What we learned from the Lone Star Skirmish

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Kappei wrote:

The Ladder wrote:

The IM35/MW/MS lineups I faced were absolute cannon fodder. I didn't encounter too many people with decent scores using that combo. Read into that, what you will.

Ahem, 657 points

I may have been lucky (and I surely have, since this lineup is awful in defense), but I managed to get that way up with a clever combination of health pack use and a good intuition of when I could start a battle with half damaged team. As I've written elsewhere, also overusing the Forest with Storm helped to minimize the damage, and after my only loss in attack against IM35/Storm/Jugg I quickly learned to avoid the fight against heavily tanky teams: too slow and too risky.

Ahem here as well... 745 points.

The point here is that a successful defense was all but impossible short of a miracle cascade when the AI was defending. Thus, climbing past 500 was a matter of speed and winning points faster that you were losing them.

Juggs is good on defense, but awful on offense specifically because of the mandatory self-inflicted damage. Yes, you can win battles easily; but you also incur significant downtime as well that is costly late in the tourney. Further, tile damage attrition piles up over time. Stunned targets negates all tile match damage.

Avoidance = 100% damage mitigation. A Juggs/Venom means absolutely nothing when under a 6-turn stunlock (I get one more move once the 5-turn stun breaks before the AI acts).

Yes, the IM/Storm/Widow team is extremely squishy. Boost red + x-men to guarantee Storm dies very quickly, stunlock IM, and Widow is helpless alone. Even if she somehow pulls off Recon, you have time to recover before IM breaks his stun. Your own IM's defense tiles will all but completely negate any sub-level 50 tile match damage, and at two casts negates all match damage. Defy the other side needed reds once storm is down and victory is guaranteed with minimal accumulated damage.

My best example here was when under my usual practice of spending the last 45 mins or so of a tourney trying get top 75 placement for my girlfriend for max 2** covers, that I completely smoked most of a very hard bracket with a 50 Storm + 40 Widow + 20 IM35. Pulled off 326 points in that timeframe to squeak out 15th place in her bracket.

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Hawkeye is good... at PVE.

I only have 2 probs with him in PVP:
1. Low health makes him a liability.
2. 7 AP cost red skill makes AI choose it over Headbutt/Elements.

Fix those two things and I would use him in Lone Ranger without hesitation. Although, a 3rd ability wouldn't hurt.

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Nick-Fury wrote:

I thought it was the wrong decision to have Psylocke as the reward for this, usually the 1* tournaments are a great tournament for those with starter rosters to get some great rewards and compete, so make the top prize something a new starter would like, say 10 heroic tokens. Instead they make the reward the just released 3* character, that everyone wants for the new tournament, and so everyone jumps in for that magical top 5 ranking.

Sure. For me that would have meant to go the same 500 target then leave (my normal team is fair for tanking team , so others can grab the prices and I get better MMR. With psylocke prizes I was urged to shield up instead.

10 heroic sounds like a perfect prize -- for starters it's golden and for veterans it's just 1250 iso not worth the trouble.

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Teke184 wrote:

My thoughts are "We really need some one-stars which people use besides IM35, modern Widow, and modern Storm".

I saw so many different people playing that lineup it wasn't funny.

That being the best team by FAR no wonder. At least next time the jungle should be replaced by something neutral.

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Join tournament with 5 minutes left > acquire Psylocke cover.

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I've really wanted Venom and Juggernaut to get 3rd powers for a long time; after last night I'm not too sure. With third abilities and 10 more levels they might just absolutely dominate the 1* competition.

At the very least, though, these tournaments would be more interesting if the worst 1* characters (Belova and Hawkeye) had 3rd abilities to round them out. Give Yelena Belova a good blue ability and she would go from the worst Dark Avenger to an enticing bit of color variety in an otherwise saturated sea of black and purple.

Ronfar

I played a Storn/Widow/Juggernaut team to a first place finish, thanks to grinding, using up my stockpiled boosts, and getting lucky. (I won a match on defense while shielded that took me from second to first.) I used Juggs because I sold off my IM35 to get more roster space. My Juggernaut was only level 16 when the tournament started and he took a while to bring up to speed.

