Best strike tile generator- Punisher or Patch??

Unknown

So I was thinking. Patch and Punisher kinda fill the same role on your team- strike tile generator. But which is better!?

First off, I wanted to rank all the strike tile generators in terms of power/usefulness:

1/2: Patch/Punisher will analyze below
3: Black Panther tank that can make tiles off of yellow which is a color not normally associated with the ability, active black that makes him playable
4: Psylocke abilities are comparable to Punisher's in cost/effect, but has 1 dud ability and is in the wrong colors overall. if her red ability was green, or her blue purple, would make me reconsider possibly,
otherwise she is marginal at best
5: Daken amazing generator! only thing holding him back is his level 69 cap and lack of any active abilities
LAST Astonishing Wolverine nerf hit waaaaaaay too hard. 6 green (plus 3 red if you want any real value) make him a bit costly. nowadays, if you do play him, you play him for his red, and his strike tiles are an added bonus

Patch: 9green to make 6 tiles with a strength of 148 each. Drawback is that opponent gets them, too. Also does 1780 damage to the opponent, which is pretty solid.
Punisher: 8green to make 3 tiles with a strength of 104 each. Blows up 3x3 square, possibly cascading.

Both Punisher and Patch have very good red abilities. They are both situational, but have upwards of 6k damage. Unfortunately, Patch's cost 14red, which is.... a bit. Even when not optimal, Punisher's can be spammed for 1482 damage

Patch has a passive healing factor that heals him for 370 a turn, while Punisher has a 7black that does 668 damage to whole team (2004 total) or 980 damage (2940 total) after you use his green first

Patch can really dish out the damage but requires Spider-Man/Loki to really not get hurt back. Punisher is very solid all-around due to having 3 actives and can pretty much go on any team.


Team compositions!!
Honorable mention to OBW, who teams up best with Patch/Punisher when you can only bring in 2 characters:

I feel like most teams should look like:
Patch/Punisher +
Magneto (broken cascades at 2R and 5B) +

Spider-Man (active yellow, stuns, heals)
Hood (active yellow, steals ap)
Black Panther (active yellow, insane black aoe, tanks)
IM40 (active yellow that plays well with Patch's red, tanks)
Hulk (tanks, good on defense, funsies)
Loki (shenanigans with Patch, cascades)

So which do you all prefer for your strike tile generators?

Unknown

I leveled them both to 100 and then ultimately decided on Punisher to max. He uses black and provides no enemy advantage. I will pair him and OBW with Black Panther when I have enough covers to level BP effectively.

Even then, I might choose two molotovs over BP's black attack. They hit just fine after Judgement and have a decent chance of generating damage every turn even if the enemy stuns all of your characters. That has gotten me out of plenty of situations with Spidey. I can see Judgement followed by BP's yellow followed by a Molotov. Squishier opponents are ready for Retribution by then.

NorthernPolarity

Punisher is safer, Patch is more powerful. I like consistency/flexibility over power so I went with Punisher.

Unknown

I have nothing to add other than Wolvie's Green followed by Punisher's Black is a hoot

Unknown

I use Punisher's green more than Patch in PvP. I maxed out Patch red instead green so its not a big deal.

Spoit

I'm sure I'll regret dumping all of my thor/wolvie ISO into patch once the spidey nerf comes, but in the meantime, it's hilarious to destroy 7-10k HP characters with only a few regular match 3s

Unknown

Patch is great for a quick fight with a stun-locking Spidey. You don't have to worry about the "risk" of a huge retaliatory hit if you load up your blues before you initiate it. On the flip side, as a Spidey user - whenever I fight a team with Patch I let him initiate his strike tiles before I start stun locking. So it's still a double-edged sword in that regard.

