*** Iron Fist (Immortal Weapon) ***

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Tripwire wrote:

Yeah, I'm going to take a break from MPQ and only play the Deadpool Daily Quests until I see how this issue gets resolved. I'd like at least a fighting chance, but Iron Fist pretty much forces me to spend health packs every time I encounter him, and I'm not willing to do that.

If you need to take a break because of one character who appears in one node out of 30 in a PvE, I'd say you were itching hard for a reason to put the game aside.

Actually, I was enjoying the game quite a bit and I do have a lot of interest in what passes for PvP in this game.

I mentioned the node because it gives a glimpse of what new team compositions will be like in PvP.

I can see that in 2 months Iron Fist is going to show up regularly in a lot of teams, and he is a **** to fight against. Either I have access to top tier teams (X-Force/Thoress/Luke Cage with Iron Fist) or I can forget PvP entirely, because I'm not willing to spend health packs every time I encounter him.

If you want to know, I completed my 2* transitioning phase and have a Luke Cage with 11 covers, who currently is my best character and probably one of the only ones who can somewhat counter Iron Fist.

I also have a Iron Fist with 3 covers in black and Luke Cage/Iron Fist will be my only chance at making encounters with enemy Iron Fists bearable.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The efficiency at which he enables other skills is not fair. If I had a character that had an ability that said "5 AP: If you have Iron-Man 40 on your team, this does 10k damage", would that be balanced?

It's probably a couple of AP too cheap (IMO) BUT I don't think you can fully disregard the guy's point about the difference between self enabling and enabling another.

Take Sentry for example. His pre-nerf state would have been significantly less OP in practical terms if he didn't make his own strike tile for WR. If you use BP for strike tiles then no intimidaton to guarantee safely firing off the WR before unlucky cacades/matches kill your strike(s). The fact he could do everything for himself gave a lot more scope for min/maxing his partners and is insurance against a bad cascade killing someone else off before you can combo them.

From that perspective, his purple should probably be a bit more efficient than a similar ability that another character can use in a closed loop with themself.

From that perspective I think I would pitch it at 7AP (probably) even though it makes one more tile than cyclops does and my gut feeling is random tiles is better than TUs... not 100% sure though without some science.

Also, the fact that there are devastating abilities on black is somewhat skewing people's perspective of the skill. If he made yellow tiles would we all be this excited?

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

onimus wrote:

You have an incredibly good chance of getting surgical strike turn 1. If you're facing an Xforce, that could mean an Xforce turn 1 too. He can, in fact, legitimately, win in 2 to 3 turns.

Having 9 placed black tiles generate the 9 AP would be extremely lucky, not an "incredibly good chance". Even if you also boosted 3 black, I've seen plenty of casts of his purple that don't yield 2 matches. Unless it's your second cast of purple, I don't even think it's 50-50 that you get two matches.

But let's say you did... and you got off SS... and let's say you are facing another XF, collect green, and get off XF. All you've done at this point is down XF. You still have 16k of GT to get rid of, and whatever the 3rd character is. And you're out of AP. So I'm not seeing how this translates into a 2 or 3 turn win.

What you're missing here is the cascades these powers cause. Between the blacksplosion you get from IF's purple and X-Force doing his thing, you're very likely to end up with a good amount of random AP. All it takes is five purple to drop in for you and you can do it all again, and if you've got an outlet for red/blue/yellow on your third character it just gets bad.

Wonko33

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The efficiency at which he enables other skills is not fair. If I had a character that had an ability that said "5 AP: If you have Iron-Man 40 on your team, this does 10k damage", would that be balanced?

who does 10k when hits purple? Are you using the cascade from hell "proof' ?

Unknown

Wonko33 wrote:

it just sucks when they nerf, the dev have no nerfing skills- they're going to go Magnerfo on him or give him a Sentry castration and we will lose a fun character

It does suck if he can do it twice in a row, so he gets stunned 1 turn when he hits purple? Cost from 5 to 7 ?

You aren't wrong about their nerfing skills, although I can't imagine how they can mess IF up. With IF, the only thing they have to do is change a few values. Something like
- Increase the purple cost to 7AP
- Drop the max black tiles from 9 to 7 and reduce damage to 3k
- Drop the Attack tile's strength by 200

If after that he is bad, give his black Attack tile a buff of +50 Strength and add 1 more black tile on the board and test again. Just like in programming you don't just build a code of 5000 lines and then test if it works. Start with small changes and test often. If it works make more changes if they are needed. This is how testing should be done, but with MPQ I doubt the characters are tested at all before jumping from the drawing board into our screen.

