** Black Widow (Original) ** [PRE 2014-06]

Unknown

I haven't had that happen on the first turn but I have had the ai use abilities they don't have enough ap for

over_clocked

Typhon13 wrote:

I haven't had that happen on the first turn but I have had the ai use abilities they don't have enough ap for

Are you sure there wasn't the Hood as well? The Hood steals AP at the start of his turn; i.e. enemy team could have, say, 8 blue, steal 1 blue from you at the start of their turn and heal.

_RiO_

Alecrizzle wrote:

Soooo I don't know if this has happened to any one else but it literally just happened to me and it'll totally sound made up but you'll just have to take my word for it.

On turn one I got an L shape resulting in an extra turn, with the critical tile in play I got a row of 5 resulting in another extra turn, followed by a regular 3 match. Immediately following my turn the enemy OBW used AR. -8 purple AP. Which sounds absolutely impossible since they AI had not even taken a full turn yet. So I'm more astonished than anything really lol. Has anything like this ever happened to anyone else?

Had it happen with Ares' Sunder recently and reported it here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8837

Unknown

I was sure there was stuff going on, but I thought maybe I was a bit out of my right mind about it.

With so many people siting similar occurrences, we're either observing a pattern, or we're all going crazy together. But I offer this perhaps?

In the TaT boss battle vs. The Hood and Magneto, I noticed Mags popping his red waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too often. He couldn't possibly be tripping it this often. But then I saw it.

After using it and waiting for the cascades to clear, Mags only ever lost ONE red AP.

It's almost like the PvE ability scalings are being translated over into the PvP side of things.

I can't say for sure that it's happening but I observe it all the time that OBW, Ares and Thor *2 are triggering abilities way too often.

rixmith

I can't say for sure if this is what you are seeing but... when the AI gets cascades their AP doesn't update until their turn is completely over. So if a low level cMags uses Red (cost 4) and it results in a red match (plus 3) at the end of the turn it will look like he spent only 1 AP. But you won't see the intermediate step where he lost the 4 AP. What you will see during cascades is that even though the AP indicator doesn't change, abilities that the AI can use do light up. So you can see Thor trigger his Yellow then suddenly get Call the Storm even though his AP only shows 12 because a green match happened.

Spoit

rixmith wrote:

I can't say for sure if this is what you are seeing but... when the AI gets cascades their AP doesn't update until their turn is completely over. So if a low level cMags uses Red (cost 4) and it results in a red match (plus 3) at the end of the turn it will look like he spent only 1 AP. But you won't see the intermediate step where he lost the 4 AP. What you will see during cascades is that even though the AP indicator doesn't change, abilities that the AI can use do light up. So you can see Thor trigger his Yellow then suddenly get Call the Storm even though his AP only shows 12 because a green match happened.

I could have sworn that it chooses the moves to use at the very start of it's turn, so even if it crosses the availability mark, via a move like that, or more commonly, Aggressive Recon, It doesn't cast until the next turn.

The only exception is when it gets it from passives like the hulk's anger matches or hood's AP sapping

rixmith

I am sure I've seen Thor use his Yellow -> Green (and maybe Red -> Yellow) all in one turn. But that may be something special coded into Thor and not the norm.

Unknown

I think this is an issue of the enemy AP list taking a while to update. I just had Ares use Sunder on two separate occasion even though his yellow AP reads like 3, but I know he actually has enough to use it based on what he matched.

If the AI didn't use a move at the beginning of a turn, I've never seen them use that move no matter what happens later in the turn. Even if they got 30 AP in every color and take 15 extra turns in a row, they still won't use it. Extra turns from match 5 does not count as a 'new turn' for the purpose of AI deciding to use a new ability. Note that if they stun your team, then they will use the moves on the next turn since that is a new turn for them (you skipped yours).

Unknown

I had one round today where it seemed i had an enormous amount of ap after aggressie recon. I pull a 11 ap recon and i had enough AP to do it again. I know i didnt have enough AP to do it previous turn and i didnt have any remarkable cascades.

pressatobegin

mimio wrote:

This character needs to be nerfed. Period. It's ridiculous that I have to target this "flimsy" 2* over any other 3*. A bad cascade (defined as 2 or 3 purple matches or 4-/5- that let opponents have 8~11 purple AP) would let her to use AR to steal my AP, those boost AP that I buy with ISO, as well as fuel other char so fast the next 2 turns will see my team heavily injured or dead. In what universe would a 2* take precedence over any other 3*/4*? Pls increase the AR cost or something!

TL;DR (just in case), char is too OP for a 2*. Nerf pls.

I vehemently agree. Not from the standpoint of playing against her, but rather from the standpoint of playing with her... All of my 3-stars that are higher level (including my maxed-out BW grey suit) take a back seat to using BWO due to the healing ability.

Not only is it a massive stall/regroup effect, but it means I almost never use a heal token unless my opp gets lucky with a brutal cascade... otherwise I leave the battle with every character at or near full health. Especially when playing against other BWOs - having her on my team ensures that I'll be the one stealing AP instead of my opp.

It really says a lot when playing with a 2-star version of a character is vastly more effective than playing a maxed-out 3-star of the same character.

Unknown

pressatobegin wrote:

It really says a lot when playing with a 2-star version of a character is vastly more effective than playing a maxed-out 3-star of the same character.

