**** Sandman (Flint Marko) ****

Cthulhu

Vhailorx said:

Zodiac: i am assuming that the yellow power creates tiles and the, checks against the toles thresholds, kind of like hobofist blue.  If that is the case then 2 casts will proc damage.  If not then sandman is even worse.

Sorry about that, I will review again, they made a last minute edit and I'll double check the numbers again.

Anon

Yeah he seems pretty lackluster. I love the character but these moves are ehh.

Hoping I'm wrong like I was for Blade.

Cthulhu

I just reviewed it again and the numbers are correct as of release 130.  I'll ask the designer or QA though just to double check.

OzarkBoatswain

Positives:
Cheapest stun ability that's on green. 5* Spider-Man, 3* Gamora and 3* Ock have the others. Could be useful with 4* Gamora.

Some move synergy with purple creating yellow. 

If purple checks for match-3s both before and after the colors change, it could be a little better -- that's something to check.

Negatives:
The powers are boring and do not bring to mind the comic book character.

Green doesn't compare favorably with many similar abilities on blue.

Purple doesn't compare favorably with similar moves. It swaps fewer tiles at level 5 than Loki's 5 AP purple at level 2. Kingpin's 8 AP purple just straight up gives you 5 or 8 yellow AP and also destroys enemy AP. 

Yellow's damage is only decent compared to other yellow damage powers, which are rare and equally underwhelming.   4* Sam's protect tiles are usually slightly better in total for 9 AP. Unlike 4* Sam, Sandman's get removed by the damage move. If you don't have another protect tile move, you'll have to have 20 yellow AP to get the damage.

Rick_OShay

As mentioned he will be played for his purple/green, letting others on your team make better use of yellow.
Sandman will play well with C4ge and Mr. Fantastic.
Full rainbow actives, purple for yellow AP acceleration (and I have great hopes on how this will work at 5 covers).  
Have Imaginaut out before Sandman's purple swap for tons of extra damage on automatic yellow matches.
Mr F's blue swap helps you target colors you need to build AP on, he stuns the target enemy, and fortifies new protect tiles.
Cage should be able to cast yellow often enough, for especially good damage if he has he placed any protect tiles passively to fortify. 
Save Sandman's green for when the AoE will KO a weakened side enemy while stunning the target. 

As a side point, the AI would probably play this team well for you on defense since Cage's yellow will often be played before SM's, and if not you'll have tons of annoying protects for Cage to fortify and Mr. F to gain team health from.

zodiac339

Rick OShay said:

As mentioned he will be played for his purple/green, letting others on your team make better use of yellow.
Sandman will play well with C4ge and Mr. Fantastic.
Full rainbow actives, purple for yellow AP acceleration (and I have great hopes on how this will work at 5 covers).  
Have Imaginaut out before Sandman's purple swap for tons of extra damage on automatic yellow matches.
Mr F's blue swap helps you target colors you need to build AP on, he stuns the target enemy, and fortifies new protect tiles.
Cage should be able to cast yellow often enough, for especially good damage if he has he placed any protect tiles passively to fortify. 
Save Sandman's green for when the AoE will KO a weakened side enemy while stunning the target. 

As a side point, the AI would probably play this team well for you on defense since Cage's yellow will often be played before SM's, and if not you'll have tons of annoying protects for Cage to fortify and Mr. F to gain team health from.

Can't agree on the defense side. Too often, AI will wait when it says to itself, "You know, I could use Hero for Hire now, but this other guy has a yelllow that costs more. That means it's better, right? I'll just wait for 10."

himatako

Seems like the description of Sand Smash has been fixed to make it clearer. The conditional damage part is checked after the protect tiles are created. This mean you only need to fire his yellow twice to deal damage. Or if your bring 3* Cage with you then Sandman's yellow will always deal damage at 5 covers.

Vhailorx

himatako said:

Seems like the description of Sand Smash has been fixed to make it clearer. The conditional damage part is checked after the protect tiles are created. This mean you only need to fire his yellow twice to deal damage. Or if your bring 3* Cage with you then Sandman's yellow will always deal damage at 5 covers.

