how would you have handled it?

Unknown

Yea, another Rag thread. Most thoughts have been expressed and regardless of your opinion, something needed to be done with Rag. How would you have handled it? I'm not asking about customer service. This is for in-game modifications. Higher AP cost? Less damage? Fewer green tiles? Something more unique? How do you think he should have been balanced?

Unknown

With the no abilities under 5 AP rule in place, I think 5 AP, 5 green tiles, and current damage could work. It would still be a heavy blow, but he'd still have some power.

Alternative ideas:

Diminishing returns: He spawns up to 5 Green tiles based on his green AP.
Antagonist: Another character (maybe Loki) that causes damage or steals AP when an active ability is used. (nerfs Spiderman as well)
AP drain: Increased green tiles spawned or damage for each red AP, but drain red AP when cast.

These could be mixed with other nerfing tactics.

Unknown

5 AP 8 greens, less damage. Or green generation scaling with some other factor.

Kelbris

Minimum 3 or 4 AP; every use before the opponent's next turn makes the AP cost raise by 1.

Move AP cost resets after opponent takes a turn.

If minimum is 4, three claps would cost 15 (4, 5, 6 respectively)

Does not influence defense much since AI didn't spam skills

Unknown

3 AP generating 3 green was always my idea since the beginning.

FoxInSox

Any other way. He should have been dropped to still useful status, not received the Loki treatment (similar ham-handed nerf in the early days of the game).

They should have either:

1. Raised AP costs to 3 (max 4), but keeping his current damage/AP ratio and current tile creation.
3. Raised AP costs beyond 4, with same damage/AP ratio and increased green creation slightly.
2. Reduced green creation to 3.


At the end of the day he had extremely powerful red, a significantly sub-par green, high health, and leveled damage on only red & green matches (instead of 3 colors like all other characters). As such, in order to remain a viable character, he needed red to continue being one of the stronger powers in the game. He is a 3 star after all, and one which players had dedicated a lot of resources to (time + money). By completely neutering him to below 2 star powers (seriously compare him to 2 star red and green powers now), his only remaining benefit is his high health.

Those changes would have kept him powerful, but no longer overwhelmingly so. Now he is one of the least useful 3 stars and I am livid.

Unknown

When changing the rules of a game you have to look at how all connected parts (or try to) will be affected....

Rag's ability and uniqueness was his low cost but less effective spam. He was limited in having only 2 colors, a max level of only 115. That essence should have been maintained. It could have been similar to Hulk....

2 red ap - do 600 damage and create 1 green countdown tile that produces 2 green ap.

but the recent changes slows down the entire meta to 6 ap per move. but if 6 ap is now the equivalent of 2 AP skills before other skills need to be address properly. Meaning all abilities need to have their AP cost tripled.

Nonce Equitaur 2

First ... most of the complaints were for Rags being buffed in the Lightning Rounds.
Solution -- Don't buff Rags in the Lightning round. That would have eliminated most of the aggravation. As an overarching rule, any time the devs feel a character is overpowered, they should stop buffing him up.

Next problem -- red was being overused to cause green cascades. There were several more subtle nerfs they could have tried:
1. Increase the AP costs by 1.
2. Give opposing team some AP.
3. Decrease damage 30%
4. Have Rags hurt himself 10%

Put in a small nerf, and see if the "problem" is fixed. The devs should have put faith in their own ability to watch and track behavior. if the "problem" remains, then put in another small nerf. Gutting the character this severely demonstrates that they don't want people to use this character any more.

Subtle corrections are much better than severe ones.

Unknown

I don't think Rag balancing had anything do with simply leveling out characters. With the characters up for nerfing and the last two covers released it's clear to me that health is being changed to the pay-for commodity. I wouldn't be surprised if OBW gets a grav belt nerf pretty soon as well.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Elementalor wrote:

I wouldn't be surprised if OBW gets a grav belt nerf pretty soon as well.

If the developers go full "earn money at all costs", you're probably correct. By eliminating all healing from the game, they might have a belief that more people would buy health packs.

However, this greed is having the opposite effect. What tournaments are worth winning now? They are deliberately crippling the top 6 characters into oblivion. If the prize is a good character, then their fate is to be crippled. If it's a mediocre character, why fight for it? Why spend money on a character if it will just have it's arms and legs ripped off if it becomes popular?

In this attempt to make more money, the developers have instead motivated people to never spend money. I've spent money on the game, but I've now lost all faith in the developers. It used to be that they had faith in the players (we'll miss you, IceIX). Since they no longer have faith in their original design or in the players, how can the players have faith in them?

