**** Wolverine (X-Force) **** [PRE 2015-04]

NorthernPolarity

All aboard the 5/5/3 X-Force train. Choo choo! I put him at equal or better to LazyThor: he's amazing when you want at black/green guy just like how lazythor is great if you want a yellow/green guy but the true healing might push him over the edge.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

All aboard the 5/5/3 X-Force train. Choo choo! I put him at equal or better to LazyThor: he's amazing when you want at black/green guy just like how lazythor is great if you want a yellow/green guy but the true healing might push him over the edge.

He's slightly less dummy proof than Thor but when he gets his moves going it's really devastating, and you need a very varied team to reduce his effectiveness when fighting him since Surgical Strike on the major attack colors (red/green/yellow) usually means at least one guy dies immediately.

Phaserhawk

Highdark wrote:

Been playin my X force, and the enemy matched my yellow tile during there turn(or to end theirs). They got damaged and the resulting cascade damaged them but i didnt gain any AP from the cascade. Wondering if you theorycraftors know if the enemy gains the AP or is it nulled? Or am I blind. Thx

I'm asuming one only gains ap on their turn except if u have marvel. Thus I think no one gets it. But if you matched the tile on your turn I bet you would

Unknown

One of my alliance mates mentioned that if you match an enemy X-Force's yellow cd tile, and X-Force's hp is low enough such that the yellow match you are making will kill him, he will still do the damage and tile destruction before he dies.
On another note, does stunning X-Force make matching his yellow cd tile do nothing?

Unknown

I have him maxed Level270 at 553 (saved up ISO for this), and he is undoubtedly my most favourite character to use. Not only does he pack a wallop, but he's fun to use (planning your surgical strikes/recoveries) and is soooo tanky.

Green does way more damage than advertised (3.4k+), due to the tile damage from destruction. It usually hits around 4.5-4.8k for me. Not even counting the cascades.

Black does hell of a lotta cascades as well, and I grab blacks on the board whenever green isn't available.

And when he's down to half health or so, just pop a recovery and watch the fun.

Excellent re-design, fitting for a 4* legendary character. Let's hope Invisible Woman gets similar treatment from the devs in time!

Unknown

^^^ what he said.

Saved up my ISO and have him at 270 5/5/3. X-Force is my new favourite character and I will use him whenever I can from now on.

The green, X-Force, at only 8, gets going fast and is great for killing low-health support characters that will be dangerous is they survive for too long (I'm thinking mainly OBW and Hood). Board cascades are a nice bonus.

The black, Surgical Strike, is probably my new favourite power in the game, beating out even LThor's Thunder Strike. Just wait for a board to turn a certain color, fire off his black, and watch everything die. My favourite thing to do vs. a team with green as their strongest color is to bring along GSBW. Get 11 purple and black. Wait for the board to go green. Cast deceptive tactics without matching any green tiles. Fire off Surgical Strike and laugh as you do 10k damage.

The yellow, recovery, being a true heal, allows sustainable play, and even prologue healing if you really want/need to. At level 3, you get a 4243 true heal for 9 yellow. That is crazy good.

X-Force is a great combination of a quick attack, an expensive nuke, and being tanky as hell. Definitely worthy of the "legendary" moniker. The devs did a great job. I'd like to see IW get fixed next.

azraelpreston

Personally, got enough covers when he was G/R/Y for a 1/5/3 setup, and kept reading that he was tinykitty useless, but given that Wolverine was my first comic book waaaaay-back when, I couldn't bring myself to sell him.

So glad I didn't - he's become a staple at 150 for my transition from 2* to 3*, and even works well with the new cMags (I had 5/3/1) and especially with oBW.

X-Force is dead; long live X-Force!

Demolira

I'm not sure about stunning then matching, but using Lazy Cap's blue to stun while knocking out the heal tile did not trigger the tile destruction.

orbitalint

So question, at what level does a four star start being as viable as a 3 star? Is it 15 levels above a 3*? 20-25?

I'm still in the three star transition with my A team at like 135. Would x force be decent at 150? 165? I know they ramp up slower and wanted to figure out what to shoot for.

OnesOwnGrief

Demolira wrote:

I'm not sure about stunning then matching, but using Lazy Cap's blue to stun while knocking out the heal tile did not trigger the tile destruction.

Overwrites aren't considered matching.

Unknown

orbitalint wrote:

So question, at what level does a four star start being as viable as a 3 star? Is it 15 levels above a 3*? 20-25?

