by BillyBabel
Ok, so you got your new LTs, and you think they are pretty baller, but here is the thing, you don't want to just plop down that big awesome looking miniature as soon as you build up enough threat. If you lose the LT you have to pay 3 threat to buy the card back, and 2 more threat to use them in the scenario, a huge hit to your threat. So you need to ensure that your LTs can survive and that you get good threat coming in before you put any of them in the game.Also you may be interested what overall the LTs do, I've looked through the cards and given you my best impressions to how I think they work so far.
Splig: Thus far I think he is actually the best hero, his Scavange card has a very achievable goal of getting threat by just having monsters near a downed hero. On top of that it gives you the most threat of any card in the game. It's incredibly useful for farming threat. Get that card first, then get his card that makes monsters wilderness, and then get dive into cover, this gives him an extra black die for a whole turn and a free movement. It'll be incredibly hard to do anything to him. Add in emergency rations and you'll have a Splig that will be nigh unkillable.
Zacareth: he seems like a late game kinda guy, as all of his cards really deal with going through the overlord deck. he doesn't have much of anything to help him in actual combat as a figure on the board except some pretty good raw stats. His ability to slim down the overlord deck and go through the cards is nice, but won't really be a lot of help until you get far into the game and get some good overlord cards. 2 pronged gambit gives decent threat, but it's nothing to write home about. If you use him, consider helping him out with some of the warlord or infector class overlord cards to ensure his battlefield longevity.
Merrick: This guys is a ranged attack power house doing scary damage with Cabal adding damage for monsters that are standing within 3 spaces of heroes he is a glass cannon. The only stop him from dying ability that he has is masques which once per quest makes one attack miss. Possibly handy but nothing to write home about. if you want him to not die, be sure that the monsters in his group can keep the heroes away from him, or supplement some cards from overlord deck that will help protect him. he has a very unreliable threat farming mechanic though, luckily it's free, but i wouldn't rely on it too much, focus more on getting kills for threat.
Eliza: She is primarily a long ranged support. She has no real way to farm threat which makes getting cards somewhat problematic, but her best cards are pretty cheap. Fangs in the dark, the power of blood, and the lady's care all are pretty cheap to buy and activate. If you have the threat, you will probably be able to keep a monster group alive and kicking indefinitely. Additionally I have a few questions about whether or not the effects of taste of suffering are cumulative. I'm assuming that you can only mark a monster a single time for the +1 health for each hero benefit, but if it's cumulative and you can do it more than once, then we are looking at the most powerful ability in the game.
Belthir: He makes me a little bit sad, he requires the basic overlord deck to really be effective. Combining fight with honor which allows you to reduce the cost of a card by one for discarding a trap card and hazard pay which allows you to reinforce by spending threat, and going down the Saboteur route of the overlord deck could guarantee you a free extra small monster when you reinforce fairly frequently. This would give you a lot of good options, but if it's the best use of the saboteur route is questionable. It's also incredibly tempting to use the infector deck with him. Cry havoc with the ability to also poison, means that you could in one turn poison an entire team and set yourself up very nicely for infector deck effects. This also doubles as a nice defense for Belthir if he gets into trouble as the infector deck can give him a lot of armor. Sadly this will be an act to gambit as cry havoc and the right combo of infector deck cards probably won't be available until then if your game is close.
Alric: Is basically the melee equalvalent of his brother, a straight up powerhouse of melee destruction. Council of veterans seems like it could be a fairly decent way of farming threat. If you are feeling fairly confident you might follow it up by getting trial by knighthood. And use that to farm as much threat as possible. Following that with "Fight in formation" giving you a max of +3 defense and a threat token if the attack does no damage would be a very strong way to keep Alric alive while maintaining a neutral threat expenditure early game. Follow that up with "Knight Training" for free rerolls on all small monsters in that group for the rest of the game and you Alric will be able to survive almost any encounter. After you have his defenses built up, then purchase his more offensive cards like dark champion or vengeful resolve. It's very tempting to try and go for refuse to die, but buying it and using it has a fairly steep cost and I think it lacks the utility of cheaper cards that come before it, but as a late game ender, it's incredibly powerful.
So anyways these are my thoughts and theorycrafting over new LTs, feel free to add any incredibly OP overlord card and plot deck card combos you can think of, or any critiques of my thoughts up here, or any other trenchant observations.