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

Unknown

No. Strike Tile != Attack Tile. Attack Tiles are fists, what Storm and Punisher and now Iron Fist make with their No fists on board, free green fist for Iron Fist. Fist.

Unknown

Grey Widow - 5950 HP | Iron Fist - 7650 HP
GW - 11 turns into 6 | IF - 5 turns into 9 (that's over triple more efficient)
GW - 19 to deal max 12k dmg if all characters are alive | IF - 15 (20) to deal 12k dmg, targetted and in spread packets of 4k each (add 5 to make sure he meets requirements for damage)
GW - useless dump | IW - cheap strike tiles of Punisher strenght (double if matching requirements) AND passive uncounterable huge

Sigh

Unknown

Give it a couple of months (maybe 3) and I bet the nerf bat will strike again.

Edit: With my limited roster, I think a team with with CMags (for blue/red) and Black Panther will be fun to play. Match 2 purple (or just 1 if boosted), use it to get black and possible cascades, then use IF green and BP's yellow to fill the board with strike tiles and finish with BP's black. A replacement for BP could be Luke Cage whose black doesn't seem expensive (as you need 2x to use effectively) with IF on your team and he brings a little defense to the team.

Unknown

Funny how NorthernPolarity didn't considered Falcon, who can enhance both his attack and strike tiles while also covering protect tiles like cage.

Cypr3ss

Not sure about funny but I found it interesting he'd missed Cyclops too, whose black requires 13 AP and seems to pack a bit of a punch?

Regards,
Cypr3ss.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

No. Strike Tile != Attack Tile. Attack Tiles are fists, what Storm and Punisher and now Iron Fist make with their No fists on board, free green fist for Iron Fist. Fist.

Gotcha,

Thanks

simonsez

Nivrax wrote:

GW - 11 turns into 6 | IF - 5 turns into 9 (that's over triple more efficient)

There's a big difference when you can place the tiles vs when you can't. So it's not even close to being triple as efficient. In fact, it's probably not more efficient at all. It's already been said in this thread that IF purple will gain 5-6 AP on average. When placing GW's green tiles, with a reasonable board you can get way more than 10-12 AP.

CrookedKnight

Feel free to tell me I'm being dumb here, but if you're not planning to run Iron Fist with X-Force, would it be better to go 4/5/4 than 3/5/5? You lose 150 damage per turn from the attack tile but you gain 88-176 in strike tiles, which more than makes up the difference even when you use the lesser version (because it adds 88 to match damage and an additional 88 to the attack tile damage, a total boost of 176 per turn).

Scoregasms

Hmm, I think folks are overlooking what makes Surgical Strike so good because Iron Fist is just so gdamn sexy, when the board has a lot of the opposing teams strongest color, it's Christmas morning. But 9 Basic Color tiles converted is a lot, what happens when they have 10 of that color on the board (5K+ damage) and Iron Fist converts 5 of them to black instead, SS is now doing just 2.5K damage.

I'm sure someone else can math it out, but that's why 2* characters like MnMags are so good since you can place his 5 blue tiles strategically, even guaranteeing a couple crits along the way.

Don't get me wrong, I think Iron Fist is going to be freaking spectacular, especially for a 3* character, he's borderline 4* (in fact, I'd take him on my team over Elektra/Starlord every day of the week). But my point is that because of the basic color tile conversion, it may make other Blacks that just do straight damage like RoTP or Cage's be as good or better a percentage of the time. Not sure if that percentage is a lot or not, but I've definitely misjudged an opposing teams strongest color only to do a whopping 1K damage on a surgical strike instead of it being the game ender I was planning.

Sure, it's going to be uber OP when it's Daken/Blade/Pun/Doom on the other side as the team's strongest member, but how often does that actually happen?

CrookedKnight

Right now you see a good amount of Dakens placed ahead of a green user specifically to force SS into hitting black, so it's not that uncommon (although it'll get less so when IF enters the meta).

That said, even if you have to take a couple of turns to clear the black off the board before you fire, it's still accelerating the move dramatically. And if Thunder Strike is an indicator there'll be a decent number of times where the cascades get rid of it all for you.

Xenoberyll

I think the play is to convert the tiles to black, creating instant matches of black, leading to cascades of varying colours. Then surgical strike and get the AP of their strongest color. A lot of the created black will be gone by then.

CrookedKnight

Also, bear in mind that if his purple leaves a lot of black on the board it probably didn't create enough cascades to give you 11 black yet.

simonsez

CrookedKnight wrote:

Feel free to tell me I'm being dumb here, but if you're not planning to run Iron Fist with X-Force, would it be better to go 4/5/4 than 3/5/5? You lose 150 damage per turn from the attack tile but you gain 88-176 in strike tiles, which more than makes up the difference even when you use the lesser version (because it adds 88 to match damage and an additional 88 to the attack tile damage, a total boost of 176 per turn).

But the strike tiles will go away. The attack tile is always going to be there.

Unknown

Narkon wrote:

Give it a couple of months (maybe 3) and I bet the nerf bat will strike again.

