Nerfing to cause respecs?

Raffoon

It might just be me. And it's pretty late here so I'm not going to go research all of the cases right now. But......

Does anyone get the impression that when the devs change a character, they do it in a way that purposefully changes the best build to a different set of covers?

Top of mind here is Xforce, where green seems like it will be pretty terrible, but yellow will now do 3600 damage when matched at 5 covers.

Cmags got his colors switched around so that what used to be a blue/red build became a yellow/red build. Yes, the covers that people specced into actually changed color.

With Thor Blue making 42% of the tiles it used to, it's possible that yellow might actually be superior now?

Sentry's green got nerfed hard, but Red stayed mostly the same I believe. Maybe this isn't a great example?

I mean..... on top of getting a mainstay character rearranged so that it's much weaker or functions completely differently, they also have to put "whoops looks like you don't have the best build for that character any more either" on top of that?

Obviously, the cynical response here is that they want you to spend money changing your character's covers. The more the devs make changes to this game, the harder and harder it is to reject the cynical response.

dr tinykittylove

XF yellow looks nice in theory, but in practice (speaking for myself) when I want to do damage, I want to do it now, not maybe later or not at all. Also, I would keep green as is just because it's pretty good for board destruction. Like, say you need to smash up some traps or a recovery tile...

Not to say that I like that his green has been nerfed, but I think it's a good change that yellow is more viable as an alternative spec-choice as opposed to 553 all the way. Vast mprovement on what they did to GT's yellow, which basically reduced utility from an already weak skill.

GuntherBlobel

You could look at it that way. But you could also say that they want to sell covers, period. They want to sell X-Force , , and covers. I think they thought Recovery was awesome and initial player reaction agreed. But by the time people started playing him, no one advised buying a single Recovery cover.

They also want to sell Starlord covers, which wasn't happening with 2 overly dominant 4* characters.

So, you could say that cover sales was the motivation behind both the build rework and the nerf. To be generous, they may be aiming more for people like me who have a 5/5/2 X-Force rather than to people with an already cover maxed character.

JamieMadrox

Cascade damage can be pretty significant too. Last night I did almost 8K total damage off of a X-Force use and the resulting cascade.

simonsez

Raffoon wrote:

Does anyone get the impression that when the devs change a character, they do it in a way that purposefully changes the best build to a different set of covers?

Of course they do. There was no other reason to shift XForce's damage from green to yellow.

puppychow

dr tinykittylove wrote:

XF yellow looks nice in theory, but in practice (speaking for myself) when I want to do damage, I want to do it now, not maybe later or not at all. Also, I would keep green as is just because it's pretty good for board destruction. Like, say you need to smash up some traps or a recovery tile...

Not to say that I like that his green has been nerfed, but I think it's a good change that yellow is more viable as an alternative spec-choice as opposed to 553 all the way. Vast mprovement on what they did to GT's yellow, which basically reduced utility from an already weak skill.

I tend to agree w/ love here. Yellow is simply too unreliable because you don't get to select the actual tile to convert to a CD tile. Also, even post nerf xf's ability to remove 15 tiles off the boards is still pretty awesome. Combine the two, and it still makes sense for me to keep my xf at 553.