How long until the top characters are nerfed?

simonsez

I can't see Sentry getting nerfed. The devs like us to pummel each other and do massive damage. The nerfs they've been doing lately are to keep us from escaping battles damage-free... eg no more stun locks, no more perma-healing, limited Storm board control, and the upcoming Cmag anti-infinite turns nerf. I think Sentry as-is might be the dev's favorite character. Hell, every opponent you face has a Sentry TU in its arsenal.

Unknown

onimus wrote:

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.

I'm going to nitpick these points a little here.

Sentry's "weakness", as much as he has one, is that he does more than just damage himself, he damages the whole team. If you're running him with Hood, it takes its toll rather quickly. And since most events are 2 + featured, you're nuking your featured hero every time without any way to switch him out short of using a loaner or having a second built up version, which very few people do at the 3* level. If you're using Sentry to win matches, you're going to eat up health packs pretty quickly. There's really no way around it. For shield hopping, not a big deal. For sustained play, not really practical.

LDaken's weakness is the Heat mechanic of his healing (which may or may not get altered "soon"). Choke him out of blue and he starts killing himself. Both versions of Mags are very good at this (until CMags also gets nerfed). As is Daken himself when he uses his own nuke. It's not like fighting a 5 yellow Patch who's getting 500 hit points back every turn unless you stun him. Daken on the other hand can be made vulnerable and taken down fairly normally.

Thor's weakness, as someone else pointed out, is he's slow. Ignore his red. If you take a smack there you won't like it, but you'll live. Deny yellow and green like your life depends on it, because it probably does. Hood and OBW are both really effective at keeping Thor from being too much of a threat.

And for the record I am in no way arguing that these aren't top tier characters. They are. And I fully admit to using them all the time. Because they're good. Using bad characters might be good for a chuckle occasionally (Bagdevil I'm looking at you), but at least for me it's not something I like to subject myself to over a longer time period. The problem is there are a lot of substandard characters who need help to be playable as more than an act of desperation or in situations where we're forced to. Up to this point they have been extremely reluctant to do any buffing of the bad characters, presumably because they have limited development time and they can't find ways to make it profitable. So we end up here with good characters that people use all the time and bad characters that nobody uses unless they don't have much of a choice.

Unknown

As one of those annoying people who frequently use the Sentry/Daken combo, I do fear there will be some considerable nerf in the future. Well, for Daken it has already been decided, though that concept doesn't hurt him as much as some people think, IMO.

However, I use other characters too, I usually decide who to use after a look at the opposing team. Against characters with self-healing powers, I use fast damage dealers and strike tile generators like Daken, Psylocke, Punisher, Panther or Patch, maybe with Falcon thrown in the mix. Against AP-stealers I use fast damage dealers and/or Hood. Against Hulk I use stunners or countdown tile overwriters like Spidey, Capt. Marvel, Capt. America or Magneto, usually in combination with massive damage generators like Deadpool, Panther, Punisher or Thor. Against protect tile generators I use strike tile generators and tile overwriters/removers like Daken, Panther, Punisher, Patch, Magneto, Capt. Marvel, Falcon or Capt. America. And with those I need to take out fast, I use fast and massive damage dealers like that deadly Sentry/Daken combo, with Hood, Panther, Psylocke, Storm or Falcon thrown in the mix, or sometimes Magneto if I need to overwrite tiles.

And then there's that wonderful experimenting ground, PvE. Especially for the easy node I set up various combos to check how well they work. It serves well for me to consider which caracters could be raised for a few levels, or if I should buy up the powers if I'm missing covers or not. Or I break out my old 1* and 2* and have fun with them. Even unpopular characters like Bagman and Yelena get their "screen time" during PvE.

Roster diversity? Definitely.

Unknown

kevind722 wrote:

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.

There's reasonable variety up to a certain point, but after that threshold you start to notice every team looks awfully the same, and since your attack team has to be your defense team you can infer everyone else was using the same 5 or so teams too. And since speed is part of the game you can't say 'this team is viable the only thing it's missing is speed' because lack of speed automatically makes the team not viable. Falcon + Daken + deadweight featured character has great speed but no defensive capability whatsoever (the team is reliant on a single color, yellow). You can't just think outside the box and take that team for a spin because you'd be losing points way too fast due to overdependence on a single color. You'd win fast but lose even faster and that's why you don't see Falcon + Daken very often unless one of the two is featured.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

kevind722 wrote:

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.

