Iron Man (Model 40) Updates Coming Soon

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ronin-san wrote:

Still not a fan. The caveat AP loss is a tough pill to swallow.

The yellow is a huge improvement, but let's not kid ourselves.

I like the AP loss for him overall, honestly.

Like, Recharge generates a ton of AP in all colors, mainly Red and Blue over the others.

If you use this to charge up other character's abilities, you're using an entire roster slot on on ability. (Which isn't bad! Scarlet Witch is great, even if she's mainly used to power up other Purple users). You also are doubling up on active ability covers, and missing out on that sacred "Rainbow + 3 Passives" that good looking teams have.

But, if you use him to charge his own abilities, the AP drain is the drawback that limits, well, all the other AP he generates. Makes him a bit trickier to use on his own, so he's not just self charging a ton of nukes all at once. (Especially in a way that doesn't clear the board of the tiles that are already there)

I think it all fits well balance-wise. (Also, the "story" of this character, recharge, barrage, recharge, and such)

Der_Lex

That yellow is insane now. Who cares about his other powers not being that great when you can use him to feed tons of AP to your big bruisers?

mjh

He's still pretty bad. You're not very good at this but keep trying. still sucks. still sucks.

When can do 4k AOE for 12 green, his blue is garbage. His yellow's now just useable. I guess 1 out of 3 is better than 0 like

You guys need to realize he is, I think, the only character that drains other AP to fire an ability. This is garbage and needs to stop.

hodayathink

mjh wrote:

You guys need to realize he is, I think, the only character that drains other AP to fire an ability. This is garbage and needs to stop.

2* Cap Marvel black drains a random color.

Both Torch's black drains colors.

IIRC, Mystique's black does as well.

Der_Lex

A 6 AP power that generates 36 AP is 'just useable' now? Sheesh.

squirrel1120

I knew I'd regret all the yellow covers that came along in the last few weeks that went into the iso grinder...

GuntherBlobel

mjh wrote:

He's still pretty bad. You're not very good at this but keep trying. still sucks. still sucks.

When can do 4k AOE for 12 green, his blue is garbage. His yellow's now just useable. I guess 1 out of 3 is better than 0 like

Have you tried the new ? I know you haven't played the new .

is very fun now. Super-fast. I just climbed to 900 in BoP with 5 . I'm not saying he's OP, but when you break down characters to Damage/AP ratios, you miss out on the fun.

looks interesting. I'll reserve judgement until I play him. Frankly, I like that they are keeping with the original powerset themes, instead of reworking them. has always been an expensive battery. Great when working with teams; not so great all alone.

whitecat31

Why do you guys post this the day AFTER, I sell my yellow Iron man covers keeping him at the desired 5/5/2.
Cry

GuntherBlobel

babinro wrote:

Yellow is clearly OP for the cost. That's completely nuts.

You'll have to play it smart though. His other abilities drain . There's also a lot more ways to get rid of CD tiles than when IM first came out, so I think you need to big reward for the risk.

Mawtful

mjh wrote:

He's still pretty bad. You're not very good at this but keep trying. still sucks. still sucks.

When can do 4k AOE for 12 green, his blue is garbage. His yellow's now just useable. I guess 1 out of 3 is better than 0 like

You guys need to realize he is, I think, the only character that drains other AP to fire an ability. This is garbage and needs to stop.

Both 2/3* Human Torch and 2* Ms Marvel have Black abilities which drain friendly AP.

His new Red is fine. It's possibly the strongest single-target nuke in the 3* tier (it's not limited by conditional requirements like Luke Cage Yellow or Cyclops Black).

His Yellow is fine. It's a huge amount of AP gain for babysitting some CDs.

His Blue, on the other hand, is not in a great place. It's a very low tier AoE and it lost its stun. It has gained extra random tile destruction & so it suffers because developers really prize board shake abilities. It would be overcosted if it had no AP drain at all. I think the best fix would be if the ability fired three attacks that each targeted a random enemy - so you could end up hitting each enemy once, or you could end up nuking a single target - would be turn the ability into something unique and could well we worth the drawback.

snlf25

The blue is still inexcusably over priced, the AP drain is still an enormous and unneeded drawback but that yellow is really nice. So you've taken the lowest trash tier garbage and made him a very solid one trick pony that will have good use when boosted. He definitely leap frogged over Punisher and Psylocke in usefulness.

rkd80

He is still a 3*, why the fuss? With so many trashy 4* - shouldn't the focus go there? 3* is nothing more than a transition and there are plenty of other 3* that will help in that transition.

I don't understand the rework of 3* characters at all, there appear to be oodles of other glaring problems with far more reaching impact.

Like....chronic shortages of ISO. RNG at the most elite levels. Monotonous PVEs. So many things that are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than silly IM40. *shrug*

Vhailorx

This is certainly a much needed upgrade. IM40's powerset was completely outdated when I started playing the game more than 18 months ago.

But I think i disagree with what appears to be the fundamental premise of this (and several other designs): over-costed damaging powers that "compensate" for powerful ap acceleration powers.

