Advanced Spite

Morning all,

I had a great game against Advanced Spite last night that I feel compelled to share. I’m trying to hit all the villains on advanced, and although I haven’t yet done any of the difficulty 4s on advanced, I’m making good progress.

You’ll understand where I’m coming from as soon as I tell you my team: Legacy, Visionary, and Absolute Zero. Pretty much the ideal team for Spite, I’m thinking.

An early Take Down from Legacy bought me some time, and although I lost a lot more victims than I’d planned, damage actually started to stick after 4 or so rounds once Visionary had out a Demoralization and Absolute Zero had out Cold Snap and Impale, and all of them were boosted by Galvanize + Inspiring Presence. But even this was only because Absolute Zero got set up right away and started throwing down Coolant Blasts, which were doing insane damage after he’d done cold damage with Cold Snap and Impale. A few times the resulting fire backblast brought him down to nearly 0 hp, and I skipped damaging a third target more than once just to stay alive.

Things got really crazy once Visionary Twisted the Ether on Spite. All his damage was -1, which really nerfed his healing. Once Legacy got Lead From the Front and Fortitude up, he redirected all Spite’s damage to himself and reduced it by another point. I occasionally let Spite hit Absolute Zero for a bunch of EtherTwisted cold damage, but since that healed both Zero and Spite, I did it only rarely.

At the end, Spite pulled a lab raid and got his 4th & 5th drug out, but by that point he was at less than 30hp. Visionary hit him with 5 damage and Zero pulled out all the stops and hit him for upwards of 20hp. Game over.

It occurs to me that he takes a bunch of damage from victims in the flip, and that he’d have died at that point even had I not put in the extra effort during that last round.

Spite regains HP when he deals damage.

Absolute Zero's Null-Point causes him to regain HP instead of taking damage.

So Spite hitting AZ for cold would deal no damage, and Spite would not heal.

I’d taken it that Spite was dealing cold damage to AZ, which was healing him. I guess I need to refamiliarize myself with “deal damage”. The game’s complexities still throw me from time to time.

The word instead on Null Point is the key.  Null Point cancels Spite's damage and replaces it with an equal amount of HP recovery.  Because HP was not reduced by the attack Spite dealt no damage.

It sounds like a pretty epic beat-down, which are the best kind when dealing with Spite.

I just realized that this rule interpretation also means that I can’t count cold damage done to Zero by Coolant Blast as damage for the second half of the Coolant Blast text. I’ll need to remember that.

If you mean Thermal Shockwave, then yes, you are correct.

Yeah, that's true. I was counting it, myself, until I was corrected.

Sure you can, so long as you don't have that pesky Null Point card in play.