Powers the Dev's thought would be more popular?

wymtime

So as I am playing R&G and I am squishing Mystique I looked at her pink and thought to myself now that is a power the Devs thought the players would really like. I know I personally only use her pink to set up her black. Mystique shapeshift is her signature move and I think it is meh, rather go 3,5,5.
Power #2 Xforce yellow. Man Ice was so excited about this power when it came out. If you don't match it he will fully heal, or if you do match it you will take major damage. What did the player base do? 5,5,3. Regen is not a bad power as people use it to heal Xforce all the time, but most players passed on this ability right away.
#3 4thor yellow. AOE damage check, removes enemy special tiles check add more charge tiles check. Player base, 3. Again not a bad power players just realized blue to red was devastating.
#4 colossus yellow and black. His yellow stops 50% match damage. I was excited, I thought it was going to be game changing, oh it does not stop damage from attack tiles or strike tiles? Pass. Colossus black, throw you team into the air and they will fire an ability, and Colossus does direct damage as well. While in the air your character cannot take damage. COOL said I. Then I throw GSBW and get pistol ugh.
#5 Deadpools black. I think the Devs thought this might be a little bit of a joke power but how annoying is it when he jumps in front of Patch to take the hit.
#6 all healing powers since true healing cam out. Every time a character came out with a healing ability all I saw on the forum was at is the 3 cover of 5,5,3.

So I ask the forum. What powers do you think the Devs thought would be really good powers that you feel the player base passed on?

Unknown

Everything Doc Ock does. Everything Beast does. Everything Quicksilver does.

wymtime

Lerysh wrote:

Everything Doc Ock does. Everything Beast does. Everything Quicksilver does.

At least they have now made beast playable.
I will also throw out Gamora's black. When you read the power it sounds amazing, until you realize until she is fully leveled and taking all the damage it actually does nothing.

Chrono_Tata

Moonstone's purple and black, anyone?

Mawtful

There's not really any way for me to say this without sounding condescending, so I'm just going to say it anyway:

Balance is a deceptively simple concept. It is something which I think can usually be easily identified, but difficult to actually create, implement or maintain. There are a few big traps that the devs seem to fall into fairly consistently - even when they do things right. There's a big disconnect between cost (as an objective measurement) and value (as a subjective assessment/perception).
I think there's likely 2 (maybe 3) teams/people working on character design. I think 1 of those often over/under-values powers, which usually results in stale builds/team composition/metagame, and 1 of those simply lacks comprehension and understanding of balance or design, which results in weak/uninteresting characters which only serve to reinforce the metagame created by the former. This has been made most apparent with the release of Quicksilver when compared to the string of characters which proceeded him.

Quicksilver is a classic "team 2" character, like Beast and Doc Ock before him. Quicksilver's best build is to maximise his two "least bad" abilities, but even choosing optimally, he simply doesn't contribute enough of anything to warrant attention.

XFW and TGT are both "team 1" characters. As pointed out in the OP, both Recovery and Striking Distance were overvalued during design - both are/were perfectly good abilities that simply couldn't compete against the other two abilities (SD was probably nerfed too hard, but going forward Recovery is a contender).

I have a feeling that "team 1" has been studying up recently. With characters likes Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Kamala Khan and Kingpin all offering interesting choices across their whole powerset it feels like it's getting harder to simply say "max the best 2". Kamala is probably the most impressive, given that her burst healing is still highly valued.

Unknown

I always considered Deadpool's Red and Purple to be more representative of the character. Red breaks the 4th wall, and Purple is just ... off the wall. Black seems more like an afterthought.
Agreed on Shapeshift and Fastball Special. I almost never use shapeshift, as I've almost always got a different purple user.

Fake healing makes sense if you're not playing in an ultra-competitive environment, though Reprieve still sucks. The forumite population really doesn't represent casual play.

Anything Star-lord does.

GrumpySmurf1002

Recovery is pretty devastating, but it was just completely dwarfed by the other abilities. It will get more builds now that XForce has been declawed.

I actually like Mystique's purple and use it often. She's one of the few characters I have built with the heavy damage ability undercovered (mine is 5/5/3). That's of course because I was only using her for an XForce support, which will likely still be true after the nerf, since his black is still devastating.

Unknown

Mystique is interesting outside of supporting other users of her primary colors; her black move hurts and her blue...well, it used to be amazing...now it's kind of functional. But yeah, her purple is so often just the other half of her black that I barely think of it as doing anything on its own.

I think Invisible Woman was supposed to be amazing from the beginning, and I think it's been a repeated shock each time she came back from design as a giant disappointment (after her update will be her third try, and I'm still not convinced that she's going to do much). Locking tiles in bubbles seems like it would be really useful, but in practice it affects cascades in such a complicated way that it's really hard to make any intelligent plans with any kind of foresight when one eighth of the board is locked.

I think Elektra's unkillability was supposed to be amazing...and for that matter, I think all defensive abilities are expected to be better than they are. The design principles as they stand don't seem to take into account just how much more valuable offense is than defense. This is why the only really good defensive powers are the ones that happen automatically (Cage and Khan); any resources you have to spend to defend yourself would probably be better spent just killing someone on the other side of the screen.

Unknown

Recovery is pretty devastating, but it was just completely dwarfed by the other abilities.

I think it's also that Recovery was already very good at what it did at just three covers, while the other two got a major boost with their fifth cover.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

I think Elektra's unkillability was supposed to be amazing...and for that matter, I think all defensive abilities are expected to be better than they are. The design principles as they stand don't seem to take into account just how much more valuable offense is than defense. This is why the only really good defensive powers are the ones that happen automatically (Cage and Khan); any resources you have to spend to defend yourself would probably be better spent just killing someone on the other side of the screen.

