Revised Villain Difficulty Rankings

I have long thought the flat 1-4 scale for villain difficulty really didn't seem accurate, so I though I'd try to create a better one.  For now I'll keep it to rankings between 1 and 5, though I think there's a certain logic to saying that there's enough ambiguity in the categories to deserve a 10-point scale, so that Akash'bhuta would show as being more difficult than original Spite, even though the difference is too fractional to reflect in a smaller range.  Since this is all experimental, I welcome feedback based on personal experience (NOT based on parroting the results of the statistics thread, as I don't think the methodology there is rigid enough to produce truly definite answers of what's actually objectively true, rather than what reflects the experiences of the limited pool of people who are contributing to it); if you think Ambuscade deserves to be a Difficulty 2, please tell us why, with as much detail as possible of how he's stomped you in the past.

Without further ado, here are my rankings for all current villains.

* Akash'bhuta:  Normal 2, advanced 3.  She's not very aggressive, but those 200 HP can take a long time to slog through, and a few Primeval Eruptions at once can leave you buried neck-deep in more Limbs than you can possibly kill.  (If I get to the point of having these ratings adjust by H level, I'll need to reflect the fact that she's particularly awful for small parties; if you're down to one surviving hero, an Entangling Brambles is an instant game over for anyone other than Fanatic or the Argent Adept, as far as I can tell).

* Ambuscade:  Normal 1, advanced 2.  I just don't see how Ambuscade (in his current form, not the character as a whole - I'm among those who hopes to see him as a Vengeance-style mini-villain who does pretty much exactly what he's always done when solo) can ever pose more than a trivial threat.  Even his Advanced mode only manages to make him a nuisance rather than an actual danger; I've never lost to him and have only had a couple heroes so much as incapped, even when I behaved flat-out suicidally during the fight.  Those 50 HP just don't suffice to keep him alive for any longer than he can Vanish, not when he can't destroy hero cards and only sporadically deals damage.

* Apostate:  Normal 2, advanced 2.  Apostate is a "high 2" in my opinion; he's very hit-or-miss, going down easily in some games and being almost invincible in others.  However, while he is sometimes more difficult than a 2 suggests, this has very little to do with whether he starts the game with a 3-HP "players skip their draw step" card in play; I don't think I've seen more than 2 heroes miss their draw before one managed to kill the Tome.  His Advanced text on the flipside might matter, but in my experience he's hardly ever on the flipside for any length of time, as the heroes usually get all the Relics killed before taking him down (or use the Sucker Punch loophole).  And I still think the text about the Tome raising Condemnation from the trash must be a misprint, because when is an 11-HP target with DR 1 going to be in the trash first, unless the Tome comes out later (which certainly isn't the case in an Advanced game)?

* Baron Blade:  Normal 1, advanced 2, promo 2, promo advanced 3.  Pretty much the standard baseline which defines the difficulty scale.  Normal Blade is capable of winning a game, but only occasionally; I have only a little experience with his promo, but it doesn't seem to add enough to increase his difficulty by more than one tick, since he's still working with tiny numbers of HP and often playing cards which do very little.

* The Chairman:  Normal 4, advanced 4.  While I consider the Chairman the single hardest villain to beat, my own record against him fails to bear this out, though I suspect at least one of my victories against him was the result of a rules error.  Thusly, I'm leaving him at 4 rather than making him the first villain with a base difficulty of 5, though I may change my mind on that.  While a game with advanced text is certainly capable of being deadlier than a normal one, Chairman already has such sharp teeth that really, making him quicker to flip seems as likely to help as to hurt, simply because it makes it possible to kill him faster, leaving only a souped-up Operative to deal with.  My theory is that if you lose the game because of Advanced text, you would probably have lost the normal game too, it would just have taken longer.

* Citizen Dawn:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  Pretty straightforward.

* The Dreamer:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  Probably should have a higher ranking than Dawn, especially with a high "H" number, but for now I'll stick with the written numbers.

* The Ennead:  Normal 3, advanced 5.  The advanced Ennead is just a ridiculous beating, so I'm currently opting to set them as one of two villains who jump more than one difficulty point when you Advance them.  The difference between possibly having no more than three gods to kill and as long as you need to do it (assuming you have Visionary burying the Rise to Powers and so forth), versus having at least 4 of them by the end of turn 1 and a maximum of six turns before they're all out AND getting +1 to all their tiny damage-instances AND healing 2 HP each per turn...it's just a quantum leap in difficulty, and I'm confident that I'm right to call the advanced Ennead one of the two most devastating battles in the game.

* Gloomweaver:  Normal 2, advanced 2, promo 3, promo advanced 4.  I am perhaps being excessively generous by not dropping him all the way down to 1; the occasions on which he can actually win a game will be exceedingly rare (and usually involve Cursed Acolyte).  But for the moment I'll give him the benefit of the doubt; somehow the writers of the rulebook thought he was a 3, and I'll pretend they were only slightly wrong.  I'm mostly guessing about the promo version, and entirely guessing about the advanced promo, which I've never played; Skinwalker definitely poses a threat, but with just 50 HP he tends to be a manageable one, and once he's the Rotting God, he actively helps you kill him, so it's possible he's not as dangerous here either as I've credited him with being.

