Lower match damage for support characters?

Xenoberyll

People often hold back on levelling support characters like Loki or Hood so their match damage will stay low and they wont have to tank.
To me it's bad design if a lower level version is better than a higher level version of the same character. An idea to change that could be reducing match damage by one tier so tanky characters stay in front of the squishies even when maxed. Is this viable or are there any flaws i'm overlooking?

Unknown

See, the issue with that is due to the RNG nature of card draws, newer players wouldn't really choose their roster, moreso that their roster would be influenced by which 3-star characters they can piece together from their respective trio of covers. Unbalancing damages like it is for EVERY character (save Ragnarok) would create a clear favoritism for certain team matchups. MPQ is designed to make you think about which characters have what colors and to what strengths, so that they can be teamed up accordingly. With new characters coming out all the time that may influence strategies and color coordination, it'd be foolish to create an instant 'always works' team that'd stagnate the late/endgame pvp with nothing but those team ups.

Phaserhawk

Xenoberyll wrote:

People often hold back on levelling support characters like Loki or Hood so their match damage will stay low and they wont have to tank.
To me it's bad design if a lower level version is better than a higher level version of the same character. An idea to change that could be reducing match damage by one tier so tanky characters stay in front of the squishies even when maxed. Is this viable or are there any flaws i'm overlooking?

Over time with the release of more characters, it will balance out. If you want to keep Hood 100% hid, then use Black Panther, want to keep Mohawk hid use X-Force, etc. in addition, just because you may suffer from lack of roster depth and leveled characters does not mean supports should do less damage, team comp creativity is key, and in PvP it wouldn't matter anyway since featured character almost always tanks.

Xenoberyll

I know how to hide a character and i'm sure so do others, nonetheless a lot of Hoods and Lokis are kept at lower levels and a lot of forum posts are about optimal levels for supporters. To me the optimal level should always be at the max. That's why i came up with that idea. If you'd lower Hoods match damage for his first color to the level of his second it wouldn't change mutch in damage output really but maybe more people would be willing to max him.

Phaserhawk

Xenoberyll wrote:

I know how to hide a character and i'm sure so do others, nonetheless a lot of Hoods and Lokis are kept at lower levels and a lot of forum posts are about optimal levels for supporters. To me the optimal level should always be at the max. That's why i came up with that idea. If you'd lower Hoods match damage for his first color to the level of his second it wouldn't change mutch in damage output really but maybe more people would be willing to max him.

But in 3 weeks there could be a guy to completely hide Loki thus negating the need to lower match damage, but if you want as you say then that's the strategy of the game and is probably design working as intended.

Unknown

I think the proper solution would be to let the player decide which character tanks which colors

MarvelDestiny

Hiding characters is what Invisible Woman is all about. (At least it is one of her more useful abilities, used appropriately.)

Pwuz_

Honestly I miss some characters like GSBW having off color abilities. That made her a LOT easier to hide and still build a good team around.

And let's not forget that when your team is defending in PvP, that lower leveled character is a huge liability. A 166 Hood boosted to 249 takes more than twice as much damage to down than one held back to say 68 and boosted to 102. Given the choice between two identical teams one featuring a 5/5/3 Hood level 100, and one at 5/3/5 level 166, that level difference makes one a much easier target.

Lowering the match damage for those characters would only make it a little easier on the offensive side. Conversely it would make things a lot harder defensively since when you're defending your opponent is focusing on those support characters 1st no matter how low their match damage is in most cases.

Xenoberyll

Pwuz_ wrote:

Conversely it would make things a lot harder defensively since when you're defending your opponent is focusing on those support characters 1st no matter how low their match damage is in most cases.

I don't see how that makes it harder on defense. They will be priority targets like before, so there's no change here really unless the match damage is lowered to insignificance. My thought was to lower it to the level of a 2nd color maybe, so i.e. Hood would be able to stay behind any character with yellow as their 2nd strongest if positioned right - on offense.