*** The Hood (Classic) ***

orionpeace

RefinedBean wrote:

Hey man, you care about what you want to care about. I was just trying to poke some fun over the fact that we have a 15-page discussion on something pretty innocuous. The only reason so many people are commenting on Hood's nerf is because so many of us here use him because we know his Blue is a bit OP and helps with stuff like sentry-bombing.

I didn't mean to harsh the mellow. It just gives me a giggle when a minor nerf to a character like Hood garners 15 pages of discussion, but something like "We haven't seen new PVE content in over half a year" gets a few pages of mainly one word answers.

Players have been complaining about the lack of PvE content for months and months. If you add it all up, it would be way more than the 15 pages here.

The problem is, those same players have pretty much exhausted all they have to say on the subject with the occasional exception.

We want it. The game needs it. D3 keeps giving us hints that it is on that vague horizon known as "soon".

In the meantime, Hood's Yellow at level 5 should not end the turn if it is doing damage rather than generating AP.

Unknown

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

Gauntlet was September, and Deadpool is more recently than 6 months.

Speaking personally, character design is way more interesting anyway. Another PvE like Deadpool, with the same basic mechanic and different words is nice for about 30 seconds. Then it's just same ol' same ol. (although at least Deadpool's wasn't "lets fight Venom and Ares and OMG STOP IT WITH THESE VILLIANS")

Gauntlet isn't "new," really. It's a fun little idea but it's otherwise just...well, the Gauntlet. There's no story, although I'll grant it DOES give a sense of accomplishment, thankfully. That's more than can be said for most everything else in PVE and a lot of PVP as well.

Pardon me - looks like Deadpool was more like 5 months ago? Maybe less. That was a fun one. I guess since it got repeated so soon due to the anniversary, it lost its luster.

Looks like we're of different opinions on what we find most interesting. Personally, I don't really care about character design - I find discussions like these pretty amusing, but there's only so much something like "This ends the turn now, it didn't before" can hold my interest.

I'd much rather focus on the PVE side of things, and why we haven't seen new content in so long. Why is there a push to churn out as many new 3* characters as possible and not give us anything new to do with them? It just seems...silly.

I've said this in previous threads - there's only so many mechanics that can be added to a Match 3 game. They're teasing us with charged tiles, sure. Those could be significant, given time. But eventually everything, every new character they release, is going to be very same-y. Remember the big bluster about Blade when he was released? Now, no one cares. Same with Mystique. They're vanilla. Countdown timers, stuns, etc. - it's all been done before.

We shouldn't focus on Hood's yellow. We should focus on the fact that the game is perilously riding the edge of boredom. Am I the only one whose interest has been flagging because I've busted my hump for new characters that, in the end, haven't done anything to change the game in an appreciable way? I doubt it.

NorthernPolarity

RefinedBean wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Sorry if we actually care about the design of the character's abilities and speak up when things don't make sense. Hell, we aren't even saying that this is a huge nerf or that the Hood is now underpowered, we're just saying that the overnerf doesn't make sense from a design standpoint. It's not like you're dealing with people that think that the C. Mags / Spidey nerf were completely unjustified and that the game was fine with a character that could stunlock the enemy team off of 10 blue AP, or that Sentry is overnerfed and is now below bottom tier.

Hey man, you care about what you want to care about. I was just trying to poke some fun over the fact that we have a 15-page discussion on something pretty innocuous. The only reason so many people are commenting on Hood's nerf is because so many of us here use him because we know his Blue is a bit OP and helps with stuff like sentry-bombing.

I didn't mean to harsh the mellow. It just gives me a giggle when a minor nerf to a character like Hood garners 15 pages of discussion, but something like "We haven't seen new PVE content in over half a year" gets a few pages of mainly one word answers.

The thing about complaining about PvE is that we can't really sway them in any meaningful way. They know players want more PvE, its a matter of resource limitations and prioritizations. This Hood change on the other hand, is extremely trivial for them to implement, and if they get enough constructive feedback, it seems like a good bet that they'll consider changing it. It's a matter of picking your battles to fight, and I think if we can get them to listen to us for this small change, it would be a cool win for everyone involved.