* Grand Warlord Voss:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  I consider Voss a more "solvable" 3 than Dawn, since none of his Minions have more than 3 HP or any damage reduction.  He's still plenty dangerous, though, with Forced Deployment and the alternate Game Over perhaps making up for whatever he lacks compared to the Citizens, and so I'll leave them at the same rank for the moment.

* Iron Legacy:  Normal 4, advanced 5.  This is the only one of the existing 4s where I'm confident that Advanced status is a sufficiently hardcore upgrade to be worth reflecting in his difficulty level.  It might not matter if you never reduce damage, but the odds that you were going to survive in that case aren't great; damage mitigation is just about necessary to survive against this villain, so being largely unable to do it is pretty damn crippling, even if your hero didn't have any cards that would have done the job (and thus no cards which are dead against advanced IL).

* Kismet:  Normal 2, advanced 4.  Kismet spends a lot of time doing not much (playing largely irrelevant Jinxes or the like), but also has bursts of extreme violence, especially on her advanced side where she can get as much as +3 to damage in a 5-hero game.  This variability makes a 2-point split in her ranking seem appropriate to me, but I could be talked out of it more easily than for the Ennead.

* La Capitan:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  You are unlikely ever to convince me that LC's incredibly aggressive opening does not justify a 3 difficulty rating, even if it's possible to geld her quite thoroughly by getting the Ship sunk and the Crew locked down.  I insist that her printed 2 is a typo, possibly inverted with Kismet since she's sometimes listed as a 3.

* The Matriarch:  Normal 4, advanced 4.  She's definitely extremely mean, but fractionally easier to handle than Iron Legacy or the Chairman (as long as you don't take +1 math damage), and the added difficulty posed by her Cohorts being indestructible doesn't apply if her Cohorts never actually show up, which is relatively unlikely given how quickly she tends to play her deck out, but it's still possible.  Thusly, while Advanced does make her more dangerous most of the time, I'm inclined to think it doesn't make a full point of difference, though again I could be convinced to reconsider.

* Miss Information:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  While she's extremely frustrating, she's not superlatively difficult, at least not in regular mode where she has only 45 HP.  Advanced mode gets extremely hard if you can't deal irreducible damage, but I'm inclined to think it doesn't quite deserve a 5 ranking.

* Omnitron:  Normal 1, advanced 2, promo 2, promo advanced 3.  I know some people have suggested that Omnitron is harder than the Baron by a substantial margin, I really don't see it from my own experiences; he occasionally manages to beat the heroes, but usually he's just a big target who occasionally distracts you with smaller targets, and only sporadically actually damages anything.  I have only a single game against the promo version under my belt, so I'm purely speculating about the difficulty there.

* Plague Rat:  Normal 2, advanced 2.  I'm not increasing his difficulty in the Advanced game because, while he gets a bonus to damage, so do the Infected heroes, and thus it becomes actively easier to kill him.  It's still not precisely an easy game, but it's quick and brutal and largely luck-dependant, which I figure well-fits the definition of a 2.

* Spite:  Normal 2, advanced 2, promo 3, promo advanced 4.  Spite is not a hard fight so much as a tedious and frustrating one, and Advanced text just says "don't even bother trying to beat me until I flip", after which it no longer has much effect.  Either way, he's not especially difficult, what with being a single-target villain whose plays are often blanks, and who eventually turns into a predictable robot.  The promo of course doesn't have that problem, and is definitely vicious; he should perhaps even be a 4 in his non-advanced mode, and/or a 5 in the advanced one, but that's just a guess since I haven't faced that version at all.

* Vengeance:  Here the calculation becomes extremely variable; I'd say they're unquestionably never less than a 3 in total, and that bumps up to 4 if the Baron or Fright Train is in, and bumps up another one for advanced, but that might only be true if you have both Blade and Friction (the two who have cards affecting the entire villain party, as well as having a mean combo on Advanced mode).  According to the Vengeance rulebook, Ermine + Friction + Proletariat should only be a 2, but I'm not sure I buy that, having played that combo once and not found it significantly less hard than Vengeance in general.

That looks pretty good, though Cosmic Omnitron is much more difficult than the base version.  I would say normal 3, advanced 4 (and I think the stats bear this out).  

I think Ambuscade is lower than a 1.  He should be a Villain you only fight with 2 heroes.

Ehn, if the players are rank newbies with no idea what they're doing, he'll at least manage to look dangerous.  He's not as good an intro villain as original BB, but I'd say he's on the same playing field.

While I might otherwise agree, the experience of seeing a group of newbies flail and lose against Ambuscade at a convention as everything went against them gives me pause.

EDIT – Hmm … I think I'm mostly agreeing with you here, and am just making the point that my intellect is warring with my intuition. Although he looks more dangerous than he is, for one particular game I saw, he destroyed the heroes, so I'm warry of him.

I've had Omnitron completely destroy me in one game too (the other I lost because I was screwing around).  Being able to do really well one time out of 8 seems like a good place to say that a villain is objectively weak.

I prefer to look at the deck chances rathe than experience.

Omnitron plays 3 cards every 2 rounds, and brings out a destroyed card on the single card play round.

He has quite a few big hit cards, 2 flechettes, 2 singularity, 2 EPE and 2 Terraforming, which are all serious threat cards.