Same character with completely different move set. It would be true if it was lazy Black Widow. OBW is support char and therefore should be compared to 3* Spidey or Hood.

In my opinion, vision of OBW being OP comes from 2 sources. First, it's an AP stealing char. And how powerful AP is, depends on strength of user. Would you be afraid if she was paired with Bagman? No, since you can't use that AP well anyway. Ares/Thor? Yeah, now her steal is good, it's just as powerful as characters that she supports. The 'take away' part scales in same way, just against opponents. Denying Bagman vs denying Ares/Thor. This scales when you go into 3* land. The same AP that you steal have even more value now, since it fuels yours *3 abilities, and denies other 3* abilities. That's just how AP stealing works.

The second problem comes that she is only viable 2* support character. And by viable I mean AMAZING GOOD viable way. Majority of PvP comes with set defined 3* char, which unless you are fully loaded in threes is usually just a decoy. So the most common way of building team at that stage is having a tank character that covers R/Y/G (Thor, Ares, Wolvie, kinda-ish Cpt) and a support character that can cover remaining Blue/Purple/Black. What options does 2* have?

Magneto - 2 missing colors, slow and underwhelming blue, purple only to feed more useless blue. Storm - only blue, extremely powerful, but 1 color is not enough to help the tank, makes great offensive pair with Maggie though. Hawkeye - same but worse like Storm. Moonstone - Purple and Black, both underwhelming, expensive, random etc. Useless against non-cd enemies and still only barely viable against those that use them (due to RNG). Bullseye - low max level, purple ability hurts badly by that, black is gimmicky, and wee bit too expensive if you can't use it fully. Daken - low max level, purple recently nerfed due to PvE enemies overscaling it, black completely useless since he won't tank anything with low level.

OBW? Oh hey, only 2* char that covers 3 missing tank colours. Only 2* char with healing. Only 2* char with AP steal. Oh, and she has bonus of dealing with cd tiles. I wonder why it's only 2* char that you see paired in PvP...

Honestly, OBW is how a support character SHOULD look, instead of being crippled to level of Moonstone. And I don't think you can nerf her enough to still not be prime support chart simply because of LACK of other options.

You know what could help give more options? Daken and Bullseye having third ability. Not a freaking lazy re-edit. A real patched in 2* abilities. Daken should be Blue instead of Green. Since it have offense passive, why not make Blue team-healing ability, perhaps boosted by consuming strike tiles? Bullseye - bit cheaper black. Blue instead of Green. Since it have defensive passive, perhaps Blue as powerful AP steal as cd tile? Both chars would also be able to actually level up, strengthening their old passives. It would actually make people have OPTIONS to build viable pvp team apart from tank+obw or mag+storm.

But since it's OBW topic... I think the one tweak she should get is not being able to steal purple on passive. It creates strange effect of her having to do 3 matches of purple to use Recon, but only two if enemy have any Purple themselves. So you're screwing yourself if you try to deny Purple. Any further changes should 'maybe' come after 2* actually get more viable team building options.

kensterr

You guys keep on talking about using OBW for heal - I've moved on to *** and use Patch whenever possible, and am levelling Lazy Daken now. Don't get stuck in ** land. Use the tactics posted by other forum members on how to deal with OBW.

Cascades can happen anytime with any characters. You complain about a cascade giving lots of purple AP to OBW. Wait til you have one that gives purple AP to CMags. Then you'll cry your heart out.

I used to run OBW/Thor/CStorm last time before changing to OBW/Thor/Punisher then OBW/Lazy Thor/Punisher and now Lazy Thor/Patch/CMags. The way the game works is that you have to figure out which characters suit your play style, and when it comes to PVP matches always try to make sure you have the featured character levelled as high as possible to take the match damage so that you use health packs on possibly one hero only.

Spoit

kensterr wrote:

You guys keep on talking about using OBW for heal - I've moved on to *** and use Patch whenever possible, and am levelling Lazy Daken now. Don't get stuck in ** land. Use the tactics posted by other forum members on how to deal with OBW.

Cascades can happen anytime with any characters. You complain about a cascade giving lots of purple AP to OBW. Wait til you have one that gives purple AP to CMags. Then you'll cry your heart out.

I used to run OBW/Thor/CStorm last time before changing to OBW/Thor/Punisher then OBW/Lazy Thor/Punisher and now Lazy Thor/Patch/CMags. The way the game works is that you have to figure out which characters suit your play style, and when it comes to PVP matches always try to make sure you have the featured character levelled as high as possible to take the match damage so that you use health packs on possibly one hero only.

I'm well into the 3* zone, and I've had way more games lost due to ARs than MTs. A MT kills 1 person..,if they're not like BP/LT/Sentry, but an AR can easily wipe out your whole team.

(and she's way easier to use to heal with than spidey, and much more useful in general to boot)

kensterr

So far in recent times I only lost one game to AR due to crazy cascades for enemy AI, not just for purple color but all colors. I run with OBW once a while and would say that she's no deterrent to people. Those who build up a solid roster would have no problems dealing with OBW or Hood - IMO it's players who stick by their one-trick-pony roster for a long period of time who find her OP. Except for Phantron. He somehow dislikes fishnet stockings out of principle.

***
This topic is now closed and further character discussion is here.