MPQ Community Video - March - Character Updates

Chrono_Tata

Still not entirely convinced by the devs' justification and rationale for Mystique's nerf. My thoughts:

- Again, devs emphasise that the 1AP increase in cost is a "small" increase, but I think they fail to take into account the fact that this is a cost increase from 9AP to 10AP, which is across a multiple-of-3 threshold. It's not the same thing as, say, increasing a power from 8AP to 9AP, because now it takes on average over 3 matches rather than just 3 to initially power up the ability from 0AP. I don't feel they really take this into account when building their AP generated vs AP cost graphs, otherwise this would be identified

- They rightly say that the ability to generate 2 different colours would be weaker than 1 colour, but then said that after running more tests, Mystique's ability is more useful than they thought it would be. I am curious as to what metric they are looking at to judge the ability's usefulness. Is it just from the sheer amount of AP generated? Even if Mystique is creating more AP overall from her ability over, say, Thor, who also generates 9 tiles but of the same colour, Thor's ability is still more useful. This is because most people only really care about generating a certain colour in order to power a certain ability. We don't care about generating more APs across different colours because the likelihood is that the other colour generated is not really going to be as useful.

Imagine if Thor's power generate red and green instead of just green; people really aren't going to find it nearly as useful as how it currently works, because no one cares about getting a chance to power up his red. We just want to power up his green, or another character's green (X-force, GSBW, etc.) as quickly as possible. Sure, Mystique's abilities works best when you have both purple and black powered up due to her combo, but I bet that if you ask any Mystique user whether they would prefer to have her blue as-is, or replace her blue's effect with Iron Fist's generate-7-blacks-for-5AP power, most would rather go for the latter. I would rather have the certainty of charging up Masterstroke (or another character's black ability) than a 50:50 distribution of possible AP gains across black and purple.

Anyway, I don't think that this nerf is going to break Mystique and I'm sure she's still usable and "fun" to the extent that the devs have intended her to work. However I still think it's an unnecessary nerf to a character who (apart from her synergy with MMags which is going to be broken soon anyway) isn't even a very good character compared to other 3-stars in the first place.

On another related note, it would be great if devs could share with us the methods and/or results from these AP generating ability experiments. It would be quite interesting.

Unknown

The only thing I can add to the conversation regarding Mystique's ability is that it specifically spawns pink and black tiles across red, yellow, and green tiles. Maybe concentrating their appearance into half the spectrum skews the occurrence of matches more than other abilities that spawn one color across all five other possible tile spaces?

For the record, I still think they came down too hard on her. She's a lot of fun to play, but that two-way nerf is liable to really slow her down.

Demiurge_Will

spydoorman wrote:

Also, Do you guys have armed guards? Or is that Siren I've heard in all the videos on a loop?

We're just on a busy city street.

(Getting to some of the other questions in the thread - this was just the first and the quickest to answer.)

Demiurge_Will

rixmith wrote:

I'm glad to hear that there is a desired power band for 4* characters to fit into. This begs the question whether X-Force fits into that band or not? Not to mention whether IW and Elektra are below that band?

X-Force is above the band (though not as far above as Thor (Goddess of Thunder) was) and Invisible Woman is below.

Elektra is a less clear-cut case. Her abilities don't have an opportunity to come into their own for advanced players in part because of the current speed of high-end Versus play. She becomes stronger with the changes to 4-star Thor, for example. Looking at win rates of teams that include her, she's doing well in survival missions. I'd like her to be used more often, but there are other balance issues that have bigger impacts.

No ETA on any changes that might result from these observations - we try not to announce changes until we can give you a timeline for them.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

rixmith wrote:

I'm glad to hear that there is a desired power band for 4* characters to fit into. This begs the question whether X-Force fits into that band or not? Not to mention whether IW and Elektra are below that band?

X-Force is above the band (though not as far above as Thor (Goddess of Thunder) was) and Invisible Woman is below.

Elektra is a less clear-cut case. Her abilities don't have an opportunity to come into their own for advanced players in part because of the current speed of high-end Versus play. She becomes stronger with the changes to 4-star Thor, for example. Looking at win rates of teams that include her, she's doing well in survival missions. I'd like her to be used more often, but there are other balance issues that have bigger impacts.