Arogntbastrd

Spoit wrote:

I'm sure I'll regret dumping all of my thor/wolvie ISO into patch once the spidey nerf comes, but in the meantime, it's hilarious to destroy 7-10k HP characters with only a few regular match 3s

How dare you

Everyone is pretty spot on. Patch is a nuke that destroys indiscriminately, which is awesome except every now and then you can kinda sorta maybe kill yourself a little. But hey, these things happen. Rub a health pack on it and walk it off. I run 5 green and accidentally kill OBW from time to time. But more often I'm healing to full right before killing the whole team

Unknown

Patch's drawbacks are irrelevent as long as Magneto and Spiderman isn't nerfed.

Judgment is slightly overpowered but nothing to be concerned about in light of all the other broken stuff in the game right now. The total amount of strike tile generated should be exactly the same as Psylocke (~180), not close to 300. I'm sure the logic was that strike tiles placed in random locations are harder to defend, but that turns out to not matter in reality because the AI never tries to destroy them anyway.

NorthernPolarity

Phantron wrote:

Patch's drawbacks are irrelevent as long as Magneto and Spiderman isn't nerfed.

Judgment is slightly overpowered but nothing to be concerned about in light of all the other broken stuff in the game right now. The total amount of strike tile generated should be exactly the same as Psylocke (~180), not close to 300. I'm sure the logic was that strike tiles placed in random locations are harder to defend, but that turns out to not matter in reality because the AI never tries to destroy them anyway.

I think the logic was that Psylocke has more upfront damage (900 vs randomly 100-300 from judgement) and reduces in cost as you get more tiles. Not to say that you wouldn't rather have +120 strike tile damage over these upsides, but I'm sure these factors were considered as well when the devs were balancing the skills.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Patch's drawbacks are irrelevent as long as Magneto and Spiderman isn't nerfed.

Judgment is slightly overpowered but nothing to be concerned about in light of all the other broken stuff in the game right now. The total amount of strike tile generated should be exactly the same as Psylocke (~180), not close to 300. I'm sure the logic was that strike tiles placed in random locations are harder to defend, but that turns out to not matter in reality because the AI never tries to destroy them anyway.

I think the logic was that Psylocke has more upfront damage (900 vs randomly 100-300 from judgement) and reduces in cost as you get more tiles. Not to say that you wouldn't rather have +120 strike tile damage over these upsides, but I'm sure these factors were considered as well when the devs were balancing the skills.

Sure but Judgment serves as emergency tile destruction and can usually get some cascades. I consider that as valuable as an extra 800 damage up front.

Also, when you're fighting these characters, I find that quantity usually wins over quality. If you have any specific tile destruction ability you obviously prefer to destroy 1 specific tile versus 3. In general, since the AI doesn't think about protecting its strike tiles, at best they're equally hard to destroy and that's only if you have no tile destruction ability whatsoever.

Mawtful

As someone with a 5 Red Patch build, I'm going to lean towards Punisher as a the go-to Strike generator, although currently mine is only 3/3/3. Although in "restricted roster" events like the recent Fearless Defenders (as opposed to "selected hero is powered up" format) I find Patch to be a much better executor.

Eddiemon

Patch doesn't need spidey to rule.

Try Patch and GSBW or MagNowto. Paint out the purple tiles before popping berserk.
Use Psylocke. Berserk > Psylocke black has you doing over 2k damage per round from tile match plus attack tile.
Or the old reliable Loki.
And you can still pull the double damage trick with OBW. That never gets old.

Unknown

Eddiemon wrote:

Patch doesn't need spidey to rule.

Try Patch and GSBW or MagNowto. Paint out the purple tiles before popping berserk.
Use Psylocke. Berserk > Psylocke black has you doing over 2k damage per round from tile match plus attack tile.
Or the old reliable Loki.
And you can still pull the double damage trick with OBW. That never gets old.

Patch with Magneto Classic works fine too.

Spiderman is just the simplest way to pull it off.

NorthernPolarity

Eddiemon wrote:

Patch doesn't need spidey to rule.

