Revised Villain Difficulty Rankings

I have long thought the flat 1-4 scale for villain difficulty really didn't seem accurate, so I though I'd try to create a better one.  For now I'll keep it to rankings between 1 and 5, though I think there's a certain logic to saying that there's enough ambiguity in the categories to deserve a 10-point scale, so that Akash'bhuta would show as being more difficult than original Spite, even though the difference is too fractional to reflect in a smaller range.  Since this is all experimental, I welcome feedback based on personal experience (NOT based on parroting the results of the statistics thread, as I don't think the methodology there is rigid enough to produce truly definite answers of what's actually objectively true, rather than what reflects the experiences of the limited pool of people who are contributing to it); if you think Ambuscade deserves to be a Difficulty 2, please tell us why, with as much detail as possible of how he's stomped you in the past.

Without further ado, here are my rankings for all current villains.

* Akash'bhuta:  Normal 2, advanced 3.  She's not very aggressive, but those 200 HP can take a long time to slog through, and a few Primeval Eruptions at once can leave you buried neck-deep in more Limbs than you can possibly kill.  (If I get to the point of having these ratings adjust by H level, I'll need to reflect the fact that she's particularly awful for small parties; if you're down to one surviving hero, an Entangling Brambles is an instant game over for anyone other than Fanatic or the Argent Adept, as far as I can tell).

* Ambuscade:  Normal 1, advanced 2.  I just don't see how Ambuscade (in his current form, not the character as a whole - I'm among those who hopes to see him as a Vengeance-style mini-villain who does pretty much exactly what he's always done when solo) can ever pose more than a trivial threat.  Even his Advanced mode only manages to make him a nuisance rather than an actual danger; I've never lost to him and have only had a couple heroes so much as incapped, even when I behaved flat-out suicidally during the fight.  Those 50 HP just don't suffice to keep him alive for any longer than he can Vanish, not when he can't destroy hero cards and only sporadically deals damage.

* Apostate:  Normal 2, advanced 2.  Apostate is a "high 2" in my opinion; he's very hit-or-miss, going down easily in some games and being almost invincible in others.  However, while he is sometimes more difficult than a 2 suggests, this has very little to do with whether he starts the game with a 3-HP "players skip their draw step" card in play; I don't think I've seen more than 2 heroes miss their draw before one managed to kill the Tome.  His Advanced text on the flipside might matter, but in my experience he's hardly ever on the flipside for any length of time, as the heroes usually get all the Relics killed before taking him down (or use the Sucker Punch loophole).  And I still think the text about the Tome raising Condemnation from the trash must be a misprint, because when is an 11-HP target with DR 1 going to be in the trash first, unless the Tome comes out later (which certainly isn't the case in an Advanced game)?

* Baron Blade:  Normal 1, advanced 2, promo 2, promo advanced 3.  Pretty much the standard baseline which defines the difficulty scale.  Normal Blade is capable of winning a game, but only occasionally; I have only a little experience with his promo, but it doesn't seem to add enough to increase his difficulty by more than one tick, since he's still working with tiny numbers of HP and often playing cards which do very little.

* The Chairman:  Normal 4, advanced 4.  While I consider the Chairman the single hardest villain to beat, my own record against him fails to bear this out, though I suspect at least one of my victories against him was the result of a rules error.  Thusly, I'm leaving him at 4 rather than making him the first villain with a base difficulty of 5, though I may change my mind on that.  While a game with advanced text is certainly capable of being deadlier than a normal one, Chairman already has such sharp teeth that really, making him quicker to flip seems as likely to help as to hurt, simply because it makes it possible to kill him faster, leaving only a souped-up Operative to deal with.  My theory is that if you lose the game because of Advanced text, you would probably have lost the normal game too, it would just have taken longer.

* Citizen Dawn:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  Pretty straightforward.

* The Dreamer:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  Probably should have a higher ranking than Dawn, especially with a high "H" number, but for now I'll stick with the written numbers.

* The Ennead:  Normal 3, advanced 5.  The advanced Ennead is just a ridiculous beating, so I'm currently opting to set them as one of two villains who jump more than one difficulty point when you Advance them.  The difference between possibly having no more than three gods to kill and as long as you need to do it (assuming you have Visionary burying the Rise to Powers and so forth), versus having at least 4 of them by the end of turn 1 and a maximum of six turns before they're all out AND getting +1 to all their tiny damage-instances AND healing 2 HP each per turn...it's just a quantum leap in difficulty, and I'm confident that I'm right to call the advanced Ennead one of the two most devastating battles in the game.