Trisul

I spent some of my excess alliance-slot-refund HP boosting Hood blue to 5, and man, it feels like a whole new ballgame. It's astounding how much easier the game is now that the AI uses far fewer abilities in any given match.

mouser

I think some folks are overestimating the ability of TP to create cascades. I've looked for opportunities countless times and it's rare to find something more then 2 match 3's you can create--sometimes you can only find a single match 3 as well. Even then they're likely to be in colors you aren't focusing on.

I really don't see any justification for making the ability end the turn if it's no longer going to gain AP from destroyed tiles.

Unknown

orionpeace wrote:

Players have been complaining about the lack of PvE content for months and months. If you add it all up, it would be way more than the 15 pages here.

The problem is, those same players have pretty much exhausted all they have to say on the subject with the occasional exception.

We want it. The game needs it. D3 keeps giving us hints that it is on that vague horizon known as "soon".

In the meantime, Hood's Yellow at level 5 should not end the turn if it is doing damage rather than generating AP.

You're right. I guess I'm tilting at windmills, and not really adding to the discussion here.

Apologies all around, and I mean that sincerely. I know that character design is important to a lot of forum-goers here, and didn't mean to belittle the concept of discussing the nerfs going on. We all find enjoyment in the game in different ways.

Unknown

KevinMark wrote:

I've been trying to use TP a lot recently and I don't recall seeing cascades. Only on Muscle+Hood PvE node and that's because Hood was able to use it more than 3 times in a game thanks to yellow generators.

Being objective, you're probably aiming to maximize AP generation on the colors you need though, not setting up cascades.

Unknown

If you're worried about the ends the turn restriction on Twin Pistols just shoot the 3X3 on upper right and upper left corner. There's almost no chance such a tile configuration would cascade into anything meaningful for you or your opponent. This is assuming there are no special tiles worth destroying and if there are you just got to take your chances if the tile is that important.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

It's a matter of picking your battles to fight, and I think if we can get them to listen to us for this small change, it would be a cool win for everyone involved.

They'd have to weigh all that against a few things: what they know about what's coming down the pipeline that we don't, first and foremost.

There's also the fact that forumgoers (and especially the ones in this discussion) happen to probably have a highly-leveled hood, because we knew how OP he was. The vast majority of the MPQ playerbase probably a) doesn't have a Hood, or not a good one, and b) doesn't care, really, about ANY of these nerfs or buffs.*

*I can't back this up with fact, obviously - just a gut feeling.

Maybe the designers will change it? I doubt it, though. It's odd how it's such a small thing that it almost feels crucial, somehow. I don't see it being reversed. Maybe the damage will be upped. But no one is using Hood for damage, anyway, so whatever.

Demiurge_Will

NorthernPolarity wrote:

1. Twin Pistols was never the problem with Hood, it was Dormammu's Aid. How does nerfing Twin Pistols do anything to the Hood's main strength and reason why you bring him on teams in the first place?

We hope it doesn't do much to that. We didn't make these changes to change who The Hood is and what he feels like, or to fundamentally change the reasons why you might want him on your team. We didn't even set out to make a major change to where The Hood sits in players' character rankings. We wanted to get ahead of an overpowered interaction with 4* Thor and, generally, make Twin Pistols safer.

The AP generation ability of Twin Pistols was significantly overpowered before, even before Charged tiles. Because of its higher cost, that didn't matter to top-tier players, given how few turns their games take. Keep in mind that not everyone we're balancing the game for is playing the same way you are - even if you weren't using the ability before because of its expense, others, playing longer matches, were. I've thought a change like this was appropriate for a while, but it hasn't risen to the top of the pile before because it doesn't affect top players much until they & their opponents start using 4* Thor - giving mid-level players overpowered abilities isn't as serious as something that affects highly competitive play.

(We found the combo with 4* Thor in playtesting, so you don't need to feel bad about talking about it on the forums.)

NorthernPolarity wrote:

In return for this increased damage capability, The Hood also had to lose the Level 5 reward of not ending his turn on usage.

