5* Character Archetypes and the Mystery Feature

Mawtful

Around the time that Silver Surfer was released, there was a bit of talk around his health pool and match damage, particularly in comparison to the 4* tier. Someone - probably IceIX - talked a very tiny bit about 5* characters being assigned various archetypes on top of everything else. Something that the designers had been thinking and tinkering with for a while, but that hadn't been introduced at any other tier.

At all other tiers, characters have 3 strong colours and 3 weak, and all characters in a tier deal the same damage value for their strongest colour - Hulkbuster deals 82 damage for each red tile he destroys and 11 for each Green, but it's the reverse for XF Wolverine so, while both are on the same team and active, Hulkbuster will always take the red match-3 and Wolverine will take the green. In the 5* tier, it's a bit different.

Silver Surfer's strongest colours are 586 (blue)/521 (red)/456 (black) with a health pool of 47478, he was described as having a "standard" archetype.
Wolverine's strongest colours are 624 (black)/554 (yellow)/485(red) with a health pool of 42480.
Jean Grey's strongest colours are 550 (green)/489 (purple)/428 (red) with a health pool of 42480.

Now we don't know how many archetypes were designed, or even considered, however I'm happy to make some assumptions about what we actually have. Jean is the easiest to label, she's a "support" archetype - lower health and match damage than Surfer's "standard". Edit: Wolverine is an "assault" archetype - thanks morph3us! (I think this also confirms that archetypes only affect colour strengths; health pool is scaled independently. This actually helps create a point of difference between "Glass Cannons" and "Brawlers".)

The one archetype that's obviously missing is a "defender" archetype. I'd argue that defenders are actually a type of support role, however the mechanics of MPQ which dictate who gets to sit in on defence each turn mean that tile strength is what counts even though it's an offensive stat. It could simply end up that "defenders" have almost equal strengths for all colours - higher than the average for weak colours but lower than the average for strong colours. Ultimately, I think the metagame means it doesn't matter - attackers are going to be matching their strong colours in order to fire their abilities. Unless "defenders" have some means of always being in front baked into their archetype then I suspect match behaviour will remain the same. The other solution is to give defenders higher health and higher match damage than everyone else, but I really hope I don't have to point out why that's a bad idea.

So, with all that in mind, what if this "new feature" allows us to change the combat archetype of our other characters? I think a big example to consider would be PX, SW and GSBW. Currently, it's preferable to leave PX underlevelled so that Master Plan doesn't generate blue. What if you were able to take him to max level and then set him to support archetype and set SW to an assault? That could allow you to still play that team but encourage more people to spend ISO levelling PX. Alternatively, you may want to switch PX into an assault archetype so that he covers more colours in order to get more mileage out of Blind Spot's passive when you run him with Dino and Starlord. And the more I think about it, the more I think that combat archetype is probably only going to determine match damage rather than also covering health pool - otherwise a defender Hood or Loki is going to be a lot of trouble.

Thoughts?

Mod Edit: Removed "spoiler" wording

RoryQ

Sounds good, haven't really got using my 5* so never noticed the difference in match damage. How would a defender work with just two high match damage and four above average? You'd be guaranteed at least two colours tanked with the likelihood of four possibly five.

morph3us

OML was referred to by the devs as being "assault" tier.

IceIX comments briefly on this in OML's stats write up in his character thread:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=33359

morph3us

Mawtful wrote:

So, with all that in mind, what if this "new feature" allows us to change the combat archetype of our other characters?

Interesting thought. I guess it depends on how much complexity the devs want to add to what is, on the surface, a simple match 3 game (although given how some of the nodes are set up, like the red goon feeders to Carnage, I suspect it's not their intention for it to stay simple for more than the early tiers of play).

I'm going to say that it's not going to do that, for the simple reason that it does introduce too much complexity into play. The majority of the playerbase (that's not on the forums) probably doesn't really understand match damage much beyond, "I match these gems and it does damage". My guess is that they will eventually apply the three or four character archetype match damage tiers to 3-4* characters when they need to rebalance 4* match damage to more appropriately scale relative to the 5*s, but it's going remain relatively transparent to most of the players.

OneLastGambit

Definitely brings the puzzle element back into the game which has been obliterated by the "my toy is stronger than your toy" approach that currently infects the game

acescracked

Mawtful wrote:

...
Thoughts?

Very interesting and I haven't given archetypes alot of thought. I just think really there is no point in discussing it since the following...

Mawtful wrote:

The game will fail. It's destined to fail.

Punisher5784

Sounds like Final Fantasy XIII.. I hate that game