*** Blade (Daywalker) ***

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

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.

The meaningful difference here is there is limited Red space available to fill up. Say there are 11 red tiles out, 5 turns later you have filled 10 of them with your STR 1 tiles, turn 6 and onward you get STR 11, where stronger ones become STR 12. Then 14. Then 16.

That does imply the match goes 6+ turns of having 11 red on the board, which I know is unlikely. I do feel it's worth considering tho after using Blade. This scenario comes up more than it should, if you and the AI are both ignoring the red.

One really solid argument for 2 a round at 10 Red tiles is feeding them to Daken's Chemical Rage. Blade/Daken is just freaking awesome.

over_clocked

Spoit wrote:

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

Rags always has red as his strongest colour... Are you sure there was no Venom or Ares around? Being lower rarity, they scale better and easily overtake Rags' match damage with their green.

Colognoisseur

Why I am 5/3/5 and will stay that way.
I chose to make my blade 5/3/5 because I saw him as a character I would use primarily in PvE with Daken and Falcon versus goon battles. I would also potentially use Blade to climb early in PvP with Daken and Thor. I de-value purple because of its cost and the need for four matches to fire it off. It can be the most amazing attack tile in the history of MPQ but in the current meta-game in PvP special tiles are just things to be destroyed via X-Force. Without WR how scared is anyone of Sentry’s sacrifice? As long as X-force is around that attack tile is fragile I feel the same way about Fury’s Escape Plan too. One X-Force green almost always takes care of anything. As a result I will never use Blade at high level PvP because I don’t care which build you have his health and the fragility of the tiles make him a liability. In my opinion he is only useful in PvE and only against goons. I have come to this conclusion after exclusively playing Blade Daken Falcon or Blade Daken Thor throughout the first two legs of The Gauntlet except the Capt. Marvel essentials. I played unboosted throughout to really get a feel. Every goon or two goon plus active was a walk in the park never came close to losing one and the synergy of all three characters worked as expected. I will use this team a lot in PvE in the future for these situations. When I used the Daken Blade Thor team against three actives they were all close matches and I found myself using the black as early and late damage with the ap drain meaningless as suspected by many. In what passes for a PvP trial Blade fails as even buffed by the event he took major damage. I also spent some time in the SHIELD simulator using Blade Daken Thor against all of the current best teams Sentry Hood and X-force Hood and X force Cmags. I won all of them but my team was heavily damaged and they all required at least two if not three healthpacks at the end. Blade was dead or close to in most of those matches.That is with the stupid AI playing those matches. With a player taking on a Blade team under the control of the AI with the top PvP teams it will be all too easy to beat them before Blade’s black or purple come into play. Blade is a support character, at best, in PvP and I suspect will see little play once we finish with his High Stakes PvP in a few days. I think there are three viable builds as discussed here but after having used him pretty extensively for the past few days I would suggest he not be a priority for leveling over many others. I think he will be similar to Punisher with multiple viable builds and might be a good transitioning character but if you aspire to get into the top ranks Blade is not the path to that.

Unknown

If I had to rank Blade right now I think I would put him just behind C.Mags, just ahead of HT. Maybe a spot or two higher because of his sheer dominance of PvE. He's essentially about as good as Deadpool. He is a 6800 health character. 6800 health characters can not do extended PvP sessions except for Daken and Patch. You can probably get out of a fight for 0 or 1 Health Packs if you deny the right color and smack around the enemy team with Thor/Blade. Take all the green, leave all the red. Add Falcon or Daken to taste. If you are using Thor/Blade/Daken and X-Force gets enough green for X-Force then you are not very good at playing Thor/Daken.

Blade does have True Heal resting HP regen. That means if you are rotating teams he can get back into a fight without a HP pretty quickly. He won't do a long distance marathon, but you can do a short sprint with him in PvP. Saying he isn't going to get you to to top ranks is like saying "he isn't as broken as Sentry" which is actually a good thing. I do wish he had some form of in match healing tho. Like if The Thirst also healed him when he matched a strike tile or something.

