Everyone pumped for Iron Fist and X-Force combo?

Aidonis

Get ready for shield hopping to really come back, I imagine scores will head back up, not to pre-cooldown levels, but certainly into a realm I'll never have the time to visit.

Boost's: All maxed.
+1 Green and Black
+1 All
+1 Purple and Blue

So before you even have to make a match you can fire off IF's pink. Board depending this should nearly land you into Surgical, we'll go heavy and say you may need two turns to get it off. Use SS on the X-Force you're fighting and viola, you can nearly rinse and repeat. With decent cascades, I can see matches going under 5 turns.

Anyone else find IF's powers a bit on the odd side? They feel game breaking to me. That attack tile will ward off a lot of attackers as well...since matching for 600+ every move, with the ai's love of cascades, will be a health pack nightmare.

Maybe I'm over analyzing it.

NorthernPolarity

Nope, you're right on the dot. I have no idea why the developers released Iron Fist as is, because he's arguably more broken than LazyThor, who is far and away the best (non support) 3* by a mile. For people without 4or, XF / IF is now the new best duo in the metagame. For people with 4or though, it gets trickier. When XF is up against 4or, he sort of fizzles: surgical / X-Force aren't enough to kill her outright, and sometimes you run out of damage while trying to DPS her down. If the featured character is on an unfavorable color (yellow), then all of the sudden turn 1 surgical into nothing isn't looking so hot. It's probably going to be one of those things where he can replace 4or in select PvPs where the featured is on a favorable color for surgical, but 4or reigns supreme in most PvPs in general.

OnesOwnGrief

No. I'm ready for my Heroes For Hire simulator and pve team.

orbitalint

So since he is in tokens, is a pre release nerf even possible? He's technically already in the wild. So they can't even go all falcon on IF before anyone gets their hands on him, right?

I'm very scared right now for what PvP is going to look like for us non functional 4*s. On the flip side, makes me want to pair with my 3/5/3 xf sooooo bad.

Unknown

Yes I am that combo will be much easier to defeat then xforce/thor.

Seasick Pirate

Though I'd prefer to fight Iron/Force teams than Thor/Force, I'm wondering which team is going to allow the fastest hops?
Surely Iron/Force when boosted all the way.

scottee

Seasick Pirate wrote:

Though I'd prefer to fight Iron/Force teams than Thor/Force, I'm wondering which team is going to allow the fastest hops?
Surely Iron/Force when boosted all the way.

But it increases the likelihood of you getting hit back during the hop. Depends how many matches you're trying to get in.

Unknown

Seasick Pirate wrote:

Though I'd prefer to fight Iron/Force teams than Thor/Force, I'm wondering which team is going to allow the fastest hops?
Surely Iron/Force when boosted all the way.

I'd agree definitely fastest that I could think of but I don't have a thor so not sure how quickly that battle is with boosts...I would guess pretty fast.

Unknown

I knew that I was in the minority, but not this badly. In practice, this will not work the way everyone thinks it will. The stipulation of either/or for purple and just board physics prevent it. IF is not replacing 4or in high end pvp meta. The combination is too slow. You could argue in sim and pve, IF would be the best 3rd on the Xor combo.

At worst case, the ap cost could be raised to 7 or 8, but I don't think it is necessary. The only reason ppl are arguing that it be changed is bc ppl think it will combo in a different way in pvp. When you pair IF with other characters, his purple needs to be 5 ap. His abilities only reach their true potential if you have 12 ap in your bank. And black ability would be a finishing move in that equation.

What this character does represent is another tool for 3* players to take on 4* characters.

Edit - Fixed autocorrect

Unknown

I have to disagree with you, once you fire of x-force surgical strike there won't be many tiles to destroy next time surgical strike gets charged up. Surgical can take out a 3* if you get a lucky board but it won't take out shora nor x-force. This might be a good strategy to start of good but other wise I don't see it being an under 2 min jump. Unless you get a lucky board.

Unknown

Nope, pretty much totally disagree.

First issue is you're talking about using +all AP boosts every match in a hop, that's a seriously inefficient way of playing HP wise. At the moment I pretty much reserve +all AP boosts for hitting Hood teams in a hop where I don't want to use my own and present such a squishy defensive team.

Second issue is you can't efficiently chain use surgical strike. Once you fire it off there are literally zero of that colour left on the board. So you're down to whatever drops on for you for a subsequent SS. On an average kind of board you've probably done 4-5k damage which is hardly a win unless you're fighting lower health band 3*s.

Third issue is you're relying on getting useful AP out of that SS to try and get your fast win. Unfortunately your options for useful AP are green, to a degree black (assuming you have downed the person who had black as highest damage colour with the SS) and purple... after that you're down to featured hero colours and that's pretty luck based.

Fourth issue is how are you chewing through 26k + featured hero health with that combo (max XoR). IMO Patch + Hulk would be quicker for hopping vs XoR teams and XoR would obviouslt be quicker vs XoR teams.

It's not a bad combo, but not meta breaking IMO.

Unknown

Featured character color is almost always typically highest anyway, and guaranteed to be on your team, so you should have an AP outlet for SS at most times. And if their featured is under leveled you are almost always hitting green on XF.

I agree it's not meta breaking in PvP, but it might be in PvE.

Also Also Wik, Attack Tiles do not care about cascades. It's just 600 damage every round forever. And it increases the time a fight takes since it has to resolve after every turn.

Unknown

No.

