[Poll] When will Arcane Incantation get nerfed?

simonsez

daibar wrote:

Against an AI, a 3-turn CD will come to fruition 4/5 times

Even your nerf buddies might dispute that one...

mjh

daibar wrote:

mjh wrote:

Nope, not even close. A 3-turn CD will come to fruition maybe 2/5 times.

Just look at

This is if you're explicitly targeting it because it
A. Doesn't come back every turn, and you don't have other stuff to do.
B. Actually has a noticeable significant effect upon resolution.

Good point that there will almost always be a 3-turn CD or less on the board since it's passive and you don't have to save AP for it. This makes the 3-turn marginally better but I don't think it will be OP. We shall see

notamutant

wirius wrote:

Legit question here. How is a 3 turn countdown randomly placed tile that turns 5 surrounding tiles into pink overpowered? 3 turns results in possibly one pink match? I mean, X-force has a three turn yellow coundown tile that gets matched or blown up 2 out of the 3 times. Not sure I get your argument here.

Alone, it isn't overpowered. SW in a vacuum is a reasonable balanced character. Add in Prof X at the correct level to get purple AP created from Master Plan, and all of a sudden you go to having 4k or so damage and 9+ purple AP once the blue countdown tile resolves (using AP boosts you can almost definitely get 14 AP by turn 4 if it resolves), plus maybe a crit tile and some leftover purple on the board. And it isn't as big of a deal if it gets matched away as other countdown tiles, because it is a free passive. At best you delay the inevitable by one or two turns. Once you get 14 AP, drop a Whales! with Deadpool and get 12k damage to the enemy team. In PvP, you get 6k damage to the enemy team and freeze someone for 5 turns. Considering the fact that Prof X just did 4k damage, one enemy character is probably dead, and a second stunned. Synergy is the issue, not SW in a vacuum.

I hope they don't nerf her, and I like her a lot, but I am just trying to outline the issues.

Unknown

Since I've barely been playing MPQ, I have no clue what SW does and don't care. If she is overpowered and does get nerfed; I think I know when it'll happen.....

.... after D3 "reap$ the reward$" and ha$ made enough money off of her.

Unknown

This sounds like the kind of post that gets her nerfed, seems we dont learn, see something awesome? keep it yourself and use it, dont give the devs more nerf ideas with posts and youtube videos lol

Unknown

notamutant wrote:

wirius wrote:

Legit question here. How is a 3 turn countdown randomly placed tile that turns 5 surrounding tiles into pink overpowered? 3 turns results in possibly one pink match? I mean, X-force has a three turn yellow coundown tile that gets matched or blown up 2 out of the 3 times. Not sure I get your argument here.

Alone, it isn't overpowered. SW in a vacuum is a reasonable balanced character. Add in Prof X at the correct level to get purple AP created from Master Plan, and all of a sudden you go to having 4k or so damage and 9+ purple AP once the blue countdown tile resolves (using AP boosts you can almost definitely get 14 AP by turn 4 if it resolves), plus maybe a crit tile and some leftover purple on the board. And it isn't as big of a deal if it gets matched away as other countdown tiles, because it is a free passive. At best you delay the inevitable by one or two turns. Once you get 14 AP, drop a Whales! with Deadpool and get 12k damage to the enemy team. In PvP, you get 6k damage to the enemy team and freeze someone for 5 turns. Considering the fact that Prof X just did 4k damage, one enemy character is probably dead, and a second stunned. Synergy is the issue, not SW in a vacuum.

I hope they don't nerf her, and I like her a lot, but I am just trying to outline the issues.

Turns out her CD will convert purple to purple. So it isn't the reliable crit generator we all believe it to be. It's still good, and still generates match 5's, but not all the time. I don't see it as broken tho. Especially when the tile doesn't even resolve >20% of the time. Synergy with other characters should not be an issue, unless it's causing infinite turns. Strong pairings are good.

And since when does Whales do 12k team damage?

Unknown

Converting purple to purple just means having 1 purple (or more around) is more like 50% 0 purple/50% 1 purple from the test runs.

I thought about this some more and most of the recent passives would make a lot more sense if they don't have the 'we immediately replace the tile you're trying to destroy if you somehow destroyed it'. It'd be like if you interrupt the Arcane Incantation this staggers Scarlet Witch for a bit and she needs to recover. Same with Unbreakable/Exquisite Technique (turned out you can break Luke Cage after all and Iron Fist's Kung Fu wasn't as good as he thought). Right now, when you're matching those abilities away they might as well pop up a message like: "You know this doesn't do anything right?"

