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

zodiac339

Oh my, the cheese with Cardusa just got so much better. You could safely set him to 5/3/5, and Entaglement paired with Alien instincts starts popping enemy protects at the end of turn 2. And will it make 3 at once with the AOE of Symbiote Scythes. Then quickly costing 7 AP for Sybiotic Fury with damage that matters and disgusting amounts of board shake. Still no blue or black outlet, and that's sad.
Also, the team with Grocket and Drax still sounds good.

Pongie

monsieurmojo said:

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

Fixed it for you

Brigby

Thanos said:

I'm pretty sure they just nerfed Venom. His green still sucks even with a slight damage boost, his black is still tinykitty 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.

@Thanos
 (Disclaimer: I'm not a designer/developer, so please consider my following comments as spoken by a fellow player)

His yellow does give the enemy protect tiles, but wouldn't that detail be practically negligible if at level 5 his black reduces them all to 1?

zodiac339

Pongie said:

monsieurmojo said:

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

Fixed it for you

No, you broke it. Unibeam does about 6700 for 13 red plus 2 purple, red, and yellow. A base of 6500 for 12 yellow is favorably comparible to Unibeam. It's his only damage move and, much like other supportive heroes (Kamala Khan, Falcon), it looks really quite good compared to a similarly costed power of a more damage-focused hero. Not quite as good as Righteous Uppercut with both allies up, but far better than it with 1 ally down. I wonder if Spidey PVP will see lots of teams with 1 fodder character to actively get killed. Maybe paired with Punisher MAX.

Khartmann

The numbers on Spid3y are absurd, doing about 1k damage per AP. It's basically the damage of hulkbuster red when he is boosted. 

It's the best damage dealing power of the tier and with his support powers he surely is now one of the best in the tier, but not balanced at all. 

STOPTHIS

Spidey's yellow hits pretty well. 12ap is quite a bit, but I'm thankful he can deal some damage. I think he'd fit nicely in a Iron Fist/Cyclops team.

I'm really looking forward to playing around with Venom. His green isn't blowing up my skirt, but I like where his black is at and yellow still good too. Venom bomb is going to be something different. Cage might be the MVP he has been the last few times. Pairing him with Medusa seems like a no brainer, but I kinda wanna try him with Rocket and Starlord.

DrDevilDinosaur

@Brigby

Just wondering if you can get some confirmation on Venom at rank 5 - the description shows that it sets the strength of enemy protect tiles to 1 (rather than reducing by a % like the other ranks). How does this interact with tile strength buffs?

For example,

enemy 4* Falcon drop some protect tiles - Venom sets them to strength 1

enemy Falcon starts matching blue to improve the strength - does Venom's passive keep them at 1 (at least while he is active) or does it only effect them at the time of creation?

Based off existing mechanics, I would assume that the tiles are buffed, but still only effectively strength 1 while Venom is active, however the wording of the ability at rank 5 is slightly different to what we have had before, so it would be nice to check.

Jaedenkaal

DrDevilDinosaur said:

@Brigby

Just wondering if you can get some confirmation on Venom at rank 5 - the description shows that it sets the strength of enemy protect tiles to 1 (rather than reducing by a % like the other ranks). How does this interact with tile strength buffs?

For example,

enemy 4* Falcon drop some protect tiles - Venom sets them to strength 1

enemy Falcon starts matching blue to improve the strength - does Venom's passive keep them at 1 (at least while he is active) or does it only effect them at the time of creation?

Based off existing mechanics, I would assume that the tiles are buffed, but still only effectively strength 1 while Venom is active, however the wording of the ability at rank 5 is slightly different to what we have had before, so it would be nice to check.

Reduces by 100%, to a minimum of 1, I'd imagine.

notamutant

I am pretty sure this change to Venom's yellow was a nerf. You need incredibly specific teams to ever get full value out of it. You need around 3-4 enemy protect tiles just to equal the pre-"buff" damage of his yellow. His green damage increase is negligible. Definitely a neutral change at best.
Spider-Man is better now, but I don't see the condition being all that useful. Useless on offense (no one is going to intentionally get their own teammate killed to make a 3 star hit harder), and rarely going to go off on defense.

GuntherBlobel

I, for one, am excited to try out the Venom change. I always thought that his design didn't quite gel. His green suggests that he should spam enemy protect tiles, which he didn't until now. This new kit makes more sense and has some self-synergy to play around with.

I like that he is a double-edged sword like Carnage. I think it will be fun to both play with him and against him. It will be fun to take advantage of those protect tiles he give you. He won't be great for PvP, of course... but whatever, PvP isn't the only game in town.

Jaedenkaal

notamutant said:

I am pretty sure this change to Venom's yellow was a nerf. You need incredibly specific teams to ever get full value out of it. You need around 3-4 enemy protect tiles just to equal the pre-"buff" damage of his yellow. His green damage increase is negligible. Definitely a neutral change at best.
Spider-Man is better now, but I don't see the condition being all that useful. Useless on offense (no one is going to intentionally get their own teammate killed to make a 3 star hit harder), and rarely going to go off on defense.

I think that's a little harsh. With the passive Yellow effect it won't be that hard to get a couple of tiny enemy protect tiles pretty much all of the time,  so the green  will often be cheaper than before, in addition to doing more damage. And it's really less than 3 Protect tiles before the Yellow does as much damage as before (I think. more than 5500 but less than 6500, surely) and again, 2-3 enemy protect tiles shouldnt be that hard. The AI wont try to match them away. And anything above that is better, and that's assuming the other team doesn't make Protect tiles for itself.

Bowgentle

Well it'll be fun to do Venom bomb with the higher damage numbers on a 451 Venom.

SCL based scaling. NOW.

