Character Feedback

Grantosium

@entrailbucket said:

@Grantosium said:
Here's a thought. I think it's been brought up before but not in this thread. We could do with another character that (for want of a better word) punishes opponents who have brought a loaner or otherwise a character loads of levels below the rest of their team into PvP.

We currently have 3 and 5 star Thanos who deal damage to the team when one opponent is downed, it works quite well against seed teams but against a team running 2 500s and a loaner (or 2 500s and a 370 Iron May, for example) he basically hits once at the beginning and is then pretty much dead weight.

What I'd envision is something like doing damage each turn based on number of downed enemies, reducing enemy ability levels based on number of downed enemies, increasing their own match damage based on difference in lowest and highest enemy max health... This sort of thing.

Obviously you'd have to again be careful not to make the character disproportionately effective on defense as you don't want to have a revolt on your hands, but it could produce a little bit of pressure for the guys running loaner all the time (and those running underleveled Hawkeye and May)

I think one time I suggested a guy with a cheap active power that does AoE damage equal to the difference between the highest and lowest enemy HP.

Something like that would punish the munchkin teams without messing with anything else. But that guy would end up sort of useless against actually good teams, so I now think the ability needs to go on a support somehow.

What if it was...
The first time an enemy is downed in a battle, if that enemy had lower max health than any other enemy reduce those enemy's max health to equal the max health of the first downed enemy.

It would solve the Iron May teamed with Galactus problem. Obviously you do also have the Rocket situation here where one ability is so useful on its own that the other 2 have to be almost completely useless.

entrailbucket

@Grantosium you just didn't have the right counter!

I didn't think you wanted to eat cupcakes super fast, based on your reasoning, but your idea would've done that.

entrailbucket

@Grantosium said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Grantosium said:
Here's a thought. I think it's been brought up before but not in this thread. We could do with another character that (for want of a better word) punishes opponents who have brought a loaner or otherwise a character loads of levels below the rest of their team into PvP.

We currently have 3 and 5 star Thanos who deal damage to the team when one opponent is downed, it works quite well against seed teams but against a team running 2 500s and a loaner (or 2 500s and a 370 Iron May, for example) he basically hits once at the beginning and is then pretty much dead weight.

What I'd envision is something like doing damage each turn based on number of downed enemies, reducing enemy ability levels based on number of downed enemies, increasing their own match damage based on difference in lowest and highest enemy max health... This sort of thing.

Obviously you'd have to again be careful not to make the character disproportionately effective on defense as you don't want to have a revolt on your hands, but it could produce a little bit of pressure for the guys running loaner all the time (and those running underleveled Hawkeye and May)

I think one time I suggested a guy with a cheap active power that does AoE damage equal to the difference between the highest and lowest enemy HP.

Something like that would punish the munchkin teams without messing with anything else. But that guy would end up sort of useless against actually good teams, so I now think the ability needs to go on a support somehow.

What if it was...
The first time an enemy is downed in a battle, if that enemy had lower max health than any other enemy reduce those enemy's max health to equal the max health of the first downed enemy.

It would solve the Iron May teamed with Galactus problem. Obviously you do also have the Rocket situation here where one ability is so useful on its own that the other 2 have to be almost completely useless.

That one feels a little complicated, and I think it'd still be too good for hitting cupcakes.

I'm not sure if it'd fix Galactus since he can only take 40k damage a turn anyway (is that the number? I feel like someone corrected me once but that number is still stuck in my head).

The key is that you want to punish a team composed of very low health characters and very high health characters, or very low level characters and very high level characters. Whatever it is needs to be free, or cheap enough to go off turn1, because these teams don't usually give the AI any turns at all.

Grantosium

@entrailbucket said:

I'm not sure if it'd fix Galactus since he can only take 40k damage a turn anyway (is that the number? I feel like someone corrected me once but that number is still stuck in my head).

Specifically on this point, I guess if it went ahead into the game it can be whatever the devs want it to be.

In my mind "reduce max health" is not "damage" but I don't know if we have any examples in game of this that aren't specifically described as "permanent damage" that we can test against. I guess probably not, so technically I'm proposing an all new mechanic, even if it would visually be identical to permanent damage.

Edit: perhaps they can introduce that when they get to 7 star character sin 2035.

entrailbucket

@Grantosium said:

@entrailbucket said:

I'm not sure if it'd fix Galactus since he can only take 40k damage a turn anyway (is that the number? I feel like someone corrected me once but that number is still stuck in my head).

Specifically on this point, I guess if it went ahead into the game it can be whatever the devs want it to be.