GuntherBlobel

Look, I don't like "broken" characters. You know, the ones that trivialize the game by creating infinite turns like the original cMags. However, is well designed and not "broken." In fact, it's exactly the way I think an undeniable passive power should work. You can't deny it, but you can match it away. Unlike IF's and LC's passives, this one can actually be managed.

So, it's not broken, but is it "over-powered?" (What exactly sets the bar anyway?) It seems to me that 3* Caps and abilities are as powerful or nearly as powerful as Arcane. Heck, these are excellent counters as well: use them overwrite her CD tile. The AP will even return in time for you to knock out the next one.

Things might get interesting when you pair her with other characters, like Prof X and Elektra. I don't think that's a fault in SW's design.

GrumpySmurf1002

Phantron wrote:

Converting purple to purple just means having 1 purple (or more around) is more like 50% 0 purple/50% 1 purple from the test runs.

I thought about this some more and most of the recent passives would make a lot more sense if they don't have the 'we immediately replace the tile you're trying to destroy if you somehow destroyed it'. It'd be like if you interrupt the Arcane Incantation this staggers Scarlet Witch for a bit and she needs to recover. Same with Unbreakable/Exquisite Technique (turned out you can break Luke Cage after all and Iron Fist's Kung Fu wasn't as good as he thought). Right now, when you're matching those abilities away they might as well pop up a message like: "You know this doesn't do anything right?"

So lets say there's a 3-turn gap after you match Fist/Cage's tile away. How is that different than what Scarlet Witch does right now?

This is effectively suggesting Cage/Fist should only generate the protect/attack tile after a 3 (or more) turn CD resolves, putting its effect on relative par. Which then means either

a) this isn't a real solution to Witch
b) there's nothing wrong with Witch

Unknown

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Converting purple to purple just means having 1 purple (or more around) is more like 50% 0 purple/50% 1 purple from the test runs.

I thought about this some more and most of the recent passives would make a lot more sense if they don't have the 'we immediately replace the tile you're trying to destroy if you somehow destroyed it'. It'd be like if you interrupt the Arcane Incantation this staggers Scarlet Witch for a bit and she needs to recover. Same with Unbreakable/Exquisite Technique (turned out you can break Luke Cage after all and Iron Fist's Kung Fu wasn't as good as he thought). Right now, when you're matching those abilities away they might as well pop up a message like: "You know this doesn't do anything right?"

So lets say there's a 3-turn gap after you match Fist/Cage's tile away. How is that different than what Scarlet Witch does right now?

This is effectively suggesting Cage/Fist should only generate the protect/attack tile after a 3 (or more) turn CD resolves, putting its effect on relative par. Which then means either

a) this isn't a real solution to Witch
b) there's nothing wrong with Witch

The second thing.

Seriously tho, interrupting the Arcane Incantation only buys you 1-3 turns. I'd be totally ok with IF and Luke Cage both being delayed 1-3 turns when you match their tile away. Something like "Begins the game with a special tile. If none of that special tile exist creates one when you match this color". Match red for Cage, match black for IF. Could potentially delay them several turns if no match comes up.

GrumpySmurf1002

Lerysh wrote:

Seriously tho, interrupting the Arcane Incantation only buys you 1-3 turns.

There's risk in doing so, but you don't have to match it immediately when a match presents. In fact letting the dumb AI match it buys you a turn. So you can push the window of time before it resolves.

Phaserhawk

Hi, my name is Sue Storm I'm using Phaserhawk's account to post, some of you may also know me as Bag Lady. I just wanted to let you know that my Force Bubbles are actually pretty good now and I can lock a lot of things down. As annoying as many of you think the Scarlet Witch is, rest assured I can deal with her and many others quite handedly.

Just saying

Der_Lex

If that countdoWn tile scares you so much, bring Falcon and have Redwing eat it, or bring lcap and have him overwrite it. It's almost like that countdown was intentionally set at 4 turns so both of the aforementioned abilities will resolve before the new countdown tile does, or something.

fmftint

Phaserhawk wrote:

Hi, my name is Sue Storm I'm using Phaserhawk's account to post, some of you may also know me as Bag Lady. I just wanted to let you know that my Force Bubbles are actually pretty good now and I can lock a lot of things down. As annoying as many of you think the Scarlet Witch is, rest assured I can deal with her and many others quite handedly.

