The new Jester King certainly feels different. I might like it, but the change occured midway through our match and I already had two artilleries set up to explode him, so we only saw the power trigger once.
As for the resource bosses (Queen of Lies, Lich King, Master of Coin), I think they would work better by cutting your resource generation in half and growing stronger off the “stolen resources”. That would prevent them from utterly FUBARing players at the start of the game. (The Queen of Lies is probably the worst boss to start a game with because it cuts in half the # of initial settlements you can claim.)
Definitely saw this in a game that I’m in. She pretty much tore me in half for a solid chunk of the game on Hard.
However, we did manage to turn things around, and chances are we’re going to win.
Maybe it’s just that I have a particular taste for things insanely difficult, (My favorite games are roguelikes, and I borrowed a playstation from a friend just so I could play Dark Souls) but I feel like her difficulty is actually pretty on par with how I would want a “hard” game to be… which is y’know pretty friggin hard.
I’m not disagreeing with you: She increases the difficulty of a game a LOT when she shows up early… but so far I haven’t seen it be “beyond all repair”
So far JK’s ability has proven (to me) to be interesting, but not necessarily something that makes the game more difficult.
As you say, all the resource bosses are very strong if they appear at or near the start of the game. I doubt the creators will go back to a take-resources-away approach anytime soon, though. I’m sure that was something they considered when they originally changed these bosses from their original global thievery abilities, and I expect their current powers were chosen partially because rather than just doing things to the players, they give the players some choices about which cards, spells, and towns are important enough to justify paying the doubled price and empowering a boss.
I haven’t seen the new JK yet; I’m interested to see what happens there. If he has a bunch of stacks near him and gets near a heavily populated area, that could make things very interesting to deal with.
The Queen of Lies is stronger than most, though, since at the start, all of your resources depend on claiming towns. She can easily cut your gold & mana generation in half.
Perhaps the solution there is to start each player out with more settlements & a mana pool. That would solve issues with an early Queen of Lies and the slower start thanks to the new hero deployment rules.