*** Blade (Daywalker) ***

Unknown

His green will trigger the question is at what cost? Ignoring skills that can reshape the board like Polarized Force, it's not like you'll have a board where you start with 13 red and you take away a match and let it sit there for a while. What's almost certain to happen is you just never touch red and let it keep on build up so you're likely to get a board that's increasing dangerous. Now it doesn't take too long for his strike tile to get going but it also doesn't take too long before the AI do something with the pile of red sitting around, so it's a matter of how much risk you want to take. The AI could just match away TUs but they might indeed just take the pile of reds available too. Depending on who you're fighting, Thor 3* might be okay to accept that risk in PvP but not PvE (because he has 5r in all PvE). Sentry would be kind of risky even at level 3 Supernova. The green is probably better for PvP simply because PvP opponents don't get to have 5/5/5 covers and players tend to sacrifice the red covers due to red being slightly weaker than green/yellow for similar functions, but again, even a level 3 Supernova isn't something you can take lightly, so it really depends on who you're fighting too.

GrumpySmurf1002

Blade's purple benefits from a maximum of 6 tiles, so everything after that is greed. At 4+ Green, 3 turns gets your 6 tiles out there, and then you start scooping up the dangerous red tiles if need be.

In the larger sense, his strike tiles are a happy accident. It should be obvious that with obvious match-4 or match 5-potential, it's not worth leaving the red out there. Board management supercedes the need to spam his strike tiles, because ultimately he's just an offensive support character, much like Psylocke. Your big boys are going to do their damage whether or not his green triggers, and the extra damage lost from protecting red isn't going to mean a ton in a single match.

Unknown

Fievel wrote:

I had a strange issue last night where I used his and it was stealing from a character who's strongest color was Anybody else have this come up?

Are you sure it wasn't stealing based on a downed character's strongest color? I think, but am not sure, that I've observed that happening.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Hello everyone and Happy Halloween!

I'd like to direct you to a cool new blog post that went up today at the Demiurge Studios site. The post, written by Casey Malone, explores the design concepts and powers of Marvel Puzzle Quest's latest addition- Blade!

You can find it here: http://www.demiurgestudios.com/blog/des ... daywalker/

"Design of Blade (Daywalker)"
Quote:
"The first thing we considered when figuring out Blade was his, uh... blade. His sword! Representing Blade attacking you with a sword in an ability seems easy at first, but looking at the roster of Marvel Puzzle Quest characters we already have characters with two swords (Deadpool), a psychic sword (Psylocke), a big ol' battle axe (Ares), and characters with up to three tiny swords on each hand (I think you know who I'm talking about). So a big question when designing these abilities isn't about what kinds of attacks Blade can make, but HOW he makes them. The answer, for Blade, is ruthlessly."

Unknown

After playing with him in the Gauntlet, I'm going 3/5/5. He's NOT a support character, he's a Punisher/Psylocke type glass cannon.

I think people are misjudging his green because it's a passive that performs like an active, not a passive - you don't NEED it to trigger every single turn, you don't need to try to keep the board flooded with red; you just need to play normally and at some point (hopefully early) it's likely he's going to rapidly spit out six sizeable strike tiles like a souped-up Judgement. It's awesome.

Unknown

I think his green should be considered a gift. I don't see how you can easily integrate that into a viable generic strategy because red is prevalent even in PvP and even more so in PvE.

I also don't think people should worry too much about strike tiles when it comes to his purple because it's basically 3200 damage in 4 turns which is already better than Escape Plan on a bad day (when it gets matched immediately) and I've a lot of cases of using Escape Plan on a bad day. Note that unlike Escape Plan it is quite possible to protect the attack tiles whereas Escape Plan's placement is completely random. Again if you happen to have some strike tiles up at the time of using his purple consider that a free gift from the game, but you don't need any strike tiles for an ability that pumps out roughly 800 damage worth of attack tile for 10 purple.

I'm leaning toward 3/5/5 now because it seems like if you want AP steal you'd run either The Hood or X Force (Surgical Strike strictly outclasses Nightstalker), and stealing 2 at a time should be sufficient for almost any scenario other than a case where you've say Ares + 2 Pyros. In general there's only 1 in 3 chance that you'd have matching pump color versus the villian's strongest color so it's not a likely scenario.

