There's tons of complaining about everything atm, but I get why the app-driven route might be a compelling one to take, due to the space not being as crowded at this point. I get that 3D cardboard terrain is a cool idea if executed right (think of how awesome a Core Space game board looks!). Unlike some of the comments I've seen, I also like the character artwork most among all of the Descent games so far. The stylized look with its flat, earthy tones is simply the most characterful to me between those games. But... What happened to the design of the board components? Describing my impressions, bland, monotonous and generic would be the terms that come to mind.
How comes that cobblestone is made up of middle-to light gray, regular rectangular pattern all over with nearly no detail to break up the monotony and to add some character? No shadowed edges (might be a problem with tiling, bit still!), no different colored hues, nearly all rectangular shapes. It doesn't get better with the water. A homogenous, light blue mass with indistinct lines drawn across as water - seriously?

It doesn't get much better either, if you add grassy elements, lava and wooden planks to the mix:

 
That game board to me is the definition of generic and indistinct. That's outright a regression more towards the generic and indistinct tiles of the 1st edition. And it absolutely doesn't fit in with the highly stylized, characterful character artwork. Those characters seem to come from a world, where there is more variety to cobblestone than light grey rectangular smallish plates everywhere. 😛   Where's moss`? Where's rubble? Where are different shapes, hues, broken stones, different patterns (other than that one circular shape, that doesn't really change the impressoin at all)?

 
Or this menu sceen for that matter.  Behold, there's moody lightning coloring the environment - not just light grey stone, medium green grass, light blueish, solid looking water and reddish lava...

 
Also, if those handful of staircase elements, the couple of dead trees, two or three archways and some doodads are all of the 3D elements in the game... There's an underwhelmingly executed idea - the terribly bland board artwork notwithstanding. For 175$, that is...  Of course, the game may - perhaps - end up being pure genius and bliss in app-driven, dungeon-crawlery form, but if it does, it's despite the board artwork, not because of it.

Printed 3D cardboard game board, app-driven... I see the an absolute ton of potential in those bullet points. I even like the stylized character best out of all the Descent artwork I've seen so far. 
But what they've shown of the board so far looks so unbelievably bland. Sure, the miniatures seem to be more than just a step above all the previous Descent stuff, but they also lack variety between smaller and larger miniatures compared Ed 1 + 2. About the same amount of minis (39 vs 40), albeit larger, as the second edition, terribly bland looking game board elements and the app beeing a great unknown without a full demo, is making this look reaaaally unattractive at 175$.
I'm no stranger to throwing 200$+ after a miniature blender kickstarter, or 700€+ at the complete Descent 2nd edition collection. But I need to see something that compels me to spend the money and a monotonous game board with a handful of alibi 3D staircases does not.

What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Personally, I love the style and color choice in the screen. Highly stylized, very expressive night scene, realized with a very limited color palette that I find very pleasing to look at. Conveys the impression of a group huddled around a warm campfire in a cold night perfectly for me.
Unlike the board elements, which imo carry very little mood at all. 😛
Edit:
Generally, I agree. Except for the term "only". The terrain, which is responsible for the first impression the game gives on the table, looks poor and the price is too high? That is, higher than Gloomhaven, higher than mini blender Kickstarter with more miniatures and better designed terrain? If "only" those two aspects are poor, that makes the whole thing a difficult sell.

There's tons of complaining about everything atm, but I get why the app-driven route might be a compelling one to take, due to the space not being as crowded at this point. I get that 3D cardboard terrain is a cool idea if executed right (think of how awesome a Core Space game board looks!). Unlike some of the comments I've seen, I also like the character artwork most among all of the Descent games so far. The stylized look with its flat, earthy tones is simply the most characterful to me between those games. But... What happened to the design of the board components? Describing my impressions, bland, monotonous and generic would be the terms that come to mind.
How comes that cobblestone is made up of middle-to light gray, regular rectangular pattern all over with nearly no detail to break up the monotony and to add some character? No shadowed edges (might be a problem with tiling, bit still!), no different colored hues, nearly all rectangular shapes. It doesn't get better with the water. A homogenous, light blue mass with indistinct lines drawn across as water - seriously?

