Just crazy enough to work

Arimis_Thorn

This is a place to make radical game-changing suggestions that you feel would drastically improve the game.

For example:

Remove match damage.

This would actually level the playing field somewhat. Players with lower tier rosters would have a better chance against higher tier players. It would also encourage experimentation with more diverse teams.

The higher star tier characters would still have more damaging powers, etc., but they wouldn't render matches against lower tier players irrelevant.

Tile Matches would be purely for generating AP. Powers would still cause damage. Crit tiles would simply become rainbow tiles you could use to match any color. We could keep the whole "strongest color" values for each character, but they would just be numbers relevant to the powers that affect strongest colors.

There would have to be some character power tweaks (OBW black comes to mind), but I don't think it would be that many.


Go.

Suddenreal

Protect tiles are already considered weak, and your suggestion would completely render them moot. It'll take more than just changing OBW to pull off your idea, and will be too much of a hassle. Back to the drawing board, I'd say.

Arimis_Thorn

Protect tiles would still defend against ability damage, attack tiles, etc. And they could always be buffed if need be.

El Satanno

If you've played any of the other Puzzle Quest games, you'll note that this one is the only one that features match damage, so it isn't as crazy as it sounds. In fact, this game is the outlier! But it would create a rather fundamental problem. Not only protect tiles but more importantly strike tiles would be rendered significantly less potent. A whole lot of the game revolves around those, in case you hadn't noticed.

As for my radical idea, I'll throw one out there which has been inspired by Boss Rush: An event/series of events with independent health tracking. That is, what you take your characters in with is what they come out with. Any and all damage taken within the boundaries of that event is negated after finishing a match. I think Boss Rush would be much more enjoyable if the constant losses didn't impact my ability to play the rest of the game (and almost to exclusion, at that!). We could have any manner of special challenges that wouldn't force us to choose between playing one event or the other.

Think about it. Gauntlet or Boss Rush with monumental difficulty. Heroic events that you could actually try to have fun with. Special roster challenges: Use only X-Men to defeat these guys! Use special one-cover versions to defeat these other guys! Take your pants off and dance down the street!...wait, that's something different... Anyway, something like that could be running the same way boss events do (time locks on attempts) so that Demiurge could maintain their historical tight fist on rewards.

And it might even be fun!