* Gloomweaver:  Normal 2, advanced 2, promo 3, promo advanced 4.  I am perhaps being excessively generous by not dropping him all the way down to 1; the occasions on which he can actually win a game will be exceedingly rare (and usually involve Cursed Acolyte).  But for the moment I'll give him the benefit of the doubt; somehow the writers of the rulebook thought he was a 3, and I'll pretend they were only slightly wrong.  I'm mostly guessing about the promo version, and entirely guessing about the advanced promo, which I've never played; Skinwalker definitely poses a threat, but with just 50 HP he tends to be a manageable one, and once he's the Rotting God, he actively helps you kill him, so it's possible he's not as dangerous here either as I've credited him with being.

* Grand Warlord Voss:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  I consider Voss a more "solvable" 3 than Dawn, since none of his Minions have more than 3 HP or any damage reduction.  He's still plenty dangerous, though, with Forced Deployment and the alternate Game Over perhaps making up for whatever he lacks compared to the Citizens, and so I'll leave them at the same rank for the moment.

* Iron Legacy:  Normal 4, advanced 5.  This is the only one of the existing 4s where I'm confident that Advanced status is a sufficiently hardcore upgrade to be worth reflecting in his difficulty level.  It might not matter if you never reduce damage, but the odds that you were going to survive in that case aren't great; damage mitigation is just about necessary to survive against this villain, so being largely unable to do it is pretty damn crippling, even if your hero didn't have any cards that would have done the job (and thus no cards which are dead against advanced IL).

* Kismet:  Normal 2, advanced 4.  Kismet spends a lot of time doing not much (playing largely irrelevant Jinxes or the like), but also has bursts of extreme violence, especially on her advanced side where she can get as much as +3 to damage in a 5-hero game.  This variability makes a 2-point split in her ranking seem appropriate to me, but I could be talked out of it more easily than for the Ennead.

* La Capitan:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  You are unlikely ever to convince me that LC's incredibly aggressive opening does not justify a 3 difficulty rating, even if it's possible to geld her quite thoroughly by getting the Ship sunk and the Crew locked down.  I insist that her printed 2 is a typo, possibly inverted with Kismet since she's sometimes listed as a 3.

* The Matriarch:  Normal 4, advanced 4.  She's definitely extremely mean, but fractionally easier to handle than Iron Legacy or the Chairman (as long as you don't take +1 math damage), and the added difficulty posed by her Cohorts being indestructible doesn't apply if her Cohorts never actually show up, which is relatively unlikely given how quickly she tends to play her deck out, but it's still possible.  Thusly, while Advanced does make her more dangerous most of the time, I'm inclined to think it doesn't make a full point of difference, though again I could be convinced to reconsider.

* Miss Information:  Normal 3, advanced 4.  While she's extremely frustrating, she's not superlatively difficult, at least not in regular mode where she has only 45 HP.  Advanced mode gets extremely hard if you can't deal irreducible damage, but I'm inclined to think it doesn't quite deserve a 5 ranking.

* Omnitron:  Normal 1, advanced 2, promo 2, promo advanced 3.  I know some people have suggested that Omnitron is harder than the Baron by a substantial margin, I really don't see it from my own experiences; he occasionally manages to beat the heroes, but usually he's just a big target who occasionally distracts you with smaller targets, and only sporadically actually damages anything.  I have only a single game against the promo version under my belt, so I'm purely speculating about the difficulty there.

* Plague Rat:  Normal 2, advanced 2.  I'm not increasing his difficulty in the Advanced game because, while he gets a bonus to damage, so do the Infected heroes, and thus it becomes actively easier to kill him.  It's still not precisely an easy game, but it's quick and brutal and largely luck-dependant, which I figure well-fits the definition of a 2.