Ambuscade is a nuisance, but he doesn't have any 1 card that scares you, his scary side is running of a string of cards due to Run and Gun, Armed and Dangerous and Quick Stim-Patch  But those cards are only 6 cards of his deck.

With 50 health you often only face one or two turns that involve one of those cards, but if they come out in a chain he's suddenly not so easy.

The odds aren't good for that though.

Ambuscade is a great example of a deck built on cool mechanics, but not built very well.  (I mean if you were building it to be hard, not that GtG did a bad job)  It doesn't have enough card play to be a spamming, burn your cards deck, and it doesn't have big enough cards to make up for it.  The flip mechanic and Reactive Plating are great stall cards, but they don't do enough to let Ambuscade whittle down your health.  It's sad because he has a lot of really cool cards but he's pretty much a newb deck.

He's pretty easy to house rule though, so I don't really mind.

I mostly agree, except against the Ennead. I’d put them on 2 normal and 3 advanced. No way they’re a 5. They’re really not THAT hard, and if you take them out strategically (Nuit first, then Set, then Atum, then Tefnut, Geb, Shu, and Osiris, and then Isis and Nephthys.) They are actually quite manageable.

Completely agree! My warriness is psychological, not logical.

I've had Ambuscade win in 2 rounds on more than 1 occasion. I fear Ambuscade...

As the guy who wrote a guide for the advanced Ennead, I do agree that vanilla Ennead is probably a 2. Borderline 1, really.

But how can they not be a 5 on advanced? Their damage output is insane if you're even a little bit lacking in defense, they're not vulnerable to tricks like deck manipulation or ongoing destruction, and they regenerate.

Also, I've got to ask about that order. Set first after Nuit? Huh. In my experience, that tends to be an invitation to get Elemental Stormed to death. The extra hero card plays can be useful, but without the ability to control what you get or re-roll Limited cards, it's going to be more beneficial for the villains than the heroes most of the time.

On-topic, I wouldn't call Advanced Kismet a 4. She's pretty easy to control thanks to her flipping mechanics. If you've got a lot of jinxes, take the amulet. If you have a lot of Ongoing destruction, let her keep it. Now, Advanced Kismet who manages to draw Lady Luck on her first turn? That's a 4. And yes, this has happened to me multiple times.

My experience tells me that they're harder than both Iron Legacy and The Chairman; I've lost 5 out of the 8 games I've played against them.  When the entire team is around, they have a combined HP total comparable to Akash'bhuta, without the Limbs self-damaging part.  They heal themselves constantly, and they deal absurd amounts of damage in small increments which aren't easily deflected.  I do all the things that are obvious for dealing with them, like mass-damaging and damage reduction, and they still mop the floor with me.  I'm seldom able to get more than one of them killed.

and if you take them out strategically (Nuit first, then Set, then Atum, then Tefnut, Geb, Shu, and Osiris, and then Isis and Nephthys.) They are actually quite manageable.

I generally avoid taking out Set early, since it switches him from "sometimes play an extra villain card" to "always play an extra villain card"; the extra hero cards are unlikely to be worth the trade-off, unless Unity or someone is in the game.  And I usually kill Tefnut last so as not to have to discard every turn.  Osiris I kill way earlier than this because he's incredibly annoying alive, and not terribly problematic dead IIRC.  Otherwise I pretty much agree with this sequence.

2 Normal: Agree

3 Advanced? No way. They are one of the hardest fights on Advanced mode currently in game. They are a solid 4.

Unsafe_Bet,

Nice job on this. Looks like you spent a lot of time on it. I have a couple of edits:

Gloomweaver: The purpose of your difficulty ratings is not to parrot what the rulebook difficulty is. It's to correct those ratings. Just because the designers thought Gloomweaver was a 3 doesn't mean you should if it's wrong. Gloomweaver is clearly a 1. I have only seen him flip one time and that was becuase I specifically allowed him to flip just to see what he did. Then, I beat him anyway. Your rankings are correct for Skinwalker. I strongly encourage you to try him out. The fact he "only" has 50 is misleading since he goes up to 100 when he flips. True he does hurt himself, but he'll only deal himself about 30HP before the heroes are dead anyway. That means to win the heroes have to deal around 120 damage to him over the course of the game (as opposed to 90 or 75 on the original Gloomy).

Grand Warlord Voss: You said, "since none of his Minions have more than 3 HP or any damage reduction." But he does have damage reduction. A lot of it. His guards and his Lietenant. And his advanced mode. I'd argue that he has much more damage reduction than Dawn.

Matriarch: Advanced Matriarch is clearly a 5. The cohorts being indestructible completely changes the game. You mentioned that doesn't matter if they don't show up, but it's impossible for them to not show up. The cohorts together destroy 2 hero cards a turn and give the Matriarch a +2 attack and +2 defense. Saying that both advanced and normal are a 4 means that you can just fight her like normal and that is not true at all.

Omnitron: Normal Omnitron is a 2. Advanced is probably a 2 or 3. Cosmic Omnitron is a 3 with advanced on 4.

Plague Rat: You said that he's a 2 because it's quick, brutal, and luck dependent. However, the difficulty rating is not about how fast the game is. It's how likely the heroes are to win. And the Rat wins a lot. True, it is fast and luck driven, but he's a 3. You yourself said it was not easy. A 2 (out of 5) is still in the easy range.

