*** Beast (Classic) ***

atomzed

Bowgentle wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Yeah the serious issues that blue has (i mean the ability clearly wasnt designed to randomly destroy the tiles that you just created) makes me seriously question how much time the developers have spent testing the ability or how the programmers/testers/designers communicate: you would think that this would have been seen as an issue before the characters release.

That is almost word by word what I said on Line chat yesterday.
"Playtesting" seems to only consist of checking if the game freezes when the ability is used, nothing more.

I suspect that it is their way of "balancing him". I won't go as far as saying they didn't test, in fact history has shown that they are very conservative in balancing heroes. With the exception of sentry, recent heroes like shehulk, mohawk storm have good concepts, but always nerf hard before launch.

Let's take a look at the concept of beast. Specially beast blue.

8 blue to generate 400+ strength special tiles. This could be 400+ attack, strike or protect tiles.

This is as good as pun judgement, which most agree that it's great. However, beast muta expt has an additional advantage on blue, which is some thing rare. A good active green is plenty. Whereas good blue are far and few in between.

The original concept may be "after countdown, it convert any surrounding tiles into blue special tiles". That means that it can convert enemy strike tiles, countdown tiles into your own tiles. That will be an ability to drool for. So just taking out the word "basic" will instantly make beast a much better 3* hero, as he has a blue ability that can overwrite tiles, generate strike/ attack / protect tiles.

Alas, their balancing team felt that the ability is too strong and decided to add in the word basic. A tier 1 blue ability is instantly relegated to tier 3 ability.

The potential is there..But the actual implantation makes beast a poor hero. I won't even be scared if I see a max beast in pvp.

Phaserhawk

Look at it this way, if it does create 4 blue and matches, destroying 3, you just got a random special tile for the cost of 5 blue, that's not terrible. Blue is in no way shape or form suppose to be getting you tons of damage and such, it's designed to generate a special tile to allow you to use green and or yellow. If 5 blue didn't get you the 1 CD timer, I would have gone 3/5/5 or 4/5/4 depending on where the 1 CD countdown timer went.

Another option to fix the skill too is to have the tile that is randomly turned into a blue CD tile stay blue and not be destroyed and that counts as one of the random strength tiles, while the other 3 go to tiles around that blue tile but they don't change color.

Mutagenic Breakthrough - 8 Green AP
Hank has big plans for a genetic experiment that might lead to unpredictable results. Creates a 3 turn Blue Countdown tile that, when activated, converts 3 surrounding basic tiles and itself into random special tiles with strength 22. Does not alter tile color
Level Upgrades
Level 2: Creates special tiles of strength 28
Level 3: Reduces to 2 turn cooldown
Level 4: Creates special tiles of strength 33
Level 5: Reduces to 1 turn cooldown
Max Level: 4 strength 105 special tiles

Pylgrim

Tiles definitely need to be added randomly around the board. That fixes

-Tiles being immediately matched up with one another
-Tiles being missed because the countdown tile was on a side or corner
-Tiles being missed because the surrounding tiles were not basic colour tiles

For that change, I think it would be fair to make him create 3 special tiles instead of 4. Maybe one of each, every time, the randomness of not knowing what you'll get is too unreliable. I don't think it is asking much? BP, Punisher and the new c.Magneto add their special tiles to the board immediately, without the risky proposition of a countdown tile. It's not as though Beast's tiles are much more potent than theirs or the ability significantly cheaper. I guess they made it super slow, risky and unreliable because the other two abilities are powered up by it so they didn't want players getting the bonuses /every time/ otherwise they wouldn't be bonuses. Problem is, that the blue tile "bonus" barely make his green and yellow abilities decent, and without it they are near worthless. The abilities should be able to be useful alone and become remarkable when you hoop through the loops.

mjh

He's a doctor for crying out loud. There is no reason he shouldn't "true heal" his comrades. To top it off, after playing with him these past 2 events we can safely say he sucks. This would make him 1% better.

Let's say for a minute he only treats their wounds like a pain killer would, and after the battle is when it would wear off. There would still be some amount of "true heal". In this case they should split the difference. If he heals for 200, 100 should be true and 100 should be a "burst of health".

***
Edited to add final poll results.

Item - Votes - % of Total Votes
Yes, he's a doctor ffs. There's no question - 23 - 37%
Split the difference as noted above - 9 - 14%
No because Beast - 18 - 29%
Other. Explained in my comment - 13 - 21%

Slarow

Doctors don't heal wounds. They patch them until the body heals itself. Wolverine/Daken's bodies naturally heal faster, hence true healing. Spidey, OBW, and Beast are only patching the wounds to improve the chance that the character will last long enough (i.e. not die) for the wounds to heal themselves at their natural pace.

mjh

Slarow wrote:

Doctors don't heal wounds. They patch them until the body heals itself. Wolverine/Daken's bodies naturally heal faster, hence true healing. Spidey, OBW, and Beast are only patching the wounds to improve the chance that the character will last long enough (i.e. not die) for the wounds to heal themselves at their natural pace.