ThatOneGuyjp189512

the biggest thing to me, is this....his green is so damn situational, you're gonna be ignoring the red on the board for a couple strike tiles a turn? me i consider it an afterthought, in my extensive playtime with him in PVE and PVP with my maxed Blade, his green activated in maybe....half the matches, and when it did actually activate, it was gone within a couple turns cause of the amount of red on the board. Exactly twice did it activate right away, twice...out of at least a couple dozen matches i ran him with. Ignoring the red on the board just for a couple extra strikes could lead to crazy cascades which against a good red power(hello sentry and Cmags!) it'll mean the crippling of one character or death.
3 gives you 1 strength 89 tile as opposed to 2 58's....sure it's two, but they are 65% weaker than just the single one, and if there's two there's a good chance that one or both will get matched right away cause for them to appear there's already a ton of red on the board. Daken does that exact same job, there's no conditions other than matching green, and he's taking away the most powerful color in the game to do it, as mentioned to get blade's strikes you're letting the AI get free reign on the red and match any strike tiles you've earned.
Meanwhile 5 in Black(to me 5 in pink is the essential power so that's a given to me on any of his builds) you get meh damage(1877 at 166) but you get a 3 AP steal on the board, which against goons is basically unlimited AP for you, if you're down to one goon you'll get two different colors cause their strengths are even(most likely a bug) and that will win you the game, and that's not even mentioning the insanity that is when you get an awesome cascade to cast it twice and have 6 ap from a stronger color a turn, granted once their color is gone the CD's just sort of....there, but 2ap steal as opposed to 3ap steal is a different of 2 turns for 6 as opposed to 3 and in this game one turn can mean death,

Unknown

I think I've decided he's getting a first 13 covers build and I'll sort out the specifics later. I'm leaning towards 3/5/5, but I don't think he has truly bad builds, just less good ones.

Unknown

kalirion wrote:

Fievel wrote:

I had a strange issue last night where I used his and it was stealing from a character who's strongest color was Anybody else have this come up?

Are you sure it wasn't stealing based on a downed character's strongest color? I think, but am not sure, that I've observed that happening.

That could be. I know Yelena was one of the other enemies, but don't remember the 3rd.

NorthernPolarity

ThatOneGuyjp189512 wrote:

the biggest thing to me, is this....his green is so damn situational, you're gonna be ignoring the red on the board for a couple strike tiles a turn? me i consider it an afterthought, in my extensive playtime with him in PVE and PVP with my maxed Blade, his green activated in maybe....half the matches, and when it did actually activate, it was gone within a couple turns cause of the amount of red on the board. Exactly twice did it activate right away, twice...out of at least a couple dozen matches i ran him with. Ignoring the red on the board just for a couple extra strikes could lead to crazy cascades which against a good red power(hello sentry and Cmags!) it'll mean the crippling of one character or death.
3 gives you 1 strength 89 tile as opposed to 2 58's....sure it's two, but they are 65% weaker than just the single one, and if there's two there's a good chance that one or both will get matched right away cause for them to appear there's already a ton of red on the board. Daken does that exact same job, there's no conditions other than matching green, and he's taking away the most powerful color in the game to do it, as mentioned to get blade's strikes you're letting the AI get free reign on the red and match any strike tiles you've earned.
Meanwhile 5 in Black(to me 5 in pink is the essential power so that's a given to me on any of his builds) you get meh damage(1877 at 166) but you get a 3 AP steal on the board, which against goons is basically unlimited AP for you, if you're down to one goon you'll get two different colors cause their strengths are even(most likely a bug) and that will win you the game, and that's not even mentioning the insanity that is when you get an awesome cascade to cast it twice and have 6 ap from a stronger color a turn, granted once their color is gone the CD's just sort of....there, but 2ap steal as opposed to 3ap steal is a different of 2 turns for 6 as opposed to 3 and in this game one turn can mean death,

1. Why are you trying to optimize for goon fights, which are the easiest fights in the game? Your logic for black relies heavily on that fact, but against 3 goons, do you really need a character specialized to deal with them? Against character + 2 goons, there is a very high probability that black won't steal the goon's color if the character doesn't share that color, which means that black only works if you down the character first, at which point its dumb since the hardest part of the fight is destroying the character in the first place.