No ETA on any changes that might result from these observations - we try not to announce changes until we can give you a timeline for them.

Annnnnnnd....there it is.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

rixmith wrote:

I'm glad to hear that there is a desired power band for 4* characters to fit into. This begs the question whether X-Force fits into that band or not? Not to mention whether IW and Elektra are below that band?

X-Force is above the band (though not as far above as Thor (Goddess of Thunder) was) and Invisible Woman is below.

Elektra is a less clear-cut case. Her abilities don't have an opportunity to come into their own for advanced players in part because of the current speed of high-end Versus play. She becomes stronger with the changes to 4-star Thor, for example. Looking at win rates of teams that include her, she's doing well in survival missions. I'd like her to be used more often, but there are other balance issues that have bigger impacts.

No ETA on any changes that might result from these observations - we try not to announce changes until we can give you a timeline for them.

That XF is above the band gives me a lot of pause. He should be the "desired 4* power level" not be above it. As the first 4* you guys redesigned shouldn't he set the bar?

I'd also be interested to know exactly where this band exists. Are you going for something akin to the 3*>2* power level where any group of 3*s will beat the snot out of a 2* team, or are 4*s and 3*s supposed to be in similar power levels, with 4*s just having more HP? Right now 4* Thor (post change) feels weaker than 3* Thor to me, but she has 6k more health.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

That XF is above the band gives me a lot of pause. He should be the "desired 4* power level" not be above it. As the first 4* you guys redesigned shouldn't he set the bar?

I'd also be interested to know exactly where this band exists. Are you going for something akin to the 3*>2* power level where any group of 3*s will beat the snot out of a 2* team, or are 4*s and 3*s supposed to be in similar power levels, with 4*s just having more HP? Right now 4* Thor (post change) feels weaker than 3* Thor to me, but she has 6k more health.

Well we got told Elektra is actually "pretty good".... so about there for the band? Does that mean Fury gets a nerf too since he is better than her?

Anyway, poor old Xforce looks like he will get the treatment. So don't buy his bloody covers!

SnowcaTT

EpicBeastmode wrote:

Demiurge_Will wrote:

rixmith wrote:

I'm glad to hear that there is a desired power band for 4* characters to fit into. This begs the question whether X-Force fits into that band or not? Not to mention whether IW and Elektra are below that band?

X-Force is above the band (though not as far above as Thor (Goddess of Thunder) was) and Invisible Woman is below.

Elektra is a less clear-cut case. Her abilities don't have an opportunity to come into their own for advanced players in part because of the current speed of high-end Versus play. She becomes stronger with the changes to 4-star Thor, for example. Looking at win rates of teams that include her, she's doing well in survival missions. I'd like her to be used more often, but there are other balance issues that have bigger impacts.

No ETA on any changes that might result from these observations - we try not to announce changes until we can give you a timeline for them.

Annnnnnnd....there it is.

Yep. Thor got the nerf, now X-force is "the best", and we all know a "the best" 4* won't stay that way for long....

The only good part of this is the "not as far above", so perhaps they agree that simply taking AP steal away from Surgical Strike would be enough.

frostCoH

Demiurge_Will wrote:

spydoorman wrote:

Also, Do you guys have armed guards? Or is that Siren I've heard in all the videos on a loop?

We're just on a busy city street.

(Getting to some of the other questions in the thread - this was just the first and the quickest to answer.)

In a previous thread one with Miles in it, I raised a very long (and IMHO lucid) point about Iron Hammer and how it seems like the top level of this power will now be useless because you can't use Magneto to power it up within 2 moves, it now takes at minimum 5 to 6 even using the new Polarity Shift then you have 8 chances for it to be matched away by accident or on purpose by your foe. So will the countdown or the amount of AP required to use teir 5 iron hammer be adjusted down?