But yes, you're probably correct. The developers seem intent on following a strategy of greed-suicide.

TheVulture

I would have gone with:

1. Thunderclap for 5 AP with 5 green tiles, and current damage - reasoning being that Thor's upcoming nerf would make current damage come out ahead.
n.b. Each cover reducing cost by 1 AP as before (only 9 > 5), not the weird progression it has now.
2. Leave Godlike Power as is - yes it's weak, but I don't think star ratings are supposed to mean powers are actually better so it may as well stay on par with Unstoppable Crash.
3. Give Ragnorak a 3rd tile damage colour - perhaps blue, since it seems to be the electric/technological colour.

Unknown

I've said it before: His red ends the turn.

Done.

Uniqueness and utility of the skill is preserved. Ragnarok is still powerful, and if lucky, can get on a roll if he makes crit tiles. But you can also leave yourself in a bad situation. A simple change that doesn't neuter him, but makes the ability far more tactical instead of a spam cannon.

I think that would have gotten us 90% of the way there, with maybe a minor adjustment needed after.

Spoit

Either way, incremental changes, rather than throwing the whole bathtub out with the baby

eidehua

would been interesting if green generated ap from the tiles destroyed (hey he's not godlike enough to completely destroy the tile eh?)

NorthernPolarity

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Elementalor wrote:

I wouldn't be surprised if OBW gets a grav belt nerf pretty soon as well.

If the developers go full "earn money at all costs", you're probably correct. By eliminating all healing from the game, they might have a belief that more people would buy health packs.

However, this greed is having the opposite effect. What tournaments are worth winning now? They are deliberately crippling the top 6 characters into oblivion. If the prize is a good character, then their fate is to be crippled. If it's a mediocre character, why fight for it? Why spend money on a character if it will just have it's arms and legs ripped off if it becomes popular?

In this attempt to make more money, the developers have instead motivated people to never spend money. I've spent money on the game, but I've now lost all faith in the developers. It used to be that they had faith in the players (we'll miss you, IceIX). Since they no longer have faith in their original design or in the players, how can the players have faith in them?

But yes, you're probably correct. The developers seem intent on following a strategy of greed-suicide.

I think this logic is actually a little backwards: I think the point of the changes is to make a lot more characters viable. If all the characters are "mediocre", that means that they are all around the top of the power ladder, which means that you would be happy earning covers for any of them. Now instead of having only a character that you're excited earning covers for (rags), you have a lot more characters to be excited about. I also think that the devs learned a lesson this time around, and will probably post updates about what characters they're looking at in the future beforehand so you don't feel cheated out of a character that you just spent a ton of time and resources on.

Unknown

A ton of good ideas here...

I'm one who play a lot and currently have 0 Rags. Did not much like to play against him, but could deal, including the 240 lvl top teams in hulk and other places. I always thought the 2AP cost combined with that body and the ability content is nuts.

So I did welcome the nerf in general but reading the content I thought it went way too far. IMO the max evolved thing is about good as it is now but should the cost set at 4. (So in the evolution it could go to 5 at some step.

Other good ideas I spot: the +1 to mana cost of any ability when used, that gets reset at start of turn. just a stroke of genious.

I also agree that the most problem vame not so much from clap but the buff in lightning. Especially what I noticed just recently, that all villains appear tripled, not just the one leading the event. That is completely nuts, and ruins the arena bigtime. And it could be easily fixed in a number of ways, just a few from top of my head:

- only the borrowed figure gets tripled, yours only doubled
- the other villains are not buffed, or only slightly, +50%, double at maximum
- the buff may get scaled down with level

When I started to play here lightning was very fun, I and most people played adding lvl 1-10 * characters, that hid behind the leader bt provided good support, fighting down the opposing boss. It quite lost flavor as lvl85 partners started to surround the 15x3 "boss" that now worked more like ballast and redundant. Then 3-villain groups started to take over. Bummer.


Back to Rag nerf and the upcoming rebalancing of most other characters: I welcome the idea -- especially if **** things stop being lamer than bag-man, and other not feasible characters gain some value. more diversity means more fun and incentive to stay around.

However there ability to respec need be added first. It's pretty unfair that we developed in some way, and can't adjust to the changes.

Unknown

Keep in mind Rag may be **** now, but the might not be so bad once the Thor and Wolverine changes happen.

Spoit

StoneWolf wrote:

Keep in mind Rag may be **** now, but the might not be so bad once the Thor and Wolverine changes happen.

No, he'd still be bad. It's just that everyone else would also be bad