It's Time for Team Bonuses!

The Bob The

With Medusa shaking her crimson locks, we've now got four Inhumans in the game (along with Blackagaragaragar Boltagonagonagonagon), America's Sweetheart Kamala Khan, and Quack. That's enough to have multiple three-member variations! With this in mind, it seems there's enough breadth of possibilities available to give serious consideration to introducing some team bonuses. Consider first what we've got:

Available teams:

Heroes Villains Avengers Team Cap Team Iron Man Guardians of the Galaxy Inhumans Fantastic Four

Unavailable teams:

X-men (seriously guys, what the heck?) Spider-folk X-Force? Weirdos/Gags/Novelties/Deadpools

Seems like enough to do something with! Some bonuses or perks for teaming up would add a layer to the game. It could be an AP bonus: For example, you run a Fantastic Four team and you get a passive green feeder (1 AP/turn, or a 3 AP boost at the start of battle) on account of three of those characters draw on green. Or maybe it's special tiles: Running all Villains gives you strikes, or Team Cap gives protects. Or maybe it's an effect over time, like placing enough web tiles for Team Spider generates an AoE stun. The bonuses could be AP, specials, or passive effects (couldn't be an active because there's nowhere to put the power to fire it!), and the conditions could be either start-of-battle or AP/special/other-based. The result is an additional level of complexity and strategy.

There are, of course, drawbacks:

Potential issues:
1. The best team combos could come to dominate
2. Could create a larger divide between haves and have-nots
3. Some bonuses could be duds
4. Phoenix and OML already define the 5* meta, and they're both moo-tants, and that's UNNNFAIRRRR!
5. I don't wanna

Responses to them there issues:
1. Sure, there's always gonna be a meta, and there's always gonna be OP combos. One option, however, is to require three-member teams to get the bonus. Outside of SSim and PVE, this would mean optimal teams would vary based on who the required character is, which means there'll be some shuffle just like there is now with boosted and essential characters.

2. Yeahhh maybe, but that's why I waited until there were at least four Inhumans to suggest this. If there's more than the minimum of three, you've got a decent potential of having enough to make a ball team.

3. Sure, maybe something like a protect tile bonus isn't so sexy, but if you're looking for a range of powersets with complete parity, you're playing the wrong game. Put another way, eh, whaddaya gonna do?

4. True, but they're not classified "X-men" in the game (yet), so that wouldn't apply. Next!

5. Look, we're trying to have a constructive conversation here.

At any rate, we've got team affiliations already baked into the game, and the mechanic for special conditions at the start of the battle (i.e., Moon Knight or Peggy) is also already set up, so why not combine the two? The result is an addition that gives us another wrinkle to tinker with, break, and strategize around, and this is what we in the business call "fun." Whaddaya think, sirs?

Stax the Foyer

Rotating buffs were a very good solution to character domination in the lower tiers. Something similar could be applied to the team bonuses. This week could see boosts for FF teams, next week for X-men, next week for Team Iron Man, so on and so forth.

One particularly interesting boost would be to start with something like 1 AP in each color for each featured team member. That would significantly boost offense at the cost of leaving a comparatively softer team on defense. If defensive teams got the bonus, that would make them slightly scarier to hit, too.

There's a lot that they could do, especially if the bonus were defined on a weekly basis, so if one boost turns out to be ridiculously overpowered, it's gone in a week and we never have to deal with it again.

JHawkInc

I'd like to see some Team oriented bonuses. Make it like "optional requirements," and provide a small ISO boost.

Like, take Hearts of Darkness for example. What if every node gave like, 10 ISO for a clear (no idea what a good balance would be, just throwing this out as an example for the theoretical math I'll do in this post), so long as your team included Wolverine, Daredevil, The Punisher or Ghost Rider? (and they could choose whether or not to restrict it to 4* Wolverine and 3* Punisher, or if other versions could be used) Make it only count until you hit the green checkmark and get XP so it isn't infinitely farm-able? Maybe have it scale so if you use Ghost Rider AND Wolverine you get 20 ISO?

Something to encourage you to use the characters in that story. Spidey and Miles and the Avengers in Venom Bomb, the Dark Avengers in Prodigal Sun, Rocket & Groot in Meet Rocket & Groot, Doctor Strange in Strange Sights, etc. You could even break it down by sub events, maybe, so when you go fight Doom in Strange Sights, you get the bonus for using Doctor Strange or any of the Fantastic Four, or Luke Cage and Iron Fist in the sub event where they are featured.

Basically, a reason to run certain characters that has nothing to do with how good they are (you know, like the current boosts, which has people running teams solely because the boosts make some characters stronger/better than others). Then, create events that make use of the teams in the game. Like an X-Men vs Avengers story event (doesn't require any new characters, but would be a good time to release/feature a new character from either team), where you benefit for using X-Men characters to fight Avengers (and vice versa).

