Character Feedback

@ThisisClemFandango said:
I dont think there's anyone here who is that childish and petty

I'm still sniping people in PvP who did stuff to me like 5+ years ago, and I plan to continue doing that until the game ends.

@ThisisClemFandango said:
I dont think there's anyone here who is that childish and petty

"You will find that it is you who are mistaken....about a great many things."

What? Different IP, but they're both Disney.

@F0nt said:

@entrailbucket said:
Hahahahagaha good luck with this.

Sword Master -- probably ok when boosted/lvl672, just because of numbers, but doesn't do anything unique or interesting. Non-blue stuns are generally useful, his red is fine, but black/the entire locked tile situation is just way too much work for way too little reward. If I play the lock/unlock game or whatever it needs to be ending the game, not doing some mediocre damage.

Joaquin -- seems built to counter a strike tile metagame/Sam specifically. He's not going to do that, because he's just way too slow at it. The Sam/Juggernaut team makes a billion strikes every turn at 10 million strength, so reducing a few of them by a % is not helpful. Red is fine. Yellow is a bit weak, although I think there's a good, annoying "flap around forever" Airborne team out there because we have zero good counters for Airborne at the moment. Blue is fine, and probably does decent damage against the Sam team, except that you're dead by the time they have enough strikes on board.

Toad just showed up like 5 minutes ago so no idea yet.

Yep, Sword Master was our earliest addition and likely could use a bit of a rework in the future to make him a bit more interesting. He locks up the board too much for the little payoff that he gives.

Thanks for the input on Falcon; his intent was to make those kinds of team combos less viable. The Sam/Jugger spam wasn't on our radar, so we'll look into that and what characters can possibly combat later on.

I meant to address the "Sword Master could use a bit of a rework" part of this and forgot to.

Listen, buffs are good. We will never turn down buffs. But just so you know, Sword Master is, like, fine. Ranking MPQ characters is kind of impossible at this point, but among endgame players there are basically 3 tiers: usable always, usable only when boosted, and usable never (even when boosted/lvl672!).

Sword Master is somewhere in the middle of Tier 2. I think he'll be usable when boosted and high level, probably. But there are a bunch of total losers hanging out in Tier 3 still!

If you want to make Sword Master really good because he's one of your first, that's understandable. But in the past, resources for character changes were really limited, and I'd personally much prefer fixing all the useless losers first!

@amigopdude22 said:

@F0nt said:
I’ve been sticky beaking the nerf forum post a bit and taking notes for the future.

Please do not bring back nerfs. The few that happened were disastrous to the player base and incredibly disheartening. It starts the inevitable chase of a snake eating it's tail where the team just chases down meta characters or teams that people invest in to compete. Nerfs are bad, buffs are good. Building counters is good.

The gambit nerf was good, he was unbeatable without having your own gambit, which was disheartening. Nerfing him was the opposite, it opened the game up again.

Nerfing bishop was good. He punished 5 stars just for existing and stun locked you out of playing the game.

The chasm nerf was good. He was oppressive to fight against, he dominated the game, and he made matches last forever and often made matches unable to ever end and forced retreating.

The Polaris nerf and mthor nerf made them less op, but still very powerful and still very useful.

I'm struggling to think of any nerf that hasn't been a good thing for the health of the game.

@Tiger_Wong said:
Lin Lei Iron Fist - this character feels good and very useful. I can throw him on a bunch of teams as support and I’d love to see the numbers on his red when ascended.

His purple makes yellow, which is VERY rare. This is a very good character with a lot of potential.

Grade B+ (subject to change based on ascended numbers)

I would add that a good design space for new characters to fit into would be something like ‘when any character on your team makes a red match, do a [new character specific, cool/useful/flavourful] thing.
But because it’s a passive, and easily triggerable, don’t give it high numbers.

This means that they can pair with all sorts of other teammates and still be effective, as they don’t need to be the highest level character and ‘tanking’ those colours.
To me, this is exactly why Cosmic Iron Man and Lin Lie Iron Fist have been so well received! And they’re not brokenly good, they just have a use on a wide variety of teams!

If you wanted it to be a bit more powerful and less frequent the trigger could be ‘every 3 blue matches your team makes’ or ‘for every 6 matches of any colour your team makes’

As @LuxAurae has said, Toad does seem to be brokenly good because he self-combos, like 1 star Hawkeye. Whilst some players will love this power trip he brings, you might want to rein him in a bit before people sink resources into him?

Also, side note, won’t all these valuable comments vanish once the forum transitions to its new home??

Furthermore, you could make team affiliations seem much more useful in this way too.
E.g. for any match made by a ‘Brotherhood’ member of the team trigger an effect (which would be significantly more powerful than things triggered by any colour matches, such as in my previous post).

Or something like ‘if you have at least 2 Agent of Atlas members on the team, you can match locked tiles as if they were charged tiles’
This would lock down the board for the enemy whilst giving an AP advantage to the player team.

Or ‘if you have at least 2 Defenders on the team, ignore the effect of all enemy strike tiles’

Affiliations have so far only had minor benefits, outside of Deathlock and his passive AP generation.

This new design space would give people strong reasons to focus on building teams around affiliations, and because there are a number of affiliations on each character it might be possible to trigger several of these powerful abilities with the right team composition.

Due consideration should be given to how many characters have any given affiliation, as pairings that would be easier to trigger should not have as powerful an effect. (E.g. there are a great many ‘enhanced’, so any such ability should be less powerful, or require all 3 characters to be ‘enhanced’)

Any or all of the above could/should perhaps be tied to supports rather than certain characters, for greater team building flexibility.
Alternatively it could be stapled on to each existing character with that affiliation, as an additional passive?

