How long until the top characters are nerfed?

Unknown

One thing I've noticed as I get a better roster is that from 0-600 or 700, you'll see a variety of team comps. These are mostly people who level champions based on what covers they get, rather than who the best characters are. I, for example, got about 10 hulk covers before I decided to level him because obviously he would be the strongest option I have.

However, after you break 700, you only see a very small hand full of characters.

You see Magneto, Lazy Daken, Lazy Thor, Sentry and Patch.

That's really about it.

Patch I don't have a problem with because the AI uses him so stupidly.

But Sentry and Lazy Thor are the two biggest tanks in the entire game. I literally just skip those two. Their skills are so loaded with power you literally can't compete with them.

And then Magneto and Lazy Daken are incredibly difficult to overcome as well, because of how surprisingly resilient they are.

When are these 5 characters getting nerfed so that other characters can actually make it up into the 1000 range?

Unknown

Pretty sure I sometimes see Hood as well. One that probably we ought to see more now is BP, considering his 5/3/5 build delivers both excellent match damage (without the drawback of generating enemy strike tiles) and decent AoE on a colour rarely required by other top tier characters.

Honestly, aside from Patchneto I don't see a big issue. Sure, Sentrybombing is a little overpowered when it works but not always a reliable way to shieldhop unless you use boosts.

Aside from those characters you mention, which are more about their synergy than their individual power, Hulk is probably MORE viable now because of the amount of characters that can do enough damage to trigger anger, Shieldbro is brilliant for PvE and still pretty handy for PvP, Deadpool will start appearing pretty frequently now etc etc.

I don't see much of a problem.

Unknown

Why would they get nerfed. Because you have trouble finding a way to beat them. Nerfing characters only makes the game worse. Some characters have to be strong, if all characters were the same it would be pointless to have 2* 3* etc. Instead of nerfing everyone why not make everyone a 1* and give them the same ability. Would that make everyone happy, cause that's pretty much what your asking for. Nerfing is brought by people who cant think of a strategy or simply adjust to a situation making them to cry for a nerf.

So in conclusion d3 just make everyone a 1* and give everyone the exact same power so that we will never see another nerf thread

Unknown

Why Nerf good characters when you can buff the bad ones?

NorthernPolarity

Apocalypse sr wrote:

Why would they get nerfed. Because you have trouble finding a way to beat them. Nerfing characters only makes the game worse. Some characters have to be strong, if all characters were the same it would be pointless to have 2* 3* etc. Instead of nerfing everyone why not make everyone a 1* and give them the same ability. Would that make everyone happy, cause that's pretty much what your asking for. Nerfing is brought by people who cant think of a strategy or simply adjust to a situation making them to cry for a nerf.

So in conclusion d3 just make everyone a 1* and give everyone the exact same power so that we will never see another nerf thread

This logic is bad and it blows my mind that so many people here think this way. Lets say that the game developers released street fighter and it turned out that ryu was completely broken and beat everyone. Under your logic, youd be like "some characters have to be strong, so screw you guys", and then the game dies because everyone is just playing ryu vs ryu mirrors. I dont know if you guys remember 2ap thunderclap, but playing against that ability was miserable, and the game is far better off having that ability nerfed (despite rags being rendered unplayable because of it). To say that a character like that shouldnt be nerfed under this logic just sacrifices a lot of what makes the game playable and interesting because you were too fixated on not losing the investment that you are stomping everyone with.

Also note that op didnt actually talk about nerfing 3*s down to 2* or 1* level, he meant nerfing them so other 3*s can see more play, which should be a pretty obvious thing to go for.

Unknown

Apocalypse sr wrote:

Why would they get nerfed. Because you have trouble finding a way to beat them. Nerfing characters only makes the game worse. Some characters have to be strong, if all characters were the same it would be pointless to have 2* 3* etc. Instead of nerfing everyone why not make everyone a 1* and give them the same ability. Would that make everyone happy, cause that's pretty much what your asking for. Nerfing is brought by people who cant think of a strategy or simply adjust to a situation making them to cry for a nerf.

So in conclusion d3 just make everyone a 1* and give everyone the exact same power so that we will never see another nerf thread

I'm not saying we should make 1 stars and 2 stars compete with 3 stars. The understanding is that 3 stars are better.

My problem is there are a group of characters that have little or no weaknesses. Sentry is amazing as both an offensive and defensive option. Same with Lazy Thor and Lazy Daken.

