Hardest Sentinels Villains

OblivAeon, Citizen Dawn (THAT CARD), Apostate (Relic Spirit + Runes of Malediction cycle is terrible), Matriarch (mostly just a headache), Kaargra (lots of unpredictability and swinginess)

OblivAeon is tops, because he can 1 shot any hero before you have a chance to go, and therefore the things that one might do in other MUs to compensate for the villains strengths aren't reliable here.  Ultimate Cosmic Omnitron has also killed several (non-Sentinel, full life) characters of mine before I've had a chance to go, so that's #2. 

Everyone else, I think it comes down to "can be built around" and difficulty is more MU dependent.  Villains that are harder for me to build around with the teams I like to play are generally those with mass ongoing/equipment removal and the ability to play multiple cards per turn. 

Without adding Advanced or Challenge Mode Rules I’d say the following(not in any particular order):

1.  OblivAeon - He can devastate teams quickly in any portion and if you aren’t careful things can spiral out of control quickly

2.  Dreamer - Often bigger teams have an easier time but not so here with the amount of AoE damage and card plays once flipped   

3.  Kaargra - She cheats :).  Typically I’ve lost because she flipped at an inopportune time and I can’t get her flipped back over in time.

4.  Cosmic Omnitron - The damage, setup destruction, and potential amount of card plays can end poorly for the heroes.  

5.  Miss Information (stand-alone) -  Another where having more heroes makes it more challenging.   As more heroes makes it harder in this case for her to flip.  By the time you do get her flipped you have little setup, low health, or both as she retaliates when you do attack her. 

6.  Plague Rat (team) - I’ve often found my harder matchups for Team villains includes Plague Rat.   He is hard to take down and hits all heroes most of the time while his damage to the villains is often reduced.  

My criteria is what villains are most likely to defeat the heroes the most often assuming regular difficulty and team size, all heroes, and the environment chosen at random. I'll exclude Vengeance and Oblivaeon formats.

1. Iron Legacy: While most heroes have tools in their deck to be effective against Iron Legacy, he hits so hard out of the gate that he can easily overwhelm even the strongest team if they're unlucky enough to start out with weak starting hands.

2. Kaagra Warfang: Kaagra can be very swingy since Fickle Fans and Get Back in There can really swing the game if played at an inopportune time. Deck control is helpful in dealing with this, but since Kaagra plays at least 2 cards a round it's not fully effective.

3. The Dreamer: Dreamer is the only villain to favor smaller hero teams. She's pretty punishing against heroes who utilizes multi-target damage or retaliation damage. Also environments that cause targets to deal themselves damage like MMFFCC are very dangerous with Dreamer in the game. 

4. The Chairman: For a 3 hero team Chairman is likely the hardest villain in the game. Deck control is very effective against him as it can postpone or avoid Jail Breaks. Cards like Stun Bolt and Regression Turret which can lower Chairman's and Operative's retaliation are effective as well. 

5. Cosmic Omnitron: Environment cards that can play villain cards out of turn have a very high chance of playing EPE since each Drone plays another card. Also Cosmetic Omnitron has non-limited ongoing and equipment destruction cards, deals a steady stream of damage, and can end up playing large numbers of cards in a single round.

I almost completely agree with Dandolo!

I will add that 5H Iron Legacy can be extremely brutal if he gets the wrong series of Ongoings out to start. Nothing like having your first turn with every hero under 10 hp! From there, if you didn't draw the correct combination of cards (Heroic Interception/Takedown, Hypersonic Assault, Throat Jab, End of Days/Wrathful Retribution, etc), you're likely done by round 2.

Infinitor can also be bad, if he Infinitors his whole deck in one turn as he is known to do.

~Komori

I see a lot of "temporarily invulnerable/couldn't be defeated T1 even with infinite damage/you kinda have to let them do their thing for a bit" villains showing up as problems here.  That makes sense, as many of these villains can only be managed through deck or trash control and the average hero contributes very little to these capacities, so they will be a problem for a random team loadout (which I never use, since what is fun for me about Sentinels is making strong teams and testing them against the harshest opponents without changing the lineup). 

Slightly related: did anyone else find the recent 'Iron Reckoning' weekly one-shot, pitting the five Oblivaeon villains-turned-hero against Iron Legacy, to be surprisingly...easy? The Ongoing destruction that team can field is really wild!

The only thing that surprises me about Dandolo's list is the inclusion of Kaargra Warfang. I'd be more likely to put Matriarch, Miss Information, or Progeny as my fifth.