So as has been pointed out, yellow is awesome but is offset by the fact that both the red and blue are decidedly weak for their costs, even compared to other 3* options. Blue is especially bad as it costs 4 ap more, does less damage, and drains other ap pools all for the miserly prize of 6 basic tiles destroyed (demiurge really needs to reduce their internal valuation of boardshake). this design philosophy also seems to appear in other characters (e.g. Scarlet Witch whose purple is quite expensive for what it does, but is fueled by her blue making it effectively cheaper).

the problem with this design philosophy is that the game isn't 1v1 (except for 4*ddq). So people just leverage the ap acceleration and bring a second character to actually use the ap. The yellow is probably a bit too powerful, but since most people will never use the red or blue it doesn't matter. Players get all the benefit of the OP power and none of the downside of the other two. IM40 is now on SWitch tier when it comes to ap acceleration. with +3 yellow boosts, he can produce 12x blue and 12x red (plus more) on round 3, so he will be for red/blue users what SWitch is for purple users.

I suppose one could argue that making him that sort of strong support character is a good thing, in that he will have a roll, but won't be overpowered. Personally, I would prefer to see more balanced character designs, rather than more min-max.

On a side note: AP generation/destruction is pretty obviously the most powerful ability type in the game (True Heal regeneration Patch/OML style is arguably better, but is sort of a special case since it's only on those two characters). Almost all of the most prized characters at each tier offer some type of ap generation (IMHB, Rulk, 4*Cyclops, Iceman, 3* Cyc, Iron Fist, Kamala Khan, 3* Thor, Switch, now maybe IM40). I can't decide if this is an inevitably result of the game design, or a pitfall into which demiurge has fallen. But it is increasingly clear that new top tier characters can be identified pre-release with this litmus test. It will be interesting to see what happens to the 5* meta when they release one that has some sort of ap trick (that seems like the only thing that could possibly displace OML from his throne).

stochasticism

Well, yes ap generation is something the top characters all share for one reason, speed. Speed is the most important thing at the top levels of the game.

- Want to not get hit on your shield hop. Be fast.
- Want to not need to use as many health packs. Be fast.
- Want to be at the top of pve. Do your clears fast so you gain 10s of points each clear which translates to the 100s of points of separation you see at the end of pve events.

So yes, ap generation is prized and almost all the top characters have it and speed is the reason.

Dauthi

This is similar to the buff that She-Hulk got. Nobody realizes how good/annoying it will be until they watch it destroy them. His yellow is going to be OP, which is fine since his other abilities are good and OK (like She-Hulk). This will definitely put him in the high tier with the better characters.

Monged4life

Dauthi wrote:

This is similar to the buff that She-Hulk got. Nobody realizes how good/annoying it will be until they watch it destroy them. His yellow is going to be OP, which is fine since his other abilities are good and OK (like She-Hulk). This will definitely put him in the high tier with the better characters.

Him being sent high tier isn't a bad thing... 3* land is currently ruled by Kamala/Ironfist/Cage/Cyclops. I'd welcome another face there.

_Ryu_

Many THX for this renewed IM, he is the only one I never ever used accept he is essential. Now he is a red/blue generating machine, the only question is 5/3/5 or 3/5/5?

He makes a real good team up with Cap but then he is only there for generating AP, I would prefer to use at least one of his attacks, red or blue, dont know...

Maybe a , or , or

IM with red or blue/yellow, IF or KK with green/pink... no, I mean purple, BP with black/blue or Cyc with black/red

So IM 3/5/5 +KK 3/5/5 +Cyc 5/3/5 or IM 5/3/5 +IF 5/5/3 +BP 3/5/5

Both combos offers strong attacks, AoE and support.

CNash

rkd80 wrote:

He is still a 3*, why the fuss? With so many trashy 4* - shouldn't the focus go there? 3* is nothing more than a transition and there are plenty of other 3* that will help in that transition.

The 4* transition can be painfully slow. At my current rate of play I'll have most of the 3* roster maxed before I get anywhere near having a usable 4* team. Increasing the utility of old characters that have been left behind by the metagame is always worthwhile, regardless of tier.

IM40 was always a support character disguised as a tank anyway. His yellow now seems slightly OP, but then his other two abilities are still last-resorts for when you don't have a better red or blue user on the team, so it balances out a little.

Krongle

Really pleased that I didn't sell off the I've gotten recently. Having a IM40 at 2/4/5 suddenly isn't a useless roster slot!

smoq84

colwag wrote:

I'm honestly half afraid to talk about how hype that yellow is out of fear it'll get nerfed.

Like, lets run a team of 3*

Your first two moves, you get 6 yellow. Not unreasonable. Make sure there's no easy yellow matches. Clear them up if there are.

Fire Recharge. (And get a heal for it), and keep those CDs safe for two turns.

All three go off.

You now have 12 , 12 , 9 , and 3 (6 Yellow into 36 AP!!!)

On turn 5, The Cap Train is rolling.

Shields are tossed, players with annoying passives are stunned, and you only need 1 AP in 3 turns to throw the shield again. And you also got two heals for it.

You're also only 1 Green match-3 away from Kamala tossing down some pretty big AOE damage on top of it.

You're tossing shields left and right now, and you got Kamala healing you for each one. This is a team that can start at half health and keep going no problem, so long as you can get Two. Yellow. Matches.

This loadout is just beastly.

I can also think to use instead of - additional stealing APs, and black skill can spead up all countdowns.