balancing the Big 5

Unknown

I've thought a little more about it, an here's what I think they should do:
Start with sentry. Make world rupture only trigger strike tiles once. He goes from op as hell to the high risk-high reward character he was meant to be. Still strong, not overly so.
Then, look at daken. If nerfing sentry balances him out, leave him. If not, lightly nerf his strike tile generation. Either make it have a required 4 or 5 purple before starting, make it only work on enemy or your own green matches (not both), or turn it into an active ability based on the number of green ap both teams have.
Cmags should be easy. Make his blue cost 8, make his red cost 5 and proportionately increase its power. Blue is still strong, but now cannot be chained. Red is still fast and works good with strikes but can't be spammed.
Now patch is balanced with the cmags nerf.
Thor is tough and should be the last to be nerfed. If you combined 2* thor's green damage onto one character, it would kill any 2*. If you did the same with 3* Thor, it would kill most 3* and leave the rest with little left. So he's proportionately as strong as 2* Thor, who no one is arguing is unbalanced. But at the same time, a 10000 unconditional damage attack is a little high, in addition to the fact that the rest of the big 5 has been balanced already according to this plan. I say increase the cost of his yellow and green a little, maybe 3 or 4 each.

homeinvasion

so I had a horrible thought last night - the only real thing keeping Hood in check at the moment is the prevalence of Daken. I think if they nerf Daken then every team would have to have hood or be left behind. Then we need to start the thread again because every team is Hood/ OBW/ Insert favorite character here. I still like the suggestion of making his strike tiles and Heat abilities work off the same color. I.e. you can either regen or drop strikes it is very in line with his comic.

Unknown

Hood and OBW were always quite broken and only kept in check by even more broken characters. The effective damage done by AP steal ability is simply off the charts.

That said, both Hood and OBW have a similar ranking pattern in the 3 categories of a character's power. That is, they're all:

Synergy: OMG
Damage (as in damage attributed to their own direct damage skill): Practically nothing
Durability: Practically nothing

Although this can still be overpowered, there is at least an obvious weakness. If your team is anyone + OBW + The Hood, and whoever that third guy is dead, you no longer have any way of winning the game under any realistic scenario. That might not be a sufficient drawback but at least it's a drawback. The current top tier characters no drawbacks. Most of them can be their own team if needed and yet they also work well in combination with other characters, and all but Magneto are extremely hard to kill.

At any rate these two characters are easy to fix. They should simply do more damage but have less synergy.

homeinvasion

Phantron wrote:

Hood and OBW were always quite broken and only kept in check by even more broken characters. The effective damage done by AP steal ability is simply off the charts.

That said, both Hood and OBW have a similar ranking pattern in the 3 categories of a character's power. That is, they're all:

Synergy: OMG
Damage (as in damage attributed to their own direct damage skill): Practically nothing
Durability: Practically nothing

Although this can still be overpowered, there is at least an obvious weakness. If your team is anyone + OBW + The Hood, and whoever that third guy is dead, you no longer have any way of winning the game under any realistic scenario. That might not be a sufficient drawback but at least it's a drawback. The current top tier characters no drawbacks. Most of them can be their own team if needed and yet they also work well in combination with other characters, and all but Magneto are extremely hard to kill.

At any rate these two characters are easy to fix. They should simply do more damage but have less synergy.

I really like your posts Phantron, they are always thought out, proactive and helpful. Thanks mate

Unknown

I was just thinking that if this game followed a standard P2W structure where higher rarity = strictly better, then Magneto/Sentry/Thor/Daken would be at least 5* characters (and maybe even 6*) that would normally cost thousands to max out. That's how most P2W games get around these problems because if it costs thousands of dollars to max out any of those guys then it's actually pretty easy to rationalize why those guys are allowed to be so broken if only Cologneisseur have them (because he's rich!), but of course this isn't the case here. We're basically all given easy access to 5* power characters and the game was never designed to make any sense with characters that powerful.

Unknown

ITT: People who understand game design bashing their heads against the brick wall that is the average gamer.

What makes me sad about MPQ is that I like playing it. I have lost all faith that the developers of this game understand what they're doing. MPQ could be SO MUCH more fun than it is.

No one on these forums can argue that the big 5 are MILES ahead of the 4* characters. That should be the first warning sign. How long has X-Force been absolute trash? It's insulting that a Yellow X-Force cover is the prize for Season 5. Forget comparing X-Force to the other 4* character, compare him to the other Wolverine characters. I would rather use the 2* version. The let characters like Thor and Sentry have MASSIVE amounts of HP and damage and utility... for no reason. Just because. It boggles the mind that people think this is ok design.

(EDIT: Just saw the post about the X-Force rework coming and my statement stands. A very small percent of the player-base reads the forum, so all the average players sees is the worst color cover of one of the worst characters as a prize for grinding all month.)