I'm still in the three star transition with my A team at like 135. Would x force be decent at 150? 165? I know they ramp up slower and wanted to figure out what to shoot for.

His skills get really powerful at the final covers, so it's more of a how many cover you have as opposed to how many levels you have. Surgical Strike at level 5 does around 260 damage X tile at level 70 plus the AP gain and AP loss for opponent. That's usable against a level 166 opponent from a pure offense point of view (though level 70 would be way too weak to defend), but you got to have 5 black to hit that. X Force has a similar scaling where the last covers gets you most of the power.

mags1587

For reference, my fully covered X-Force (5/5/3) at level 145:
- Green deals 2744 damage.
- Black deals 423 damage per tile.
- Yellow heals for 3377 or destroys 6 tiles at 92 per tile.

So yes, fully covered he is very usable as you're leveling him.

mischiefmaker

I've been playing with the new X-Force a lot and recording some data that I thought I'd share.

The first thing I was curious about is how many tiles his green is expected to destroy, since that has an effect on both damage and expected cascade output. For versions up to L4, it's pretty easy: since there's only one pattern to deal with, there are 64 possible locations for the center, but each quartile of the board is the same, so we can just consider 16 positions. Anyway, assuming uniform distribution, versions up to L4 are expected to destroy 6.06 tiles.

L5 is trickier, because with three X patterns, there's going to be some overlap. How much overlap? As usual I was not smart enough to figure out the probability, so I wrote a Python script to simulate it -- L5 averages 11.6 tiles destroyed. Assuming rainbow tile damage coverage, that's an additional ~600 damage.

I then started recording cascades for X Force. So far I've recorded 73 trials. There were 6 instances where it generated a critical and 3 where it generated 2 criticals. In total it averages 1.3 matches, or around 4.5 tiles cascaded, for an additional ~250 damage and 4 AP.

For those still considering how to build X-Force, I'd say this puts green as much of a must-have L5 as black. L4 cuts the damage by ~1400, plus 5 fewer tiles destroyed, and likely cuts cascades by more than half. That's around 1800 damage and 2 AP, which is pretty monster, especially when you consider the competition for green.

Unknown

mags1587 wrote:

For reference, my fully covered X-Force (5/5/3) at level 145:

(5/5/2) at 195
HP: 7938
Green: 3135 damage (+ cascades)
Black: 481 damage per title
Yellow: 3006 health or 6 x 81 damage (with 3 covers this will be 3865 / 6 x 104)

So 145 with 3 yellow is much better than 195 with 2 : )

MarvelMan

Excellent analysis, and exactly what I need! I have a 3/5/3 X, with some HP to spend (thank you selling Daken and Hawkeye!).....not to mention almost 500k iso.

Unknown

I recall his stats roughly double from level 70 to 270, so the covers will tend to matter a lot more than the level themselves.

Moral

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

Demolira wrote:

I'm not sure about stunning then matching, but using Lazy Cap's blue to stun while knocking out the heal tile did not trigger the tile destruction.

Overwrites aren't considered matching.

Redwing taking out the healing was not matching.

Matching the Redwing tile next turn did set it off.

I cannot tell if that is bugged or working as intended.

orbitalint

Thanks for the info. He sounds pretty useful at any level. Only have 3 black covers ATM and seven covers overall. I'll keep him low lower levels until I get some more covers to make him a better partner with my team. I'm seeing him everywhere as I climb PVP and he was pretty manageable. So I was curious.

Unknown

I just had a monster cascade from the enemy matching my healing tile and I can confirm the monster cascade definitely got credited to the enemy team, not mine.

This means the healing is actually kind of a liability. You should probably only use it if you need the heal, or otherwise you should match it yourself because the it's not really a 6 tile shatter when the enemy gets it. They get at least 3 tiles (the match) plus 6 more which is awfully close to the threshold of tiles you need to destroy for something nasty to happen.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

I just had a monster cascade from the enemy matching my healing tile and I can confirm the monster cascade definitely got credited to the enemy team, not mine.

This means the healing is actually kind of a liability. You should probably only use it if you need the heal, or otherwise you should match it yourself because the it's not really a 6 tile shatter when the enemy gets it. They get at least 3 tiles (the match) plus 6 more which is awfully close to the threshold of tiles you need to destroy for something nasty to happen.

That sounds....really bad. Like something that should have an actual email bug report filed, rather than just being mentioned on the forums, since who know how many months it'll be before they see that post