Is Rebalancing (Nerfing) Stronger Characters Necessary?

SummerGlau

better testing of new characters prevents the need to nerf older characters

carrion_pigeons

I assume I'm the only person who thinks nerfs are an important tool that it's stupid to take off the table. We all know there's eventually going to be an OML level mistake that warps the game for a year, and turning the game into something that one-dimensional for that long is just not an acceptable alternative to just using the nerfbat and accepting the fallout.

Yes, it's a shame that nerfs like Spider-Man and Magneto took away fun ways to play completely instead of bringing them in line with other characters. But can you imagine how awful the game would have been for the entire rest of the 3* tier, if Sentry hadn't gotten nerfed? Raise your hand if you like the idea of Hood having 50% more health than he does.

If a character is ruining a tier, there should be honest evaluation of the cost of nerfing versus the cost of enduring a sucky game for however long it takes to correct itself. And some of that time, nerfing should be the right answer. I don't think the game needs nerfs right now, but we really ought to accept that at some point it's going to have to happen to fix a long-term problem and people are just going to have to suck it up.

seyerin

Great post partner, I agree

Jaedenkaal

I feel like this poll is the equivalent of your boss sending out a survey asking employees if they think they should take a pay cut. Even if you do think you're overpaid, why would you say yes? "Pay everyone else more!" you'd say, "and then by comparison I won't be getting paid too much".

Well I think nerfs are justified in certain cases, and I don't agree that simply buffing everyone else is an acceptable alternative (and would you really be fooled if they simply buffed every other character so high that Rulk, or Ice Man, or whoever sucked in comparison? No, it'd be exactly the same except that they'd also have to re-tool the entire scaling scheme of the entire game to compensate.)

As an aside, I totally agree with Babinro that Recharge was still very useful at 8 AP.

Crowl

Nerfs should be an absolute last resort, they need to be far more careful in the first place when it comes to designing and testing characters and the way they interact with other ones as then there should be no need for nerfs, just look at how many times players have spotted interactions from the initial character numbers and powers posts that have been overlooked by the devs.

Punisher5784

babinro wrote:

Yes! I accept that I'm in the huge minority here but I'm all about character balance for the good of the game and that includes nerfs.

1) IM40:
2) Juggernaught:
3) Ares:

I find it amusing that two of the characters you want to nerf are the reason why we need to use IM40. This just proves my point that PvE needs to fix scaling. Why nerf characters that we need to defeat these high health, cheap AP enemies. As long as Jugs has 6AP abilities, then IM40 needs to keep his.

Skygazing

babinro wrote:

Is the overpowered character actually harmful for the game?

Personal Opinion Time! What characters do I personally feel demand a nerf?

1) IM40: I feel his yellow is undercosted to the point where its actually harmful for the game. Unlike Fist, IM40 has a great health pool to compliment this AP gain skill. MPQ recently had a bug that made yellow cost 8AP instead of 6AP and I think most of us would agree that the skill costing 8AP still made IM40 a great character. If I had my way I'd have kept that skill at 8AP.

2) Juggernaught: Here is a 1* whose damage and health places him leagues above his 1* alternatives. Most players just roster him alone cause he can easily school ddq on his own. Either buff all other 1* characters in the game or take the easier action by making Juggs better balanced against other offensive characters.

3) Ares: This character is basically the Juggernaught of 2* land but not quite so extreme. In fact I think he just needs to be tuned back slightly. You have other 2's that are pretty excellent and are close in terms of power to Ares but they are often balanced out by needing multiple characters for synergy or simply having half the health.

In what ways are any of those characters (as you suggested the importance of this question) actually harmful for the game?

IM40 is a battery/support character whose red does decent damage when boosted. Otherwise he's a 3* with moderate HP and he goes down pretty quickly to just boosted 3*s. He's not at all that difficult to deal with so how is he hurting the game?

Juggernaut is typically used to solo the 1* DDQ mission, and not much else. He doesn't even really come up in BoP anymore and in regular Versus events playing with a 1* is a joke. The only harm I can see coming from him is in Story events where scaling can make just about any character ridiculous to deal with.