Everything else you have is right on. That means I have a lot more head nodding going on that disagreement. It doesn't sound like that since all I have here is the criticism. Sorry about that.

I disagree. I have almost never lost against them, and almost never won against the chairman. The thing with Set is that on his first side, he often gets an extra card play and sometimes deals damage. With Atum, he WILL play an extra card, because Atum will force it. On his flip side, he does play an extra, but a.) doesn't deal damage and b.) lets heroes play cards too. That, alongside turning red cards into dead ones (Set and Nuit are the only ones who trigger from red, besides Shu) means that his being dead is often more helpful than not.

Part of it is also about team planning, true; certain heroes are less helpful against them, but as long as you stay away from Unity, you should be ok.

Focusing fire on one at a time also limits the effectiveness of their healing. If all but 1 of them are at full health, then what issue is it if they all regain 1? That is easily overcome. Their damage is often small, so with even a little DR they can be made easier, if not neutralized. Not a lot; just a little.

After you take care of Nuit, Set, and Atum, focus on either all the Green triggers or the Black triggers. That way you can eliminate the effectiveness of one of the triggers, so only 1/3 of the cards in the deck will cause chain reactions.

It's a bit of a puzzle, but once you solve it, it's easily beaten.

Everyone hates Unity and the Ennead, I like her a lot.

First on the front Stealth Bot eats 80% of their damage, and a -1 damage taken effect on him covers 80% of their flip side.

Then Cryo Bot is just fantastic vs. the Ennead, and Platform Bots live through the front side pretty well.

Stealth, Champion, Cryo Bot is insane.  Unity with those three can almost take them single handedly.

Hasty Augmentation and powers like Squall, Defensive Blast or Thermal Shockwave is also really awesome against the Ennead.

Holy crap, Hasty Augmentation on a Defensive Blast, I never thought of that.  Definitely will be trying that against one of the tougher minion-based villains one of these days.

Chair is certainly not easy, but I got spanked by him early and have taken him with extreme seriousness ever since, while I keep underestimating the Ennead and thinking that they'll surely be less diastrous this time, which consistently doubleplus unhappens.  With Chair, I don't think I've used fewer than four heroes since my first game, and I pay a lot of attention to the critical issues - managing the Underbosses, focusing fire on the Operative, and so forth.  It's always a narrow victory with several casualties, and I think at least twice it involved rules errors in my favor, but I have taken him three times, and I think twice it was on advanced, which is why I say that match is almost easier than the regular one.  ("Almost"; Operative does have that frightful +1 damage to keep it from being entirely advantageous getting to flip the Chairman sooner, and of course once flipped the Chairman needs to die in a hurry or you'll be quite thoroughly screwed.  At which point the issue of shuffling him becomes relevant, but that's more a nuisance than anything.)

Focusing fire on one at a time also limits the effectiveness of their healing. If all but 1 of them are at full health, then what issue is it if they all regain 1?

Aside from the fact that I'm often using global damage, "focusing fire" only does so much when you're not able to throw all that much of it.  The one time I can recall having Ra out, the nemesis rule killed him in like five seconds with all the 1-damage hits the Ennead throw around.  Tempest ought to be effective, I don't recall whether I've tried using him, but in general I don't recall too many occasions when I was seeing more than 5 or 10 damage outgoing per round.  That's not enough to even kill the Ennies faster than they can come out, even if they didn't heal like crazy.

After you take care of Nuit, Set, and Atum, focus on either all the Green triggers or the Black triggers. That way you can eliminate the effectiveness of one of the triggers, so only 1/3 of the cards in the deck will cause chain reactions.

This part does sound like good enough advice.  But I still think enough things have to go right, and can go wrong, that this remains at least a 4 difficulty.  My use of an almost unique 5 rating is perhaps hyperbole, but I stand by it for now.

Mm, I've had at least one game where he managed to put some serious hurt on the players, though I forget exactly how.  I think with his Relics being as tough as they are, and the Pins being a serious issue at least in low-H games (particularly the Indigo one), he feels like an extremely low 2 rather than being among the ranks of the 1s.  If nothing else, being a 1 suggests beginner-game status, and Gloomy is complicated even if he isn't difficult, so I think it's better to exagerrate slightly for the sake of encouraging people not to start by going up against him.

I have only seen him flip one time and that was becuase I specifically allowed him to flip just to see what he did.

True, he basically never flips.  But he does occasionally win, courtesy of the high damage his cult can occasionally dish out, even if they're not remotely consistent about it.

Your rankings are correct for Skinwalker. I strongly encourage you to try him out.

I've played him three times, just never on Advanced.  Sorry if that was unclear.

[quote[True he does hurt himself, but he'll only deal himself about 30HP before the heroes are dead anyway. [/quote]

I don't recall the heroes being remotely in danger against him; he damages himself twice each turn, and the heroes only once.

Grand Warlord Voss: You said, "since none of his Minions have more than 3 HP or any damage reduction." But he does have damage reduction. A lot of it. His guards and his Lietenant. And his advanced mode. I'd argue that he has much more damage reduction than Dawn.

