Soul Gem Season Changes *Updated (6/27/17)

The Viceroy Returns

Just for funsies, would have been neat to see a 1 Star Venom update, like giving him a 3rd power (Green based on his match damage).
I would say something that generates Web tiles, like a passive or Countdown tile (similar to Scarlet Witch and Totally Adequate Hulk), but it could be used in crazy Spider-Teams for possibly over-powered results.  But I guess what's wrong with that if it introduces a new meta of some kind, even if only in lower tier player progression gameplay.

Khanwulf

Well the last revision to poor Spiderman was three years ago, and the game has moved on without him. Revising yellow to do damage instead of healing is nice, however until numbers come out it's hard to say if that accomplishes anything.

A few other comments:
* Blue is a cheap stun, which is handy. You could make it more-so by reducing it's cost by 1 for every two web tiles (minimum 3). A duration of 1/2 turns is still ok.

* Purple needs an activated effect. Perhaps a low-cost (5 or 6) power that generates a yellow web tile and a blue strike tile for each web?  Or, a power that converts a couple enemy strike (and attack at higher level) tiles into web tiles? 

There's a lot of things that could be done to make him more Spidey and less "Bag-man sans Bag".

--Khanwulf

zodiac339

Khanwulf said:

Well the last revision to poor Spiderman was three years ago, and the game has moved on without him. Revising yellow to do damage instead of healing is nice, however until numbers come out it's hard to say if that accomplishes anything.

A few other comments:
* Blue is a cheap stun, which is handy. You could make it more-so by reducing it's cost by 1 for every two web tiles (minimum 3). A duration of 1/2 turns is still ok.

* Purple needs an activated effect. Perhaps a low-cost (5 or 6) power that generates a yellow web tile and a blue strike tile for each web?  Or, a power that converts a couple enemy strike (and attack at higher level) tiles into web tiles? 

There's a lot of things that could be done to make him more Spidey and less "Bag-man sans Bag".

--Khanwulf

Blue used to cost less like that. It was determined too powerful.

Purple active, create 1 web tile. At level 2, 1 additional web tile per friendly purple protect tile, up to 2. Increase to 3 extra at rank 3. Per any friendly protect at rank 4. Up to 5 additional webs at rank 5. In practice, probably not actually good like that since the big protect spammers are Magneto, Falcon, and Flaptain, on colors that Spidey uses.
Really, Spider Woman has the best Spider Sense in the game, completely dodging most damage while Seeking Redemption is active. Maybe a passive that makes web tiles with matches, then consumes them to avoid [damage threshold] damage or a percentage damage reduction per web tile on the board, with the potential to reduce damage to Spider Man to 1 if there are enough webs. Would be a shame to lose the protect tiles though.

Straycat

mexus said:

We who only have the latest 12 and not yet covered Gamora will be glad to bring Spider Man into our 4* realm as he offers a cheap stun - something the latest 12 seem to be lacking.

I guess, but the update doesn't change that. I still think his blue is overrated.  If he could generate web tiles some other way it would be a decent power, but for 10 ap you only get 3 turns of stun. Doctor strange, Daredevil, Hawkeye all do that better in 3* land and aren't vaulted.
I was hoping, aside from giving him a damage ability, they would give him some ap gen or something to make him more helpful on 4* teams. Kinda surprised they left 2 abilities alone

Jaedenkaal

Straycat said:

mexus said:

We who only have the latest 12 and not yet covered Gamora will be glad to bring Spider Man into our 4* realm as he offers a cheap stun - something the latest 12 seem to be lacking.

I guess, but the update doesn't change that. I still think his blue is overrated.  If he could generate web tiles some other way it would be a decent power, but for 10 ap you only get 3 turns of stun. Doctor strange, Daredevil, Hawkeye all do that better in 3* land and aren't vaulted.
I was hoping, aside from giving him a damage ability, they would give him some ap gen or something to make him more helpful on 4* teams. Kinda surprised they left 2 abilities alone

You could put him on a team with Star-Lord and Coulson and just perma-stun everyone all the time

Jarvind

Zappa said:

Yeah Jarvind, we should just sit here and accept their frankly lazy attempts at character balance. For 3* spiderman, a character who has been around for YEARS, with dozens upon dozens of suggested rebalances to make him an interesting character, the only thing they did was give him a conditional damage dealing skill. No consideration for teamplay, synergy with the host of other spider heroes, or the low power of his remaining two skills. No consideration that they took a month off of fixing heroes and this is what they came up with. That they spent said downtime instead looking at their poor profits and attempting to extort the player base for more money (albeit poorly). I'm glad you're so happy to sit back and accept their 'best' efforts at improving the game. Stop mocking people that do not.

Are you posting from the Dead Sea? Because that's an awful lot of salt.