I voted 5.3.5 but I'm being swayed by the arguments in this thread. He may have no wrong 5/5/3 build, which is amazing really. First time it's happened I think. If his Black drained the highest AP number instead of the highest damage color then I think 3/5/5 would be the solid winner, because you would get mountains of purple in the current meta using it.

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

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

I think Ragnarok's highest match is lower than an equivalent level goon's match damage and he might be the only 3* that does that. At least I don't recall this behavior for any other normal 3* mixed with goons.

Spoit

locked wrote:

Spoit wrote:

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

Rags always has red as his strongest colour... Are you sure there was no Venom or Ares around? Being lower rarity, they scale better and easily overtake Rags' match damage with their green.

Yes, he was the only one left alive.

Phaserhawk

I have noticed Blade has accelerated healing, so that's a nice unstated bonus.

Phaserhawk

Colognoisseur wrote:

Why I am 5/3/5 and will stay that way.
I chose to make my blade 5/3/5 because I saw him as a character I would use primarily in PvE with Daken and Falcon versus goon battles. I would also potentially use Blade to climb early in PvP with Daken and Thor. I de-value purple because of its cost and the need for four matches to fire it off. It can be the most amazing attack tile in the history of MPQ but in the current meta-game in PvP special tiles are just things to be destroyed via X-Force. Without WR how scared is anyone of Sentry’s sacrifice? As long as X-force is around that attack tile is fragile I feel the same way about Fury’s Escape Plan too. One X-Force green almost always takes care of anything. As a result I will never use Blade at high level PvP because I don’t care which build you have his health and the fragility of the tiles make him a liability. In my opinion he is only useful in PvE and only against goons. I have come to this conclusion after exclusively playing Blade Daken Falcon or Blade Daken Thor throughout the first two legs of The Gauntlet except the Capt. Marvel essentials. I played unboosted throughout to really get a feel. Every goon or two goon plus active was a walk in the park never came close to losing one and the synergy of all three characters worked as expected. I will use this team a lot in PvE in the future for these situations. When I used the Daken Blade Thor team against three actives they were all close matches and I found myself using the black as early and late damage with the ap drain meaningless as suspected by many. In what passes for a PvP trial Blade fails as even buffed by the event he took major damage. I also spent some time in the SHIELD simulator using Blade Daken Thor against all of the current best teams Sentry Hood and X-force Hood and X force Cmags. I won all of them but my team was heavily damaged and they all required at least two if not three healthpacks at the end. Blade was dead or close to in most of those matches.That is with the stupid AI playing those matches. With a player taking on a Blade team under the control of the AI with the top PvP teams it will be all too easy to beat them before Blade’s black or purple come into play. Blade is a support character, at best, in PvP and I suspect will see little play once we finish with his High Stakes PvP in a few days. I think there are three viable builds as discussed here but after having used him pretty extensively for the past few days I would suggest he not be a priority for leveling over many others. I think he will be similar to Punisher with multiple viable builds and might be a good transitioning character but if you aspire to get into the top ranks Blade is not the path to that.

Well written. I agree with everything you said. And I too played that team as well, my Blade is currently 3/2/3 so I'm not quite there but what I have noticed is that The Thirst ast Level 3 is pretty much all you need for triggering the threshold, there doesn't seem to be too much differnce, and the times it would have triggered at lvl 5 over level 3 or 4 has not been very often, but does that mean one shouldn't go 5? No it doesn't. I agree Blade is very much a support character, he's both better and worse than Hood, better for the higher damage generation and life but worse in terms of AP steal. You are correct that in the world of X-Force special tiles are just fodder.

Further Looking at his skills.

Nightstalker:---In Highstakes PvP I ran X-Force, Blade, C.Mags and went in with the thought of using Nightstalker to destroy other X-Force teams, and it was working. I would get earlier Nightstalkers to lock X-Force out of Green to cast X-Force which then always seemed to destroy my Nightstalker CD tile and I could have probably waited a turn and just done the same thing with Surgical Strike with more damage, so X-Force and Blade do not work well together. And as you stated the AP steal thing is moot because after 2 -3 turns at level 3 it's drained them of their AP, I couldnt' imagine if it was at 3, so if you upgrade Nightstalker past three it should be for damage only or as you put it because you de-value purple.