I stand corrected on him not having any, and maybe in Advanced he does indeed have more.  But Dawn has Citizen Truth; that counts for a lot.  Especially when he Returns With the Dawn.  And brings Anvil with him.

Matriarch: Advanced Matriarch is clearly a 5. The cohorts being indestructible completely changes the game.  You mentioned that doesn't matter if they don't show up, but it's impossible for them to not show up.

That is certainly not true.  Say she starts the game with 2x Darken the Sky, and the heroes take out the Mask in one turn.  Then she puts out Carrion Fields.  Turn 3 she does another Darken the Sky; by then the heroes might be well-enough set up that they can not only destroy the Mask again before her turn returns, but do enough damage to her that by the time a Cohort does appear, they can just finish her off.  With two Horrid Cacophonies on top of the cards already named, the Cohorts are just 2 out of 9 non-Fowl cards; if you're able to consistently keep her Maskless, you can potentially have six turns before both Cohorts appear, and that's plenty of time to ventilate a squishy 70-HP girl with no defenses whatsoever.  I've had games where she was extremely dangerous, but I've also had games where I just rolled over her, and if I ever really want to make her lose, I'll just play Legacy and that's practically Game Over before it even starts.

The cohorts together destroy 2 hero cards a turn and give the Matriarch a +2 attack and +2 defense. Saying that both advanced and normal are a 4 means that you can just fight her like normal and that is not true at all.

It's not that there's no difference; it's that the difference is potentially minimal, and even at worst not really enough to uptick the difficulty a full point.  Matty is too solvable to deserve a 5 even on Advanced; she can be dangerous at her best, true, but Chairman and IL are dangerous at their worst, and Matty at her worst is almost completely harmless.

Omnitron: Normal Omnitron is a 2.

No way.  He sits there doing nothing half the time.  That 100 HP doesn't last long if he doesn't pull a TechSing or Flechettes to wipe you out or a That Bomb to draw some of your fire.  Even a little deck control neuters him entirely.  His strategy relies on the long game, and he has only a few cards that can ensure a long game ever happens.  Most of the time, he just puts out Components that explode before his turn rolls around and he can fire them, or he drops Drones that deal a couple damage and can be safely ignored until someone has a global-damage card they were going to play anyway.  He needs strongly above-average luck to be capable of winning, except in Environments where he might get a Bomb into play just before his turn.  One of those Environments is Rook City, which pretty much always adds 1 to the difficulty number of any fight taking place there; the other is Atlantis, and while I can see that Atlantis games may sometimes be dangerous, personally I've almost always found it to be on my side in the fight.  When I fought OT there, the threatened insta-Bomb never happened, and I cleaned his clock just like usual.  As I've said, he's only scored one victory against me which wasn't largely due to my own carelessness.

Plague Rat: You said that he's a 2 because it's quick, brutal, and luck dependent. However, the difficulty rating is not about how fast the game is. It's how likely the heroes are to win. And the Rat wins a lot. True, it is fast and luck driven, but he's a 3. You yourself said it was not easy.

I wouldn't call it hard either.  He deals a lot of damage, but that's his only trick, and it's potentially quite manageable.  With virtually no secondary targets and no destruction, he's just not incredibly dangerous; I think he's won twice, and at least once it was against 3 heroes (he's definitely on the list, along with the Chairman, of games where higher H is pretty much strictly better).  Iron Legacy dishes out about the same amount of damage as Rat, but is much harder to damage himself, and doesn't actually help you damage him, and destroys your stuff.  It probably also helps that Rat's damage is irreducible and I seldom bother using heavy DR.  I'll try him against the Sentinels sometime and see how miserable that gets.

It doesn't sound like that since all I have here is the criticism. Sorry about that.

Completely understood.  The greatest reward of the genius lecturer is the silence of the audience's total comprehension; it doesn't bother me in the slightest to hear only complaints, since they're all that needs to be heard.  Praise, I can simply assume myself to be worthy of. 

I've found Tempest to be pretty effective against the Ennead if you can get his Shackles out and then keep all Ennead members within a couple of hp of each other - that way Squall alone should do three points of damage to each of them. I've not played them on Advanced but at least in Normal mode they don't last long when they're getting so utterly pounded (considering Squall is usually far from the only thing hitting them) :D. Okay so unless Tempest can start using Grievous Hailstorm instead he's not gonna hit Shu (if he comes out)...but that just gives everyone else something to focus on instead ;).

and threads like this is why we started the statistics project…

When H=4, I can very reliably beat the Chairman unless the environment is just being a jerk or everyone gets unlucky draws. I don’t know if that affects your ranking, but it certainly encourages me to knock him down from a 4, which I would reserve for villains like Iron Legacy against whom strategy is irrelevant and it all comes down to luck.

Playing random teams I usually win 3 out of 4 games against Iron Legacy, but get utterly trashed by the chairman if I don't get to choose elements that can tank the damage and do damage to all enemies at once to get the thugs out. You just can't gimmick the fight against the chairman like you can against Iron Legacy with say a Flesh of the Sun God + Twist the Ether or even 2 reclaim from the deep and Throat Jabs and Offensive transmutation.