Look, I'll agree with you that he's not likely to be incredible even with the change. Unless his yellow does absolutely nutty damage, he'll never be better than "maybe use when boosted, forget he's there when he isn't."

That said, I think it's fair to say that most of the suggestions for how to change him were something to the effect of "give him a damage ability," "replace his **** heal with something useful," or some combination of the two. Given that, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that the devs didn't deliver damn-near-exactly what people have been asking for since literally the day I joined, which is 800-something days ago now.

If those same people are just now realizing that the suggestion was shortsighted or have suddenly changed their minds on how he should play, I have a hard time sympathizing with that.

What a lot of folks don't realize is that the devs don't owe you anything. If you pay for VIP or buy HP, you got exactly what you paid for - there's no clause stating that if you support the game, the devs are also obligated to tailor new or existing characters to your liking.

Would I be happier if they made Spider-Man the best 3* around? Sure, absolutely. He's by far my favorite Marvel character. Buff his 5* version too while we're at it, because he kind of blows too. But I also understand that D3/Demi/Infinite/Whoever Else is a business, and the goal of a business is to make money.

The reality is that virtually nobody's spending habits would be changed by altering 3* Spider-Man, regardless of the quality of said change, so the monetary incentive to dramatically improve him is pretty minimal. As a result, a change that makes him better at all, even superficially so, is pretty much fine in my book.

BoyWonder1914

zulux21 said:

unless the damage is massive the 3* spiderman still won't be very interesting, the changes sure don't make him work any better with miles/gwen as they need yellow to make web tiles.

will need to see the numbers on venom but doesn't sound great either, I don't have faith that the numbers will be high enough to make him above mid tier. 

Agreed. And unless this damage is actually impressive in some kind of way, that 12 Yellow ap is definitely not worth it. Venom I actually like, they were very thoughtful in his rework. 

zodiac339

The Venom rework pairing. Rocket and Groot. Green is easy, R4G uses that one. The instant strikes should probably meet the damage threshold to make enemy Protect tiles to boost Venom yellow. Throw in Drax to cover using red/black/purple, or even consider a 5/3/5 Electra to steal some of those protects back (but Drax means early boost from strikes and extra damage once Rocket's Pack starts rolling).

Warbringa

Yeah it depends on the damage for 3* Spidey.  Already his bonus damage is just worse than Cage since it only kicks in if you have defeated allies.  That is hands down inferior to Cages, which is allies still alive.  A scenario you encounter much more often than having downed allies.  At least in my experience, I rarely ever have a character go down, albeit they may get very close.  

Venom does sound better and actually decent but he didn't change enough to be only mid tier 4* at best now, depending on damages.  His passive against protect tiles really isn't better than just bringing someone who can add strike tiles, which effectively counter protect tiles.  Someone who adds strike tiles is just superior since they are good against characters with or without protect tiles.  Venom's passive is only useful against protect tiles. The match damage bonus sounds great, but really isn't that spectacular considering at best Venom is only make 50% of your matches and more likely 25 to 33% of them and he is also taking more damage too.

Zappa

Saying banal things like "the devs don't owe you anything" and "they are a business first" is the kind of short sighted mentality that neither raises profit margins nor instills goodwill with your customers. This is not a AAA title that can ride on the back of great graphics or amazing story or complex and intricate gameplay. The only way this game stays around is if they make it fun. If the game is fun, people want to spend more time with it, spend more money to do cool things with it. Not everything needs to be a buff, but changes should overall trend to making players have a better time and make them want to play more. Name a single change in the last 6 months that have made you want to play more, or made you say 'you guys are doing such a great job I'm going to buy a Stark'. You just wrote up a veritable essay on the travesty that is 5* transition and early 5* play, a problem that has been around and has only gotten worse for the past year, and yet you have the temerity to stand up for their poor decisions and lack of effort. People are actively avoiding getting into the 'end game' because of testimonials like yours (throwing around boring internet insults like salt, when you wrote an essay full of it, is ironic).  If they had buffed spiderman 3* to high hell, you're right, that would have changed nobody's spending habits. But the fact that they did virtually nothing just reinforces the stereotype that D3 would rather spend an entire two months working on H4H, and working to in fact make it worse.

Jarvind

Zappa said:

Saying banal things like "the devs don't owe you anything" and "they are a business first" is the kind of short sighted mentality that neither raises profit margins nor instills goodwill with your customers. This is not a AAA title that can ride on the back of great graphics or amazing story or complex and intricate gameplay. The only way this game stays around is if they make it fun. If the game is fun, people want to spend more time with it, spend more money to do cool things with it. Not everything needs to be a buff, but changes should overall trend to making players have a better time and make them want to play more. Name a single change in the last 6 months that have made you want to play more, or made you say 'you guys are doing such a great job I'm going to buy a Stark'. You just wrote up a veritable essay on the travesty that is 5* transition and early 5* play, a problem that has been around and has only gotten worse for the past year, and yet you have the temerity to stand up for their poor decisions and lack of effort. People are actively avoiding getting into the 'end game' because of testimonials like yours (throwing around boring internet insults like salt, when you wrote an essay full of it, is ironic).  If they had buffed spiderman 3* to high hell, you're right, that would have changed nobody's spending habits. But the fact that they did virtually nothing just reinforces the stereotype that D3 would rather spend an entire two months working on H4H, and working to in fact make it worse.