(Edited because stupid autocorrect and stupid 2nd day wearing contact lenses and I can't bloody see right yet).

frostCoH

Phantron wrote:

theshadeofopal wrote:

A lot of these you can debate because of character health, other negative or positive effects of the skills but at the end of the day hes outpaced by quite a bit, even with characters in comparable health range like bp or 3*thor who also have significantly more useful secondary moves in the form of their yellows. Destroying one column does not help balance this. Power of attorney has a slightly lower damage per ap but is a much better move because its significantly faster and the nature of its tile destruction is much more likely to cause additional matches. I honestly don't understand the reasoning a move that is already not very good on its face needs self damage. The only reasoning that makes any sense is its kind of designed to help give lightning rod a little more purpose, like ares sunder/rampage interaction.

BP and Thor 3* are way above the power curve. BP may or may not be balanced by the fact that one of his skill is basically useless (Defense Grid).

She-Hulk has a very strong red, but her other two moves are very bad. There are a lot of combination of enemies where you can't even use Settlement at all, and Reprieve is even worse than Settlement. While it's not clear if a particular move gets a better budget because the other two move sucks, that has to count for something from a gameplay point of view even if the budget doesn't care. BP may have benefited from this rule since at one point both Battleplan and Defense Grid sucked and that may have justified why ROTP was so great (and then Battleplan got buffed anyway).

OMG I love settlement, it's one of my fav powers! Yeh she doesn't play well with someone that drops a lot of friendly tiles but man, use it vs Danken or Mafia, very nice! Also I have a love hate relationship with defense grid, I feel it could pop out a stronger shield or pop out shields ad infinitum because the current shield level and cap is very lackluster.

Chrono_Tata

Moon 17 wrote:

The only thing I can add to the conversation regarding Mystique's ability is that it specifically spawns pink and black tiles across red, yellow, and green tiles. Maybe concentrating their appearance into half the spectrum skews the occurrence of matches more than other abilities that spawn one color across all five other possible tile spaces?

For the record, I still think they came down too hard on her. She's a lot of fun to play, but that two-way nerf is liable to really slow her down.

Yeah, that is definitely a fair point, but it doesn't "feel" like that much of a difference when you are playing. This is when raw numbers from the running a bunch of tests like the devs have done would be really useful, since it's really a matter of statistics. I guess one could write a simple board generator to try to run this oneself but it would probably be a lot more effort than it's worth.

Unknown

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I think what alarms me the most is that 4or yellow is being considered by them to be too powerful in 4* land, but if you scale it down to a 3* power, it's not even close to what would be considered a "powerful ability", but rather merely a "good one" at best, which I think implies that their balancing formula is off by a pretty wide margin.

What I got from them is that they have a balancing scale for the charge tiles themselves. When considering how much red and blue were nerfed and what they can do, nerfing yellow does make sense in line with how many charge tiles any ability should produce along with other abilities. Remember, yellow does area damage while removing special tiles.

Not that I agree with the change, but I imagine this was their line of thinking. Personally I think they went from undervaluing charge tiles to overvaluing. It's hard to consider the double edged nature they represent, because those tiles could easily be your opponents in a bad game.

That special tile removal is conditional. On both how many covers you have and the enemy actually using special tiles. Conditional elements must be given less weight as a balancing factor, by necessity of only being useful X% of the time. Therefore their effective balance 'weight' should be multiplied by X% to be reduced to it's actual effectiveness level.

A perfect example of this: - we can pretty much all agree this power is the worst power of all time. Costs too much, does too little. That's because the costs are weighted as if all their conditional effects are 100% useful 100% of the time. They aren't. A single, random, CD destruction is MAYBE useful 25% of the time if that. If it destroyed 4+ of them, then maybe it would see use against goons at the very least. A 3 turn stun that costs 12 is MAYBE useful, if you get a green heavy board and can use it to stop a power hitting you in the face, except it stuns a random enemy, so it's only 33% useful. 5 AP destruction in the enemy's strongest color is only useful if A) they have AP and 2) they have a power in that color and not a passive. And the damage, ugh, I'd literally rather have this power cost 8 and do 0 damage than have a power that does only 200 damage per AP.

All those factors taken into account make it terrible at 4 things instead of good at 1 thing with marginal side benefits in 3 things (like it should be). Thor's is KINDA good at damage, if you take it to 5 covers, which very few if any of us did. The change from 5 to 3 charge tiles is marginal mainly because who can even make that many specials to convert? Daken, Bullseye, Blade, Storm, Punisher, that's about it. The biggest hit to this power was pushing CDs to 5 covers, making us choose between Smite base damage, Striking Distance base damage, or a 3 turn stun.

