I like to organize my heroes and villains by their difficulty rating, makes it easier to explain to new players (who I play with more often than not) who is easier to beat or understand.
It worked great until I got the Scholar and Miss Information. They didn't come with any sort of rating like the other cards. I have them both at about 2 (I haven't played either of them yet), can anyone confirm this or give me a better estimate?
Also, any chance we have a rating for environments, or are the circumstances just too varied for that to do any good?
The Scholar is a 2; Christopher confirmed that, though he added that mastering him was a 3 or even a 4. As for Miss Information, I believe the forum concensus is that she's a tough 3, but with no official ruling so far.
The Scholar is neat because of how, unlike some heroes, he is effective at just about every stage of complexity. You could play him as a complexity-1 character and just have him sit with the most HP, 2-4 damage reduction, and soak abuse for the party while self-healing. He can do that better and quicker than any other hero, the concept is simple as dirt to understand and implement, and the benefits to the team are obvious (if sometimes under-appreciated). On the complexity-3 side, he can turn into damage slingshot like Absolute Zero where he gets a couple of Water Forms and Energy Forms out and then turns healing into multiple beams of energy damage. Just as Absolute Zero can lay waste when paired with Ra or Visionary, The Scholar working with Omnitron-X, Argent Adept, or Legacy can clear the board.
Yeah, I keep looking at his cards thinking, "wow, he doesn't do much" then I realize he can draw attacks, resist them, heal, sling damage, and I think, wow, played properly this guy is a beast isn't he.
Tangent: Any idea why his one card is "reduce all damage to 0" instead of "he is immune to damage"?
Yeah, my first game with the Scholar had me knowing when to let loose with 15 cards in my hand to kill off.... Kismet? I have a tendency to cackle in glee whenever I pull off something like that. I realize it's not the biggest point upset in the world, but for someone whose base power is healing himself, taking the kill shot is pretty sweet.
The stats spreadsheet I think has enough samples of the environments (of course not the new ones) to draw reliable conclusions from (the least played is Rook City with 98 data points). Going off that, their difficulty is, from easiest to hardest:
Realm of Discord, Megalopolis, Insula Primalis, Pike Industrial Complex, Tomb of Anubis, Wagner Mars Base, Ruins of Atlantis, and Rook City.
We always start new players on Megalopolis or Insula Primalis, as Realm of Discord can get weird for a first timer. We had a friend get cocky and say he wanted his first game as hard as possible, and we were so tempted to do Matriarch Advanced in Rook City, but we went easy on him. I forget which villain we had, but our buddy got the killing blow as Absolute Zero when the volcano went off and the villain and Tachyon (I think) redirected their damage to AZ and AZ, in turn, redirected all 3 volcano hits back onto the villain. (Technically the villain only had 3 HP, so only one actually hit, but it's WAY more fun to imagine AZ completely obliterating the villain in a shower of frozen lava and then walking away, saying, "Have an ice day!" We're terrible, terrible nerds.)
Us too. We brought Apostate and Condemnation down to exactly 1 HP, then Fanatic skipped her turn to draw 2 cards, and let the Escaped Lab Rats chew through Condemnation then Apostate.
I always find it funny to read these defeats of Apostate. He always just seems like such a serious character, and here he is, defeated by little rats, of all things.
You gave up a killing blow on a nemesis? I love nothing more then having fanatic stab absolution right into the heart of apostate for the killing blow.
I LOVE the nemesis mechanic, and theirs is my favorite. Omnitron's is a close second
I played a game last night (Legacy, Absolute Zero, and Tachyon vs. Omnitron), and my police backup were the ones who took Omnitron down. The guy who took the shot must have been really happy, but it has to be kind of frustrating to be a superhero, and have the villain taken out by some normal guy with a pistol.
