Rebalancing

cyineedsn

notamutant wrote:

I think both of these buffs are being underrated. I think people also are not keeping up with the whole charged tiles meta-game that is forming now. We previously had only Thor that could create charged tiles. Cho too, but he was useless. Then we had Silver Surfer. Recently, we added Black Bolt to that group. Black Bolt and Thor both benefit from more charged tiles on the board through either more damage with Thor's red or Black Bolt's black. Generally, bringing a lower tier to a fight is a bad idea since it will make you more of a target in PvP, but it is fine for PvE. When boosted, a max 4 star is almost as good as a 5 star, especially Cho who has around 30k health when boosted and maxed.

So let's pretend we are talking about a typical PvP event with a 3 star and then two other characters you can choose. If you are in the 4 star world, you wouldn't use Thor previously due to the requirement to first use stun before red to make the damage meaningful. You also needed IM40 to get enough AP quickly, which made you a target on defense. Now if you bring Thor and Cho, you have Cho's passive blue feeding Thor's stun, as well as his black creating charged tiles for more damage from Thor's red. Not as fast as IM40, but much safer since Cho has huge amounts of health, and when boosted his healing will be annoying. Previously, you had to spend blue AP by Cho to get charged tiles, so it wasn't worth it. Now you have the free green generator. So you have a usable-decent green, blue, red, black, and **** yellow and no purple. Not a crazy team, but better on defense than Thor/IM40.

Next, let's look at Silver Surfer's buffs. The ideal partner for Silver Surfer is now Black Bolt. They have a all actives covered except purple. They also have higher health than the other "popular" 5 stars (OML and Phoenix). SS has healing as well, but BB doesn't, so the team isn't quite as difficult as OML Phoenix in that regards. Still, with a cheaper blue, you are much more likely to get it off multiple times in a match. BB activates his black when there are enough charged tiles on the board. His red now created an extra charged tile as well as doing 1.5k more damage for cheap. With all the charged tiles on the board, BB's black will be dishing out damage almost every turn, and will be hard to stop since SS will create more charged tiles every time he gets 9 blue or 7 red AP. Black hole will now finally be a move worth using, as the 1 AP cheaper means one less match, and it actually does damage as well as gathering more AP. Now this team won't climb quite as well as OML and Phoenix due to no revive or self-heal except for Surfer, but it will make up for it with getting attacked less on defense since you will definitely take a bigger chance at defeat fighting this team than Phoenix + OML.

In the past, I agree, the devs overvalued charged tiles. But I think now, we are finally starting to see ways to get charged tiles on the board cheaper and more useful ways to take advantage of them, to the point where they are actually worth some interesting strategies.

Some good insights/analysis here, I just really hope there are some viable partners for Surfer BESIDES black bolt, because it'll be pretty depressing to wait to use him until sometime in christmas 2017/2018

FaustianDeal

Everyone has comical yard stick they use to measure buffs/nerfs. Buffs need to be *HUGE*. We want it to be ridiculous how much better the character is, and be left either coveting their power until we possess it, and then lording if over others once we do. But nerfs need to so infinitesimal as to be unnoticed or unfelt; the character should only go from being "so obviously the best" to being "still noticeably better than anything else, but not ridiculously so". That's a tad unrealistic isn't it?

Listening to most people, I would infer that the only 'good buff' we have ever seen in the game was the original update to XFW that elevated him to a status where he dominated the meta for several seasons. Keep in mind those changes were so far beyond adequate that he was subsequently worked over by a gang of devs swinging nerf bats.

What should happen here is recognition of (what appears to be) a carefully-considered, moderate update to characters that had drifted to the bottom of the meta in their respective tier. Did these changes make them the new, dominant force in any game format? No. But, did they make the characters recognizably more playable than they were before? YES. Someone who was cursed with a fully covered Cho by the Random Number Generator can now at least level their character and have something usable, instead of being left hamstrung with a character widely regarded as the worst. I would love to see a similar, gentle adjustment made to a number of characters who would only take minor changes to see them elevated back into semi-regular play.

No one wants their favorite character to be trash tier. No one wants to 'chase the meta' and get the 'new hotness' just in time for them to be nerfed into unusability. That kind of necessitates a trend toward the mean for most characters.

This approach leaves open the door for these characters to get another adjustment if either; these changes don't get them off the bottom of the depth chart. The most important thing here is: this (more moderate) approach to nerf/buff of characters is going to be appreciated when it inevitably comes time to re-examine the characters at the top of the power curve. You will welcome a lighter touch in that circumstance.