In case anyone's interested, I've been attempting to get a Flawless Victory against each solo villain. I've been posting the results to Facebook as photos, so I think you can see them here: https://www.facebook.com/arenson9/photos_all
I started with Baron Blade just as a bit of a lark, and then just kept going. I've got four left. So far I've been able to get the flawless victory on my first try for each.
Neat. I’m curious as to why the change in version of Tempest in some cases with F6 Tempest against Kismet.
How do you define Flawless Victory?
From what I’m seeing every hero at full health at game end.
Presumably having them end at full HP.
I'm awed that you beat Dreamer with 5 heroes, let alone having the heroes end up with full HP at the end.
Good luck with Miss Information, with her counter-attacks and generally terrible deck.
He already did Miss Info based on his posts.
Oh geez.
She’s the only thing keeping me from completing the Ultimate challenge.
Flawless: Full HP at end of game.
Vairations of Tempest: For some villains, spread damage is bad (Dreamer, Kismet). For Miss Information, in particular, I liked the idea of neutering the high-HP Diversions. Since getting Cleansing Downpour in play is usually the limiting step in healing to full, F6 Tempest is often a great option. I didn't realize that, though, until I'd played many of the games.
Did it once, got the achievement, I figure that's good enough for me. @_@ I applaud you.
I admittedly have a fairly weak understanding of many of the heroes that were published later. Parse, in particular, seems to be a favorite of well-versed players, but I've never quite understood why people find her so effective. Even so, I'm struck by the fact that virtually every hero I've used during this exercise is out of the core box, though generally using a variant.
When we just had the core box, I recall discussion of how Wraith was OP, and maybe Tempest was, too. That doesn't get brought up as much these days, but I still see it, particularly with Wraith. I focus so much on card draw (F6 Tachyon), tanking (Scholar), and healing (Tempest, Scholar, Legacy), that there isn't much room on the team for everyone else, so Wraith loses out, occassionaly to Visionary when I want immediate deck control or reliable ongoing destruction, but I am impressed by just how many cards I can get out for using Impromptu Invention. These are admittedly long games, but even so I regularly get out virtually all of her equipment, including all three Mega Computers. With her Utility Belt allowing multiple attacks she does a great job of picking off minions and dinosaurs so they don't become a threat. More often than not, towards the end of the game I run out of things for her to do (though this is true of other heroes, too), and she'll end up with virtually her whole deck in hand or in play.
Wraith is definitely potent, although she requires a little bit more setup than some others. I find the big trick with her is just choosing which of her strategies I should be using (deck control, damage, damage mitigation, or some hybrid thereof). Tempest is of course essential for consistent Flawless Victory, as Cleansing Downpour can't be beat (although combining it with Greatest Legacy, Inspiring Supertonic, and/or Dynamic Syphon is just nuts).
I love Parse, although Fugue State Parse is by far the better version. If you're used to Wraith, you can treat Parse's main function like Infrared Eyepiece on steroids: Extrasensory Awareness is effective even on villains that play two cards a round, Buffer Overflow can block even cards that get through that, and Updated Intel is another free piece of control on top of those. Or you can play her like a complicated vanilla Legacy, with Exploit Vulnerability, Critical Multiplier, and Targeting Arrow. Plus she has Segmentation Fault, which is Ongoing/Environment destruction as a power, extremely potent. The tricky thing about her is balancing card draw with discards, since she needs to do a lot of both to function.
Oh, REALLY. That's pretty exciting, as it was the one thing I couldn't figure out how to do.
Wow, looking at those Parse cards is very convincing. She probably is the best person to take that deck control slot.
A bit off topic, but it confounds me why Tachyon and Wraith score as low as they do in the various stats projects. I think they are both amazingly strong heroes, but perhaps they take more experience than someone like Tempest to know how to play them to their full potential.
I think Parse scores lower than she should because people focus too much on damage (a la Critical Multiplier). It is a fine way to play her and some games the optimal way, but her best stuff for most games is her deck control.
Likely because it’s the first heroes people play when they aren’t familiar with the game and more losses occur. As to Parse she has no defenses which means if she doesn’t get the right cards for deck control she can be in trouble.
Tachyon's explanation is simple: base Tachyon isn't very good compared to any of her promos. More experienced players who have any of the promos available to them will use one of those the vast majority of the time. Looks like the few people with physical copies of Freedom Five Tachyon haven't totally figured her out yet, though.
Wraith is an interesting case, and I'm not totally sure about her. I'm thinking that she probably wins less often because 1) she's in the core game, which means a greater number of inexperienced players using her, 2) her high-damage setups are extremely gratifying but frequently not the best way to win, so they're often a trap, and 3) she does require a bit of setup, and setup time is very strongly correlated with a lower win rate. Freedom Five Wraith helps explain that first point: her earlier two promos aren't very good, so they don't do any better than base Wraith, but Freedom Five Wraith--unlocked very recently in the video game and available only in foil form in the physical game--is dramatically more successful.
Parse is amazing at everything but defense. She can give out of turn powers, out of turn card plays, damage boosts, damage by herself, make all hero damage irreducible, destroy ongoings, destroy environment cards, and AMAZING deck control. Buffer Overflow is THE best defense against "that card". Her main weakness is she can't protect or heal herself from direct damage, and her incap powers are pretty terrible.
Used Fugue State Parse in my deck control position against Kaargra Warfang and it worked quite well. Now that I've come to know the awesomeness of Reclaim from the Deep, Don't Dismiss Anything shenanigans, having even more options for card placements and out of turn card plays is very exciting, but I haven't really grokked what can be achieved with Parse.
I was really on a tough learning curve against Kaargra, as I struggle to keep a lot of information in my head at once, much less a lot of new information, and I didn't really know her titles or her gladiators. Throw new stuff from Parse in at the same time, keeping in mind how crowd favor is earned, and a very different win/lose condition, and I'm afraid that I was a bit of a wreck trying to get it all figured out quickly enough to not lose my perfect record of getting these flawless victories on the first try.
But really, it wasn't that hard in the end. Extrasensory Awareness came out too late to forestall Kaargra wading into the fight herself, too late to forestall five cards getting destroyed, and too late to keep the crowd's favor from turning from 14-4 to 9-9, but then it and Take Down worked beautifully the rest of the game. With Shielding Winds, two Flesh to Irons, Alchemical Redirection, card cycling shenanigans, and Hypersonic Assault, the only question left was whether I could keep enough of the card effects in mind to not accidentally win before I'd healed back to full, or misunderstand how some Title works, and do damage to a hero causing the game to end but the hero not to be at full. I'm quite sure that if I knew all the cards better I could have finished that game faster
How long are these games taking? I imagine you have to run through quite a few rounds to get enough hits of the Downpour…