Controversial: No character should be able to heal teammates

over_clocked

Oh and I don't grind 1 point level 230 missions to beat the bracket leader, that would be stupid even for me. I like chance, I like to open standard recruit tokens despite the fact that they stopped being useful for me a while ago until I start collecting 1 stars again, they are still a thing that warms up my heart. I also like the challenge and testing my abilities (even against the stupid but powerful AI, hey it's something). I just like the game for the sake of being both Marvel and Puzzle quest. Loaned heroes mode might be a good idea but who would bother buying covers then? Only hardcore collectors and *really* competitive people.
While on the subject I actually can propose a new ability for X-Force: we all know that in comics Wolverine could donate his awesome blood to heal other people, so why not attach another semi-AoE healing ability on a character who needs rebuilding anyway? Say, active yellow, 13 AP. Level 1: heals the weakest teammate for 10% of their health. Level 2: heals the weakest teammate for 20%. Level 3: heals two weakest teammates for 20%. Level 4: two weakest teammates, 30%. Level 5: heals one weakest teammate to full health.
And one stars need some love from healers as well. Why not slap some very low level healing on Yelena while also reducing AP cost on her other abilities? Tell me how this could hurt the game in any way; Yelena would be as useful to 2 and 3 stars as Venom missions in Prologue (not useful most of the time) but people would actually bother keeping and leveling her; X-Force is just too damn rare.

Unknown

@ Phantron

I have been playing the PVE with lineups at or weaker than opponents level. I'm using my one-star characters. I don't have insane high level opponents in normal mode. Its pretty tame. But I rarely exploit all points possible in PVE. No time.

Unknown

@ locked

Can we have a TL; DR version?

over_clocked

Bugpop wrote:

@ locked

Can we have a TL; DR version?

I dunno, it's mostly annoyed feels and denying 'healing is bad for the game'. also the player has every right to make 'bad' choices and run healers and grind and abuse OP chars and do anything they want (except outright cheating lol), oh the terror. the game suffers from it? bad design, don't blame the players.

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

I use it to win matches often. I will heal before the final blow as well, but the Hard Simulator has almost necessitated the need for a healer on your team. Yes it is possible to beat these opponents without a healer...assuming the board falls your way...but without one, in certain instances you are completely screwed. Examples being any of the ridiculously overpowered Maggia or Hammer attacks.

That only shows that you didn't grasp "find the best team for THIS battle" idea of simulator.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

RangoFett wrote:

rowaasr13 wrote:

Now I'm playing Ascension and FF:Tactics on my phone instead of playing MPQ .

Create a separate save before Riovanes Castle!

Reroll Ramza's to a Pisces birthday and that fight is cakewalk. It's pretty funny your birthday determines how hard the game is. You'd have to be like level 50 to even have a chance of winning that fight if you're the wrong birthday type without resorting to some really cheap tactics.

Yeah, this was mostly just a trip down nostalgia lane. The touch controls are interesting but I think I'd prefer it on a tablet to my phone. The controls really slow things down.

Unknown

I think there's a lot of misplaced negativity in this thread. Grinding is necessary because the progression rewards for both PVE and PVP are set at inhuman levels. If healing were taken out of the equation, the Devs would drop the progression reward thresholds...to a slightly lower point that was still set at an inhuman level. I'm comfortably in the top 2 of my main simulator bracket (been trading 1st with one other serious competitor), but I will probably come up 20000 points shy of the 8000 ISO reward (let alone the final Patch). PVP evolved to be terrible through a convergent path (rather than divergent); the numbers aren't unreasonable but competition ensures that only a few lucky and dedicated players can break free of the crummy matchmaking to reach for the sky.

You can take any number of abilities out of the game; if the developers want progression rewards to be unreachable in principle, they will be. I would rather have a bunch of options in play style and play the game more than have fewer options and no incentive to play at all.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

I think there's a lot of misplaced negativity in this thread. Grinding is necessary because the progression rewards for both PVE and PVP are set at inhuman levels. If healing were taken out of the equation, the Devs would drop the progression reward thresholds...to a slightly lower point that was still set at an inhuman level. I'm comfortably in the top 2 of my main simulator bracket (been trading 1st with one other serious competitor), but I will probably come up 20000 points shy of the 8000 ISO reward (let alone the final Patch). PVP evolved to be terrible through a convergent path (rather than divergent); the numbers aren't unreasonable but competition ensures that only a few lucky and dedicated players can break free of the crummy matchmaking to reach for the sky.

You can take any number of abilities out of the game; if the developers want progression rewards to be unreachable in principle, they will be. I would rather have a bunch of options in play style and play the game more than have fewer options and no incentive to play at all.

Rewards were unreachable.
Devs added in shields to make them reachable.
People started using tank teams to leap frog to progression rewards. (You could see shielded opponents)
Devs took away ability to see shielded people. (Progression rewards fell back out of reach)
The attack shield attack shield method was developed. (Consumes large amounts of hp to utilize)
Large amounts of hp are being consumed - hunt for progression reward fix halts. (Why use shields for progressions when they can use it for an hp dump)
New fix to makes progressions reachable not implemented, possibly not even being searched for.



