Patch Notes - 2/14 Discussion

IceIX

Very minor patch today in number of changes, although each of them has a bit of impact on their own.

Characters

- Captain America (Modern): Sentinel of Liberty - Raised the strength of Protect tiles placed by this ability across the board.

Old -> New Level 6, Ability level 1: 6 -> 13 Level 85, Ability level 5: 95 -> 150

Misc

- Added Daredevil (Man Without Fear) to the Standard and Heroic Comic Packs - 72 hour Valentine's Day Iso-8 Sale! Receive double Iso-8 for any purchase this weekend.

Just as a note, this is not us saying that with this change, Captain America is now fully balanced. It was simply a quick and painless change to a vastly underused ability.

octagon69

Lol,

The reason its underused is because it costs so much.

By the time you can use this ability ICEIX you either have won the game and you're using it for a 5 Hit extra turn or it won't make a difference if you are losing.

Instead of buffing the ability, why not decrease the cost of the ability.

Unknown

That ISO sale is awesome. After all of my complaining I opened my wallet and bought the 100k.

my roster thanks ye

turul

octagon69 wrote:

Lol,

The reason its underused is because it costs so much.

By the time you can use this ability ICEIX you either have won the game and you're using it for a 5 Hit extra turn or it won't make a difference if you are losing.

Instead of buffing the ability, why not decrease the cost of the ability.

Agreed

IceIX

octagon69 wrote:

Lol,

The reason its underused is because it costs so much.

By the time you can use this ability ICEIX you either have won the game and you're using it for a 5 Hit extra turn or it won't make a difference if you are losing.

Instead of buffing the ability, why not decrease the cost of the ability.

From a personal, not part of the company, point of view I'd agree. If someone else's ability synergized to give controllable bursts of yellow like Black Widow (Grey Suit) does with Green it'd be more naturally usable. As it is, it's pretty rare to get real use out of this.

LordWill

Well maybe they will change it?

19 AP cost for the shields is just too much.

Maybe if they were 10 AP then that would be good.

Just curious since they made some changes to him (Capt. America), does this mean he is off the balance board for awhile?

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

octagon69 wrote:

Lol,

The reason its underused is because it costs so much.

By the time you can use this ability ICEIX you either have won the game and you're using it for a 5 Hit extra turn or it won't make a difference if you are losing.

Instead of buffing the ability, why not decrease the cost of the ability.

From a personal, not part of the company, point of view I'd agree. If someone else's ability synergized to give controllable bursts of yellow like Black Widow (Grey Suit) does with Green it'd be more naturally usable. As it is, it's pretty rare to get real use out of this.

That would be nice but still who would use cap instead of hood with that yellow feeding character though.

Unknown

F cap. Where is the xforce buff?

Honestly, cap is a PvP character...simple as that. His whole shield mechanic is slow by nature which is not great for PvP. His ap costs are all too high to be useful at what they do on def as well. There is no way to truely balance him without reworking his shield gimmick...something I don't think is necessary anyway. Kinda like moonstone. Only way to make them better would be to change them completely. Caps yellow should be 10-14 ap not 17 though regardless.

Unknown

You're right Cap is a PvE char. That being said, I have him w/5 yellow at lvl 61. If I ever get a match where I can't use spidey, Cap is there to take some damage and play utility. I don't have any yellow covers for Hood, so he's out. Ares? Too health pack reliant for my tastes. I'd use IM40 instead if I cared enough to level him, past 53.

Yes 19 yellow is an extreme amount of AP, but if I ever get there (and especially when cap is buffed), It's just -1hp for the rest of the match, or a free cascade to solidify a victory.

Would I like him to be more useful, sure. As he is, he's IM35's 2* big brother.

Unknown

Double ISO is very very very very tempting...

Unknown

Yeah, Cap didn't need a stronger skill power:cost wise.

But it's tricky. No matter the cost, the very nature of the skill makes it more suitable for offensive use. Just look at Magnetic Field.

My solution is to reduce cost to 6 and make it only 1 tile. It makes it much more attractive to use it right away for the damage mitigation, but also leaves opportunity to save up to 12/18 for a crit tile.

DD-The-Mighty

ihearthawthats wrote:

Yeah, Cap didn't need a stronger skill power:cost wise.

But it's tricky. No matter the cost, the very nature of the skill makes it more suitable for offensive use. Just look at Magnetic Field.

My solution is to reduce cost to 6 and make it only 1 tile. It makes it much more attractive to use it right away for the damage mitigation, but also leaves opportunity to save up to 12/18 for a crit tile.