It doesn't get much better either, if you add grassy elements, lava and wooden planks to the mix:

 
That game board to me is the definition of generic and indistinct. That's outright a regression more towards the generic and indistinct tiles of the 1st edition. And it absolutely doesn't fit in with the highly stylized, characterful character artwork. Those characters seem to come from a world, where there is more variety to cobblestone than light grey rectangular smallish plates everywhere. 😛   Where's moss`? Where's rubble? Where are different shapes, hues, broken stones, different patterns (other than that one circular shape, that doesn't really change the impressoin at all)?

 
Or this menu sceen for that matter.  Behold, there's moody lightning coloring the environment - not just light grey stone, medium green grass, light blueish, solid looking water and reddish lava...

 
Also, if those handful of staircase elements, the couple of dead trees, two or three archways and some doodads are all of the 3D elements in the game... There's an underwhelmingly executed idea - the terribly bland board artwork notwithstanding. For 175$, that is...  Of course, the game may - perhaps - end up being pure genius and bliss in app-driven, dungeon-crawlery form, but if it does, it's despite the board artwork, not because of it.

There's tons of complaining about everything atm, but I get why the app-driven route might be a compelling one to take, due to the space not being as crowded at this point. I get that 3D cardboard terrain is a cool idea if executed right (think of how awesome a Core Space game board looks!). Unlike some of the comments I've seen, I also like the character artwork most among all of the Descent games so far. The stylized look with its flat, earthy tones is simply the most characterful to me between those games. But... What happened to the design of the board components? Describing my impressions, bland, monotonous and generic would be the terms that come to mind.
How comes that cobblestone is made up of middle-to light gray, regular rectangular pattern all over with nearly no detail to break up the monotony and to add some character? No shadowed edges (might be a problem with tiling, bit still!), no different colored hues, nearly all rectangular shapes. It doesn't get better with the water. A homogenous, light blue mass with indistinct lines drawn across as water - seriously?

It doesn't get much better either, if you add grassy elements, lava and wooden planks to the mix:

 
That game board to me is the definition of generic and indistinct. That's outright a regression more towards the generic and indistinct tiles of the 1st edition. And it absolutely doesn't fit in with the highly stylized, characterful character artwork. Those characters seem to come from a world, where there is more variety to cobblestone than light grey rectangular smallish plates everywhere. 😛   Where's moss`? Where's rubble? Where are different shapes, hues, broken stones, different patterns (other than that one circular shape, that doesn't really change the impressoin at all)?

 
Or this menu sceen for that matter.  Behold, there's moody lightning coloring the environment - not just light grey stone, medium green grass, light blueish, solid looking water and reddish lava...

 
Also, if those handful of staircase elements, the couple of dead trees, two or three archways and some doodads are all of the 3D elements in the game... There's an underwhelmingly executed idea - the terribly bland board artwork notwithstanding. For 175$, that is...  Of course, the game may - perhaps - end up being pure genius and bliss in app-driven, dungeon-crawlery form, but if it does, it's despite the board artwork, not because of it.

What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Personally, I love the style and color choice in the screen. Highly stylized, very expressive night scene, realized with a very limited color palette that I find very pleasing to look at. Conveys the impression of a group huddled around a warm campfire in a cold night perfectly for me.
Unlike the board elements, which imo carry very little mood at all. 😛
Edit:
Generally, I agree. Except for the term "only". The terrain, which is responsible for the first impression the game gives on the table, looks poor and the price is too high? That is, higher than Gloomhaven, higher than mini blender Kickstarter with more miniatures and better designed terrain? If "only" those two aspects are poor, that makes the whole thing a difficult sell.