Good point however Spidey and OBW are not doctors. I'd like to give some validity to his medical expertise hence I think splitting the difference is the best option to make a new character that sucks, suck just a little less

Moral

Biggest thing to make Beast suck less is make blue create 4 randomly placed tiles. Or spread them out further.

Didn't think an ability could get trashed faster than a Torch inferno facing Ragnarok but I was proven wrong.

Unknown

How about just scrapping any "heal" power in general if they aren't going to be useful due to "true healing"?

Otherwise, how about lowering the cost considerably if it is going to be first aid vs. real healing?


Spider-Man's yellow, Beast's yellow, and She-Hulk's green are damn near useless given their cost since they aren't "true healing" powers.

OBW is the only exception here and that's more a function of her affecting countdowns than her healing or the lowered cost due to espionage if she's tanking blue.

orionpeace

I voted to split the difference.

But really, it doesn't make a difference.

His powers are too easily negated. His damage and health aren't high enough. And, he is too dependent on a chain of events (blue friendly tile + count down) to be dependable.

He is on the same tier as Daredevil, in my book. And I would level Daredevil before him.

wymtime

I said other. I think they should scrap the true healing and he should just make protect tiles. It should be 3 tiles strenth 50 or 3 for 150 with blue tiles. Also I agree make the blue place 4 random tiles instead of 4 right next to each other and they should all be stronger4 random tiles with a power of 105? At least make them power of 150 when maxed.

Nonce Equitaur 2

It will never happen. D3 has a delusional belief that temp-healing is a great ability.

Temp healing illustrates the glaring disjunction for how D3 perceives the game compared to how players perceive the game.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

It will never happen. D3 has a delusional belief that temp-healing is a great ability.

Temp healing illustrates the glaring disjunction for how D3 perceives the game compared to how players perceive the game.

If obw, shulkie, Spidey, and beast could really heal, these characters would me used much more. Instead... Well...

Unknown

Voted No. He is offering healing that anybody can get by going to the local hospital. If there is going to be a distinction between healing and true healing, then true healing is for characters whose bodies actually heal themselves.

Unknown

My vote is Other because healing (as implemented in the game currently) has no place at all. You have self healers and that's fine, but wasting an ability for a character on healing is terrible. Get rid of healing abilities and do something else with it (make special tiles instead or come up with a new idea).

Pylgrim

I chose "other" because as piss-poor as his yellow is, the true reason why he is not a playable character is his blue. Fix the blue and we can live with him having a throwaway healing ability, as we live with Spidey and OBW. As he is, he's Daredevil-quality.

Unknown

i say give him a better usable skill. fixing true heal he will still suck unfortunately.

Unknown

most healing abilities are frustrating because they either take too long to do anyhing, don't do anything at all if no one is hurt, and don't last after battle. What we need is a character that is a healer, that is his whole job.

Healing Waves-Blue 9AP
Drops several staggered countdown timers (5,4,3,2,1 turns) that heal a small amount to the whole team

Life Force-Yellow 12AP
Large heal to whole team

Arise-Black 15 AP
Revives one downed ally with 1 HP

Alternatively they should add in the opposite of an attack tile. A healing tile. just sits there and gives small amounts of temporary healing until it gets matched away

mischiefmaker

Beast is a scientist, right? Blue is supposed to represent a genetic breakthrough -- some experiment of his on genetic mutations has succeeded, but he doesn't know what the results will be. But science usually builds on itself (one breakthrough begets another), and if you let it go long enough, often creates powerful results. With that in mind, what if the blue worked exactly as it did now, but also created an additional blue countdown tile on a random basic blue tile?

In practice this would mean that you would still commonly get only 1-2 blue tiles, or they'd get matched right away (hey, science is unpredictable!), but you get another countdown, so after a few turns the board would be littered with blue tiles, and that'd add up pretty fast.

I'd like to then see green also destroy all blue special tiles for hefty additional damage per tile. That has the advantage of both increased options (trigger green early to get the damage or hold it in reserve to build up blue specials) and thematic tie-in (when Beast is in animal mode, tearing up his lab, he's destroying all of his results, but they're powerful/unstable so it results in lots of damage). If that does too much damage, and it probably does, it should also do some friendly team damage.

Unknown

His blue needs to dump way more tiles on the board, and at random, if they're going to be blue (which they pretty much have to be, because of the other abilities). Until then, you could make his green be thor's green and his yellow true healing and he'd still not be used at all.

Unknown

I don't think the converting to blue and automatching is a problem. If all 4 of your tiles get automatched it's got to be at least 2X3, so you spent 2 blue AP for a 2X3 cascade. That's probably at least neutral. The problem is that he often fails to create 4 blue special tiles.