There's reasonable variety up to a certain point, but after that threshold you start to notice every team looks awfully the same, and since your attack team has to be your defense team you can infer everyone else was using the same 5 or so teams too. And since speed is part of the game you can't say 'this team is viable the only thing it's missing is speed' because lack of speed automatically makes the team not viable. Falcon + Daken + deadweight featured character has great speed but no defensive capability whatsoever (the team is reliant on a single color, yellow). You can't just think outside the box and take that team for a spin because you'd be losing points way too fast due to overdependence on a single color. You'd win fast but lose even faster and that's why you don't see Falcon + Daken very often unless one of the two is featured.

Sentry is a 3* Thorverine or rags in a nutshell

He's totally sustainable when you spend money on HP. He can win every match really fast with a bagman and the free character when you buy boosts.

How do you solve this without nerfing Sentry? Glad you asked!

Just remove boosts, then everything will be slowed down enough that he won't feel so OP compared to other characters

Unknown

onimus 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

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.

So you are saying some characters are better than others? That's about how it comes across in the comics as well.

Moreover, you are saying essentially instead of working and getting the characters that you want to be nerfed, you want to punish everyone else that has worked hard enough to get those characters.

Lastly, that was another reason TUP's (you know thing every one complained about because like all new things it didn't come out perfect and has to be improved to work the way everyone wants it to) were developed. You can you these more powerful characters, but you'll be larger targets for everyone else who wants TUP's from them. In fact, we have one player with a maxed Fury, who after that work to get and level him, will not play him for that exact reason.

Moreover, you can use TUP's to help level the playing field against these giants.

Lastly, they all do have weaknesses. Sentry, the supposedly strongest has the highest cost. That's typically why you do not see him until after 700. His cost is way to high below that. As far as high health, just like in PVE, you're going to need stronger characters to take them down. It's just like for 2*'s Thor and Ares are stronger than the other 2*'s. so you typically need one of them to take them on. It's the same thing for 3*. If your going to battle the titans, it helps to have one of your own.

Unknown

All the talk about Sentry's drawbacks totally misses the point where ending the game early prevents a lot more further damage from taken. Let's say you run Sentry + Daken and you take 100 damage per World Rupture while they take 500 damage per World Rupture, 10 of them go off so you take 1000X3 and they take 5000X3 and die. Let's say this ends the game 10 turns earlier than otherwise even though this figures to be you doing 1500 damage per turn which would only be possible in a completely unrealistic situation like you get to match green every turn for a Call the Storm (Call the Storm averages around 600 damage per green AP). Most moves don't even do 500 damage per AP so 1500 damage per turn is well above even an arbitarily favorable board can do with match 3s.

Of those 3000 damage, 1000 damage goes to Daken, so that might as well be 0. In 10 turns an equally strong team can do at least 2000 damage from just matching 3 tiles at a time. If they fired off any special moves the damage you take goes way up. This isn't even a very strong World Rupture (500 is about 2 Phermone Rage worth of strike tiles). There's nothing balanced about Sentry's abilities even in the absence of boosts. Taking damage to your team that is less than the other team would've done by match 3s had they survived is not a drawback.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

All the talk about Sentry's drawbacks totally misses the point where ending the game early prevents a lot more further damage from taken. Let's say you run Sentry + Daken and you take 100 damage per World Rupture while they take 500 damage per World Rupture, 10 of them go off so you take 1000X3 and they take 5000X3 and die. Let's say this ends the game 10 turns earlier than otherwise even though this figures to be you doing 1500 damage per turn which would only be possible in a completely unrealistic situation like you get to match green every turn for a Call the Storm (Call the Storm averages around 600 damage per green AP). Most moves don't even do 500 damage per AP so 1500 damage per turn is well above even an arbitarily favorable board can do with match 3s.

