*** Loki (Dark Reign) ***

Unknown

Not enough to dethrone The Hood as the premier support character though honestly anyone who could've done so would be way overpowered. This is probably as powerful as a support class can be without being outright broken. He's going to be underappreciated because people are likely to way overestimate their ability to play the game and undersell his green even though it's not unusual to hand the AI a match 4 every other move when you're in a zombified 2.5H PvE grind state.

As always the balance in this game makes me wonder if devs just block existence of certain characters out of their mind. These changes are solid if one forgets that The Hood exists, just like Gamora is decent if one forgets that there are about 5 characters sharing a very similar color coverage doing nearly the same thing.

rixmith

Glad to see the black changed to 11 AP no matter how many covers. The green looks like it will be fun. I would have liked to see one of his abilities scale as you level him up as it can be hard to spend ISO on him when it only gets you Health. I'm curious to see whether he'll start showing up in PvP or if he'll just be Patch's best PvE friend.

MarcusGraves

a6fan36 wrote:

Loki's new power is up. It's called Mischief. It's an ap steal; if the enemy gets a match 4, it creates two countdown tiles in that color that steal 2 random ap. It looks like the countdown goes down at level 2.

*heavy breathing*

Zen808

whereisbatman wrote:

New green seems useful for people transitioning 2* to 3*. Good counter to 2* Mag and Hawkeye.

Any usefulness after that? Ehhhh.... I'm not seeing it.

Have you met the AI?

scottee

Green is actually way better on defense than offense, because standard strategy is take all the match-4's and leave none for the ai.

MarcusGraves

Phantron wrote:

Not enough to dethrone The Hood as the premier support character though honestly anyone who could've done so would be way overpowered. This is probably as powerful as a support class can be without being outright broken. He's going to be underappreciated because people are likely to way overestimate their ability to play the game and undersell his green even though it's not unusual to hand the AI a match 4 every other move when you're in a zombified 2.5H PvE grind state.

As always the balance in this game makes me wonder if devs just block existence of certain characters out of their mind. These changes are solid if one forgets that The Hood exists, just like Gamora is decent if one forgets that there are about 5 characters sharing a very similar color coverage doing nearly the same thing.

but we did get to keep the illusions unchanged in any way which is good, so now we have a support character with a VERY cheap and good board shuffle + AP steal, bonus points go to it being a passive instead of an active power on a highly contested color

illusions can actually lead into multiple 4/5 matches after you pop it, so you could take one of them and let AI go for the other forcing the passive to go off since AI will always go for a 4/5 match

Unknown

Seems like a nice bonus -- the 2-turn countdown tiles will tick down to one the turn after the Match-4 is made, so the opponent really only has one turn to respond.

Is the ability going to pick a color at random and then steal? Will it always attempt to steal from a color that the enemy has? (e.g. AI has no green, all four of my tiles try to steal green, my face when...)

Unknown

Hello 535 Loki!

Marty17

onimus wrote:

Hello 535 Loki!

I'm considering that build as well.

Spoit

Marty17 wrote:

onimus wrote:

Hello 535 Loki!

I'm considering that build as well.

IIRC, NP's simulator said you really don't gain much at all with 5 vs 3 purple.

I'm actually kind of surprised, I thought they said they needed to nerf the other powers to add a 3rd one, whereas the change might actually be a buff, since it was pretty much unusable at under 4 covers

Moral

platypusavenger wrote:

Seems like a nice bonus -- the 2-turn countdown tiles will tick down to one the turn after the Match-4 is made, so the opponent really only has one turn to respond.

Is the ability going to pick a color at random and then steal? Will it always attempt to steal from a color that the enemy has? (e.g. AI has no green, all four of my tiles try to steal green, my face when...)

I read the ability that it places cd tiles on random colors. The cd tile color is what is stolen.

Edit. Totally misread that. Hopefully it is coded to steal non-zero ap colors.

IceIX

Moral wrote:

platypusavenger wrote:

Seems like a nice bonus -- the 2-turn countdown tiles will tick down to one the turn after the Match-4 is made, so the opponent really only has one turn to respond.

Is the ability going to pick a color at random and then steal? Will it always attempt to steal from a color that the enemy has? (e.g. AI has no green, all four of my tiles try to steal green, my face when...)

I read the ability that it places cd tiles on random colors. The cd tile color is what is stolen.