* Spite:  Normal 2, advanced 2, promo 3, promo advanced 4.  Spite is not a hard fight so much as a tedious and frustrating one, and Advanced text just says "don't even bother trying to beat me until I flip", after which it no longer has much effect.  Either way, he's not especially difficult, what with being a single-target villain whose plays are often blanks, and who eventually turns into a predictable robot.  The promo of course doesn't have that problem, and is definitely vicious; he should perhaps even be a 4 in his non-advanced mode, and/or a 5 in the advanced one, but that's just a guess since I haven't faced that version at all.

* Vengeance:  Here the calculation becomes extremely variable; I'd say they're unquestionably never less than a 3 in total, and that bumps up to 4 if the Baron or Fright Train is in, and bumps up another one for advanced, but that might only be true if you have both Blade and Friction (the two who have cards affecting the entire villain party, as well as having a mean combo on Advanced mode).  According to the Vengeance rulebook, Ermine + Friction + Proletariat should only be a 2, but I'm not sure I buy that, having played that combo once and not found it significantly less hard than Vengeance in general.

That looks pretty good, though Cosmic Omnitron is much more difficult than the base version.  I would say normal 3, advanced 4 (and I think the stats bear this out).  

I think Ambuscade is lower than a 1.  He should be a Villain you only fight with 2 heroes.

Ehn, if the players are rank newbies with no idea what they're doing, he'll at least manage to look dangerous.  He's not as good an intro villain as original BB, but I'd say he's on the same playing field.

While I might otherwise agree, the experience of seeing a group of newbies flail and lose against Ambuscade at a convention as everything went against them gives me pause.

 

EDIT – Hmm … I think I'm mostly agreeing with you here, and am just making the point that my intellect is warring with my intuition. Although he looks more dangerous than he is, for one particular game I saw, he destroyed the heroes, so I'm warry of him.

I've had Omnitron completely destroy me in one game too (the other I lost because I was screwing around).  Being able to do really well one time out of 8 seems like a good place to say that a villain is objectively weak.

I prefer to look at the deck chances rathe than experience.

Omnitron plays 3 cards every 2 rounds, and brings out a destroyed card on the single card play round.

He has quite a few big hit cards, 2 flechettes, 2 singularity, 2 EPE and 2 Terraforming, which are all serious threat cards.

Ambuscade is a nuisance, but he doesn't have any 1 card that scares you, his scary side is running of a string of cards due to Run and Gun, Armed and Dangerous and Quick Stim-Patch  But those cards are only 6 cards of his deck.

With 50 health you often only face one or two turns that involve one of those cards, but if they come out in a chain he's suddenly not so easy.

The odds aren't good for that though.

Ambuscade is a great example of a deck built on cool mechanics, but not built very well.  (I mean if you were building it to be hard, not that GtG did a bad job)  It doesn't have enough card play to be a spamming, burn your cards deck, and it doesn't have big enough cards to make up for it.  The flip mechanic and Reactive Plating are great stall cards, but they don't do enough to let Ambuscade whittle down your health.  It's sad because he has a lot of really cool cards but he's pretty much a newb deck.

 

He's pretty easy to house rule though, so I don't really mind.

I mostly agree, except against the Ennead. I’d put them on 2 normal and 3 advanced. No way they’re a 5. They’re really not THAT hard, and if you take them out strategically (Nuit first, then Set, then Atum, then Tefnut, Geb, Shu, and Osiris, and then Isis and Nephthys.) They are actually quite manageable.

Completely agree! My warriness is psychological, not logical.

I've had Ambuscade win in 2 rounds on more than 1 occasion. I fear Ambuscade...

As the guy who wrote a guide for the advanced Ennead, I do agree that vanilla Ennead is probably a 2. Borderline 1, really.

But how can they not be a 5 on advanced? Their damage output is insane if you're even a little bit lacking in defense, they're not vulnerable to tricks like deck manipulation or ongoing destruction, and they regenerate.

Also, I've got to ask about that order. Set first after Nuit? Huh. In my experience, that tends to be an invitation to get Elemental Stormed to death. The extra hero card plays can be useful, but without the ability to control what you get or re-roll Limited cards, it's going to be more beneficial for the villains than the heroes most of the time.

On-topic, I wouldn't call Advanced Kismet a 4. She's pretty easy to control thanks to her flipping mechanics. If you've got a lot of jinxes, take the amulet. If you have a lot of Ongoing destruction, let her keep it. Now, Advanced Kismet who manages to draw Lady Luck on her first turn? That's a 4. And yes, this has happened to me multiple times.