This doesn't make any sense. Level 5 Pistols does what, 5.7k damage? This for 15 AP = 380 AP / dmg, which while is respectable given that it can cause cascades and destroy CD tiles, hardly justifies ending the turn to use the ability. Whales by comparison does 857 AP / dmg, and I don't see that ability ending the turn. Hell, even fireball does more damage / AP, and I don't see that ability ending the turn either. Ending the turn makes sense when the ability is insanely strong or leads to AP generation loops: the new pistols does neither, so I feel like this nerf is very poorly reasoned and explained: some more dev insight as to why they chose to tack on this clause would be much appreciated.

You could balance Twin Pistols' level 5 by ending the turn and doing as much damage as it's going to do under the redesign, or by not ending the turn at level 5 and having it do less damage. We playtested both versions, and making TP continue to end the turn at level 5 was easier to understand, the added damage led to more exciting moments, and the turn ending kept it feeling different from other abilities. It comes down to people who played the version of the ability we went with having more fun.

Twin Pistols does a couple things Whales can't: it's single-target instead of affecting the whole enemy team, and it destroys tiles of your choice. Not saying you should necessarily value Twin Pistols as highly as Whales - just saying the damage-per-AP comparison doesn't tell the whole story.

Hope that's helpful insight into the way we're thinking about things!

Unknown

jralbino wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

I've been trying to use TP a lot recently and I don't recall seeing cascades. Only on Muscle+Hood PvE node and that's because Hood was able to use it more than 3 times in a game thanks to yellow generators.

Being objective, you're probably aiming to maximize AP generation on the colors you need though, not setting up cascades.

That's also correct. Either that or destroying immediately dangerous enemy special tiles. This will still be correct after the nerf, so there is no reason to defend "ending the turn" with the notion that it causes cascades. Not to mention leaving Hood in the front when ending the turn with a freshly shook up board.

mags1587

Thanks for the insight, Demiurge_Will. But I have to admit, I'm still confused by the reasoning behind ending the turn consistently. I think perhaps my biggest issue is the fact that using the power will leave Hood in front and given Hood's health, the damage Twin Pistols will now do still isn't worth that risk.

Thinking about tough PvE battles -- there are times when I'd want to pull out an ability like Twin Pistols, downing one guy and destroying some problem tiles. But not if it means that Hood will take the next hit, which in those tough PvE battles, can often mean that Hood is downed in the next turn. I would happily take less damage dealt in return for not exposing my Hood to that risk.

It feels like that aspect of the power's change may not have been fully thought through.

Katai

I find it weird that you took an ability that was almost never used, and turned it into an ability that is absolutely never used.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

We playtested both versions, and making TP continue to end the turn at level 5 was easier to understand, the added damage led to more exciting moments, and the turn ending kept it feeling different from other abilities. It comes down to people who played the version of the ability we went with having more fun.

I don't quite get what is meant by the bold part. Getting the 5th cover of any 3* character ability you like is a great milestone. It's an achievement. I think it would be pretty shortsighted to think that people don't read what the 5th cover does before they are upgrading/respeccing. I'm sorry but I also don't buy the rest of the explanation.

Phaserhawk

My future Hood possible respec really depends on how bad World Rupture will be. On a Favorable board you can still bomb the team to death by 5th turn with boosts and Hood. However without a favorable board, is having only 4-5 World Rupture tiles left because of the AI worth those times you can get Intimidation to go off? Instead of Intimidation turning those World Rupture tiles into CD 1's, you need it to be CD2's and with the added cost to World Rupture you will more than likely have enough time to gather the black AP for Intimidation. On paper Sentry can still destroy a team by himself, the damage nerf to Sacrfice strike tile is not as bad as it appears since World Rupture got a damage buff. I'm guessing with play testing that at 12 AP it was still too fast for their liking thus the extra turn on the CD tile. Will Sentry still be the fastest way to single handedly take out an entire team? Absolutely yes, however, the gap now between X-Force and new Sentry is more of a blur especially if there is a rise in X-Force usage and you decided to rush Surgical Stirke knowing you will get Green AP due to X-Force, obliterate one guy, use X-Force on X-Force and perhaps finish off anyone else with Hood.

