though definitely not exclusive), weakening the enemies almost to the non-threat level, so that her teammates or summons can safely deal with those. Alternatively, she has a number of Situational Damage Attack abilities that deal increased damage to the target for every ailment it is affected by, quickly taking them out of their misery.
- You Dirty Rat!: both she and her minions frequently inflict Poison, playing the stereotype straight.
Scoundrel
Human Scoundrel
- Back Stab
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: a textbook example of the latter.
- Flechette Storm: A good number of her abilities work like this - each one is a relatively weak, but multi-target ranged attack, hitting up to four enemies at once.
- Glass Cannon: Most of the time, Scoundrel initiates the battle round by acting on the highest initiative, dashing towards her chosen target, and hitting it like a truck. After that, she leaves herself highly vulnerable, since enemies always target the closest and the quickest of the available targets.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: She's pretty good at looting, and her unique hood, which she can pass along to the party if they protect her from the guard, allows any player to change a Loot 1 action (loot all spaces around the player) into a Loot 2 (loot all spaces up to two spaces away).
- One-Hit Kill: Scoundrel possesses a few options of killing an enemy outright with a single blow. For obvious reasons, these are usually one-use-only.
- Situational Damage Attack: most of the time, this character deals additional damage to an enemy who's been pulled away from their allies, and/or is currently adjanced to Scoundrel's another party member. This represents her reliance on flanking and backstabbing, rather than fighting fairly.
- Smoke Out: One of her starting cards. It can be used either defensively (turning invisible), or offensively (forcing a certain enemy to relocate).
- The Highwayman: after leaving the group of the adventurers, she resorts to this. She'll let the team go without a hitch because she knows how tough they are.
Spellweaver
Orchid Spellweaver
- Black Mage: The overwhelming majority of her abilities are designed to deal damage.
- Demon Slaying: This seem to be her main motivation. 'Demons' in Gloomhaven are essentially Elemental Embodiments for all intents and purposes, except foreign to this world, so the Spellweaver spends her career and subsequent retirement fighting fire with fire (or water, or any other element at her disposal).
- Elemental Powers: Her specialization in the group, on par with the unlockable Elementalist. Spellweaver is able to use every single element, rather than just one or two as other characters do. However, since gameplay-wise your ability hand is limited, it makes more sense to specialize at just one or two of them.
- Herd-Hitting Attack: If her abitity isn't a magic missile, it's usually this. One late-game spell in particular explicitly hits the entire room she's in (which usually covers 1/3 of the current scenario), effectively serving as a
Game-Breaker. - Heroic Second Wind: Among the starting characters, Spellweaver posesses the shortest hand of ability cards, and most of them are one-use only, getting Lost afterwards (rather than simply Discarded to be retrieved back later). However, one of her starting cards allows her to take all her Lost cards back, all but doubling the firepower that she may dish out over the course of the scenario.
- It May Help You on Your Quest: On her search for knowledge, she is able to disarm a powerful censer that was summoning powerful creatures. She offers the censer as payment, as its magic can be useful in adventuring.
- Squishy Wizard: Generally Played Straight. However, Spellweaver does possess a number of abilities that block the incoming damage and/or retaliate against the attacker, so in skilled hands she may act as a Glass Wall of sorts. Her low health pool, though, makes such strategy incredibly risky.
Tinkerer
Quatryl Tinkerer
- Chemistry Can Do Anything: Besides being the resident technology expert, the Tinkerer also acts as an alchemist or a potion master; among his milti-colored bottles there are Healing Potions, explosive bombs, and toxic poisons of all kinds.
- Gadgeteer Genius
- Goggles Do Nothing: He sports a pair of cool looking goggles. They offer him neither benefit nor drawback.
- Fantasy Gun Control: An interesting example. The Tinkerer is armed only with a single-hand crossbow and other regular High Fantasy wargear, yet his later abilities involve such things as a flamethrower, a taser, or even a Desintegration Beam (whatever it is). Meanwhile, at least one character within the setting may be armed with a flintlock pistol - but it's the Scoundrel instead.
- Our Gnomes Are Weirder: The Quatryl as a whole seem to be the similar to the D&D (or World of Warcraft) gnomes - they're small, quick-thinking, and technologically advanced; Tinkerer himself provides a perfect example. Their brown hairless skin, bug-like eyes, and "thin spider-like fingers", though, create the impression of the race being vaguely insectoid in nature.
- Power Glows: His armor has a glowing Power Core in his chest, not unlike Marvel's Iron Man.
- Red Mage: Tinkerer provides his party with both offensive attacks (of the technological, rather than magical nature, although there's no gameplay difference between the two) and multiple restoring abilities.
- Trap Master: One of the few characters that's able to set-up traps during the course of the game.