My experience tells me that they're harder than both Iron Legacy and The Chairman; I've lost 5 out of the 8 games I've played against them.  When the entire team is around, they have a combined HP total comparable to Akash'bhuta, without the Limbs self-damaging part.  They heal themselves constantly, and they deal absurd amounts of damage in small increments which aren't easily deflected.  I do all the things that are obvious for dealing with them, like mass-damaging and damage reduction, and they still mop the floor with me.  I'm seldom able to get more than one of them killed.

and if you take them out strategically (Nuit first, then Set, then Atum, then Tefnut, Geb, Shu, and Osiris, and then Isis and Nephthys.) They are actually quite manageable.

I generally avoid taking out Set early, since it switches him from "sometimes play an extra villain card" to "always play an extra villain card"; the extra hero cards are unlikely to be worth the trade-off, unless Unity or someone is in the game.  And I usually kill Tefnut last so as not to have to discard every turn.  Osiris I kill way earlier than this because he's incredibly annoying alive, and not terribly problematic dead IIRC.  Otherwise I pretty much agree with this sequence.

2 Normal: Agree

3 Advanced? No way. They are one of the hardest fights on Advanced mode currently in game. They are a solid 4.

Unsafe_Bet,

Nice job on this. Looks like you spent a lot of time on it. I have a couple of edits:

Gloomweaver: The purpose of your difficulty ratings is not to parrot what the rulebook difficulty is. It's to correct those ratings. Just because the designers thought Gloomweaver was a 3 doesn't mean you should if it's wrong. Gloomweaver is clearly a 1. I have only seen him flip one time and that was becuase I specifically allowed him to flip just to see what he did. Then, I beat him anyway. Your rankings are correct for Skinwalker. I strongly encourage you to try him out. The fact he "only" has 50 is misleading since he goes up to 100 when he flips. True he does hurt himself, but he'll only deal himself about 30HP before the heroes are dead anyway. That means to win the heroes have to deal around 120 damage to him over the course of the game (as opposed to 90 or 75 on the original Gloomy).

 

Grand Warlord Voss: You said, "since none of his Minions have more than 3 HP or any damage reduction." But he does have damage reduction. A lot of it. His guards and his Lietenant. And his advanced mode. I'd argue that he has much more damage reduction than Dawn.

 

Matriarch: Advanced Matriarch is clearly a 5. The cohorts being indestructible completely changes the game. You mentioned that doesn't matter if they don't show up, but it's impossible for them to not show up. The cohorts together destroy 2 hero cards a turn and give the Matriarch a +2 attack and +2 defense. Saying that both advanced and normal are a 4 means that you can just fight her like normal and that is not true at all.

 

Omnitron: Normal Omnitron is a 2. Advanced is probably a 2 or 3. Cosmic Omnitron is a 3 with advanced on 4.

 

Plague Rat: You said that he's a 2 because it's quick, brutal, and luck dependent. However, the difficulty rating is not about how fast the game is. It's how likely the heroes are to win. And the Rat wins a lot. True, it is fast and luck driven, but he's a 3. You yourself said it was not easy. A 2 (out of 5) is still in the easy range.

 

Everything else you have is right on. That means I have a lot more head nodding going on that disagreement. It doesn't sound like that since all I have here is the criticism. Sorry about that.

I disagree. I have almost never lost against them, and almost never won against the chairman. The thing with Set is that on his first side, he often gets an extra card play and sometimes deals damage. With Atum, he WILL play an extra card, because Atum will force it. On his flip side, he does play an extra, but a.) doesn't deal damage and b.) lets heroes play cards too. That, alongside turning red cards into dead ones (Set and Nuit are the only ones who trigger from red, besides Shu) means that his being dead is often more helpful than not.

 

Part of it is also about team planning, true; certain heroes are less helpful against them, but as long as you stay away from Unity, you should be ok.

Focusing fire on one at a time also limits the effectiveness of their healing. If all but 1 of them are at full health, then what issue is it if they all regain 1? That is easily overcome. Their damage is often small, so with even a little DR they can be made easier, if not neutralized. Not a lot; just a little.

After you take care of Nuit, Set, and Atum, focus on either all the Green triggers or the Black triggers. That way you can eliminate the effectiveness of one of the triggers, so only 1/3 of the cards in the deck will cause chain reactions.