Nice idea on the yellow. make it a more active variation on bulleye's defense tiles. as that's Bullseyes real strength: Getting the defense up when you really need it-- As quickly as possible.


Ive been trying to rank cap since thew last PVE event with him. I like his hi amount of health coupled with his semi repeatable moves. if there were a better def tile implementation he could be one of the great defensive characters. Unfortunately the boosted events shows another problem both he and Moonstone share: the need a slight (in caps case) or moderate (in moonstones case) damage buff.

For cap nothing major, just a nice 1-200 bump in his red. there are better Reds to team him up with, but if he could give you a decent chunk off of their health, it would really open up player options. It would also really push the characters best qualities: he's not a 1-puch hard-hitter, but he is resilient and won't go down easy.
Make a fight with cap a war of attrition. Some thing a high (for a 1*) level im35 does very well.

Moonstone just needs some bite. Like alot of the 2*'s she has nothing to be afraid of. If she were at even 50% of the damage boost that she has in boosted events she would have more pvp viability and not be relegated to PVE mook destroyer. She also needs some reworking on her black but thats for another thread.

bahamut685

DD-The-Mighty wrote:

Nice idea on the yellow. make it a more active variation on bulleye's defense tiles. as that's Bullseyes real strength: Getting the defense up when you really need it-- As quickly as possible.

Ive been trying to rank cap since thew last PVE event with him. I like his hi amount of health coupled with his semi repeatable moves. if there were a better def tile implementation he could be one of the great defensive characters. Unfortunately the boosted events shows another problem both he and Moonstone share: the need a slight (in caps case) or moderate (in moonstones case) damage buff.

For cap nothing major, just a nice 1-200 bump in his red. there are better Reds to team him up with, but if he could give you a decent chunk off of their health, it would really open up player options. It would also really push the characters best qualities: he's not a 1-puch hard-hitter, but he is resilient and won't go down easy.
Make a fight with cap a war of attrition. Some thing a high (for a 1*) level im35 does very well.

Moonstone just needs some bite. Like alot of the 2*'s she has nothing to be afraid of. If she were at even 50% of the damage boost that she has in boosted events she would have more pvp viability and not be relegated to PVE mook destroyer. She also needs some reworking on her black but thats for another thread.

Very true about Moonstone, she's in desperate need of funbalancing... Red is her strongest skill, and it requires 12 red tiles to be on the board to be comparable to Wolvie's red (and that's with ignoring Wolvie's ten thousand strike tiles on the board).

Unknown

I've no idea why people think Moonstone is weak. She's the second strongest character on purple in the game for damage (only Magneto is better), simply because the vast majority of purple powers do not even deal damage. While Gravity Warp is probably not as useful as Aggressive Recon, Aggressive Recon doesn't do more damage. As long as green is covered by someone else, her ability to convert purple into damage against most characters allows you to get a very quick alpha strike to knock out the most problematic character first.

Captain America's ability works fine conceptually as s 'defensive game over' the same way IW's work. They don't currently work because there's no point to go for a defensive victory when Spiderman means the last guy (and often the last two guys) don't count, so all you need is the ability to knock out one guy and then Spiderman takes over. So I wouldn't worry too much until Spiderman is balanced because currently the meta game is very imbalanced toward just killing the weakest guy as fast as possible and then Spiderman takes care of the rest.

NorthernPolarity

Phantron wrote:

I've no idea why people think Moonstone is weak. She's the second strongest character on purple in the game for damage (only Magneto is better), simply because the vast majority of purple powers do not even deal damage. While Gravity Warp is probably not as useful as Aggressive Recon, Aggressive Recon doesn't do more damage. As long as green is covered by someone else, her ability to convert purple into damage against most characters allows you to get a very quick alpha strike to knock out the most problematic character first.

Captain America's ability works fine conceptually as s 'defensive game over' the same way IW's work. They don't currently work because there's no point to go for a defensive victory when Spiderman means the last guy (and often the last two guys) don't count, so all you need is the ability to knock out one guy and then Spiderman takes over. So I wouldn't worry too much until Spiderman is balanced because currently the meta game is very imbalanced toward just killing the weakest guy as fast as possible and then Spiderman takes care of the rest.

Moonstone just feels too much like a 1 skill character to me due to black being extremely situational and red being extremely oversaturated in the 2* roster (Wolvie/Thor/debatably Ares, etc). The only thing she's bringing to the table is her purple skill, which is good as you said, but isn't enough for her to be considered a strong 2* character imo.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I've no idea why people think Moonstone is weak. She's the second strongest character on purple in the game for damage (only Magneto is better), simply because the vast majority of purple powers do not even deal damage. While Gravity Warp is probably not as useful as Aggressive Recon, Aggressive Recon doesn't do more damage. As long as green is covered by someone else, her ability to convert purple into damage against most characters allows you to get a very quick alpha strike to knock out the most problematic character first.