I've had 0 chance to full color cover Xforce in 135 days. I won't have the ISO to boost IF as it will all have to go to Xforce when that day comes.
I love the idea of heroes that are teammates in the comics are being designed to have good synergy in game though.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Nope, you're right on the dot. I have no idea why the developers released Iron Fist as is, because he's arguably more broken than LazyThor, who is far and away the best (non support) 3* by a mile. For people without 4or, XF / IF is now the new best duo in the metagame. For people with 4or though, it gets trickier. When XF is up against 4or, he sort of fizzles: surgical / X-Force aren't enough to kill her outright, and sometimes you run out of damage while trying to DPS her down. If the featured character is on an unfavorable color (yellow), then all of the sudden turn 1 surgical into nothing isn't looking so hot. It's probably going to be one of those things where he can replace 4or in select PvPs where the featured is on a favorable color for surgical, but 4or reigns supreme in most PvPs in general.

SIGH.

IF is a good character, but not with X-Force. Aside from expediting of the intial SS, that may get you one other attack That's where their synergy ends. You can't use IF's green bc X-Force green the same cost. You can't use IF other purple ability if there are less than 12 black ap. That leave his attack tile.

Better 3* pairings with X-force include, but not limited too, C Mags, Hood, Loki, Laken, LT, DP, and even L Cap.

Let's put it another way. Let's say you got a massive cascade and had 22 black AP. You can SS once. But it's going to be a while before you can SS again with any effectiveness. The only scenario where his would work is if SS green, shake up the board really good to get more green out. That one scenario does not merit IF replacing any one else to be paired with X-Force.

What IF is good for is being paired with other 3*'s to take assist 3* rosters to better take down 4*'s. However, if his purple is nerfed, then, IF will just be another mediocre 3*. The purple does not put IF on par with 4*'s. Likewise, it's okay to have good 3* characters like Hood, Loki, LT, etc.

Phaserhawk

It's his passive I also don't like. Between that and match dmg you are looking at almost 700 per turn.

The fact that 70% of the time or more you will probably be KOing someone in the first turn and the rest is 2v3 I think this guy is going to be a problem.

I still think the easiest nerf to X-Force that would actually be a good quality of life is to keep Surigical Strike 100% as is except for this....it steals the strongest color from the enemy team instead of getting the AP off of the tile destroyed on the board. He will still do the massive damage, but it would shift the skill into a drain instead of a AP destruction of the player and then AP from the board.

IF's purple should probably be at least 7 and his passive should only trigger on 12 black AP.

IamTheDanger

One thing that worries me is that Xforce Berserker Rage will destroy some of the attack tiles. Resulting cascade can, probably will, break more of them. Really depends on how many are out, and where they are placed. As a general rule, I prefer to avoid using tile generaters with tile breakers. The special tiles I create almost always get destroyed. Like using Steve Rogers and Xforce together. I can only use Xforce abilities when Cap doesn't have any CD tiles on the board, (which still leaves the chance that he can break one of Caps protect tiles). And waiting for Steve's CD to finish can be deadly.

IF's other abilities look great though. Personally, I'm going to reserve judgements until after I've had a chance to use him a few times. Experience is the best teacher.

Unknown

The_Valeyard wrote:

What IF is good for is being paired with other 3*'s to take assist 3* rosters to better take down 4*'s. However, if his purple is nerfed, then, IF will just be another mediocre 3*. The purple does not put IF on par with 4*'s. Likewise, it's okay to have good 3* characters like Hood, Loki, LT, etc.

IF won't be usable for 3 months (or more), so haven't thought about him much, but it sounds like IF purple into Black Panther. Rage, baby, rage

Unknown

JCTthe3rd81 wrote:

IF's other abilities look great though. Personally, I'm going to reserve judgements until after I've had a chance to use him a few times. Experience is the best teacher.

You don't match-3 on paper and I definitely find that my initial impressions are frequently very wrong (good or bad) once I start playing with a character.

Unknown

Yeah, I hate that this conversation bleeds over into "Nerf Surgical Strike" territory. It should exclusively be "Nerf IF and his crazy purple ability" all day every day. Getting to poop out that many colored tiles for 5 ap is ridiculous. I don't care how much damage it conditionally does, because I never want it to do any. I want it to make tons of black ap to fuel my cascades and surgical strikes (or RotP or whatever I'm using) forever until the end of time. Maybe the people who are dismissing this combo are forgetting what Thunderstrike does to a board with even a little bit of green on it. Cause, you know, this ability is the tile generation half of Thunderstrike. For 5.

Also, free crazy-strong attack tile seems a bit much. It seems to me that getting a free attack tile should be more valuable than getting a free protect tile, and as such his attack tile should be weaker (and not over twice as strong) as Luke Cage's protect tile.

Honestly, when I read IF's abilities yesterday, I thought he would make a really reasonable and desirable 4* character. He is way out of line with basically everything else in 3* land.

Unknown

papa07 wrote:

The_Valeyard wrote:

What IF is good for is being paired with other 3*'s to take assist 3* rosters to better take down 4*'s. However, if his purple is nerfed, then, IF will just be another mediocre 3*. The purple does not put IF on par with 4*'s. Likewise, it's okay to have good 3* characters like Hood, Loki, LT, etc.

IF won't be usable for 3 months (or more), so haven't thought about him much, but it sounds like IF purple into Black Panther. Rage, baby, rage

IIRC, LoreNYC of S.H.I.E.L.D had the same thought. They seem to be the best pairing.

The combo looks wicked. After have 12 black AP, IF green, BP Yellow, IF Purple, BP black. That's a lot of AP, but it's also a lot of damage.

BTW, all this fuss over IF purple is taking away from the lot of discussion who IF pairs well with.

Trisul

Most people here seem to think that 7 purple is the right AP cost, just to not be able to cast it on first turn fully boosted.

This level of board manipulation seems to be severely undercosted here. The XF combo is just the most obvious example of what can result.