Interesting strategy, but I don't draw the Shackles every game, and given how good the Ennead are at healing all their members, I'm not sure I'd want to try to keep them all at equal HP, rather than just focusing fire as said above.  I'm not saying your strategy is crap or anything, I'm just saying I'd have to have all the right cards before I'd even consider trying to arrange it.  And one Ancient Magics might leave you back at square one, regretting your failure to get one or two Ennies finished off while you had the chance.  (Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just detailing the psychology that tends to underly my strategic decisions…a strategy as risky as "leave Atum alive and hit each of the others in turn" would be something I would usually avoid, unless I was quite certain I had everything I needed to pursue it to its end.)

To be more specific, statistics can only go so far.  If, for example, the statistics thread showed that Tempest won 75% of his games against the Advanced Ennead (we're temporarily ignoring the question of what other heroes he was paired with), it would NOT mean that I could count on having a 3/4 chance of winning an Advanced Ennead game just by playing Tempest.  Maybe all the players who contributed to the thread were using Ameena's method, but I wouldn't know that, would have my aforementioned reluctance to try it, and would be playing him differently than is necessary to get that sweet, sweet win percentage.  The statistics don't tell me that kind of thing - they don't tell me much of ANYTHING, by my standards of somethingness - and thus I don't consider them more than minimally useful.  The numbers don't help me much, if at all; what helps me is knowing WHY something is true, not simply that it is (and of course statistics don't even tell us that, they simply say that something has a certain percentage of confidence in SEEMING to be true, based on the available data - which, to me, is like climbing aboard a bus whose driver has a certain percentage of confidence in SEEMING to know how not to crash into a gasoline tanker).

Bear in mind when I fight the Ennead, H is always three and we only ever do them on Normal. Therefore we often only have to fight thee of them, sometimes four, and once or twice five…I don't know if we've ever gone past seven. It only requires that one card for Tempest to be super-effective and he has more than one copy in his deck plus the potential to get Aquatic Correspondance and speed up the cycling through to get hold of it. We never really have any trouble with the Ennead healing spectacularly - about the best they ever manage is a couple of hp each in a single turn.

As for stuff destruction, Tempest is highly unlikely to be the only hero with stuff in play and I think the stuff-destruction card only takes out H things total, doesn't it? It's not a lot, anyway. And plenty of heroes (including Tempest himself) have ways of getting stuff back out of the trash if they can't outright get hold of and play a second copy of whatever it was they lost. I don't recall ever having any major problem with the Ennead nuking my stuff though - I'd even forgotten that they could…but we don't fight them that often given that we roll for our villains and there are so many of them to choose from now :).

When destroying the Ennead we usually go by "who's got the most annoying incap power?" and leave them till last. So Tefnut, for example, will get left till last every time. If we're doing the "Shackled Tempest AEs everything" tactic, it doesn't tend to matter since they all go down in the same turn anyway >:). The main thing that messes up this tactic if we can get it going is that another member of the Nine comes out just as we're nearly done finishing off everyone else. But that's okay - then we just focus fire on them instead and they go down within a round or two anyway, muahahaha…

Anyway, Osiris is annoying for the forced discard under Ankh cards when active, so we try and take him down early if he's around. Nuit gets priority if she's up, though, naturally…though on thinking about it combining Tempest with Parse (what's that card where all hero damage is irreducible…) would be pretty epic. Or just Parse in general if there is anyone (like Osiris) about who's annoying and needs dealing with through soak granted by Nuit. Though it might be better to just focus on Nuit so she goes down that much quicker.

Oh well, that's the thing about this game - so many options for destroying the bad guys!

I don't mean that your ratings are not to be done.

I meant that all the people in this thread who are saying 'no, your wrong, so and so villain is easier/harder than that!' 

Well thats what the statistics are for. Not to make your difficulty ratings for you. But to say 'well,on average, over a larger number of entries, so and so villain really is easier than such and such villain' At least at a glance.

Delving into the why is great. Delving into the how is even better. I'm not saying taking the statistics as gosple. Hell, most things on there still have less than 500 entries, so still with (i think, someone did the math not me) greater than 5% error  - which when the range of '% won' 17-40% that 5% can radically change where some character lands.

Just saying they are a useful tool when people start spouting opinions on such and such villain being stronger/weaker than others.  By all means, make your own ratings, and have your own reasonings. You can just use the statistcs to help defend your ratings, (not parrot, but defend) and remember there is a large error margin which gives you that leway to play around.

I've never actually looked at the grand table or graph or however it is the stats are depicted. I just upload the stats for our games so as to contribute to the general pool of stats that everyone is pouring their own stats into :). Mind you, I'm not gonna try and suggest the stats are wrong or that people are wrong if they have a different opinion of a villain to me, or whatever ;). I find some villains harder than others, some easy…and some fly between those two points. Baron Blade has easily destroyed us numerous times (mainly due to Devious Disruption, really, especially the times when he manages to play it three times in a game, the smeggy git :P) but we rarely have major problems with Apostate or the Dreamer. Apostate and Gloomy have never flipped for us. On the other hand, despite the fact that I know we've definitely beaten the Chairman in the past (we've beaten everyone at least a couple of times), in more recent games we just can't seem to manage very much before we get overwhelmed by all his guys just repeatedly coming back and stopping us from really doing anything of use.

Then again, H as three (and only two players), so of course we're gonna do better/worse against some villains than those groups who play with more people ;). Plus we have our certain ways of playing heroes and I'm quite sure there are ways to play some of them that the two of us just haven't ever thought of because we've never played games with anyone who played them that way.