KyEC:---At level 2 I can't comment too much but yeah, this is a hit or miss skill. When I got it to go in PvE it was nice, but have yet to see it in PvP as the games are just too fast. If X-Force/Blade worked well together I could actually seeing doing this because as with C.Mags you tend to fall into the off colors with X-Force due to his Green blowing up everthing and cascades, its' why I switched C.Mags to 3/5/5 over 5/5/3, I just kept ending up with blue that it made no sense not to max it. However, even at max, purple does 2024 at the end of turn vs. a 1877 Nightstalker that costs 2 less

The Thirst:---This is the skill that I need to evaluate to figure out how to build him. As I said, it seems to activate almost as much on 11 red as it would on 10 red and by the time you would be ready to activate KyEC you general have 6 tiles, however as Phantron had stated sometime ago, you end up blowing up half your red because well, there are 10-11 tiles of it and more opportunities to match. So overall while lvl 4 or 5 will put more tiles on the board, you are going to lose them at a fair pace regardless.

The more I played with him, the more lackluster I found him. He is not PvP worthy, but he is very good in PvE as Colongnoisseur has stated. Where Blade seems to fail is that he has no specfic role. He's got the body of a bruiser that's suppose to put out midranged damage constantly, like a Punisher, C.Mags, etc. that's what the 6800 guys do, but he's got the skill makeup of a support character. And again like Colongnoisseur stated he really does have multiple viable builds all dependent upon your prefered play and character roster, but being the nerd I am I try to build the best roster that completely features one character, regardless of how it is overall, so How do you max Blade?

Well because of Nightstalker and never knowing what color he will steal you would want the rainbow of actives. Blade gives you Black, Purple so we just need Blue, Red, Green, Yellow. Now if you want to make sure Blade's purple is always firing at max, you have to run Blade with Daken, this ensures your strike tiles will be at a high number, plus Daken tanks 2 colors further protecting Blade. So then you are left with a red/yellow/green character to balance out your lineup, and that leaves you with Thor or Sentry, or Ares if you are transitioning. Both Thor and Sentry have their pluses and minuses, I lean towards Thor just because it will save you health packs in theory but it is slower.

I won't being pumping hp into him anytime soon as I will just wait for covers to come and see how he plays, he's a solid character but not versatile in all the enviornments

NorthernPolarity

Phaserhawk wrote:

Colognoisseur wrote:

Why I am 5/3/5 and will stay that way.
I chose to make my blade 5/3/5 because I saw him as a character I would use primarily in PvE with Daken and Falcon versus goon battles. I would also potentially use Blade to climb early in PvP with Daken and Thor. I de-value purple because of its cost and the need for four matches to fire it off. It can be the most amazing attack tile in the history of MPQ but in the current meta-game in PvP special tiles are just things to be destroyed via X-Force. Without WR how scared is anyone of Sentry’s sacrifice? As long as X-force is around that attack tile is fragile I feel the same way about Fury’s Escape Plan too. One X-Force green almost always takes care of anything. As a result I will never use Blade at high level PvP because I don’t care which build you have his health and the fragility of the tiles make him a liability. In my opinion he is only useful in PvE and only against goons. I have come to this conclusion after exclusively playing Blade Daken Falcon or Blade Daken Thor throughout the first two legs of The Gauntlet except the Capt. Marvel essentials. I played unboosted throughout to really get a feel. Every goon or two goon plus active was a walk in the park never came close to losing one and the synergy of all three characters worked as expected. I will use this team a lot in PvE in the future for these situations. When I used the Daken Blade Thor team against three actives they were all close matches and I found myself using the black as early and late damage with the ap drain meaningless as suspected by many. In what passes for a PvP trial Blade fails as even buffed by the event he took major damage. I also spent some time in the SHIELD simulator using Blade Daken Thor against all of the current best teams Sentry Hood and X-force Hood and X force Cmags. I won all of them but my team was heavily damaged and they all required at least two if not three healthpacks at the end. Blade was dead or close to in most of those matches.That is with the stupid AI playing those matches. With a player taking on a Blade team under the control of the AI with the top PvP teams it will be all too easy to beat them before Blade’s black or purple come into play. Blade is a support character, at best, in PvP and I suspect will see little play once we finish with his High Stakes PvP in a few days. I think there are three viable builds as discussed here but after having used him pretty extensively for the past few days I would suggest he not be a priority for leveling over many others. I think he will be similar to Punisher with multiple viable builds and might be a good transitioning character but if you aspire to get into the top ranks Blade is not the path to that.