Edit. Totally misread that. Hopefully it is coded to steal non-zero ap colors.

Correct, coded to steal non-zero AP colors. It does place on random tiles though when it places, so it's possible for a tile to get whacked immediately by the ensuing cascade.

OzarkBoatswain

Still the only 3* character with no abilities that improve with character level. The only other characters like this are 1* Black Widow, *1 Hawkeye and 0* Bag-Man.

MarcusGraves

Spoit wrote:

Marty17 wrote:

onimus wrote:

Hello 535 Loki!

I'm considering that build as well.

IIRC, NP's simulator said you really don't gain much at all with 5 vs 3 purple.

i dunno what you guys are talking about, I noticed a huge difference in match frequency when I got illusions from 3 to 5. I wouldn't drop down illusions anyway, are you really going to spend 11 black that often just to switch some strike/protect tiles when we have things like RotP, surgical strike, masterstroke and summon demons for around the same cost?

Unknown

a6fan36 wrote:

Loki's new power is up. It's called Mischief. It's an ap steal; if the enemy gets a match 4, it creates two countdown tiles in that color that steal 2 random ap. It looks like the countdown goes down at level 2.

Yeah...

Well...

At least he can go up to 166 now, right?

Moral

MarcusGraves wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Marty17 wrote:

onimus wrote:

Hello 535 Loki!

I'm considering that build as well.

IIRC, NP's simulator said you really don't gain much at all with 5 vs 3 purple.

i dunno what you guys are talking about, I noticed a huge difference in match frequency when I got illusions from 3 to 5. I wouldn't drop down illusions anyway, are you really going to spend 11 black that often just to switch some strike/protect tiles when we have things like RotP, surgical strike, masterstroke and summon demons for around the same cost?

Those are all great, until PvE scales over 300. Those times Loki becomes really useful and it is for black.

Unknown

Mischief seems OK. Seems better than Trickery, now that Trickery is 11 AP flat. I'd personally want 3/5/5. Although with powers trending down in cost lately maybe 4 CD's to steal 2 AP each is too many.

A 3 Trickery Loki works with a 3 Berserker Rage Patch.

PuceMoose

I think that 5 / 3 / 5 is going to be a winner - even at only 3 protect/strike at level 3, you effectively neutralize six strike tiles (since your three protects cancel out an additional three strikes, of course), which, unless things are going really poorly, is probably about the max you'll have on the board fighting an ornery enemy lazy Daken. I can't speak much for PvE, since I generally don't play it beyond beating each node once for the story.

Unknown

MarcusGraves wrote:

but we did get to keep the illusions unchanged in any way which is good, so now we have a support character with a VERY cheap and good board shuffle + AP steal, bonus points go to it being a passive instead of an active power on a highly contested color

illusions can actually lead into multiple 4/5 matches after you pop it, so you could take one of them and let AI go for the other forcing the passive to go off since AI will always go for a 4/5 match

Illusions is stupidly overpowered, and even if we accept it is supposed to be stupidly overpowered, the fact that it does virtually the same thing at level 4 and 5 because it can't move TUs (moves 52 tiles at level 4 + on average 9 tiles are TUs, so that's basically the same as moving the whole board) suggests there's something really wrong with a skill that gains nothing from 4->5. He has an active purple and a passive green which is pretty much the best combination of those two colors in the game, and Loki was always quite good if he somehow didn't usually have less HP than The Hood due to his lower level cap. The green isn't enough to propel him over The Hood but he'd still be formidable since 'not as good as The Hood' really isn't saying much. Against opponents that aren't boosting, he might be even better because his green/purple really punishes an opponent in a drawn game as much as Dormammu's Aid will. The only difference is that none of his ability have any effect against a heavily boosted opponent while Dormammu's Aid can even slow down boosts. Of course that's a very unreasonable bar to live up to (strong enough to slow down boosts) so he should still be plenty playable.

I wonder if Loki + The Hood can counter the AI massive cascade teams (Jugg/Rag + green feeder) as long as you've level 5 Intimidation ready, because it should be 1 turn left after the enemy do their crazy cascade (2 turn CD but 1 turn should go off after they end their turn) and then you pop Intimidation to steal it all, though you got to make sure your third guy can do damage with all the APs you just stole.

OnesOwnGrief

This looks good and all, nice reduction to black and a seemingly useful green passive. To be honest though, I'm much more interested in that Daredevil rework that's coming.