Ares is basically the same thing. Yeah he's one of the best 2*s but that tier of characters don't matter at all outside of Story. And again, the issue there is how characters scale.

IMO the nerfs you've mentioned (aside from Ares) would actually cause more harm to the game. Without IM40 as a reliable battery many people will have much slower clear times in Story; increasing the cost to 8 would just mean it would be mandatory to take a +2 R/Y boost into fights which just eats up ISO. That sounds pretty miserable. And Juggernaut? Are you telling me you'd prefer for people to have to waste HP and ISO on additional 1*s for the sake of a single daily node?

The only time a nerf is ever even remotely feasible is if a character is so ridiculous that you can't use anything else (closest problem currently is the entire 5* tier, but that's a whole other beast). And with the boosted system in place that doesn't happen.

Polares

Right now I think there might be two or three chars in the whole game that might need a bit of tweaking so they are not thaaaaaaat good. So it is not a bad situation. (And I said tweak, not nerf, very small changes to make them on par with other chars in their top tier)

I agree Recharge at 8AP (or even 7AP, just not two matches) should be tweaked.

Then in 4 land, to those that say that no one is OP, what do you think of Peggy's blue? (Yeah, a part from her crazy good yellow, her blue is nuts!). In this PvE she is buffed and my 316 Peggy is now 421. At that level her blue does 16k per countdown! Plus the two char stun, for 11 AP !?!?!?!?!?!? As a reference GG purple does 10k per countdown ( It is one AP cheaper but it doesn't have stun). And of course, it doesn't matter that they are countdowns, because if you play the ability as you should, there will be no one to match them because they will be stunned. So, simply put, this is nuts!

4s usually start being competitive with 5s when they reach 325 to 330 level (unbuffed). At 330 when buffed their powers are as strong as 5s. At 340 their powers are stronger than the 450 level 5s. Peggy's blue is stronger than 5 powers at 316!!!, 15 levels before all other 4s !!!! (My Rhulk is now 330 and when buffed he does 22k for 18AP which I think is on par with Bolt's green for example).

I used to think Iceman was the best by a very small margin over Peggy, but looks like Peggy scales faster than Iceman, so from now on, at least for me, Peggy is THE BEST 4.

So yeah, don't hoard, open your LTs now and get as many Peggys as you can before she leaves LTs, don't worry about all the covers you will have to sell, it is worth it!!!!

GrimSkald

Polares wrote:

Right now I think there might be two or three chars in the whole game that might need a bit of tweaking so they are not thaaaaaaat good. So it is not a bad situation. (And I said tweak, not nerf, very small changes to make them on par with other chars in their top tier)

I agree Recharge at 8AP (or even 7AP, just not two matches) should be tweaked.

Then in 4 land, to those that say that no one is OP, what do you think of Peggy's blue? (Yeah, a part from her crazy good yellow, her blue is nuts!). In this PvE she is buffed and my 316 Peggy is now 421. At that level her blue does 16k per countdown! Plus the two char stun, for 11 AP !?!?!?!?!?!? As a reference GG purple does 10k per countdown ( It is one AP cheaper but it doesn't have stun). And of course, it doesn't matter that they are countdowns, because if you play the ability as you should, there will be no one to match them because they will be stunned. So, simply put, this is nuts!

4s usually start being competitive with 5s when they reach 325 to 330 level (unbuffed). At 330 when buffed their powers are as strong as 5s. At 340 their powers are stronger than the 450 level 5s. Peggy's blue is stronger than 5 powers at 316!!!, 15 levels before all other 4s !!!! (My Rhulk is now 330 and when buffed he does 22k for 18AP which I think is on par with Bolt's green for example).

I used to think Iceman was the best by a very small margin over Peggy, but looks like Peggy scales faster than Iceman, so from now on, at least for me, Peggy is THE BEST 4.

So yeah, don't hoard, open your LTs now and get as many Peggys as you can before she leaves LTs, don't worry about all the covers you will have to sell, it is worth it!!!!

There are limitations on her stun, though. It does not stun the targeted character, so if there are two characters left on the other side, it will only stun one, and if there is one character left it won't stun. The countdowns are 3 turns, so if any characters on the other side are not stunned (and generally one won't be,) you will lose at least one the vast majority of the time, possibly two or all three. She takes some work to get right (fire the stun when you can kill one character, down the character, hope a cascade doesn't take out the CDs,) which of course makes it much less effective defensively.

