Aw Sweet, They Nerfed A 4*!

Unknown

Maybe now X-Force will move from an 8-AP "kill target Hood" to an 8-AP "do a reasonable amount of damage and generate cascades", and maybe Surgical Strike will be toned down from "11 AP: Win The Match straight-up in most cases" to "11 AP: weaken the opponent and do some significant damage", and the game's overall balance will be way better as a result.

...I'm being informed that the 4* they nerfed was not X-Force.

Dafuq, guys? Yeah, pre-nerf 4thor could straight-up one-shot anyone in the game. For 10 red and 9 blue AP. Single target. It's pricy enough that getting it off is not guaranteed, the AI can **** it up, and generally speaking it's not the end of the world. Slightly OP, but the elephant in the room is not 4thor. It's XForce. It's always been XForce. Because 4thor fills the role Magneto filled, giving powerful skills on colors XForce isn't using that complement the character beautifully and offering nearly rainbow coverage. It's just that 4thor has way more HP and does considerably more damage.

Although the Iron Fist nerf was a good idea. Seriously, a hardcore black accelerator for 5 AP? On pink?! What were you thinking?! Remember, one surgical strike ends the game! Didn't go far enough, if you ask me, it's still pretty dumb and would be unless if was pretty much useless or had different colors... But only because Surgical Strike is the most ridiculously overpowered skill since Magneto had a 5-cost blue.

This isn't hard to understand. X-Force completely warps the game's balance.

Unknown

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago there were a few threads about 2* players trying to skip the 3* bracket entirely and buying Xforce covers once they get their daily reward covers then using XForce + a 2*?

Then we get told there are a lot of those 2* players.... does that mean there are a lot of those 2* players buying covers?

Does that mean there are lots of XForce covers being sold?

I'm sure it's completely unrelated, i'm just musing about Xforce cover sales, sorry to derail your thread about why Xforce wasn't nerfed despite being universally considered much better than any other hero barring being similar-ish to pre-nerf 4Thor (and some would argue including 4Thor) when they decided to reduce her power by A LOT and leave him head and shoulders above everyone.....

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago there were a few threads about 2* players trying to skip the 3* bracket entirely and buying Xforce covers once they get their daily reward covers then using XForce + a 2*.

Then we get told there are a lot of those 2* players.... does that mean there are a lot of those 2* players buying covers?

Does that mean there are lots of XForce covers being sold?

I'm sure it's completely unrelated, i'm just musing about Xforce cover sales, sorry to derail your thread about why Xforce wasn't nerfed despite being universally considered much better than any other hero barring being similar-ish to pre-nerf 4Thor (and some would argue including 4Thor) when they decided to reduce her power by A LOT and leave him head and shoulders above everyone.....

It's not a bad idea. You get easy PvE scaling, and OBW+X-Force+Storm (or I dunno, who cares who the third is?) is scarier than most 3* teams not involving Hood or Thor anyways.

Square

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

Dafuq, guys? Yeah, pre-nerf 4thor could straight-up one-shot anyone in the game. For 10 red and 9 blue AP. Single target.

Without addressing your other points, 4hor wasn't exactly one target. It stunned another target, and left the board primed to power up more.

I'm apathetic about the nerf, but 4hor had a very similar likelihood of success on defence as others.

Surgical strike is great, but it is reliant on the opponent having a top offence that the team can use, and those being on the board. I'm not an anal retentive player (compared to many, at least) and now and again, like in this GSBW PVP, I've surgical strike purple and been somewhat out of luck. X-force vs XF or 4hor, it's great (green or red), but it can be a ****-shoot against others. I hate surgical striking LThor and getting a pile of yellow, then he Call the Storm on me.

Unknown

Square wrote:

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

Dafuq, guys? Yeah, pre-nerf 4thor could straight-up one-shot anyone in the game. For 10 red and 9 blue AP. Single target.

