*** Storm (Mohawk) ***

over_clocked

Nereb wrote:

The fact that they powered up none of the *1 in Thick as Thieves lets us know exactly what they think of *1s, and also what they think of F2P.

Storm's MVP colour is actually that Black hoo! That's a lot of lingering damage.

1*s never get powered up outside of limited roster events (Heroics).

DubbaHuss

I have her fully covered and pushed her to 114, just to get her past 166 while boosted in the current pvp, and I'm stunned by how awful she is. Such a waste of a formerly very good character. She's now one of the least threatening three stars. I won't give her another drop of iso until she's buffed ( which is likely never since buffs in this game never hardly ever come around)

wymtime

HairyDave wrote:

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

I don't see it - I think Storm is kind of awful.

And right at this point in time I agree with you.

However, should TUs actually become more useful (easier to manage, equip, whatever) in future, Mostorm is going to be pretty potent if she can enable you to get them out a lot faster. If I could be guaranteed to get the same spread of TU abilities the AI is managing to get, I'd be using her a hell of a lot.

With the way she is playing in PVP right now I would say she is better on defense then on offense. The AI loves itself some TU abilities and if she is the only active Yellow she can help get those TU for the AI. the problem is with such little health she can be killed fairly quickly. overall her health is too low and her powers cost too much for what they do. She will stay as a trophy in my roster incase of PVP events of buffs in PVE.

Jathro

HairyDave wrote:

However, should TUs actually become more useful (easier to manage, equip, whatever) in future, Mostorm is going to be pretty potent if she can enable you to get them out a lot faster. If I could be guaranteed to get the same spread of TU abilities the AI is managing to get, I'd be using her a hell of a lot.

And therein lies my (any many others) problem with TUs in the first place. Why run a character that lets you use other character abilities (more easily?) when you could just run those other characters?

This change really hurt Mohawk, but she was somewhat underwhelming to begin with. Had Mistress been cheaper than 9 red to cast, who knows.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

Yes black is quite decent and green, while random can be powerful. No way in hell you want NOT to give her 5 covers in each of those colours when what you get from maxing Yellow is so little in comparison. And yeah, sure you can put the positive spin that taking a number of tiles of the same "colour" from the board is a good thing. But remember, my main point is that she /was nerfed/. So you like that she takes away 5 (or 7, if you really want to go that way) white tiles from the board? Well, my friend, there were times when she used to get them ALL. Back then she also dealt slightly more damage per tile broken, so the actual damage output was much, much higher WITHOUT counting the inevitable cascades.

Putting on my devil's advocate hat again...

I'm going to continue to make a case for 5 yellow and black covers. We seem to agree on black so I'll leave that alone for now and focus on yellow. Yes, her former red version of this power removed all of the enviro tiles. Now at best she nukes seven TU tiles. Under most circumstances that will be less tile destruction, and I would assume less cascade potential (the number wizards can suss out the details of this if they like). However, let's look at what you're getting back. Previously you got a lot of enviro AP, which was either game-breakingly good, as in the case of desert, or almost entirely pointless, yum hot dog. What you get now instead is consistency, seven TU AP every time, assuming you don't use it when there are less than seven TU tiles on the board. So you've spent nine yellow and you've gotten back 7 TU AP as well as causing about 1300 damage, for a net cost of 2 AP even if you get zero cascades. If you get even one match off of it you now have more AP than you started with. Granted you must have a TU worth using or the TU AP is worth less, but again you're still denying the enemy so there's some value in that.

By taking yellow and black to 5 we've left green at 3. But even assuming you don't have a better green power to use (shame on you again), you can still turn your ten green AP into ten random AP and about 600ish damage (Woo!) assuming decent color coverage on your team, plus whatever cascade matches you get. So you now have two powers on two different colors that are likely to net you more AP than you started with and a very annoying board spamming damage over time power on black, which your other powers can help to fuel.

Pylgrim wrote:

You may have a point when you say that that skill is useful at denying the defending team T-U AP. Then again, you may just bring a better character (basically any 3* not called Loki or Ragnarok, and hell, half the 2*s are arguably better) and finish the game quicker, before the opponent collects enough T-U AP.