16 quests. $175. Sorry, this is a hard pass. Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion is 25 scenarios for $50. Miniatures are cool and all but... yikes that’s a big ask for what is basically a third attempt to make Descent relevant. 

What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Printed 3D cardboard game board, app-driven... I see the an absolute ton of potential in those bullet points. I even like the stylized character best out of all the Descent artwork I've seen so far. 
But what they've shown of the board so far looks so unbelievably bland. Sure, the miniatures seem to be more than just a step above all the previous Descent stuff, but they also lack variety between smaller and larger miniatures compared Ed 1 + 2. About the same amount of minis (39 vs 40), albeit larger, as the second edition, terribly bland looking game board elements and the app beeing a great unknown without a full demo, is making this look reaaaally unattractive at 175$.
I'm no stranger to throwing 200$+ after a miniature blender kickstarter, or 700€+ at the complete Descent 2nd edition collection. But I need to see something that compels me to spend the money and a monotonous game board with a handful of alibi 3D staircases does not.

Printed 3D cardboard game board, app-driven... I see the an absolute ton of potential in those bullet points. I even like the stylized character best out of all the Descent artwork I've seen so far. 
But what they've shown of the board so far looks so unbelievably bland. Sure, the miniatures seem to be more than just a step above all the previous Descent stuff, but they also lack variety between smaller and larger miniatures compared Ed 1 + 2. About the same amount of minis (39 vs 40), albeit larger, as the second edition, terribly bland looking game board elements and the app beeing a great unknown without a full demo, is making this look reaaaally unattractive at 175$.
I'm no stranger to throwing 200$+ after a miniature blender kickstarter, or 700€+ at the complete Descent 2nd edition collection. But I need to see something that compels me to spend the money and a monotonous game board with a handful of alibi 3D staircases does not.

Personally, I love the style and color choice in the screen. Highly stylized, very expressive night scene, realized with a very limited color palette that I find very pleasing to look at. Conveys the impression of a group huddled around a warm campfire in a cold night perfectly for me.
Unlike the board elements, which imo carry very little mood at all. 😛
Edit:
Generally, I agree. Except for the term "only". The terrain, which is responsible for the first impression the game gives on the table, looks poor and the price is too high? That is, higher than Gloomhaven, higher than mini blender Kickstarter with more miniatures and better designed terrain? If "only" those two aspects are poor, that makes the whole thing a difficult sell.

There's tons of complaining about everything atm, but I get why the app-driven route might be a compelling one to take, due to the space not being as crowded at this point. I get that 3D cardboard terrain is a cool idea if executed right (think of how awesome a Core Space game board looks!). Unlike some of the comments I've seen, I also like the character artwork most among all of the Descent games so far. The stylized look with its flat, earthy tones is simply the most characterful to me between those games. But... What happened to the design of the board components? Describing my impressions, bland, monotonous and generic would be the terms that come to mind.
How comes that cobblestone is made up of middle-to light gray, regular rectangular pattern all over with nearly no detail to break up the monotony and to add some character? No shadowed edges (might be a problem with tiling, bit still!), no different colored hues, nearly all rectangular shapes. It doesn't get better with the water. A homogenous, light blue mass with indistinct lines drawn across as water - seriously?

It doesn't get much better either, if you add grassy elements, lava and wooden planks to the mix:

 
That game board to me is the definition of generic and indistinct. That's outright a regression more towards the generic and indistinct tiles of the 1st edition. And it absolutely doesn't fit in with the highly stylized, characterful character artwork. Those characters seem to come from a world, where there is more variety to cobblestone than light grey rectangular smallish plates everywhere. 😛   Where's moss`? Where's rubble? Where are different shapes, hues, broken stones, different patterns (other than that one circular shape, that doesn't really change the impressoin at all)?

 
Or this menu sceen for that matter.  Behold, there's moody lightning coloring the environment - not just light grey stone, medium green grass, light blueish, solid looking water and reddish lava...

