Character Rebalance - **** War Machine (James Rhodes) ****
Comments
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Invis never really took off as a meta, and that’s really the only niche he sort of fills. But since AOE punches through it too, and most of those powers hit harder, odds are good you have better options for all his powers.0
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I was thinking that he could be helpful in other nodes in SCL 10 since I believe many relying on Polaris/BRB would go for stun-lock and they have no use for red aps. That amount of damage could one-shot some goons at 4th clear, or it could deal 1/5 to 1/6 of the highest hp enemies, which is pretty impressive. Pre-Polaris, it's difficult to achieve this amount of damage with his red.
As for Blob, I run him at 3/5/5, so he destroys only 6 tiles instead of 12. For WM, it's 5/3/5. I think WM synergises well with Blob, since he could make use of those attack tiles to convert into damage. Maybe throw in Coulson for crazy ap gains.0 -
He's invaluable against Spider Ham. After iHulk AoE, War Machine Blue is the next best tool to counter a fast invisible caster.Blackstone said:I'll be honest, I've never played WM unless the game picked him for me.
He's champed, I've just never thought "this is a job for War Machine" over any other character.0 -
With this rebalance, I think I might use him even less. I use him mostly for his creation of countdown tiles which work well with 4* Carol and Agent Coulson or even 4*Starlord.As for using green power to destroy tiles, there are just so many green abilities out there that do the same things or even better.Now he seem to be good against invisible enemies and protect tiles creator but his blue is still expensive and there are now characters that can goes invisible without using invisible tiles. Maybe his blue will be better if he can also target those characters and remove them from invisibility (e.g Yellowjacket and Alligator Loki).
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ThaRoadWarrior said:Invis never really took off as a meta, and that’s really the only niche he sort of fills. But since AOE punches through it too, and most of those powers hit harder, odds are good you have better options for all his powers.
Elsa for 7ap stuns invisible + damages and can target airbourne too and her other two powers are probably better than WM's.
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Does Spider-Ham go invisible? Or are you thinking of Howard the Duck?Phumade said:
He's invaluable against Spider Ham. After iHulk AoE, War Machine Blue is the next best tool to counter a fast invisible caster.Blackstone said:I'll be honest, I've never played WM unless the game picked him for me.
He's champed, I've just never thought "this is a job for War Machine" over any other character.
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Ham goes airborne, and surely that is irony because what mode is this spider-ham reign of terror happening?0
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I'm assuming there's a typo in there somewhere.Phumade said:
He's invaluable against Spider Ham. After iHulk AoE, War Machine Blue is the next best tool to counter a fast invisible caster.Blackstone said:I'll be honest, I've never played WM unless the game picked him for me.
He's champed, I've just never thought "this is a job for War Machine" over any other character.
Regardless: WM blue costs 11. It's not dealing with any fast characters at all.
Especially with so many cheap stuns on the same color that could prevent the enemy from hiding in the first place.
I'm willing to listen if you care to elaborate on what circumstance WM would be "invaluable", but I have my doubts that circumstance exists.0 -
Clearly chosen because of Black History month. We may still get a Flaptain re-balance too since there are still 3 weeks to go.As for the changes - whatever. What's done here is essentially what was done to Lockjaw. He's slightly better now mostly because of his green change (shocked at some of the above comments saying they liked the old green better when it was clearly inferior unless you faced non-tile moving goons and could ensure the CD's all resolved) so at least 2 of his powers resolve instantly.But in the grand scheme of things, he went from the 100th or so best 4* to the 90th? In other words he's still not usable even when boosted because just about every other boosted 4* that week will be better. A comparison of him after his re-work to say Riri after her re-work a couple years back is just devastating (she has 3 actives on the same 3 colors and all 3 of hers are better than all 3 of his for the same costs) and I like Riri but with the depth of 4* land now she's probably no longer a T20 character so imagine just how far down he is at 90th. Just to illustrate how big the gap is, they should change his crash from Thanos to Riri so we can see it first hand.KGB0
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I think we're all missing the lede, that MPQ has data on what powers are used/not used. So WM Green is one of the least used powers in the game? Fascinating to me! Be curious in the 4 star tier which powers are are the bottom 3. Show us the data!1
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that data is the "what," but it doesn't really tell you the "why." Always fascinating to ponder on. I'd like to see that data as well lol0
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I’ll make just 1 comment on this: rebalances are supposed to increase the character’s usage and these improvements are so minor that I don’t see that happening, especially given the negative feedback here.