Without addressing your other points, 4hor wasn't exactly one target. It stunned another target, and left the board primed to power up more.

I'm apathetic about the nerf, but 4hor had a very similar likelihood of success on defence as others.

Surgical strike is great, but it is reliant on the opponent having a top offence that the team can use, and those being on the board. I'm not an anal retentive player (compared to many, at least) and now and again, like in this GSBW PVP, I've surgical strike purple and been somewhat out of luck. X-force vs XF or 4hor, it's great (green or red), but it can be a ****-shoot against others. I hate surgical striking LThor and getting a pile of yellow, then he Call the Storm on me.

It's the GSBW PVP. If you surgical strike purple you can generate 10+ green, and use that to do ridiculous team damage or nuke someone with X-Force's green (which is also phenomenally underpriced, by the way). I've been running LThor as my third, so basically the only things that don't lead to an instant "**** you" are blue and red (and red is still pretty good) - purple gets me Deceptive Tactics -> Sniper, yellow gets me Thunder Strike -> Sniper, green gets me Sniper, black gets me another surgical strike, and presumably whoever was tanking black mostly dead.

simonsez

After the past few days around here, is this really the best time to start a "we need more nerfs!" chant?

Unknown

I'd expect an Xforce nerf coming pretty soon.

D3 would be pretty daft to see a game dominated by 2 characters and nerf one of them, leaving the other to outright dominate the game from there.

But I'm an optimist...

babinro

simonsez wrote:

After the past few days around here, is this really the best time to start a "we need more nerfs!" chant?

Maybe?
The devs made their intentions pretty clear that they don't want 4* characters to be substantially stronger than 3*'s.
Fury and post nerf Thor will both fit in nicely along side the most powerful 3* characters but XF remains the standout 4* character.

I can't blame people for wanting to nerf X-Force so he belongs in the same category as the rest.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

After the past few days around here, is this really the best time to start a "we need more nerfs!" chant?

No. The best time was months ago. You know, when we first saw Surgical Strike becoming a "get this off and you win the game" button. If I recall correctly, I did chant. Profusely. So did a bunch of other people.

Unknown

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

Maybe now X-Force will move from an 8-AP "kill target Hood" to an 8-AP "do a reasonable amount of damage and generate cascades", and maybe Surgical Strike will be toned down from "11 AP: Win The Match straight-up in most cases" to "11 AP: weaken the opponent and do some significant damage", and the game's overall balance will be way better as a result.

...I'm being informed that the 4* they nerfed was not X-Force.

Dafuq, guys? Yeah, pre-nerf 4thor could straight-up one-shot anyone in the game. For 10 red and 9 blue AP. Single target. It's pricy enough that getting it off is not guaranteed, the AI can **** it up, and generally speaking it's not the end of the world. Slightly OP, but the elephant in the room is not 4thor. It's XForce. It's always been XForce. Because 4thor fills the role Magneto filled, giving powerful skills on colors XForce isn't using that complement the character beautifully and offering nearly rainbow coverage. It's just that 4thor has way more HP and does considerably more damage.

Although the Iron Fist nerf was a good idea. Seriously, a hardcore black accelerator for 5 AP? On pink?! What were you thinking?! Remember, one surgical strike ends the game! Didn't go far enough, if you ask me, it's still pretty dumb and would be unless if was pretty much useless or had different colors... But only because Surgical Strike is the most ridiculously overpowered skill since Magneto had a 5-cost blue.

This isn't hard to understand. X-Force completely warps the game's balance.

xforce is not getting nerfed. If he did, they would just remove ap gain from ss. Xforce isn't op. He does a bunch of things well. If you're threshold is if he had down hood, over of the lowest health characters, than a whole bunch of others need to be nerfed by that standard. Bp black, c mags blue, lt green, fist purple, hood yellow, etc. Xforce ap is lower bc he is 4* not 3*.

How low is your scaling that ss is winning a game for you? I can ss, xforce and still have 2 and part of a 3rd to deal with.