Captain America's ability works fine conceptually as s 'defensive game over' the same way IW's work. They don't currently work because there's no point to go for a defensive victory when Spiderman means the last guy (and often the last two guys) don't count, so all you need is the ability to knock out one guy and then Spiderman takes over. So I wouldn't worry too much until Spiderman is balanced because currently the meta game is very imbalanced toward just killing the weakest guy as fast as possible and then Spiderman takes care of the rest.

Moonstone just feels too much like a 1 skill character to me due to black being extremely situational and red being extremely oversaturated in the 2* roster (Wolvie/Thor/debatably Ares, etc). The only thing she's bringing to the table is her purple skill, which is good as you said, but isn't enough for her to be considered a strong 2* character imo.

Yeah except for the fact that if there is any sort of special tile out on the board the purple does 0 damage and just switches one random tile around. She's pretty horrible.

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

Well maybe they will change it?

19 AP cost for the shields is just too much.

Maybe if they were 10 AP then that would be good.

Just curious since they made some changes to him (Capt. America), does this mean he is off the balance board for awhile?

19 AP is actually not too much, 10 would be broken. The problem is that most people have him at 3/5/5 so they don't understand how strong this ability is. It can easily 10-15 yellow AP by itself, plus 10-15 AP from other colors. You could lower the cost to 17 or so, but any less and it becomes spammable. So while I agree that the cost needs to be decreased for it to see play, they'd also need to decrease the number of tiles it creates, and perhaps increase the tile strength to compensate.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I've no idea why people think Moonstone is weak. She's the second strongest character on purple in the game for damage (only Magneto is better), simply because the vast majority of purple powers do not even deal damage. While Gravity Warp is probably not as useful as Aggressive Recon, Aggressive Recon doesn't do more damage. As long as green is covered by someone else, her ability to convert purple into damage against most characters allows you to get a very quick alpha strike to knock out the most problematic character first.

Captain America's ability works fine conceptually as s 'defensive game over' the same way IW's work. They don't currently work because there's no point to go for a defensive victory when Spiderman means the last guy (and often the last two guys) don't count, so all you need is the ability to knock out one guy and then Spiderman takes over. So I wouldn't worry too much until Spiderman is balanced because currently the meta game is very imbalanced toward just killing the weakest guy as fast as possible and then Spiderman takes care of the rest.

Deceptive Tactics?

Unknown

For Deceptive Tactics, GWBS is literally a one trick pony, even more specialized than Moonstone. Deceptive Tactics doesn't do much damage by itself and is generally used to setup for Sniper Rifle, which is great if you can get it but it also needs 11 instead of 8, which is a nontrivial difference.

Moonstone's red is weak but unless you picked characters with passives, you're going to have overlap somewhere. It's no different than that if you pick Hulk, hopefully you got someone on your team with a better green or red because you're really lacking in firepower if those are your best red/green moves. Photon Blast is likely more useful on defense when whoever your primary red guy is likely to die first (unless he's Patch).

Gravity Warp functions as special tile defense when special tiles are out. Let's look at some of the common characters seen on the high end:

Spiderman - Difficult to deal with for Moonstone because the protect tiles aren't very useful, but literally no one can deal with Spiderman well except for himself.
OBW - No special tiles.
GSBW - No special tiles.
Hulk - No special tiles. (can't use Gravity Warp on Anger because they expire before your turn)
Patch - Getting rid of his strike tiles from Berserker Rage often results in winning the game.
Magneto - Cannot deal with him effectively because AI leaves protect tile in random places, though like Spiderman, Magento is someone who has no real counters except for himself
Punisher - Mr. Average is probably the bane of a tile defense specialist like Moonstone. Judgment scatters tiles at random places. Molotov creates random attack tiles, and to top it off none of them are even very strong to warrant stopping.

She has 4 favorable matchups (OBW, GSBW, Patch), and the only significant weakness is against Punisher but Gravity Warp has similar cost to Molotov and Judgment so you can potentially just outrace them.

Now does that mean she's a good character against the powerhouse characters? No because she's still only a 2*. Aside from OBW (Aggressive Recon is way underpriced for what it does), none of the 2* matches up favorably against a 3* in general, and that's probably a good thing. On one hand you don't want 2* to be useless but it'd be pretty weird if the average 2* matches up well against most 3*s. She's not OBW but she's good enough until you have a level 100 3* to replace her.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

For Deceptive Tactics, GWBS is literally a one trick pony, even more specialized than Moonstone. Deceptive Tactics doesn't do much damage by itself and is generally used to setup for Sniper Rifle, which is great if you can get it but it also needs 11 instead of 8, which is a nontrivial difference.