If we go off of Video Game stats these are most difficult solo villains (standard difficulty) starting with the hardest:

1.  Dreamer

2. Kaargra Warfang

3.  Iron Legacy 

4. Spite: Agent of Gloom

5.  The Chairman

I agree with the assessment that Kaargra is very swingy/high variance.  I remember a couple early games against her where I was still figuring her out and Fickle Fans took me from being horribly behind to roughly even.  Not quite the "oops, I won?" that Wager Master can hand out, but close.  On the other hand, she can easily "oops, we're racing neck and neck but only I can win" you in the blink of an eye unless you can lock her out of playing cards at all, so I think there's a principle that's approximately like "the more knowledge you have of the game, the more you experience variance as a negative shift in relation to your default expectations."

I wonder what the video game stats are telling us - something something comparisons between fighting game tier lists by top players vs bulk database reports of wins and losses.  Or, to try to put useful words in for something something... I could see Dreamer being especially difficult against players who were a. inexperienced or b. selecting random teams/teams they normally like, since sources of uncontrolled mass villain/non-hero damage become dead/dangerous cards if you can't heal her.  So more losses against her the first couple of times you play against her while adjusting makes sense, which might skew database results.  I feel like she's a "don't bring mass damage heroes" villain as opposed to the Chairman, who is a "bring Dark Visionary or Haka" villain.  Not sure how either should be parsed on difficulty lists.

Another possibility is that, like me, other people's minds also stop working properly if they look straight at the Tooth Fairy card.  Gaaah!

Except for Spite:Agent of Gloom all of them have over 19,000 games recorded so there going that’s removes a lot of the idea that the data is skewed.  Spite:Agent of Gloom only has 4,368 games which I’d attribute more to people avoiding Spite in general and as a variant people likely aren’t unlocking him.  

There are some video game quirks, though.  The Dreamer is super easy to lose to by confirming through stuff too quickly, oops, she's dead, too late to rewind.  She's plenty hard, especially on H=5, but I think that has a lot to do with it.

Kaargra, I'm not sure about.  The self-reports also show that she's really hard, similar to Iron Legacy, but I think video game players are less likely to think carefully about titles and points and just try to play normally.  I know every time a Kaargra one-shot goes up, there are plenty of people who post to that effect.

Certainly "tier lists" are for a very different audience than raw stats.  Ones with quicker learning curves will do much better in the latter than the former.

All data is what it is, I'm not making a claim that this is particularly skewed.  I am not sure what 19k plays means, though - at the hypothetical ends of the bell curve, that number of plays means something very different if a single team of dedicated playtesters generated the 19k plays than it does if it's 19k people each playing the Dreamer for the first time.  In the former data set, matchup unfamiliarity will account for very little of the win/loss ratio, while in the latter it will be a huge part of it. 

Again, to point back to the fighting game analogy - a character might have a very high skill floor, and a community-wide data scoop will show a high % of losses because of it, but this doesn't tell us much about the skill ceiling of that character (and is why it's not necessarily a great idea for new players to a game to choose their first character based on what is currently dominating the tourney meta).  So I suppose I'm gesturing at a similar phenomenon and suggesting that the Dreamer might be a higher difficulty floor (because she's so different than the norm that unfamiliarity is more likely to be lethal) while Kaargra might have a higher difficulty ceiling (because her variance makes it fairly hard to exert tight control even once one is familiar with her).  I'm not strongly committed to the truth-value of these statements w regards to Kaargra and the Dreamer specifically, but I believe the underlying theory is sound. 

If you’re going with unfamiliarity as an issue both are different game styles compared to other villains.   With the Dreamer you want to avoid hitting her at all costs (especially challenge mode) throughout the game while she is hitting you herself and through projections.   Then Kaargra adds Crowd’s Favor and titles into the mix of everything.  In both cases they are shown to be harder matchups and I don’t think I’ve come across any player who has felt either is breeze regardless of their experience with the game.   Overall, I would agree with an assessment that the Dreamer has a higher difficulty floor and Kaargra may have a higher ceiling but I don’t see any argument against them being harder villains overall to face.  

I can speak to my personal data. Of the 5 villains I listed as the hardest, only The Dreamer has an under 20% win rate in games I reported to the stats project. If I were going purely on my own data Agent of Gloom Spite would replace her in the top 5. I started recording data after I already had around 3 years of playing Sentinels under my belt.

My own experience does tell me that Dreamer and Kagraa do have higher learning curves than most but that they both can still pose a real threat to me after 5 years of playing this game.

Oh, I wasn't proposing "it was all playtesters" as a plausible reality state, just as the "most experience concentrated in fewest players possible to generate 19k games" end of the bell curve.  Do you know how many unique users contributed?  And how many units of the video game moved?