 
Also, if those handful of staircase elements, the couple of dead trees, two or three archways and some doodads are all of the 3D elements in the game... There's an underwhelmingly executed idea - the terribly bland board artwork notwithstanding. For 175$, that is...  Of course, the game may - perhaps - end up being pure genius and bliss in app-driven, dungeon-crawlery form, but if it does, it's despite the board artwork, not because of it.

I wish you the best of luck and a lot of fun with painting your collection! 🙂
Painting only minis used in current or upcoming games will probably never work for me. The painting simply takes me to long, so I have to deal with the fact that I may not have all or any minis painted, when we manage to play something for the first time. 8-10h for a hero, 8-12h for a big mini. I only managed to get "ahead" of the current Shadow Rune campaign, because it's been paused for quite some time now. But I really should work on getting  results for some of the monsters faster. Some of them however are pieces for painting practice of certain techniques. Descent's minis aren't exactly showcase pieces, but they are terrific practice pieces. Small enough to not take dozens of hours, even if you experiment a lot with new techniques, diverse enough to be able to try a ton of different things.

I wish you the best of luck and a lot of fun with painting your collection! 🙂
Painting only minis used in current or upcoming games will probably never work for me. The painting simply takes me to long, so I have to deal with the fact that I may not have all or any minis painted, when we manage to play something for the first time. 8-10h for a hero, 8-12h for a big mini. I only managed to get "ahead" of the current Shadow Rune campaign, because it's been paused for quite some time now. But I really should work on getting  results for some of the monsters faster. Some of them however are pieces for painting practice of certain techniques. Descent's minis aren't exactly showcase pieces, but they are terrific practice pieces. Small enough to not take dozens of hours, even if you experiment a lot with new techniques, diverse enough to be able to try a ton of different things.

I wish you the best of luck and a lot of fun with painting your collection! 🙂
Painting only minis used in current or upcoming games will probably never work for me. The painting simply takes me to long, so I have to deal with the fact that I may not have all or any minis painted, when we manage to play something for the first time. 8-10h for a hero, 8-12h for a big mini. I only managed to get "ahead" of the current Shadow Rune campaign, because it's been paused for quite some time now. But I really should work on getting  results for some of the monsters faster. Some of them however are pieces for painting practice of certain techniques. Descent's minis aren't exactly showcase pieces, but they are terrific practice pieces. Small enough to not take dozens of hours, even if you experiment a lot with new techniques, diverse enough to be able to try a ton of different things.

The acrylic colors from Vallejo and Games Workshop are water-soluble. Basically hacking and mashing the dried pulp of GW color down to the pigment and stirring it with water helped revive the color. But it  took a lot of effort. I also later used Lahmian Medium/Vallejo Thinner to thin the color down. Both could replace the water. The color was more than ten years old, no less. My best tip for preserving colors is: Use dropper bottles and not Games Workshop style pots. The latter seem to let colors dry up rather quickly even while closed. Edit: Mostly if you open and use them regularly, however. Probably something to do with the bottle's large opening, exposing a large surface area leading to increased evaporation. Yet, other GW colors of mine remained mostly liquid for ten years without use. The Vallejo dropper bottles i had from ten years ago still had usable color in them from the get go. A lot of shaking was required though. I didn't have any at hand, but adding some rust free metal balls/small nuts to the bottle would have helped to stir the color back to life more easily in the dropper bottles. If you're concerned for the colors' life and if you must use Games Workshop colors or other acrylic colors from pots, I'd recommend also getting some empty dropper bottles and transferring the colors with a funnel (e.g. from Greenstuff World).
So far I've used Army Painter and recently Vallejo mat spray varnish to protect the minis. Can't say I'm seeing any color shift of the coat of (Army Painter) varnish on my 10+ years old minis. Any glossy varnish is a no go, since the gloss will make any details of the paintjob hard to discern. Other people are using the "Dullcoat" varnish from Testors to good effect (e.g. Sorastro mentions it in his videos). Just make sure to spray an even, thin coat in short bursts and avoid pooling of the varnish. Pools of the varnish may become opaque when drying. Both spray varnishes I use are well suited to being painted over as well.
Whatever effects the varnish will have on the mini, they beat out color pealing off from your minis due to the handling by grimy players' hands any day. 😉
Edit: Also, if you've got the time and generally enjoy painting, I'd recommend to start yesterday, rather than now or tomorrow. You seem also to be a bit of a compulsive collector, so your chances of ever having a fully painted collection are slim to none, simply because collections are more easy to amass than miniatures are to paint. 😜 See it this way: every single mini you painted looks better than an unpainted one on the table.
If you need to build confidence in your painting abilities, start with minis to which you have little attachment. Less nice sculpts, like goblins or zombies. From there you can progress to the bigger monsters. That's the reason I started with the goblins and zombies - to relearn painting and become more confident - only to work on the major sculpts like the shadow dragons and most heroes at the very end. It helped me a lot.
If you need a beginner friendly, near fool prove step by step tutorial, watch Sorastro's Descent painting series! I really, really cannot recommend it enough for people trying to get into painting Descent.

