Collected thoughts on character updates

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I have a few thoughts about some of the upcoming character updates:
http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27385

First off, whenever a character is modified it would be fair that we get to do a free "re-spec", meaning that we can lower any number of covers on that character to gain and raise other covers. Lots of players might have already sold covers they could have used to do this re-spec, so selling or keeping the character sub-optimal doesn't help those players at all.

Secondly, considering the character changes you announced, one begins to wonder how much you listen to your players when doing these changes and how much you just randomly do something and watch how the players react. How about actually listening and getting some feedback, and then doing some GOOD changes with the characters? There's a big reason why the playing field mostly consists of "X-force, 4-Thor and default PvP character". It's partly because those two are so overpowered (and now you destroy X-force but keep boosting 4-Thor, way to go...) and partly because so many other characters are downright bad or just not good enough.


X-force
Reducing the damage of his green with 2000 points is a LOT. Way too much, actually, especially since 4-Thor is a really tough nut to crack and X-force was one of the few characters that could take her down efficiently. At the same time, boosting his black to compensate for this might be too overpowered and black becomes the most dangerous ability in the whole game. Sure, X-force will still be the automatic go-to character when dealing with 4-Thor but instead of getting either green or black, it now looks like there will be a crazy race to get 11 black faster than 4-Thor gets blue and red (because if she does, you lose). Green was and is a much needed weapon but a 2000 point damage reduction is just too much.

Beast
Changing his blue is definitely a step in the right direction. His green ability is still almost completely worthless, since it's completely dependent on having a blue countdown on the board and you risk destroying either your countdown or other useful tiles you want to keep, so the green was bad both before and after the update, no change there. His yellow ability is bad because...well, healing is now so bad we don't even care about it anymore. Get it? So even though you feel you "captured the essence of Beast as a character" you obviously did something very wrong. He was completely awful, after the update he will "just" be bad. And no one will use him anyway. This was just a sad and really laughable character update.

Doctor Octopus
A much improved blue, thanks for that. A slightly improved but also worsened green, feels a lot like "meh". Octopus will keep being a niche character that you MIGHT use against Strike-tile-heavy characters like Daken or Blade but most of the time you will have lots of better options. Still, he's not bad...just not good enough either.

She-Hulk
The new blue seems way worse than the old one, which was actually very useful, especially against goons. Why did you think it was "complicated" when it was actually perfectly understandable and useful? Exchanging countdown tiles was gold. "Thanks" for robbing us of that useful ability. Also, you could severely damage a Strike, Protect or Attack tile with this ability, but now it just redistributes the tiles, meaning the enemy has a big chance of keeping an overpowered tile. Why? How is that any help at all? I know people complained a lot about the old ability, and even though the new ability looks decent, that old healing did help sometimes. However, the main problem still remains: That the green ability selects colors completely randomly and therefore won't do much good most of the time. It doesn't go for the strongest color, nor the color with the most current points in it, it's just completely random. Hey, I just spent 6 green AP to lower the enemy AP with 0 purple and 1 teamup. Yay. Not. As long as she destroys AP randomly, She-Hulk will continue to s*ck. So all in all, She-Hulk just went from "quite good" to "hardly acceptable". Shame on you!


And while I'm at it: When will you update the weak and almost completely useless Bullseye? Give him a third ability, rework his other two abilities and raise his health. Did you forget him in this health update? And what about Moonstone? Her black ability is so bad it's almost scary.

All in all, this character update doesn't really make anything better. Except Invisible Woman, but that's it.