2. "just for a couple of extra strikes" seems to be completely understating the power of green. If I told you Blade gave you FREE judgement level strike tiles over the course of three turns for not matching any red, you would think that that was a pretty good character right? The ability is clearly more situational than that, but the way you describe it is as if it's completely irrelevant. You obviously try to deny red if the AI is going for red and is dangerously close to a super nova, but it can't be that hard to start the match not denying red, get your judgements worth of strike tiles, and be done with it.

The way I see it, 3->5 green doubles the speed at which you can maximize purples strength, which is pretty relevant when as you say, the tiles stop spawning after a couple of turns and boosts its power by a non-negligible amount. The real question is whether 3->5 black is worth it, and an extra 700 damage and conditionally stealing 1AP just doesn't seem that important for longer matches. Again, like I said before, 3/5/5 is probably optimal if you want to use blade as a sustained damage guy for longer matches, 5/3/5 is better if you're using him to push in easy, fast matches such as climbing pre 800 in PvP, with 3/5/5 probably being the more rounded build overall.

Unknown

I don't see going 3->5 black being useful except some specialized PvE circumstances. In any case where you really need the drain you'd be better off running X Force or The Hood instead. Even if these characters aren't available, it's hard to see a situation where you need to drain 3 AP instead of 2 AP each turn unless it's say Ares + 2 Pyros and there's only 1 out of 3 chance the villian's strongest color matches the pump color. Ironically that would've worked rather well on the Black Panther + Muscle node that gave everyone a lot of headache in the last Simulator but I don't think you can count on fights like that to build a character around. 2 AP a turn is sufficient for any villian + 1 goon scenario since goons only generate 2 AP a turn at most (and quite a few do only 1 AP a turn). The only characters that cannot use their highest match damage is Falcon and Daken, so it should be very unlikely to have a large number of AP to drain to begin with where doing 3 versus 2 matters.

ThatOneGuyjp189512

Ben Grimm wrote:

I think I've decided he's getting a first 13 covers build and I'll sort out the specifics later. I'm leaning towards 3/5/5, but I don't think he has truly bad builds, just less good ones.

the fact that i've seen more math busted out in this thread than any other character and there is a ton of debate on his builds tells you how flexible of a character he is. Good job D3, good job

Unknown

Thanks for all the positive news about Blade guys, lol. I ended up splurging and grabbing a 42 pack for Blade because I couldn't wait. Didn't pull even 1 Blade, but I did get a surprising amount of 3*Dakens, win-win!

ThatOneGuyjp189512

NorthernPolarity wrote:

ThatOneGuyjp189512 wrote:

the biggest thing to me, is this....his green is so damn situational, you're gonna be ignoring the red on the board for a couple strike tiles a turn? me i consider it an afterthought, in my extensive playtime with him in PVE and PVP with my maxed Blade, his green activated in maybe....half the matches, and when it did actually activate, it was gone within a couple turns cause of the amount of red on the board. Exactly twice did it activate right away, twice...out of at least a couple dozen matches i ran him with. Ignoring the red on the board just for a couple extra strikes could lead to crazy cascades which against a good red power(hello sentry and Cmags!) it'll mean the crippling of one character or death.
3 gives you 1 strength 89 tile as opposed to 2 58's....sure it's two, but they are 65% weaker than just the single one, and if there's two there's a good chance that one or both will get matched right away cause for them to appear there's already a ton of red on the board. Daken does that exact same job, there's no conditions other than matching green, and he's taking away the most powerful color in the game to do it, as mentioned to get blade's strikes you're letting the AI get free reign on the red and match any strike tiles you've earned.
Meanwhile 5 in Black(to me 5 in pink is the essential power so that's a given to me on any of his builds) you get meh damage(1877 at 166) but you get a 3 AP steal on the board, which against goons is basically unlimited AP for you, if you're down to one goon you'll get two different colors cause their strengths are even(most likely a bug) and that will win you the game, and that's not even mentioning the insanity that is when you get an awesome cascade to cast it twice and have 6 ap from a stronger color a turn, granted once their color is gone the CD's just sort of....there, but 2ap steal as opposed to 3ap steal is a different of 2 turns for 6 as opposed to 3 and in this game one turn can mean death,