Just like The Hood and OBW, you have to consider Lazy Storm to be a support character. She isn't going to win matches by herself. Her job is to facilitate someone else ruining your day. The trouble is who's going to do that. Assuming you're using all three of her colors, that leave you with red, blue, and purple to smash face with. LDaken is a natural fit. He can use any blue you get for his nuke, and you get the benefit of his strike tiles on both your cascade powers and your attack tiles while keeping the green for Storm. Plus he tanks green and black for our glass-jawed sweetheart here. That leaves us with red and purple. Deadpool fits the bill, and he can help bodyguard Storm with his black passive. Purple is a tough one otherwise, but there's a lot of choices for red, Patch and LCap to name a couple. She-Hulk could be an interesting hipster pick, featuring red and blue, or Daredevil who can even use the purple. There are possibilities out there, and that's before we start talking about TU powers, which will have to be part of your plan if you want to fully utilize Storm's abilities.

Pylgrim wrote:

You want to pretend that she's still useful (even though she's not a damage dealer, a tank, or a NON-conditional support character) please be my guest. You still cannot scratch my point that she was nerfed, nor that such nerf was unfair for an already mediocre (if fun) character. Now she's more mediocre and less fun to play.

I don't have to pretend that she's still useful. She is still useful. How useful she is now versus how useful she was before is debatable. It's hard to argue that going from a five cost red to a nine cost yellow wasn't a nerf to 1* Storm, who is now far less useful than she was before. But one could argue that before she was WAY too good for a 1* character, and outside of the desert and jungle environment, gaining TU AP over enviro AP could be considered a buff. The 3* flavor of Storm never had a five cost red, so technically her power was never really nerfed in that way. The utility of green was reduced, which is one of the reasons I'm making a case for leaving it at 3. It still has uses there, and it's easy to find another good green power if you want to ignore it completely. You still have utility from yellow and black, hard to find on one character outside of Hood and BP. BP is a completely different kind of character, and even Hood can't help you deny TU AP. Meanwhile her black does damage-wise in one turn what his does period. 1* Storm took a beating, no doubt, but 3* Storm just changed with the times. Bye-bye hot dog stand. Rest in peace.

Unknown

She's not really playable because her ability seems to be roughly designed with the power of a standard HP character (e.g. Daken) except she's on the lowest HP class. If she had the same HP as Daken, she'd probably be better than Psylocke but still nowhere close to the top of the normal HP tier, which would make her a usable character.

In general there's some serious disconnect in the character power to base HP design. While nobody expects D3 to get all the exact balance right, it seems to me sometimes they don't even try. Something like Smash can be situational useful but it's generally not very strong and that's an appropriate ability for the guy with the highest HP in the game. There's nothing situational about Call the Storm or World Rupture being overpowered, and likewise there's nothing situational about the new Mistress of the Storm being below average. Even The Hood suffers from this, as Intimidation/Twin Pistols would have a hard time counting as an average ability in the normal HP tier let alone his extra low HP tier (which should have better abilities) and if not for his blue being so powerful he'd be in the same place as Storm is right now.

Twysta

Mororo who?

OzarkBoatswain

I suspect Storm will be useful against Nick Fury's Demolition. All of her abilities counter it.

Changing Mistress to yellow means she goes poorly with Black Panther now. Odd decision.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Addition of Team-Ups has been like a boat anchor on the game.
Storm is the only one that can make the boat anchor hover a few inches off the ground.

The awful feature makes the awful power somewhat useful, and thus she's slightly better than she was before.

I do like her color change. This discussion should be at the Storm (Mohawk) thread.

Pylgrim

DubbaHuss wrote:

I have her fully covered and pushed her to 114, just to get her past 166 while boosted in the current pvp, and I'm stunned by how awful she is. Such a waste of a formerly very good character. She's now one of the least threatening three stars. I won't give her another drop of iso until she's buffed ( which is likely never since buffs in this game never hardly ever come around)

Thanks for reporting this. To say the truth, I was finding hardly any significant difference between my level 120, 4/3/3 Storm and the loaner Storm you get for free in the PVP, even in a team without other yellow abilities, and wondering whether it would get any better at the max level. Time to stop wasting Iso-8 on her.

Thugpatrol wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

Yes black is quite decent and green, while random can be powerful. No way in hell you want NOT to give her 5 covers in each of those colours when what you get from maxing Yellow is so little in comparison. And yeah, sure you can put the positive spin that taking a number of tiles of the same "colour" from the board is a good thing. But remember, my main point is that she /was nerfed/. So you like that she takes away 5 (or 7, if you really want to go that way) white tiles from the board? Well, my friend, there were times when she used to get them ALL. Back then she also dealt slightly more damage per tile broken, so the actual damage output was much, much higher WITHOUT counting the inevitable cascades.

Putting on my devil's advocate hat again...

I'm going to continue to make a case for 5 yellow and black covers. We seem to agree on black so I'll leave that alone for now and focus on yellow. Yes, her former red version of this power removed all of the enviro tiles. Now at best she nukes seven TU tiles. Under most circumstances that will be less tile destruction, and I would assume less cascade potential (the number wizards can suss out the details of this if they like). However, let's look at what you're getting back. Previously you got a lot of enviro AP, which was either game-breakingly good, as in the case of desert, or almost entirely pointless, yum hot dog. What you get now instead is consistency, seven TU AP every time, assuming you don't use it when there are less than seven TU tiles on the board. So you've spent nine yellow and you've gotten back 7 TU AP as well as causing about 1300 damage, for a net cost of 2 AP even if you get zero cascades. If you get even one match off of it you now have more AP than you started with. Granted you must have a TU worth using or the TU AP is worth less, but again you're still denying the enemy so there's some value in that.

By taking yellow and black to 5 we've left green at 3. But even assuming you don't have a better green power to use (shame on you again), you can still turn your ten green AP into ten random AP and about 600ish damage (Woo!) assuming decent color coverage on your team, plus whatever cascade matches you get. So you now have two powers on two different colors that are likely to net you more AP than you started with and a very annoying board spamming damage over time power on black, which your other powers can help to fuel.

First off, being completely honest, have you actually played with her extensively and find her satisfactory? The way you word things sounds as though you are coming from a completely theoretical (and wishful) place, rather than from having experienced it. I, myself, have played with her enough now trying to keep an open mind... and boy, does she suck. Anyway, you seem to disregard the part I have bolded as a minor drawback, but you must understand that the Dev-lauded ability to accelerate T-U acquisition comes as the trade-off for literally thousands of damage AND coloured AP acquisition from cascades. If T-U is not important to you in a given fight (and you don't seem to disagree with me that the times when T-Us are relevant are far less frequent than the times when they are not) you are getting much, much less from that skill than from her previous Red skill.

Pylgrim wrote:

You may have a point when you say that that skill is useful at denying the defending team T-U AP. Then again, you may just bring a better character (basically any 3* not called Loki or Ragnarok, and hell, half the 2*s are arguably better) and finish the game quicker, before the opponent collects enough T-U AP.

Just like The Hood and OBW, you have to consider Lazy Storm to be a support character. She isn't going to win matches by herself. Her job is to facilitate someone else ruining your day. The trouble is who's going to do that. Assuming you're using all three of her colors, that leave you with red, blue, and purple to smash face with. LDaken is a natural fit. He can use any blue you get for his nuke, and you get the benefit of his strike tiles on both your cascade powers and your attack tiles while keeping the green for Storm. Plus he tanks green and black for our glass-jawed sweetheart here. That leaves us with red and purple. Deadpool fits the bill, and he can help bodyguard Storm with his black passive. Purple is a tough one otherwise, but there's a lot of choices for red, Patch and LCap to name a couple. She-Hulk could be an interesting hipster pick, featuring red and blue, or Daredevil who can even use the purple. There are possibilities out there, and that's before we start talking about TU powers, which will have to be part of your plan if you want to fully utilize Storm's abilities.

Alright, please explain to me how is she going to facilitate someone else's ruining anyone's day (under the caveat that T-U is not going to be relevant every battle.) Her green is super bad along strike tile users because it randomly destroys the tiles, I really don't know how you may think for a second that she and LDaken should be in the same team (and reinforces my belief that you are being purely theoretical). Her yellow is only conditionally good, as we have discussed, and doesn't particularly interact with other characters' skills. Her black is decent on its own (not great; for great, look at Doom's black) and only interacts with strike tiles, slightly. A support character truly supports and improves other character abilities and/or consistently disrupts the opposing team. Hood, OBW, Falcon, She-Hulk and a few others are support characters; Storm ain't. You could have called her a support before, when both her Red and Green abilities produced coloured AP and significant board shake. Storm now falls in the same odd category of Daredevil of being a self-contained package that is fairly unremarkable and not particularly improved by or improving a given team.