In my mind "reduce max health" is not "damage" but I don't know if we have any examples in game of this that aren't specifically described as "permanent damage" that we can test against. I guess probably not, so technically I'm proposing an all new mechanic, even if it would visually be identical to permanent damage.

Edit: perhaps they can introduce that when they get to 7 star character sin 2035.

Yeah, I think you might be getting too complicated here. There are ways to do what you want without introducing new ability classes! Why can't it just be damage? They can figure out some other way to handle the impending Galactus disaster.

entrailbucket

The thing that you want to be doing here is not punishing low level teams, or low health teams, overall. That gets used to eat cupcakes and beat up on low level players, and really we've got plenty of stuff that does that already!

What you're after is a relatively new phenomenon where folks are running a munchkin 4* or even 3* support character paired with maxed out boosted 550s, to take advantage of their crazy buff %. You need to make sure you do the second thing without accidentally doing the first thing, which is why I'd try to focus on an enemy team's disparity between levels, health, match damage, etc.

...and it probably needs to go on a support, so that I can bring it to a fight without dragging along some otherwise-terrible counter character.

entrailbucket

...and I'll keep posting because I'm playing PvP right now and just saw a great example of this.

When 1* Yelena is boosted, 672 Yelena + 4* Iron May is a commonly used team, with 12 purple and 6 black AP supports. If you don't kill or stun Iron May (or Yelena) turn0, you eat like 800,000 damage on the AI's turn 1.

This just turns a match into "whose free AP supports fire?" If I get mine, then I can kill Iron May with a power first. If I don't but they don't get theirs I can play MPQ for awhile. If they get theirs and I don't get mine I am dead.

Is this the game we all want to play? Win or lose because my supports didn't fire?

KGB

@Grantosium said:
Ok, I guess I walked into that backlash. I could take away from that either that I'm way off base in general or that my experience has been quite different from other people due to my MMR being at 370 and not having given that as context.
My queue sees a lot of 1a5 and 4a5 Juggs with incredibly weak team mates. It's not unusual for 2 team members to have 10k-20k health and Juggs has 300k+. I don't have trouble beating them, because winfinites, but I can't help but feel that there's something wrong with that. (Disclaimer: While typing I've seen it flash up that Bucket has replied but I haven't read it yet.)

My soft capped 370 roster sees the same.

It's because they gave away 1a5 Juggs in that vault that everyone got 10 tokens for. So LOTS of low level rosters ended up with a 1a5 Juggs that forces them into our MMR even though when you peek at their rosters they often have <25 total characters rostered with most of them being champed 2s or 3s.

That vault was the problem.

KGB

KGB

@entrailbucket said:
...and I'll keep posting because I'm playing PvP right now and just saw a great example of this.

When 1* Yelena is boosted, 672 Yelena + 4* Iron May is a commonly used team, with 12 purple and 6 black AP supports. If you don't kill or stun Iron May (or Yelena) turn0, you eat like 800,000 damage on the AI's turn 1.

This just turns a match into "whose free AP supports fire?" If I get mine, then I can kill Iron May with a power first. If I don't but they don't get theirs I can play MPQ for awhile. If they get theirs and I don't get mine I am dead.

Is this the game we all want to play? Win or lose because my supports didn't fire?

I've been thinking about this too when we were discussing supports in another thread and why you can't use Frog etc.

For PvP, they could make a change to Supports so that you can only get starting AP from 1 support max. You can equip 3 supports that grant starting AP to increase your chances of getting some, but once one triggers starting AP the rest don't. So you'd put your most wanted AP support on the middle character and so on.

Seems an easy change they could implement.

KGB

entrailbucket

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:
...and I'll keep posting because I'm playing PvP right now and just saw a great example of this.

When 1* Yelena is boosted, 672 Yelena + 4* Iron May is a commonly used team, with 12 purple and 6 black AP supports. If you don't kill or stun Iron May (or Yelena) turn0, you eat like 800,000 damage on the AI's turn 1.

This just turns a match into "whose free AP supports fire?" If I get mine, then I can kill Iron May with a power first. If I don't but they don't get theirs I can play MPQ for awhile. If they get theirs and I don't get mine I am dead.

Is this the game we all want to play? Win or lose because my supports didn't fire?

I've been thinking about this too when we were discussing supports in another thread and why you can't use Frog etc.

For PvP, they could make a change to Supports so that you can only get starting AP from 1 support max. You can equip 3 supports that grant starting AP to increase your chances of getting some, but once one triggers starting AP the rest don't. So you'd put your most wanted AP support on the middle character and so on.

Seems an easy change they could implement.