I would add to this defensive powers that happen as a side effect, of which Invisible Woman has 2. Captain America's blue is pretty good, but his yellow is gawd awful bad.

If Invisible Woman becomes the new hotness, I'm wondering if Captain Marvel won't see an upsurge as her partner. Active Red/Black which she needs, and good on the mirror match to destroy shields. Plus her longevity health buff didn't hurt Energy Absorption since it's a fixed number and not a %, one of the very few abilities that got stronger with everyone having more health.

Playing with Elektra's black recently vs Maggia Thugs in R&G, and it's not bad. It's just not great. It's a pain to get up to 10 AP and keep rolling. I wish they would knock the number of traps back to 4 and make it cost 7. Boostable to 1 match to kick start and then 1 match per set of traps. Then she'd truely be "unkillable".

OnesOwnGrief

Chrono_Tata wrote:

Moonstone's purple and black, anyone?

Other than this, this thread has a severe lack of Moonstone.

Marc_Spector

Dragon_Nexus

[quote="Lerysh"Captain America's blue is pretty good, but his yellow is gawd awful bad.[/quote]

In general play, yes it is. But he kills in survival nodes. Especially if you pair him up with Falcon. Survival nodes are always Patch/Steve/Falcon for me. Gather blues ASAP, then relax and gather as much as possible before wave 1 ends.
You can usually gather quit a few yellows (which Falcon will use to boost your defense tiles and strike tiles) and then lay down a really heavy defense.

But yeah, in regular play you'll likely never reach 19 yellow and if you did you'd want to spend it on Thor or Luke Cage or something else more deserving.

simonsez

Moon 17 wrote:

I think Elektra's unkillability was supposed to be amazing...and for that matter, I think all defensive abilities are expected to be better than they are.

The only place where ANYONE thinks a good way to play is to spam protect tiles, spam fake healing, and grind out a 20 minute win, is in the demiurge playtesting lab.

Unknown

Dayraven wrote:

Recovery is pretty devastating, but it was just completely dwarfed by the other abilities.

I think it's also that Recovery was already very good at what it did at just three covers, while the other two got a major boost with their fifth cover.

Biggest issue with Recovery is that when the AI matches your tile, while they do get hit with the damage from the power kicking in, you take all the damage from the resulting cascade and they get all the ensuing AP, because it's still technically their turn when it happens. The damage boost will make it way nastier in some situations, but you still can't place it, and it's still a risk/reward kind of power rather than one that works as expected every time.

Unknown

Couldn't agree more. There's a lot of talk on the fora about how good Recovery is now, but its basic functionality is unchanged...and underwhelming. There are still going to be a lot of occasions where it basically does nothing, or does the thing you didn't want it to do. Is a way less good version of Ambush that might heal you a decent power? Sure. Is it necessarily any better than his 60% of his old green power? I'm not convinced.

FaustianDeal

Dayraven wrote:

Recovery is pretty devastating, but it was just completely dwarfed by the other abilities.

I think it's also that Recovery was already very good at what it did at just three covers, while the other two got a major boost with their fifth cover.

The true failure of recovery was that, before his buff, Recovery could be considered to *get worse* with the 4th and 5th covers. So almost everyone contemplating running him already had him at 5/5/3. With the buff, the rising tide didn't lift Recovery boat high enough to warrant a change.

Maybe now though. Depends on how people rate the instant board-shake potential of green against the delayed potential of true heal (or damage) off yellow.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

Couldn't agree more. There's a lot of talk on the fora about how good Recovery is now, but its basic functionality is unchanged...and underwhelming. There are still going to be a lot of occasions where it basically does nothing, or does the thing you didn't want it to do. Is a way less good version of Ambush that might heal you a decent power? Sure. Is it necessarily any better than his 60% of his old green power? I'm not convinced.

It's basic functionality hasn't changed but it's damage increased by almost 150%. Coupled with XF damage being reduced by about 33% and 3/5/5 begins to make a lot of sense. The absolute worst thing that happens with a 5 recovery is you have a full health XF after the tile counts down. Also for damage a 5 green is much worse than a 5 yellow, with the caveat that yellow may result in 0 damage if you can't match it.

I think 3/5/5 XF and a 3/5/5 KK will be best of friends now. You can use purple to line up a green 4 against your yellow. Plus KKs green skill is now better vs 2 or more targets instead of only better vs 3. Plus plus if you are SS on green, oof.

Unknown

That's all fair. I did find myself SSing green today and thinking, "Eh...who cares...I got nothing going on in green, anyway."

Unknown

I remember when Xforce first got buffed, one of the devs was gushing about how much fun it would be to use Moonstone to steal his regen tile.

The forum goers, collectively, looked around and asked "Who the **** uses Moonstone?"

When Elektra came out, the devs pimped her red as high damage every turn that is hidden on the map, making it hard to destroy... and didn't remember to tell us that the damage for AP cost was so ridiculously low that she would never be worth investing ISO into.

CNash

Cap's Yellow needs rebalancing in the light of recent character releases. You could save up 18 Yellow to get 3 strong Protect tiles and never take match damage for the rest of the fight... or you could just bring Luke Cage along instead, get a free, respawning powerful Protect tile and never take match damage for the rest of the fight.

Also, why run him with Falcon? Bird Strike already spams the board with moderate Protect tiles, and Inspiration buffs them - so by the time you have enough Yellow to use Cap's move, you don't need any more defense. And his Red or Blue lets you take out the enemy special tiles of your choice (rather than random ones like Redwing does) and has secondary effects into the bargain.