Patch and Mageto are relatively weak defensively, but they can still pull a fast one on you if you let Magneto stack a few blue and red. And they are an amazing offensive comp. Magneto's ability costs are so low, its easy for him to get the ball rolling very quickly.

When balancing a game, the point is to develop characters with clear strengths and weaknesses.

Look at Grey Suit Black Widow. She has one amazing strength; when used correctly she provides more damage than just about everyone. She has two glaring weaknesses to go along with that. Her health is one of the worst among 3 stars and when on a defensive team, the AI uses her purple incorrectly and doesn't focus farm greens.

Look at Black Panther. He has a few significant strengths. Relatively large health pool. Great AoE damage and an unusual AP color combo that makes him very effective pairing with the Red/Green/Black/Yellow characters in the game. But he also has significant weaknesses. One of his abilities requires a countdown token that you don't control where it is placed. And his offensive AoE ability gives the enemy some AP for a retaliation attack.

Steve Rogers: Great abilities that regenerate AP for a way to set off multiple abilities. He has so many protect tiles, it is easy to get the enemy to deal 1 damage per match, regardless of color. However, his weaknesses are his stiflingly high AP requirements, his reliance on his match tiles not being destroyed and his lack of AoE ending ability.

With Sentry, LDAken and LThor, there is no such weakness. Thor and Sentry have enormous health pools, enormous damage potential and don't have any abilities that are easily misused by the AI. and Daken is an autopilot character in its truest form. Since green is such a valuable color in this game, he gets his strike tiles very easily and his healing leaves him incredibly resilient to anything other than a 1 hit KO.

Sentry's only weakness is he damages himself, but his health pool is so large that he can still make it through 2 or maybe 3 matches without a health pack. In addition, on defense, him taking damage doesn't really matter.

Daken's only weakness is his low health pool. But building up a one hit KO for him can be difficult with all his strike tiles mounting up and his low cost blue burst damage.

And Thor has no weaknesses.

As for the whole "some characters have to be strong" argument...I don't even know what the retort to that is. Its such flawed logic that its hard to argue against. Nerfing is often a great solution. When there is a small pool of characters choking out the rest of the group, there is no character diversity. When there is no character diversity, d3p loses money. Because the top players are just going to max Daken and Sentry or Thor and then have the perfect team comp for any scenario.

Buffing weaker characters is an option, but honestly, that just develops a power creep scenario and that leaves the characters that weren't buffed in the dust. The point of balance is to eliminate outliers, not to bring the average up to the par of the outlier. And the 4-5 I mentioned are definitely major outliers.

Its much easier to nerf 4 or 5 characters than it is to buff 20 characters.

Unknown

I downvoted the OP, but now I removed the downvote because I realized I jumped the gun. I think this is because I see a difference between powerful and broken. I agree broken characters need to be fixed, whether its by nerf or buff. But a powerful character should be dealt with by way of making the playing field even. I know it's a fine line. Everyone has their own definitions of broken. I feel that if a character can destroy the opposition consistently WITHOUT BOOSTS, then it is broken. Rags old 2 AP red, Cmags infinite blue shields, etc. These are broken. Sentry is powerful, but not unstoppable if being used without boosts. So I feel to deal with him, (and the other top tier characters mentioned in the OP), we should have characters to counter him, which some of our current choices could do if they were just tweaked in Powerset or AP cost. Hence my aversion to nerfing. It makes sense in my head anyway.

Unknown

The only way for D3P / Demiurge to make money consistently is not by boosting existing characters, but by releasing newer, stronger ones while nerfing older ones if needed. Power creep is a reality already - see how many of the top 10 heroes were released in the last 5 months.

Unknown

God, these threads are stupid. They consist of people whining that they can't beat certain characters and resorting to crying to the devs that its too hard instead of getting the characters themselves. Then you have the other people come in afraid that they'll get they're precious little baby sentry nerfed. There is no serious debate or conversation about the issue that goes on in these threads, just two sides who want the game to be easier for them at the expense of others while pretending that they care about the game's "balance"

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

God, these threads are stupid. They consist of people whining that they can't beat certain characters and resorting to crying to the devs that its too hard instead of getting the characters themselves. Then you have the other people come in afraid that they'll get they're precious little baby sentry nerfed. There is no serious debate or conversation about the issue that goes on in these threads, just two sides who want the game to be easier for them at the expense of others while pretending that they care about the game's "balance"

So the response to having an OP character in the game is for everyone to just "get the characters themselves?"

