Upcoming Change to Moonstone's Control Shift

Demiurge_Will

Hi, all,

Will here from Demiurge to let you know about an upcoming change to Moonstone’s Control Shift power.

To refresh your memory, Control Shift steals an enemy Countdown tile and stuns the enemy if there are none. Upgrades increase the stun and can shorten the Countdown.

Control Shift can lead to some great stories (like that time Miles stole a Recovery Countdown from Wolverine (X-Force)), but it has a lot of drawbacks: It’s situational and complicated for a 2-star. It’s expensive to fire at 17 AP. The nature of the power doesn’t lend itself well to a clean, understandable upgrade path. And it adds development and testing effort to every power that uses a Countdown tile in a new way, creating bugs and taking time away from other features we could be developing.

We fought to make it work for a long time because it can lead to cool moments, but ultimately a simpler, less expensive ability makes more sense for this character.

The cost of Control Shift is decreasing from 17 to 9, and the power now steals enemy special tiles:
At level 1, 1 Attack tile.
At level 2, 1 Attack or Protect tile.
At level 3, 2 Attack or Protect tiles.
At level 4, 2 Attack, Protect, or Strike tiles.
At level 5, 3 Attack, Protect, or Strike tiles.

(As always, these numbers might change between now and when the change goes live as a result of further testing.)

Whenever we make significant changes to a character, we increase their sell price. That’ll be true for Moonstone, too: her sell price will increase (to roughly 50% of the Iso-8 that was needed to level her up, or the current sell price when that’s better) for 2-4 weeks when the change happens.

We expect this change to happen in a patch the middle of next week.