babinro wrote: 4) Hood - Dormammu's Aid rework As someone who now has 3 hoods this one is particularly hard to recommend. Hood's blue is already somewhat problematic in the current game. Remove the ability to use boosted AP bonuses to take him down quick and the problem just intensifies. I realize that Hood negates enemy Hood but this leads to a character tax when selecting a team of only 3 people. The game would inevitably devolve to ______/ ______ /Hood. Lets be honest...that's how most of the game operates now until you bring boosts into the mix. How do we change his blue? Any number of ways. I think passive non-interactive AP steal is simply harmful for the game. Rather than further nerf the passive ability I'd much rather see it become an active skill. Something more along the lines of OBW, Mystique or even Loki's.
babinro wrote: We've had a recent influx of VERY powerful 3* options added to the game... - Rocket & Groot - Cyclops - Luke Cage - Blade - Iron Fist We have several great revamped and long term 3* characters as well... - Magneto - Thor - Doctor Doom - Hood - Black Panther - Captain America - Deadpool Not to forget characters that shine when used in combination with others... - Patch and Loki/Daredevil - Daken, Blade and Falcon I'm sure I've missed a few (especially 3* combos with AP generators) but the point is we have a fairly healthy and diverse 3* character list going on right now. Even adding in the 4* pool of IW, Fury, Star-Lord, Devil Dinosaur and Elektra doesn't throw this off. With all that setup aside...imagine MPQ with the following changes.1) Thor: Goddess of Thunder - Health reduced to 12,000 - Power Surge now only applies charge tiles to Red and Yellow tiles. This allows her to still one shot anything with her red/blue combo but then lack the ability to sustain the combo after the initial stun. Making charge tiles more of a risk/reward prospect as was originally intended by design. The health reduction makes her a bit more reasonable to deal with when it comes to 3* character damage output. 2) X-Force - Green Power deals 500 less base damage - Surgical Strike: Steals and adds AP based on how many covers the skill has. At 5 black surgical strike can drain 5AP and gain 5AP. All other damage and tile destruction mechanics remain unchanged. X-Force's green is mostly okay. It's supposed to be a powerhouse as he's a 4* character but the damage he does with the potential to cascade really makes certain low hp characters like Hood and Loki trivial. Lowering the damage slightly makes put this skill more in line with other powers around the same cost without making it so weak that it's useless. Whether the damage reduction should be 500, 750, 1000 or more is certainly up for debate. But an adjustment feels appropriate given the skill cost to benefit ratio. The suggested black skill change should be obvious. Draining and gaining less AP helps keeps this skill from chaining other skills as reliably. So rather than chaining SS into 2x Green vs Hulk you'll only be able to chain it into 1. This is still a potent 8k+ damage combo with mass cascades but that's okay because other characters have these kinds of combos (Mystique, GSBW, and Doom for example). XF's is made more powerful as a 4* by nature of generating AP from cascades. 3) ALL bonus AP generating boosts are removed from the game. We've got plenty of characters who can help with that now (Hood, Loki, X-Force, Cyclops, Doom, GSBW, Mystique, etc). No more absurd competitive advantages that automatically make any offensive match trivial (barring AI cascades).4) Hood - Dormammu's Aid rework As someone who now has 3 hoods this one is particularly hard to recommend. Hood's blue is already somewhat problematic in the current game. Remove the ability to use boosted AP bonuses to take him down quick and the problem just intensifies. I realize that Hood negates enemy Hood but this leads to a character tax when selecting a team of only 3 people. The game would inevitably devolve to ______/ ______ /Hood. Lets be honest...that's how most of the game operates now until you bring boosts into the mix. How do we change his blue? Any number of ways. I think passive non-interactive AP steal is simply harmful for the game. Rather than further nerf the passive ability I'd much rather see it become an active skill. Something more along the lines of OBW, Mystique or even Loki's.What do these changes even achieve? Don't you realize there will ALWAYS be 'best' teams for optimal play? I realize that the nature of a competitive game means that we'll always have PvP's dominated by the same team. These suggestions instead offer a more varied selection of viable alternative characters to the top tier. They might deal a little less damage and kill a little slower..but it's not the enormous gap that we have now. From here D3 would simply need to continue revisiting older characters and improving them over time as you have been in order to further balance out the playing field.Do you think some of these changes go to far? Not far enough? Are these characters fine as is? Most importantly, do you think these changes would make for a more fun game?