Well written. I agree with everything you said. And I too played that team as well, my Blade is currently 3/2/3 so I'm not quite there but what I have noticed is that The Thirst ast Level 3 is pretty much all you need for triggering the threshold, there doesn't seem to be too much differnce, and the times it would have triggered at lvl 5 over level 3 or 4 has not been very often, but does that mean one shouldn't go 5? No it doesn't. I agree Blade is very much a support character, he's both better and worse than Hood, better for the higher damage generation and life but worse in terms of AP steal. You are correct that in the world of X-Force special tiles are just fodder.

Further Looking at his skills.

Nightstalker:---In Highstakes PvP I ran X-Force, Blade, C.Mags and went in with the thought of using Nightstalker to destroy other X-Force teams, and it was working. I would get earlier Nightstalkers to lock X-Force out of Green to cast X-Force which then always seemed to destroy my Nightstalker CD tile and I could have probably waited a turn and just done the same thing with Surgical Strike with more damage, so X-Force and Blade do not work well together. And as you stated the AP steal thing is moot because after 2 -3 turns at level 3 it's drained them of their AP, I couldnt' imagine if it was at 3, so if you upgrade Nightstalker past three it should be for damage only or as you put it because you de-value purple.

KyEC:---At level 2 I can't comment too much but yeah, this is a hit or miss skill. When I got it to go in PvE it was nice, but have yet to see it in PvP as the games are just too fast. If X-Force/Blade worked well together I could actually seeing doing this because as with C.Mags you tend to fall into the off colors with X-Force due to his Green blowing up everthing and cascades, its' why I switched C.Mags to 3/5/5 over 5/5/3, I just kept ending up with blue that it made no sense not to max it. However, even at max, purple does 2024 at the end of turn vs. a 1877 Nightstalker that costs 2 less

The Thirst:---This is the skill that I need to evaluate to figure out how to build him. As I said, it seems to activate almost as much on 11 red as it would on 10 red and by the time you would be ready to activate KyEC you general have 6 tiles, however as Phantron had stated sometime ago, you end up blowing up half your red because well, there are 10-11 tiles of it and more opportunities to match. So overall while lvl 4 or 5 will put more tiles on the board, you are going to lose them at a fair pace regardless.

The more I played with him, the more lackluster I found him. He is not PvP worthy, but he is very good in PvE as Colongnoisseur has stated. Where Blade seems to fail is that he has no specfic role. He's got the body of a bruiser that's suppose to put out midranged damage constantly, like a Punisher, C.Mags, etc. that's what the 6800 guys do, but he's got the skill makeup of a support character. And again like Colongnoisseur stated he really does have multiple viable builds all dependent upon your prefered play and character roster, but being the nerd I am I try to build the best roster that completely features one character, regardless of how it is overall, so How do you max Blade?

Well because of Nightstalker and never knowing what color he will steal you would want the rainbow of actives. Blade gives you Black, Purple so we just need Blue, Red, Green, Yellow. Now if you want to make sure Blade's purple is always firing at max, you have to run Blade with Daken, this ensures your strike tiles will be at a high number, plus Daken tanks 2 colors further protecting Blade. So then you are left with a red/yellow/green character to balance out your lineup, and that leaves you with Thor or Sentry, or Ares if you are transitioning. Both Thor and Sentry have their pluses and minuses, I lean towards Thor just because it will save you health packs in theory but it is slower.

I won't being pumping hp into him anytime soon as I will just wait for covers to come and see how he plays, he's a solid character but not versatile in all the enviornments

Not sure if I agree with Phantron's logic about 5 green. In the 5 (huge sample size right), there have been 2 instances where there were 10 red but not 11 on board, which have caused me to miss out on strike tiles for 6+ turns. More testing needs to be done with the ability.