I think they should just knock the points down. Top is still 2400 I believe?
All my bracket leaders keep ending 700-1000. Maybe it's different elsewhere but it would probably take me 800+ 1 point matches to reach 2400 reward and that's assuming that not a single person would hit me during those 800+ matches.

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

Moon 17 wrote:

I think there's a lot of misplaced negativity in this thread. Grinding is necessary because the progression rewards for both PVE and PVP are set at inhuman levels. If healing were taken out of the equation, the Devs would drop the progression reward thresholds...to a slightly lower point that was still set at an inhuman level. I'm comfortably in the top 2 of my main simulator bracket (been trading 1st with one other serious competitor), but I will probably come up 20000 points shy of the 8000 ISO reward (let alone the final Patch). PVP evolved to be terrible through a convergent path (rather than divergent); the numbers aren't unreasonable but competition ensures that only a few lucky and dedicated players can break free of the crummy matchmaking to reach for the sky.

You can take any number of abilities out of the game; if the developers want progression rewards to be unreachable in principle, they will be. I would rather have a bunch of options in play style and play the game more than have fewer options and no incentive to play at all.

Rewards were unreachable.
Devs added in shields to make them reachable.
People started using tank teams to leap frog to progression rewards. (You could see shielded opponents)
Devs took away ability to see shielded people. (Progression rewards fell back out of reach)
The attack shield attack shield method was developed. (Consumes large amounts of hp to utilize)
Large amounts of hp are being consumed - hunt for progression reward fix halts. (Why use shields for progressions when they can use it for an hp dump)
New fix to makes progressions reachable not implemented, possibly not even being searched for.



I think they should just knock the points down. Top is still 2400 I believe?
All my bracket leaders keep ending 700-1000. Maybe it's different elsewhere but it would probably take me 800+ 1 point matches to reach 2400 reward and that's assuming that not a single person would hit me during those 800+ matches.

Top is not 2400. Also the problem with shields was never tank teams. Only weaker players required a shielded team to be a tank team to get to the high progression rewards.

Unknown

If you remove heals & stuns (OBW & Spiderman)from this game, nobody could play no more.
Many fights are too hard to be done without stunlock & the regeneration system is too bad to allow players to play without proper heals.

The only thing this game needs is full rebalance and better mechanics, which need both more work than current updates.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

Top is not 2400. Also the problem with shields was never tank teams. Only weaker players required a shielded team to be a tank team to get to the high progression rewards.

Yeah. I think hands were waved at shielded tank teams as though that were a problem, but the only real "problem" with shields was that they broke the zero sum nature of PVP. They were fantastic for a few days, when they were a way for points to actually be added to the total available PVP pool from outside. If they made shielded characters visible again the current progression values might be close to correct.

akboyce

Morphee-moi-mal wrote:

If you remove heals & stuns (OBW & Spiderman)from this game, nobody could play no more.
Many fights are too hard to be done without stunlock & the regeneration system is too bad to allow players to play without proper heals.

The only thing this game needs is full rebalance and better mechanics, which need both more work than current updates.

I think this is true and that this is the main reason Spidey and to less degree OBW need to be nerfed or healing removed. If removing healing will make the devs realize the problems and actually address them it would be an overall plus for the game. Healing hides the overly harsh penalties of taking damage in a fight.

The removal of yellow skill from the free spidey in the prologue shows the devs think this prologue healing strategy is undesirable behavior for us to do. Now we have to see if they make the changes that remove the need and desire for us to engage in that behavior.

Unknown

akboyce wrote:

Morphee-moi-mal wrote:

If you remove heals & stuns (OBW & Spiderman)from this game, nobody could play no more.
Many fights are too hard to be done without stunlock & the regeneration system is too bad to allow players to play without proper heals.

The only thing this game needs is full rebalance and better mechanics, which need both more work than current updates.

I think this is true and that this is the main reason Spidey and to less degree OBW need to be nerfed or healing removed. If removing healing will make the devs realize the problems and actually address them it would be an overall plus for the game. Healing hides the overly harsh penalties of taking damage in a fight.

The removal of yellow skill from the free spidey in the prologue shows the devs think this prologue healing strategy is undesirable behavior for us to do. Now we have to see if they make the changes that remove the need and desire for us to engage in that behavior.

Let's say demiurge identified a group of players that regularly used the mission-based spider-man heal. A good way to see the effects of removing spider-man heal is to change spider-man in the mission and see what those players do. If there is an increase in purchases of health packs or covers (which would be presumed to be an attempt to get spider-man or obw), or if there is a decrease in playtime. I don't know what metrics they use but it's a glimpse of the whole group.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Let's say demiurge identified a group of players that regularly used the mission-based spider-man heal. A good way to see the effects of removing spider-man heal is to change spider-man in the mission and see what those players do. If there is an increase in purchases of health packs or covers (which would be presumed to be an attempt to get spider-man or obw), or if there is a decrease in playtime. I don't know what metrics they use but it's a glimpse of the whole group.