Of those 3000 damage, 1000 damage goes to Daken, so that might as well be 0. In 10 turns an equally strong team can do at least 2000 damage from just matching 3 tiles at a time. If they fired off any special moves the damage you take goes way up. This isn't even a very strong World Rupture (500 is about 2 Phermone Rage worth of strike tiles). There's nothing balanced about Sentry's abilities even in the absence of boosts. Taking damage to your team that is less than the other team would've done by match 3s had they survived is not a drawback.

You make a valid point, but you've also made something of an oversimplification when it comes to the actual issue of sustainability. It's not just how much damage you're taking but where that damage is going. Pairing Daken with Sentry helps lessen the health pack burden, but if you were using Daken on another team where he's eating a lot of damage you could be far more sustainable even if matches go on a little longer. Also by not using Sacrifice in your example you've saved some self-damage but you've come up short of a big enough World Rupture to deal with other high hit point teams, like LThor, other Sentry teams, and some boosted featured thirds. Even against a mid-range hit point team it might not be enough to seal the deal. At the very least you're going to take some more match damage, and if an enemy attack is looming you might have to use Supernova to finish it. Now you've put another 1k onto your own guys, or you're using Sacrifice and putting another 1k+ on Sentry every battle.

The issue with Sentry is you're putting damage on all your characters every battle, without any way to mitigate it. If you're running Hood with Sentry and/or you've got a squishy featured character you're going to be burning them down very quickly. Meanwhile other teams might be able to hide a character completely behind someone with hit points to burn, and if you're using Daken or Patch as well on that team you now have two characters who will rarely need health packs. You only need to look as far as the other premiere offensive team, who between Patch's regen and CMag's board control can push almost indefinitely. The bottom line is other teams can present opportunities to minimize your health pack usage, but Sentry's burning through them no matter how you do it.

Katai

Paintsville wrote:

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

Because the good characters can end a game before turn 2. If every character can end a match in 1 minute or less, there's a whole different problem we have to deal with. It's barely a game anymore.

Unknown

Let's take a team of Hood + Sentry + Daken and assume all are max leveled. If Daken is boosted, he gets purple, green, black, and TU for 4/7 of the team's total damage intake. If Sentry is boosted, Daken gets purple and black. If Hood is boosted, Daken gets purple and green.

Against a hypothetical team that does 2000 damage in 10 turns with match 3s (which is basically doing no damage at all) you'd have Daken taking 2000*4/7 = 1143 damage and rest of team share 857 if he's boosted, but otherwise he'd take 571 damage and rest of team takes 1429 damage. Compared this to 1000X3 on World Rupture the rest of team takes 2000 damage. This assumes all damage to Daken is effectively 0 but is fairly accurate given how good his regen is. According to the character compendium the damage is 54 to team per World Rupture, and our original assumption is 10 tiles fire on World Rupture so you're only taking 540X2 which is less than the expected damage taken from just match 3s. This of course assumes the AI never even made a decent cascade let alone fired off any damaging abilities during this extra 10 turns they have. In the past it may have possible to get improbably lucky when the AI only matched environment tiles for most of those turns, but now even that does damage and given AI's infinite supply of TU powers you'll almost certain to take a pretty big hit too from the TU powers.

Of course it's always possible to misjudge a World Rupture or had a bad cascade destroying your strike tiles and end up taking more damage than you need to, but 864 damage on 2 guys (this is if all 16 tiles fire) just isn't that big of a risk. Even a modest 5000X3 World Rupture (and most World Rupture are far bigger than that) should be able to end a game 10 turns early and it's just inconceiveable to not take at least 864X2 in 10 turns. Yes World Rupture is unavoidable damage to your own team, but unless Daken is boosted he can tank at most 3 colors out of 7 in a PvP event because he will never have TU over a high level featured, and Sentry always gets yellow/red over him, and then there's whatever color that the featured character gets. Red/green/black is the most common combination and with such a character featured, Daken can only get purple! So there's no way you're going to funnel the damage away from the fragile character to begin with.

Unknown

Katai wrote:

Paintsville wrote:

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

Because the good characters can end a game before turn 2. If every character can end a match in 1 minute or less, there's a whole different problem we have to deal with. It's barely a game anymore.

