Good variety in PVP teams?

Unknown

Despite the ongoing debate about nerfs & reliance on certain characters, based on my experience a wide variety of characters are being used in high level PVP - and this diversity seems better than it has ever been.

So I took a sample of the 5 people in my shield season 1 nodes - I'm at around 2,200 points so these are all people around the top 20 and with a range of maxed characters to choose from. All characters were maxed except the odd spidey which isn't, and teams were:

1. pun/hulk/spidey
2. hood/cmags/spidey
3. rags/cmags/LT
4. HT/hulk/spidey
5. OBW/doom/LCap

I know that lots of top players haven't started seriously on shield PVP yet, and I was surprised patch was not in any of these line ups; but this looks like a pretty good spread to me. 11 different characters out of 15 and no-one with the same combo.

Conclusion: there is no case for nerfs (at least not based on PVP)

Spoit

patch kinda sucks for defense, you mostly use him for quick pushes and then shield

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

patch kinda sucks for defense, you mostly use him for quick pushes and then shield

You take that back about my patch!

HailMary

The three Spideys, two CMags, and two Hulks, I understand, even though I question the use of Rags in team 3.

OBW/Doom/Rogers? I don't get it.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

The three Spideys, two CMags, and two Hulks, I understand, even though I question the use of Rags in team 3.

OBW/Doom/Rogers? I don't get it.

I don't get it either. WIth that last team, you can't even get a lot of mileage out of Technopathic Strike. But hey, whatever works, right?

Unknown

I think variety is simply because not everyone has everyone maxed out.

Even with a free form 3 person team you're basically looking at teams that look like this:

Lazy Thor has to be one of the 3 because he's the most powerful character in the game in straight up categories (damage, HP, and even pretty good board control).

Pick one of the 3 based on:

Spiderman - Marathon grinding/short on health pack
Magneto - Offense
The Hood - Defense

It's only the third person do you have any real choices on who it can be. In the standard PvP event where one character is fixed, you don't even have a choice here.

Unknown

On paper I'd agree with you Phantron. But if I look at the rosters then 3 of the 5 have multiple 141s to choose from including 1 with a maxed LT but not running them.

Obviously a small sample but people seem to be running teams you might view as sub-optimal. I still think there is now quite a range of line-ups that can beat anyone and suit individual preferences and style of play.

Clearly you're right that lots of players are limited by their levelled roster

Unknown

I can see people making argument about how you don't always need to use one of Magneto/Spiderman/The Hood but I don't see why you wouldn't always start with a maxed LT on any team. LT simply has no weaknesses and is good at virtually everything. Though if you say there are 5 choices for slot 2 & 3, that's still 25 possible teams, and more for the guys who don't have LT maxed out.

I'm more concerned about the featured PvP events because they almost invariably become featured + LT + special guy (Spiderman/The Hood/Magneto/OBW). Any deviation from that is simply due to lack of having the said character covered/leveled.

Spoit

If I had the LT covers, I'd probably be using him all the time, but even then, he can't beat the TTK of patch/mags

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

The three Spideys, two CMags, and two Hulks, I understand, even though I question the use of Rags in team 3.

OBW/Doom/Rogers? I don't get it.

I've been trying to find excuses to use Cap, but as far as I'm concerned, he's still a pve hero.

He can work when boosted or freeforall, but Loki, Doom, etc events he's kinda useless.

Copps

The rags involved in the one team is there as a second green battery for Thor. I too find that Thor is just too powerful him and the hood are my go to team for pvp events I have a feeling you are seeing the large variety of teams in this event right now as it's still too far out to be serious. I have 6 maxed chars atm and nothing is faster than patch mags and nothing is more of a deterrent than hood Thor. The third for hood Thor should likely be mags given the choice since it gives you a huge nuke for purple and an outlet for blue. It kinda cuts off thorns red but that isn't a big loss.

The ai for cap on defence just isn't good enough or else he would be a solid contender possibly paired with falcon punisher. There is a variety of usable characters but some just aren't there yet. I do like that falcon is a pretty hard counter for cap unless you have someone else to spam special tiles.