My Internet is much better since I got my new computer and a new wireless-USB-Internet-signal-detector-thingy, so I suppose it might actually manage to survive a Google chat thingy if those Sentinels games are still going. Maybe I can see about joining one some day.

Awesome. :)

And yes, G+ games are very much still happening.

I used to get e-mail notifications about the Hangout things but they either stopped or I somehow turned them off or something (can't remember now). I think timezones were a bit of an issue anyway…plus any games running in the evening (my time) I probably can't get to because that's when my partner is online and we play whatever our current multiplayer game is (Borderlands 2 from last December through till about last Wednesday, then Hammerwatch from then till now but I have a feeling we may be finishing that in another session or two since we appear to be very close now to whatever the final boss is). Then he goes to bed and I watch my daily dose of the Yogscast over on YouTube ;).

Anyway, I feel as though I'm starting to cause this thread to go a bit Fright Train so I'd better add a comment that is actually on-topic ;).

Erm…

Some villains are harder than others and some are easier but sometimes they swap and you totally destroy someone who kicked your arse in the previous session or have it handed to you on a plate by someone who was a complete pushover last time. And every hero gets a chance to totally destroy stuff on some days and has the favour returned on others. Even the ones who don't always deal a lot of damage ;). And hopefully more new people will discover Sentinels and play it a lot so that their stats can be added to the stat pool and widen the range of stuff because all of us who play the game a lot probably have our preferred playstyles and heroes and stuff so certain heroes/villains/environments (and combos thereof) are probably likely to be used more than others ;).

Speaking of which, I really should actually get around to playing Fanatic more. I think I have literally played her only two or three times ever :O.

To further clarify, I've played eight games against the Matriarch, and three of them were declared Advanced, but in only one of them did it actually matter whether the Cohorts were indestructible or not.  One time, I fought her in Insula Primalis with a five-hero team, and she died in four rounds without ever getting a Cohort into play (Visionary was one of the heroes, so I probably controlled her deck to ensure she played blanks for most of her turns after the first); another time she utterly destroyed me, and the Cohort showed up at the last minute and was basically irrelevant at the time, so I just conceded since I had one hero left with like 2 HP.  The one game in which Advanced status actually mattered was a crushing loss, but I think that had more to do with her +1 damage on Advanced and the fact that a Marsquake killed all the Fowl that we'd been trying to avoid popping while we beat on Lilian herself.  It also didn't help that our first-time Haka player wasted a Ground Pound early in the match when we didn't need it; I figured I should avoid telling him what not to do, as this habit of mine tends to annoy people, but it could well have been what cost us the game in this case.  Regardless, my experiences have taught me that advanced games against Matriarch are only potentially harder than regular ones, and if I cared about what might happen, I'd agree that Omnitron was more than a 1.  But I care about what actually does happen (my avatar notwithstanding), and so far Omnitron has usually been largely inert, and so far Matriarch's Cohorts have been a very small part of her deck.

Then it's clear what you need to do - play more games! ;)

I played my eighth Chairman game tonight, and I definitely reconfirmed my opinion on Advanced.  We were three of the most powerful heroes (Legacy, Wraith, and Tempest) plus a specialized weapon for getting through all the reduction (Parse), and we completely destroyed him.  It only took three rounds to mop up all the Underbosses and Thugs, and then Parse stripped the last Prison Break out of his deck and just left him at like four cards while we clobbered him and Operative into mincemeat.  Once the Organization ceases to exist, these two don't actually do anything by themselves, so by not letting the deck reshuffle, we kept them just sitting around waiting for the axe to fall.  It was magnificent.  I now feel about the Chairman the way McBehrer does about the Ennead - a challenging puzzle at first, but easily reduced to formula with a bit of experience.  I don't know how you can beat him with a more run-of-the-mill party, but when the heavy hitters are all involved, he seems to be fairly possible to steamroll, and Advancing him actually helps in that case.  (The only thing we sorta did wrong was kill the Chairman first, since his retaliation damage nearly did in a hero or two; with both Shielding Winds and Superhuman Durability in play, it only just now occurred to me that we should have gotten Oppy to flip so she'd boost his H damage up to 5.  I didn't think of it at the time, and just wanted to kill him fast because he was weaker, so Tempest got the tar beaten out of him rather unnecessarily.)

We've beaten the Chairman before by having Haka eat pretty much all the Thugs and stuff. Most of the time we just get overrun, though, and generally destroyed. I think the fact that pretty much all his deck's damage is fixed (as opposed to being based on H in some way) has something to do with it so he's probably a bit easier when you have more heroes present. We don't fight him very often, though...not because we're avoiding him but because we only manage to roll him pretty rarely. We've never tried fighting each villain a certain amount of times or anything, though some may come up more often than others if we just want a quick game to finish a session and decide to go for Ambuscade or something, for example.

My first game against the chairman, I had Inspiring presence, Galvinize, Imbued Fire and Grevious Hailstorm. Killed almost all the thugs on the first round. After that Operative died pretty quickly and then I had to wait for the Underbosses to come out, but he kept pulling one shots so I had 3+ turns to gear up. When he flipped, I killed him in one turn.