Don't get me wrong, she's a great character, I just don't think she's inherently better than IMHB or Cyclops, and I still see Iceman as the top of the 4* tier (does two tricks very well,) I just don't think any of the top 6 are so much better than the rest that they should be tweaked, nor do I see the top 6 so far and away more powerful than the rest that they need to be brought down.

In other words, like I said before, I don't see the need for any nerfs at this time, big or small.

WelcomeDeath

carrion pigeons wrote:

I assume I'm the only person who thinks nerfs are an important tool that it's stupid to take off the table. We all know there's eventually going to be an OML level mistake that warps the game for a year, and turning the game into something that one-dimensional for that long is just not an acceptable alternative to just using the nerfbat and accepting the fallout.

I do not understand why people think OML is OP. Yes, his healing is great. Yes, his strikes are great. But he is slow....very slow. And if you have a BSS, his strikes are irrelevant. His transformation is great, but its very very expensive. Need 12 yellow, 16 black and 8 red to transform and fire his skills ONE time after transforming...36 AP.
I think the main reason people think hes OP is because hes used so often, but that has more to do with the fact that he was one of the original three and is more covered by more players than the later 5s...not because hes OP.

Daredevil217

KGB wrote:

Every Buff to one character is in reality a Nerf to every other character.

This was best illustrated when they gave a health boost to a lot of characters a while back in certain tiers. That health boost in effect nerfed all characters that didn't get the boost.

So what D3 is doing with the buffing of characters in the 4* tier is slightly nerfing all other 4* characters. Given enough time and enough buffs those characters who once defined the meta will be left behind until they themselves require buffs. It's an arm race.

KGB

Killians8 wrote:

If rebalancing is the goal, nerfing is no different than boosting. In fact, if there are more overpowered than underpowered characters, then nerfing is the quickest route to balance.

For those that complain or want refunds on nerfed characters, you're forgetting to be grateful that you've had the advantage for so long which you shouldn't have had. I wish I had an OML yellow so I could assert that dominance, but I don't.

This is a gross over-generalization, and is flat out wrong.

This isn't simply, the new model makes the old model obselete. Characters have different strengths and can function VERY well in certain capacities but not be OP because they are weak in other areas.

Court Death is my go to against low level seed teams, Strange is my go to against goons, Cap is my go to for board control, Patch/Daken for climbing and conserving health, IM40/Fist/Witch are my batteries, then of course you just play who is boosted.

Falcon getting buffed did not nerf any of the above. They are still very strong in the areas I use them in. My "toys" work just as well as they did before. It's just that I'll use Sam more than I did before.

Let's assume Peggy, Rulk and Bobby are top tier 4's. Elektra, Mordo and Venom are bottom tier. How does Star-Lord's HUGE improvement change any of these characters? You could argue that Star-Lord's synergy with countdown makers buffs characters like Peggy even more when paired. The top is still the top and the bottom continues to be ignored. The exception is Star-Lord is no longer ignored.

The premise "a buff is a nerf to everyone" also works under the premise that everyone has every character. I'm not lucky enough to have Iceman, Peggy, Medusa, Carol, Deadpool, etc champed. The way my covers fell I got 13 Star-Lords. So for me the buff to Star-Lord means so much more as he's one of the better toons on my roster.

Wasp got a huge update and no one complained. No one mumbled or groaned because their toys worked the exact same as they did before. There was just a new one to covet. But when characters get over nerfed to the point in which they are unusable people damn near riot. The time, energy and resources seem wasted and for many like me who don't have an expansive roster, we can't just go play all the other characters that are now "buffed" (using your theory) because you made my old ones obsolete.

If someone was breaking the game, or was must-play to win then sure. But there isn't one character in the game who is necessary to play in order to win (except maybe boosted characters in general).

Nerfing is bad business.

Tee

I don't think any character needs a nerf currently but to say characters never need a nerf is rather crazy to me.

Power creep is a real thing and constantly buffing characters is the same as nerfing.