I have everything available for the original Descent and all the boxed releases for 2.0. The crossover set with 1.0 is a godsend. When FF released the lieutenants and monsters for 2.0 separate, it totally pissed me off. What a blatant cash grab. It felt like micro transactions for board games and grossed me out. Most all that stuff was included with 1.0 so selling it all separately was super gross to me. Especially when I would open a $40 expansion box and there would only be like, 10 minis in the there. It was obvious stuff was left out on purpose to sell separately (especially lieutenants). I refused to back that business model. They've gone on to use it for their Star Wars games and many other releases too.
That's one aspect. Another aspect is that the quality and execution of most sculpts from the H&M addons visually
completely and utterly trounces everything from 1st edition. Having looked through the 1st edition base game minis from a friend recently,
they're not even in the same ballpark anymore, especially the later H&M ones. The entry price for the 2nd edition base game was also lowered and its size thankfully reduced due to including less of an army of super low quality plastic, while the play value compared to 1st edition was increased by including a decent campaign system instead. But I'm with you on the lieutenants - selling character minis as addons to replace cardboard tokens from the game for around the price of the complete box
stings. Then again, if that helped them push the price of the boxed content down, it's a win for probably the majority of customers who're not hell bend on having every character as plastic miniature. You'll only maybe see them in one or two scenarios of the campaign anyway. A pack including
all lieutenant addons for the base game or the big box expansion for ~25€ and less forced attempt to up sell these situational character minis as self contained addons would've been much preferred however. But personally, even if I had the option to get the 1st edition and conversion kit cheaply now, I'd rather collect the H&M addons. I'm too mini focused and all 1st edition plastic has been made obsolete for me by much better sculpts being available. Still nice to have the option to reuse practically all 1st edition
content minis without shelling out for the later released H&M packs. Updated rules from the monster/hero cards of the H&M can just be printed out, since all the details are available in the Descent wiki.
Idk. about the pricing of the Heroes and Monster packs everywhere else, but here you can get them all for 25€-30€ per pack. That's not cheap for game minis and there are
nine of these addons to collect (none are necessary for the game), but it's by no means expensive either. Very comparable to buying a bunch of minis from the
Reaper Bones range (at ~3€ / mini and 10 larger and smaller minis on the very low end you're also at ~30€ buying Reaper bones). It may just be too expensive to justify for people who're looking to add playable content rather than being mini enthusiasts. They are better off buying the boxed addons. Which, even without the H&M mini range, offer plenty of content as it is and imo hit a rather affordable sweet spot of game content and decent enough minis. We're not talking about Games Workshop here after all. 😅