The only thing it would do is make the healing less efficient - I doubt it would increase the purchase of health packs very much. I'd end up picking the 115 Rags solo fight and stunlock-heal anyway. Just not as easy without having Venom to feed you web tiles.

Unknown

If you removed healing the games would look more like Nefarious Foes where people only played a few games before the placement were well settled, and that's not a bad thing as long as it's not the only event around. People who grinded it more still had an advantage, as long as they didn't die.

People need to realize the game already has many mechanism that is designed to minimize the effect of healing. The reason why you have those 230X3 battles is that they're trying to kill your guys so that you can't heal them. If healing is weak, you wouldn't need this much firepower to slow people down and they would be lower level. The healer-less fight in Simulator Basic (Devil Dino) ended up in a quite reasonable level for those with the appropriate roster for that encounter.

Unknown

What if the "healing" powers granted temporary HP instead of healing? Using a healing power would instead add temp HP (up to your character's max health - current health). As long as you have temp HP all damage goes against the temp HP instead of your base HP, and you lose all temp HP at the end of every battle.

Unknown

gamar wrote:

What if the "healing" powers granted temporary HP instead of healing? Using a healing power would instead add temp HP (up to your character's max health - current health). As long as you have temp HP all damage goes against the temp HP instead of your base HP, and you lose all temp HP at the end of every battle.

I had that idea for a while. It'd probably be easier just make it absorb X damage rather than showing like say 15000/8000 health. It'd just be like hitting an invisible target. Nothing happens until you do enough damage past the heal. It'd actually make heals used in fight stronger, since currently if you got a 5K heal all it's unlikely all your characters are missing 5K, but if it's temp HP or damage prevention that's an extra 15K HP to work with. And that's okay, because healing right now is actually pretty pointless relative to the fight themselves. You only use it when the fight has already been decided. I can't think of a case where I need to get a heal off in mid fight to continue going because to get a strong heal off requires a large amount of web tiles which means you should've them stunned.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

gamar wrote:

What if the "healing" powers granted temporary HP instead of healing? Using a healing power would instead add temp HP (up to your character's max health - current health). As long as you have temp HP all damage goes against the temp HP instead of your base HP, and you lose all temp HP at the end of every battle.

I had that idea for a while. It'd probably be easier just make it absorb X damage rather than showing like say 15000/8000 health. It'd just be like hitting an invisible target. Nothing happens until you do enough damage past the heal. It'd actually make heals used in fight stronger, since currently if you got a 5K heal all it's unlikely all your characters are missing 5K, but if it's temp HP or damage prevention that's an extra 15K HP to work with. And that's okay, because healing right now is actually pretty pointless relative to the fight themselves. You only use it when the fight has already been decided. I can't think of a case where I need to get a heal off in mid fight to continue going because to get a strong heal off requires a large amount of web tiles which means you should've them stunned.

Additionally, like I said if there's balance problems there could easily be some cap on how much temp HP you could get (like a character could only gain an amount of temp HP until their current HP + temp HP = their max HP), and healing in the middle of a fight is definitely useful for OBW + potentially nerfed spidey + potential future healers who can't stunlock everyone.

over_clocked

Tell me again why we can't have AoE healing in the game where we have the likes of Thor, Ares, GSBW, mHawkeye, cStorm, IM 40, etc. who all have AoE damage abilities. Granted you don't want to let enemies use those anyway, but imagine the worst happened, a character is dead, 2 are practically dead. Without healing, you're supposed to give up or something?
Just deny any of that? But you need AP stealing for this, which somehow also is the bane of Phantron's existence. I wish he had the exact kind of roster that I have atm and tried placing in any of the events. Yeah top 10 in the Sim, I probably do not deserve that, I dare use oBW and Spidey, the terror, the infamy!

Imo if the devs want more money they could lower prices for everything like 5x-10x and then they would have a bazillion more players and more paying players as well. With new content being added constantly, there's not much fear of players losing interest. Heck, many people still want different builds of one and the same character to try different styles, despite being able to respec. Maybe I'm wrong, but ridiculously high pricing hasn't helped anyone (barring Apple). And even then MPQ isn't the elitist kind of product, it should be as accessible as possible. The random nature of rewarding still makes the gaming process quite continuous.

Unknown

People talk about having to wait to heal to be no fun, Well my idea of no fun is fight the Thor\OBW combo again, and again, and again and again oh look! there is Modern storm with, yep you guessed it, original black widow.

Sorry about the rant, my MMR is a bit wonky right now and I'm really tired of fighting level 85 obw over and over again.

The thing is though it doesn't matter in the slightest. If they lower her effectivness, then people will stop playing her and then then everyone will gravitate towards the next "I win" button. It's human nature and nothing can be do about it.