 

It's a bit of a puzzle, but once you solve it, it's easily beaten.

Everyone hates Unity and the Ennead, I like her a lot.

First on the front Stealth Bot eats 80% of their damage, and a -1 damage taken effect on him covers 80% of their flip side.

Then Cryo Bot is just fantastic vs. the Ennead, and Platform Bots live through the front side pretty well.

Stealth, Champion, Cryo Bot is insane.  Unity with those three can almost take them single handedly.

Hasty Augmentation and powers like Squall, Defensive Blast or Thermal Shockwave is also really awesome against the Ennead.

Holy crap, Hasty Augmentation on a Defensive Blast, I never thought of that.  Definitely will be trying that against one of the tougher minion-based villains one of these days.

Chair is certainly not easy, but I got spanked by him early and have taken him with extreme seriousness ever since, while I keep underestimating the Ennead and thinking that they'll surely be less diastrous this time, which consistently doubleplus unhappens.  With Chair, I don't think I've used fewer than four heroes since my first game, and I pay a lot of attention to the critical issues - managing the Underbosses, focusing fire on the Operative, and so forth.  It's always a narrow victory with several casualties, and I think at least twice it involved rules errors in my favor, but I have taken him three times, and I think twice it was on advanced, which is why I say that match is almost easier than the regular one.  ("Almost"; Operative does have that frightful +1 damage to keep it from being entirely advantageous getting to flip the Chairman sooner, and of course once flipped the Chairman needs to die in a hurry or you'll be quite thoroughly screwed.  At which point the issue of shuffling him becomes relevant, but that's more a nuisance than anything.)

Focusing fire on one at a time also limits the effectiveness of their healing. If all but 1 of them are at full health, then what issue is it if they all regain 1?

Aside from the fact that I'm often using global damage, "focusing fire" only does so much when you're not able to throw all that much of it.  The one time I can recall having Ra out, the nemesis rule killed him in like five seconds with all the 1-damage hits the Ennead throw around.  Tempest ought to be effective, I don't recall whether I've tried using him, but in general I don't recall too many occasions when I was seeing more than 5 or 10 damage outgoing per round.  That's not enough to even kill the Ennies faster than they can come out, even if they didn't heal like crazy.

After you take care of Nuit, Set, and Atum, focus on either all the Green triggers or the Black triggers. That way you can eliminate the effectiveness of one of the triggers, so only 1/3 of the cards in the deck will cause chain reactions.

This part does sound like good enough advice.  But I still think enough things have to go right, and can go wrong, that this remains at least a 4 difficulty.  My use of an almost unique 5 rating is perhaps hyperbole, but I stand by it for now.

Mm, I've had at least one game where he managed to put some serious hurt on the players, though I forget exactly how.  I think with his Relics being as tough as they are, and the Pins being a serious issue at least in low-H games (particularly the Indigo one), he feels like an extremely low 2 rather than being among the ranks of the 1s.  If nothing else, being a 1 suggests beginner-game status, and Gloomy is complicated even if he isn't difficult, so I think it's better to exagerrate slightly for the sake of encouraging people not to start by going up against him.

I have only seen him flip one time and that was becuase I specifically allowed him to flip just to see what he did.

True, he basically never flips.  But he does occasionally win, courtesy of the high damage his cult can occasionally dish out, even if they're not remotely consistent about it.

Your rankings are correct for Skinwalker. I strongly encourage you to try him out.

I've played him three times, just never on Advanced.  Sorry if that was unclear.

[quote[True he does hurt himself, but he'll only deal himself about 30HP before the heroes are dead anyway. [/quote]

I don't recall the heroes being remotely in danger against him; he damages himself twice each turn, and the heroes only once.

Grand Warlord Voss: You said, "since none of his Minions have more than 3 HP or any damage reduction." But he does have damage reduction. A lot of it. His guards and his Lietenant. And his advanced mode. I'd argue that he has much more damage reduction than Dawn.

I stand corrected on him not having any, and maybe in Advanced he does indeed have more.  But Dawn has Citizen Truth; that counts for a lot.  Especially when he Returns With the Dawn.  And brings Anvil with him.

