After having played SotM for a few months now, and becoming a big fan, I've come to a conclusion:
I really, really hate Spite.
Note, I don't mean in the sense of finding him hard, or disliking his fluff. Rather, playing against him is just aggressively unfun. The first half of the game is almost always a waiting game for him to flip, given how much he regenerates. The second half is boring, because there's no variation: he always has the same drugs, and always does the same things, with no card play at all. What's more, the "suffer damage every time you use a power" is just masochistic. In almost every way, Spite feels like an experiment in how to design a villain that, ahem, spites the players for wanting to play the game.
Does anyone else have any villains they really, really hate playing against, for whatever reason?
Spite. Miss Information is a close second. I will agree with the consesus that the promo Spite at least fixes the monotony issues, if not the drugs having un-fun mechanics.
I dont *hate* IL, but there are times I am annoyed at having taken the time to shuffle and setup a game that ends in 2 rounds
Ambuscade. The constant shuffling means you don't actually go anywhere. With all other characters, as cards are played, you know more about what will come (for good or bad). The constant shuffling of Ambuscade means that there is always a chance that any card will show up. It makes the beginning, middle, and end all feel the same.
Spite, Matriarch, Chairman, Miss Information. With the first three it just feels very samey. Their cards come out and if you can break them then you’ll get hurt and they’ll probably just come back out again anyway regardless of (H) scaling or chance. Miss Information feels like she gets a head start while the heroes patiently wait for their cue to figure out that the reason they’re burning to death while standing stupidly in a burning building that their secretary lit the building on fire. It doesn’t feel terribly heroic, and I feel like it’s an old episode of The Superfriends. Corny and poorly paced.
Voss. >.< I play most games on advanced, and it sucks randomly losing to an ill timed Forced Redeployment. Outside of that..... uh... Chairman, probably, for a similar reason ala Jail Break.
Spite and Miss Information are mine. Just waiting for them to flip becomes such a drag, even more so with Miss Information, since with Spite you can pretend to be doing something. GloomWeaver as well, but only because I have only lost to him once and that was because Tomb of Anubis was just rough that game.
I think the most groan-worthy villains we ever turn up are Kismet and La Capitan, just because of the amount of times they tend to beat us. The Chairman too, actually, though he doesn't seem to come up very often. At least if Iron Legacy's gonna beat us he'll do it in a couple of rounds, rather than dragging out over many and with loads of horrible minions and stuff :P.
Miss Information and Iron Legacy. The former keeps you from doing anything fun and the latter is either a face-stomping or villain-crushing depending on your luck, neither of which is particularly interesting to my group.
I can handle most game results, what I can't handle is knowing that a game is going to take a long time, and unless I really screw up or get insanely unlucky there will be nothing interesting happenning in the game.
Spite and Miss Information. I don't see this having anything to do with difficulty; they both force you to spend a fair amount of time waiting. If you're lucky, you have some deck manipulation and you can use this to draw them out a little faster, but generally you just have to wait.
I also get annoyed by Spite's drugs. On PL626, I can see taking damage for using powers, but the discarding gets old very fast. Then, in this single-target game, Mynd-Phyre takes out most environment effects, which could help to add some variability.
I like both of them conceptually; I just don't find the fights very engaging.
Spite is unfun, though I like the variant fine. I rarely have fun with Plague Rat, but then I tend to pack at least 2 heroes with ongoing hate. Gloomweaver can be tedius. I really like Aposttate and Akash, as they come out guns blazing, meaning my newer friends feel like we’re going to lose, as we plan.
I've never found spite boring or unfun (but I also play a lot less than most forumites) I do find that he is one of the few villians I never play correctly though. I'm constantly realizing I've been ignoring his healing or card play for half the match, which invalidates everything.
Currently I hate Cosmic Omnitron, digital game allowed me to play him for the first time with H=5 (random draw). Both games started with Railgun, disintegration, interpolation follwed by sedative fletchettes with an EMP within the first 2 rounds. Hard to get ahead of all that damage. I've yet to try round three but this time I'll pick my team.
Ms. Information is easily number 1 for me. Because of her destruction effects, you can't do any set up with anybody. You can't actually do anything till she flips. She's challenging in a way that's boring.
Strange to see so many people disliking Miss Information - I don't mind her. We don't usually have too much trouble against her. Maybe because we only play with three heroes so it's easier?
Ive just played a game against Miss Info on Challenge mode, she flipped on the first turn. Im finding a lot of the Challege modes are "fixing" some of the issues I had with certain villains. *cough* Ambuscade *cough* Gloomweaver
I'm going to jump on the Miss Information and Spite bandwagon too.
I actually don't mind Miss Information very occasionally, but I certainly don't complain that we veto her in G+ games. Her games just feel very samey to me - sit around having her wreck your stuff being unable to do much until she finally flips (and that can take ages since it's entirely based on where the Clue cards are sitting in the deck) which is dull, and then actually being able to play the game afterwards.
And Spite. He's another one where you sit around not doing much until the right cards come out for him to flip, and then you can start actually playing. And when he does flip it's essentially the exact same game every time because he has the same five drugs, and he removes any variation you might have got from the environment. Boring. I'm with Matchstickman, a couple more drug cards so you need 5/7 would help a lot.
I don't mind Miss Information, but I prefer to have some deck manipulation when playing against her so that I can feel like I have some form of player agency rather than simply weathering the storm until the flip then hammering down as hard as possible.
Spite is annoying, but not to the point I'll pass on a game against him. The Matriarch is the only one that I actively avoid playing against as it's just a hassle to deal with all the upkeep.