NorthernPolarity wrote: People on this forum do not want a balanced metagame, they just want to stomp with their xors. I attribute this to Demiurge traumatizing everyone with the Ragnarok Spidey nerfs: everyone has PTSD. Say the word 'nerf 4or', and you'll have a crowd of pitchforks waiting to **** you. Honestly the only way we're going to see any progress is to start buffing the other 4*s to at least X-Force tier. If you touch a hair on their baby 4or, even something relatively innocuous as your changes (well, the surge change, probably not the HP change), then everyone just goes up in arms. It's frankly disgusting, but the world we live in right now, so yeah. I would try to aim the changes more at promoting a healthy 4* metagame instead, which can be accomplished without any nerfs and inciting the mobs.
Phantron wrote: NorthernPolarity wrote: People on this forum do not want a balanced metagame, they just want to stomp with their xors. I attribute this to Demiurge traumatizing everyone with the Ragnarok Spidey nerfs: everyone has PTSD. Say the word 'nerf 4or', and you'll have a crowd of pitchforks waiting to **** you. Honestly the only way we're going to see any progress is to start buffing the other 4*s to at least X-Force tier. If you touch a hair on their baby 4or, even something relatively innocuous as your changes (well, the surge change, probably not the HP change), then everyone just goes up in arms. It's frankly disgusting, but the world we live in right now, so yeah. I would try to aim the changes more at promoting a healthy 4* metagame instead, which can be accomplished without any nerfs and inciting the mobs. If all 4*s are as powerful as X Force most games would end in 2 AP consuming moves since X Force effectively decides most games with 2 moves (Surgical Strike + X Force + whatever you cascade into) and if we made other characters that strong then it'd just be any 2 moves end the game. That might be balanced but it'd just be two sides playing with an atomic bomb kind of balanced. His offense is obviously way too much even for himself, as he can trivially kill himself with ease and even if it's balanced, the 'everyone dies in 2 moves' game is just not very fun. I do think the game might benefit from a 'back in the days...' mode where you do get to just stomp some hapless victim forever. Bring back the 2AP Thunderclap there. Maybe make it a weekly version of DDQ or something. It's okay to totally stomp everyone for fun once in a while.
babinro wrote: 1) Thor: Goddess of Thunder - Health reduced to 12,000 - Power Surge now only applies charge tiles to Red and Yellow tiles. This allows her to still one shot anything with her red/blue combo but then lack the ability to sustain the combo after the initial stun. Making charge tiles more of a risk/reward prospect as was originally intended by design. The health reduction makes her a bit more reasonable to deal with when it comes to 3* character damage output.
babinro wrote: 2) X-Force - Green Power deals 500 less base damage - Surgical Strike: Steals and adds AP based on how many covers the skill has. At 5 black surgical strike can drain 5AP and gain 5AP. All other damage and tile destruction mechanics remain unchanged. X-Force's green is mostly okay. It's supposed to be a powerhouse as he's a 4* character but the damage he does with the potential to cascade really makes certain low hp characters like Hood and Loki trivial. Lowering the damage slightly makes put this skill more in line with other powers around the same cost without making it so weak that it's useless. Whether the damage reduction should be 500, 750, 1000 or more is certainly up for debate. But an adjustment feels appropriate given the skill cost to benefit ratio. The suggested black skill change should be obvious. Draining and gaining less AP helps keeps this skill from chaining other skills as reliably. So rather than chaining SS into 2x Green vs Hulk you'll only be able to chain it into 1. This is still a potent 8k+ damage combo with mass cascades but that's okay because other characters have these kinds of combos (Mystique, GSBW, and Doom for example). XF's is made more powerful as a 4* by nature of generating AP from cascades.
babinro wrote: 3) ALL bonus AP generating boosts are removed from the game. We've got plenty of characters who can help with that now (Hood, Loki, X-Force, Cyclops, Doom, GSBW, Mystique, etc). No more absurd competitive advantages that automatically make any offensive match trivial (barring AI cascades).
NorthernPolarity wrote: The 3* metagame + X-Force devolves into the situation that you described. The 4* metagame, which involves 10k HP+ characters, does not. Remember that X-Force / Fury are the equivalent of a 4* 6800 HP character. While it's true that X-Force ends the game vs a 3* team composition with say 2 guys at 6800 and 1 guy at 10k, if you're facing a 4* team composition of LadyThor / X-Force / and some other tank that has 10k+ HP, X-Force obviously gets a lot worse. X-Force takes either one surgical or two X-Forces to kill a 4* 6800 guy, and that seems relatively balanced. Of course I would prefer a metagame where the 3* featured actually mattered and an average 4* was between X-Force / Fury, but given all the **** I've seen from saying the word 'nerf', I've bitterly given up on a route that involves nerfing xor for the moment.