Phaserhawk

I keep coming back to The Thirst because I beleive it's this passive that does determine your build. There was someone who did the math earlier, but basically at 11 red The Thirst will trigger 30% of the time, where at 10 red it triggers 43% of the time. Now taking into account lvl 3 vs lvl 4 where they trigger at the same rate the difference comes at the strike tile damage and it's almost a perfect 2:3 ratio where 2 (89) tiles are = to 3 (58) tiles. Now if you run Blade exclusively with Falcon you are probably better off with the 2 tile generation because Falcon loves tiles, however if you run him without Falcon, I think the quality over quantity takes precedent. Now if you run him with Daken you really don't need the passive as much and why not take advantage of Daken tanking Black and Purple for Blade and maxing those skills, so I really do believe there is that strong arguement for 5/5/3.

Now lets say in a perfect world of a Goon battle, you never get your red destroyed, and we are now comparing lvl 3 Thirst to lvl5

If it triggers 3 out of 10 for lvl 3 that gives us 3 89's, and if it triggers 4 out of 10 for lvl 5 that gives us 8 tiles.

3(89)=267
8(58)=464

that 197 difference can quickly outstrip a 5/5/3 build over a 3/5/5 build as that 784 damage difference between Nightstalkers gets outstripped pretty quickly, basically 5 matches and your ahead with a 3/5/5. Then there is the keep your enemies closer, which would in theory be maxed with the 3/5/5 but be short with the 5/5/3 which would be a theoretical 630 damage lost per turn.

Now a lvl 3 vs lvl 4 Thirst would be 3 tiles vs. 6 tiles and thats only an 81 difference thus going 4 in the Thirst doesnt really make more sense over lvl 3 unless you plan only on running him with Falcon, so the 5/4/4 or 4/5/4 build is out the window IMO

That leaves you with the 5/3/5, 3/5/5, or 5/5/3 as we have shown.

3/5/5 and 5/3/5 keep more match damage on the board, that's a fact. The double tiles and the quicker generation of tiles is also a fact. Furthermore because Daken is an enemy you see constatnly in PvE and many times yours is unplayable because of this having a Daken replacement to work along side Falcon seems too good to ignore thus I have offically pulled my support from 5/5/3 for that fact.

This then brings me to the 3/5/5 vs. 5/3/5 debate. The difference then becomes is the 504 to 1134 extra damage per turn from purple that 3/5/5 supplies better than the extra 784 that black supplies on 5/3/5? The AP steal is moot, it doens't make all that much of a difference and the fact that the tile could get destroyed next turn and steal nothing. So therein lies the choice, do I opt for the guarenteed damage of the 5/3/5 build or the maximum damage of the 3/5/5? I have not yet decided but at least I know I need 5 in Green.

Adding all the possible damage outputs from purple for level 3 or 5 assuming no tiles out or max 6.

Lvl 3 Avgs 575 dmg
lvl 5 avgs 1394 dmg

per ap that's 57.5 and 139.40 respectively

compared to Night stalker at lvl 3 and lvl 5 is 161 and 234 dmg per ap respectively. combined

3/5/5---avgs 150 per AP combing Nightsalker and KyEC
5/3/5--avgs 145 per AP combining those as well

As you can see they are spot on similiar the only issue is that the longer those attack tiles are out the greater discrepency the 3/5/5 has in it's favor, but up front damage they are the same if you cast both, then had all tiles destroyed after the AI finished their turn. This reminds me of the debate for 3/5/5 Punisher vs. 5/5/3 Punisher

simonsez

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Not sure if I agree with Phantron's logic about 5 green. In the 5 (huge sample size right), there have been 2 instances where there were 10 red but not 11 on board, which have caused me to miss out on strike tiles for 6+ turns. More testing needs to be done with the ability.

I thought we already calculated that the probability of exactly 11 reds on the board is 13-14%

Phaserhawk

simonsez wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Not sure if I agree with Phantron's logic about 5 green. In the 5 (huge sample size right), there have been 2 instances where there were 10 red but not 11 on board, which have caused me to miss out on strike tiles for 6+ turns. More testing needs to be done with the ability.

I thought we already calculated that the probability of exactly 11 reds on the board is 13-14%

Rough math says that there is a 30% chance there will be 11 or more red tiles on the board, and a 43% chance there will be at least 10 or more.