KGB

Stuff like this is fine if (and ONLY if) it's part of a broader effort to slow the game down in general. Yes, starting with 18 free AP (or more, if you're boosting!) is ludicrous and breaks the game, but without some way for every character to cast their stuff turn0, the metagame would just pivot into guys who can win with mostly passives turn0.

If they limit free AP at the same time they go after overpowered passives, then things get a lot more interesting, but that might be too much change at once.

The free AP supports are the only thing making active powers viable at all right now, and limiting them in any way just pushes us all back to overpowered passives all the time.

KGB

@entrailbucket said:

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:
...and I'll keep posting because I'm playing PvP right now and just saw a great example of this.

When 1* Yelena is boosted, 672 Yelena + 4* Iron May is a commonly used team, with 12 purple and 6 black AP supports. If you don't kill or stun Iron May (or Yelena) turn0, you eat like 800,000 damage on the AI's turn 1.

This just turns a match into "whose free AP supports fire?" If I get mine, then I can kill Iron May with a power first. If I don't but they don't get theirs I can play MPQ for awhile. If they get theirs and I don't get mine I am dead.

Is this the game we all want to play? Win or lose because my supports didn't fire?

I've been thinking about this too when we were discussing supports in another thread and why you can't use Frog etc.

For PvP, they could make a change to Supports so that you can only get starting AP from 1 support max. You can equip 3 supports that grant starting AP to increase your chances of getting some, but once one triggers starting AP the rest don't. So you'd put your most wanted AP support on the middle character and so on.

Seems an easy change they could implement.

KGB

Stuff like this is fine if (and ONLY if) it's part of a broader effort to slow the game down in general. Yes, starting with 18 free AP (or more, if you're boosting!) is ludicrous and breaks the game, but without some way for every character to cast their stuff turn0, the metagame would just pivot into guys who can win with mostly passives turn0.

If they limit free AP at the same time they go after overpowered passives, then things get a lot more interesting, but that might be too much change at once.

The free AP supports are the only thing making active powers viable at all right now, and limiting them in any way just pushes us all back to overpowered passives all the time.

Which passives are so OP that they win turn 0?

If there are dozens of them it's unlikely they'll get to all of them anytime soon and expect tooth-n-nail fights on every such change to existing characters.

TBH, I'm not sure anyone wants the game slowed down though. So maybe 18 AP on turn 0 is just the way things are going to be.

KGB

entrailbucket

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:
...and I'll keep posting because I'm playing PvP right now and just saw a great example of this.

When 1* Yelena is boosted, 672 Yelena + 4* Iron May is a commonly used team, with 12 purple and 6 black AP supports. If you don't kill or stun Iron May (or Yelena) turn0, you eat like 800,000 damage on the AI's turn 1.

This just turns a match into "whose free AP supports fire?" If I get mine, then I can kill Iron May with a power first. If I don't but they don't get theirs I can play MPQ for awhile. If they get theirs and I don't get mine I am dead.

Is this the game we all want to play? Win or lose because my supports didn't fire?

I've been thinking about this too when we were discussing supports in another thread and why you can't use Frog etc.

For PvP, they could make a change to Supports so that you can only get starting AP from 1 support max. You can equip 3 supports that grant starting AP to increase your chances of getting some, but once one triggers starting AP the rest don't. So you'd put your most wanted AP support on the middle character and so on.

Seems an easy change they could implement.

KGB

Stuff like this is fine if (and ONLY if) it's part of a broader effort to slow the game down in general. Yes, starting with 18 free AP (or more, if you're boosting!) is ludicrous and breaks the game, but without some way for every character to cast their stuff turn0, the metagame would just pivot into guys who can win with mostly passives turn0.

If they limit free AP at the same time they go after overpowered passives, then things get a lot more interesting, but that might be too much change at once.

The free AP supports are the only thing making active powers viable at all right now, and limiting them in any way just pushes us all back to overpowered passives all the time.

Which passives are so OP that they win turn 0?

If there are dozens of them it's unlikely they'll get to all of them anytime soon and expect tooth-n-nail fights on every such change to existing characters.

TBH, I'm not sure anyone wants the game slowed down though. So maybe 18 AP on turn 0 is just the way things are going to be.

KGB

Eh, I said "win turn0 with mostly passives" there but what I meant was something more like "mostly win turn0 with passives." Stuff like Sam/Juggernaut and M'baku/Namor probably can't kill you turn0, short of a lucky cascade (this does happen though), but they can pretty consistently kill somebody turn0 and maybe more than one somebody with a little luck.

Is that a win? I guess it depends which guy they kill and whether or not you've got enough muscle left to recover. If they randomly kill your best damage dealer and you haven't got much else then the fight is over in all but name.