My Second legitimate game against the Matriarch (I've fooled around with her a few times) I pulled Twist the Ether first round. Then Later She pulled Darken the Skies and Carrion Fields, O-X Defensive blasted, then Reactive plating subroutine activated (I had Ablative coating to block the toxic damage and Visionary changed the psychic to toxic) and I did like 25 damage and killed her.

I'm not sure if I did things wrong or got lucky.

I can't quite tell from your description but regarding Omni-10's RPS, it only activates if you actually took damage. If Lilian was trying to deal you toxic damage but you blocked all of it, your RPS wouldn't trigger.

Best game we had against the Matriarch was shortly after Shattered Timelines came out and I decided I wanted to deliberately fight her in the Final Wasteland to see if we could get all her stuff utterly destroyed. First enviroment card was a Horrid Skunk Ape (one point of damage to everyone except himself). Second was Unforgiving Wasteland. Third and fourth were the Bunker and the Library (can't remember which way round). Then I think it was a Yeti or something but by that point most of Lilian's stuff had been removed from the game. She ended up with just one target in her entire deck, one of the Carrion Fields which had been in play but which we'd destroyed. Everything else we arranged for the environment to deal with and she was a total pushover :D.

Visionary + Absolute Zero is the best way to beat the Matriarch.

How suspiciously convenient, that the environment gave you exactly what you had decided in advance you were going to need. 

Do tell?  I sort of figured the best way to beat her would be to have Legacy with Lead from the Front and Next Evolution set to Projectile.

You put twist the ether on Visionary and get cryo-inducer on AZ, then when Matriarch deals damage you turn it to cold and it heals AZ, AZ stays highest HP and never takes damage.

Hm.  Well my method only requires one hero to get two specific cards, rather than two heroes to each get one.  Not sure which is better.  AZ can tutor his half of the combo, but Vizh can't do anything but try to draw her Twists.  I feel like the odds are better if Legacy just keeps draw-twoing or playing Bolster Allies until he finds both halves of his combo, since even with just one he's helping the team a lot more than either of AZ's cards can do.

I should try AZ and Visi together sometime though, I just don't know if I want to use it with the Matriarch.

On the Matriarch, not Visionary, but that is the gist of it. Although actually I alternate between fire and cold, so AZ can consistently do damage, and heal when he needs to. You can get 20+ damage coolant blasts this way, every round. It makes it SUPER easy.

I dunno if you were deliberately trying to imply that I was cheating in my Matriarch game, but I wasn't - we've never cheated at Sentinels in any way (we accidentally got the occasional rule wrong in the early days but that's hardly cheating). We just got really amazingly lucky at our environment plays, that was all.

As for dealing with the Matriarch in general, you could use Legacy with some Lead from the Front action, or maybe Bunker with both Recharge Mode and Heavy Plating. Also, the Naturalist in Rhino Form with Resilient Hide is handy. Also, the Scholar. Then again, since I only ever play with H as three, I have less damage to block ;). Also, in all of those cases except Bunker's, you'd need to make sure you had some spare Ongoings out to be nuked by Horrid Cacophony when that starts showing up.

Oh, also, Nightmist in Mistform or Visionary in TK Coccoon when all characters have the same hp. Or both those charactes in their invincible modes with one as the highest and one as the lowest ;). Okay so you'd need the other hero(es) to be dealing all of the damage, but still…

Basically, there are plenty of ways to deal with Lilian, just as there are plenty of ways to deal with anything else. You just need to get hold of a bunch of cards that'll work well ;).

Sounds that way to me, even with the smiley.

Not cool.

Vis burns her own deck at 3-4 cards with her power and draw, and can bring her card back if it is destroyed.  AZ can find his and get it back pretty easily with 8 cards to get it and 4 that bring it back.

Legacy has to do nothing at all until he gets 2 specific cards to pull off a less powerfull version, and frankly Legacy has better things to do vs. the Matriarch than just try to pull of tanking with immunity.

But…but…the smiley cures all!  It says so in the manual…

Ahhh… I didn't catch that, I thought it would activate when he blocked the damage too, but either way Visionary could have increased the damage so it hit him for 1 each time if I'd known.

Yeah, he does need to actually take damage. He can be really good against Plague Rat if you can get out the Ablative Coating, the RPS, and an Innervation Ray or two. Then get yourself Infected - at the start of your turn you will have to hit yourself for irreducible toxic damage, against which the plating is no protection. However, that means you've taken damage covered by said plating, so your RPS goes off and you get to hit Rat (or another target, if you prefer, meaning Rat's Locus or an environment target if present). Meanwhile you get any lost hp back from the Innervation Ray(s), which will go off either before or after the Infection depending on the order in which they were played. It means you get to hit Rat for free at the start of every turn, heal it back, and still do other stuff in all your other phases (and that's not even mentioning the effects of your other three Component types if you can get those out as well) :D.

I, for one, would love to see a rating system based on number of Heroes. From my experience, some villains are much more difficult with higher H (Iron Legacy, Dreamer), were some are easier with higher H (Omnitron, Chairman).

Check out the 'Hero Count Win Pct' tab on the following spreadsheet

http://public.tableausoftware.com/profile/arathorn#!/vizhome/Sentinels1/Overview

I haven't looked at that sheet in a while. That is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!