The given Chance of any color for future reference

1 of a given color 99.99%
2 of a given color 99.93%
3 of a given color 99.64%
4 of a given color 98.64%
5 of a given color 96.10%
6 of a given color 91.00%
7 of a given color 82.66%
8 of a given color 71.14%
9 of a given color 57.45%
10 of a given color 43.26%
11 of a given color 30.25%
12 of a given color 19.61%
13 of a given color 11.78%
14 of a given color 6.55%
15 of a given color 3.38%

This is just good to know in general for skills that require board requirements, like the difference between Daken Heal/Heat he could heal either 71% of the time or 83% of the time. Now because as the player you have control of the board to a point, but say C.Mags, well the odds of him doing a certain amount of damage is x% of the time.

Unknown

Why do people keep making comparisons with Blade fighting goons? There are so many better pve characters against goons.


Maybe -


I wouldn't even touch him against goons unless forced to in a heroic.

Blade looks like a fun, fast but lightweight character for early pvp / sim and maybe goofing around in pve - key word being fun.. Because of the rate at which attack and strike tiles multiply AND the fact that you shouldn't ignore matching red just because you have a non-falcon boosted strike tile, I think 3/5/5 looks much better, but in the end, that's not much more than arguing which build is Beast's best?

I wouldn't buy blade's covers as a mostly F2P player but I'll definitely enjoy him for short stints

ironsmudgie

I haven't bothered to read all the pages, but wanted to know if Blade is a fast health regen character, like hulk spidey wolvie etc....

over_clocked

ironsmudgie wrote:

I haven't bothered to read all the pages, but wanted to know if Blade is a fast health regen character, like hulk spidey wolvie etc....

Yes, he is.

ironsmudgie

locked wrote:

ironsmudgie wrote:

I haven't bothered to read all the pages, but wanted to know if Blade is a fast health regen character, like hulk spidey wolvie etc....

Yes, he is.

Thanks.

Highdark

That moment when you realize that loki and blade share the same colors..

over_clocked

Highdark wrote:

That moment when you realize that loki and blade share the same colors..

Add Venom and Bullseye to the list then, too.

FaustianDeal

Phaserhawk wrote:

The given Chance of any color for future reference

1 of a given color 99.99%
2 of a given color 99.93%
3 of a given color 99.64%
4 of a given color 98.64%
5 of a given color 96.10%
6 of a given color 91.00%
7 of a given color 82.66%
8 of a given color 71.14%
9 of a given color 57.45%
10 of a given color 43.26%
11 of a given color 30.25%
12 of a given color 19.61%
13 of a given color 11.78%
14 of a given color 6.55%
15 of a given color 3.38%

This is just good to know in general for skills that require board requirements, like the difference between Daken Heal/Heat he could heal either 71% of the time or 83% of the time. Now because as the player you have control of the board to a point, but say C.Mags, well the odds of him doing a certain amount of damage is x% of the time.

I had two question before we committed these percentages to our permanent memory..
1 - when we say "1 of a given color" do we mean "one and only one" or simply "one or more"? Based on the percentages shown I am going to assume we mean "one or more". It might seem like an odd point to belabor, but it slightly feeds into the 2nd question:

2 - Do these percentages take into account the fact that certain board layouts are not allowed to naturally occur? The reason I ask is because one of the earlier postings with percentages (forgive me for forgetting by whom) mentioned the non-zero % chance that a board could be "all red" at the start. That is, in fact, not true... no board with an existing match is shown to the users at the start of the match (a match must be present, but a match already made is not allowed).

The same is probably not true in reverse... a board that includes no possible matches at all would be reshuffled... that doesn't mean that this board layout isn't a valid one, because a shuffle can make matches possible again, so even if you wound up there the game would just shuffle to one of the layouts with a valid match.

There is a number above which we would never see a board layout, but I am blanking on how to determine what it would be. Based on a quick pencil-sketch it seems like any layout with > 40 of any 1 'color' cannot exist without including a match, so it wouldn't be countable in these probabilities. (The actual number could be, and probably is, slightly higher than 40, but definitely cannot be higher than 56 because you need to punch out more than 1/row to prevent horizontal matches alone - completely discounting the existence of vertical matches.)

