I had a game where Legacy and Expatriette almost totally invalidated a Forced Deployment. Expatriette killed something like 9 Minions with Hairtrigger Reflexes. Only the Guards and the Soldiers survived.
Don't the Guards give all Minions soak, or do they just have it themselves? I know First Lieutenant Tamar gives all of them +1 soak but of course, he's not a Minion.
Anyway, yeah, Expatriette is, I think, a pretty good, steady damage dealer, and with lots of options in order to change her damage type, hit multiple targets, or get past soak by using a more powerful weapon. She could pretty much solo-kill everything if assisted by various effects from people like Legacy and the Adept, letting her get more stuff out and deal more damage, and so on. I suppose it depends who you're fighting.
I think the terms best and worst don’t truly fit here. Simply because every hero has their use during any fight. It’s more a favorite/least favorite kinda thing.
My personal favorites are Legacy, Tempst, and Ra. Tempest is simply so versatile that he does a little of everything, but that same strength sometimes causes him to have cards he really doesn’t need at the time. Legacy is just a good tank and Ra can make toast out of nearly any villian.
My least favorite are AA and AZ. Not saying they are bad heroes, they just refuse to work for me. That and AZ has the one card I have not found a use for yet. The one where he switches the start and end of turn effects for villian cards. I see no real use for it.
It doesn't switch them, it moves the end of turn to the start of turn. It helps with villains like Voss whose minions act at the end of turn giving you a turn extra to deal with the before they pummel you.
It delays things, when the chairman plays a underboss, he wouldn't bring a minion from the discard pile until the start of his next turn, so if brought out soon enough it can make some battles a bit painless, not much because some things cant be killed in one round.
I used to think it was useless too, I used to just use it if our group thought we would need select ongoing destruction.
She
Really? How can you tell? I'm guessing it's in some fluff text somewhere that I just haven't read...probably at the bottom of Tamar's card, lol.
Mind if I point out that Tamar happens to have breast? She is also the only one out of the three Thorathian to have visible hair, long hair at that. My speculation is that for whatever reason men can't grow hair, or maybe their skin tight spandex cover it and they just keep it short.
I had a similar situation with Ra's Glare card (destroy target with 2 or less hp), simply because Ra can normally deal much more than two damage, it wasn't useful… until I took him against Apostate and started to burn the relics.
Each character is a lot different in use and purpose. Adept should never be the damage dealer and Haka is never support, but that doesn't make one better than the other, just better in one situation or another. The reason I think that Fixer takes a lot of flack is because he looks like a damage dealer and just isn't. Fixer either plays minion control or mini-tank when I play with him. He's never really there to take out the boss. Like-wise, when I play Ra, he normally targets the boss so directly, I could care less about minions except for collateral damage.
Ah okay...I suppose I never looked at her pic that carefully, and anyway she's an alien - Tempest could be said to have long "hair" in the form of those tentacle thingys hanging down his head ;).
They do, but you can bring the Minions out in whatever order you want, and Expatriette kills them as they come out, so I brought all the Minions that weren't Guards or Soldiers out first so they wouldn't get the benefit of the damage reduction.
The only difficulty with this is when you're playing against Akash'bhuta. I was in a game earlier this week playing Nightmist where I did a total of 93 points of damage with one Oblivion, not counting the 2 each of the heroes took. Doing killing damage to 6 limbs that dealt 59 damage directly skews the numbers quite a bit. Still, that was the single most damaging attack I've ever done.
The thing about that is NightMist isn't dealing the damage to Akash'Bhuta when limbs are destroyed, it is Akash"Bhuta dealing damage to herself. So that wouldn't really have an impact if we recorded damage dealt from each character.
that
record it before double ups (including Bonus damage, from like Galvanize and so on)
Galvanize damage should, of course, be credited to Legacy. Which is one thing that stands to make this somewhat complicated. But I'll give it a try, when I remember, and have a bunch of extra time. Only beatdowns for me today. (Man, some of you are really looking forward to Iron Legacy. Some of you aren't.)
Does this mean Ra's +1 should also go to him? Or Visionary's +1/-1 card?
I'm a little surprised to see people so down on Mister Fixer and Expatriette, especially in comparison to Argent Adept and Absolute Zero.
The nice thing about Fixer and Expatriette is that while they, like most heroes, are reliant on Ongoings and Environment cards, they both are able to recover easily. Fixer needs three cards to function at a solid level: a Stance, a Tool, and Harmony...and Harmony can even be forgotten in a pinch. If the field is wiped by, say, Devastating Aurora, Fixer is back up and dealing damage within 2 rounds.
Expatriette works similarly, as she can throw down cards out of her hand faster than almost any other character. If she's out of cards she's pretty screwed, but then again, who isn't? And for crowd control, she's right up there with Tempest--Hairtrigger Reflexes, the Assault Rifle, and Shock Rounds see to that.
The thing that frustrates me most with AZ is the fact that for the turns that you're trying to get set up--your Calibrator, your Focused Apertures, etc.--you're not doing anything worthwhile. You might be healing yourself, or dealing damage 1:1, but it's just not worth the trouble. Argent Adept has much the same trouble, but his comes in balancing Instruments and Songs. Too much of one leads to not enough of the other, and a happy medium is hard to maintain.
I readily agree that the potential of AZ and AA are much higher than almost any other hero, but those turns taken while getting set up come close to being wasted turns. Heroes like MF, Expatriette, and even Bunker (if you can throw down Upgrade mode quickly) get on their feet much faster than certain other heroes, which means that damage output comes out faster, even if it's at lower values.
The Adept can be useful with just one card, though - one song, any song, and he can do something. And if he starts with no songs in hand, he's got several copies of Arcane Cadence which have a chance of being in the starting hand (and which in turn have a pretty high chance to turn up at least one song when played). Okay, so one song may not be hugely useful, but it depends on the song, and which other heroes are present, and which villain is being fought. Or even which Environment you're in (Sarabande of Destruction versus the Self-Destruct Sequence? Yes please!) ;).
Agreed, and that seems to be the biggest difference between him and AZ at our table:
Where Absolute Zero needs a very specific set of cards out in order to Anything without killing himself, Argent Adept can be functional from the start, even those his individual functions are generally lesser than that of any other given power.
My overarching point, though, was that during all that set-up time where AA and AZ are prepping huge combos of cards, Expatriette and Fixer are actually fulfilling their intended purpose--crowd control and damage.
The key words I notice is "without killing himself", AZ is all about killing himself. As pointed out in another topic is he really only needs two cards to function as well as others. Isothermic will always without a doubt be one of those cards. The other can be any card other than Null-Point and Cyro Chamber. Then he'll be more than capable of dishing out plenty of damage.
So my main point is if your playing AZ in a manor of not trying to kill yourself than you are extremely limiting his ability.