* Venom (Dark Avengers) *

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

I want to say I agree, because that would be amusing to do, but I'm going to say no, simply because that could make for some nightmarish PvE nodes.

How?

Unknown

KevinMark wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

I want to say I agree, because that would be amusing to do, but I'm going to say no, simply because that could make for some nightmarish PvE nodes.

How?

Let's say level 300+ Venom Lieutenant & Spy ~ both feeding Purple AP to Venom to continuously stun your team, 2 turn Healing tiles and Venom can collect black while you keep waiting for your turn. He'd probably devour your whole team and still have full health.

Unknown

I'm playing this game for nearly a year now and I have never seen Venom properly Devour anyone (with 6 web tiles on the board). Changing his black will not effect his ability to make webs or keep them on the board. I play every event in the game. Of course I also finished Prologue 100%.

Unknown

Hi there!

New to the game and I had one question. I keep seeing Level 100+ /1 Star Venoms in PvP teams and I noticed that Venom is a 1 star cover that level caps at 40. So my question is : is there a way to take characters levels past their level caps?

Thanks.
Uttinidakilrjawa

orbitalint

Hey there,

You are almost certainly talking about PVE events and/or the prologue story. I can't remember for certain in the prologue.

That said, no, Venom will always be a lvl 40 max for you on your roster. They increase the levels in events because of the need to give players with higher capped characters a challenge without having to change out the people you go against (you'll see in the forums that this is called scaling). The only exception to this is in some of the events (Balance of Power and Combined Arms) where all characters are boosted to a certain level. However, those boosts are temporary and will not constitute the vast majority of your playing experience with a character.

Hope that helps and welcome to the forum!

yogi_

KevinMark wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

Is it better to keep Venom's purple at 4? For 4 purple AP you generate 1 web tile and stun an enemy for 1 turn as opposed to for 7 purple AP 1 web and stun the whole enemy team for 1 turn.

Answering my own question, yes.

Can you expand on your reasoning a little?

Unknown

yogi_ wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

Is it better to keep Venom's purple at 4? For 4 purple AP you generate 1 web tile and stun an enemy for 1 turn as opposed to for 7 purple AP 1 web and stun the whole enemy team for 1 turn.

Answering my own question, yes.

Can you expand on your reasoning a little?

It's for pairing him with Spider-man and Devour, to make webs quicker. If you don't plan on using Devour with 6 web tiles, 5 cover is better for the free turn.

Unknown

I'm curious about peoples opinions on the MPQ version of Venom as a character (not from a playable perspective, but how he is portrayed.)
Granted, I don't know much about Venom and I'm not too eager to investigate it, but was the guy always so...well, one dimensional? Looking at his dialogue in all the PvE's he's been in, it's all "Gonna eat you, gonna lick you, <insert descriptor> meat!"

I get that we're not going to have fully fleshed out novel-ready characterizations in this match-3 game but how is this version of Venom outside the game?

Marc_Spector

dearbluey wrote:

Granted, I don't know much about Venom and I'm not too eager to investigate it, but was the guy always so...well, one dimensional?

Not really, no... the Venom in MPQ is a thug named Mac Gargan, formerly Spider-Man villain The Scorpion (who got ahold of the symbiote suit and operated as Venom in Norman Osborne's Thunderbolts & Dark Avengers). The original Venom, Eddie Brock, was much more nuanced -- practically Hamlet compared to this guy.

Arimis_Thorn

Zhirrzh wrote:

Venom has rocked for me in the Simulator Hard bracket. Rather than trying to whittle down the health of boosted level 230s while stunlocking them, I can insta-kill them one by one. Much quicker. Classic Spiderman, Magneto Marvel Now, Venom. Heck, they aren't even that high level! (Spidey is somewhere in the 40s, although with 5 blue covers, Magneto in the 50s, Venom is maxed at level 40). I'm generally boosting with a blue/purple for the tough matches and both a blue/purple and a +3 all for the 230s, purely due to the lack of HP on my Mags and Spidey at the moment to survive hits while building to the first use of Mags' purple. It's been kind of hilarious pulling all these Devours and instakilling guys with up to 14k hp. Makes up for the tedium of running the Spidey stunlock...