Matriarch: Advanced Matriarch is clearly a 5. The cohorts being indestructible completely changes the game.  You mentioned that doesn't matter if they don't show up, but it's impossible for them to not show up.

That is certainly not true.  Say she starts the game with 2x Darken the Sky, and the heroes take out the Mask in one turn.  Then she puts out Carrion Fields.  Turn 3 she does another Darken the Sky; by then the heroes might be well-enough set up that they can not only destroy the Mask again before her turn returns, but do enough damage to her that by the time a Cohort does appear, they can just finish her off.  With two Horrid Cacophonies on top of the cards already named, the Cohorts are just 2 out of 9 non-Fowl cards; if you're able to consistently keep her Maskless, you can potentially have six turns before both Cohorts appear, and that's plenty of time to ventilate a squishy 70-HP girl with no defenses whatsoever.  I've had games where she was extremely dangerous, but I've also had games where I just rolled over her, and if I ever really want to make her lose, I'll just play Legacy and that's practically Game Over before it even starts.

The cohorts together destroy 2 hero cards a turn and give the Matriarch a +2 attack and +2 defense. Saying that both advanced and normal are a 4 means that you can just fight her like normal and that is not true at all.

It's not that there's no difference; it's that the difference is potentially minimal, and even at worst not really enough to uptick the difficulty a full point.  Matty is too solvable to deserve a 5 even on Advanced; she can be dangerous at her best, true, but Chairman and IL are dangerous at their worst, and Matty at her worst is almost completely harmless.

Omnitron: Normal Omnitron is a 2.

No way.  He sits there doing nothing half the time.  That 100 HP doesn't last long if he doesn't pull a TechSing or Flechettes to wipe you out or a That Bomb to draw some of your fire.  Even a little deck control neuters him entirely.  His strategy relies on the long game, and he has only a few cards that can ensure a long game ever happens.  Most of the time, he just puts out Components that explode before his turn rolls around and he can fire them, or he drops Drones that deal a couple damage and can be safely ignored until someone has a global-damage card they were going to play anyway.  He needs strongly above-average luck to be capable of winning, except in Environments where he might get a Bomb into play just before his turn.  One of those Environments is Rook City, which pretty much always adds 1 to the difficulty number of any fight taking place there; the other is Atlantis, and while I can see that Atlantis games may sometimes be dangerous, personally I've almost always found it to be on my side in the fight.  When I fought OT there, the threatened insta-Bomb never happened, and I cleaned his clock just like usual.  As I've said, he's only scored one victory against me which wasn't largely due to my own carelessness.

Plague Rat: You said that he's a 2 because it's quick, brutal, and luck dependent. However, the difficulty rating is not about how fast the game is. It's how likely the heroes are to win. And the Rat wins a lot. True, it is fast and luck driven, but he's a 3. You yourself said it was not easy.

I wouldn't call it hard either.  He deals a lot of damage, but that's his only trick, and it's potentially quite manageable.  With virtually no secondary targets and no destruction, he's just not incredibly dangerous; I think he's won twice, and at least once it was against 3 heroes (he's definitely on the list, along with the Chairman, of games where higher H is pretty much strictly better).  Iron Legacy dishes out about the same amount of damage as Rat, but is much harder to damage himself, and doesn't actually help you damage him, and destroys your stuff.  It probably also helps that Rat's damage is irreducible and I seldom bother using heavy DR.  I'll try him against the Sentinels sometime and see how miserable that gets.

It doesn't sound like that since all I have here is the criticism. Sorry about that.

Completely understood.  The greatest reward of the genius lecturer is the silence of the audience's total comprehension; it doesn't bother me in the slightest to hear only complaints, since they're all that needs to be heard.  Praise, I can simply assume myself to be worthy of.  :slight_smile:

I've found Tempest to be pretty effective against the Ennead if you can get his Shackles out and then keep all Ennead members within a couple of hp of each other - that way Squall alone should do three points of damage to each of them. I've not played them on Advanced but at least in Normal mode they don't last long when they're getting so utterly pounded (considering Squall is usually far from the only thing hitting them) :D. Okay so unless Tempest can start using Grievous Hailstorm instead he's not gonna hit Shu (if he comes out)...but that just gives everyone else something to focus on instead ;).

and threads like this is why we started the statistics project… :slight_smile: