*** Daken (Classic) ***

Unknown

Grazzt wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Moon 17 wrote:

Remember him? He's the guy who was released at the conclusion of Heroic Oscorp one month ago. What exactly is preventing his release into the recruit token pool? Seriously, guys, that was May 14th. The entirety of Season 2 will have elapsed since his premiere, and I can't justify quitting this game until I've cashed in the 260-someodd tokens I'm holding.

Seriously. This must be the work of several minutes.

Judging by the number of people with maxed UDakens, his covers sell extremely well, which probably is why he isn't in packs yet.
I'm lucky and got 12/13 covers from PVE, PVP and lucky event token pulls, and didn't hesitate a second to buy that last cover.

I'd like to think there's a reason other than business that he isn't in packs yet, but i prefer Occam's razor.

Well D3 gave away his covers like candy at the beginning of season 2, some people got all covers just by competing in those events. Mine was 5/4/3, so I only bought 1 cover eventually making him 5/4/4.

"Gave away like candy" !?!?!?! Well, my experience was not the same. I tried to pretty damn hard to get a Daken cover in his initial event and scored none. I think I got 2 useless Bullseye covers, ISO and some HP. Oh, and if you're one of the 1% that finishes as a top alliance, sure covers are given away like candy. Since then; the game has sucked donkey balls so I've barely been playing and couldn't care less about cash grab Daken.

Unknown

An interesting factoid to help share some perspective:

I am both a veteran and a fairly devoted player. Soon I'll be finishing my 10th and 11th lvl 141 characters -- after Daken becomes a possibility and I cash my tokens/end my HP cover purchase freeze. I'm usually a top ten PvP finisher, and I've only missed one premiere character from a PvP event (my job got between me and Storm).

Now, to turn all of this idle "boasting" into a relevant point: the newest character I've completed is Fat Thor. Not coincidentally, he is also the last character to be distributed before alliance awards. Since I'm in an alliance with my friends and loved ones, I've missed most of the alliance covers and haven't covered any characters so distributed. My alliance membership is my choice, of course, but I just wanted to make my situation (and the situation of every other player outside of a top alliance) apparent once again. It's real scarce out there if you aren't in the right company.

TL;DR: The illusion of the candy cover rain comes from a very specific privileged position within the top alliance bracket. There hasn't been a real candy cover rain since the early days of IM 40 (and Hulk green).

Unknown

Based on the new true healing **** D3 is looking to roll out, is 544 now a more sustainable option?

Phaserhawk

simonsez wrote:

Has anyone ever tried to measure how long a given strike tile will survive on a board? During all the debating of 3 vs. 4 blue, the breakeven estimate was anywhere between 6 and 11 turns, depending on whose strike tiles they are. This seems like a pretty long time to me, so I'm skeptical that keeping a tile on the board, rather than just taking the immediate damage, is really beneficial.

okay, I'll bite. if 64 tiles and assuming 3.5 tile match a turn, then with complete random matching, any one given tile stays on the board about 18.28 turns. Now factor in cascades, specific color matches, etc and it's much likely less than that. Maybe even half that, but remember 18.28 is really 9 turns for you so roughly i would say 5-10 turns most of the bored is recycled and the tiles that started the game are probably gone. With that being said, what do you want Daken for?

If you want him for absolute pure dmg no holds barred, then by all means go 5/3/5. But the big thing to rember is when losing 3 or 4 strike tiles is the extra damage you are not seeing with blue at 3. Rember blue at 4 and 5 removes 4 strike tiles, while 3 blue only removes 3, thus if there were 4 on the board, level 4 and 5 blue only do ability damage, while 3 blue does ability damage plus that extra strike tile left, and depending on that tile it can close the damage gap between the levels.

Now if you want Daken as a strong healer more akin to his 2* self, well then you are gonna want him more 5/5/3 or 5/4/4. My experience and raw data has told me that 5/5/3's healing isn't all that much better than 5/4/4 (thankyou Phantron), however, I have found that 5/5/3's blue is in reality much better than 5/4/4's. Why?

5/4/4--Blue dmage 623 base + 358 X 4 = 2055 dmg
5/5/3--Blue dmg 623 base + 358 x 3 = 1697 dmg

that's 358 dmg difference. but......if there were 4 tiles out and assuming they are daken's, that blue is now 1754 only at 301 difference in dmg. Now, 301/57(that extra strike tile left) = 5.28 matches needed to where 5/5/3 does more damage than 5/4/4. However, every skill you cast inbetween shortens that amount needed to recoup. So say you have him paired with Mags and you fire off 2-3 Magnetized Projectiles, well, all of a sudden you start to miss that extra tile.

However, I like to run Daken with Mags, so 5/5/3 is the best build with those two, because mags likes to destroy blue, having the tile requirement for Daken with 1 less helps mitigate some of his Heat dmg. But Daken is cool in that 5/5/3, 5/4/4 or 5/3/5 are all viable

Edit: I do actually like to use Daken's Blue, It's a nice little finisher, and I will use it early. I had run 5/4/4 before I got another black, and I can say the healing isn't much, with Mags it makes a big difference, but without him, not as big of a deal unless you are floating at like 500 health, then 5/5/3 is a godsend. However, having that extra strike tile does make a difference. Here's my summation
5/3/5--Knockout uppercut
5/4/4--Roundhouse hits
5/5/3--Jabs and body blows

In otherwords 5/3/5 is meant to take you down quickly, 5/4/4 hits hard but not quite all the dmg as 5/3/5 but 5/4/4 can last a bit longer. 5/5/3 is to wear your opponent down into the late rounds.

Unknown

A strike tile is expected to do (base damage) * (average tile destroyed per turn/3) * (32/average tile destroyed per turn)
= 10.66 * base damage from match 3s, plus whatever special moves you used before the tile is destroyed.

Note that the average tile destroyed per turn doesn't really impact strike tile damage because destroying more tiles usually means bigger chains, so you get more bonus to offset the fact that bigger chain is more likely to destroy the strike tile. This doesn't account for the match 4/5 that destroys more than 3 or environmental tiles but is good enough as an approximation.

Phaserhawk

Phantron wrote:

A strike tile is expected to do (base damage) * (average tile destroyed per turn/3) * (32/average tile destroyed per turn)
= 10.66 * base damage from match 3s, plus whatever special moves you used before the tile is destroyed.

Note that the average tile destroyed per turn doesn't really impact strike tile damage because destroying more tiles usually means bigger chains, so you get more bonus to offset the fact that bigger chain is more likely to destroy the strike tile. This doesn't account for the match 4/5 that destroys more than 3 or environmental tiles but is good enough as an approximation.

No idea what you are talking about

mischiefmaker

Phantron wrote:

A strike tile is expected to do (base damage) * (average tile destroyed per turn/3) * (32/average tile destroyed per turn)
= 10.66 * base damage from match 3s, plus whatever special moves you used before the tile is destroyed.

Note that the average tile destroyed per turn doesn't really impact strike tile damage because destroying more tiles usually means bigger chains, so you get more bonus to offset the fact that bigger chain is more likely to destroy the strike tile. This doesn't account for the match 4/5 that destroys more than 3 or environmental tiles but is good enough as an approximation.

Wait, why 32/ave tiles per turn? I'm assuming this is the expression for how long you expect a strike tile to stay on board, but it seems like this would be derived from:

probability that a strike tile is destroyed on a given turn: (ave tiles destroyed per turn)/64
expected number of turns before a strike tile is destroyed: 1/p = 64/(ave tiles destroyed per turn)

This is assuming that the probability that a strike tile is destroyed on a given turn is independent from turn to turn, but I'm not sure that's true.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

Wait, why 32/ave tiles per turn? I'm assuming this is the expression for how long you expect a strike tile to stay on board, but it seems like this would be derived from:

probability that a strike tile is destroyed on a given turn: (ave tiles destroyed per turn)/64
expected number of turns before a strike tile is destroyed: 1/p = 64/(ave tiles destroyed per turn)

This is assuming that the probability that a strike tile is destroyed on a given turn is independent from turn to turn, but I'm not sure that's true.

We start with the assumption that a strike tile is destroyed when 64 tiles have been destroyed. Since the enemy gets a turn for every turn you have, the strike tile is expected to last 32/X turns where X is the average number of tiles destroyed per turn. The enemy turns do not matter for strike tile damage, and your strike tiles do (strike damage) * (X/3) because if you destroy more than 3 on average that usually implies some kind of chaining. The X goes away when you multiply the two numbers and you get 10.66 * (value of strike tile). It's hardly the best model of the game but anything better would be extremely complicated to model.

Meto5000

I've come to the conclusion that 5/5/3 is Daken's best possible build. In an ideal world, you want to make sure you're matching green as often as possible. I regularly find myself using Chemical Reaction, not to do damage, but to inject more green tiles onto the board. I'll even do this when there are no strike tiles on the board to convert.

If your goal is to generate as many strike tiles as possible while building green nukes (Zerker rage, Sniper Rifle and Call the Storm), you may not even want to destroy that extra strike tile. Thor's yellow and red both increase the chance for cascades allowing you to get more mileage out of any strike tiles on the board. Even though Blue is probably my 4th or 5th tile priority, I always seem to have plenty of it when the board stalls on my primary match targets.

If you're concerned about weakening your Blue Bomb, consider Thor for a moment. Nobody thinks Thor's red is bad. I think most people would describe it as mediocre at worst. And that's for a color that is typically pretty strong. Post spidernerf, the only other 3* with a usable blue is Magneto. (The jury is still out on She-Hulk's blue but it seems pretty mediocre at best)

Thor's red generates .375 yellow tiles per ap spent
Daken's blue generates .4 green tiles per ap spent

Thor's red does 146 damage per ap spent
Daken's blue does 125 damage per ap spent (not counting any strike tile interaction)

Furthermore, once you start spamming ChemRe the blue dries up pretty quick which makes the 4th and 5th point in Healing & Heat even more useful.

Also, I absolutely love being able to prioritize green above all other colors. Daken tanks the green and if you play smart on offense he can eat just about any bomb and recover in a few turns (or hey, a trip to the prologue after the match and he goes from 1-5800 in about 2 minutes or less...prologue healing lives on I guess). The more damage you can soak with Daken while building game ending bombs the better. It's for this reason that I think Punisher is only a mediocre teammate since even though his black is terrific he has to tank damage with only a regular sized health pool. Same reasoning with Human Torch except more pronounced because of his lower health pool. Torch's green is terrific with strike tiles, but his red is what you want to take out high health targets like Thor/Sentry/Hulk/Bag-Hulk.

If you pair Daken with Patch, GSBW, or Thor you could match nothing else but green (and purple with GSBW), have Daken tank 100% of the damage, and win the game. However, Patch needs Magneto to really shine so you're limited in most PvPs, and GSBW has super low health with a super high costed nuke even with her Purple. Thor, however, is a perfect fit. No other power floods the board with so much green for the cost (.75 green tiles per ap spent). Thor does tank his own yellow but his high health means I don't typically need a health pack until he falls below 4k life; typically after 4-5+ matches. ChemRe is especially useful after you whiff with thunder strike and adding 2 or 4 more green to the board will result in a giant cascade.


TL;DR
If your goal is to vomit out numerous strike tiles and build green nukes, 5/5/3 is easily the best build. Also, if you weren't aware, Thor is really good too.

Phaserhawk

Meto5000 wrote:

I've come to the conclusion that 5/5/3 is Daken's best possible build. In an ideal world, you want to make sure you're matching green as often as possible. I regularly find myself using Chemical Reaction, not to do damage, but to inject more green tiles onto the board. I'll even do this when there are no strike tiles on the board to convert.

If your goal is to generate as many strike tiles as possible while building green nukes (Zerker rage, Sniper Rifle and Call the Storm), you may not even want to destroy that extra strike tile. Thor's yellow and red both increase the chance for cascades allowing you to get more mileage out of any strike tiles on the board. Even though Blue is probably my 4th or 5th tile priority, I always seem to have plenty of it when the board stalls on my primary match targets.

If you're concerned about weakening your Blue Bomb, consider Thor for a moment. Nobody thinks Thor's red is bad. I think most people would describe it as mediocre at worst. And that's for a color that is typically pretty strong. Post spidernerf, the only other 3* with a usable blue is Magneto. (The jury is still out on She-Hulk's blue but it seems pretty mediocre at best)

Thor's red generates .375 yellow tiles per ap spent
Daken's blue generates .4 green tiles per ap spent

Thor's red does 146 damage per ap spent
Daken's blue does 125 damage per ap spent (not counting any strike tile interaction)

Furthermore, once you start spamming ChemRe the blue dries up pretty quick which makes the 4th and 5th point in Healing & Heat even more useful.

Also, I absolutely love being able to prioritize green above all other colors. Daken tanks the green and if you play smart on offense he can eat just about any bomb and recover in a few turns (or hey, a trip to the prologue after the match and he goes from 1-5800 in about 2 minutes or less...prologue healing lives on I guess). The more damage you can soak with Daken while building game ending bombs the better. It's for this reason that I think Punisher is only a mediocre teammate since even though his black is terrific he has to tank damage with only a regular sized health pool. Same reasoning with Human Torch except more pronounced because of his lower health pool. Torch's green is terrific with strike tiles, but his red is what you want to take out high health targets like Thor/Sentry/Hulk/Bag-Hulk.

If you pair Daken with Patch, GSBW, or Thor you could match nothing else but green (and purple with GSBW), have Daken tank 100% of the damage, and win the game. However, Patch needs Magneto to really shine so you're limited in most PvPs, and GSBW has super low health with a super high costed nuke even with her Purple. Thor, however, is a perfect fit. No other power floods the board with so much green for the cost (.75 green tiles per ap spent). Thor does tank his own yellow but his high health means I don't typically need a health pack until he falls below 4k life; typically after 4-5+ matches. ChemRe is especially useful after you whiff with thunder strike and adding 2 or 4 more green to the board will result in a giant cascade.


TL;DR
If your goal is to vomit out numerous strike tiles and build green nukes, 5/5/3 is easily the best build. Also, if you weren't aware, Thor is really good too.

I too play 5/5/3, but as being the best? the healing is only better for 2 turns. That is, if you have 10 blue and match 3 you got to 7, 5/5/3 still gets you health where 5/4/4 doesn't, and if you are below 7. It takes one less turn to get back to healing than it does 5/4/4. The big issue is really the blue. 5/4/4 does more on the front end, 5/5/3 will do more on the back end. That's it. take your pick.

Spoit

The problem with 5/4/4 isn't the healing, but how it takes an additional strike tile for only marginal benefit

Unknown

Phaserhawk wrote:

I too play 5/5/3, but as being the best? the healing is only better for 2 turns. That is, if you have 10 blue and match 3 you got to 7, 5/5/3 still gets you health where 5/4/4 doesn't, and if you are below 7. It takes one less turn to get back to healing than it does 5/4/4. The big issue is really the blue. 5/4/4 does more on the front end, 5/5/3 will do more on the back end. That's it. take your pick.

I've been playing 5/3/5 and I was considering respeccing today since I got a Black cover, but frankly I've never had a problem healing and I love the punch on his Blue at level 5, so I'm actually sticking with 5/3/5

Unknown

Daken's regen matters a lot less for PvP because a lot of time you simply can't get much out of his colors. While blue is pretty weak, it's still better than regen when you're not tanking. For example in Army of One Daken would only get purple over Punisher if Punisher is high enough level. In PvE it's a lot easier to rearrange your team to take advantage of Daken's regen.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

Daken's regen matters a lot less for PvP because a lot of time you simply can't get much out of his colors. While blue is pretty weak, it's still better than regen when you're not tanking. For example in Army of One Daken would only get purple over Punisher if Punisher is high enough level. In PvE it's a lot easier to rearrange your team to take advantage of Daken's regen.

That's a special case, black and purple are both rather uncommon. And green is his primary color so he'd only lose it to another green when they're boosted

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Daken's regen matters a lot less for PvP because a lot of time you simply can't get much out of his colors. While blue is pretty weak, it's still better than regen when you're not tanking. For example in Army of One Daken would only get purple over Punisher if Punisher is high enough level. In PvE it's a lot easier to rearrange your team to take advantage of Daken's regen.