DFiPL

I'm concerned enough about the changes to Magneto that I registered just to express those concerns. For those of us who are mid-tier players, changing him that drastically because of Mystique (who many of us don't even have/use) is going to render him much less useful. One of my friends has used him so heavily that the changes have him considering how long he's going to continue playing. I don't know that I'm going to go that far, personally, but it's a concern.

Iron Hammer now costs much more, speaking practically, since Magneto gathering blues has been significantly slowed. Polarity Shift used to be able to generate at least one critical tile with regularity, which made Magneto a useful partner for (say) 2* Hawkeye. Whoops. Sorry, Hawk. Your usefulness just got nerfed with the changes to Magneto.

With the changes and the addition of five random reds to compensate for the reduced blues, the fact that you cannot control where the reds generate mean that even if you try to use your three blues to create a critical tile, those reds have a 5/61 chance of spoiling your effort.

I just...I think that went way too far. Reducing the usefulness of Magneto in order to nerf Mystique is going to have the effect of making him far less playable a character for people who don't even have Mystique. I wish you'd reconsider the rebalancing and find another way to rein Mystique in that doesn't harm Magneto that drastically.

Demiurge_Will

Dauthi wrote:

You just released Xavier who makes an invis on himself that has AMAZING special effects too for 7ap. Now, lets compare this to Invisible woman who can make a invis tile with no special abilities for 14 AP???

In a time where 4*s are few, why wouldn't she be a priority to fix when you obviously shown her Invisibility at least is extremely underpowered.

The part of me that wants to fix all of my mistakes, and the part of me that's a big Sue Storm fan, wishes we could make changes that make powers stronger as quickly as we make them weaker. But overpowered characters and abilities tend to have a much larger negative effect on the game than underpowered ones, and fixing them typically has to happen more quickly.

When a character is underpowered, it limits their usefulness, slightly reducing the number of possible solutions to a problem. When a character is overpowered, it limits the usefulness of every other character, and they become the solution to every problem. We can intentionally keep a character below the power level of other characters, like we've done with Devil Dinosaur and Bag-Man, without having a negative impact on other characters.

We've both strengthened and weakened characters and powers over the life of the game (and some of the changes we've made, like the latest Magneto (Marvel NOW!) one, are mostly sideways) and will continue to do both, but fixing overpowered characters will often take priority.

DFiPL

So I just spent about a half hour on a post expressing my concerns with the changes to Magneto, and it either didn't post when I hit submit (twice, since a new post had appeared in the time I spent composing the post), or it got deleted. Whichever the case, let me try this again:

The changes to Magneto are going to hit mid-level players disproportionately hard, especially those who don't have Mystique in the first place. They're being made to suffer for Mystique being overpowered.

The changes take him from being squishy but useful for 2* players to having no particular appeal for 2* players. Iron Hammer takes far longer to power up, Magneto can't swiftly collect blues for 2* Storm's Wind Storm power, and the five random reds replacing two of the chosen blue conversions means that there is 5/61 chance that the use of Polarity Shift won't even spawn one critical tile, regardless of how friendly the board might have been when the power was unleashed, meaning Hawkeye's Speed Shot is being affected, also.

That's a total of three mid-level characters whose usefulness just took it in the shorts for mid-level players because Mystique needed a nerf.

I really wish you guys would reconsider that change.

Demiurge_Will

bonfire01 wrote:

Well we got told Elektra is actually "pretty good".... so about there for the band?

I didn't mean to say that I'm confident Elektra is in the right spot, just that it's not as clear-cut that she's out of line as it is with Invisible Woman. Other balance changes will have an effect on her usefulness and I'd like to see how that shakes out.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

The part of me that wants to fix all of my mistakes, and the part of me that's a big Sue Storm fan, wishes we could make changes that make powers stronger as quickly as we make them weaker. But overpowered characters and abilities tend to have a much larger negative effect on the game than underpowered ones, and fixing them typically has to happen more quickly.

