Gather up a team, and rocket through all of the villains. Lay the smackdown as fast as you can, because these dastardly foes are wreaking havoc in all that time you're dilly-dallying.
The Ultimate Sentinels Gauntlet
Summary: Run through every villain on Ultimate mode once. Record your time.
Da Rules:
Make up a team, then fight every villain on the Ultimate setting (advanced if there is no ultimate) while changing no team members. Hero order may be change, if desired.
For each game, the Environment will be randomly either Atlantis, or Rook City. Heads Atlantis. Tails Rook City.
Time your games. Timer starts once you press “start game”, ends once you get to the victory screen. Every “loss” you suffer adds a 30 minute penalty to your time, in addition to the time of that run.
Your team must remain the same throughout the whole challenge.
Compare-contrasting times is different for 3-4-5 man teams, as well as if you do a "Standard" gauntlet run.
Ultimate Skin Gloom/Agent Spite counts as 1 villain.
Ultimate Cosmic Omnitron and Ultimate Miss Information are skippable and 100% optional. Otherwise, you need to achieve 1 victory against every villain, and assess your total time spent.
(How do the rules sound? I'll be posting my own run as I chug along, along with highlights/summaries of the events, but I'm hoping that the challenge is generalizable enough for anyboy else attempting it to join in.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The A Team (4 Member Run)
Greatest Legacy, F-6 Tach, Skyscraper, Chrono Ranger
BB Original (Rook): 6m 35s 00
BB Variant (Atlantis): 14m 33s 67
Citizen Dawn (Atlantis): 8m 21s 31
Voss (Rook City): 7m 45s 19
Omni 1 (Atlantis): 11m 04s, 14
Ambuscade (Rook City): 15m 57s 43
Chairman (Atlantis): 21m 15s 85 +30m loss
Chairman (Atlantis) (Take 2): 9m 34s 41
Matriarch (Atlantis): 9m, 21s, 80
Miss Information (Atlantis): 17m 35s 08
Spite (Atlantis): 14m, 29s, 57
Akash’Bhuta (Rook City): 18m 38s 27
Highlights/Comments
Baron Blade, starting off with the nemesis matchup for GL. The fight is mostly the same as usual, the Ultimate mode just means we need to keep the pressure up. Kind of like Kaargra, where you’re never going to lose from your HP total, but from the alternate loss condition. Was fairly close, but we had decent wiggle room.
BB Variant, the mad bomber. This guy was actually a fumbling block because his DR is annoying to get around, and chrono ranger died on the flip right as he got his DR piercing weapon, leaving me dicking around with Compulsion Canister shuffling and a tachyon burst for 13 ish to finish him off. Thankfully after he flips he’s harmless as a newborn kitten, so it was tedious, but assured victory. Eventually.
Citizen Dawn. Hoo boy, Atlantis proved to be a jerkweed the whole way through. Denying one of my plays with Leaking Room. Collapses and Lazors to kill citizens to enable her flip. Thankfully, (and I only realized this as I was “don’t care JUST WINNING”) when she didn’t flip on her turn, Anvil brought Hammer out of the trash, meaning still only 4 citizens down. That was close, though. Dawn herself just played a bunch of damaging civilians, Sky died to monolith protect the team on the last round.
Voss was surprisingly easy, well, okay not surprisingly, but easy. I stumbled a little over my turns, mentally making the mistake of optimizing my damage order just for a dinky +2 damage onto voss, but I only made that mistake once. Voss Challenge is basically “voss plays 1 more card over the course of the whole game”. Oh well, on to more scary things.
Omnitron 1: Or not. At least, not the “scary” part. Unbearably, unceasingly tilting, however… I would say yes. Interpolation beam got played once during each of the first three turns, which causes notifications to slow the battle down. I actually wound up using ongoing removals on it because that was simply faster. Managed to wail him down despite both fletchettes slowing my ramp up, and then took 2 ish entire minutes to kill his last bot in the Leaking Room. I mocked Omni 1, eve n going so far as to type that “Or not.” Before fighting him. The machine showed me up for it.
Cosmic Omnitron: Skip Used. NooOOoOoOo. Screw that noise.
Ambuscade: Whew! This was the first guy I was worried about losing to in a serious way, but we made it. He never got into huge trap springs, and most turns I had monolith guards, Takedowns, and Heroic Sacrifices in play to help stop the flow. I was concerned about his original setup, but once that and his “deal 3 to all when a device explodes” cards were dealt with, everything calmed down. Still, longest fight so far in the gauntlet.
Chairman: To. Hell. With. Chairman. To begin with, it’s always Huffer/Broker, but thankfully there’s a Takedown in Legacy’s hand. Things were going so smooth until the jailbreak, and then Sky died. No more aoe, and I backslid into a defeat. Hilariously enough, I thought the challenge wouldn’t matter, because just HP… but I think without that heal spam I’da had enough damage to power through to a victory.
Chairman Take 2: Why did I put atlantis in the environment rotation? I’m not even to the ‘really’ bad villains and I’m already tilted into the sun. Leaking room is going to be the death of me. Fight went relatively simply comparative to last time, cause I drew a little better. Once again, It’s Always Broker, but Legacy got a takedown again to deal with it. Oh yeah, and Synaptic is Best Card for dealing with the gunman both this run and last (reason sky even died last time was because I didn’t have another synaptic). Well done, and chairman sent out, but that first run ‘cost’ in terms of time.
[i]Matriarch[/i]: Okay, this was pretty fun. Low damage opening, but Takedown prevented her from playing on the turn I left Mask up. I got a solid damage start, and rolled through 1 turn of bounties onto her despite Hugnin being a DR annoyance. By time she got a “cawcawphony” out, I’d already managed to check her for 4+ damage, and could rush her down the last 25 without caring about setup or defense. My “A Team” functioning like the well oiled machine I picked it for.
[i]Miss Information[/i]: I jumped her up to the next fight because I received comment feedback that she was an especially difficult fight. While true, the fight did turn into something of a slog, I halfway expected this with the Advanced text giving her 2 DR. The challenge actually helped a little by making her play 3 clues at once and flipping way sooner. She got some fangs by cantripping her clues, but in the end, Tachyon eventually just got enough Bursts in the discard to clock her for 30+ damage.
Edit: On future assessment, I got a little lucky. the Miss Information fight is incredibly swingy, and while I'm keeping it on record for this run-through, I'm adding a rule that allows it to be skipped.
[i]Spite[/i]: Man, this is a lot of atlantis fights. Spite vamps a lot, but thankfully we have damage negation to prevent him from this. He never even got to flip, though he would have on the next villain start. I wasted a little too much time trying to read the victim cards and remember what they did, but I’m overall happy with how that fight went. I'll do the Spite Variant along with Gloom, as the spite fight is kinda monotonous and it's an excuse to put it off a little.
[i]Akash’Bhuta[/i]: Okay, wow. Blob of HP fight to make the last one look meager. Thankfully, no ‘super chain ten thousand things into play’, even if I did have Sky loaded with enough Hug cards to beat it back by a fair amount. Slow, steady, but with 50+ DPS a round, akash finally returned to the dirt from whence she came.
Progress So Far: 12/28
Total Time Elapsed (So Far): Approx 3h, 01m