Try Patch and GSBW or MagNowto. Paint out the purple tiles before popping berserk.
Use Psylocke. Berserk > Psylocke black has you doing over 2k damage per round from tile match plus attack tile.
Or the old reliable Loki.
And you can still pull the double damage trick with OBW. That never gets old.

The thing I don't like about Patch is that he isn't as flexible in terms of team composition as Punisher. You could throw Punisher in virtually any team composition and he'll be a solid contributor. Patch, on the other hand, has to be the best there is in order to make his red relevant (also randomly makes him unusable in PvE events where the buffed required character outdamages Patch), and really wants some sort of mitigation for his green giving the enemy strike tiles. He is extremely powerful though, so I guess that the price you pay to appease Patch and make him rage everything down for you.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The thing I don't like about Patch is that he isn't as flexible in terms of team composition as Punisher. You could throw Punisher in virtually any team composition and he'll be a solid contributor. Patch, on the other hand, has to be the best there is in order to make his red relevant (also randomly makes him unusable in PvE events where the buffed required character outdamages Patch), and really wants some sort of mitigation for his green giving the enemy strike tiles. He is extremely powerful though, so I guess that the price you pay to appease Patch and make him rage everything down for you.

I find that Patch's speed matters more than anything else when you're in PvP because you need to win that game really fast and then you can actually shield up again, so whatever you got to do to keep Patch happy for those 3 minute wins is definitely worth it. The Punisher will generally grind out an uneventful 5 minute victory with no need for special accomodations or risk, but that's not always good enough when you're trying to keep your rating from slipping.

Eddiemon

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The thing I don't like about Patch is that he isn't as flexible in terms of team composition as Punisher. You could throw Punisher in virtually any team composition and he'll be a solid contributor. Patch, on the other hand, has to be the best there is in order to make his red relevant (also randomly makes him unusable in PvE events where the buffed required character outdamages Patch), and really wants some sort of mitigation for his green giving the enemy strike tiles. He is extremely powerful though, so I guess that the price you pay to appease Patch and make him rage everything down for you.

Sure. He's the strike tile specialist. When you want to ram raid an opponent, say down Hood by turn 3, he's your guy. I often roll him with two support specialists, say hood spidey so he can soak damage and claw faces. Punisher isn't as good in that team because he doesn't bring the pain as quickly, and he doesn't enhance his partners as powerfully.

Punisher does everything ok to good. Which works if your team is lacking components, but if I have patch and punisher on my team I am always berserking instead of firing punisher green unless it is a Hail Mary to stop a countdown tile.

Unknown

If you play with CMags, Patch is better.

Otherwise it depends on many factors -- first times I used Patch way more and he was good scare factor. But in the meantime people seem to have learned to deal with him.

As just pure strike tile guy Punisher is way better if you think in multiple turns: his tiles stay there while patche's are the most fragile you can imagine. Certainly that is no concern if the opponent never gets a turn after berseker.

Unknown

Both are amazing.

Patch is definitely better offensively if you pair him with 5/5/3 Classic Magneto (or to a lesser extent, Spider-Man).

But I prefer Punisher because Patch is easy to beat on defense, while Punisher is much tougher to fight against. Having a great black skill that pairs so well with strike tiles is also more appealing to me then Patch's big red bomb.

Unknown

I've been running them both on the same team with OBW. if I can't match any purple I'll use Punisher, if I can I'll use Patch. I prefer Patch, but Punisher is also good. I have Patch at 134 and Punisher at 114. Once I finish Patch ill level Punisher. A lot of people don't run them together but I think they make a pretty nasty combo.

Unknown

I like the OBW double damage, but she is just too squishy to use seriously. I love pairing pun with patch in spite of the overlap because of the green (patch) + black (pun combo) add a char who is matching purple and i end up with situations where i get 5-6 green strike tiles and only 2-3 enemy strike tiles, which i can deal with. Patch green is more about knowing when to pull the trigger. In terms of power he owns Punisher. Pun wins the versatility award. When you are picking between both consider this though. Patch heals for 371 every turn. Making him front and center pays off.