Has anyone come up with a good time to ever use Fanatic's Divine Focus or RA's Solar Flare. I don't ever find myself in a situation where I feel compelled to use cards like these. Playing a card that deals more damage to self than the villain just doesn't add up for me.
Divine Focus allows Fanatic to toss tons of cards, and then play a Prayer of Desperation to draw a ton. In a three hero game, she will be able to deal 10 damage to the villain target with the highest HP if she discarded every turn, sounds awesome to me!
As for Solar Flare, on the turn you play it, you will deal 2 extra damage. Take the 4 damage from Solar Flare, then on your next turn you will deal 2 extra damage for the one-shot played and 2 extra damage for the power. That's 6 extra damage for the price of 4 damage. Toss in a Flesh of the Sun God and Flame Barrier, which allows Ra to trigger the extra damage anytime he his hit, without triggering Flame Barrier on himself.
Edit: And if the one-shot you played is Flame Spike, you will get an extra power usage, so even more damage!
I've used Divine Focus with Prayer of Desperation. It allows me to deal some damage before I get a new hand on my next turn. With Solar Flare you could end up dealing an extra six damage between your power twice and a card but only take four in return overall. If it gets destroyed before your next turn obviously you ended up losing on it.
In my opinion, Divine Focus can be a game-changing card seeing as that you can discard at the start of every turn. So in a four hero game, once around the table Fanatic can discard at the start of each hero turn and the villain turn and the environment turn for a total of 12 damage, and even more if you have some damage boosts out. It can also be done for a time and then sacrificed to ongoing destruction or to hero actions that can destroy and hero ongoing (such as Dark Watch Mister Fixer's base power). Also, if you have Wrathful Retribution around, hurting Fanatic isn't the worst thing.
I will let someone who knows Ra a lttle bit better speak on his behalf.
Divine Focus let's you discard to deal damage at the start of every turn, not just Fanatic's turn. Keeping it after a round of discarding rarely makes sense outside of using prayer of Desperation to refill your hand for another round of discards.
Solar Flare is often used with Ra's power that hits every non-hero target for the number of ongoings in play. You play solar, nuke everything for +damage and then let it go away. I will pay for it when I'm setting up a turn that involves at least 3 instances of damage.
I personally use Solar Flare whenever I would like to bump my damage up by 2 for one round. Under most circumstances (basically any circumstance other than another player granting you an out-of-turn card play), this means it only applies to one attack; but if you have your Flame Barrier up, you can potentially do a lot more damage as people trigger your counterattacks. I don’t like taking 4 damage to keep it in play, though, so I generally scrap it at the start of my next turn…which of course makes it great fodder for any environmental or villain effect that demands the sacrifice of an ongoing card.
Solar Flare does damage at the end, unless of course you house ruled it!
Our group regularly uses Divine Focus, but after the clarification that you had to take at least one point of damage for Solar Flare to remain in play our group mainly uses it as a very temporary buff if at all. Try it with Visionary's Twist The Ether. You could get a pretty impressive bonus if you had a few of Ra's buffs in play.
Oh. No, I just confused it with one of those other effects that goes away unless you take damage next turn. I’m probably thinking of that one Fanatic card that lets whoever use two powers per turn.
That's also end of turn. Fanatic's Divine Focus and Chastise are start of turn.
Because Divine Focus deals self damage at the start of her turn, there is nothing wrong with only keeping it out for a single round. You still get to discard each and every turn for damage (even more with +damage buffs), and there doesn't have to be any draw backs if you dont want to take the damage. Its not very common to have enough expendable cards in hand to fuel Divine Focus for 2+ full rounds. And with Fanatic, maybe you WANT to take that self damage? If you have Wrathful Ret. in hand, then there is little reason not to burn yourself to the ground to make good use of it.
Solar Flare is kinda the same way. Personally I use Solar Flare as a sort of one-shot damage boost, and usually opt not to take the damage to keep it in play. But as Ronway pointed out above, even by taking the full 4 damage you are still way ahead of the damage curve by the end of your 2nd turn with Solar Flare out.
Solar Flare doesn't work with Flesh of the Sun God: You can't deal yourself power, so it goes away immediately.
I'd also add that semetimes it can be crucial to boost your damage to get through DR. Admittedly that's not usually a big deal for Ra.
Doesn't Solar Flare deal psychic damage? Flesh of the Sun God shouldn't be a factor.
Solar Flare, Flame Barrier, and Flesh of the Sun God work just fine together. Solar Flare will deal you the four damage, since you dealt damage to yourself, it will then trigger Flame Barrier, but Flesh of the Sun God makes you immune to Fire damage, so you do not take the Flame Barrier damage aswell. It doesn't cause Solar Flare's destruction just because you didn't take Flame Barrier's damage, the destruction of Solar Flare only triggers if you ignore Solar Flare's damage.
That set up is wicked vs. The chairman, keeping Ra highest takes work though.
We had a great match with Ra, the Sentinels and Adept where we were able to keep Ra the highest hp for quite a while, and got the operative killed. Sadly hitman came out and the Sentinels dropped, but the heroes wtill won.
My mistake! Sorry!
I thought that all the recent errata was supposed to change this (and the other cards) so that you actually have to take damage to keep the card in play, thus preventing this combo from working? Or am I double misleading myself? Is it even allowable to doubt the font of ROnway knowledge? You see what happens when I stop hanging out with the cool kids for a few weeks???
You've misread Ronway. He's saying Flame Barrier damage won't matter, but you still take the Psychic damage from Solar Flare.
well in my defence he does mumble a lot.