In pvp, he can be a game changer, but he's not a game ender like 4or.

Unknown

The_Valeyard wrote:

xforce is not getting nerfed. If he did, they would just remove ap gain from ss. Xforce isn't op. He does a bunch of things well. If you're threshold is if he had down hood, over of the lowest health characters, than a whole bunch of others need to be nerfed by that standard. Bp black, c mags blue, lt green, fist purple, hood yellow, etc. Xforce ap is lower bc he is 4* not 3*.

Have you used XForce recently? Getting off Surgical Strike has the ability to end the game in a way which simply no other skill can match. Not even BP's black. And then there's his green, which does around 4k for 8 AP. Your comparison is to things that cost considerably more AP and one that is contingent upon a lot of black being on the board. There's nothing wrong with an ability that costs 12-14 AP nuking a character. If I pay that much AP, it's reasonable to do a huge chunk of damage. But for that much AP, XForce is doing a massive amount of damage, crippling the opponent's offense, and setting up for more attacks.

XForce is not just OP, he's metagame-warping in a similar way that Sentry was back when shieldhopping was a thing.

Unknown

babinro wrote:

simonsez wrote:

After the past few days around here, is this really the best time to start a "we need more nerfs!" chant?

Maybe?
The devs made their intentions pretty clear that they don't want 4* characters to be substantially stronger than 3*'s.
Fury and post nerf Thor will both fit in nicely along side the most powerful 3* characters but XF remains the standout 4* character.

I can't blame people for wanting to nerf X-Force so he belongs in the same category as the rest.

that's not what they said. Basically they said charged tiles were a new mechanic, 4or was op, and future characters could make it really op. There is no indication any other 4*s will be nerfed. Remember, 4*s are supposed to be better than 3*s. 4or once she got going was better than anyone or any future 5* tier, which equated to her being broken.

Unknown

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

The_Valeyard wrote:

xforce is not getting nerfed. If he did, they would just remove ap gain from ss. Xforce isn't op. He does a bunch of things well. If you're threshold is if he had down hood, over of the lowest health characters, than a whole bunch of others need to be nerfed by that standard. Bp black, c mags blue, lt green, fist purple, hood yellow, etc. Xforce ap is lower bc he is 4* not 3*.

Have you used XForce recently? Getting off Surgical Strike has the ability to end the game in a way which simply no other skill can match. Not even BP's black. And then there's his green, which does around 4k for 8 AP. Your comparison is to things that cost considerably more AP and one that is contingent upon a lot of black being on the board. There's nothing wrong with an ability that costs 12-14 AP nuking a character. If I pay that much AP, it's reasonable to do a huge chunk of damage. But for that much AP, XForce is doing a massive amount of damage, crippling the opponent's offense, and setting up for more attacks.

XForce is not just OP, he's metagame-warping in a similar way that Sentry was back when shieldhopping was a thing.

Green does around 5k. 4k Wouldn't down Hood.

Valeyard plays with xforce every pvp event.

BP black barely ever beats any team in pvp - BP is not a top pvp character.

Xforce is not, nor will ever be, as metagame warping as Sentry. That you're even saying that shows you have no idea how dominant Sentry Hood was, or how good.

sinnerjfl

X-Force is nowhere near as powerful as Thoress was, just stop it please.

His green does 4k damage, thats actually not that powerful all things considered, it's a little stronger than most abilities but he is afterall a 4* char so he should have that.

Surgical strike can be very strong but it can also be complete garbage depending on the enemy team. If you SS into red for example, you probably won't even benefit from that AP. There's also the fact that once you use SS, the next one won't do as much damage the next time for several turns. It's a great skill sometimes, some other times it can be completely useless. It has a downside which acts as a balance. He could only drain half of the enemy AP he does now and that'd be fine too.

His yellow is a 3-turn CD tile that's not easy to keep alive so that's another downside for him.