Anon

Excited with these changes. Spidey hits hard with that yellow, and Venom got a bump in usefulness.

Speccing Spidey to 5/5/3 and Venom to 3/5/5

DrDevilDinosaur

Jaedenkaal said:

notamutant said:

I am pretty sure this change to Venom's yellow was a nerf. You need incredibly specific teams to ever get full value out of it. You need around 3-4 enemy protect tiles just to equal the pre-"buff" damage of his yellow. His green damage increase is negligible. Definitely a neutral change at best.
Spider-Man is better now, but I don't see the condition being all that useful. Useless on offense (no one is going to intentionally get their own teammate killed to make a 3 star hit harder), and rarely going to go off on defense.

I think that's a little harsh. With the passive Yellow effect it won't be that hard to get a couple of tiny enemy protect tiles pretty much all of the time,  so the green  will often be cheaper than before, in addition to doing more damage. And it's really less than 3 Protect tiles before the Yellow does as much damage as before (I think. more than 5500 but less than 6500, surely) and again, 2-3 enemy protect tiles shouldnt be that hard. The AI wont try to match them away. And anything above that is better, and that's assuming the other team doesn't make Protect tiles for itself.

Agreed.

The Black and Yellow have some good synergy between them - let's not forget Black passive also increases Venom's match damage by as much as 75% at Rank 5 (fwiw, this brings a match of three green tiles to ~446 damage, which is just shy of the 451 damage threshold for the passive portion of the Yellow).

Crowl

Jarvind said:

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 tinykitty 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.

While most suggestions to improve his yellow would have included the swapping his heal for damage, a lot of people would also make suggestions on how to improve his lacklustre purple, either thematically or in power terms so if people are complaining about that part of his change it should not be a surprise and given the high cost of his yellow along with the onerous condition to get the bonus damage, it is equally reasonable for people to complain about that too.

As far as people's spending habits being unchanged by an update to 3* Spidey, that is technically true, but at the same time seeing that they are aware of the need to make such updates would give people a better overall impression of the game and make them more likely to spend in the future.

Starfury

I'm liking both these changes

Though I suspect there's an error in the table for Venom's yellow. It seems really strange that the damage threshold for his passive is constant between lvl 70 and 270 but doubles between 270 and 366.

Lukoil

in addition to  carnage now also venom is a good choice for medusa AP generation. Her passive damage will trigger venoms passive all the time and matching those 1 power tiles will generate blue/green/pink for somone with blue/pink/green power

Jaedenkaal

Jaedenkaal said:

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.

Called it.

notamutant

Jaedenkaal said:

notamutant said:

I am pretty sure this change to Venom's yellow was a nerf. You need incredibly specific teams to ever get full value out of it. You need around 3-4 enemy protect tiles just to equal the pre-"buff" damage of his yellow. His green damage increase is negligible. Definitely a neutral change at best.
Spider-Man is better now, but I don't see the condition being all that useful. Useless on offense (no one is going to intentionally get their own teammate killed to make a 3 star hit harder), and rarely going to go off on defense.

I think that's a little harsh. With the passive Yellow effect it won't be that hard to get a couple of tiny enemy protect tiles pretty much all of the time,  so the green  will often be cheaper than before, in addition to doing more damage. And it's really less than 3 Protect tiles before the Yellow does as much damage as before (I think. more than 5500 but less than 6500, surely) and again, 2-3 enemy protect tiles shouldnt be that hard. The AI wont try to match them away. And anything above that is better, and that's assuming the other team doesn't make Protect tiles for itself.

His yellow did around 6600 before. And any condition is worse. That is the problem with conditional powers, you can't always get boosted characters that provide that condition. Being realistic here, most characters are only useful boosted (except rare exceptions like Medusa, Carol, and Peggy). If boosted, you will need to do 900+ damage to the enemy to activate his passive. 

Jaedenkaal

notamutant said:

His yellow did around 6600 before. And any condition is worse. That is the problem with conditional powers, you can't always get boosted characters that provide that condition. Being realistic here, most characters are only useful boosted (except rare exceptions like Medusa, Carol, and Peggy). If boosted, you will need to do 900+ damage to the enemy to activate his passive. 

Sure. So at 3 enemy protect tiles it's largely the same (6714). Anything less and it's worse, any more and it gets really good, really fast. 

Carnage and Medusa both do enough damage every turn, passively, as would most 5* match damage of a comparable level. Ant-Man, Gamora, and Rocket & Groot can all set up enough recurring damage with a single ability use

Failing that, you'd need between 200 and 500 Strike tile strength total to meet the threshold with 4* match damage, remembering that Venom will do 45-75% more match damage as long as he's tanking his colors, so at 366 that means he makes Green match-3s that do 717 damage.

R&G naturally begin the match with sufficient Strike tiles. Gamora creates a strong enough one after a single incapacitate, Iron Fist after a single Chi Focus, and, of course, Nova, Wasp or Punisher.

The required boosted 3* in the match will also provide additional options, if applicable. Daken, Iron Fist, Psylocke, Hawkeye, Human Torch, Storm, and so on.

Oh the whole I'd say the change to Symbiotic Fury is clearly a buff (+27% at rank 5, with no downsides), Give and Take is no longer a massive liability in some cases and dead weight in many, so I'd call that a buff. The passive addition to Lethal Protector is (to me) clearly better than the Protect tile rider from before, which should spread tiny protect tiles around the board with much greater frequency and thus further increase SF's usability.

So even if we consider the Lethal Protector active change to be neutral, which I could get behind, I think he's clearly been buffed to the point where it's not absurd to use him, and he does seem like he could be a pretty good counter to Luke Cage teams, and special tile teams in general.