People should check the Mugen fighting game engine where people are allowed to make their own arbitarily powerful fighting game character, and it essentially turns into constant buffs because killing the other guy in one hit just doesn't quite cut it anymore when you've a character that can kill you before the game starts, and I think they got character who can beat characters who can do that too.

Spoit

Welp, it didn't take long for this to become yet another 'phantron's every character is OP' rant, did it?

But seriously, it's been half a year since the cmags nerf was announced. They don't move very fast at all

NorthernPolarity

Thugpatrol wrote:

Phantron wrote:

All the talk about Sentry's drawbacks totally misses the point where ending the game early prevents a lot more further damage from taken. Let's say you run Sentry + Daken and you take 100 damage per World Rupture while they take 500 damage per World Rupture, 10 of them go off so you take 1000X3 and they take 5000X3 and die. Let's say this ends the game 10 turns earlier than otherwise even though this figures to be you doing 1500 damage per turn which would only be possible in a completely unrealistic situation like you get to match green every turn for a Call the Storm (Call the Storm averages around 600 damage per green AP). Most moves don't even do 500 damage per AP so 1500 damage per turn is well above even an arbitarily favorable board can do with match 3s.

Of those 3000 damage, 1000 damage goes to Daken, so that might as well be 0. In 10 turns an equally strong team can do at least 2000 damage from just matching 3 tiles at a time. If they fired off any special moves the damage you take goes way up. This isn't even a very strong World Rupture (500 is about 2 Phermone Rage worth of strike tiles). There's nothing balanced about Sentry's abilities even in the absence of boosts. Taking damage to your team that is less than the other team would've done by match 3s had they survived is not a drawback.

You make a valid point, but you've also made something of an oversimplification when it comes to the actual issue of sustainability. It's not just how much damage you're taking but where that damage is going. Pairing Daken with Sentry helps lessen the health pack burden, but if you were using Daken on another team where he's eating a lot of damage you could be far more sustainable even if matches go on a little longer. Also by not using Sacrifice in your example you've saved some self-damage but you've come up short of a big enough World Rupture to deal with other high hit point teams, like LThor, other Sentry teams, and some boosted featured thirds. Even against a mid-range hit point team it might not be enough to seal the deal. At the very least you're going to take some more match damage, and if an enemy attack is looming you might have to use Supernova to finish it. Now you've put another 1k onto your own guys, or you're using Sacrifice and putting another 1k+ on Sentry every battle.

The issue with Sentry is you're putting damage on all your characters every battle, without any way to mitigate it. If you're running Hood with Sentry and/or you've got a squishy featured character you're going to be burning them down very quickly. Meanwhile other teams might be able to hide a character completely behind someone with hit points to burn, and if you're using Daken or Patch as well on that team you now have two characters who will rarely need health packs. You only need to look as far as the other premiere offensive team, who between Patch's regen and CMag's board control can push almost indefinitely. The bottom line is other teams can present opportunities to minimize your health pack usage, but Sentry's burning through them no matter how you do it.

This might matter more if pvp was more about sustainability than it was about shield hopping. Yes, youre going to burn through health packs quickly as sentry/daken, but when you play a more sustainable, slower composition, youre just going to get stomped because 1. Youre not pushing as fast as sentry/daken and 2.you arent running sentry daken on defense which means when people see you, theyll instantly lock onto you. I cant count the number of times ive skipped sentry daken teams and sniped down patchneto because of how much less damage i take when playing against that team comp. there is no case where sustainability is actually an issue because either
1. You use some other team comp thats sustainable to push to 800. Then you sentry daken with your 5 health packs up to 1100, which is relatively easy buying only iso boosts if youre like me and try to maximize hp gains.
2. You shield hop and have plenty of hp to shield and do 2-3 matches per run, in which case sustainability doesnt matter at all since you can wait for your health packs to regen inbetween shields.

At least in pvp, if you arent playing sentry daken above 800 points, you either dont have the characters or are doing something wrong, and thats a pretty oppressive place to be.

homeinvasion

Seriously don’t nerf Cmags or Sentry. What lunacy is this? Hear me out. The problem with both is not the actual character, nerfing them will make the problem persist. The underlying root of the issue is the core mechanics and maths. There is a reason Magic the Gathering persists, because the guy that invented it is a PHD of pure mathematics.