NorthernPolarity

Phantron wrote:

I can see people making argument about how you don't always need to use one of Magneto/Spiderman/The Hood but I don't see why you wouldn't always start with a maxed LT on any team. LT simply has no weaknesses and is good at virtually everything. Though if you say there are 5 choices for slot 2 & 3, that's still 25 possible teams, and more for the guys who don't have LT maxed out.

I'm more concerned about the featured PvP events because they almost invariably become featured + LT + special guy (Spiderman/The Hood/Magneto/OBW). Any deviation from that is simply due to lack of having the said character covered/leveled.

I disagree with this: LT's weakness is that he's slow to get going, so I would much rather have Punisher or Patch with C. Mags on offense throughout most of the tournament. I feel like in terms of 3 man team compositions, the optimal teams are probably something like this:

Offense - C. Mags + Patch or Pun + Hood
Defense - LT + BP + Hood
Prologue Healing - Spidey + Whoever.

Phantron wrote:

It's only the third person do you have any real choices on who it can be. In the standard PvP event where one character is fixed, you don't even have a choice here.

This isn't quite true either: having a fixed, 3rd character is actually one of the few ways that the game can make you use new and interesting team compositions. For example, LazyThor looks a ton worse in the Rage and Ruin tournament where the entire team comp revolves around Ares, for instance. You're probably still right about LazyThor though since his yellow compared to everyone elses yellow probably gives him a spot in virtually every team out there.

Konman

mikeydollar7 wrote:

Despite the ongoing debate about nerfs & reliance on certain characters, based on my experience a wide variety of characters are being used in high level PVP - and this diversity seems better than it has ever been.

So I took a sample of the 5 people in my shield season 1 nodes - I'm at around 2,200 points so these are all people around the top 20 and with a range of maxed characters to choose from. All characters were maxed except the odd spidey which isn't, and teams were:

1. pun/hulk/spidey
2. hood/cmags/spidey
3. rags/cmags/LT
4. HT/hulk/spidey
5. OBW/doom/LCap

I know that lots of top players haven't started seriously on shield PVP yet, and I was surprised patch was not in any of these line ups; but this looks like a pretty good spread to me. 11 different characters out of 15 and no-one with the same combo.

Conclusion: there is no case for nerfs (at least not based on PVP)

I think the top tier has a lot less repetition of teams than the middle, where most of us are playing, the space between ** and ***. In the Mid level, pretty much all the PvP events have teams that consist of a low level required character (say Doom with the current event), and then take your pick of OBW plus Thor/Wolverine/Ares, or the occasional CStorm/MNMags. And that's pretty much it. Mid game is pretty stagnant, there are too few viable ** characters as compared to ***. And as many have noted, in multiple threads, getting useful numbers of *** covers isn't getting any easier.

Unknown

For the SHIELD tournament, I'm juggling between deciding on Thor, BP, Captain America, Hood, and Punisher - they're all pretty useful on defense. I'm usually just using LT / Cap / Hood as it's an incredibly painful process to deal with, and have considered (but not implemented) the choice of swapping out Hood with Black Panther... mainly because I'd be mad if BP's skills were being used instead of LT / Cap, and Hood is a complete PITA to attack if he's maxed out. One bad cascade and he'll leech his teammates into 'oh **** Call the Storm' range.

mouser

mikeydollar7 wrote:

On paper I'd agree with you Phantron. But if I look at the rosters then 3 of the 5 have multiple 141s to choose from including 1 with a maxed LT but not running them.

Obviously a small sample but people seem to be running teams you might view as sub-optimal. I still think there is now quite a range of line-ups that can beat anyone and suit individual preferences and style of play.

Clearly you're right that lots of players are limited by their levelled roster

There's also the possibility that some of the players have switched over to their B teams, or have swapped some offensive characters for defensive characters while they take a break without shielding.

Still I agree there's a good amount of variety.