How to use X-Force?

bat_239

Managed to grow X-Force to 270lvl at 5/5/3 covers - and the only effect I see is that my pve levels grew significantly. Tried using him several times, but he does not look impressive at all! What am I doing wrong? What are the typical use cases for him, combos, typical character combinations?
Currently I use patch+laken (sometimes laken+falcon against low-health opponents or bp+lazy thor vs health chams) for pvp climbing and sentry+hood for shield hops. For pve (depending on situation) my teams are laken+falcon+lazy thor, hulk+patch+lazy thor or laken+hood+sentry - depending on situation. (All characters maxed) Do not see how X-Force can fit into any team, what role he would play?
Your suggestions would be much welcome, have almost everyone cover-maxed and tons of iso level-max a couple of 3stars, so feel free to suggest any combination!

NorthernPolarity

Number one rule of X-Force is, he's only amazing if you have a GOOD active ability that you can use the AP that you surgical for. The reason why he's probably bad for you is that your only good active ability in most, if not all of your of your teams is green! Look at your teams. Patch, Daken, Hood, LThor Sentry. Most of these characters hardly give you any surgical value (Surgicalling green goes straight into X-Force so the other skills are redundant, you can't spam chemical reaction or Sentry abilities, mjolnirs is eh). The only good abilities here to surgical are in yellow: Twin Pistols / Thunder Strike. Your number 1 priority should be to level up strong characters that have strong abilities in colors that you currently do NOT have. Aka, guys in red/blue/purple:
C. Mags - Strong red, blue
LCap - Strong red, okay blue
DP - Strong red, strong purple when surgicalled.

So on and so forth.

bat_239

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Number one rule of X-Force is, he's only amazing if you have a GOOD active ability that you can use the AP that you surgical for. The reason why he's probably bad for you is that your only good active ability in most, if not all of your of your teams is green! Look at your teams. Patch, Daken, Hood, LThor Sentry. Most of these characters hardly give you any surgical value (Surgicalling green goes straight into X-Force so the other skills are redundant, you can't spam chemical reaction or Sentry abilities, mjolnirs is eh). The only good abilities here to surgical are in yellow: Twin Pistols / Thunder Strike. Your number 1 priority should be to level up strong characters that have strong abilities in colors that you currently do NOT have. Aka, guys in red/blue/purple:
C. Mags - Strong red, blue
LCap - Strong red, okay blue
DP - Strong red, strong purple when surgicalled.

So on and so forth.

Ok, then probably I do not understand how Surgical Strike works
Imagine, I play BP event (so that the strongest enemy color is yellow). I run a team of BP (obviously), X-Force, Lazy Thor. I get 11 black AP (4 matches), do surgical - this does some damage (not that impressive) and brings me 8-9 yellow AP (which is not enough for Thunder strike). How this is better than calling Rage of Panther (4 matches) right away? Or going for Thunder Strike (4 matches) + Call The Storm?

NorthernPolarity

bat_239 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Number one rule of X-Force is, he's only amazing if you have a GOOD active ability that you can use the AP that you surgical for. The reason why he's probably bad for you is that your only good active ability in most, if not all of your of your teams is green! Look at your teams. Patch, Daken, Hood, LThor Sentry. Most of these characters hardly give you any surgical value (Surgicalling green goes straight into X-Force so the other skills are redundant, you can't spam chemical reaction or Sentry abilities, mjolnirs is eh). The only good abilities here to surgical are in yellow: Twin Pistols / Thunder Strike. Your number 1 priority should be to level up strong characters that have strong abilities in colors that you currently do NOT have. Aka, guys in red/blue/purple:
C. Mags - Strong red, blue
LCap - Strong red, okay blue
DP - Strong red, strong purple when surgicalled.

So on and so forth.

Ok, then probably I do not understand how Surgical Strike works
Imagine, I play BP event (so that the strongest enemy color is yellow). I run a team of BP (obviously), X-Force, Lazy Thor. I get 11 black AP (4 matches), do surgical - this does some damage (not that impressive) and brings me 8-9 yellow AP (which is not enough for Thunder strike). How this is better than calling Rage of Panther (4 matches) right away? Or going for Thunder Strike (4 matches) + Call The Storm?

Not that impressive? Surgical for 9 yellow tiles deals 4.5k damage, causes random board cascade, AND gets your 9 yellow AP. This is like getting 4.5k damage and board shakeup for 3AP, which is straight up crazy.

bat_239

Yeah, you're right, forgot about board shake-up
I guess I'll give X-Force another change! Thanks a lot!