Dear devs, next time make these improvements far more significant and it could breathe life into old unused characters.The next MPQ poll should be on how to rebalance X character. I bet players could show you many ways to improve someone without making them OP0 -
With so many existing overpowered characters in the game, why *shouldn't* they buff these guys to overpowered status? Like, why should they have to set their sights on "mediocre?" If War Machine was as good as Polaris who does that hurt?bbigler said:I’ll make just 1 comment on this: rebalances are supposed to increase the character’s usage and these improvements are so minor that I don’t see that happening, especially given the negative feedback here.
Dear devs, next time make these improvements far more significant and it could breathe life into old unused characters.The next MPQ poll should be on how to rebalance X character. I bet players could show you many ways to improve someone without making them OP0 -
I'd rather see older 5 stars get some reworks than war machine. I'm sure his usage will go up .0002% though0
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Buff is overall good, but I kinda wish they'd improved the green so it had *better* synergy with 4* Captain Marvel, rather than removing the only part that provided synergy in the first place. Some controlled board destruction is good, I guess. But I would have gone for something like a passive power that fires a countdown or two every turn so long as you have enough AP (like Wasp's black). Could have kept the countdowns, the random board destruction, the synergy with Carol, but it would have been less likely to be a power that goes to waste when the countdowns go away (as it would just keep making more of them).0
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Rebalancing can be tricky in a game like this. With so much separation between meta/bad, have/have not characters. Plus as others have mentioned it really seems like some on the dev team don't play and or understand their own game.
I've always been in favor of rebalancing, but I'll admit I was naive to think the they could properly pull it off with consistency and effectiveness. I feel like rebalance may be a train wreck like everything else they do with the game. It's likely to be a roller coaster ride of not doing enough at all like Lockjaw/WM to something half way decent as 5JG.
Where will this lead us ultimately, who knows. On the current pace it seems a good portion of rebalanced characters, they didn't do nearly enough to make them much better at all. At that point it's like why bother in the first place, seems a waste of time and resources to rebalance and the changes be almost unnoticeable.
Not sure how many characters each year will get a rebalance, but let's just say they managed to do one a month. If 8 or 9 out 12 end up with almost unnoticeable tweaks, it just seems like a waste of time. Especially considering they're not just starting from the bottom floor and working their way up. At this rate it could be years before characters that need rebalance or tweaks the most ever get them.
I also feel like they should concentrate more on rebalancing 5s which I believe need it the most. I feel like there's just too many 4s in that tier and to me the gaps between characters aren't nearly as bad as the 5 tier. That and all the time they spend rebalancing a 4* just to get the Lockjaw/WM treatment, it doesn't seem worth bothering at all when they could address a 5* that needs it more. To me it would make the game healthier if they were able to balance out the 5 tier first and do what they can to get that settled.
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like some on the dev team don't play and or understand their own game.
OK let's unpack this one first. You say that some on the Devs team don't understand their own game. However, this is what they say is the reason behind the rebalance:NEW:
Aerial Assault - 8AP
War Machine soars skyward to rain down bullets below! If one does not exist, create a 4-turn Red Countdown tile that deals 908 damage. While this tile is on the board, new tiles have a 15% chance of being strength 41 Attack tiles on War Machine's turn. (Max 1769 damage/strength 79 tiles)- Level 2: Countdown tile deals 1032 damage. New tiles have a 20% chance of being strength 55 Attack tiles. (Max 2010 damage/strength 107 tiles)
- Level 3: Countdown tile deals 1128 damage. New tiles have a 25% chance of being strength 65 Attack tiles. (Max 2198 damage/strength 126 tiles)
- Level 4: Countdown tile deals 1163 damage. New tiles have a 30% chance of being strength 95 Attack tiles. (Max 2266 damage/strength 182 tiles)
- Level 5: Countdown tile is Fortified and deals 1938. New tiles have a 35% chance of being strength 113 Attack tiles. (Max 3776 damage/strength 219 tiles)
The stated purpose of this rebalance is to both make the power stronger on each use but also specifically to make it more useful at a non optimal power level. So the motive is not difficult to understand. Whether it achieves that is of course purely subjective.NEW:
Heat Signature Detection - 10
AP