I actually never leveled Venom on my way up, but having just come off of the Gauntlet and regularly getting destroyed by ridiculously boosted AI, I've considered adding Venom to my roster for exactly the reason you describe. Just trying to decide if it's worth the 650 HP to add a slot, especially given that I'm hoping to add a spot for Kamala.

Kolence

Arimis Thorn wrote:

Zhirrzh wrote:

Venom has rocked for me in the Simulator Hard bracket. Rather than trying to whittle down the health of boosted level 230s while stunlocking them, I can insta-kill them one by one. Much quicker. Classic Spiderman, Magneto Marvel Now, Venom. Heck, they aren't even that high level! (Spidey is somewhere in the 40s, although with 5 blue covers, Magneto in the 50s, Venom is maxed at level 40). I'm generally boosting with a blue/purple for the tough matches and both a blue/purple and a +3 all for the 230s, purely due to the lack of HP on my Mags and Spidey at the moment to survive hits while building to the first use of Mags' purple. It's been kind of hilarious pulling all these Devours and instakilling guys with up to 14k hp. Makes up for the tedium of running the Spidey stunlock...

I actually never leveled Venom on my way up, but having just come off of the Gauntlet and regularly getting destroyed by ridiculously boosted AI, I've considered adding Venom to my roster for exactly the reason you describe. Just trying to decide if it's worth the 650 HP to add a slot, especially given that I'm hoping to add a spot for Kamala.

Just keep in mind it was the old 2AP Spidey that is mentioned in the post you quoted.

Unknown

So yeah. Venom needs to be run as 5 4 . That last purple cover does -not- pay off for the increased AP cost. I've been using him with Spidey some in the prologue and DDQ and have still yet to get the Devour trick to work. Part of it is not having Spidey's blue well covered enough to cheapen it to spam out more web tiles, but with his overlap with Spidey's purple, your web tile generation is still going to be restricted.

I hope he really does get a third power at some point, (and the other 2 power 1 stars as well, but hey) to even out level caps, and also to correct the fact that his effectiveness drops when max covered.

I'd argue the purple needs to change, I liked the above suggestion that the fifth cover increase the cost to 8, but it generate 2 web tiles.

Of course people would be annoyed if he got a third power, because that means fighting him might be a bit harder, so if he ever got a third power, his other 2 might need a rebalance.

Just kind of disappointed in him right now.

ErikPeter

Venom's been changed. Instead of instantly downing the target, Devour now does ~2K+ damage and requires 8 tiles instead of 6.

I imagine this was because Miles makes it too easy to get webs on the board, but still, this nerf is pretty unfortunate. Was anyone actually exploiting this rare clause? He's got 2600 HP, it's not like you'll get far in PvP, and it was fun to try to take advantage of.

Even teamed with a maxed Miles, downing one opponent costs 6 purple, 8 yellow, and 12 black. That's some setup, and it removes all of your webs so you're back to square one.

I'll allow that a damage cap is fair so people can't one-shot level 300 Juggs (or Ultron...) with a 1* character. The extra damage (roughly triple base) is acceptable (in the 1* range, 2K is enough) but the 8 tile requirement makes it almost impossible to pull off without Miles. A week ago, I started over on a new device and I've been rolling Spider-Man (Original) with Venom, and I've capitalized on the Devour clause once, ever. It's incredibly difficult to get to 6 webs; 8? The match will be over by then, one way or the other.

Oh well. I normally wouldn't care about a D-lister in the 1* tier, but he's got the most interesting gimmick of any 1- or 2-star, and thanks to PvE scaling Venom will always be relevant. After this change, the clause on Devour will almost never trigger. It's a newbie-unfriendly, unnecessary rules complication.

I think a better change would have been to lower the base damage, but add bonus damage per web tile on the board (Removing some number when fired), creating a good incentive to remove the web tiles, but not be broken either way. It also creates an interesting tension when fighting Venom using Spider-Man (Original)--every web tile you place could be boosting his damage, you'd really want to prevent him from matching Black as much as possible. However, a total overhaul may be too design and QA-intensive for a 1* character (which is also why I don't think he needs a 3rd power that generates web tiles or something).