In terms of the big 5:

cMags: This guy is broken and everyone knows why. The kind of board control he provides is off the charts and if you boost then there's a very real chance the opponent doesn't actually get a turn. I think there are some really cool things that could be done with a character who's utility revolves around leveraging small shifts to the board in order to provide bigger bonuses to your other teammates. That's always felt like Magneto's core flavor to me. Sadly, I think we'll be delivered a festering pile of extremely small kittens.

LazyThor: The God of Thunder has all the problems he's always had, just 3*-ified. Remember when 2* Thor was nerfed and they had a big post talking about what they did and why (this also included the Wolvie nerfs)? In that post they said Thor's powers were still doing more damage than they should be given their AP cost and utility, but they left it anyway. That blew my mind! Here you have a developer that established a baseline for the power of their characters and decided "ehhh... screw it, he's Thor" and ignored them at absolutely no cost. They were going to piss everyone off with the nerfs anyway, so why not take the opportunity to actually bring the character in line with the your established baseline of balance. LazyThor is just more of the same. Tons of HP, tons of utility and... wait for it... tons of damage. I'm genuinely surprised he doesn't also get tons of regen out of combat. There's the argument that "he's too slow" yeah, but compared to whom? Outside of the big 5, what character is LazyThor so much slower than that it hurts his viability? Spoiler alert: no one. You can't use "wildly overpowered" as your baseline for whether or not someone is too fast or too slow. A real comparison would be LazyCap. The two characters came out at the same time and were the first to model the trend of "lazy" characters. Not only is Thor faster, but his powers are far more devastating. For the sake of not cherry-picking my examples, though, let's look at some other 3* characters.
Punisher: he's a bit faster than Thor, I feel, but he has way less HP and his powers are not as game-ending. You don't get to 12 green with Punisher and one-shot someone.
Black Panther: pretty much nothing is as slow as getting full value out of Panther. Blue needs to go off a couple times for it to be worth the AP and his yellow can be pretty variable in power because of the team-up tile gimmick. BP's black power is the only one that's on-par with something Thor does and trades the increased damage and AP cost for giving your opponent AP, which feels fine. Oh yeah, Panther also has less HP.
Human Torch: waaaaaay less HP, but his red is faster than any of Thor's powers. Green is an awkward power on Torch because of the reliance on both a stockpile of green AP and needing to protect the countdown as best you can, which does not a fast power make. The black on Human Torch is deceptively slow because of the way it drains your AP and often requires waiting until you've used other powers to not "waste" any; maybe there are people who just fire off the black and forget the consequences, but I don't think I would call that particularly optimal.
Spider-Man: Doesn't get much slower than this. Spidey got so ravaged by the nerf that it's easy to forget about him other than as a warning to other strong characters. What if his protect tiles generated no matter who matched them? What if his blue not only stunned someone, but also ate protect tiles to do damage or heal his team or increase stun duration even more and, oh yeah, also generated more purple so you can just get those protect tiles it ate back instantly? Doesn't that sound like fun to play against? He also has a yellow power. I dunno... it costs a good amount of AP and getting the full heal out of it requires an additional 15 blue. He also has less HP than Thor.
Iron Man 40: The Lord Supreme of over-costed powers that don't feel worth using by the time you have the AP for them. Ballistic Salvo is the most over designed power in the game. Why does the 5th cover add a stun? Why does it randomly destroy a couple of tiles? Why does it also drain your other colors of AP? Why is it still worse than Call the Storm? Were they desperate to justify the obscene AP cost so they just threw whatever they could think of onto this thing? His yellow can be pretty fast and can also accelerate your other characters, but the cost also scales incredibly high so how fast this is gets pretty variable. His red costs 13 and drains your AP. Oh, btw, still has less HP than Thor.
There are so many other 3* that could be compared to Thor, but most of them just lose for no reason other than... I dunno... legacy? Thor was heads-and-shoulders above the other 2* for so long (with Wolvie and Widow excepted) that I guess they decided to give him his time at 3*.

Patch: I agree with what seems to be the prevailing sentiment on this guy: he might be overpowered, but not by a whole lot. I think Best There Is is a well-designed power. It requires thought both in its use and in roster selection (since you need his symbols) which is unique in MPQ. The gimmick of giving your opponent strike tiles is interesting, for sure, and might end up balancing the character in a world without cMags. As a personal thing, I hate his healing factor. It is horrible and unfun and requires almost nothing of the person using it. All the stuff they said about this healing factor when they took it off of 2* wolvie applies here, too. I think the 4* heal should go to 2*, 2* should go to 3* and the 3* should be bumped up to 4*. Or they should just delete 4*... knowing that thing exists just pisses me off.

Sentry: The second biggest offender. Remember that time IceIX said they weren't worried about power-creep? L-o-freakin'-l. This guy is why people say Thor is too slow and that's not acceptable. In no universe should this have ever been released as-is. That said, Senty's problems are easily fixed. They're almost exclusively number-related, which is relatively forgivable. Maybe make some powers single-target. Maybe he does more damage to himself/team. Maybe he has less HP. Tons of ways to make him work. The concept is interesting and the mechanics behind the powers are solid enough that not much really needs to change about this guy.