It still is going to be Sentry 3/5/5 Hood and 5/5/3 everyone else

I hope Phantron does a calculation on how many of the 16 World Rupture tiles survive 3 turns, if it's say 5-6, well 3/5/5 Hood is just out the window since it's not worth losing all that damage on TP for a couple more tiles to go off.

orionpeace

Demiurge_Will wrote:

Hope that's helpful insight into the way we're thinking about things!

I was going to write an analysis of my interpretation of your statements and how the reasoning doesn't make sense and doesn't seem to achieve balance, but I decided it was a waste of time.

Your post is a clear indication that some people in your office decided that "big damage" on Hood's Yellow and ending the turn with him in the fronts ranks to take a return hit was "more fun".

Who can argue with that high level of play testing and decision making process.

PS: I assume these are the same play testers who thought Beasts Blue was a ton a fun. Cause who doesn't enjoy using 8 Blue AP to create a match 3 and a strike tile. Woohoo!

NorthernPolarity

Demiurge_Will wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

1. Twin Pistols was never the problem with Hood, it was Dormammu's Aid. How does nerfing Twin Pistols do anything to the Hood's main strength and reason why you bring him on teams in the first place?

We hope it doesn't do much to that. We didn't make these changes to change who The Hood is and what he feels like, or to fundamentally change the reasons why you might want him on your team. We didn't even set out to make a major change to where The Hood sits in players' character rankings. We wanted to get ahead of an overpowered interaction with 4* Thor and, generally, make Twin Pistols safer.

The AP generation ability of Twin Pistols was significantly overpowered before, even before Charged tiles. Because of its higher cost, that didn't matter to top-tier players, given how few turns their games take. Keep in mind that not everyone we're balancing the game for is playing the same way you are - even if you weren't using the ability before because of its expense, others, playing longer matches, were. I've thought a change like this was appropriate for a while, but it hasn't risen to the top of the pile before because it doesn't affect top players much until they & their opponents start using 4* Thor - giving mid-level players overpowered abilities isn't as serious as something that affects highly competitive play.

(We found the combo with 4* Thor in playtesting, so you don't need to feel bad about talking about it on the forums.)

NorthernPolarity wrote:

In return for this increased damage capability, The Hood also had to lose the Level 5 reward of not ending his turn on usage.

This doesn't make any sense. Level 5 Pistols does what, 5.7k damage? This for 15 AP = 380 AP / dmg, which while is respectable given that it can cause cascades and destroy CD tiles, hardly justifies ending the turn to use the ability. Whales by comparison does 857 AP / dmg, and I don't see that ability ending the turn. Hell, even fireball does more damage / AP, and I don't see that ability ending the turn either. Ending the turn makes sense when the ability is insanely strong or leads to AP generation loops: the new pistols does neither, so I feel like this nerf is very poorly reasoned and explained: some more dev insight as to why they chose to tack on this clause would be much appreciated.

You could balance Twin Pistols' level 5 by ending the turn and doing as much damage as it's going to do under the redesign, or by not ending the turn at level 5 and having it do less damage. We playtested both versions, and making TP continue to end the turn at level 5 was easier to understand, the added damage led to more exciting moments, and the turn ending kept it feeling different from other abilities. It comes down to people who played the version of the ability we went with having more fun.

Twin Pistols does a couple things Whales can't: it's single-target instead of affecting the whole enemy team, and it destroys tiles of your choice. Not saying you should necessarily value Twin Pistols as highly as Whales - just saying the damage-per-AP comparison doesn't tell the whole story.

Hope that's helpful insight into the way we're thinking about things!

Thanks for the feedback, it would be great if you could add this level of justification to the original post so we don't spend 15 pages arguing about it . I'm not sure if I agree entirely with your reasoning, but I'll reserve judgement until I actually play with the ability. It would also be nice to have some sort of postmortem regarding other character abilities that make zero sense to us, such as Beast blue and whether its current incarnation was actually intended to be that way by you guys.