Wonko33

Like Bonfire said:

If you look at previous nerfs they were mostly self-enablers.
Magneto
Rags
Spiderman
certainly Sentry

the only only pair I can kinda remember was the 2* wolverine+thor combo.

Maybe a very basic nerf would be fair, like cost 6 and stuns him, or cost 7 - I sure don't want a tomato can nerf where he becomes just a slot spot for essentials (I'm looking at you Sentry, spidey and maybe even cmags)

NorthernPolarity

Wonko33 wrote:

Like Bonfire said:

If you look at previous nerfs they were mostly self-enablers.
Magneto
Rags
Spiderman
certainly Sentry

the only only pair I can kinda remember was the 2* wolverine+thor combo.

Maybe a very basic nerf would be fair, like cost 6 and stuns him, or cost 7 - I sure don't want a tomato can nerf where he becomes just a slot spot for essentials (I'm looking at you Sentry, spidey and maybe even cmags)

No one was asking for a wheelchair nerf. This is PTSD from those nerfs showing its face again. Regarding how 5ap translates into 10k damage, i see two characters (bp / xf) that do that trivially.

I agree that a nerf to 7 or 8 ap would be much more than reasonable to make IF not OP. IFs putple should be more aggressively costed as he doesnt enable himself, but not like this.

Unknown

Wonko33 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The efficiency at which he enables other skills is not fair. If I had a character that had an ability that said "5 AP: If you have Iron-Man 40 on your team, this does 10k damage", would that be balanced?

who does 10k when hits purple? Are you using the cascade from hell "proof' ?

He's talking Rage of the Panther

simonsez

NorthernPolarity wrote:

He's by far the fastest in 3* land. If your argument for why a nerf isn't necessary is that he's not as fast as XF / GT, then I don't know what to say, because you're comparing a 3* to 2 4*s that are at least 50% better than any existing 3* today.

So the argument is "transitioners can't have nice things?"

Maybe the real problem here is that a strong 3* runs the risk of silencing the "nerf XForce" choir...

NorthernPolarity

simonsez wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

He's by far the fastest in 3* land. If your argument for why a nerf isn't necessary is that he's not as fast as XF / GT, then I don't know what to say, because you're comparing a 3* to 2 4*s that are at least 50% better than any existing 3* today.

So the argument is "transitioners can't have nice things?"

Maybe the real problem here is that a strong 3* runs the risk of silencing the "nerf XForce" choir...

Or maybe, the problem is that IF obsoletes almost every single other 3* character in existence, and destroys any semblance of a balanced 3* metagame that we were close to.

Omega Red

People exaggerate greatly about Iron Fist's purple. When you compare it against other cheap abilities it is not that overpowered at all.

For six red, Ragnarok converts four tiles and brings 1000+ damage.

For five blue, Laken converts four tiles and brings over 2500 damage.

For five green, Ares deals over 2,000 damage and he is a two-star character.

For five purple, Loki shakes the board, which often can lead to pretty nasty cascades.

Iron fist only converts on first cast. You still need to match those blacks and you actually need someone else to do any damage with them. That last bit is very important because it commits you to play for purple and black. Every time you use purple you will be denying yourself red, yellow, blue, etc. It means also that the enemy can easily counter you by generating green, red or team-up tiles.

Now, I understand that Doom and Mystique's blues look pretty terrible in comparison but that is an entirely different problem.

simonsez

Thugpatrol wrote:

What you're missing here is the cascades these powers cause.

I'm not missing it, I'm just not going to do an assessment as if it were sure thing. Maybe the universe hates me, but it's not unusual at all for IF purple, XF green/black to generate no cascade for me.

NorthernPolarity

Omega Red wrote:

People exaggerate greatly about Iron Fist's purple. When you compare it against other cheap abilities it is not that overpowered at all.

For six red, Ragnarok converts four tiles and brings 1000+ damage.

For five blue, Laken converts four tiles and brings over 2500 damage.

For five green, Ares deals over 2,000 damage and he is a two-star character.

For five purple, Loki shakes the board, which often can lead to pretty nasty cascades.

Iron fist only converts on first cast. You still need to match those blacks and you actually need someone else to do any damage with them. That last bit is very important because it commits you to play for purple and black. Every time you use purple you will be denying yourself red, yellow, blue, etc. It means also that the enemy can easily counter you by generating green, red or team-up tiles.

Now, I understand that Doom and Mystique's blues look pretty terrible in comparison but that is an entirely different problem.