1. Why are you trying to optimize for goon fights, which are the easiest fights in the game? Your logic for black relies heavily on that fact, but against 3 goons, do you really need a character specialized to deal with them? Against character + 2 goons, there is a very high probability that black won't steal the goon's color if the character doesn't share that color, which means that black only works if you down the character first, at which point its dumb since the hardest part of the fight is destroying the character in the first place.

2. "just for a couple of extra strikes" seems to be completely understating the power of green. If I told you Blade gave you FREE judgement level strike tiles over the course of three turns for not matching any red, you would think that that was a pretty good character right? The ability is clearly more situational than that, but the way you describe it is as if it's completely irrelevant. You obviously try to deny red if the AI is going for red and is dangerously close to a super nova, but it can't be that hard to start the match not denying red, get your judgements worth of strike tiles, and be done with it.

The way I see it, 3->5 green doubles the speed at which you can maximize purples strength, which is pretty relevant when as you say, the tiles stop spawning after a couple of turns and boosts its power by a non-negligible amount. The real question is whether 3->5 black is worth it, and an extra 700 damage and conditionally stealing 1AP just doesn't seem that important for longer matches. Again, like I said before, 3/5/5 is probably optimal if you want to use blade as a sustained damage guy for longer matches, 5/3/5 is better if you're using him to push in easy, fast matches such as climbing pre 800 in PvP, with 3/5/5 probably being the more rounded build overall.

I just prefer stronger strike tiles for my characters, and if there's 2 strike tiles out going on red and red is the reason they're on the board to me means that they'll get matched quite quickly. I would rather have the chance to get 1 extra AP per turn and some extra damage.

Unknown

There's no meaningful difference between say 2 strike tile at a strength of 1 versus 1 strike tile at a strength of 2 in this game as long as Falcon is not involved (and Falcon prefers more strike tiles anyway, and less strike tiles for opponent with Redwing). I don't consider the purple to be too dependent on the number of strike tiles because trying to setup a 6 strike tiles is likely overkill and can easily backfire, so you should still play a game the same way you'd normally play with Blade and make the red matches whenever they'd normally make sense to regardless of the number of strike tiles that are on the board. Yes having more strike tiles means it's more likely some of them will be placed in bad spots but having fewer of them means if they do get placed in a bad spot you stand to lose a lot more. It seems fairly improbable you'll saturate the board with strike tiles since you'd need at least 10 strike tiles before you can do that (need that to add more in the first place) so I don't think that scenario has to be considered.

ThatOneGuyjp189512

another thing to consider is that when you get his CD out, it's in a random spot, so you have no idea how long you'll be stealing AP for, and i'd rather be getting 9 over 3 turns as opposed to 6. His red is entirely a board dependent passive which is why i chose 5/5/3 over 3/5/5 or 4/5/4(my second choice personally). Board dependency really just means it won't activate that much, i consider the strike tiles when they do activate a bonus to two already good powers. I usually run him with Daken so the strike tiles thing is just redundant with him, Daken's pink does the exact same job as blade's green but you're taking away the strongest color in the game as opposed to leaving a ton of red on the board for the AI to cascade.

GuntherBlobel

Again, I love these!

I like to understand the "story" that is created by playing the abilities, which isn't always clear (why does Panther's Rage give the enemy AP?). But this was nice, because I couldn't image what was going on with "Keep your enemies closer." I've got a better idea now (at least why it's a Purple power and what the created tiles represent) and I really appreciate that.

Unknown

ThatOneGuyjp189512 wrote:

another thing to consider is that when you get his CD out, it's in a random spot, so you have no idea how long you'll be stealing AP for, and i'd rather be getting 9 over 3 turns as opposed to 6. His red is entirely a board dependent passive which is why i chose 5/5/3 over 3/5/5 or 4/5/4(my second choice personally). Board dependency really just means it won't activate that much, i consider the strike tiles when they do activate a bonus to two already good powers. I usually run him with Daken so the strike tiles thing is just redundant with him, Daken's pink does the exact same job as blade's green but you're taking away the strongest color in the game as opposed to leaving a ton of red on the board for the AI to cascade.