Unknown

With the restriction of a fixed featured character, there are really only two ways to use X Force in PvP environment. Either you go with The Hood + featured and just have X Force power through with his abilities and not worry too much about getting the right colors with Surgical Strike (there's a very high number of characters with green as their strongest color anyway), or you go with Magneto which will have all but purple somewhat covered for Surgical Strike. I used to mess around with ideas like say swapping in Captain America if the enemy is strong in red (Sentry/Thor), but in the end as long as the featured character limitation doesn't go away you end up hurting yourself too much to do be swapping your only other available option just for a single color specialist.

bat_239

Phantron wrote:

With the restriction of a fixed featured character, there are really only two ways to use X Force in PvP environment. Either you go with The Hood + featured and just have X Force power through with his abilities and not worry too much about getting the right colors with Surgical Strike (there's a very high number of characters with green as their strongest color anyway), or you go with Magneto which will have all but purple somewhat covered for Surgical Strike. I used to mess around with ideas like say swapping in Captain America if the enemy is strong in red (Sentry/Thor), but in the end as long as the featured character limitation doesn't go away you end up hurting yourself too much to do be swapping your only other available option just for a single color specialist.

I like the idea of using X-Force with Hood, will give it a try.
As for pairing him with CMags, tried it in LR, don't like it. Magneto's powers are just not that strong nowadays.. And with Hood+Thor I win much faster than with X-Force+CMags

NorthernPolarity

bat_239 wrote:

Phantron wrote:

With the restriction of a fixed featured character, there are really only two ways to use X Force in PvP environment. Either you go with The Hood + featured and just have X Force power through with his abilities and not worry too much about getting the right colors with Surgical Strike (there's a very high number of characters with green as their strongest color anyway), or you go with Magneto which will have all but purple somewhat covered for Surgical Strike. I used to mess around with ideas like say swapping in Captain America if the enemy is strong in red (Sentry/Thor), but in the end as long as the featured character limitation doesn't go away you end up hurting yourself too much to do be swapping your only other available option just for a single color specialist.

I like the idea of using X-Force with Hood, will give it a try.
As for pairing him with CMags, tried it in LR, don't like it. Magneto's powers are just not that strong nowadays.. And with Hood+Thor I win much faster than with X-Force+CMags

That doesnt seem right at all, xf cmags is probably the fastest team out there right now except for sentry bombing. Are you prioritizing black/red with that team, and casting cmags red into xf black? The resulting cascades should easily win you the game.

bat_239

NorthernPolarity wrote:

That doesnt seem right at all, xf cmags is probably the fastest team out there right now except for sentry bombing. Are you prioritizing black/red with that team, and casting cmags red into xf black? The resulting cascades should easily win you the game.

You're right, I was not playing XF-CMag team the right way. Was going for black, not red. And red should come first, black after red. (then green, then blue, then yellow)
Tried Hood+XF+CMags in balance of power - and the results are well beyond my expectations! Quite fast and much safer compared to Sentry's Sacrifice + WR.
Plan to use this team in Simulator and some pve fights ) Not sure, how good is this team on defence, but be prepared, I'm going after you!

MattC02

bat_239 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

That doesnt seem right at all, xf cmags is probably the fastest team out there right now except for sentry bombing. Are you prioritizing black/red with that team, and casting cmags red into xf black? The resulting cascades should easily win you the game.

Which are you guys casting first, red or black? Does it matter? I haven't had a lot of cascades when I cast black first...which I interpreted as "casting red into black" but maybe that's not right?

Unknown

MattC02 wrote:

bat_239 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

That doesnt seem right at all, xf cmags is probably the fastest team out there right now except for sentry bombing. Are you prioritizing black/red with that team, and casting cmags red into xf black? The resulting cascades should easily win you the game.

Which are you guys casting first, red or black? Does it matter? I haven't had a lot of cascades when I cast black first...which I interpreted as "casting red into black" but maybe that's not right?

Red first to get rid of Team Up tiles, which can ramp up Hood's AP steal, lead to cascades and also put a few more colored tiles on the board that will get triggered by black, which will often lead to huge cascades and should give Dormammu's Aid a confirmed steal in the remaining colors.

Unknown

If you can destroy more than 10 tiles at once with Surgical Strike you probably want to use Surgical Strike first, because there's a very good chance Polarized Force will end up matching some of those tiles and thus significantly decreasing the damage done by Surgical Strike (same AP, but you don't get 500 or so per tile destroyed). Under most normal circumstances you'd do Polarized Force before anything else to get rid of the teamup tiles which are typically the least valuable so you get more other tiles to work with. This is also true with X Force, as a board without TUs will tend to give you more useful cascades after an X Force versus one with TUs.

hurcules

Phantron wrote:

This is also true with X Force, as a board without TUs will tend to give you more useful cascades after an X Force versus one with TUs.

People should already do this due to added damage from regular tiles. TU tiles do less damage when destroyed by X Force.