So, its a pay to win game.

Good to know.

I would discuss the subtleties of balance, as I did in my second post, but I don't think anyone around here has any interest in a truly balanced game. They want their freelo and they don't want any scenario where a daredevil or a psylocke team can compete with them.

Unknown

i love how people want characters nerfed because they can't come up with a strategy to beat them. why don't you try different combinations or try keeping ap tha AI would need away from the AI?

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Apocalypse sr wrote:

Why would they get nerfed. Because you have trouble finding a way to beat them. Nerfing characters only makes the game worse. Some characters have to be strong, if all characters were the same it would be pointless to have 2* 3* etc. Instead of nerfing everyone why not make everyone a 1* and give them the same ability. Would that make everyone happy, cause that's pretty much what your asking for. Nerfing is brought by people who cant think of a strategy or simply adjust to a situation making them to cry for a nerf.

So in conclusion d3 just make everyone a 1* and give everyone the exact same power so that we will never see another nerf thread

This logic is bad and it blows my mind that so many people here think this way. Lets say that the game developers released street fighter and it turned out that ryu was completely broken and beat everyone. Under your logic, youd be like "some characters have to be strong, so screw you guys", and then the game dies because everyone is just playing ryu vs ryu mirrors. I dont know if you guys remember 2ap thunderclap, but playing against that ability was miserable, and the game is far better off having that ability nerfed (despite rags being rendered unplayable because of it). To say that a character like that shouldnt be nerfed under this logic just sacrifices a lot of what makes the game playable and interesting because you were too fixated on not losing the investment that you are stomping everyone with.

Also note that op didnt actually talk about nerfing 3*s down to 2* or 1* level, he meant nerfing them so other 3*s can see more play, which should be a pretty obvious thing to go for.

When u use the street fighter logic, it makes sense. I remember m bison and seeing him used online by everyone cause he was cheap. But that's totally different. Only person that can use a fix is mags because he can use a power every turn. But sentry etc doesn't need anything changed. That's the point im trying to make. People only want him nerfed because he's good but he's not broken or cheap. So when naming hood, sentry and l thor my statement makes great sense. Lazy thor is strong cause his powers cost a ton to use.

At the end of the day we should be asking for more balanced and stronger characters instead of asking to make others weak.

To the op dont take my post as an attack or disrespect, cause its not. It was more to get a point across that making stronger characters weaker is absolutely not the answer

Unknown

onimus wrote:

So, its a pay to win game.

Good to know.

All freemium games are pay to win. The only difference4 is that some are more obvious than others.

babinro

Mags absolutely needs to be nerfed.
His blue chains constantly to the point that makes any matchup in the game trivial in a bad way. I've been using him for about a month now (because why not) and he makes the game feel like there was never a change to true healing. I can play PvE and PvP for hours barring enemy cascades solely due to this one character. He's clearly not on par with any other.

Sentry is the only other problematic character and that's solely because of his green. This isn't even half as broken as mags but the fact remains that you have an ultra cheap skill that gets out of hand very easily with strike tiles. I'd fix this skill in one of two ways to properly reflect it's AP cost to power ratio.

1) World Rupture Resolves as a single trigger and as such only triggers strike tiles once. Any cascades that result from destroyed tiles still trigger strike tiles as normal though.

or

2) World Rupture's AP cost is increased to 11. This better reflects the power and damage dealt by the ability. Granted, the ability is still far more devastating than something like Thor's Green, GWBW's Green, Deadpools Purple and BP's Black, but the skill requires assistance to be devastating. That 'drawback' deserves an AP discount but the current cost of 7 just goes to far.

Note: I also take full advantage of a maxed out sentry for defense and shield hops. I realize my recommendations to nerf these characters directly impact my ability to perform well in MPQ but I feel it's for the benefit of the game as a whole.

Unknown

onimus wrote:

And Thor has no weaknesses.

Not true. When lthor first came out and all the whales had him maxed out on the second day I easily countered him with punisher and hood. Thor's weakness is that his skills cost a lot (12y and 14g). With hood's passive ap theft ability, thor almost never fired any skills, barring the occasional monster tile cascade. And punishers red makes quick work of him when you only need to get him down to 40% health. Havent used him yet but I would wager deadpools red would be quite cost-efficient vs. tank characters.