War Machine activates his heat signature detection, flushing enemies out of hiding and cutting through their defenses. Removes all enemy Invisibility tiles and up to 2 enemy Protect tiles, then deals 773 damage. (Max 1505 damage)- Level 2: Can remove up to 3 enemy Protect tiles and deals 1172 damage. (Max 2282 damage)
- Level 3: Can remove up to 5 enemy Protect tiles and deals 1560 damage. (Max 3037 damage)
- Level 4: Can remove up to 6 enemy Protect tiles and deals 2397 damage. (Max 4666 damage)
- Level 5: Removes all enemy Protect tiles and deals 4051 damage. (Max 7886 damage)
So the Devs recognise that the power is already decent but niche and so the change is meant to increase utility and make more accessable but it remains niche. It is a small increase in damage and AP cost and provides an immediate removal of 3 tiles at power level 2 whereas before there was no removal at this level. Once again this increase looks to be aimed at players with lower or part built WM and to help them counter protect tile spammers at only 2 covers. So there is more reason to fire this now as it does more things at low levels/2 covers. Seems fair enough.NEW:Gatling Gun - 8
APWar Machine revs up his Gatling gun and prepares for destruction. Destroy 6 non-friendly tiles in two random adjacent rows and deal 38 damage per tile destroyed. Destroyed tiles do not generate AP or deal other damage. (Max 75 damage)- Level 2: Destroys 7 tiles. Deals 62 damage per tile destroyed. (Max 123 damage)
- Level 3: Destroys 8 tiles. Deals 79 damage per tile destroyed. (Max 156 damage)
- Level 4: Destroys 9 tiles. Deals 120 damage per tile destroyed. (Max 237 damage)
- Level 5: Destroys 10 tiles. Deals 203 damage per tile destroyed. (Max 401 damage)
Gatling Gun is amongst one of the least used abilities, showing that it could definitely use a little more power. With relatively low damage per Countdown tile and random placement, it wasn't really exciting to use. At the very best, it could do around 3000 damage if all 3 tiles somehow blew up 15 Red tiles which was... unlikely. The updated ability alters the functionality a bit, turning it into a power that is a bit more niche in use, but becoming much more powerful and targeted within that niche. Dealing damage for each non-friendly tile it happens to find in the two rows, this ability now works as a fairly cheap destroyer of tile spammers like Carnage, but also a possibility of a hail mary approach when you've got a dangerous CD tile hanging out that you just can't otherwise reach.Players have said that this change removes usability with 4* Captain Marvel. However - read the part I have bolded. The Devs metrics which players have no access to show that actually that synergy is still largely not used regardless, so players might be overvaluing something that the vast majority of MPQ War Machine owners do not use in tandem. Is the power better? That is probably going to be again subjective depending on how WM is used but the Devs have identified a power which hardly anybody uses and tried to change that.Will any of these changes achieve these goals? I can't say but I can say that The Devs have very clearly spelled out their objectives - they clearly do "understand their own game" from a Developer stand point.They have also clearly stated that buffing rubbish 5* is not their priority in doing this. So complaining about this when they have said what you want is not what they are necessarilly doing just seems like going round in some pretty silly circles. It seems like you don't understand what they are doing, which is fine of course but they seem to be pretty clear on it.We can of course disagree with paths taken and believe that resources could be better used and I have no issue with that at all but to outright insult the Dev team is completely unnecessaryI feel like rebalance may be a train wreck like everything else they do with the game.And yet here you are still playing their terrible game. I mean there must be *something* about it that is not a "train wreck" when they add features etc. Confusing.
TL;DR - These rebalances might not be for us or even likely to massively increase character use but to insult the Devs with accusations they have no idea what they are doing seems pretty harsh to me. They are completely transparent in their intentions in each power.5 -
I think the dev is stuck in a terrible situation when it comes to rebalancing.
For years, players have been asking for regular rebalances because it was stopped for a long time due to lack of time. I think Dr Ock was the one who kicked off rebalancing again, followed by Mr Fantastic a few months later. Then, we had long breaks here and there. In the last couple years, I think we had about 6-8 tweaks/rework/number buff, not including nerfs.
Unfortunately, the score for impact of buff is at best 2 or 3/10, for some it's 0/10. However, the dev get 10/10 for giving this group of players a glimmer of hope that rebalancing is not dead, and there are possibilities of more rebalances down the line.
As you can see, with each frequent rebalance having a impact of 2 or 3 out of 10, players start to question the dev's abilities in term of all these buffs: Are the dev out of touch? Do they not play their game? Why choose x when it should be y? Now, some are wondering if the dev are wasting their time doing all these rebalances.