@powerhound2000 - yeah, certainly you want to avoid hitting Dreamer in challenge mode, but outside of Cosmic Omnitron I don't have a sense of where to rate the difficulty of Ultimate mode villains as compared to their normal modes (e.g. Ultimate Dawn is mostly like regular Dawn but a bit punchier, Ultimate Chokepoint does weird things to lots of heroes, making them play really differently than normal, and Ultimate Baron Blade is much harder to race if you were going to follow that route but isn't particularly different if you have solid trash control).  In normal mode, I think it's worth tagging flipped Dreamer with your Hypersonics/Throat Jabs/Offensive Transmutes in order to address the mass damage options, and having AA or Dr Dr around makes it safer/more sustainable (and/or opens up more damage reduction options like Stun Bolt or TK Thump), so in a sense having target-based healers on your team undoes a fair bit of what makes Dreamer hard.  I would say she's above the fold in difficulty, but I don't have a sense of her as one of the absolute worst - I'd generally prefer to face her rather than Cosmic Omnitron, Iron Legacy/Progeny/Kaargra, or Dawn/Chairman without trash control options, and I'd probably be about as happy to face her as I would the Matriarch. 

Anyway, I've sort of derailed the conversation into a sidebar about "what even is difficulty mode" because I think it varies widely depending on how you play Sentinels (randoms vs. static teams against all comers vs tailor-made teams to beat certain enemies vs. challenge of the week vs. other options) and I always have both interest and skepticism in how valid the concept of tiers of heros or villains can be in isolation from a particular gamestate (i.e. the specific MU of villain-heroes-environment).  I'm happy to let it fall back into the OP's question, though, since I can derail *almost* any Sentinels conversation into this. 

Probably because they were implemented later and therefore we all have less experience against them (both individually and talking them over as a community).  Certainly if you're using MindWanderer's stats, most of the ultimate mode villains have something like 2-10% of the number of plays associated with them that the defaults do, so what data we do have may be less useful as well.

For the most part I'm with Dandolo, the only thing is I don't find Dreamer that hard.  Rough sure, but nowhere near top 5 hard.  I'd put Miss Information in her place.  It's one thing to force you to stall until the baddie lets you fight, it's an entriely different thing when said baddie is ALSO CONSTANTLY destroying your setup by destroying your equipment, ongoings, and forcing massive discards.  Don't get me started on her searcher card, which she has 4 copies of in her deck, which suffles her trash into her deck, AND which plays the top card of her deck once that's all done.  Difficulty 3 my Akash'Bhuta!

I think it's because they are explicitly called out as "not balanced." They are a challenge experience rather than the way those villains' games are supposed to be calibrated.

I'll bite though: here are my picks for the 5 hardest Ultimate Mode villains assuming random selection of heroes and environments.

1. Miss Information

2. Cosmic Omnitron

3. The Ennead

4. Iron Legacy

5. Mad Bomber Blade

I'm not great with stats, and it isn't clear to me whether the win rate is just of completed games or of all started games, so I could be misinterpreting things. 

That said, if you sort by loss rate you can see weird artifacts of the process, such as many Normal/Advanced/Challenge versions of the villains having a lower hero winrate than their Ultimate counterparts.  For example, a higher percent of the people who tried it were apparently able to beat Ulimate Spite: Agent of Gloom (that is, beat Advanced Spite: Agent of Gloom and then immediately beat Advanced Skinwalker Gloomweaver with the same board state) than were able to beat just Advanced Spite: Agent of Gloom by himself.  This cannot be an accurate reflection of their relative difficulties, because if both villains require you to do the same thing and then the Ultimate version also requires something additional of you if and only if you have completed the first thing, it can never be easier to do both things than it is to do just the first one.  Also, some of the ratings just feel really wonky - e.g. Vanilla Dreamer has a higher loss rate than UItimate Iron Legacy, which doesn't correlate to my experience of their relative difficulties. 

I don't know where the data populating the chart is drawn from, did it partially get drawn from the weekly one-shots?  If a very significant number of plays against certain villains were from a specific lineup of heroes due to a one-shot, that might really skew the data. Or if (like me) a significant number of people who like to construct very powerful teams try to challenge those teams by testing them against Ultimate mode villains, while people who play random tend to play against Normal villains, then the effect of intra-team synergies will be much more heavily represented in the former than the latter.  It could be that hero teams designed  for maximum power and effectiveness benefit more from this than villains do from going from Normal to Ultimate, and therefore Ultimate villains will show up in the data as beaten a higher % of the time than normals.  (At least at the far end of the bell curve I'm pretty sure this is correct, as a team designed around it makes Guise's infinite available on T1 a significant chunk of the time.)