These "impossible layouts" seem like they would have 2 impacts:
1 - based on the 1st question - if we include the probability of a layouts with 56 or more of the same color in the "1 or more" number then we are slightly inflating the possibility that this will happen by including cases that are disallowed
2 - based on the 2nd question - saying any layout with 56+ of a single color has anything other than a 0.00% chance of occurring (because the game disallows them or causes them to match themselves out of existence) then we are slightly deflating the odds of there being "10+ reds" because we have a "64 greens" board listed as something that could happen instead.

Hopefully these posts don't read like I am taking time away from hammering out a manifesto out in a small cabin in the woods...

I am not sure how big an impact this will have on the actual values, since we start talking about vanishingly small numbers pretty quickly...

Phaserhawk

FaustianDeal wrote:

Phaserhawk wrote:

The given Chance of any color for future reference

1 of a given color 99.99%
2 of a given color 99.93%
3 of a given color 99.64%
4 of a given color 98.64%
5 of a given color 96.10%
6 of a given color 91.00%
7 of a given color 82.66%
8 of a given color 71.14%
9 of a given color 57.45%
10 of a given color 43.26%
11 of a given color 30.25%
12 of a given color 19.61%
13 of a given color 11.78%
14 of a given color 6.55%
15 of a given color 3.38%

This is just good to know in general for skills that require board requirements, like the difference between Daken Heal/Heat he could heal either 71% of the time or 83% of the time. Now because as the player you have control of the board to a point, but say C.Mags, well the odds of him doing a certain amount of damage is x% of the time.

I had two question before we committed these percentages to our permanent memory..
1 - when we say "1 of a given color" do we mean "one and only one" or simply "one or more"? Based on the percentages shown I am going to assume we mean "one or more". It might seem like an odd point to belabor, but it slightly feeds into the 2nd question:

2 - Do these percentages take into account the fact that certain board layouts are not allowed to naturally occur? The reason I ask is because one of the earlier postings with percentages (forgive me for forgetting by whom) mentioned the non-zero % chance that a board could be "all red" at the start. That is, in fact, not true... no board with an existing match is shown to the users at the start of the match (a match must be present, but a match already made is not allowed).

The same is probably not true in reverse... a board that includes no possible matches at all would be reshuffled... that doesn't mean that this board layout isn't a valid one, because a shuffle can make matches possible again, so even if you wound up there the game would just shuffle to one of the layouts with a valid match.

There is a number above which we would never see a board layout, but I am blanking on how to determine what it would be. Based on a quick pencil-sketch it seems like any layout with > 40 of any 1 'color' cannot exist without including a match, so it wouldn't be countable in these probabilities. (The actual number could be, and probably is, slightly higher than 40, but definitely cannot be higher than 56 because you need to punch out more than 1/row to prevent horizontal matches alone - completely discounting the existence of vertical matches.)

These "impossible layouts" seem like they would have 2 impacts:
1 - based on the 1st question - if we include the probability of a layouts with 56 or more of the same color in the "1 or more" number then we are slightly inflating the possibility that this will happen by including cases that are disallowed
2 - based on the 2nd question - saying any layout with 56+ of a single color has anything other than a 0.00% chance of occurring (because the game disallows them or causes them to match themselves out of existence) then we are slightly deflating the odds of there being "10+ reds" because we have a "64 greens" board listed as something that could happen instead.

Hopefully these posts don't read like I am taking time away from hammering out a manifesto out in a small cabin in the woods...

I am not sure how big an impact this will have on the actual values, since we start talking about vanishingly small numbers pretty quickly...

I'ts just a simple binomial equation. So when a random board appears, the chances of there being at least 1 red, or yellow, etc. is almost 100%, same with 2-3. The odds of there being 10 or more red on a board at any given time assuming 7 possible outcomes for each tile and 64 occurances, it roughly comes out to being 43% of the time there would be at least 10 tiles out of a color. But as you said because matches could occur and because a player can influence the board these aren't clear cut, just theoretical. But labratory numbers would state that 11 red tiles would happen 30% of the time and 10 red would happen 43% of the time.