Daken: Everything about this character I hate. Everything. His strike tiles generating off of any matches is a horrible mechanic. It feels simultaneously punishing and inevitable and when, in the history of video games, has that ever fun? (Yes, Dark Souls, you're the exception that proves the rule.) As has been said already in this thread, there's no winning against this guy. Either you avoid matching green, giving up the strongest color in the game, and hope the computer doesn't match green either, or you just bite the bullet and race to the win. Against a guy who gets to regen. So that's a thing. The mechanic is awful. It's not fun when LazyDaken gets it, it wasn't fun when normal Daken got it, and it isn't even fun when Bullseye has it. Stop using this as a crutch for power at the expense of the player experience. Yeah, it might feel good to play WITH, but people have to play against this garbage, too. Nothing is more demoralizing than going out of your way to avoid green just to have RNG cascade you into 2 green matches. And then there's his blue. I think this is the single worst-deigned power in the game. Five blue AP to do over twenty-three hundred damage and create two green tiles at the cost of four strike tiles. The created tiles aren't even entirely random, since they convert blue and you've been matching some. This power just doesn't make any sense. What is it supposed to be doing? If you want people cashing in damage over time for a burst, then why does it create green tiles? Why are blue tiles, specifically, turned to green? At max level, each strike tile needs to be trigger 4.5 times before they do more damage than Chemical Reaction. How is that reasonable? Why is this color blue? It is so wildly different from every other blue power in this game that it just makes no sense. What DOES make sense is making this green. Then you have a case where Daken wants to match green, for increasing amounts of damage because of strike tile generation, before cashing in on a big hit with Chemical Reaction. Something like that creates actual trade-offs and critical decisions. Hell, even the green-tile-generation makes sense at that point (kind of... it's weird for a green power to make green tiles, but whatever its no worse than what exists now). This character is just a mash of poor design decisions. Unlike Sentry, these are not things that can be fixed with numbers. Either the strike tiles are nerfed to the point of meaninglessness or they're oppressive in their method of creation. There is no middle ground.

(EDIT: Because I know it's going to come up, calling Chemical Reaction a 2300 damage ability for 5 AP is exactly how discussion should happen. In a game like this, powers have to be balanced around the best-use scenario. Player's WILL find ways of turning "best-use" into "every-use" and a power will quickly be revealed as over-powered or under-powered. When Patch gets talked about on the forums, it is almost exclusively in the context of "Patchneto" because that is his best-use case and it is incredibly broken.)

I don't really know why I spent time typing any of this out. People are either going to agree or disagree and I don't really care which. This game could be so much more than it is and it kills me that there have been so few attempts at creating interesting, balanced gameplay. I guess I hope that one of the devs actually reads this thread and maybe something someone says will inspire a change. I'm not going to hold my breath, but it's a nice thought.

homeinvasion

Kaden wrote:

Player's WILL find ways of turning "best-use" into "every-use"

Inspired.

Excellent post. Quality read mate, ty. The event that made me realize Sentry was broken was playing sentry/ patch and got to 16 green then let go a berserker's into world rupture to tank the game and just finish it, the noticed I was only taking 60 damage or so a tick while the other team was taking 2K plus each a tick, not realizing that strike tiles and defense tiles are a one way street on this highway to hell. Surely even just changing that would bring him in line then at least SOMETHING counters Sentry.

famousfoxking

Kaden wrote:

Daken: ... This power just doesn't make any sense. What is it supposed to be doing? If you want people cashing in damage over time for a burst, then why does it create green tiles? Why are blue tiles, specifically, turned to green?

Well, blue tiles are specifically turned green to A) lower the number of blue tiles on the board and bring heat closer to activating and increase the number of green tiles so that Pheremone Rage has more fuel. Conceptually, it's rather meant to be like Sunder: LDaken is theoretically trading health for damage (both in terms of direct damage from the power and potential damage from more strike tiles). I assume it is at least not yellow so that it also doesn't negatively impact regeneration of any of the Wolverines.

Turning blue tiles green also, theoretically acts as a limit on how often the power gets used: you can blow it early game, but using it lowers the number of blue tiles available, making it slower to cast later on. In that way, it's sort of the opposite of Psylocke and HT's reds: it gets more expensive after it's used (because there are fewer blue tiles on the board to pick up and cast with). It's so cheap that doesn't really work, but that would appear to be the idea.

The power isn't green because then LDaken would be rewarded twice for making green matches: not only would he gain strike tiles, but he would also gain fuel for a green active. Making Chemical Reaction green would be a horrible mistake, and ultimately make LDaken more powerful.

Other than the cost and the art, Chemical Reaction doesn't bother me.

Unknown

I think Chemical Reaction works in theory, but currently the payoff for the strike tiles is too low so you almost never use it unless it ends the game or at least kills someone. That said they can't exactly increase the damage because then it'd be way too strong, so the only way this ability would make sense is by lowering the strike tile damage by a lot, which would then make Chemical Reaction look like a good deal. So this ability only make sense if you put a significant nerf on Phermone Rage. Talk about a badly designed ability where it's only useful if you nerfed yourself!