There is one simple thing that would bring these characters back in line with what they are supposed to do, fix most of the existing problems and as a consequence would bring most characters back into regular rotation or play lists. The fundamental reason that every team is Laken/ Cmags or Laken/ Sentry is that any time you try to have A + B in the same arena you have A * B the multiplication will always win. I am of course referring to strike tiles.

In and of themselves strike tiles aren't broken. A strike tile is basically an ability that takes several turns to resolve, that could go longer or go less, depending if it gets matched away, its the gamble you take. It’s the multiplication of strike tiles over cheap low damage abilities that is broken. Everyone has already worked this out and exploits it, and nerfing Sentry or Cmags is only a band aid solution at best.

The fundamental and ONLY problem with the game can be fixed by not multiplying abilities with strike tiles. Game fixed, no more issues.

Strike tiles become their own cumulatively larger damage abilities like they are supposed to, and all abilities do an amount of damage within an easily controlled parameter. Then you just have a scale of how much damage versus AP each ability costs and strike tile damage fits in there based off an average game length.

Say you have abilities (X) and you have strike tiles (Y)
3AP = X for ease of use, one match = 3 ap
X (or 3AP)= 1,000 damage
2X (or 6 AP) = 2,000 damage
3 X (or 9 AP) = 3,000 damage

Nice easy scalable damage

With strike tiles being something similar, say an average of 5 turns of match damage off each strike before being matched away – the only difference is that it could be more or less depending on how many turns of match damage it is on the board for.

Call it 200 damage for a strike tile we have the same thing (Y)
Y (or 3AP)= 1,000 damage (200 X 5 turns)
2Y (or 6ap) = 2,000 damage (400 X 5 turns)
3Y (or 9AP) = 3,000 damage (600 X 5 turns)
Both are nice steady increase.

The problem is you have two variables that need to be mutually exclusive

Lets use 12 AP and see the scales. (or using an ability for 6AP twice)
2 (2X) or 2 (2Y) = 2(2000) or 4,000 damage (from 12AP, so we are still on track here)
The problem again is even with just addition
3 AP for 1000 damage of strikes (Y)
Then we use the other 9AP on a 3AP ability (X) 3 times.
We go to
(Y+X) + (Y+X) +(Y+X) = 6,000 damage, so all of a sudden we are way ahead of the curve.
Or worse if we used 6AP on strikes then the other 6AP on abilities we are looking at either
(2Y + X) + (2Y +X)
= (2000 + 1000) + (2000 + 1000)
=6,000 (still ahead of the curve)
Or
2Y + 2X
(2000 + 2000)
=4,000 we are back on the curve, it is this variation that is the fundamental problem.

The numbers are way out. This is the fundamental problem. If you nerf Cmags or sentry without fixing this fundamental problem the issue will just be strike tiles * the next cheapest abilities in the game. Strike tiles should be match damage only, not anything from an ability.

yogi_

I am surprised that there is another thread about this matter.

Then again, we have been promised random boost and nerfs for months, so I guess I am not really surprised that there is another thread about this matter.

I would imagine that over time most of the current "top" characters will be nerfed to some degree or another. Just like the earlier groups of top characters - spidey, rags, thorverine, etc.

I mean in theory, Mags and Daken are already done (just hidden and pulled respectively) and I can't imagine Sentry's numbers aren't going to get lowered, even a little, eventually.

And so on and so on, the game continues...

Unknown

The only character that can sustain better than Sentry is Magneto since Magneto can often kill an entire team on the turn he has 5 blue AP. Let's imagine this scenario. You take 54 damage for World Rupture, and you made 3 green matches and fired off World Rupture with 3 Phermone Rages, and 10 CDs fired doing a total of 6024 damage per person (602 damage per World Rupture, which is less than value with 6 strike tiles up) while your team suffers 540X3 = 1620 damage.