Thanks for the kind words. If I consider the Descent collection a ten year project, painting all of the minis might be more realistic. I hope that I'll have as much interest in 10 years in playing the game as I have now. 😉 For such an elaborate painting project, interest in playing the game is somewhat a driving factor for me. That being said, I can well see me finding some group interested in running a campaign many years from now. It's not that good board games age poorly and Descent 2nd Ed., despite its flaws, is pretty good at what it does. 
As for colors, if you do actually intend on painting up a complete collection as diverse  as the Descent one and start from square one in terms of painting equipment, I'd honestly recommend going for a full set of Vallejo Game colors. Specifically the linked case, if you can get your hands on one and if money isn't the limiting factor, that is. Bonus: you get a rather space efficient and elegant storage solution on top of the paints. You're really trading time for money here. The Descent collection is varied enough that you'll find a use for nearly all of those colors before long. A (near) complete set saves you from hunting them down one by one. While I'm fan of the Vallejo colors, a cheaper option would be the Army Painter set. But my impression is that Vallejo Colors provide much better coverage with less layers, so I prefer them where possible. You just need to know for sure that painting minis is "your thing" before spending near 200$ on colors. 😅 At least there are some brushes in there, but I doubt that they'll last for the whole collection and a really good brush is around 10$ in itself. You don't even have primer sprays by then, although the grey Vallejo brush on primer is really good as well. 
A cheaper route to getting started is a color set (very much recommend the base set from Vallejo Game Color here, comes with 16 tones, but not a single good skin tone 😛), then get two good brushes (one size 0 and one size 2) and a grey primer spray.
When I took up painting again around April last year, I still had some old Games Workshop colors (some dried to a pulp), a black and a white can of spray primer and a couple of Vallejo colors. Got the Vallejo starter set, some new brushes, liquidified some of the GW colors by literally hacking them apart with a modeling tool and adding some water and went from there. This is where I am now (old wine box with a bit of cut up cardboard for organizing the dropper bottles): 



If I didn't have some colors to start out, I'd have been cheaper off buying the whole set. 😉

As for how fast you can finish a collection - that entirely depends on your pace and technique. I'm generally slow and tend to experiment quite a bit or fail at some details until I feel I got a mini right. On the other hand, I'm watching some Instagram painters (https://www.instagram.com/bossepainter/) paint up half of the complete Descent 2nd Ed. collection within a year (really excellently, I should add!), whereas it takes me just above a year alone to finish the base set. 😛
Edit: On that note - the last base game minis are finally finished.
Captain Glittersparkles (Avric Albright)