He is far from being perfect and he sure as hell didnt change the whole game like Thoress does. And he also doesn't have freaking 16,000 HP.

Unknown

The thing that sucks is ever since I have been playing (150 days), the sole purpose has been to get whatever char I need to be able to position myself to eventually get Xforce. If they overnerf him like they did 4Thor, f this game. It's already on extremely thin ice as is.

Unknown

The_Valeyard wrote:

that's not what they said. Basically they said charged tiles were a new mechanic, 4or was op, and future characters could make it really op. There is no indication any other 4*s will be nerfed. Remember, 4*s are supposed to be better than 3*s. 4or once she got going was better than anyone or any future 5* tier, which equated to her being broken.

To be fair... what they said was: "Working on Ragnarok gave us an opportunity to rethink how we were valuing Charged tiles. It’s clear that we’ve been under costing them, and we felt it was important to go back and update Thor (Goddess of Thunder) using the new thinking."

It is an interesting logical leap TBH. We think charged tiles are too good.... so we reduced her damage per AP by 1/3 irrespective of whether you are matching, and therefore taking advantage of the core mechanic of charged tiles or not. The justification they used would be fine if they reduced her to 5 charged tiles (because charged tiles as a mechanic in their own right are OP) but maintained her total damage (increase base damage to compensate) but instead they decided she deserved about the same damage per AP as Mystique with 1 extra turn of stun and 5 randomly placed charged tiles (well quasi-random since they are colour restricted) at 104 levels higher.

Also... not many of the 4*s are that much better than top tier 3*s and also... XF is a lot better than all the other 4*s (after 4thor gets nerfed). Although I think claiming SS literally finishes a match is a bit much (although in PvP it's pretty devastating if you team has ANY kind of decent colour coverage) the OP has a point that he has become a singular anomaly.

ps... I do know the mystique comparison falls apart if you get a second smite off since you don't necessarily need a second power surge to maintain decent damage per AP but Mystique needs a second shape shift. On the other hand that is going to 20 red in a match without much if any help from charged tiles (simulating 5 charged tiles yields unimpressive results). Also you never know.... Mystique might be stealing AP for a while before you explode that shapeshift tile whereas everyone can matych those charged tiles.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

The_Valeyard wrote:

that's not what they said. Basically they said charged tiles were a new mechanic, 4or was op, and future characters could make it really op. There is no indication any other 4*s will be nerfed. Remember, 4*s are supposed to be better than 3*s. 4or once she got going was better than anyone or any future 5* tier, which equated to her being broken.

To be fair... what they said was: "Working on Ragnarok gave us an opportunity to rethink how we were valuing Charged tiles. It’s clear that we’ve been under costing them, and we felt it was important to go back and update Thor (Goddess of Thunder) using the new thinking."

It is an interesting logical leap TBH. We think charged tiles are too good.... so we reduced her damage per AP by 1/3 irrespective of whether you are matching, and therefore taking advantage of the core mechanic of charged tiles or not. The justification they used would be fine if they reduced her to 5 charged tiles (because charged tiles as a mechanic in their own right are OP) but maintained her total damage (increase base damage to compensate) but instead they decided she deserved about the same damage per AP as Mystique with 1 extra turn of stun and 5 randomly placed charged tiles (well quasi-random since they are colour restricted) at 104 levels higher.

Also... not many of the 4*s are that much better than top tier 3*s and also... XF is a lot better than all the other 4*s (after 4thor gets nerfed). Although I think claiming SS literally finishes a match is a bit much (although in PvP it's pretty devastating if you team has ANY kind of decent colour coverage) the OP has a point that he has become a singular anomaly.

ps... I do know the mystique comparison falls apart if you get a second smite off since you don't necessarily need a second power surge to maintain decent damage per AP but Mystique needs a second shape shift. On the other hand that is going to 20 red in a match without much if any help from charged tiles (simulating 5 charged tiles yields unimpressive results). Also you never know.... Mystique might be stealing AP for a while before you explode that shapeshift tile whereas everyone can matych those charged tiles.