In a parallel universe another guy has the same team with Thor instead of Sentry. 6024 damage per person, conveniently, is the average damage of two Call the Storms. In this parallel universe Thor has 9 green AP as well, and after the turn World Rupture fires off he has green match 3 every turn. He'd need 28 green AP so that's 19 green AP to go, so it takes him 7 turns to get 30 green AP to use 2 Call the Storms. The match damage for a level 166 is 79/70/61, so we'll take the middle value and assume the opponent just makes match 3 the whole time too at 210 each, doing 210*7 = 1470 damage. So if you were able to make a green match 10 out of 12 turns and your opponent somehow was never able to do better than match 3 damage, you'd come out of this encounter ahead by 150 HP. Remember that a 6K World Rupture is nothing special, while the Thor in the parallel universe had some unbelievably favorable board to make 10 green matches in 12 moves and even then this alternate universe Thor barely beat Sentry's efficiency.

Can you use World Rupture in an inefficient way? Sure, but it's not really that hard to hit an early green and fire them off while the enemy team is still near full health. It's trickier when some of them are close to death/dead, but usually by the time that happens they're likely close to being able to use an AP consuming move, and just about any damaging AP consuming move is going to set you back way more than the health you pay for World Rupture. The maximum damage you can take from World Rupture is 864X3 = 2592, and there are plenty of moves that do more than 2592 damage by itself.

OnesOwnGrief

My issue with the whole Sentry debate is not Sentry. It's Daken. The imbalance is completely slanted in his direction. Sentry + Hood I can deal with. Sentry + Daken is an entirely different matter. Even looking at the skills you can see how seriously slanted it is in Daken's favor to the point I'd call Daken the main damage dealer in that situation.

World Rupture - 7 Green AP ---Team Up Power---
Sentry flies into the heart of the battlefield, sending waves of kinetic energy rippling outward. Creates Countdown tiles that do 24 damage to enemies and 12 to allies. Countdown tiles are created on a board-centered X pattern.
Level Upgrades
Level 5: Impact extends further. Max: 1024 allies / 2784 enemies + 16*(ally strike - enemy protect).

Pheremone Rage - Purple Passive
(PASSIVE) Daken releases a scent that sets his enemies on edge, using their anger to his advantage. Whenever anyone makes a Green match, add a Red Strike tile to the board with a strength of 7.
Level Upgrades
Level 5: Creates 2 Strike tiles at 90% base strength..
Max Level: 2 Strength 68 Strike tiles.

In a perfect world, with no boost Sentry would only do the max damage without a strike tile. That's 174 per hit. Collecting 3 matches of Green or 2 with a match 4 or 5 and you end up 272 or 408 added damage per hit. With 3 matches Daken is pulling over twice the damage per tile.
That comes out to 6528 damage just from Daken. 9312 damage total...

If you ask me, 6528 (Daken) is far more than 2784 (Sentry). This should immediately cause a person to conclude that World Rupture needs to either change how its damage is calculated because Daken exploits Sentry's play style or Daken needs a change. Its just crazy how effective that is and downs everyone outside of Thor, Hulk, Sentry, and She-Hulk on its own.

I would personally go the route of changing Sentry so that World Rupture would behave the way it does but change how it works by making it unaffected by strike tiles. I'd also make Sacrifice into a different type of tile that only effects match damage and World Rupture exclusively. It would be a new type of tile. If they can make destroy effects generate or not generate AP, they can code this.

That change would not fundamentally change Sentry's skill set. It would be more high risk though for that type of clearing power. Daken can just continue being Daken for all I care after that point.

Unknown

World Rupture benefits up to 48 times from the application of strike tiles so yes, the vast majority of the damage comes from being paired with the best strike tile generator in the game (Daken). But if Sacrifice still works with World Rupture, 7g+8y to end the game is just way too low of a bar. If you give 14g+12y to Thor, that'd only take about half the health off a high end team and that's about as devastating an attack as you can get from a single person that isn't named Sentry. Even something like 12 black from BP + 14 green from Thor can't end a game instantly against high end opposition, so why should a character be able to do so with far less AP by himself?

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Thugpatrol wrote:

Phantron wrote:

All the talk about Sentry's drawbacks totally misses the point where ending the game early prevents a lot more further damage from taken. (snip snip....some interesting stuff...snip snip) There's nothing balanced about Sentry's abilities even in the absence of boosts. Taking damage to your team that is less than the other team would've done by match 3s had they survived is not a drawback.

