I'm looking to buy a Vst synth soon and if you could give me some advice that would be great!
First of all I'm basically looking for one with heaps of patches and I don't have to make the sounds from scratch.
Second it has to sound good ;)
Thirdly it has to be under $200

• Buy a VST Synth? Many good ones are freeware: you should only spend money if you know you "need" a certain instrument, for example because you have tried a demo and it is better than what you are already using for a specific purpose.
  
• Even if you aren't interested in complex synth programming, you need to know what you are doing. Ready-made patches are a good starting point, but you still have to adjust parameters. Don't be afraid: common "subtractive" synths are rather easy to understand and control, while samplers (if you buy well made sample libraries) sound good with little effort at the expense of flexibility.
  
• Looking for a single synth is pointless. You can use many different instruments for different sounds, layer and chain synths and effects, and with experience you can progress along the complexity scale from simple VSTs to comprehensive and quirky ones.
  
• Software synthesizers do not "sound good" in the same way as a well made antique violin sounds better than a cheap chinese one; they can only sound more or less close to what you want, after more or less stressful and complex programming effort. Another reason to learn several diverse ones rather than obsessing about what's best.
  
• Freeware suggestions: the simple but deep Synth1 by Ichiro Toda and most of the KVR Developer Challenge submissions of the last few years.
  
• Paid suggestion if you really want to: Native Instruments Komplete, a large collection of synths and samples. Probably you won't find much use for Reaktor, but the rest is likely to last you a lifetime.