The question becomes "how much damage is all that black generation worth in the first place?" BP and XF have abilities that convert 1 black AP to roughly 1k damage. So now the question is: how much AP does IFs purple generate compared to other abilities? If you look at my post here: (viewtopic.php?f=14&t=18598) and use Thor's thunder strike numbers at level 1 for 4 tiles and level 5 for 9 tiles, we have:
level 1 on 4 tiles - generates 1.5 green tiles.
level 5 on 9 tiles - generates 5 green tiles.

Just on your first comparison: Ragnarok - 1k damage + 1.5 green tiles on average, assuming green tiles is 1k damage / ap (which it isn't) = 2.5k damage on average.
IF 5 purple - no damage + 5 black tiles on average = 5k damage on average.

Now, this isn't even counting the additional damage caused by cascades or subsequent casts of the abilities. If IF's purple is literally 100% more efficient than thunderclap without counting extra cascades and crits (which is probably another 1-2k damage) and it costs 1 AP less, then something's not right.

You can apply the exact same logic to all of the other abilities you listed as well. Nothing comes close to IF's purple in terms of speed and efficiency. Being forced to have another guy for black is probably worth it if what you get out of it is twice as efficient as anything else out there.


Regarding Doom / MQ, I think it's generally accepted that MQ / Doom's abilities are their best ability, and very strong ones to boot. If IF's purple is twice as efficient as those abilities with even less restrictions, its not that Doom/MQ's abilities are underpowered, but probably IFs ability being overpowered.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Thugpatrol wrote:

What you're missing here is the cascades these powers cause.

I'm not missing it, I'm just not going to do an assessment as if it were sure thing. Maybe the universe hates me, but it's not unusual at all for IF purple, XF green/black to generate no cascade for me.

Have you been cursed by an old gypsy woman recently? I don't know what to tell you. Assessing it as if it's a sure thing doesn't make much sense, but neither does assessing it as zero chance, which is exactly what you were doing by saying "you're now out of AP" after firing off that combo. Using three strong board shakes in a row is very likely to get you extra AP, and in a world of "random" tile generation it's about as much of a guarantee as you're going to get.

If you've got couple colors you can't use and that's what you wind up with, well that's going to be a problem for you. But if you work in someone with even more board shake, like say a CMags, it's very easy to keep the train rolling. Not every PvP is going to feature a character that helps you out there, so you end up with a combo that's not quite as bulletproof as the 4* goon squad, but it's still fairly sustainable considering you're only ever five purple away from starting the merry-go-round all over again.

Unknown

To the guy who asked why transitioners can't have nice things, it seemed like the 4* teams showed up hard to earn IF covers and it was even harder than the typical character release because of all the hype about this guy. So, it will be a long long time before this transitioner will be able to "have nice things" and he will probably be nerfed just after I manage to level him up, he is a toy for the veterans and whales for now. And they will not hesitate to use him ~against~ transitioning teams.

My average damage taken went way up in fist bump, which means more healthpacks, more downtime, lower scores. That is the opposite of "this is so much fun!"

simonsez

Thugpatrol wrote:

Assessing it as if it's a sure thing doesn't make much sense, but neither does assessing it as zero chance

Very true... but at this point I guess we can all move into the other thread and fight about nerfing the new character instead

Chief270

Aint going to lie. Paid to upgrade this guy(And I had only ever bought one cover prior to this) cause of how useful I saw him to be. Nerfing his black immediately would be a complete slap in my face. But if the only issues are with purple, I probably won't care that much.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

onimus wrote:

You have an incredibly good chance of getting surgical strike turn 1.

If you're facing an Xforce, that could mean an Xforce turn 1 too.

He can, in fact, legitimately, win in 2 to 3 turns.

Having 9 placed black tiles generate the 9 AP would be extremely lucky, not an "incredibly good chance". Even if you also boosted 3 black, I've seen plenty of casts of his purple that don't yield 2 matches. Unless it's your second cast of purple, I don't even think it's 50-50 that you get two matches.

But let's say you did... and you got off SS... and let's say you are facing another XF, collect green, and get off XF. All you've done at this point is down XF. You still have 16k of GT to get rid of, and whatever the 3rd character is. And you're out of AP. So I'm not seeing how this translates into a 2 or 3 turn win.

Well then I'm cursed.

Because every time he cast it, it caused at least 2 matches. usually 3 or 4.

I hope NP runs it in his simulation soon.

Because you're way underscoring it's power.

Trisul

He ran a 9-tile generator before, Thor yellow. It generated something like 5.3 avg AP or something like that.

Unknown

Trisul wrote:

He ran a 9-tile generator before, Thor yellow. It generated something like 5.3 avg AP or something like that.

Well there you go.

On average, you get a turn 1 surgical strike. Just like I thought.