*** The Hood (Classic) ***

wymtime

I am not worried about going against Hood alone what I would fear more is IW with Hood, maxed 3* in PVP. IW throws down invisibility hiding Hood so you cannot target him. IW has 13K health so force bubbles could take you down, and then you have a max buffed character with over 10k health as well. That is what I would call not fun.

dr tinykittylove

He's seriously squishy. In lord of thunder today i kept wandering into fights against him without bringing hood, deadpool, psylocke or any of the other recommended characters. Because i was doped up with a cold and not paying attention. just focus on attacking him, watch the board for ap you can collect without letting him steal, or chase tuap and drop him with a good tu.

dkffiv

According to the character forums, Blade, Daken, Falcon, Professor X, Deadpool, oBW (especially with blurple match damage boosts), Mohawk, Patch, Ares, Punisher, Devil Dino, modern Hawkeye with MMN, Kingpin, Luke Cage should be your go-to Hood counters.

Unknown

dkffiv wrote:

According to the character forums, Blade, Daken, Falcon, Professor X, Deadpool, oBW (especially with blurple match damage boosts), Mohawk, Patch, Ares, Punisher, Devil Dino, modern Hawkeye with MMN, Kingpin, Luke Cage should be your go-to Hood counters.

Unfortunately the PvP mechanics come out and slap you round the face for using half of those guys. If the game didn't force your last won team onto defence for you in people's nodes then there is a surprising amount of rock-paper-scissors you could try out in 3-4* land. Also if speed to win wasn't so vital at higher scores the pool of viable heroes widens.

As it stands though... you can't really risk throwing, say, Blade or Daken+Falcon to make big strikes and kill Hood then the remaining bad guys, into a PvP match once your score is high enough to be of interest to other players because a bullseye appears on your face and ppl start punching it.

Spoit

puppychow wrote:

For me, the best hood killer is actually deadpool red. If you're starting with four red ap boosted, that's just a 3-match away from triggering his ability to knock out most of Hood's health.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to take AP alls into a fight with hood. A single color is fine, since you're probably cutting off the supply after a few matches anyway

Unknown

If all these strategies that counters The Hood actually worked no one would be stupid enough to bring a character that has the lowest HP in the game when there are allegedly easy ways to win this matchup. Some matchups are reasonably successful, most notably Iron Fist since he doesn't depend on the board state for his black to work, but the reason why The Hood is around is because there are no favorable matchups against him short of a mirror match which is why you put up with his incredibly low HPs. Even if you run something like Daken + Falcon + Blade and let's just say you have no concern for defense, you still need the board to give you the right tiles to get your strike tiles working even if you don't need any AP in particular. The HP change makes it very hard to climb with The Hood, but nothing says you can't swap him in for your last game.

dr tinykittylove

Phantron wrote:

If all these strategies that counters The Hood actually worked no one would be stupid enough to bring a character that has the lowest HP in the game when there are allegedly easy ways to win this matchup. Some matchups are reasonably successful, most notably Iron Fist since he doesn't depend on the board state for his black to work, but the reason why The Hood is around is because there are no favorable matchups against him short of a mirror match which is why you put up with his incredibly low HPs. Even if you run something like Daken + Falcon + Blade and let's just say you have no concern for defense, you still need the board to give you the right tiles to get your strike tiles working even if you don't need any AP in particular. The HP change makes it very hard to climb with The Hood, but nothing says you can't swap him in for your last game.

Honestly he's fairly easy. No need for boosts or mirror hoods. Just need to be careful, and that's the main reason I might use a hood vs hood instead, because I'm lazy and shieldhopping is time-sensitive. Buffed Gamora will still half kill him with 5 red, no strike tiles required. Or Deadpool will take 60% off his health with 6 red. Then match-damage him to death or something.

puppychow

dr tinykittylove wrote:

Phantron wrote:

If all these strategies that counters The Hood actually worked no one would be stupid enough to bring a character that has the lowest HP in the game when there are allegedly easy ways to win this matchup. Some matchups are reasonably successful, most notably Iron Fist since he doesn't depend on the board state for his black to work, but the reason why The Hood is around is because there are no favorable matchups against him short of a mirror match which is why you put up with his incredibly low HPs. Even if you run something like Daken + Falcon + Blade and let's just say you have no concern for defense, you still need the board to give you the right tiles to get your strike tiles working even if you don't need any AP in particular. The HP change makes it very hard to climb with The Hood, but nothing says you can't swap him in for your last game.

