think this would be skip worthy?

MajinDavid

I was toying around with the idea of a team comprised of groot, colossus, and blade.
groot and colossus have well over 20k life between them and more if groot matches yellow.
Full rainbow. And only cover that overlaps thats not passive is black and either black ability can hurt.
blade has ap drain, colossus can tank and groot deals decent dmg.
Skip worthy?

simonsez

Unfortunately, nothing is really skip-worthy based on formation. It's points that most people are using to decide.

OnesOwnGrief

If you are worth the points, you will be hit. Plain and simple.

Unknown

Echoing Simon and Grief, once you get to higher levels of competition, you're not going to scare your peers away if you've got juicy points. You might be on to something though, in that if there's a "trick" to defensive teams it's actually drawing people in with teams that people might underestimate. If they're leveled appropriately, people might attack that team just because they're NOT X-Force, Thor(s), Hood, et al, and you might see a fair amount of defensive wins because people haven't had their butts handed to them in quite that way yet.

Unknown

I don't see the point to discuss whether people will skip you if you're worth say 40 points. Nobody is ever so strong to worth skipping if you're worth 40 points because you'd have to be winning less than 20% of the time for this to workout, and in terms of character imbalance I'm pretty sure you can do better than 20% against pre nerf Ragnarok using modern characters (so no cheap AP+3 all boosts, pre nerf Magneto, pre nerf Spiderman, or pre nerf Wolverine 2*). It's inevitable you get hit by guys who get 40. Whether a team is intimidating should be assuming if you had the same base points.

I don't think Blade is intimidating even though he is certainly respectable. I can't imagine a human player having too much problem with R&G unless they're very bad at math. Colossus is a good character but certainly not better than X Force or Thor. This is a team that is likely surprisingly hard but assuming equal points, your opponents only need to beat you 50% of the time to come out even, and you can probably beat any team at least 50% even with very bad imbalance. Note that imbalance exists not because you have less than 50% of beating someone, but because that team usually has near 100% chance of beating you. So unless your plan is to shield up and get people to attack you, it is never a good idea to purposely make people want to attack you because I just don't see any team winning over 50% defensive battles against anything that can be considered remotely in the same tier.

_RiO_

jralbino wrote:

Echoing Simon and Grief, once you get to higher levels of competition, you're not going to scare your peers away if you've got juicy points. You might be on to something though, in that if there's a "trick" to defensive teams it's actually drawing people in with teams that people might underestimate. If they're leveled appropriately, people might attack that team just because they're NOT X-Force, Thor(s), Hood, et al, and you might see a fair amount of defensive wins because people haven't had their butts handed to them in quite that way yet.

Seconding this. On the lower end of things the defense meta (if there really is such a thing) consists of powerhouse scare tactics. On the higher end it consists of 'uncomfortable'/'annoying' combinations or combinations that invoke crouching-tiger, hidden-dragon.

Problem with the latter is that it won't work for long: once enough of the hardcore forumites get wind of such combinations they will reverse-engineer them and come up with effective counters. The best deterrence are thus teams with lots of hitpoints to chew through and/or with lots of passives that force-fire every turn: teams that take up a lot of precious time to defeat, basically. Even those will likely lose a great deal of their effect once the shield mechanics are changed at the end of the running season and highly time-pressured shield-hopping will fall from grace.

Unknown

For defense it's mostly about discouarging the second attack by the same guy. Simple math suggests even if you've an unbelieveable 50% defensive win rate, you'd still be hit by anyone who sees you worth at least 25 points. However, let's assume that you take damage equal to (1-chance of winning) for winning a fight, and that your chance to win a new fight starting with lower health is exactly linear. That is, if you've 50% chance of winning, then winning a fight costs you 50% of your health, and your next game's winning % is 50% * 50% = 25%. So more realistically, if you have a 20% defensive win rate, then the second attack from the same guy is only going to have a 64% win rate (he starts with 80% of his health with a base 80% win rate), and that might be discouraging enough. Besides, the estimation for decrease in winning % is way too generous, as starting with half of your health should be far worse than having only half the chance to win. Note that this of course this doesn't apply to any true healing characters. Therefore, even a 20% defensive win rate could be enough to discourage most repeated attacks, though of course even winning 20% of your defensive games is quite difficult.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

