About Shield Training

kk3thess

I commonly use Shield training to test the new character's abilities, and usually it works out just fine. With Emma Frost, this was not possible for me.

I'm entering the 4* tier now, so I don't actually have any character above or even close to lvl 270, so I use the characters that are already there (I know that there's some name for this kind of team, but I can't really remember rn). Every single time I tried this node, Frost dies. I've won with both Iron Spider and Ant-Man or with only one of them, but never once Frost was alive at the end of the fight.

I know many players here have far more developed rosters than me, so that's probably not a problem for them, but it sucks that I can't even test Emma's set of powers because Carnage downs her pretty fast. If I match yellow, purple, black and TU, she's in front taking damage. If I match red or green, Spidey is in front. Only with blue Ant-Man is in front.

Does anyone in the same situation as me successfully tested her powers without her dying soon? Does anyone have any tips on how can I keep her alive to test her powers when Carnage's tiles downs her before I can do anything?

I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

JHawkInc

I enjoyed Emma in her test node.

Note, I've got a handful of champed 5's now, but I used the loaner Emma and Spidey, as only my Ant-Man was stronger than the loaner. And I got stomped in my first match. I think it has more to do with a bad team than anything else.

The second run, I was able to fire off both Emma's purple and Ant-Man's blue early(ish) into the match, and with one destroying Carnage (and Torch and Beast) tiles, and the other converting them, it actually made for a fun match. I'm looking forward to running Emma with Shuri/Panther in the future, to use her purple to keep enemy tiles at bay (something Panther/Shuri can't do), and to throw out one of her yellow with Panther's so I'm creating and buffing tiles over the course of the match. In general, she looks like she'll be solid over longer matches with the right team.

I can't say how GOOD she is, but I don't think she's as bad as people think, and I absolutely blame that on the horrible Shield Training node. That first node should be more flexible, I think, maybe scale it to a hard 3* fight, require people to only use 3*s or lower (so the shiny new 4* character is stronger and stands out), then let people repeat it a few times so they can try out a few combos. Make it a teaser for the new character, not a road block to the rest of Shield Training.

Phumade

kk3thess said:

I commonly use Shield training to test the new character's abilities, and usually it works out just fine. With Emma Frost, this was not possible for me.

I'm entering the 4* tier now, so I don't actually have any character above or even close to lvl 270, so I use the characters that are already there (I know that there's some name for this kind of team, but I can't really remember rn). Every single time I tried this node, Frost dies. I've won with both Iron Spider and Ant-Man or with only one of them, but never once Frost was alive at the end of the fight.

I know many players here have far more developed rosters than me, so that's probably not a problem for them, but it sucks that I can't even test Emma's set of powers because Carnage downs her pretty fast. If I match yellow, purple, black and TU, she's in front taking damage. If I match red or green, Spidey is in front. Only with blue Ant-Man is in front.

Does anyone in the same situation as me successfully tested her powers without her dying soon? Does anyone have any tips on how can I keep her alive to test her powers when Carnage's tiles downs her before I can do anything?

I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

The truth is the devs rarely put out demo nodes that synergize the new release well.

Here they did give 3 270 4* champs vs 3 270 4* champs, so the match up is pretty even.  Even people with better IW spidery/Antman really have no idea how Emma plays. 

Her kit isn't really designed for those chars in the same sense that the 4e pve nodes don't always work well with 5* champs.

Waddles_Pines

My suggestion, concentrate on one of her powers at a time.  If you try and get AP for all 3 powers, you'll need a lot of luck to get there.  If you're really interested in getting all her powers off, use AP boosts.  

Sim Mayor

The team was poorly chosen. Two characters who create / steal / destroy special tiles when you usually just want one, and the third character was a *barely* offensive build made for a pretty slow fight. None of the three characters have the health for a slog, so they kept going down before they really got their mojo going.

Brigby

Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like players had rather different experiences for a variety of reasons.

Do you think the issue is primarily with the provided team composition, or do you think we could do a better job of highlighting in-game how the team's synergy works?

Phumade

Brigby said:

Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like players had rather different experiences for a variety of reasons.

Do you think the issue is primarily with the provided team composition, or do you think we could do a better job of highlighting in-game how the team's synergy works?

I'm not so sure we even understood the synergy the dev's were trying for in this event.

LeRoy1979

Brigby,

From my experience, plus what I've read on the board, the reality is that there was no synergy to the team. You can't highlight something in-game that doesn't exist. This was just a bizarrely constructed trio.

Are the teams chosen randomly, or is there some larger thematic rationale for them? Not to sound overly harsh, but it felt like a team that was put together by someone who hasn't played the game, nor who was trying to set Emma up for success in her debut. A separate thread can debate whether there is any possible world that could be constructed where Emma (as she currently is designed) can be successful....

Waddles_Pines

Brigby said:

Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like players had rather different experiences for a variety of reasons.

Do you think the issue is primarily with the provided team composition, or do you think we could do a better job of highlighting in-game how the team's synergy works?

As the OP alluded to, unless the character is meant to be a tank (which Emma in theory should be in diamond form, but that's a discussion for another thread...), the featured character shouldn't be killed so easily before you can see what they can do.  In this case, it's a combo of her tanking, Carnage, and high AP costs.  

If I remember correctly, the same thing happened when Kraven was featured.  His best ability is to nerf special tiles and to passively do damage.  In his SHIELD training, there was no way for the enemy to make the required number of special tiles to even trigger his power. 

The two issues you noted go hand in hand.  SHIELD training should emphasize what the new character can do, and the essential team composition should help highlight the new character.  

Daiches

Brigby said:

Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like players had rather different experiences for a variety of reasons.

Do you think the issue is primarily with the provided team composition, or do you think we could do a better job of highlighting in-game how the team's synergy works?

