Space Gem Season Character Updates *Updated (8/23/17)

Brigby

Hi Everyone,

Starting with the Space Gem Season this Thursday 8/24, Mockingbird (Bobbi Morse) and Yondu (Awesome Mix Volume 2) will be entering Latest Status and Venom (Agent Venom) and Medusa (Inhuman Queen) will be transitioning to Vintage Status.

Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze) and Kingpin (Wilson Fisk) will be receiving character updates this season. We will also be debuting an all-new way to test out your newly updated character including a way to earn an additional random cover for each character!

A preview of the character updates can be seen below:

Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze)

Burning Rubber
The cost has been increased to 12 Green AP (from 7). Damage has been significantly increased, creates 2 friendly Attack tiles, and the AP cost of the power is reduced for each friendly Attack tile on the board (to a minimum of 6)


Hellfire
The cost has been increased to 9 Red AP (from 8). The power deals damage (plus additional damage if the enemy is a villain) and creates a Countdown tile. Each turn the Countdown tile creates 2 friendly Attack tiles.


Penance Stare
The cost has been decreased to 10 Black AP (from 12). No other changes have been made.

Kingpin (Wilson Fisk)

Wilson's Gambit
The cost has been increased to 8 Black AP (from 6). Damage has been increased. Remove a Friendly Countdown tile to deal damage to the enemy or if there are 3 or more friendly Countown tiles, remove 3 friendly Countdown tiles and deal enemy team damage instead.


The Fisk Defense
No changes have been made.

Maggia Pawns
The damage has been increased for each Maggia Thug Countdown created, and the duration of the Maggia Muscle and Maggia Hitman Countdown tiles has been decreased by 1.

System Reboot

An all-new Story event that will run alongside the normal Story events. Complete missions to earn Iso-8 and a random Ghost Rider and Kingpin cover!

Update: Added number charts.
Update 2: Clarified that damage increase for Maggia Pawns only applied to Maggia Thug tile.

Captain_Carlman

The changes to Ghost Rider seem to work (depending on how much damage was increased).  I didn't think Kingpin really needed to be fixed, but his new changes look pretty good though.

Anon

Changes to Kingpin seem interesting.

Ghost Rider has become yet another great partner for Cardusa.

STOPTHIS

As always, I await the final numbers, but these are sounded pretty good all around. I'm going to miss that damage on GR's red (him chewing through goons was fun), but a cheaper Penance Stare and increase on green? Sounds like a fair trade.

Kingpin's black is an interesting change. I really don't look forward to facing him with some goons, but I might use him more.

Very excited for more supplementary story events! I hope these become a more regular thing. They're a fun distraction and nice little boost of sources.

Anon

@Brigby Penance State? What's that? 

Brigby

@Anon
Penance State...aka copypasta.  Nice catch! I've corrected it now

jgomes32

@Brigby what else can you say about "System Reboot"? That's a regular event randomily popping up from now on, or weekly, once per season or only for character buffs? Also how much iso are we talking about here?

Borstock

Always thought Kingpin was underrated, despite the fact that even I don't use him that much. He's sneaky good with the right team. This should make it less sneaky and more just good. 

zulux21

really love the new event for testing out update characters.

always bothered me when things were vaulted that you updated characters and there wasn't a good way to get them or test them.

I will have to see the final numbers but both updates on paper sound fine.

zodiac339

Huh. I don't recall anyone in this dimension complaining that Kingpin needed a rework, but sure. And Hellfire sounds especially nice with carol, plus increases his synergy with Coulson/Hawkeye.
(Let CDs resolve, or AOE? Resolve or AOE?) Shoot. Now I'll be sad if Kingpin's boosted for a boss event. Unless it's Civil War and those stupid drones are in the way.

bob554

Ghost Rider/Coulson is one of my favourite Shield Sim pairs, mainly because GR's relatively cheap powers can set off Coulson's CDs and AP gain.

with these changes, they might take a bit longer to set off, but the damage increase will hopefully be worth it. and GR's red CD being changed to 1 turn (if I'm reading that right) could be good.

I usually put them with C4rol, but if GR is pumping out two attack tiles a turn then maybe medusa is the better option?

and agreed with above - much love for the supplementary event!

Dragon_Nexus

Kingpin used tp be a really good tank but these days after a year or two of power creep he felt quite underwhelming. That buff to his black is nice though. Also nice that his countdowns are speedier.

I'm also very much liking the Ghost Rider buff, assuming the numbers are good. His green felt so anaemic even at 5 covers. His red was okay and his black had the potential to hit like a truck. This looks like better synergy between moves so they compliment each other, rather than being three seperate things thrown into a pile.

Vhailorx

Kingpin's black is a disappointing change.  2-match powers are incredibly useful.  8ap powers are fine, but it will really need to do a lot more damage to be a net improvement.