Buret0

Magic PQ did something similar, to the rage of the users.

"Finish the match, having summoned 16 elderazi"

It seriously just limited decks and made you have to delay winning in order to complete the goal. So long as we avoid things like, "complete the match having used X green abilities" I think it would be fine.

However, I'm sure that a more open ended solution, such as boosts for choosing to lead a team of XYZ into battle would be fine. Mr. Fantastic already needs a boost, his passive could simply be, "start the battle with 1-3 AP in every colour based on the number of FF characters" or "gain X AP in a random colour while this CD tile is in play where X is the number of non-downed FF characters in the party."

If you are offering the bonus, the bonus should be based on the "leader" chosen. So like PX would offer a different bonus for leading a team of xmen into battle than another leader, like say Cyclops. Like PX might add 1.0 to the crit multiplier, while Cyclops would give a flat bonus to the match damage of the strongest colour for each Xman.

Characters would have to be assigned a leader bonus, and when you pick your party, if you meet the qualifications for the party, a banner would appear at the start of the match describing the bonus (as well as somewhere on the character selection screen).

Leader should have to be the middle character on the selection screen, which makes the RC important in determining teams.

Problem is, some teams are just too few, like currently exists as a problem for MrF and his "gain AP" passive. Other teams are more powerful and only available to those in 5* land. Might create a new barrier to entry for the transition.

STOPTHIS

I do like the idea, but I think there's an imbalance to the team associations. Though to be fair, it's probably not something that could be avoided. There will always be more Avengers than GotG members. But still, I'd like to see something addressing that there are far more heroes than villains. Or that there's been several characters that have been on the FF that aren't listed as FF members. And while I haven't done a head count in a while, I remember the number of team Cap far outweighing the number of team Iron Man, even with many of the picks not making any sense like Embiggening Girl being team Cap, but she wasn't in CW1 and is (mostly) team Tony in CW2.

Maybe imbalance isn't the right word, but I think who counts as what team should be overhauled if they every implemented this idea. Especially if every PvE match results in the Dark Avengers getting some boost.

Jarvind

This was brought up once a looooong time ago (I can't be bothered to find the post) and my answer is still the same: in order to prevent mass cookie-cutter team syndrome (even moreso than we have now), the bonuses would have to be so weak that they wouldn't really matter anyway. Either that or, now that we have team affiliations, you'd end up just having the bonuses all the time. I'd guess that I have a team of 3 "heroes" 90% of the time.

I think a better solution would be to implement passives on characters on the same team that make them work well together. It seemed like they were going to do this with Mr. Fantastic, except that it didn't work very well because Mr. F is fairly weak and Thing was realistically his only decent FF partner (IW's rework changed that recently). Granted, this would also necessitate either designing abilities with future characters in mind or retroactively changing existing ones, so now that I think about it, it's probably not super realistic.

ClydeFrog76

There are SO MANY ways they could make the game more fun with little changes like this. Anything to combat the never-ending fights with DAs and the same old goons.

These kind of bonuses are one, and I think another - that wouldn't be hard to implement - is daily missions, where you have to win a fight a certain way (such as kill the whole opposing team with one power), or win a fight in a set amount of time, stuff like that. Complete each one and get a little reward, complete all and get a big(ish) reward.

Reecoh

A minor but potentially useful perk for a team would be an extra team-up card slot. They would still limit the number of boosts to 3 cards, but this way you could boost + have a team-up to burn. Wouldn't really matter in most cases, but in a boss battle or other hard situation it might.

Beastwood

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

There are SO MANY ways they could make the game more fun with little changes like this. Anything to combat the never-ending fights with DAs and the same old goons.

These kind of bonuses are one, and I think another - that wouldn't be hard to implement - is daily missions, where you have to win a fight a certain way (such as kill the whole opposing team with one power), or win a fight in a set amount of time, stuff like that. Complete each one and get a little reward, complete all and get a big(ish) reward.

Something like an "achievements" kind of system wouldn't go a miss, lots of one off challenges for small rewards... its not enforced but it's there as a side alternative or just a little extra thrown at you while you play...

Basic things like match x amount of (colour) tiles - progressive number for each rank
Win a fight using x* roster
Win fight using Team x (3 chars)
Recuit your first 1,2,3,4,5* chars
Champion x amount of chars

Basically all them kind of things....alot of games i have played had it and a lot of F2P seem to have something similar, daily challenges for a little bonus, an achievements kinda system for the longer term etc

BUt yeah you get the idea.

Topic wise i think you already covered what i would've said, while it sounds fun on paper it would probably just create must have team combos... .think it would need some good thought but it would be a nice addition haven't they got Team Iron Man/Cap already where they do more damage with one of their moves based on the other 2 members of the team?