**** Invisible Woman (Classic) **** [PRE 2015-04]

Unknown

I just noticed that since you can lock 8 tiles up, what you could do is if you don't need a color and the enemy team goes, what you can do is simply lock 8 tiles of that color. That pretty much guaranteeds nobody will be making any matches of that color anytime soon.

Spoit

So the way the yellow works. If you use it and then have her (or the 'weakest' person on your team) make a match and go in front, does it work like hawkeye, and shunt the damage elsewhere, or does the damage just disappear?

Unknown

... or lock 8 tiles and subsequently crush them to generate at least 58 AP (with overlap in tile coverage) and dealing 1344 damage at level 30.

Unknown

My first reaction: getting there but still not good enough. Either in play or roleplay value. But can be improved.

1. New Force Bubbles

I like the change a big deal. Protect tile is great. Was thinking about the nature of the bubble. Sure on enemy tile it shall cancel the effect. On friendly tile should protect it and keep the effect working. She is potent enough to tune the shield's nature, right?

2. Force Field Crush

Guess it's a typo and it destroys the 8 surrounding tiles really, leaving the center intact.
For both versions in a "crash" ability creation of random new bubbles seem odd. Or do I misunderstand what happens, really it creates the bubbles and immediately crashes those, works like Punisher's green? If so I withdraw this complaint.

But the random part in the crash is not good. Is should be selectable. Best adding this ability at leveling up, say level 3 makes 1 chosen + 1 random and level 5 makes you chose all 3. She learns to handle things properly not just smashing around.

3. Grant Invisibility

The base idea is cool, but I have serious doubts with implementation. The cost still looks excessive and rendering it useless: by the time I collect 18 (or even 14) yellow the poor fellow needing protection is dead for ages. Protection needs be usable early. This ability should start cheap and rather drain stamina, say the placed tile eating Yellow AP each turn or counting down to zero unless paying up more en-route.

The other problem is the same involves other countdowns: random placement. Again it should be chosen starting at some level of upgrade, I'd say 3 but at least at 5. (As a general note, just doing the same stuff for cheaper makes me rise an eyebrow, skills can and should evolve in nature, even if only in nuances. )

As I imagine the lady, evolving she learns the ways of handling forcefields. At start they are hard to control, may just crash, suck energy, cancel each other (improvements could be thought up on those lines), but then they both grow in strength and obedience. The latter is important.

Unknown

Fangel wrote:

... or lock 8 tiles and subsequently crush them to generate at least 58 AP (with overlap in tile coverage) and dealing 1344 damage at level 30.

You can only unlock 3 bubbles with Force Bubble Crush.

Unknown

With the number of turns I take.now compared to the era.of RAGSPAM, 14 AP is really nothing. Although I wouldn't go past level 4 because most times you get 14 ap, you'd have 15 (multiples of 3) barring some match 4 or 5's.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

I like the change a big deal. Protect tile is great. Was thinking about the nature of the bubble. Sure on enemy tile it shall cancel the effect. On friendly tile should protect it and keep the effect working. She is potent enough to tune the shield's nature, right?

In that case you might as well have the game immediately end after the first Force Bubbles because you'd just lock all the blue tiles and if it's 180 at base level, that's pretty much a range almost nothing can actually hurt you, and there's almost no way to destroy the said protect tile when you have every blue tile locked up. It'd take 2 match 4s on the right line to destroy the tile, since even after you unlocked it, you still wouldn't any meaningful number of blue tiles to attempt to destroy it.

mischiefmaker

My first reaction is that it is SUPER AWESOME that D3 is not only communicating the change well ahead of time, but also explaining their rationale (and adding a little flavor and humor to boot). Two big thumbs up for that and hope this continues!

First take on the new powers:

Yellow
Still seems very ignorable. Doesn't do anything for you on offense, and on defense, if the AI has 14 yellow, something's gone very wrong. In most situations I'd rather cast almost any other yellow power: Lightning Strike, Sunder, Twin Pistols, maybe even Armored Assault and Sentinel of Liberty. Also, a single yellow tile, picked randomly, is pretty hard to protect.

Wonder what happens if you cast two of these...still, that's 28 AP, which is a ton, and it's yellow, which is relatively hard to generate (I know, Thor, but still).

Blue
OK, now we're talking. Huge improvement here. Don't know how this is going to scale, but a 185 protect tile at level 30 is pretty great. Could be insanely good when leveled up. Still on the expensive side, but blue is pretty easy to generate; a 2* Magneto/IW team could see this tile on turn 2; IM40/IW on turn 4.