I agree with some of your other points though.

OnesOwnGrief

I don't believe there are OP characters, just OP combos for the most part. Characters like Sentry, Daken, Thor and C Mags are powerful but you must pay attention to that pairings. On their own, or paired with bad characters, they pose little threat.

Thor is slow, very slow. Sentry is actually a none issue if he's not paired with strike tile generators. Even his own strike tile is not invulnerable to being matched, Shield Tossed, or Magnetic Field. CMags has only one real damaging skill. Daken however, I admit is a bit more tricky than the others but also mostly a none issue alone.

With the impending Daken changes coming, he will be doing reduced damage making Sentry/Daken a little slower. Then whenever CMags gets his supposed (Its been 6 months guys) balancing, Patch will probably fall off too since he's loosing his best buddy. Sure it may seem unbalanded now but you have to take into consideration how the other characters will play after those options are gone/toned down. Right now, I think the game is pretty close to okay in balance between majority of the characters honestly.

Unknown

Many games make lots of balance changes often. "Whats-her-face seemed underpowered so we gave her an extra 200 health and 3% damage, whereas tanky-mc-tank was dominating everyone so we scaled him back just a bit. We will let these changes run for a week and see if this brings them more into BALANCE with everyone else. We can tweak these further if necessary. Next week we are looking at McStabber, and Blast-o on our completely fluid, always changing, regularly updated list of changes we can make to keep people excited about their whole roster."

New characters will always hold a draw, especially well designed ones that are in balance with other characters but have something unique to themselves that only they can do.

Unknown

The guys who talk about 'you need to learn how to beat these guys' are just running the same guys. I sure don't see anyone tearing things up with IM40 + Psylocke. Since your offense team is always your defense team, if there was some clever way of winning that doesn't involve the same characters you'd have seen those teams that 'knows how to win' already on the high end already.

At any rate the guys defending their overpowered character shows a rather decisive lack of understanding of politics. The guys running Sentry + Daken are equivalent of the guys who voted for Democrat or Republican the last 15 times and wonder why nobody in your party cares what you think. If D3 has even a cursory understanding of the game they'd know that the Sentry + Daken teams are completely irrational as you're spending money to win events that feature prizes strictly weaker than the team you used to win it, so therefore you don't have to care about what these guys think because it makes no sense to begin with.

In the long run this means either the game will die when people suddenly realize that spending a large amount of money to win events with prizes that are worth way less than whatever you spent is not worth it, or that the game becomes so big that the act of winning a particular event in MPQ somehow justifies the cost. But it's an awfully big gamble to hope MPQ will somehow hit a e-sports level of status, not to mention e-sports game run events with significant prizes to keep the interest sustained. A game with no viable progression is unlikely to be do well in the long run. Colognesiur probably has the best roster in MPQ but why would you need that roster? There isn't even some farfetched scenario that'd give you a meaningful advantage in PvP to have a max level 3* for about 75% of the time given someone like Sentry + Daken can carry anyone. PvE is slightly more varied due to the limited roster events but it's still hardly necessary to have many max level characters. Right now the top tier characters are so far above that you can't come up with any scenario other than a limited roster event that'd justify having building other characters and this also chokes off any future opportunity to make more money.

NorthernPolarity

Apocalypse sr wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Apocalypse sr wrote:

Why would they get nerfed. Because you have trouble finding a way to beat them. Nerfing characters only makes the game worse. Some characters have to be strong, if all characters were the same it would be pointless to have 2* 3* etc. Instead of nerfing everyone why not make everyone a 1* and give them the same ability. Would that make everyone happy, cause that's pretty much what your asking for. Nerfing is brought by people who cant think of a strategy or simply adjust to a situation making them to cry for a nerf.

So in conclusion d3 just make everyone a 1* and give everyone the exact same power so that we will never see another nerf thread

This logic is bad and it blows my mind that so many people here think this way. Lets say that the game developers released street fighter and it turned out that ryu was completely broken and beat everyone. Under your logic, youd be like "some characters have to be strong, so screw you guys", and then the game dies because everyone is just playing ryu vs ryu mirrors. I dont know if you guys remember 2ap thunderclap, but playing against that ability was miserable, and the game is far better off having that ability nerfed (despite rags being rendered unplayable because of it). To say that a character like that shouldnt be nerfed under this logic just sacrifices a lot of what makes the game playable and interesting because you were too fixated on not losing the investment that you are stomping everyone with.