There was no reason to fire any of Emma's powers when Ant-Man shares her active colors and bothhis abilities are much stronger. 
SHIELD training should feature the new character front and center. No color overlap, synergistic partners, enemies to takes advantage of (her tile removal abilities gets vastly overwhelmed by Carnages spam of tiles. Bullseye or Daken would be ideal with slow steady Special tile production, and by being frequent enemies in PVE). Actually.. not only shield training should do that. Her actual PVE release event should do the same. Those loaner nodes are a pain and new release ones are even worse. There's another thread about it already.

professorplum9

Perhaps the best solution would be to decouple the characters in the Team-Up Node from the required characters for the Shield Training event. This would allow team synergy and highlighting the new character's power set to be the focus for this node.

As it is now, team composition is dictated by whoever the required 4* are for the event. I don't know if anyone has figured out the method to the madness behind how these are chosen, but to be fair to both Demiurge and the player base IMO these should rotate somewhat randomly among the characters in the 4* tier (as they do now) presumably giving everyone a turn before repeating (aka we know 4* Star-Lord synergizes with everyone, but we can't have him being a Training Essential all the time )

broll

Brigby said:

Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like players had rather different experiences for a variety of reasons.

Do you think the issue is primarily with the provided team composition, or do you think we could do a better job of highlighting in-game how the team's synergy works?

Yes.  Paring her with a team of special tile creators.  

Sim Mayor

Brigby said:

Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like players had rather different experiences for a variety of reasons.

Do you think the issue is primarily with the provided team composition, or do you think we could do a better job of highlighting in-game how the team's synergy works?

@Brigby   - It's not that I couldn't see the attempted synergy (2 characters that steal, buff or generate special tiles vs Carnage, the ultimate special-generator). It's just that special manipulation is a support power, Emma has support character health, and the team was designed in such a way that she was tanking most of the time. Carnage is already a top-tier 4*, so the lack of an effective tank kept getting Emma killed before her support tiles went off enough times to really get rolling.

ThaRoadWarrior

I think the problem was primarily enemy Carnage - she is just too slow to be an effective counter to him. As mentioned earlier, 2* Bullseye would have been better because the act of chasing purple would have been creating enemy specials for her to use her purple on. Also her build was sub-optimal at 4/4/5, which meant that Diamond Form was about 2/3 as effective as it should have been. So if the intent was for her to show off how cool she is when armored up, it just felt like "yeah! 11ap....now what?" Compare/Contrast that with the 5/4/5 build we had for Wiccan I guess. It would be ideal if we had the option to re-spec them on the loaner node ourselves, I'm not sure how hard that would be to implement.

My big takeaway from this Shield Training was "cool art on these powers, but man I really need to sink covers into Iron Spider" lol. Which, I'm sure, was not really the intent of the team up. Perhaps doubly ironic that I came away from Iron Spider's release feeling similarly about one of the wingmen - was it Chavez? I just remember he was totally overshadowed by somebody as well. In the PVP, I found that she was fun paired up with Black Panther (king of wakanda) and Shuri, but that is largely because they are better at doing her stuff than she is (like a lot better) and make her powers cheaper. I wanted to like her, but I have a hard time seeing the utility as presented.

Brigby

Ahh I see. So it wasn't really a matter of not enough information available to highlight what the synergy was, but rather the team composition forcing Emma Frost to tank most of the damage, preventing players from taking advantage of her abilities quick enough.

Would that be an accurate assessment? If so, I'll be sure to pass that along to the rest of the team, so we can take that detail into account when planning the next S.H.I.E.L.D. Training event.

Thanos

The real problem is that Emma is a very mediocre character and no matter what team she's on she's not gonna look good.

ThaRoadWarrior

“They can’t all be C4rol” as we used to say lol. But if you can’t find a team that lets her shine in the loaner node, or a composition of enemies that can get her over, then you might want to take that design back to the drawing board. It’s a time honored tradition that you don’t book the #1 team in the league when you are planning the homecoming game, you schedule a team you can beat. 

Its also not a secret that almost all characters have an optimal build, or at least a situational build, and 4/4/5 doesn’t seem like it was it if we were supposed to be impressed woth Diamond Form. I think it’s best not to shy away from that with weird cover stacks that don’t maximize the interesting power. I’d love to know if the devs actually feel that her purple and yellow were her showcase powers over Diamond Form

Waddles_Pines

Also, since it's just a loaner node to showcase the character, you could give them higher levels than the enemy team.  

HoundofShadow

I think some of the problems are:

1) Emma is tanking 3/6 colours and 1 colourless tile on the board and Antman is tanking 0% of the time unless Emma is downed.

2) Since Emma is tanking 4/7 of the board, it means she's eating Carnage Attack tiles (126 damage per attack tile) almost every turn. As the turn goes longer and if Beast managed to create strike tiles, she could be eating close to 1k damage after that. By the time any of her colour is ready, she's almost half-dead.

3) I think Beast and Human Torch is okay. Beast has cheap blue to throw out special tiles and Human Torch has his Inferno to create Attack tiles.

4) If the devs still want to keep Carnage there, throw in Kraven to replace Antman so that Emma can survive longer in the wild. I'm not sure if it's a Taboo to pair her up with Villains though.

jamesh

I'm really hoping that Emma doesn't turn out to be another character that appears to have been balanced for use when the matching rank 5 support is attached...

DAZ0273

I managed to fire off her purple in SHIELD training which blew up Carnage specials for a couple of rounds but like everyone else she soon died.

I think it might be a sign in PvP that all of the loaners I have fought so far have not been able to fire a single power for Emma even where the other characters had no powers overlapping hers, she might be a tad expensive.