Pylgrim wrote:

You want to pretend that she's still useful (even though she's not a damage dealer, a tank, or a NON-conditional support character) please be my guest. You still cannot scratch my point that she was nerfed, nor that such nerf was unfair for an already mediocre (if fun) character. Now she's more mediocre and less fun to play.

I don't have to pretend that she's still useful. She is still useful. How useful she is now versus how useful she was before is debatable. It's hard to argue that going from a five cost red to a nine cost yellow wasn't a nerf to 1* Storm, who is now far less useful than she was before. But one could argue that before she was WAY too good for a 1* character, and outside of the desert and jungle environment, gaining TU AP over enviro AP could be considered a buff. The 3* flavor of Storm never had a five cost red, so technically her power was never really nerfed in that way. The utility of green was reduced, which is one of the reasons I'm making a case for leaving it at 3. It still has uses there, and it's easy to find another good green power if you want to ignore it completely. You still have utility from yellow and black, hard to find on one character outside of Hood and BP. BP is a completely different kind of character, and even Hood can't help you deny TU AP. Meanwhile her black does damage-wise in one turn what his does period. 1* Storm took a beating, no doubt, but 3* Storm just changed with the times. Bye-bye hot dog stand. Rest in peace.

Again, you're comparing thousands of additional damage, massive board reconfiguration, and much coloured AP from cascades to crummy, half-the-time-useless 7 T-U AP. The fact that you try to pretend that this is a "debatable" fair trade betrays the idea that you are too invested in being the devil's advocate to consider hard facts.

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Addition of Team-Ups has been like a boat anchor on the game.
Storm is the only one that can make the boat anchor hover a few inches off the ground.

The awful feature makes the awful power somewhat useful, and thus she's slightly better than she was before.

Er, the point we are discussing is that the power WAS not awful before. The power is now awful because the (arguably) awful feature who created the necessity for the change.

OnesOwnGrief

She does still have an AP generating green that's good and can be used to get those high cost non-greens off the ground like "Whales! Whales! Whales!" and "Rage of the Panther." You don't have to focus her on Team-Up AP generation but she still has some worth for cascades and generating AP. You also still have the option of burning people down if this get hairy.

OnesOwnGrief

My opinion is that Storm is Storm. She works identically as she did before besides the entire 5 AP Red for free hits. She currently has no really terrible build. 3/5/5, 5/5/3, 4/5/4, and 5/3/5, are all viable, versatile, builds. You can use her to generate cascades and AP for characters that don't rely on green. Throw out annoying attack tiles that will double up on Strike tiles each turn, and can spell a world of hurt from just a single magical cascade if anyone one of her other teammates have really damaging abilities that isn't Sentry or Thor.

Unknown

Storm's abilities are decent but decent doesn't cut it for someone in the lowest HP class.

Let's say someone in the standard HP class has an ability that does 2000 damage for 10 green AP. Then someone in a lower HP class has to do better than that and someone in a higher HP class has to do worse than that.

Let's look at each color. Lightning Strike is only average because green is overloaded with powerful abilities. It obviously can't compare to World Rupture or Call the Storm. It's debatable whether it's better than Judgment or Berserker Rage, but Punisher and Patch all start with a lot more HP than Storm.

Mistress of the Storm loses pretty badly to Battleplan/Sacrifice/Thunder Strike. It might be better than Web Bandages or Twin Pistols, but those abilities are pretty weak to compare to.

Hailstorm is probably about average. It's probably better than Psi-Katana, but it's not clear if it's better than Inferno, and HT still has more HP than Storm as well.

All else being equal, if you can't be sure if ability A is better than ability B, you might as well take the character with more HP because there's nothing ambigious there. Situational usefulness is just not very useful in general. Redwing can completely shut down several abilities but you don't see Falcon used in PvP very often.

simonsez

I only need to hit her yellow 4 times to get rid of one of these damn Yelena lethal recon teamups. So psyched!