Just taking away all available matches before firing the ability should prevent the tile from being immediately matched. It's a CD on green so it should be easy to make all the green matches first because it's pretty much the most valuable color to begin with. From a probablistic point of view let's say both players match 4 tiles a turn then you'd need 4 turns before there's an expected 50% (32 tiles out of 64) that the CD is destroyed, which is 8 AP drained. Since only Falcon and Daken have no activated abilities on their strongest color, it'd be relatively rare to drain even 8 AP because if they had more than that then they would've already used the ability. Yes you can potentially have it out and let them make more matches of that color and drain again but it's not like the AI ever matches in a pattern that remotely matches human expectations unless you're giving the AI some match 4s of their strongest color. The only case I can see where draining 3 a turn matters over 2 is if the goons are pumping the same color as the strongest color of the villian, but that's a very specialized situation.

ThatOneGuyjp189512

Phantron wrote:

ThatOneGuyjp189512 wrote:

another thing to consider is that when you get his CD out, it's in a random spot, so you have no idea how long you'll be stealing AP for, and i'd rather be getting 9 over 3 turns as opposed to 6. His red is entirely a board dependent passive which is why i chose 5/5/3 over 3/5/5 or 4/5/4(my second choice personally). Board dependency really just means it won't activate that much, i consider the strike tiles when they do activate a bonus to two already good powers. I usually run him with Daken so the strike tiles thing is just redundant with him, Daken's pink does the exact same job as blade's green but you're taking away the strongest color in the game as opposed to leaving a ton of red on the board for the AI to cascade.

Just taking away all available matches before firing the ability should prevent the tile from being immediately matched. It's a CD on green so it should be easy to make all the green matches first because it's pretty much the most valuable color to begin with. From a probablistic point of view let's say both players match 4 tiles a turn then you'd need 4 turns before there's an expected 50% (32 tiles out of 64) that the CD is destroyed, which is 8 AP drained. Since only Falcon and Daken have no activated abilities on their strongest color, it'd be relatively rare to drain even 8 AP because if they had more than that then they would've already used the ability. Yes you can potentially have it out and let them make more matches of that color and drain again but it's not like the AI ever matches in a pattern that remotely matches human expectations unless you're giving the AI some match 4s of their strongest color. The only case I can see where draining 3 a turn matters over 2 is if the goons are pumping the same color as the strongest color of the villian, but that's a very specialized situation.

Green's activated for me....maybe half of the couple dozen matches for me i played him in, that was it, twice it activated right away. That percentage of the ability activating to me, just isn't worth putting an extra couple covers to his green, yes the threshold goes down by one tile at 5 covers but it still is at the end of the day, a board dependent passive, i would rather have two active abilities that i can use than rely on a passive that sees activation maybe once every couple matches. Keep in mind that i have a maxed 166 blade that i actually tried out in the Falcon PVP, and even there, in a normal climbing situation(used him to about 600) his green activated in less than half the matches i played. I also tried him out with sentry, good team, lots of good synergy, and while his strike tiles do help, i didn't want to rely on them cause sentry against sentry you don't want him cascading red and supernova'ing your team.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

ThatOneGuyjp189512 wrote:

one interesting quirk i've found for his black, going against goons in the gauntlet, i killed two of them and only a lieutenant was left, it kept steal his yellow AND pink ap every turn, so i guess it's like ROTP in that if their strongest colors are equal it just takes both. But it's something you'd only see in PVE

I don't remember 'strongest color' mechanism ever worked like that, and there are a lot of goon only nodes that have ties for strongest color. If it works like that for Blade it must be unique to him, because I sure don't recall a case where Surgical Strike wiped out two colors at once or ROTP gave the enemy 5 AP in multiple colors.

I agree that I've never seen that behavior for goons, it's always been their first power color, but the strong color can be inconsistent. I've had times where SS rags yielded and times when it was