Just saying

If SW CD is like Cage or IF special tiles she will just make a new one if locked

GuntherBlobel

Der_Lex wrote:

If that countdoWn tile scares you so much, bring Falcon and have Redwing eat it, or bring lcap and have him overwrite it. It's almost like that countdown was intentionally set at 4 turns so both of the aforementioned abilities will resolve before the new countdown tile does, or something.

I totally agree with you, but the OP seems to be mostly worried about a very specific character interaction between SW and two 4* characters that most of us do not have. One of the 4* characters is a repeat offender. The fear, I guess, is more about what this does to PvE scaling...

Demiurge simply needs to ban problematic character combos. When a specific character has more than 3 banned combos, then they might need a rework.

Unknown

its gonna get nerfed,

PS: There's no such thing as too many nerfs, balance is a scale(I guess u ppl don't play shehulk)

Unknown

Unless I'm missing something Redwing will do nothing to Scarlet Witch's power because it's going to be like:

You put down CD (3 turn to go)
Redwing picks it up (3 turns to go)
You put down CD (3 turns to go)
Redwing CD (2 to go)
SW CD (2 to go)
Redwing CD (1 to go)
SW CD (1 to go)
Redwing CD expires, but can't pick up a new one this turn
SW CD resolves

Not to mention it costs her nothing to deploy her CD while Redwing needs an AP threshold.

Der_Lex

Phantron wrote:

Unless I'm missing something Redwing will do nothing to Scarlet Witch's power because it's going to be like:

You put down CD (3 turn to go)
Redwing picks it up (3 turns to go)
You put down CD (3 turns to go)
Redwing CD (2 to go)
SW CD (2 to go)
Redwing CD (1 to go)
SW CD (1 to go)
Redwing CD expires, but can't pick up a new one this turn
SW CD resolves

Not to mention it costs her nothing to deploy her CD while Redwing needs an AP threshold.

You're right, I missed that sw's countdown becomes a turn less at L4. Seems like an easy thing to take out if this really turns out to be something that needs fixing. I still think it's way too early to cry foul about it, though. Although at this pojnt I'm really starting to hope they'll nerf prof X simply so people will stop whining about him... If that wouldn't mean people would start crying for a nerf for another character instead. That's why I wish Demiurge had adopted the 'buff, not nerf' approach: because nerf culture is one where people will **** and moan about any character that is even a little above average.

Unknown

Der_Lex wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Unless I'm missing something Redwing will do nothing to Scarlet Witch's power ...

Not to mention it costs her nothing to deploy her CD while Redwing needs an AP threshold.

You're right, I missed that sw's countdown becomes a turn less at L4. Seems like an easy thing to take out if this really turns out to be something that needs fixing. I still think it's way too early to cry foul about it, though. Although at this point I'm really starting to hope they'll nerf prof X simply so people will stop whining about him... If that wouldn't mean people would start crying for a nerf for another character instead. That's why I wish Demiurge had adopted the 'buff, not nerf' approach: because nerf culture is one where people will **** and moan about any character that is even a little above average.

Doesn't entirely work. When they buffed most characters' health, people still decried it as a nerf. Also to respond to others, the problem with this power is more on offense than defense, though eating a master plan on turn 4 due to a bad layout isn't fun either.

wirius

Phantron wrote:

wirius wrote:

Legit question here. How is a 3 turn countdown randomly placed tile that turns 5 surrounding tiles into pink overpowered? 3 turns results in possibly one pink match? I mean, X-force has a three turn yellow coundown tile that gets matched or blown up 2 out of the 3 times. Not sure I get your argument here.

The area the 5 tiles added is extremely small, making a match 5 almost a certainty. Since this ability has the same 'immediately replaces tile if it's destroyed' ala Unbreakable/Exquisite Technique, there's really no way to defend it unless every position it's put in is something you can match.

Come to think of it, all these passives would be a lot more balanced if they didn't have the 'you thought you stopped this ability? Think again!' aspect. If matching the tile stops the passive for even a few turns, they'd be much more balanced.

The problem is these are adjacent tiles to the countdown tile. Think of it as five tiles generated in a 3x3 grid around the middle. That never makes a match five. Second, if you destroy the countdown tile, another appears, but it then has 3 more rounds it has to tick. This is an incredibly counterable passive, that most often only produces a pink match 3 every three turns.