5 games a week? What lightweights! 
My average per week this year is 8.8, and I've missed quite a few sessions recently. 
Wowzers, if yours is 8.8, I wonder how many games I average this year per week… Since I go to slightly more sessions than you do…
This part of the topic will probably be split, but I feel it's important to highlight how frequently a person or group can play games of Sentinels and the desire to "rank" heroes.
I personally think a lot of the ranking systems here are not universally applicable. A lot of it usually stems from the rankings' creator's personal preferences. It's not that their insight isn't useful, but it's not useful for players with different playstyles.
That being said I do understand the desire to figure out which heroes are going to be the most useful in any given situation based on a limited timeframe to play games. 8.8 games a week? That is awesome. I wish I had played 8.8 games in the past two months. I've been busy. My group has been busy. We've been exploring other games and playtesting a few new ones (while still finding Sentinels to be one of our absolute favorites, of course) in our limited amount of free time.
Being horrifically crushed by the villain the one time in a month that we can gather together the team and fight evil is an incredible way to bring the party down and feel really, really lame.
So yes. We do occasionally try to figure out the "best equipped" or "most efficient for the given situation" heroes in harder games sometimes because this may be the only game we're going to get in for a while. We can't just say "Oh well, we started the game two hours ago and started losing fifteen minutes in. We can just start another!"
This isn't an argument for a particular playstyle, a criticism of other players ability to play more games (which, again, I'm wicked jealous that you can get so many games in and I'd love to play that many myself), or a diatribe that ranking systems are totally boss and anyone who disagrees is a big, dumb, jerkface with smelly cards. It's my perspective on what the most noble intent of ranking characters and their abilities are.
I've yet to find a ranking system that I've found to be accurate, fair, or informative enough for my use and I don't really have any desire to create one. But I can see why people want to try to convey this information. Sometimes you just want to get your homework done, clock out at work, and team up with your buddies to put the smackdown on La Capitan without getting smeared across her Timeship for a couple of hours. When we have free time we try to kick it up a notch, but when we've finally had the planets align long enough to be heroes for an afternoon we just want to try to make the game a little less swingy.
I play probably 5 games a week, but 4 are solo, and I'm playtesting stuff. Then there is the non-card game playtesting, which probably brings that up to 10 games a week, 8 solo for the past month at least. I prefer playtesting to be solo at first, so I can control the variables, and rewind and replay things that need checked, or tweak the cards/board just to see what would happen, or change rules mid way through a game to see if it would work better.
Before playtesting I was in a lull, and mostly just playing the forum games.
I used to do multiple solitaire matches in a week, stopped doing so for a while, and now that there's Vengeance I've started again. But a typical week sees me playing probably 1-2 solos and 1-2 non-solo games per week, virtually never more than 3 games total, generally all on the same day.
I think for a new player just looking over a list of potential heroes to play I would want a simple matrix that had at most a few sentences and covered the hero's theme, complexity, and perhaps "role" and mechanics. The last two being hard to do properly since a lot of heroes cover multiple aspects based on the rest of the team and the situation.
Oh wait, I forgot I only track online games. I've played a few face-to-face games as well which would certainly push my average up over 9.
I dread to think what Ronway's average is, he's been in a lot of the same games as me but he does play more often than I do. I imagine Matchstickman would have a similar score.
In case anyone cares, I pick my hero completely randomly 52% of the time - someone randomises a set of heroes, I roll a die to see which one I'll play after anyone who wants to choose one has done so. 33% of the time I'll pick one of the randomised set. 12% of the time I'll select a non-randomised hero - I've done some games where I've tested out custom heroes or attempted to learn the Argent Adept. Apparently 3% of the time I forget to note down how I chose!
I took Sentinels along with some other games to my RPG club on Friday, since one group were missing the GM. They fought the Dreamer (on my suggestion) who, due to flopping two Dark Heroes, completely killed them - their first loss ever. They immediately repeated the game with the exact same setup, this time battling on at least half an hour after we were supposed to vacate the building before finally succumbing to the projections.
They absolutely loved it, and are excited to try for a third time. And they don't get to play much more than once every couple of months in between RPG slots. Different play styles I guess, because no-one even suggested trying different heroes despite the fact that the guy who had Nightmist said he felt very restricted since you don't want all non-hero targets to take damage, and Nightmist does that a lot.
I guess the point is, not everyone needs to win to enjoy the game (but it's absolutely cool if you'd prefer not to get slaughtered). My win rate since I started tracking games at the beginning of the year is 72%, which feels about the right level of difficulty for me.
I enjoy being slaughtered in ways that are unexpecting. Like when Plague Rat plays half his deck in a single turn, that's what I call painful, but not something you'd expect to happen often at all.
I completely agree. I'm fine with losing a few games. But when we get one to two games in the course of two months? It's a drag. And the issue is not so much experiencing an interesting loss (Like when you flip SkinWeaver) but more the games where you're waiting for that last Clue card from Miss Information, or an inability to manage Dawn's Ongoings. It's nice to have that extra insurance so that you get a fighting chance to play out a heroic victory rather than a heroic (or sometimes comical…) tragedy.
Apart from one day a month when I play with three or four other people (two of whom are PWatson and Matchstickman), generally it's just me and my partner playing, over the weekend (well, more like Sunday-Monday these days rather than Saturday-Sunday), in which we usually play anywhere between three and twelve (sometimes a little more - last weekend we managed to play in every environment and then had two more games after that, for a nice big sixteen) games. He plays two heroes, I play one - I prefer to just concentrate on a single deck. Plus I run the villain and environment decks as well. I don't play solo, though I do recall attempting a couple of solo games not long after I got Sentinels.
Another thing to take into consideration when setting up a game isn't just which heroes you're taking versus which villain (and in which environment), but how many heroes - it's generally accepted that the Dreamer and Miss Information are much easier when H=3, whereas someone like La Capitan is less of a hassle if H=5 because you have more people to dish out the damage and give up their stuff. Since I play most often with only three heroes, obviously I'm going to think of certain villains as less of a struggle than others.
There are so many factors to take into consideration when determining whether a game is easy or not - the number of heroes, the heroes themselves, their turn order, how well each player knows the hero(es) they're playing, the villain, the environment, and the order in which every deck plays its cards. As such I wouldn't ever try to rank heroes in any way because there's just too much stuff to take into consideration. Plus you could play the exact same setup (this villain in this environment, with these 3/4/5 heroes going in this order) several times in a row and I'm pretty sure that not only would no two games would last the same amount of time, but some would be wins while others were losses.
About the nearest I'd get to "ranking" heroes would be to say "he/she is good against this villain because…" or "this hero is pretty easy/difficult to get the hang of because…", but that's about it.
8.8 games per week! Jealous. Stupid @#$% job.
I've played 12 in the last three days, but this is far from normal...
My games are pretty evenly split between 3, 4 and 5 players online, with slightly fewer 3-players. Face-to-face it's almost always 5, because everyone wants to play. What can I say, it's a popular game.
Hopefully I'll do game #100 of this year tonight!
Could I put in a request that one of the games be from this week's Living Campaign installments? There's a tie that needs breaking....
I play at least three solo games a day and so far it's been getting together with friends for another 2-3 games a week on top of that I love this game that much!
I think I have played maybe 5 games this year... so sad...