My suggestion:
He could be made fun again by just doubling the number of tiles generated by Symbiote Snare (at rank 5). That would retain the puzzle of capitalizing on Devour, and the danger when facing him would still be there. That is, there'd actually be a chance that the clause will apply without outside help.

amusingfoo1

OJSP wrote:

ErikPeter wrote:

Venom's been changed. Instead of instantly downing the target, Devour now does ~2K+ damage and requires 8 tiles instead of 6.

Just had this pointed out to me a short while ago. Don't understand this. Can't be bothered to make a decent Hulk, but we'll take the time to nerf a rarely-used 1*?

OJSP wrote:

The extra damage (roughly triple base) is acceptable (in the 1* range, 2K is enough)

I agree at lvl 40 it's acceptable. I'd be interested to find out what it does at lvl 395 (..or thereabouts) in PvEs. (Too bad I finished Venom: Heroic yesterday)
It's probably similar to how Juggernaut's Headbutt scales. Which makes it ironic that the 2 1*s at lvl 270 would deal bigger damage than some of the 4*s.

I just checked, and at level 242 (I have a node in current PvE at that level to check), it's about 6500 extra damage (base is 4600).

ErikPeter

"David wrote:

Moore"]• Venom now deals 2,000 Damage instead of downing a character if there are enough Web tiles on the board from Character Levels 1 to 40
• At level 41 this damage will start to scale up
• The number of tiles required to deal this damage has increased from 6 to 8."

Thanks amusingfoo1 for an example of the scaling. Now that it's been clarified...

The bonus damage scales pretty weakly considering how hard it is to achieve; I suppose players with Miles Morales wouldn't want to fight Venom in PvE and worry about 20K hits. Guess I'll be de-listing him once the Nefarious Foes event is over. Oh well! Frees up a slot.

ErikPeter

That's assuming I bring along a better way to make webs--because as mentioned above, reaching 8 webs with only Venom (Or Venom plus Spidey) is practically impossible. Even with 28 Purple AP and 4 ranks in Symbiote Snare, some of those green webs are going to match themselves away--besides, I like having 5 ranks. Maybe I'll get Miles, but with just a few covers there'll be someone better to bring. Just doesn't seem worth it anymore.

One way to possibly capitalize on it would be to only fight teams containing Spider-Man (and you know you'll see a few Spidey/Venom teams in BoP), but still a ton of setup for not an amazing benefit. Again, I feel like I'm making a bigger deal about this than it deserves, the nerf isn't a game-breaker, it just makes him less interesting.

The whole situation does give me some good speculative ideas for powers, say Spider-Woman or Silk get added to the game, having a character whose damage increases (e.g. Vision's blue, but passively), based on the number of webs on the board would be pretty interesting. Or they could give that power to 3* Spidey at the cost of some healing to make the lamenting Peter Parker fans happy. That hero would start out slowly and gain momentum as webs were added, which would be really cool. Anyway, that's a conversation for a different forum.

AaronTheLuigi

Bumping this in response to the revamp of his Symbiote Snare power following the release of R105. (I inspected my own Lv.40 Venom using the new "inspect other power levels" feature to get these stats as nothing about this skill changes with level.)
[EDIT: Unlike the previous behavior of converting a random colored Basic tile to a Green Web tile, Symbiote Snare now converts a random colored Basic tile to a Web tile without converting colors.]

Symbiote Snare - 6 AP
Venom sends out his tendrils like a rope. If there are at least 4 Web tiles on the board, stuns the target enemy for 1 turn. The tendrils leave their mark on the battlefield as Venom stalks his prey, adding 1 Web tile to the board.
Level Upgrades

Level 2: Stuns if there are at least 3 Web tiles. Level 3: Stuns if there are at least 2 Web tiles. Level 4: Stuns if there is at least 1 Web tile. Level 5: Stuns without needing Web tiles on the board.

Kolence

AaronTheLuigi wrote:

[NOTE: This still overwrites any Basic colored tile with a green Web tile, as it has in the past.]

Are you sure? I used a Venom TU (which must have dropped from some PvE node, so not sure how many covers) and noticed a single black web tile afterwards. No other characters capable of generating web tiles on either team...

AaronTheLuigi

Oh, right. Somehow missed that on my first go with Venom. Now he merely replaces any Basic tile with a Web tile without changing color. (I think, only got to see a black and red tile on two casts).

thanos8587

one star venom has now been nerfed twice!!!!

who knew he was the most broken character in the game. thanks for saving us all d3.