Pylgrim

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

My opinion is that Storm is Storm. She works identically as she did before besides the entire 5 AP Red for free hits. She currently has no really terrible build. 3/5/5, 5/5/3, 4/5/4, and 5/3/5, are all viable, versatile, builds. You can use her to generate cascades and AP for characters that don't rely on green. Throw out annoying attack tiles that will double up on Strike tiles each turn, and can spell a world of hurt from just a single magical cascade if anyone one of her other teammates have really damaging abilities that isn't Sentry or Thor.

If by "identically" you mean that now you need to fire up the power twice (18 AP!) to deal more or less the same amount of damage and the same amount of board shuffle than a single activation of her old red caused, I'll agree with you. Her playing style may have not changed that much but the efficiency of doing so has been halved, I argue.

OnesOwnGrief

Pylgrim wrote:

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

My opinion is that Storm is Storm. She works identically as she did before besides the entire 5 AP Red for free hits. She currently has no really terrible build. 3/5/5, 5/5/3, 4/5/4, and 5/3/5, are all viable, versatile, builds. You can use her to generate cascades and AP for characters that don't rely on green. Throw out annoying attack tiles that will double up on Strike tiles each turn, and can spell a world of hurt from just a single magical cascade if anyone one of her other teammates have really damaging abilities that isn't Sentry or Thor.

If by "identically" you mean that now you need to fire up the power twice (18 AP!) to deal more or less the same amount of damage and the same amount of board shuffle than a single activation of her old red caused, I'll agree with you. Her playing style may have not changed that much but the efficiency of doing so has been halved, I argue.

It's more like a quarter change in efficiency considering that her green is still the same and her Yellow hits about half of what it used to in the case of Mohawk storm.

Kelbris

Garbage

Moderate-High move cost, low HP which eans you can kill her pretty easily before her moves go off, and none of her moves pack a big enough punch to justify the AP cost.

Green got nerfed two tiles recently as well; used to be 16 tiles destroyed at 5G.

She was a great 1* because there were 7 people to choose from, and none of them had abilities like she did, so her AP gen was unmatched (MBW being too expensive). Not to mention she had the ONLY green power. Now, she has to contend with Patch, Thor, Sentry, Punisher...

Hulk's a better choice, and that's pretty sad because Hulk's... well, Hulk.

Unknown

I'll go against the trend: I find that the switch to yellow has improved her power because I would never normally be using it in red (not at 9AP, anyway). In yellow and black I've found that, even powered up to a mere level 113 or something, she's an excellent complement to Patchneto and has interested me in continuing to level her after the event is over, especially if I can get a 5th yellow and 5th black at some point. I can't see myself ever wanting to use her green because given my max 3* include Patch, LazyThor and GSBW she's never going to have the best green on the team.

Unknown

Just to be clear. If a miniscule-health character with no decent passives gets a skill off that needs 3+ matches, that skill should be a game-changer. 7 TUAP and ****-all for damage is not a game-changer. 16 AP and some mild cascades comes closer, but of course that would be in the same color as so many truly game-changing or game-ending skills. 400 in attack tiles is really not noteworthy. Storm can go down in a few turns. A single psi-katana or onslaught knocks off half her life. She's absolutely not worthwhile.

FaerieMyst

As usual, I seem to be the champion of the unloved characters. I really like Mohawk Storm.

My Storm is currently at leavel 145 and configured 5/5/3. Here's why:
Yellow - 7 tiles destroyed at 194 damage each. That's nearly 1400 damage and it adds to the TeamUp. It's irrelevant whether you like the TU - it's there and you may as well make use of it. Storm's yellow is about the only time I accumulate enough tiles to use the additional attacks.
Green - destroys 14 tiles and gives AP. Not much to say about this. I like the board disruption. Damage and AP are icing on the cake for me.
Black - Even at 3, it deals a lot of damage. This is my least favorite power mainly because it annoys me visually.

Storm suits my particular play style. I always like to have a board disruptor and her yellow and green powers do that nicely. I wish she was less squishy but I wish that of every non-Hulk character. She is seriously disadvantaged as a featured pvp character because the boost puts her front and center more often than she normally would be.

I think she is a good part of a diversified roster. There are definitely times she is the best character for a particular battle.