Thanks to demi for the clarification.

If possible, could they also fix the problem where his yellow costs 10ap and does less than 6k damage even if you can get the damage to proc with every cast?

Jaedenkaal

Vhailorx said:

If possible, could they also fix the problem where his yellow costs 10ap and does less than 6k damage even if you can get the damage to proc with every cast?

I believe that's a "feature"

zodiac339

Hey, how about how Falcon (looking at my level 217) doing 2037 AOE, 6100 total, and leaving 8 protects strength 123, 980 total protect. For 9 AP.
Geez, at level 270, Sandman's barely meeting the protect amount of a 3* 60 levels below. For 1 more AP. And no damage.
Is it just me, or does even Supernova seem better than this?

Jaedenkaal

zodiac339 said:

Hey, how about how Falcon (looking at my level 217) doing 2037 AOE, 6100 total, and leaving 8 protects strength 123, 980 total protect. For 9 AP.
Geez, at level 270, Sandman's barely meeting the protect amount of a 3* 60 levels below. For 1 more AP. And no damage.
Is it just me, or does even Supernova seem better than this?

Yeah, at 270 Sam's protects are strength 135; 1080 total, and he does 2264 team damage, all for 9 AP. To be fair, the new Bird Strike is a really good power, by 3* standards. It already totally blows Coercive Field, Defense Grid, and The Bigger They Are right out of the water.

The 10 AP here for either 6 x 168 Protects or 5542 damage and the removal of all protects does seem pretty lame. I don't know if it's very comparable to Supernova since they don't do any of the same things.

Sand Smash would probably be better if it simply destroyed the Protect tiles (dealing damage and generating AP) rather than removing them. I don't think that would be terribly abuse-able since the powers that create the largest number of Protect tiles in a single color cost Yellow AP, but at least you'd get something (on top of the sub-par damage) for the protect tiles you're losing, and there would actually be a benefit to firing the power with more than exactly 1 existing Protect tile out. Currently, if you have 5 protect tiles out already for whatever reason, you lose those 5 in addition to the 6 generated by Sand Smash, even though you gain nothing for this.

zodiac339

Jaedenkaal said:

zodiac339 said:

Hey, how about how Falcon (looking at my level 217) doing 2037 AOE, 6100 total, and leaving 8 protects strength 123, 980 total protect. For 9 AP.
Geez, at level 270, Sandman's barely meeting the protect amount of a 3* 60 levels below. For 1 more AP. And no damage.
Is it just me, or does even Supernova seem better than this?

Yeah, at 270 Sam's protects are strength 135; 1080 total, and he does 2264 team damage, all for 9 AP. To be fair, the new Bird Strike is a really good power, by 3* standards. It already totally blows Coercive Field, Defense Grid, and The Bigger They Are right out of the water.

The 10 AP here for either 6 x 168 Protects or 5542 damage and the removal of all protects does seem pretty lame. I don't know if it's very comparable to Supernova since they don't do any of the same things.

Sand Smash would probably be better if it simply destroyed the Protect tiles (dealing damage and generating AP) rather than removing them. I don't think that would be terribly abuse-able since the powers that create the largest number of Protect tiles in a single color cost Yellow AP, but at least you'd get something (on top of the sub-par damage) for the protect tiles you're losing, and there would actually be a benefit to firing the power with more than exactly 1 existing Protect tile out. Currently, if you have 5 protect tiles out already for whatever reason, you lose those 5 in addition to the 6 generated by Sand Smash, even though you gain nothing for this.

Yeah, I was thinking either generating AP per consumed protect with minor board shake or also destroying tiles surrounding the protect tiles without generating AP would make sense for the damage per AP with the condition to do damage in the first place. Or something to fortify protect tiles and have the power say "destroy all friendly protect tiles". But that would still be excessively poor compared to using Hero for Hire with a bunch of fortified protect tiles.
Maybe I should stop thinking about this power. It's really aggravating.