What's the solution? Does getting the dev to announce that the goal of rebalance is not to make characters close to meta, but to make it better within its category help? Players will probably thank the dev for saying this, but I don't think it will answer the above questions, neither would it help a lot.
Currently, we have 121 4* and 66 5*.
Let's assume that the top ~10% of each tier are the meta. The bottom tier would be the last 30%. So, we have
12 meta 4*, 40 bottom tier, and the rest of 69 4* sandwiched in between. If we rebalance the 4* in such a way that it moves from position 121 to position 81, what impact does it have? The impact is virtually zero. As for 5*, if we move 5* Wasp from position 65 to 44, does it make any significant impact at all? I think it's very likely to be no. For example, Dr Ock, Jean Grey and GR hardly made any significant impact.
I think a lot of players have been poisoned by the meta game. It's apparent from the comments about pointing out the difference between meta and bad. So, as long as rebalances don't come close to the current meta of each tier, they will continue to be disappointed by future buff of such impacts.
As such, I think the dev should stop rebalancing older characters because they will get more flakes for rebalancing characters rather than not rebalancing characters. It looks strange to see this happening, but it's happening.
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on the topic of understanding their own game or character, why would the quoted text require the best possible Gatling Gun outcome to be blowing up 15 red? Because that is the most damage it can do after factoring in the tile destruction damage and the static base damage? That misses the "point" of the power, which is to create cascades by blowing arbitrary holes in the board so that his Red CD can have maximum opportunity to airlift in attack tiles. The new version does less damage and destroys less tiles in a less arbitrary grouping (arguably but probably worse for creating cascades), with the only positive tradeoff being that it happens right away rather than being tied to 1-turn CDs. However, removing the 3x CDs breaks an important synergy with 4* Carol, who would immediately buff up a bunch of the incoming attack tiles 3x times (assuming all went off). This is exactly the kind of "missed the point, broke the internal synergy" issue that Robbie Reyes's rebalance had when they removed the AP accrual from Hell Ride and made it a single recurring, unfortified countdown rather than 3x repeaters. It removed his potential utility as an anti-hulk/anti-thor and broke his (admittedly late addition) 5* synergy with Sighclops and made it so his perhaps best partner is 4* Carol. That's the kind of choice you'd make if you saw that this power was underused, but didn't arrive at the correct conclusion as to why, and your fix made it very likely to be used even less, but of course that remains to be seen.
Comparing this new green to Blob's green - blob's being tied to the bottom 2 rows is great, because it maximizes cascade potential. When you play from the bottom, you have a lot more opportunity for incoming drops to create emergent cascades than you do when your tile destruction or matches are done at the top. Since Gatling Gun can now walk around the board and potentially be above the centerline, I would expect it to do a far less good job of pulling in more than the number of tiles it destroyed.
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ThaRoadWarrior said:on the topic of understanding their own game or character, why would the quoted text require the best possible Gatling Gun outcome to be blowing up 15 red? Because that is the most damage it can do after factoring in the tile destruction damage and the static base damage? That misses the "point" of the power, which is to create cascades by blowing arbitrary holes in the board so that his Red CD can have maximum opportunity to airlift in attack tiles. The new version does less damage and destroys less tiles in a less arbitrary grouping (arguably but probably worse for creating cascades), with the only positive tradeoff being that it happens right away rather than being tied to 1-turn CDs. This is exactly the kind of "missed the point, broke the internal synergy" issue that Robbie Reyes's rebalance had when they removed the AP accrual from Hell Ride and made it a single recurring, unfortified countdown rather than 3x repeaters. That's the kind of choice you'd make if you saw that this power was underused, but didn't arrive at the correct conclusion as to why, and your fix made it very likely to be used even less, but of course that remains to be seen.That may all indeed be true and there is not going to be any easy reasons for knowing why the power is used so little but the fact is that they identified something and tried to "fix" it. It would be really useful if 6 months from now we got an update that told us whether the fix worked and now WM's new power gets more use.I'm not going to pretend to understand the rationale of any of this - why do we have certain broken synergies left in game when others are tackled? Why do we have a character like W5sp who uses a mechanic that has no synergy with any other character in the game still? I have no clue - I just know that we can ask questions without being flat-out insulting. Do you for example believe this comment is true:I feel like rebalance may be a train wreck like everything else they do with the game.
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