Are you coming back? At least to try the changes before you make your mind up definitively?

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

Xforce is not, nor will ever be, as metagame warping as Sentry. That you're even saying that shows you have no idea how dominant Sentry Hood was, or how good.

Okay, that's overstating it. Sentry was fundamentally broken in a way unmatched by other characters; X-Force is simply way, way above the curve. Doesn't mean he's not, yanno, way above the curve and in need of nerfs.

KrazyKeylime

4* are suppose to dominate 3* just like 3* dominate 2* like 2* dominate 1*. The only problem now is that only xforce can do it now and none of the other 4* can compete cause they were designed to be buff 3* only wolverine and and 4 thor had useful game impacting move for less then 10, thor blue stun and charge tile generation and xforce high damage and board shake. oh what star lord red.. nope try again 2 move count down timer. the only other one is the dancing dino and his damage abilities don't compare with 7 ap, if it was 5 maybe but not 7.

fix nick fury- yellow remove the other Ap requirements, blue leave, purple reduce cost to 10, increase Health for infinity serum in blood 12000 max

fix elektra strongest color change to black- purple cost 5 start steal 2 for 2,for black auto generate 1 trap per turn. at 3 covers can have up to 2, 5 covers can have up to 3; 2/3 damage for trigger ie max 500-600 damage, red cost 5

Fix starlord- purple reduce cost to 7 or leave at 10 but does team damage, yellow leave or add minor protect effect on count down time, red split damage 2/3 on cast, 1/3 on tile becomes team damage

fix IW - yellow passive generate a yellow invisibility tile that grants invisiblity to her, cost 7 yellow place a shield around target ally that blocks scaling 2000( maybe more) damage max; collapse of shield deals max 500 damage to all other visible characters , blue 7ap 1 force bubble with each cover reduce by 1 max 7( maybe 9) force bubble, green 9 shatter random force bubble dealing max 450 max to all non-invisible units destroying 4 tiles around the force bubble if a another force bubble is destroyed it does the same thing; each cover destroys an additional tile around force bubbles.

Fix dino pink remove,add ravenous hunger passive offers 30%(50% @ 5 covers) for ability to retrigger for 30%(50% @ 5 covers) current damage and destroy 1 tile (each cover, max 5) every time one of his abilities has abilities is cast/triggered

fix 4 thor un-nerf
fix xforce if still op

Trilateralus

sinnerjfl wrote:

X-Force is nowhere near as powerful as Thoress was, just stop it please.

His green does 4k damage, thats actually not that powerful all things considered, it's a little stronger than most abilities but he is afterall a 4* char so he should have that.

Surgical strike can be very strong but it can also be complete garbage depending on the enemy team. If you SS into red for example, you probably won't even benefit from that AP. There's also the fact that once you use SS, the next one won't do as much damage the next time for several turns. It's a great skill sometimes, some other times it can be completely useless. It has a downside which acts as a balance. He could only drain half of the enemy AP he does now and that'd be fine too.

His yellow is a 3-turn CD tile that's not easy to keep alive so that's another downside for him.

He is far from being perfect and he sure as hell didnt change the whole game like Thoress does. And he also doesn't have freaking 16,000 HP.

It's not just the damage does, it's how cheap it is, plus board shake and cascades. Are you saying that you don't bring any user with XF? His doesn't even need to survive as matching it creates even more board shake and cascades, but if it does survive it sure makes up for not having 16K HP. Even before 4hor's nerf XF was still widely considered the best character. His power level is leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else and while I'd prefer a rock/paper/scissors style solution where there is a character who counters him, suggesting he isn't at least as big a game changer as 4hor is just wrong.

KrazyKeylime

sentry is only op cause shields exist giving him and team from the break he needs to recover health packs.