JHawkInc

Sandman's icon is a little weird. The one for his AP, a sandy morningstar over a green striped background, totally feels like Sandman.

The same morningstar on tiles looks like a plain sunburst. I'm running him with Blade and Iron Fist right now, and Blade's sunglasses and Iron Fist's dragon tattoo are both way more evocative of the character than Sandman's tile. Something just gets lost in translation going from his AP icon to his tile icon.

Jarvind

JHawkInc said:

Sandman's icon is a little weird. The one for his AP, a sandy morningstar over a green striped background, totally feels like Sandman.

The same morningstar on tiles looks like a plain sunburst. I'm running him with Blade and Iron Fist right now, and Blade's sunglasses and Iron Fist's dragon tattoo are both way more evocative of the character than Sandman's tile. Something just gets lost in translation going from his AP icon to his tile icon.

I had the same thought, but I also couldn't think of an instantly recognizable representation of "sand" that would fit on the tile. Maybe a tiny version of his stripey shirt? Or an hourglass, as per his release hint?

JHawkInc

Jarvind said:

JHawkInc said:

Sandman's icon is a little weird. The one for his AP, a sandy morningstar over a green striped background, totally feels like Sandman.

The same morningstar on tiles looks like a plain sunburst. I'm running him with Blade and Iron Fist right now, and Blade's sunglasses and Iron Fist's dragon tattoo are both way more evocative of the character than Sandman's tile. Something just gets lost in translation going from his AP icon to his tile icon.

I had the same thought, but I also couldn't think of an instantly recognizable representation of "sand" that would fit on the tile. Maybe a tiny version of his stripey shirt? Or an hourglass, as per his release hint?

Yeah, that was the problem our alliance ran into. Someone else suggested the stripey shirt. Only other ideas we had were a brick/pyramid design kinda like THIS. Upside is it links to sand well, downside is that Sandman doesn't have anything to do with pyramids or Egypt or anything. And then you could do an outline of the giant sand form from his art-set (from the Marvel.com article). But that's using his "rare" form for his "all-the-time" tile. Like, Riri's flying gauntlet could be her tile image, but it makes more sense to use a heart because she's Ironheart, you know?

The reality is that when you look for the "standard Sandman appearance", he usually has a mostly humanoid form, with one hand/forearm shifted into a sand hammer or sand morningstar. So it really makes sense for him to have the morningstar. It just looks a little too much like a sunburst on the tile (in my opinion). Could theoretically be fixed with some slight polish (rather than needing a totally new tile), but it could be left alone because it's not a HUGE deal either, you know? It's not like you can't tell which one is his.

Crowl

Sand Smash would probably be better if it simply destroyed the Protect tiles (dealing damage and generating AP) rather than removing them. I don't think that would be terribly abuse-able since the powers that create the largest number of Protect tiles in a single color cost Yellow AP, but at least you'd get something (on top of the sub-par damage) for the protect tiles you're losing, and there would actually be a benefit to firing the power with more than exactly 1 existing Protect tile out. Currently, if you have 5 protect tiles out already for whatever reason, you lose those 5 in addition to the 6 generated by Sand Smash, even though you gain nothing for this.

Sand smash just seems like another power where they haven't thought things through properly, the negatives are far too great for the cost and damage you get from it, they should redo it so that it removes steadily less protect tiles as you get more covers in the power or have additional protects beyond those needed reducing the amount destroyed, but something has to change to make the power worth spending the ap.

Vhailorx

And yellow is both the top 100 pve cover and the 900 pvp prog cover.  Thanks demi!

granne

Ah, but his green will be in Sim next season, so, um, yay?

Crowl

Vhailorx said:

And yellow is both the top 100 pve cover and the 900 pvp prog cover.  Thanks demi!

And the alliance cover too. 

I was lucky enough to already get the Sandman cover out of the Strange vault too, guess which colour that was?

Handoftheking26

I'm not the best at seeing potential in team-ups, but he looks terrible at first glance. I was very excited about a new villain, especially a classic one. But he doesn't look like a usable 4*, he seems more like Mordo, a good idea that was improperly executed.