For defense it's mostly about discouarging the second attack by the same guy. Simple math suggests even if you've an unbelieveable 50% defensive win rate, you'd still be hit by anyone who sees you worth at least 25 points. However, let's assume that you take damage equal to (1-chance of winning) for winning a fight, and that your chance to win a new fight starting with lower health is exactly linear. That is, if you've 50% chance of winning, then winning a fight costs you 50% of your health, and your next game's winning % is 50% * 50% = 25%. So more realistically, if you have a 20% defensive win rate, then the second attack from the same guy is only going to have a 64% win rate (he starts with 80% of his health with a base 80% win rate), and that might be discouraging enough. Besides, the estimation for decrease in winning % is way too generous, as starting with half of your health should be far worse than having only half the chance to win. Note that this of course this doesn't apply to any true healing characters. Therefore, even a 20% defensive win rate could be enough to discourage most repeated attacks, though of course even winning 20% of your defensive games is quite difficult.

lukewin

All valid pts above. Who are you worrying about not skipping you? When you're below 600 pts, and those 3 are well covered and leveled high, you might get skipped by those that aren't climbing to 900 and higher. But those that are, are just going after high value targets, and if you are, you're not getting skipped.

NorthernPolarity

I disagree with the sentiment in this thread that points are all that matters. Sure, if you're an x-men and have like 3k points, you're going to get hit no matter what team you put out. If you're a normal person, and aren't the overall point leader, then the team you put out on defense matters greatly for not getting hit when you make the climb from say, 600 to 1-1.3k depending on your bracket.

Here's an easy example: you're at 600 points and are pushing. Which team do you hit?
1. XF / CMags for 35 points.
2. XF / LadyThor for 40 points.

Pretty obviously the cmags team: even though ladythor is worth 5 more points, the point is that you can easily skip and find a team that has like 70% of the HP and takes a lot less time to beat.

As for the OPs original question, I don't think that team would be a very good defensive deterrent. On defense, there are three main things that matter:
1. Cheap, impactful abilities that cost 9 or less AP. Any ability that costs 12 is basically too slow to ever go off in PvP against a boosted team, and so are for the most part useless on defense.
2. Annoying passives. (specifically hood, hulk, etc)
3. High HP pools.

Looking at your suggested team, it unfortunately is very light on these three criteria. The only relevant ability for 9- AP is blade's black (colo's yellow isn't really a good ability), everything else costs 10+ and thus will be cast extremely infrequently in an average match. Your team has a somewhat annoying passive in blade, but not much else (groot's healing can be played around more and isn't that great on defense vs a competent player). HP wise, your team is average: not bad, but there aren't any hulk / ladythor / dino levels of hp. Thinking about it just in terms of 3* land and discounting 4*s, this would probably be an above average team on defense: not bad, but it won't encourage too many skips.

MajinDavid

Thanks for the feedback people. Just been toying with ideas and i figured it might be annoying another to skip if worth 25 points which is normally what i get hit for. Oh well guess im staying with thor and hood.

Spoit

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I disagree with the sentiment in this thread that points are all that matters. Sure, if you're an x-men and have like 3k points, you're going to get hit no matter what team you put out. If you're a normal person, and aren't the overall point leader, then the team you put out on defense matters greatly for not getting hit when you make the climb from say, 600 to 1-1.3k depending on your bracket.

Here's an easy example: you're at 600 points and are pushing. Which team do you hit?
1. XF / CMags for 35 points.
2. XF / LadyThor for 40 points.

Pretty obviously the cmags team: even though ladythor is worth 5 more points, the point is that you can easily skip and find a team that has like 70% of the HP and takes a lot less time to beat.

As for the OPs original question, I don't think that team would be a very good defensive deterrent. On defense, there are three main things that matter:
1. Cheap, impactful abilities that cost 9 or less AP. Any ability that costs 12 is basically too slow to ever go off in PvP against a boosted team, and so are for the most part useless on defense.
2. Annoying passives. (specifically hood, hulk, etc)
3. High HP pools.

Looking at your suggested team, it unfortunately is very light on these three criteria. The only relevant ability for 9- AP is blade's black (colo's yellow isn't really a good ability), everything else costs 10+ and thus will be cast extremely infrequently in an average match. Your team has a somewhat annoying passive in blade, but not much else (groot's healing can be played around more and isn't that great on defense vs a competent player). HP wise, your team is average: not bad, but there aren't any hulk / ladythor / dino levels of hp. Thinking about it just in terms of 3* land and discounting 4*s, this would probably be an above average team on defense: not bad, but it won't encourage too many skips.