But surely there's a middle ground? You don't need to OP Buff every weak character. Little tweaks can do wonders.

Right now, reducing IW's Invisibility to 7 would make it a weaker copy of what Xavier does. Getting rid of the turn-ending part of Force Field Crush wouldn't make it OP at all, but it might level the playing field slightly.

Sue is going to have to be reworked from the ground up, but in the meantime, a little tweak can go a long way. Just not so far as to make her the next X-Force.

Demiurge_Will

DFiPL wrote:

So I just spent about a half hour on a post expressing my concerns with the changes to Magneto, and it either didn't post when I hit submit (twice, since a new post had appeared in the time I spent composing the post), or it got deleted. Whichever the case, let me try this again:

The changes to Magneto are going to hit mid-level players disproportionately hard, especially those who don't have Mystique in the first place. They're being made to suffer for Mystique being overpowered.

The changes take him from being squishy but useful for 2* players to having no particular appeal for 2* players. Iron Hammer takes far longer to power up, Magneto can't swiftly collect blues for 2* Storm's Wind Storm power, and the five random reds replacing two of the chosen blue conversions means that there is 5/61 chance that the use of Polarity Shift won't even spawn one critical tile, regardless of how friendly the board might have been when the power was unleashed, meaning Hawkeye's Speed Shot is being affected, also.

That's a total of three mid-level characters whose usefulness just took it in the shorts for mid-level players because Mystique needed a nerf.

I really wish you guys would reconsider that change.

Good to have you here, DFiPL, thanks for your feedback.

To clarify, the random Red tiles will never overwrite the Blue tiles you place. Getting a 5-match out of the ability at level 5 is very reliable.

I hope you'll give the changed Magneto some playtime before making a final decision about what you think of the change. He's involved in different combos than he used to be, but most of our testers feel that the change ends up making him a tiny bit stronger overall, outside of the loss of the infinite turn combo with Mystique.

frostCoH

DFiPL wrote:

So I just spent about a half hour on a post expressing my concerns with the changes to Magneto, and it either didn't post when I hit submit (twice, since a new post had appeared in the time I spent composing the post), or it got deleted. Whichever the case, let me try this again:

The changes to Magneto are going to hit mid-level players disproportionately hard, especially those who don't have Mystique in the first place. They're being made to suffer for Mystique being overpowered.

The changes take him from being squishy but useful for 2* players to having no particular appeal for 2* players. Iron Hammer takes far longer to power up, Magneto can't swiftly collect blues for 2* Storm's Wind Storm power, and the five random reds replacing two of the chosen blue conversions means that there is 5/61 chance that the use of Polarity Shift won't even spawn one critical tile, regardless of how friendly the board might have been when the power was unleashed, meaning Hawkeye's Speed Shot is being affected, also.

That's a total of three mid-level characters whose usefulness just took it in the shorts for mid-level players because Mystique needed a nerf.

I really wish you guys would reconsider that change.

They also refuse to answer or address my concerns about Iron Hammer getting a side NERF because you can't effectively use Reverse Polarity as a quick battery for it.

Demiurge_Will

Vertigozooropa wrote:

Demiurge_Will wrote:

The part of me that wants to fix all of my mistakes, and the part of me that's a big Sue Storm fan, wishes we could make changes that make powers stronger as quickly as we make them weaker. But overpowered characters and abilities tend to have a much larger negative effect on the game than underpowered ones, and fixing them typically has to happen more quickly.

But surely there's a middle ground? You don't need to OP Buff every weak character. Little tweaks can do wonders.

Right now, reducing IW's Invisibility to 7 would make it a weaker copy of what Xavier does. Getting rid of the turn-ending part of Force Field Crush wouldn't make it OP at all, but it might level the playing field slightly.

Sue is going to have to be reworked from the ground up, but in the meantime, a little tweak can go a long way. Just not so far as to make her the next X-Force.

It's not intuitive, but small tweaks have a similar turnaround time to larger ones. They involve comparable amounts of analysis and testing (a little less, but not a lot), which is where most of the work is. Changing the data files is quicker when the change is more contained, but that's a few percent of the time involved.