Agreed. You gotta be willing to wreck him if you want to contribute!
I guess that angle just comes down to personal preference.
I, and most of my group, would rather deal 4 damage and take 0 hp, than deal 6 damage and take 3 hp. Yeah, the 6 hp is more 'optimal', but if you're bringing yourself closer and closer to death with each attack, how many times can you really pull that off?
And yeah, it's fine to take some damage when you're sitting at 20 HP, but when you're sitting on 3 hp, and your next attack takes you out? There's nothing about that situation that screams 'fun' or even 'optimal' to me. I feel that Nightmist doesn't run into this problem as much as AZ, given that she's given basic healing abilities by both her Equipment (Necklace) and her Ongoing (Master of Magic), rather than just one. Her numerous Call Forth cards go a long way, too. Yeah, if both get nuked she's screwed, but that's still the case with all heroes.
As usual, your milage may vary. My group just finds it frustrating to build up and build up, going turns without being productive, only to have it all wiped away and have to work from scratch. As you might imagine, Wraith and Ra get a lot of play at our table, as does Haka.
That said, it's all kudos to the >G gang for building a game in which we can actually have this sort of argument/discussion. It says a lot to their internal testing and revision, to catch the right feel for these heroes while simultaneously making them balanced enough that a character like AZ can simultaneously be viewed as the best and the worst hero.
Yes. Any hero boosts get credited to the hero doing the boosting. Try not to think of corner cases. Too late!
(Okay, Rook City Wraith flips Obsidian Field into play for everybody to use. Is she responsible for that extra damage? Okay, but only for that one turn, right? What if she was using that power for several turns to try to find them? Complicated.)
Well said. And I add that, for me, they also did a wonderful job at giving each hero many different ways to be played, even if some tactics are far less obvious than others. I am often surprised to see, when I read how another player plays a hero, how differently we play or evaluate cards and powers !
Another thing about AZ and "self destruction capable heroes" : they still contribute to the fight when incapacitated, and there are some situations where you may want them to be incapacitated… I suspect I am not the only one who sacrificed Tempest so he could make everyone immune to Toxic damage in Pike laboratories, for instance (Tempest is not a "sacrifice" hero, I know, but this example is obvious I had to use it). It can be a winning move. And in a recent game, AZ "died" fast because he did not have his Null-point calibration unit, and finished the game fueling the powers of the other team members quite efficiently - or at least as efficiently as a one song Argent Adept.
I think our reactions to heroes playing "styles" are often a matter of taste and of "do I find fun to play this way" than strengths/weaknesses. Even if some heroes are more "limited in audience" than others.
The thing about AZ is that he can still do a lot of damage throughout a game even without the Focused Aperatures. Of course, he can do more damage with them, but with just his basic setup of Null-Point Calibration Unit and Isothermic Transducer (and his deck provides ample opportunites to get these items and hold onto them) he can really contribute through the whole game. He just has such great role versatility that I have maybe only played one game out of the many times I have played with him where he hasn't been that productive, but I could say that about most heroes.
Thinking on the topic further, something occurred to me in regards to my somewhat contradictory feelings on Nightmist and Absolute Zero.
Nightmist's healing is almost entirely passive. Master of Magic rewards her with hp every time she casts a spell--something that she was going to do anyway. Starshield Necklace lets her discard as an end of turn action for healing. In no case is her basic routine of play-power-draw disrupted, while she still benefits from the healing. Getting healed for doing the things you normally do is paramount efficiency, even if those basic actions cause you temporary harm.
How many enemies in the base game deal cold damage? I can think of a couple--Voss's frost hounds, Citizen Winter--but not many at all. If AZ wants to heal, it will nearly always cost him an action, either a power or a card play. While fire-using enemies are more frequent, allowing AZ to spread around more damage, that still doesn't solve the overall hp problem for him. Using his own actions for self-healing can work, but that hinges greatly on being able redirect damage off-turn, to say nothing of support from teammates.
That active vs. passive difference for me is what makes the characters so different, and why I end up liking Nightmist while not ready caring for AZ. I'd be interested in seeing how the Elemental Wrath AZ plays, in comparison to the base character.
Ab'Zero can get better healing if the Visionary is around. Okay so this requires him to have a whole extra hero in the game, but Twist the Ether on something that'll be dealing Ab'Zero lots of damage is very cool. Or Twist on Ab'Zero himself when you're against Plague Rat and Ab'Zero's been Infected - been there, done that, and the only reason Ab'Zero didn't finish the game on max hp was because he damaged himself in the final turn (with his base power) in order to then hit Plague Rat with the resultant cold damage :D.
Actually, Twist the Ether on Ab'Zero in any game is cool, 'cause it'd be like having an extra Focused Apertures and Cryo Chamber out as a two-in-one card :D.
When I'm playing with friends who want to try AZ for the first time, I'll often pick Visionary just to show them how ridiculous he can be. They are an exremely powerful combo. Also, AZ really shines with bonus damage because it increases his output by 2 and boosts the damage he does to the enemies over himself by 1. It also makes his healing actions more efficient.