You get dig into more detail of the video game stats if you want here https://mindwanderer.net/sotm/app-stats-full.html

If you have questions about what some data means Mindwanderer put it together so it would best to ask them if some part is unclear.  Overall, the cases where you have thousands of games I trust more of what the data says.  When you have only a few hundred or less for villain which has been available for a while it can certainly be more skewed.  

That's answered on the About page: completed games only.

To compare difficulty levels, I recommend using the Model column.  This accounts for a lot of the variance as far as what heroes and environments people choose.  It doesn't account for better players playing harder modes, though.  There are a few anomalies in that respect; in particular, Ultimate frequently looks very close to, or easier than, Challenge despite the fact that it technically ought to be the same difference as between Normal and Advanced.  (There are exceptions; for instance, Ultimate Kaarga runs out of titles quickly.)

As for the weekly one-shots, they're only partially used.  Any games with exactly the same setup and result are counted only once per day.  This generally means that in the week a one-shot happens, that particular setup will show up with seven wins and seven losses.  As such, they're largely a wash.  Same goes for multiplayer: a log is generated for every player in a multiplayer game, but the duplicates aren't counted.

(That said, unlocks do skew things a little.  When the Freedom Five came out, Progeny started looking a little bit easier, because people figured out how to win that fight consistently and every different way of ordering the F5 was logged separately.  But it was still just a blip overall.)

Interesting. Well, that seems to avoid the  weirdness I was seeing in the loss stats, but I wonder if the harder villains are even harder than the stats suggest - if you’re dropping repeats and someone is replaying a team vs a villain and E.g. Ultimate Cosmic Omnitron kills a couple heroes T1 a few times in a row I don’t think that will show in your data. It does make sense that the Dreamer is showing  so many losses - oops she’s dead already, no time to drop. 

Having been playing a bit more Villains of the Multiverse lately, I would say that Ultimate Baron Blade, Ultimate Friction, and Ultimate Fright Train can be fairly problematic in combination with lots of other villains, because the first two can play cards from all villain decks, Friction is playing multiple cards per round with few downsides due to her invulernable device giving her self-damage immunity, Baron Blade can stop heroes from using multiple powers or cards per round (which is at least how my favorite hero teams tend to work) and can protect both his and Friction's devices, and Fright Train is tanking for everything (although that can make him pretty vulnerable to AoE damage, he's still stopping you from concentrating on low health, must-stop targets).  Other villains can add baked-in ongoing or equipment destruction or simply buckets of damage, but I find these three as a chassis to add other villains to is pretty hard for me to deal with. 

I never really thought of The Dreamer as one of the toughest villains, but I recently played through all of the solo villains with the original Freedom Five and random, non-repeating Environments and she was the only one I lost to. And she kicked my butt TWICE!

OblivAeon, for sure. I have yet to come even close to beating him.

I really struggle with Team mode villains, too. Giving the villains up to 4 more turns per round is brutal compared to normal mode.

Spite is super hard, especially with the indestructible drugs, ability to get Victims out of the Safe House, the Safe House only being able to be used once, and that one of his drugs that forces you to discard like 10 cards from your deck whenever you're hit.

The Chairman is bonkers hard with his minion-resurrecting Underbosses and the Operative who hits back whenever you hit anything on the villain side.

Citizen Dawn because of THAT card, and when the Citizens get together with their counterparts.

Spite can be hard, but he's super vulnerable to teams with lots of cards that reduce his damage.  Try Wraith, Chrono Ranger, and Adamant Sentinels and spamming Stun Bolt, Nuerotoxin Dart Thrower, and TK Thump as much as you can.  Spite gets a lot less scary at -4/-5 and the low hero count keeps his damage low from the start.

Tempest also counters him a bit, since Healing Rain can outperform a lot of his nickle-and-dime damage and Into the Stratosphere on victim cards can keep him playing null beats. 

Fixer with Bloody Knuckles is always fun against Spite. What? What's that you say? You want me to pick up the card that would cause me extra damage and let me play it again on my turn. Uh. Ok. Also see: Inspiring Presence, Hunter and Hunted, Compulsion Cannister, Pushing the Limits, ...

This is a game-changing strategy for Spite. In a recent game against him, I threw both of Visionary's Twist The Ether cards on him, and was able to ignore a great deal of his otherwise very annoying damage output.

Just Wraith chucking a double Stun Bolt on him every turn is pretty much enough to do the job, I've found. Plus she gets Nemesis Bonus every time she plinks him so yay, bonus damage >:D.

Scraped out my first ever win against Challenge Cosmic Omnitron through a combination of lucky villain deck plays and a crapton of damage, aided by stacking Legacy's Galvanize every chance I got!