Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion Vermling – Overview & Strategy Guide

Hi there fellow Gloomhaven lovers and welcome to the first article of the “Overview & Strategy” series in which I will speak about all the monsters in the game and share some tips and tricks that helped me to defeat them.

In today’s article, I will be writing about our beloved Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion Vermling class of monsters, which can be found in this game and in the original Gloomhaven too.
In particular Vermling Scouts and Vermling Raiders.

There will be spoilers ahead, so if you arrived at this page by mistake I’d suggest you stop reading right now.

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Vermling Scout

Vermling is a pretty common class of monsters in the Gloomhaven universe and in this version of the game, you will encounter the Vermling Scout many times throughout the campaign.
It is known to be a swarm enemy type as they always spawn as a group of 4 – 5 members, ready to make your characters their primary hunt objective.
Be ready to come up quickly with a solid team plan even when just seeing one of them, because the rest of the group will make their appearance soon.

Vermling Scout Stat Cards

Vermling Scout’s statistics are in line with the idea of it being a basic monster to fight.
The stats are overall very low – even in the Elite version of the enemy – and the lack of Specials doesn’t generally make them a serious threat. Unless you’re surrounded, in which case they could potentially make your journey pretty difficult.

Vermling Scout Ability Cards

Average Initiative value: 53.

The broad variety of melee and ranged damage makes it very difficult to predict their position on the map, but what should really be considered is the presence of the ability “Move” on 5 cards.
This game design choice reinforces the whole concept behind these monsters, in which their gameplay revolves on moving towards you like a horde to surround you and eventually attack.

Another thing to consider is that only 3 cards out of 8 are below 50 Initiative (average of the game) which makes the Vermling Scout pretty slow in antithesis with them being Scout indeed, and so theoretically fast.
Also, their base movement of 3 – 4 is the only statistic above average, so I’m personally a bit confused about this choice.

Strategy against Vermling Scout

• Strike first and strike hard! They aren’t fast so there is a very high chance of killing them before they can even move.
• Try to fight them once at a time by studying the ground and positioning your character on advantageous hexes.
• They have very low hit points value so if you can’t fight them one by one, strike them with aoe attacks and finish them off from distance.

Vermling Raider

This is the type of enemy you will encounter first during your campaign and similarly to their cousins Vermling Scouts, they are quite basic foes to fight.
Interesting to know that they don’t appear in the main missions of the campaign, outside of the first 2 dungeons of the tutorial.

Vermling Raider Stat Cards

The statistics of the Vermling Raider are overall very low.
There’s a spike in the hit points value that reaches a very high number on the Elite version of the monster, but apart from that, the rest is not scary.
When you will encounter it, during the tutorial scenarios, its movement has an “outstanding” value of 1, so you can easily fight them one at a time.

Vermling Raider Ability Cards

Average Initiative value: 57.

Similarly to the Vermling Scouts, the broad variety of melee and ranged damage makes it very difficult to predict their position on the map.
The ability cards are very basic though, with just a couple of poisonous attacks that could justify your complete attention when fighting them.

The average Initiative value and the fastest ability card that sits at 29, make them pretty damn slow.

Strategy against Vermling Raider

• Not much to say here, you just have to strike them hard with your ranged attacks and kill them at close range when they have fewer hit points. Your fights against them are the introduction to the game.

This is the end line of today’s monster review.
We talked about Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion Vermling monster, a very common and basic class of enemies that can be easily defeated with a little bit of strategy.

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in:

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion Classes – Overview & Rank
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion – Monsters Overview