As for his yellow: will be the maggia muscle tiles actually produce muscle strike tiles?  If not, then meh. . .

Ghost rider should be better now, although hiw much better will depend on the damage for his red/green. The obvious synergy with Medusa (and carnage to a lesser extent) is intriguing.  Dropping down to 10ap for black is great though.

And system reboot sounds like a new and LONG overdue path to focus on particular 4*s in a 3* ddq-like fashion.  Look forward to more details.

shardwick

Anon said:

@Brigby Penance State? What's that? 

It's the university that Ghost Rider went to.

bob554

shardwick said:

Anon said:

@Brigby Penance State? What's that? 

It's the university that Ghost Rider went to.

I heard they've got a good varsity team. Penance State wins lots of pennants!

carrion_pigeons

I feel like I use GR more than most people, given the state of my roster, so I have a pretty solid feel for how he plays, and I'm not a huge fan of the change.  Hellfire is supposed to feed attack tiles to the board so you can spam Burning Rubber, which will probably be fun when you pull it off, but unless you're pairing him with Carnage or Medusa it's only going to happen rarely.  More importantly, it's going to be super frustrating every time you almost get him there and then the CD gets matched away.

The combo with Medusa or Carnage is probably powerful, but he'll be slow on his own, which is a real departure from how he plays now, with fast abilities that ramp up damage over time, almost with no ceiling.  That was the key thing that made GR unique and gave him play, was that he was always getting more dangerous.  Now he's a combo character, which in my opinion, kinda wrecks him.

Maybe I'm wrong and his red will be so amazing on its own that it won't matter that his other two slow, expensive, hoop-jumpy abilities only impress under unusual circumstances.  I just think slowing characters down is a really **** way to "buff" them.

At least give them some kind of survival tool to justify their slowness.  They could have added a passive to Penance Stare to make it useful more often, for example: some kind of passive damage reflection would have been sweet.  Like, "if a friendly character would take more than 3000 damage from an ability, a random enemy character takes that damage instead."  It would help slow down matches and make the rest of his stuff better on defense, and it would give him direct application on offense against teams with big nukes.

fight4thedream

I am not really sure what to think about the character changes; I will have to try them out first before I can tell if I like them or not. But I am really digging the new "System Reboot" event. Sounds cool and looking forward to it!

Dotproduct

I'm going to hate facing Fisk now in the goon nodes. He was already pretty annoying with goon feeders making him spam his maggia every other turn. 

Crowl

One thing with that wording for KP, can you still use his black without countdowns on the board as it doesn't mention being additional damage for the countdowns now? If not, then unless the damage has been drastically increased, that seems like a nerf even with the aoe potential.

Good to see two characters getting reworks this season, even if there were obviously others with a far greater need that were overlooked. 

JHawkInc

Sweet!

Ghost Rider has always felt a little weak. Penance Stare is a great power in certain circumstances, but his red/green have always felt sub-par. As always, got to see the damage first and play it out, but it feels like his red has been brought up to be more even with the new R&G's blue, and his green has been tweaked to both be more useful and to pair better with that red (increased cost doesn't sound good, but it'll work out if the red is giving attack tiles faster)

Kingpin is a welcome tweak as well. Not a character that really felt like he "needed" one, but speeding up his countdowns and making him hit harder (and adding the condition to his black for an AoE) will definitely make him more competitive alongside newer characters, and keeping older characters competitive with the new stuff is ALWAYS a good thing.

(ALWAYS, even if the older characters being improved are the vast quantities of 3* characters the devs keep ignoring, HINT FREAKING HINT)

System Reboot

An all-new Story event that will run alongside the normal Story events. Complete missions to earn Iso-8 and a random Ghost Rider and Kingpin cover!

Am I reading that right? TWO possible 4* covers? I'm assuming it's something simple, like the side events we're used to (Amadeus' Inferno, Growth Industry, that Coulson event, and the Guardians events before they got squished into a normal Story event), and any extra little bit of ISO to earn is appreciated. Being able to pick up covers for characters that are updated (whether they're champ levels like mine will be, incentives to champ for players who see new value in those characters, or new additions to the roster for newer players) is a really cool thing.

I'd love to see something like this for NEW characters added. I mean, we always get the new 4* in the following season's Shield Sim for 2k points, but if there are two new 4*s in the same season (see, Mockingbird and Yondu), one of them will be the 2k point reward, and the other just gets ditched. It'd be nice if BOTH had a guarantee. (though I'm rambling about a new event like System Reboot, but a simple tweak to Shield Sim rewards to give out two 4*s at 2k points so both new characters get featured would be pretty simple and EXTREMELY awesome)

Punisher5784

Great changes to Kingpin! Now my only question is, will we still continue to see high amounts of KPs yellow TU?! To me it's one of the AL TUs because I have to kill up to 3 characters before the CDs start to go off, and now some are reduced.