Green
Big improvement here too, especially since you can now pick where the bubbles go, so you can place them in locations where they'll generate the AP you want. 9 AP is actually quite cheap considering it's guaranteed to generate 24 AP, which will probably get you halfway to casting it again (and you'll have 5 more bubbles on board without needing to cast blue again). 168 damage x 3 = 504, or 56/AP, which is pretty strong considering it also generates AP.

Ending the turn, however, is a HUGE drawback. Might be ok considering how much AP you're about to get, but makes it impossible to have chaining mega-turns. Also, it's still an incredibly bad power if you don't have any blue covers (which will be the case for a lot of players given how hard it is for most players to get IW covers). I'd have liked to see her green have a secondary effect if there are no bubbles present, so then it's at least playable without blue and you get some additional tactical depth out of it (create bubbles/cast green to get AP; don't create bubbles/cast green to do something else).

Definitely need to see how her powers scale, but my initial reaction is that if you ignore ISO cost and cover availability, these changes make IW very playable. My gut feel is top half of characters for sure, and if the scaling on the bubble damage is good, potentially top 10.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

The base idea is cool, but I have serious doubts with implementation. The cost still looks excessive and rendering it useless: by the time I collect 18 (or even 14) yellow the poor fellow needing protection is dead for ages. Protection needs be usable early. This ability should start cheap and rather drain stamina, say the placed tile eating Yellow AP each turn or counting down to zero unless paying up more en-route.

Agree so much. Previous PQ games had abilities that would drain AP every turn, and I don't know why that hasn't been tried here. It seems like a great way to keep initial AP costs low while also enabling powerful effects like this one.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

I like the change a big deal. Protect tile is great. Was thinking about the nature of the bubble. Sure on enemy tile it shall cancel the effect. On friendly tile should protect it and keep the effect working. She is potent enough to tune the shield's nature, right?

In that case you might as well have the game immediately end after the first Force Bubbles because you'd just lock all the blue tiles and if it's 180 at base level, that's pretty much a range almost nothing can actually hurt you, and there's almost no way to destroy the said protect tile when you have every blue tile locked up. It'd take 2 match 4s on the right line to destroy the tile, since even after you unlocked it, you still wouldn't any meaningful number of blue tiles to attempt to destroy it.

I'm not really seeing how the locked tiles prevent any matches from being made. You get what, 3 of them? and that doesn't help against 4-matches

Unknown

Since you cannot attack at all if there's only one person on the team left with an invisibility tile up, this ability can be considered game over if it's placed in an advantageous position on defense. In particular,if the AI was allowed to cast invisibility and then simply lock up all 8 square around it with Force Bubbles, you might as well surrender immediately for the sake of your sanity if you don't have a move that can remove an arbitary tile on your team.

Honestly the question is how nasty does the AI feel like. I assume the AI will still randomly place Force Bubbles but when you get to place 8 locked tiles, even placing them at random can easily create a nightmarish scenario for IW's 2 uber special tiles (the protect and the invisibility).

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

I'm not really seeing how the locked tiles prevent any matches from being made. You get what, 3 of them? and that doesn't help against 4-matches

You get 8 of them at max level. If you lock up everything of a given color, it'd be virtually impossible to match anything of that color. If tiles continue to provide beneficial effect while locked (I'm pretty sure they do not), this means you cannot get rid of an invisibility or a protect tile as you'd just lock up all blue or all yellow. Given 180 protect strength is her blue protect at base level, as soon as that is locked up you might as well consider the game over. It'd still take 2 match 4s to destroyed a locked tile provided you locked up everything of that color, because you wouldn't have any tiles of that color to use to destroy the unlocked tile even if you got a right match 4.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

I like the change a big deal. Protect tile is great. Was thinking about the nature of the bubble. Sure on enemy tile it shall cancel the effect. On friendly tile should protect it and keep the effect working. She is potent enough to tune the shield's nature, right?

In that case you might as well have the game immediately end after the first Force Bubbles because you'd just lock all the blue tiles and if it's 180 at base level, that's pretty much a range almost nothing can actually hurt you, and there's almost no way to destroy the said protect tile when you have every blue tile locked up. It'd take 2 match 4s on the right line to destroy the tile, since even after you unlocked it, you still wouldn't any meaningful number of blue tiles to attempt to destroy it.

Good point. (though the can't hurt is not true, yesterday I was looking at 8 ~130 dmg daken tiles just few turn in the game; in similar setup bullseye had 4 ~100 protect tiles at all odd places, but eventually got overpowered by even volverine swords...)

Actually that note could be fixed by the part I (mostly) left out, forcefields need concentration and ideally would use up stamina, AP, something or fade/crash with time. Yes, that starts leading a bit too far, at least at this point in the game. . But a hotfix for the original idea would make the bubbles count down from say 5 (number needs actual experimenting I can't do in head), scaling with covers.