That's a special case, black and purple are both rather uncommon. And green is his primary color so he'd only lose it to another green when they're boosted

Ideally you'd want to have your featured character at the maximum level though. Red/green/black is the most common template of characters, and on any such character Daken would only have purple if that character is maxed (and you won't always need max either).

NorthernPolarity

Blarg, hearing all of this arguing kinda makes me want to finish coding up that MPQ simulator thing I was doing so that we can have good numbers on exactly how many tiles will be on the board on average given whatever strategies. Current source from the 3-5 hours of work I did on that plane ride a while back is here if anyone is interested (I'm looking at you mischief): https://github.com/NorthernPolarity/MPQ ... master/src

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Daken's regen matters a lot less for PvP because a lot of time you simply can't get much out of his colors. While blue is pretty weak, it's still better than regen when you're not tanking. For example in Army of One Daken would only get purple over Punisher if Punisher is high enough level. In PvE it's a lot easier to rearrange your team to take advantage of Daken's regen.

That's a special case, black and purple are both rather uncommon. And green is his primary color so he'd only lose it to another green when they're boosted

Ideally you'd want to have your featured character at the maximum level though. Red/green/black is the most common template of characters, and on any such character Daken would only have purple if that character is maxed (and you won't always need max either).

I thought that Red/green/Yellow was the most common? The only RGB I can think of are Hulk and punisher. And realistically other than those two, the only other black character that would be a priority leveling target would be BP. Psylocke and HT are both fairly niche, and much lower priority spends unless you're swimming in ISO

Meto5000

Phantron wrote:

Daken's regen matters a lot less for PvP because a lot of time you simply can't get much out of his colors. While blue is pretty weak, it's still better than regen when you're not tanking. For example in Army of One Daken would only get purple over Punisher if Punisher is high enough level. In PvE it's a lot easier to rearrange your team to take advantage of Daken's regen.

Since green is the most powerful color in nearly all my team compositions it will be the color I try to match the most. Below is a list of characters that when buffed will out-tank Daken for green. Less than 50% of them have any green matching.

Edit: Boosted 115's like Loki will not tank their weakest match color for 141s for whom that color is their strongest match.



Even having one or two colors that Daken can match means you can have him tank single target nukes most of the time if you're careful.

Phaserhawk wrote:

I too play 5/5/3, but as being the best? the healing is only better for 2 turns. That is, if you have 10 blue and match 3 you got to 7, 5/5/3 still gets you health where 5/4/4 doesn't, and if you are below 7. It takes one less turn to get back to healing than it does 5/4/4. The big issue is really the blue. 5/4/4 does more on the front end, 5/5/3 will do more on the back end. That's it. take your pick.

5/4/4 only does more damage if you have 4 strike tiles out. If you're ever using ChemRe before you have 4 strike tiles out that extra damage potential is wasted. If you only use the power with 4+ strike tiles on the board you're wasting the potential of adding more green to create a better board state. I can see a case for 5/3/5 since it adds more damage to each strike tile you blow up with the tradeoff being your regen takes a hit. If you're focusing on quick kills and not worried so much about using Daken as an uber tank than 5/3/5 is the way to go. 5/4/4 just seems like you're giving up regen and flexibility for extra damage only sometimes.

Other 3* with Green matches (10)
Hulk
Torch
Loki (Lvl 173 boosted Loki will not tank for 141s with green as their strongest color)
Punisher
Ragnarok
Sentry
Patch (Also regens)
Mohawk
Thor
She-Hulk

Other 3* w/o Green Matches (11)
Black Panther
GSBW
Daredevil
Doom
Falcon
Hood
Iron Man
Magneto
Psylocke
Spider Man
Cap

over_clocked

nitpick: Loki can't go to lvl 141 or 212 with buff.

Meto5000

locked wrote:

nitpick: Loki can't go to lvl 141 or 212 with buff.

Forgot about that. I wonder what Loki's match damage is at max level.