I'll find with AZ I often do damage twice in a row and then switch to one heal and repeat the cycle when I need to be killing things fast, and do two heals and one damage in a cycle if we're in marathon mode. Yeah, you have to activate it, which feels slow, but if you have a few boosts in place your 3-7 damage per turn with breaks to heal up is still 2-4 damage per turn in the long run, which is normal for damage dealy characters, and then he has the added flexibility of healing for several turns or burning himself down to dish out crazy amounts of damage in short bursts if that's what you need.
With the self-harming characters (like Ab'Zero and Nightmist), I don't tend to have much of a problem burning through the hp until I get down to around 10-15 or so. At that point I consider myself "starting to get a bit low" and tend to put more of a focus on healing. Yeah, 10hp might seem like a lot, but if you're battling a high-damage villain (or a low-damage one who brings out a very nasty, harmful card), that can be reduced pretty quickly - a few hits and suddenly you realise you've lost about 8hp in one turn, for example.
I disagre entirely. Some heroes - Fanatic, Expatriette for example - do multiple small attacks. They become more powerful with Legacy around, and that should be reflected on /them/ (be like - game total damage 75 with Galvanize. Game b total damage 43) - because that doing multiple sources of damage is what /makes/ them so much more powerfull with just one or two +1 boosts, and that is a trait of them not of Legacy/ra/ect.
I can kinda see where you're coming from, but still - you'd have Legacy only be responsible for the 4ish points of damage all game from that spare Thokk! he threw out, but ignore the fact that he played Inspiring Presence turn one and Galvanized every power phase? You would say he contributed almost no damage? If anything, it seems to me like it severely overvalues the damage that characters like Fanatic deal for this equation. It's also not fair to the characters that contribute in a different way.
That's probably another reason nobody's posted about doing this yet.
Does Visionary get the damage for smacking Baron Blade around with a Monorail? Does she also get all the damage to the Monorail? Do environment targets even count? Is Argent Adept credited damage for nuking spaceships with Cedistic Dissonant? Is Fanatic credited damage for the "destroyed" part of Final Dive? As I alluded to above, things can get really complicated. I still plan to do something like this, but the specifics will likely depend on the situation.
true true and true flamethrower. Its not so cut and dried - which is why I still do not believe Expat and Mr Fixer are 'bad' in anyway XD. What they contribute to a game is not so easily noticed most of the time.
I would say you just do a comparison for heros widely regarded as 'Damage' heroes (Fanatic, Ra, AbZero, Expat... ect) and go from there but even then- is Nightmist a Damage dealer? What about Tachyon? Building for those Lightspeed Barrages is the whole /point/ of her printed power XD
So... yeah :P In the end, its not something that can be reliably compared to for all heroes. Which is why the only factor of 'How many games have they won, vrs lost?" is the only way to compare, just becaues of the myriad of different possbilities and setups. Sucks, but it does show in the stats that Expat and Mr Fixer are right in the pack - ie, the 60-70% win rate range where, with a few exceptions such as Legacy who just dominates the charts - the majority of heroes fall. (to tie this all back around to ' are expat and mr fixer the worst heroes?)
Only reason I see giving those damage to Legacy interesting. As then we might have data to see the total damage difference contributed by Young Legacy versus Finest Legacy.
I agree with the notion that this thread should be less of "greatest/worse" heroes, and more of who's your "favorite/least" favorite and why? And if you don't like a certain character, what would you do to make them better without overpowering them? And seeming how this thread was written before some expansions were even available, I'd really like to see how people's opinions have changed now that there are a few more expansions out with new heroes and villains.
There's been a lot of discussion about how you rate a character based on damage output per game, which is a common way to rate how good a hero is. Furthermore, the credit of extra damage from a buff wouldn't count towards a given hero benefitting from said buff, but rather counts toward the source of the buff, such as legacys galvanize or an obsidian field, thus playing a factor on how good a character actually is without assistance or outside influence. However, isn't that one of the points of playing the game? Looking at the villain/environment/hero combo and choosing a character that will play efficiently in that particular scenario? One such example is the observation that expat doesn't do nearly enough damage for being primarily a damage dealer. However, if you throw some damage buff and hair trigger on her, she ends up being a monster damage dealer (granted targets are being played via the villain or environment decks). That's just something to consider with her before playing, and I think her design is much more hinged on the team combination, rather than being self sufficient like other heroes, let's say Haka. The issue with haka is that he primarily pushes for one big attack per turn, via savage man or haka of battle. While he does a great job dishing it out on his own, because he often uses only one attack per turn, he doesn't benefit as much from a damage buff like expat would, simply because she would do multiple instances of damage per round (In a perfect world). Given the right circumstances, I think both would be dishing out as much damage as each other per game. And that's ONLY talking about the damage aspect of the game, which is not the worth of all heroes. So then what it really comes down to is your play style preference. And I believe that that's the balance of the game. If it all gives on just one hero every game, I don't think it'd be as fun.