And yes, being able to protect your strike and shield tiles is strong -- just as it is supposed to be for a defensive support character, especially a legendary. I would not fear ahead as normally you win games on offense not defense, and in the environment turtle strategy is suboptimal at best as you want to save time to play more.

Unknown

My take...mediocre on offense, insane on defense. Slow the game down some more, demiurge.

Cant wait to fight iw spidey hulk teams with all good offensive characters nerfed.

Unknown

Interesting to see it in practice, but it seems like an improvement for sure, especially the lower costs and the ability to do some damage. Love the powerful defense tile. Personally I wish the Yellow could be used offensively to remove a character from the fight temporarily.

AdamMagus

On paper she sounds very nice, am glad she'll finally do a decent chunk of damage and those protect tiles sound insane, fits very well with her characters theme in the comics!

I'll have to take her out for a spin to see how my level 135 IW performs, am guessing teaming her up with Hulk might be nice to feed her some green and Magneto Marvel Now to feed her some blues.

Time to spend some ISO leveling up my Magneto Marvel NOW!

Unknown

Ppl need to remember that all the mainstay characters are about to be nerfed. Wolvie thor made up 80% if all teams. Mags was kinda rare but spidey was everywhere too. Until we see them there is no way to know how bad they get nerfed...so ill rate her based with those 4 removed. Her yellow is useable now, and has its uses on certain situations. It's better than a none 5 point hood yellow. It's defensive or tactical by nature so its uses will probably increase as new characters are added. Her damage is okay, though the turn ending is kinda bad still (without it she would be pretty damn strong with the ap building...so it kinda is a must..or remove the ap build and let it not end the turn). That said the def tile is nice and the chosen tile lock sounds amazingly useful now that it doesn't require her tiles to show.

Now think of this... New 4**** wolvie, let's assume his green actually becomes viable as an attack tile maker, and doom. She gets these lock tiles up then you drop doom down and blow up her locks for some ap. Now you do another cycle of doom and wolvie maybe. Sounds pretty deadly with countdown/tile characters..which i assume is the point. Now we just need characters with good enough countdown tiles to use. Ignore her yellow and instead use it for a hopefully better wolvie yellow. Seems like a good combo. Wolvie covers green red yellow, she takes blue, and doom takes black and gives a decent purple for matching.

Biggest boosts due to the attempt to slow the game down will be characters like doom who weren't bad but just took a while to rev up...

Unknown

soenottelling wrote:

Ppl need to remember that all the mainstay characters are about to be nerfed. Wolvie thor made up 80% if all teams. Mags was kinda rare but spidey was everywhere too. Until we see them there is no way to know how bad they get nerfed...so ill rate her based with those 4 removed. Her yellow is useable now, and has its uses on certain situations. It's better than a none 5 point hood yellow. It's defensive or tactical by nature so its uses will probably increase as new characters are added. Her damage is okay, though the turn ending is kinda bad still (without it she would be pretty damn strong with the ap building...so it kinda is a must..or remove the ap build and let it not end the turn). That said the def tile is nice and the chosen tile lock sounds amazingly useful now that it doesn't require her tiles to show.

Now think of this... New 4**** wolvie, let's assume his green actually becomes viable as an attack tile maker, and doom. She gets these lock tiles up then you drop doom down and blow up her locks for some ap. Now you do another cycle of doom and wolvie maybe. Sounds pretty deadly with countdown/tile characters..which i assume is the point. Now we just need characters with good enough countdown tiles to use. Ignore her yellow and instead use it for a hopefully better wolvie yellow. Seems like a good combo. Wolvie covers green red yellow, she takes blue, and doom takes black and gives a decent purple for matching.

Biggest boosts due to the attempt to slow the game down will be characters like doom who weren't bad but just took a while to rev up...

I suppose EVENTUALLY people will get more than 4* at usable levels, but my lord, knowing how much ISO I've used just ont Wolvie (and incidentally I did a jig at his announced buff), I can't imagine the timesink.leveling both will.be

Spoit

Wait, can someone test to see if the bubble protect your tiles from punisher's green (or other similar powers)?

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

Yellow
Still seems very ignorable. Doesn't do anything for you on offense, and on defense, if the AI has 14 yellow, something's gone very wrong. In most situations I'd rather cast almost any other yellow power: Lightning Strike, Sunder, Twin Pistols, maybe even Armored Assault and Sentinel of Liberty. Also, a single yellow tile, picked randomly, is pretty hard to protect.

Wonder what happens if you cast two of these...still, that's 28 AP, which is a ton, and it's yellow, which is relatively hard to generate (I know, Thor, but still).

I actually did this, before (although I have no idea how I got so much yellow AP)! It just shields the same character, though