Edit: With my limited roster, I think a team with with CMags (for blue/red) and Black Panther will be fun to play. Match 2 purple (or just 1 if boosted), use it to get black and possible cascades, then use his green and BP's yellow to fill the board with strike tiles and finish with BP's black. A replacement for BP could be Luke Cage whose black doesn't seem expensive (as you need 2x to use effectively) with IF on your team and he brings a little defense to the team.

I give it 6 months. I figure with XThor, he may be even better than Loki. If you manage to power surge early and move the board a little, the clustering of generated blacks from Iron Fist should help you get Surgical Strike even faster, as well as cause cascades.

With the release of Cyclops and now Iron Fist guess I'm hoarding my tokens until next season.

Phaserhawk

My opinion.

If he is released as is, expect to see X-Force Surgical Strike nerf in the near future

Unknown

I don't know why D3 keeps releasing chars that only make Xforce stronger and faster. Killing the game for non xforce users.

Follow the money eh?

Unknown

Switchman wrote:

I don't know why D3 keeps releasing chars that only make Xforce stronger and faster. Killing the game for non xforce users.

Follow the money eh?

The problem isn't X-Force enablers(or 4*Thor enablers) its X-Force and Thor. It's sort of like saying, 'okay, I have this winning card. What else would go good with this winning card? Pretty much everything.'

I don't see any nerfs unless A) It effects PVP drastically and It's as easy as sentry bombing.

4* should be powerful, but there's Nick Fury(reasonable) and then there's X-Force/4*Thor:

Like, I don't even know if there's any situations where you WOULDN'T want to use X-Force. It's like playing Rock Paper Scissors and you can use all 3.

Unknown

Although you can't place the tiles, if you just get 10 purple it's going to be able to convert enough unless you already have 12+ black AP, and at that point you can either use purple for damage or just use the black AP for something if you got anyone who can use it. One interesting side effect is that IF + X Force will trivially infinite on most DA matchup since purple is their strongest color about half of the time, so Surgical Strike will usually hit purple, though to be fair being able to blow away boring DA events is not the worst thing you can do in terms of balance.

Not sure why people are still thinking Thor is the one responsible for the imbalance after how medicore she was in Cage Match and the only restriction applied by that event was you can't use X Force. Thor can't do anything without getting rid of a person fast, and right now the only guy who can reliably get rid of even a weak character with a 3 match move is X Force (X Force). Even boosted, Berserker Rage is not something you can use to immediately get rid of someone without having the other pieces go along with it since it can backfire on you easily, and if you have to wait for say 9g + 11black (for Trickery) or 9g + 10r + 9blue (for Smite) that's already very slow. Now X Force uses the same 3 match green/4 match black, but both of his moves have no drawbacks and will generally collect a large amount of AP being used, which greatly reduces the amount of AP you need in other colors (and for Surgical Strike, it's often 0 for a certain color). If there's no X Force you almost have to resort to a 4 match move to just kill someone, since the only 3 match moves that can qualify would be Berserker Rage (risky), Fireball (not quite enough damage and is on red), and Oldest Trick in the Book (easy to lose the CD and it's red) and if you need a 4 match move to get anything going, there's nothing fast about that setup at all.

Phaserhawk

Phantron wrote:

Although you can't place the tiles, if you just get 10 purple it's going to be able to convert enough unless you already have 12+ black AP, and at that point you can either use purple for damage or just use the black AP for something if you got anyone who can use it. One interesting side effect is that IF + X Force will trivially infinite on most DA matchup since purple is their strongest color about half of the time, so Surgical Strike will usually hit purple, though to be fair being able to blow away boring DA events is not the worst thing you can do in terms of balance.

Not sure why people are still thinking Thor is the one responsible for the imbalance after how medicore she was in Cage Match and the only restriction applied by that event was you can't use X Force. Thor can't do anything without getting rid of a person fast, and right now the only guy who can reliably get rid of even a weak character with a 3 match move is X Force (X Force). Even boosted, Berserker Rage is not something you can use to immediately get rid of someone with having the other pieces go along with it since it can backfire on you easily, and if you have to wait for say 9g + 11black (for Trickery) or 9g + 10r + 9blue (for Smite) that's already very slow. Now X Force uses the same 3 match green/4 match black, but both of his moves have no drawbacks and is will generally collect a large amount of AP being used, which greatly reduces the amount of AP you need in other colors (and for Surgical Strike, it's often 0 for a certain color). If there's no X Force you almost have to resort to a 4 match move to just kill someone, since the only 3 match moves that can qualify would be Berserker Rage (risky), Fireball (not quite enough damage and is on red), and Oldest Trick in the Book (easy to lose the CD and it's red) and if you need a 4 match move to get anything going, there's nothing fast about that setup at all.

Well said. And balancing X-Force could be done so simply without changing the character as much. I have said to have Surgical Strike do exactly the same as it does, but instead of getting AP from # of tiles destroyed, you just get the AP the team had of their strongest color. This would probably stop the Surgical Strike into an always X-Force. So then when you do Surgical Strike 1st turn from boosts and Iron Fist, you would do a good chunk of damage, but wouldn't steal anything since they have no AP

Unknown

I'm looking forward to having iron fist in my roster