If you go back and read the post about 5*s that you're referencing, you'll notice that at no point did I call directly on the devs to rethink the game, or say that the state of the 5* game means the devs are lazy, or anything like that. I simply described the issues that part of the game has, and recommended against it for those who aren't there yet. I've since sold off my 5* characters to regain my 4* scaling, because I have no expectation that a dev is going to read that post and go "My god! We've been doing it wrong all this time! Thank god for Jarvind!"

While I'd like to agree with your stance that the game needs to be fun to stay around, the state of the F2P market seems to indicate pretty much the exact opposite. The most profitable games are usually the ones that are the most grindy, the least fun, the most "pay to win."  One of the games in that link is literally a slot machine. Here's an article by a guy that sunk a ton of cash into another one on the list explaining why it's a horrible game but he kept playing and paying anyway.

That's because at its core, F2P pretty much depends on addictive tendencies and sunk-cost fallacy to operate. You get thrown on a treadmill that has an "end goal" that is theoretically reachable but astronomically far away. Even though the logical part of your brain knows you'll never reach it, the pigeon-in-a-Skinner-box part says "keep playing! keep upgrading! try to get ahead of the curve! you already sunk this much in, you can't quit now! zomg dopamine!"

It's possible to recognize that something is an issue and also recognize where it falls on a priority list. Imagine you're a mechanic, and somebody brings in a car that's been in a bad accident. Are you going to start by fixing the stereo? It'd technically make the car a bit better, and it's more fun to have a car with a working stereo, right?

Old three-stars just aren't a huge priority, so as I said, seeing any change to them that improves them a bit is a pleasant surprise.

Jaedenkaal

Warbringa said:

Yeah it depends on the damage for 3* Spidey.  Already his bonus damage is just worse than Cage since it only kicks in if you have defeated allies.  That is hands down inferior to Cages, which is allies still alive.  A scenario you encounter much more often than having downed allies.  At least in my experience, I rarely ever have a character go down, albeit they may get very close.  

Yeah the condition isn't stellar, as you say, but as we haven't seen the numbers yet, it's possible that it does ~6000 damage base at 166, plus bonus damage with downed allies, which would be a very reasonable 500 damage per AP, on par with Magnetized Projectiles, Righteous Uppercut, and A Little Off the Top. Even at 5000 damage base it would be in the same range as Optic Blasts or Colossal Punch, which are still pretty serviceable.

I'm not getting my hopes up, of course, the numbers could easily be lower than that. Still, "Not As Good As Righteous Uppercut" isn't exactly a bad comparison. It's almost certainly "Much Better Than Smash"

madok

Too bad Spidey is the next to leave tokens when the next 3* shows up.

Brigby

*Added data charts for updated character abilities

scottee

What do people think now that the numbers are posted?

Borstock

Jarvind said:

Haha, man

Everyone, for years: "OMG SPIDERMAN SUCKS TAKE AWAY HIS BAD HEAL AND GIVE HIM DAMAGE"

Devs: Okay we replaced his bad heal with damage.

Everyone: "OMG SPIDERMAN IS UNINTERESTING AND STILL NOT THAT GOOD"

Just can't please some people.

I find the buff uninteresting, but was already using him with Miles and Gwen. So, I'm not displeased, personally. I just don't think this will alter when I do or don't utilize the character. 

SkadenFrudee

6500 and 12k if an ally is downed? Not bad, if they had improved one of the other colors more, he'd be pretty alright. 

monsieurmojo

6,500 is comparable Unibeam, and 12k is better than Full Blast. A bit expensive, to be sure, but that's a pretty big hit.

Thanos

I'm pretty sure they just nerfed Venom. His green still sucks even with a slight damage boost, his black is still **** and you now have to give the enemy 3 protect tiles before it'll do the same damage as before. Maybe Demiurge should let a different employee take a crack at Venom, maybe try the janitor, he can't do much worse.

DrDevilDinosaur

Numbers look decent for Venom. With 6 enemy special tiles out, Symbiotic Fury comes to a respectable ~600 damage:ap, although I think the clear role of this ability is to cascade the board through tile destruction rather than as a damage source.

Under the same conditions, Lethal Protector hits for 9900 (9894 if they're protect tiles). That's ~1100 dmg:ap, which is a very good return IMO.

Will be interested to see if he's as fun to play as he seems on paper. If so, he might start getting some ISO.