I'd hit the FT team, the AI doesn't play her well at all, and if you can prep your own red or SS, the enemy FT does half the work for you! (and HP is pretty largely irrelevant for her red until you get above like lvl 330 or so)

simonsez

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Here's an easy example: you're at 600 points and are pushing. Which team do you hit?
1. XF / CMags for 35 points.
2. XF / LadyThor for 40 points.

Pretty obviously the cmags team

Not obvious to me. At 600 points, speed isn't as issue, and the AI has no idea whatsoever what to do with LT. On the other hand, Cmag can generate cascades which can ruin your day.

franckynight

Phantron wrote:

I don't see the point to discuss whether people will skip you if you're worth say 40 points. Nobody is ever so strong to worth skipping if you're worth 40 points because you'd have to be winning less than 20% of the time for this to workout, and in terms of character imbalance I'm pretty sure you can do better than 20% against pre nerf Ragnarok using modern characters (so no cheap AP+3 all boosts, pre nerf Magneto, pre nerf Spiderman, or pre nerf Wolverine 2*). It's inevitable you get hit by guys who get 40. Whether a team is intimidating should be assuming if you had the same base points.

I don't think Blade is intimidating even though he is certainly respectable. I can't imagine a human player having too much problem with R&G unless they're very bad at math. Colossus is a good character but certainly not better than X Force or Thor. This is a team that is likely surprisingly hard but assuming equal points, your opponents only need to beat you 50% of the time to come out even, and you can probably beat any team at least 50% even with very bad imbalance. Note that imbalance exists not because you have less than 50% of beating someone, but because that team usually has near 100% chance of beating you. So unless your plan is to shield up and get people to attack you, it is never a good idea to purposely make people want to attack you because I just don't see any team winning over 50% defensive battles against anything that can be considered remotely in the same tier.

Sorry.. No disrespect.. But i didnt understand your point.. Others said It better.. If you re worth the points you ll be hit whatever your team..

Phaserhawk

MajinDavid wrote:

I was toying around with the idea of a team comprised of groot, colossus, and blade.
groot and colossus have well over 20k life between them and more if groot matches yellow.
Full rainbow. And only cover that overlaps thats not passive is black and either black ability can hurt.
blade has ap drain, colossus can tank and groot deals decent dmg.
Skip worthy?

Target Blade, gather enough green quickly to X-Force him to Oblivion, Surgical Stirke will get me yellow so I'll make sure to have Hood, after I Surgical Stirke Groot for about 5K, I can finish him off with Twin Pistols and all that's left is Colossus who hasn't been able to gather black or red very fast because Hood has been eating at him. Your team would take me less than 3 mintues, so no, you wouldn't be skipped.

The last time I was skipping opponents was when I was with 1/2 health guys during the 4hor PvP where all it was was X-Force/4hor/Fury, I skipped those if not on full health, otherwise even they were fair game if it was 40pts plus.

Unknown

Due to the massive inflation of points and the lack of targets on the high end there's usually no trouble finding a guy that's worth 40 points and of course anyone that's worth 40 points is worth attacking no matter what team they have.

But you don't always get these nice and simple choices. In fact the MMR is designed to make such decisions almost impossible until the number of players in your point range is so small that it has no choice but to compromise. During your climb at lower points you'll notice that the game goes out of its way to avoid handing you anyone worth more than 30 on a regular basis, not counting for any change in points after that opponent has been queued but it's not like you can even tell that guy who the game claims to have 543 points really have that since it'd be practically impossible to verify (too low for any top 10 alliance, and probably too wide of a range in your own bracket even if that person is in it). It's usually something like:

1. Sort of weak team for 18.
2. Decent team for 23.
3. Strong team for 28.

And depending on who you have and how strong is 'strong' there's no straightforward answer and that's why having a team that appears to be strong does matter, and probably will matter more after the shield changes that is likely to put scores more squished together. Remember it's not because the game suddenly decides to give you better matchups after the 1000 range. It's because there are so few guys there the game doesn't have a choice. If everyone's score is lower after the shield changes, then the game will now be able to find people who aren't worth more than 30 points to you on a reliable basis.

Unknown

The only team that is skip worthy nowadays is 270 Xforce and 270 Thor.

And even then, you need the level 249 featured character to really be skip worthy.

I wouldn't be afraid of RG, Colossus and Blade at all. It would actually be a refreshing change of pace from the Thor/Xforce teams and I would enjoy the guaranteed points.