Moonstone's red is weak but unless you picked characters with passives, you're going to have overlap somewhere. It's no different than that if you pick Hulk, hopefully you got someone on your team with a better green or red because you're really lacking in firepower if those are your best red/green moves. Photon Blast is likely more useful on defense when whoever your primary red guy is likely to die first (unless he's Patch).

Gravity Warp functions as special tile defense when special tiles are out. Let's look at some of the common characters seen on the high end:

Spiderman - Difficult to deal with for Moonstone because the protect tiles aren't very useful, but literally no one can deal with Spiderman well except for himself.
OBW - No special tiles.
GSBW - No special tiles.
Hulk - No special tiles. (can't use Gravity Warp on Anger because they expire before your turn)
Patch - Getting rid of his strike tiles from Berserker Rage often results in winning the game.
Magneto - Cannot deal with him effectively because AI leaves protect tile in random places, though like Spiderman, Magento is someone who has no real counters except for himself
Punisher - Mr. Average is probably the bane of a tile defense specialist like Moonstone. Judgment scatters tiles at random places. Molotov creates random attack tiles, and to top it off none of them are even very strong to warrant stopping.

She has 4 favorable matchups (OBW, GSBW, Patch), and the only significant weakness is against Punisher but Gravity Warp has similar cost to Molotov and Judgment so you can potentially just outrace them.

Now does that mean she's a good character against the powerhouse characters? No because she's still only a 2*. Aside from OBW (Aggressive Recon is way underpriced for what it does), none of the 2* matches up favorably against a 3* in general, and that's probably a good thing. On one hand you don't want 2* to be useless but it'd be pretty weird if the average 2* matches up well against most 3*s. She's not OBW but she's good enough until you have a level 100 3* to replace her.

I don't think u give deceptive tactics enough credit. Yes, 8v11 is not trivial, but her purple builds green, shuffles the board, creates critical tiles, can knock out opponent tiles (not cover, but you can 4 match them away), and can be used cleverly to set up future matches with the critical in which case the damage output from it is actually rather non-trivial. The machine is just stupid.

I don't think gravity warp is bad. I think all.she really.needs is something to make her black more viable. Unless they start bringing in sine massive countdown tile monsters in pve her black is way too expensive for what it does...and the "no countdown tile on the board" effect is too weak for 17? ap.

Unknown

soenottelling wrote:

I don't think u give deceptive tactics enough credit. Yes, 8v11 is not trivial, but her purple builds green, shuffles the board, creates critical tiles, can knock out opponent tiles (not cover, but you can 4 match them away), and can be used cleverly to set up future matches with the critical in which case the damage output from it is actually rather non-trivial. The machine is just stupid.

I don't think gravity warp is bad. I think all.she really.needs is something to make her black more viable. Unless they start bringing in sine massive countdown tile monsters in pve her black is way too expensive for what it does...and the "no countdown tile on the board" effect is too weak for 17? ap.

There's a general lack of powerful countdown tiles in this game so of course Control Shift is pretty weak. It's similar to how Aggressive Recon didn't seem that powerful back when Feral Claws was 3 AP since you can always get rid of your AP almost immediately. It'll take time for the general immediate versus CD ability balance to be achieved. Honestly the PvE fights are what the CD tiles should look like. They should do absolutely crazy things precisely because you have multiple turns and multiple methods to stop it, and sometimes even the AI is on your side. Let's say Adamantium Slash does 3K damage for 12 red, then Explosive Arrow should be at least 2000 damage to all 3 targets for 10 red, and if Exploisve Arrow did that, it'd also be worth stealing. That's not how the game currently is, but I think it'll change toward that direction eventually.

Deceptive Tactics also suffers from the special tile issue since it cannot cover special tile or environmental tiles. Yes, you can usually still find a way to blow something up with it but it gets more difficult if there are special tiles around. If you're looking at a clean board then Deceptive Tactics is probably superior, but Gravity Warp is pretty awesome on a clean board too (damage + 4 AP gained in the worst case usually, and often can do damage + match 4/5 with some planning). There's alos the fact that Deceptive Tactics doesn't do much unless Sniper Rifle is at level 5 and currently getting Sniper Rifle to level 5 is very hard. I think there Sniper Rifle should be rebalanced but until it is, the level 5 requirement is actually quite significant. If you're one level short, suddenly Sniper Rifle is just a badly overpriced green move.