Honestly he's fairly easy. No need for boosts or mirror hoods. Just need to be careful, and that's the main reason I might use a hood vs hood instead, because I'm lazy and shieldhopping is time-sensitive. Buffed Gamora will still half kill him with 5 red, no strike tiles required. Or Deadpool will take 60% off his health with 6 red. Then match-damage him to death or something.

yeah, boosted 4 red ap and deadpool is probably the quickest way to kill hood off right now. You take 3k dmg w/ dp red and that leaves 2k health for hood remaining. Some 3 matches plus a gamora red will take down hood without too much trouble. Of course, if there's like no red on the board, you'll be screwed.

franckynight

My beloved dino feast on hood teams.. Ap boosted hood is just one red and green match away from being down.. Whats funny is that now green dino is better than xf.. Joy to the world..

Polares

A part from another Hood and IF I think the best would be HT. Now that he has more hps he is usable, and with two red matches if boosted does more than 3000. HT is the most similar to the good old XForce.

Maybe Cyclops red could be ok, depending on the board. +2 red boost (for if hood steals 1 red) and 3 matches and Hood is dead.

dkffiv

Polares wrote:

A part from another Hood and IF I think the best would be HT. Now that he has more hps he is usable, and with two red matches if boosted does more than 3000. HT is the most similar to the good old XForce.

Maybe Cyclops red could be ok, depending on the board. +2 red boost (for if hood steals 1 red) and 3 matches and Hood is dead.

Anything 10+ is hard to get off. If there is enough red for you to justify going after it, it probably means he's stealing your red every turn. After 3 matches you're probably sitting at 8 or 9 red. A level 166 Fireball does 3548 btw.

Polares

dkffiv wrote:

Polares wrote:

A part from another Hood and IF I think the best would be HT. Now that he has more hps he is usable, and with two red matches if boosted does more than 3000. HT is the most similar to the good old XForce.

Maybe Cyclops red could be ok, depending on the board. +2 red boost (for if hood steals 1 red) and 3 matches and Hood is dead.

Anything 10+ is hard to get off. If there is enough red for you to justify going after it, it probably means he's stealing your red every turn. After 3 matches you're probably sitting at 8 or 9 red. A level 166 Fireball does 3548 btw.

Yeah 10 is probably two much. Then HT Fireball for 3548hps, as I said is the most similar to the old XForce. He will still be alive, but not for much longer...

Unknown

So the over/under on hood getting nerfed is 4weeks. I got over seeing as it's already long overdue, and yet still hasn't been done.

OnesOwnGrief

If more characters get released that can deal with him, expect a health buff in the future. I'm sure the devs don't want him to get downed so quickly by a good portion of the roster.

Unknown

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

If more characters get released that can deal with him, expect a health buff in the future. I'm sure the devs don't want him to get downed so quickly by a good portion of the roster.

A character that can quickly down The Hood would be overpowered in itself since only X Force before his nerf qualified for that and someone with that kind of power would just get nerfed later anyway.

I'm sure when they did the HP buff they were hoping that an indirect nerf to The Hood is enough. Since The Hood seems to be returning with a vegenance I'm sure they'll retune him when data showed that The Hood is back and stronger than ever and laughed off the dev's indirect attempt to nerf him.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

If more characters get released that can deal with him, expect a health buff in the future. I'm sure the devs don't want him to get downed so quickly by a good portion of the roster.

A character that can quickly down The Hood would be overpowered in itself since only X Force before his nerf qualified for that and someone with that kind of power would just get nerfed later anyway.

I'm sure when they did the HP buff they were hoping that an indirect nerf to The Hood is enough. Since The Hood seems to be returning with a vegenance I'm sure they'll retune him when data showed that The Hood is back and stronger than ever and laughed off the dev's indirect attempt to nerf him.

This is the problem with nerfing strong characters instead of retuning weak ones. It will always create unreliable data that makes it seem like some other characters need to be nerfed. You chop off the top couple characters and suddenly people start using different characters instead that still allow them to play the game for fun. Then you nerf them too, and pretty soon there're no characters left who're any fun to play and the majority of them just fill roster slots and are thoroughly average, underpowered, and boring.

That's the problem with nerf-focused balancing, especially in games where the characters are very expensive. It means that every character needs to be nerfed at some point, unless they're absolutely terrible, whereas if you do it by retuning weak characters, you increase their use organically by making players WANT to use them more vs. nerfing, where it becomes players will all use the few characters who are the least bad / amputated. Constant nerfing only works if you're constantly releasing new characters, and releasing them cheap enough/ easy enough to get that it isn't a big deal if they're nerfed.

The cost / utility of characters in MPQ is out of whack. If characters were permanent and nerf-proof, spending a fair amount on a few good ones would be a reasonable investment. If you have to worry about whether your investment in the game will retain any value (i.e. will the characters continue to be fun and playable), then there's no reason to spend money. It's why so many players quit following the 4* nerfs and the 3* nerfs last year.