NorthernPolarity wrote: The thing is that players are supposed to win a majority of the time on offense. If you remove this and all of the sudden games become 60-40, people are going to be mad because they aren't winning as often or getting screwed over by RNG. I feel like this is a necessary evil: defense already sort of matters, and removing the offensive advantage is really just asking for trouble.
Phantron wrote: NorthernPolarity wrote: The thing is that players are supposed to win a majority of the time on offense. If you remove this and all of the sudden games become 60-40, people are going to be mad because they aren't winning as often or getting screwed over by RNG. I feel like this is a necessary evil: defense already sort of matters, and removing the offensive advantage is really just asking for trouble. The whole PvP ranking is a mess precisely because people win an overwhelmingly of the time on offense. If I beat you 100% of the time and you beat me 100% of the time, which of us is the better player? You might be inclined to say we're about equal, except in MPQ it can easily be the case that either you're a lot better than me (as a function of skill/team strength) or the other way around and we can still easily beat each other near 100% of the time when boosts are thrown in. So then it becomes about shield hopping strategy or the random 'you were attacked by soandso and OTHERS' massive fall because that's what happens when there's no way to establish any kind of 'stronger' player. As far as MPQ is concerned, just about everyone is equally strong because everyone beats everyone else near 100% of the time, and the best player is either someone who spends the most (in case of shields) or someone who is luckiest (for those who do not shield). Now, if boosts are removed I expect character regen rate or health pack system to be massively changed. I'd suggest have all PvP begin the fight with a burst of healing for 50% of your character's max health. I tested this before and found that retreating is subtracted from your real health, so you still take the full penalty for retreating including being downed. Without this mechanism, if you did start out say 60-40, it'd quickly turn into like 10-90 as your team accumulates damage. For example, imagine your team has 60% chance to win at full health and we'll say that a team has 40% chance of winning inflicts 40% of your team's health before going down. So you start the next fight with 60% of your total health. Your chances of winning this fight is extremely grim, and it'd cost you 3 health packs to get back to 100%, which is obviously not sustainable.
NorthernPolarity wrote: I think that a change like this would be a lot harder to get right than something like character balance changes, since there is a lot more risk and variables involved in making this change. Focusing on getting the character balance metagame to a point where its not just endless xors destroying everyone is a much more obtainable and less riskier proposition than doing something that fundamentally changes the way PvP works. It's a good stretch goal down the road, but we might as well go for the easier goal instead while that's available to us.
Phantron wrote: For X Force, if you're going to lower the green's damage, just make the tiles destroyed don't generate damage similar to Power of Attorney.
NorthernPolarity wrote: Honestly the only way we're going to see any progress is to start buffing the other 4*s to at least X-Force tier. If you touch a hair on their baby 4or, even something relatively innocuous as your changes (well, the surge change, probably not the HP change), then everyone just goes up in arms. It's frankly disgusting, but that's the world we live in right now, so yeah. I would try to aim the changes more at promoting a healthy 4* metagame instead, which can be accomplished without any nerfs and inciting the mobs.
NorthernPolarity wrote: The problem with the health reduction is that 4* Thor is supposed to be in the same health class as 3* Thor is for 3*s, and 12k HP isn't quite that. The only reason why this is currently imbalanced is because of the metagame: all of the other 4*s are basically in the 6800HP class for 3*s, so it seems like 4or has massively more HP when really it's just the other characters being squishy. Really good idea with the blue change, seems like it would definitely help out.
NorthernPolarity wrote: Again, X-Force feels overpowered because we're in the context of a 3* meta. In the 4* metagame, 4* Loki and Hood have 8-9k HP, in which case X-Force feels appropriately costed. I feel like black is a touch OP as well, but your change isn't really intuitive from a player's perspective: if I destroyed 12 red tiles, why am I only gaining 5 AP? Something else such as Phaser's suggestion of draining the opponents AP, or boosting base damage but removing AP drain altogether would be a more elegant solution imo.
Pylgrim wrote: Strongly disagree with the suggestion to remove AP bonus boosts. Not even with your suggested nerfs to those characters players with mere 3*s would be able to do much or not waste 3 health packs per game without boosts and/or Hood. That change would basically assure that top players are eternally uncontested
The_Valeyard wrote: Removing boosts should be done, but some players lack the skill to son harder matches without them.