Leoric of the Book

The acrylic colors from Vallejo and Games Workshop are water-soluble. Basically hacking and mashing the dried pulp of GW color down to the pigment and stirring it with water helped revive the color. But it  took a lot of effort. I also later used Lahmian Medium/Vallejo Thinner to thin the color down. Both could replace the water. The color was more than ten years old, no less. My best tip for preserving colors is: Use dropper bottles and not Games Workshop style pots. The latter seem to let colors dry up rather quickly even while closed. Edit: Mostly if you open and use them regularly, however. Probably something to do with the bottle's large opening, exposing a large surface area leading to increased evaporation. Yet, other GW colors of mine remained mostly liquid for ten years without use. The Vallejo dropper bottles i had from ten years ago still had usable color in them from the get go. A lot of shaking was required though. I didn't have any at hand, but adding some rust free metal balls/small nuts to the bottle would have helped to stir the color back to life more easily in the dropper bottles. If you're concerned for the colors' life and if you must use Games Workshop colors or other acrylic colors from pots, I'd recommend also getting some empty dropper bottles and transferring the colors with a funnel (e.g. from Greenstuff World).
So far I've used Army Painter and recently Vallejo mat spray varnish to protect the minis. Can't say I'm seeing any color shift of the coat of (Army Painter) varnish on my 10+ years old minis. Any glossy varnish is a no go, since the gloss will make any details of the paintjob hard to discern. Other people are using the "Dullcoat" varnish from Testors to good effect (e.g. Sorastro mentions it in his videos). Just make sure to spray an even, thin coat in short bursts and avoid pooling of the varnish. Pools of the varnish may become opaque when drying. Both spray varnishes I use are well suited to being painted over as well.
Whatever effects the varnish will have on the mini, they beat out color pealing off from your minis due to the handling by grimy players' hands any day. 😉
Edit: Also, if you've got the time and generally enjoy painting, I'd recommend to start yesterday, rather than now or tomorrow. You seem also to be a bit of a compulsive collector, so your chances of ever having a fully painted collection are slim to none, simply because collections are more easy to amass than miniatures are to paint. 😜 See it this way: every single mini you painted looks better than an unpainted one on the table.
If you need to build confidence in your painting abilities, start with minis to which you have little attachment. Less nice sculpts, like goblins or zombies. From there you can progress to the bigger monsters. That's the reason I started with the goblins and zombies - to relearn painting and become more confident - only to work on the major sculpts like the shadow dragons and most heroes at the very end. It helped me a lot.
If you need a beginner friendly, near fool prove step by step tutorial, watch Sorastro's Descent painting series! I really, really cannot recommend it enough for people trying to get into painting Descent.

80 in three days? 😅 That's impressive, no matter which technique you use. But with "classical" techniques and without using an airbrush that's night on impossible if you like to eat and sleep. The magic word there seems to be "contrast paints". With one coat you get a "play ready" mini with shadows in the recesses, highlights and all. He did still highlight on top of them however, so there was quite a bit manual work involved on top.
I might be trying to use a similar technique on some monster groups  of smaller models with many minis later on, but I wont be doing it for bigger monsters or characters. It does save you a **** of a lot of time however.
 
Edit: That's the best I could make of the base game collection and its six lieutenant addons with my phone, two lamps and some sheets of paper:

Will try to take a better foto at some point.

80 in three days? 😅 That's impressive, no matter which technique you use. But with "classical" techniques and without using an airbrush that's night on impossible if you like to eat and sleep. The magic word there seems to be "contrast paints". With one coat you get a "play ready" mini with shadows in the recesses, highlights and all. He did still highlight on top of them however, so there was quite a bit manual work involved on top.
I might be trying to use a similar technique on some monster groups  of smaller models with many minis later on, but I wont be doing it for bigger monsters or characters. It does save you a **** of a lot of time however.
 
Edit: That's the best I could make of the base game collection and its six lieutenant addons with my phone, two lamps and some sheets of paper:

Will try to take a better foto at some point.