I take exception to the notion that Hood is OP, for all the reasons stated above. Hood was one of the characters I invested in last year. He was considered one of the SAFE characters back then who was still useful. If he or any of the other top characters seems OP or overused now, a year later, it's because they nerfed all the utility characters and other characters who were much better than them back then.

They already double-nerfed health on most healers and true healers (their health was increased substantially less during the lvl upgrade from 141 -> 166). They've also nerfed their powers once already. If they do it twice, it'll be pretty insane, and at that point, I'd have to rethink whether or not I'd want to still play this game, even casually. They've killed off most of the fun powers that let you play around with the board in interesting ways. If they dumb it down even more, there won't be much puzzle left and it'll just be cascade roulette. When I came back, part of the decision that got me playing again in any capacity is that my characters were still intact, with the exception of CMAGS and mstorm. They start nerfing everyone else who's even remotely useful, I'll be gone like the vets. Nothing is cheap in this game and players have a reasonable expectation that their characters will retain usefulness / value.

The only rational reason, as a player, to encourage the devs to keep nerfing characters in MPQ would be if you were getting paid money by a competing developer to post shill troll posts demanding nerfs like they do with amazon reviews. Anything else is just a stress response, which I can understand, given how much of a grind the game can be if you try to play it competitively at all, but it makes it even more-so the case if your method of dealing with that is telling the devs to nerf all the remaining good characters. The weakness in enemy diversity in PvP stems not from the characters, but with the current PvP format, which is inherently repetitive.

over_clocked

Wonko33 wrote:

And....... A level 300 yellow goon fed hood in PvE good luck without your xforce

I still mostly did those nodes with X-Force (

(X-Force/Deadpool/oBW.)

But yeah, not going hard on Meet RnG was a blessing, those nodes' damage output is too fast for anything else to even come close.

(Nerf Maggia.)

As for PvP, I did run Hood a bit in Gamora's event, mainly on the troll team of Kamala/Gamora/Hood. Fury/Hood felt slow and cumbersome even if Fury tanks for Hood. I enjoyed Loki, IF and cMagneto teams quite a lot and ran Loki more than Hood (he just feels more fun on offense).
I won't be running Hood much in Blue Shift since Quicksilver is wildly unreliable at dealing damage and thus I would rather run two strong characters alongside over squishy Hood with overlapping blue passive, leaving third to cover red, purple, and blue, while you still have substandard yellow/black/green in QS and Hood. No thanks.
I'm not saying guys like Blade/Daken/etc. are good top play counters for Hood. But if you're in that realm, you either bring your own Hood or take the risk and use Loki, IF or something else available. Why is that any different from having to face Fury (bring Mohawk!) or Captain Marvel (stun, stun, stun)?

Phaserhawk

Human Torch is by far the easiest way to down hood now. Iron Fist chips away at him, but he does no damage without getting his purple to hit. I'm not sure if Deadpool is quicker than torch, while he can go off quicker, he gets stuck with match damage after that but they are very close.

4*'s it's probably still X-Force and maybe Kingpin that will give you the best chance at taking him down quickly.

3*'s offer a lot more to downing him, as previously stated from others.

Blade (if he gets going)
Cyclops (10 ap pushing it, but some boosts could do this quickly)
Daken (always has before)
Daredevil (suprsingly he works well, especially if you boost to have red go off, with red still on the board)
Deadpool
Human Torch
Iron Fist
Magneto (a favorable board he hits hard, but usually needs someone else with him)
Psylocke (her black can rip him up good, but needs to stay on board)
Storm (same as psy)
The Hood
Patch (if you acclerate Bezerker rage you can take him down quickly, but now the game gets crazy)

IMO the top 3 Hood destroyers other than using hood himself are

1.) Human Torch
2.) Deadpool
3.) Daken/Blade/Iron Fist

outside 4th Cyclops

Aidonis

I ran the Gamora event up to 815 with Loki/Daredevil, pummeling his Hoodness the whole way. I get that he doesn't get much love, but I can't get enough Daredevil. I find myself upset at times when the enemy matches Ambush, lol.

Malcrof

Aidonis wrote:

I ran the Gamora event up to 815 with Loki/Daredevil, pummeling his Hoodness the whole way. I get that he doesn't get much love, but I can't get enough Daredevil. I find myself upset at times when the enemy matches Ambush, lol.

Finally got a cyclops yellow cover! Cyclops yellow + daredevil red = insane. Especially once you have multiple trap tiles on the board!