You make a valid point, but you've also made something of an oversimplification when it comes to the actual issue of sustainability. It's not just how much damage you're taking but where that damage is going. (snip snip...some stuff I said...snip snip) The bottom line is other teams can present opportunities to minimize your health pack usage, but Sentry's burning through them no matter how you do it.

This might matter more if pvp was more about sustainability than it was about shield hopping. Yes, youre going to burn through health packs quickly as sentry/daken, but when you play a more sustainable, slower composition, youre just going to get stomped because 1. Youre not pushing as fast as sentry/daken and 2.you arent running sentry daken on defense which means when people see you, theyll instantly lock onto you. I cant count the number of times ive skipped sentry daken teams and sniped down patchneto because of how much less damage i take when playing against that team comp. there is no case where sustainability is actually an issue because either
1. You use some other team comp thats sustainable to push to 800. Then you sentry daken with your 5 health packs up to 1100, which is relatively easy buying only iso boosts if youre like me and try to maximize hp gains.
2. You shield hop and have plenty of hp to shield and do 2-3 matches per run, in which case sustainability doesnt matter at all since you can wait for your health packs to regen inbetween shields.
At least in pvp, if you arent playing sentry daken above 800 points, you either dont have the characters or are doing something wrong, and thats a pretty oppressive place to be.

When you're talking about shield hopping and short bursts, no conversation about how much damage you're taking is relevant, only how fast you're winning. If you win, spend three health packs, win again and shield for three hours the whole thing is moot. The only context in which damage taken that doesn't cause you to lose is relevant is in a situation where you are trying to sustain play over longer than a handful of matches, and that's not really what Sentry excels at, which is all I was pointing out in the first place.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Let's take a team of Hood + Sentry + Daken and assume all are max leveled. If Daken is boosted, he gets purple, green, black, and TU for 4/7 of the team's total damage intake. If Sentry is boosted, Daken gets purple and black. If Hood is boosted, Daken gets purple and green.

Against a hypothetical team that does 2000 damage in 10 turns... (snip snip...number crunching...snip snip). This of course assumes the AI never even made a decent cascade let alone fired off any damaging abilities during this extra 10 turns they have. In the past it may have possible to get improbably lucky when the AI only matched environment tiles for most of those turns, but now even that does damage and given AI's infinite supply of TU powers you'll almost certain to take a pretty big hit too from the TU powers.

First off, you're using a hypothetical team that you can only run in three out of currently twenty four possible featured 3* events, which is pretty much all they run. Not a real firm basis for making generalizations. And any talk of cascades only confuses the issue. You could take a bad cascade on turn two with your Sentry team and end up taking a lot of damage. You could also have one in your favor on turn eleven that ends the match for any other team. That's the power of the random, and where a lot of these theoretical arguments fall apart in practice. Yes you might get a quick three green matches with your team, or two and steal one, or hit a jackpot, or you might get a board so thin even Hood can't help you. You're trying to boil everything down to numbers and in practice it doesn't really work that way. You could take just as much enemy power damage in nine turns as you would in fifteen, and then you're still doing more damage to yourself with Sentry's own powers, while another team might be able to pass that extra match damage off somewhere else and not incur self-inflicted wounds on top.

If you're using boosts there's not much doubt you can roadkill people with Sentry more easily than other teams because you can get two matches away from winning before you even start. But that's not the premise you began with, at least not as I understood it to be.

Phantron wrote:

Yes World Rupture is unavoidable damage to your own team, but unless Daken is boosted he can tank at most 3 colors out of 7 in a PvP event because he will never have TU over a high level featured, and Sentry always gets yellow/red over him, and then there's whatever color that the featured character gets. Red/green/black is the most common combination and with such a character featured, Daken can only get purple! So there's no way you're going to funnel the damage away from the fragile character to begin with.

Again, you're using a limited case as the basis for a broad generalization. Red/Green/Black is the most common combination, at a whopping three out of twenty four again. Even if you throw in Deadpool, GSBW, and Storm, who also take two of Daken's colors, you're only up to six. So three quarters of the featured PvP's that don't meet your criteria, and that's before you bring Patch into the equation, another regenerator to hide people behind. The point still stands, it is possible to construct high functioning teams that are sustainable without Sentry despite taking longer to win. With him, not so much.