@Borstock said:

@entrailbucket said:

@BriMan2222 said:

@amigopdude22 said:

@F0nt said:
I’ve been sticky beaking the nerf forum post a bit and taking notes for the future.

Please do not bring back nerfs. The few that happened were disastrous to the player base and incredibly disheartening. It starts the inevitable chase of a snake eating it's tail where the team just chases down meta characters or teams that people invest in to compete. Nerfs are bad, buffs are good. Building counters is good.

The gambit nerf was good, he was unbeatable without having your own gambit, which was disheartening. Nerfing him was the opposite, it opened the game up again.

Nerfing bishop was good. He punished 5 stars just for existing and stun locked you out of playing the game.

The chasm nerf was good. He was oppressive to fight against, he dominated the game, and he made matches last forever and often made matches unable to ever end and forced retreating.

The Polaris nerf and mthor nerf made them less op, but still very powerful and still very useful.

I'm struggling to think of any nerf that hasn't been a good thing for the health of the game.

The recent nerfs to Nova and Sidewinder fixed two completely broken accidents, relatively quickly.

The idea that they'd be "bringing back" nerfs, when they just nerfed Polaris and m'Thor, is really funny.

Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't those nerfs by the previous team? And didn't the new team pause what was meant to be more nerfs coming?

"Bringing back" may not be a perfect description, but I don't find it "funny" wrong, considering the context.

The old team "paused" the planned nerf to Shang-Chi.

The nerfs cited by the other guy were all done by BCS or Demiurge too, because IP2 has been on MPQ for like 10 seconds.

@Gymp28 said:
Seriously, can we bench any discussions about nerfs for another thread?
Actual mechanical nerf discussions would be fine for here, as suggestions for the devs re: character development and rebalancing, but please can we not muddy the thread with discussions on semantics?

It's probably worth benching all of it, since none of these comments will be getting over to the new forum anyway.

@entrailbucket said:

@Borstock said:

@entrailbucket said:

@BriMan2222 said:

@amigopdude22 said:

@F0nt said:
I’ve been sticky beaking the nerf forum post a bit and taking notes for the future.

Please do not bring back nerfs. The few that happened were disastrous to the player base and incredibly disheartening. It starts the inevitable chase of a snake eating it's tail where the team just chases down meta characters or teams that people invest in to compete. Nerfs are bad, buffs are good. Building counters is good.

The gambit nerf was good, he was unbeatable without having your own gambit, which was disheartening. Nerfing him was the opposite, it opened the game up again.

Nerfing bishop was good. He punished 5 stars just for existing and stun locked you out of playing the game.

The chasm nerf was good. He was oppressive to fight against, he dominated the game, and he made matches last forever and often made matches unable to ever end and forced retreating.

The Polaris nerf and mthor nerf made them less op, but still very powerful and still very useful.

I'm struggling to think of any nerf that hasn't been a good thing for the health of the game.

The recent nerfs to Nova and Sidewinder fixed two completely broken accidents, relatively quickly.

The idea that they'd be "bringing back" nerfs, when they just nerfed Polaris and m'Thor, is really funny.

Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't those nerfs by the previous team? And didn't the new team pause what was meant to be more nerfs coming?

"Bringing back" may not be a perfect description, but I don't find it "funny" wrong, considering the context.

The old team "paused" the planned nerf to Shang-Chi.

The nerfs cited by the other guy were all done by BCS or Demiurge too, because IP2 has been on MPQ for like 10 seconds.

Okay. So, why is it funny to say don't bring nerfs back? You acknowledge they were paused and done by someone else.

@entrailbucket said:

@Borstock said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Borstock said:

@entrailbucket said:

@BriMan2222 said:

@amigopdude22 said:

@F0nt said:
I’ve been sticky beaking the nerf forum post a bit and taking notes for the future.

Please do not bring back nerfs. The few that happened were disastrous to the player base and incredibly disheartening. It starts the inevitable chase of a snake eating it's tail where the team just chases down meta characters or teams that people invest in to compete. Nerfs are bad, buffs are good. Building counters is good.

The gambit nerf was good, he was unbeatable without having your own gambit, which was disheartening. Nerfing him was the opposite, it opened the game up again.

Nerfing bishop was good. He punished 5 stars just for existing and stun locked you out of playing the game.

The chasm nerf was good. He was oppressive to fight against, he dominated the game, and he made matches last forever and often made matches unable to ever end and forced retreating.

The Polaris nerf and mthor nerf made them less op, but still very powerful and still very useful.

I'm struggling to think of any nerf that hasn't been a good thing for the health of the game.

The recent nerfs to Nova and Sidewinder fixed two completely broken accidents, relatively quickly.

The idea that they'd be "bringing back" nerfs, when they just nerfed Polaris and m'Thor, is really funny.

Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't those nerfs by the previous team? And didn't the new team pause what was meant to be more nerfs coming?

"Bringing back" may not be a perfect description, but I don't find it "funny" wrong, considering the context.

The old team "paused" the planned nerf to Shang-Chi.

The nerfs cited by the other guy were all done by BCS or Demiurge too, because IP2 has been on MPQ for like 10 seconds.

Okay. So, why is it funny to say don't bring nerfs back? You acknowledge they were paused and done by someone else.

Because the other set of devs like, just did them? Where did they go?

The team doing them got fired.

Something doesn't have to be gone long to be brought back. Charlie Cox is Daredevil again. Andrew Garfield was replaced as Spider-Man very quickly and was then brought back quickly. I can name TV shows that got cancelled, brought back, and didn't miss their premier date.

When you call someone's wording funny, others interpret that to mean "that's so stupid, it's funny". Not only is that rude, but in this case it's inaccurate.