Some thoughts:

1) Storm uses the same colors at Juggernaut and has a higher level cap, so she ends up tanking for him. This is not ideal. If I had IM35 I could have protected her better and had a red damage ability I wasn't reluctant to use.
2) My Storm was 4/5/4 by accident. I don't regret putting 4 points into Hailstorm, though, as it's probably the best damage dealing ability among 1-star characters, but it's so anti-synergistic with her green ability. (It's cheaper than both Repulsor Blast and Devour, and it doesn't do self-damage like Headbutt does.)
3) Widow's Sting is still stupidly powerful and can keep a character stunned practically forever. Sometimes I could even keep two characters stunned for most of a match.
4) One star characters recover from being downed in a very short time. I never actually needed to use health packs, because I could just play the PvE event while waiting for them to recover and then heal them with Spider-Man. (I can't use OBW on Modern Widow.)
5) I felt like the individual matches were harder than usual to get through without getting seriously hurt; I boosted in almost every match, and I still ended up with several straight-up losses as well as skin-of-my-teeth victories with two (or even three!) downed characters. I can take Thor/Wolverine/OBW against an AI team of the same characters and come out of it practically unscathed every time. I couldn't do that here. Between Thor's and Wolverine's fast offense and OBW's cheap AP stealing, I could make sure that the AI never gets to use its most useful powers before it dies, and OBW's heal saves me when something does manage to hurt me. A one-star team can do none of these things; aside from Widow's Sting, there's nothing that can really stop the AI from giving as good as it gets. (Fortunately, recovering was easier - see #4.)
6) In line with 5, I won more matches on defense than I usually do - the usual amount being almost none. Here my AI team won like 1 in 5. I usually get smacked down pretty quickly in PvP events once my point total hits 500 or so if I don't shield; people seemed a lot more reluctant to attack me here.

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Milkrain wrote:

Phaserhawk wrote:

1. 1 star characters are still fun
2. Hawkeye and Yelena are terrible
3. We need more 1 stars if we are going to have another tournament like this

I'd also like to add that this tournament felt very fair as everyone should by now have any if not all 1* that they would like. This tournament should have been an excellent opportunity for newer players to compete for the higher tier rewards. The tournament finished in the middle of the night for me so I shielded 4 hours from the end when I was in 9th place and when I woke I had finished in top 45 which was a disappointment as I had been hoping for 2 Psylocke covers.

I don't know why Yelena and Hawkeye are terrible? I don't use them. Yelena's abilities do cost a lot of AP in my mind.

I don't think we need more 1* characters. Roster spaces are too valuable and costly to be wasted on 1* heroes. I've only kept three 1* because I feel they have some use in certain matchups or if other heroes are regenerating.

Yelena is just outright terrible compared to other options. I had a ton of her covers sitting in my roster waiting to be used or sold as I debated her, but her abilities are just so weak and her damage isn't much better. Hawkeye is terrible PvP. His Take Aim can do some work, granted, but he's better dealing with countdown blocks and shield blocks rather than PvP damage. I love using him in the Prologue missions and any time the pre-PvP missions have random gangster baddies. That's where he shines. I suppose he could be a foil to Invisible Woman's massively powerful shield, but that would either mean getting lucky and having her drop it near a same colour, or wasting red to take it down.

The thing is, Juggernaut is better for tile destruction and deals out some harsh pain. Iron Man can be brutal. Black Widow is just stellar as a support. Modern Storm can feed your team like no one's business. Venom can lead to massive hijinks. The others... well...

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1) I learned that the game isn't fun if everybody has max level characters. You can't whoop anybody's ****. I had more downtime than usual cuz I was taking as much damage as I dealt.

2) IM35, Jug, Storm combo = win. The only other maxed 1* I have is Black Widow. She takes too damn long to be useful.

Unknown

A 3/5/5 IM35 really shines on a IM35/Jugg/M Storm team. I was always using my reds for Mistress in the jungle and headbutts, usually the other team involved rapidly taking down 2 of Widow/Storm/Venom and hitting 19 blue at roughly the same time, with the 3 turn stun effectively giving a free kill on the remaining IM35/Juggs. It's made me reconsider respeccing my IM35 since it's likely the only time I'll use him is in 1* tournaments.

Offense with Juggs was no problem because he hides behind IM and Storm... the only damage he takes is from using jungle powers (stick him in the middle) and the occasional headbutt. Combined with his high HP, he required less healing than my other characters throughout the tournament.