Also note that op didnt actually talk about nerfing 3*s down to 2* or 1* level, he meant nerfing them so other 3*s can see more play, which should be a pretty obvious thing to go for.

When u use the street fighter logic, it makes sense. I remember m bison and seeing him used online by everyone cause he was cheap. But that's totally different. Only person that can use a fix is mags because he can use a power every turn. But sentry etc doesn't need anything changed. That's the point im trying to make. People only want him nerfed because he's good but he's not broken or cheap. So when naming hood, sentry and l thor my statement makes great sense. Lazy thor is strong cause his powers cost a ton to use.

At the end of the day we should be asking for more balanced and stronger characters instead of asking to make others weak.

To the op dont take my post as an attack or disrespect, cause its not. It was more to get a point across that making stronger characters weaker is absolutely not the answer

It doesnt make sense to buff the other 20+ characters in the game to be as good as the most broken character when you can nerf the one character causing problems. Especially when the only thing youre gaining is to appease the people who think that characters should never be nerfed. I would argue that sentry is even more broken than cmags: paired with daken, he can easily do 5k+ Team damage for 7 green ap, which no one else in the game even comes close to.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

The guys who talk about 'you need to learn how to beat these guys' are just running the same guys. I sure don't see anyone tearing things up with IM40 + Psylocke. Since your offense team is always your defense team, if there was some clever way of winning that doesn't involve the same characters you'd have seen those teams that 'knows how to win' already on the high end already.

i see your point, but it's not always the case. i run a variety of teams starting pvp. i do end up with teams like sentry/daken or patch/cmag after passing 800 pts solely for the speed of it. it becomes necessary to win quicker to pump your score before the attacks start coming. if dp3 would do something about the way you are attacked, you would see more variety, but when you can get nailed 5 times while you're fighting 1 battle and lose 100+ points, speed becomes a necessary strategy.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Apocalypse sr wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Apocalypse sr wrote:

Why would they get nerfed. Because you have trouble finding a way to beat them. Nerfing characters only makes the game worse. Some characters have to be strong, if all characters were the same it would be pointless to have 2* 3* etc. Instead of nerfing everyone why not make everyone a 1* and give them the same ability. Would that make everyone happy, cause that's pretty much what your asking for. Nerfing is brought by people who cant think of a strategy or simply adjust to a situation making them to cry for a nerf.

So in conclusion d3 just make everyone a 1* and give everyone the exact same power so that we will never see another nerf thread

This logic is bad and it blows my mind that so many people here think this way. Lets say that the game developers released street fighter and it turned out that ryu was completely broken and beat everyone. Under your logic, youd be like "some characters have to be strong, so screw you guys", and then the game dies because everyone is just playing ryu vs ryu mirrors. I dont know if you guys remember 2ap thunderclap, but playing against that ability was miserable, and the game is far better off having that ability nerfed (despite rags being rendered unplayable because of it). To say that a character like that shouldnt be nerfed under this logic just sacrifices a lot of what makes the game playable and interesting because you were too fixated on not losing the investment that you are stomping everyone with.

Also note that op didnt actually talk about nerfing 3*s down to 2* or 1* level, he meant nerfing them so other 3*s can see more play, which should be a pretty obvious thing to go for.

When u use the street fighter logic, it makes sense. I remember m bison and seeing him used online by everyone cause he was cheap. But that's totally different. Only person that can use a fix is mags because he can use a power every turn. But sentry etc doesn't need anything changed. That's the point im trying to make. People only want him nerfed because he's good but he's not broken or cheap. So when naming hood, sentry and l thor my statement makes great sense. Lazy thor is strong cause his powers cost a ton to use.

At the end of the day we should be asking for more balanced and stronger characters instead of asking to make others weak.

To the op dont take my post as an attack or disrespect, cause its not. It was more to get a point across that making stronger characters weaker is absolutely not the answer

It doesnt make sense to buff the other 20+ characters in the game to be as good as the most broken character when you can nerf the one character causing problems. Especially when the only thing youre gaining is to appease the people who think that characters should never be nerfed. I would argue that sentry is even more broken than cmags: paired with daken, he can easily do 5k+ Team damage for 7 green ap, which no one else in the game even comes close to.

Of course Sentry is overpowered!

... and by the time I have enough covers to make him useful (if I bother to continue with MPQ), I'm guessing he'll be nerfed.