Unknown

I don't understand why devs would think Twin Pistol's AP generation ability was overpowered when it costs 15 yellow AP on a color that has several moves that can kill a guy for 4 matches if not game ending. Saying Twin Pistols was ovepowered shows a lack of touch with reality. People didn't run The Hood or feared The Hood because of his ability to whip out a Twin Pistols from nowhere. The hypothetical TP combo is really nothing compared to just Surgical Strike into Power Surge since a Thor/X Force team would have the following result from Power Surge followed by a Surgical Strike:

Green - almost certainly game over
Red - game over (Smite 3 times or so)
Blue - game over (Power Surge 3 times)
Yellow - probably game over (get 2 Striking Distance, maybe not quite enough to put the game away)
Black - probably game over (Surgical Strike to kill the character with black as strongest, and none of them have more than 6800 HP).
Purple - nothing interesting

Now this team won't be seen often not because Thor is going to be new but that the only time you can field this team in PvP is either freeform or The Hood is featured, because you're still not going to run a team without The Hood as long as Dormammu's Aid is the way it is. But this is a ridiculous kind of balance. Let's just say IW + X Force + Thor auto wins every fight when all 3 characters are present due to some hidden synergy. Well, that's technically balanced because this team can never show up in any event that features a 3*! I feel way too much of the game's imbalance is swept under the rug because first, a lot of people still don't get that The Hood is good, and second, even if you get it, there's limit to what you can do with team composition when one out of your 3 character is almost certainly guaranteed to not be The Hood so certain combos are not playable (e.g. Nick Fury + The Hood because you can easily end up with no green) in the current PvP and apparently they consider that balanced.

Dayv

Phantron wrote:

If you're worried about the ends the turn restriction on Twin Pistols just shoot the 3X3 on upper right and upper left corner. There's almost no chance such a tile configuration would cascade into anything meaningful for you or your opponent. This is assuming there are no special tiles worth destroying and if there are you just got to take your chances if the tile is that important.

That's what I plan to do, but it only mitigates some of the problems involved. You still leave your weakest character out front for a face-kicking.

GrumpySmurf1002

Demiurge_Will wrote:

We hope it doesn't do much to that. We didn't make these changes to change who The Hood is and what he feels like, or to fundamentally change the reasons why you might want him on your team. We didn't even set out to make a major change to where The Hood sits in players' character rankings. We wanted to get ahead of an overpowered interaction with 4* Thor and, generally, make Twin Pistols safer.

The AP generation ability of Twin Pistols was significantly overpowered before, even before Charged tiles. Because of its higher cost, that didn't matter to top-tier players, given how few turns their games take. Keep in mind that not everyone we're balancing the game for is playing the same way you are - even if you weren't using the ability before because of its expense, others, playing longer matches, were. I've thought a change like this was appropriate for a while, but it hasn't risen to the top of the pile before because it doesn't affect top players much until they & their opponents start using 4* Thor - giving mid-level players overpowered abilities isn't as serious as something that affects highly competitive play.

(We found the combo with 4* Thor in playtesting, so you don't need to feel bad about talking about it on the forums.)

You could balance Twin Pistols' level 5 by ending the turn and doing as much damage as it's going to do under the redesign, or by not ending the turn at level 5 and having it do less damage. We playtested both versions, and making TP continue to end the turn at level 5 was easier to understand, the added damage led to more exciting moments, and the turn ending kept it feeling different from other abilities. It comes down to people who played the version of the ability we went with having more fun.

Twin Pistols does a couple things Whales can't: it's single-target instead of affecting the whole enemy team, and it destroys tiles of your choice. Not saying you should necessarily value Twin Pistols as highly as Whales - just saying the damage-per-AP comparison doesn't tell the whole story.

Hope that's helpful insight into the way we're thinking about things!

Thank you for this. My question is simply: If this is the kind of explanation that can be given with these changes, why is the original post simply:

We're balancing this ability so that it retains its high cost, high return capability. Instead of returning AP per tile destroyed (which could be great or horrible depending on how the board was laid out), it now deals an increasing amount of base damage. In return for this increased damage capability, The Hood also had to lose the Level 5 reward of not ending his turn on usage.

I think you guys would save a lot of agita among the forum-base if you treated these changes less like a press-release and gave more of the thought process up front. Just my 2 cents.