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?
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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