Infinity Stone Supports, will they ever be available besides top 1 season score?

whitecat31

The rockett said:

As the title says, will these Supports ever be available any other way besides spending  hundreds and hundreds of hours playing this game for a 28 day stretch at a time?  

If I had to guess, it will be after they have cycled each stone at least once maybe even twice. (6 to 12 seasons) or at least after Infinity Wars 2 when Thanos loses the glove and stones which is slated for April 2019.   At that point, they will have special boosters out that you have to buy with command points that will give an increased odds to get an infinity stone.  Then after a few weeks, they will make the stones available through normal rarity pool where you will have maybe a 1 out of 40 chance of getting then.  

smkspy

I'm not against supports, but am against that the only way to earn them is either thru lucky vault draws (just for 1-3 supports) or pay packages for just the chance of 3+ supports.

Top players getting infinity gems means squat to me cause they're top players already...so bonus for being best, but they'll continue to be best even without the reward, okay.

Overall, it's just silly to have a tiered system of minor power boosts that are barely achievable without gameplay. Likewise the amount of riso that it takes to even level them. 

They could be a fun feature and something to chase, but horribly executed. IMO, I would have created a top tier token that would give really great chances to earn a five, smaller chances for a four, and current 5 🌟 rates for a 4/5 support.

tiomono

KGB said:

Supports *ARE* the 6* tier.

Here's my case for why that is:

First, a few months ago IceIX said that players had repeatedly said they don't want 6* characters and Demi was listening to that.

That said, if there *was* a 6* tier what would it look like.

1) It would be rarer than 5* tier. 5* are only obtainable by RNG on 1 token type and a few champ rewards. Are Supports rarer than that? Yes, they are because they are limited time only tokens that require enormous RNG luck coupled with huge spending of resources and then they are unobtainable.

2) 1* tier is 50 levels, 2* tier is 79 levels, 3* tier is 126 levels, 4* tier is 200 levels, 5* tier is 195 levels. So a 6* tier should be more levels than even 5*. Supports are 250 levels.

3) ISO leveling increases at each tier being the most expensive at 5*. 6* tier should be more expensive than 5 and potentially harder to get. Red ISO for supports is harder to obtain and it takes even more of it to reach max level.

4) New tiers change the game play mechanics in some way. When 4* were introduced the 3* class got a power nerf (documented on these forums) so the 4* tier power curve would be stronger. When 5* were introduced it was with huge match damage with the idea being even a few covers would make them viable. The 6* tier needs to introduce new game play mechanic. That mechanic is that they add new powers to existing characters in the 3-5* tier or increase their existing powers (3 max leveled supports at 5 covers will add potentially 9-15 new abilities/powers to a team which will increase it's power way more than anyone expects).

Thus supports are the 6* tier. The reason most players don't care or see them or use them is because most players are in 4* land or below so they have a long way to go before 6* is relevant for them in the same way that 5* are not really relevant for 3* players. For those of you in 5* land supports are where 5* land was when Surfer was first released and hardly anyone had any 5* and those that did had only 1-2 covers and he was not leveled. Once players started getting 5* leveled and champed things took off.

KGB

3*s were actually nerfed when champions rolled out. Not when 4*s were introduced.

Lot of good points on the rest though.

KGB

The rockett said:

A lot of good points here that everybody has posted.  Most supports I am not excited about, but this power stone is something different. 


Equip to a championed character 
Once per turn, when the supported character makes a match, there’s a 12.00% chance to fire one of their powers at no cost. 

This support is top tier and very OP when looking at other supports.  

You think this is really that OP?

At L250 you get a 12% chance (roughly 1/8).

So *if* the character with the support makes a match 8 turns in a row they will roughly get to fire a power for free.

But how many times does one character make 8 matches in a row given you only tank 3 colors (4 if team ups). There will be some cascades / double matches that include colors the character with the support tanks so maybe it will take 10-14 turns to activate one time (remember multiple matches by the tanking character only give one chance at the free power fire).

Doesn't seem that OP to me given you also don't control which power fires. Remember other supports in that same 10-14 turns might generate 6-8 free AP that would also let a character fire a power thanks to the extra AP generation.

KGB

Dragon_Nexus

You can easily have a 5* and two 3*s, perhaps. The 5* will tank *all* the colours in that eventuality.

Besices, 12% odds don't mean every 8th match will fire a move. You could be lucky enough that you fire a move on the first turn which happens to be an AoE which happens to end the fight there and then.

CharlieCroker

12% is pretty strong.  For people running Okoye/Thor for example, Thor will very rarely make an active move.  So 1/8 matches, Okoye will either fire her red doing solid damage, or her yellow healing her and putting more t/u tiles on the board for her to match.

I run Daredevil/Thor mostly myself (still lacking Okoye) and even though DD green isn't the best power in the game, I'd be happy to have that free a couple of times a match, and even more so if it gave me his stun.

For other characters in the 5* tier it could be even stronger (JJ comes to mind) and no doubt there are characters in the 3 & 4* tiers who have one/two great actives (Valkyrie).

Hilk

KGB said:

Supports *ARE* the 6* tier.

Here's my case for why that is:

First, a few months ago IceIX said that players had repeatedly said they don't want 6* characters and Demi was listening to that.

That said, if there *was* a 6* tier what would it look like.

...

KGB

I agree - those are the “next” tier... why can not I get fully maxed ones right now (like the top pvP finisher) ... well - basically because I’m still working my way into 5* land, so I really should not be quickly maxing them out.... What I do like is that they have made a way for people to start to build a base with 1* supports that will extend as they are able to get the higher level supports over time.  It’s. Ice I can start to build the base of “6*” land even while I’m just moving into 5.

   Is some work needed to make those a little more accessible, yeah - but I bet it will also get easier as I move up ( and they figure out the balance ). 

While I do not have one maxed ( a few 4* up around level 60), I do start to notice a difference - so, I would say, get off the sideline and get a few as high as you can - it’s not going to be worse.   I figure there is a reason why the top players already have them maxed and assigned. 

KGB

Dragon_Nexus said:

You can easily have a 5* and two 3*s, perhaps. The 5* will tank *all* the colours in that eventuality.

Besices, 12% odds don't mean every 8th match will fire a move. You could be lucky enough that you fire a move on the first turn which happens to be an AoE which happens to end the fight there and then.

Yes, just like right now you can get a match 5/big cascade on the board on turn 1 that cascades into enough AP to fire the AoE and end the fight.  Random stuff does and will happen.

Just saying it hardly seems OP given it's not going to happen very often and may not even happen in a given match at all. For example in the 4* tier Mockingbird has essentially the same power (Opportunist fires a free power on enemy match 4 if you have 6 AP in that color) except hers can actually fire multiple times a turn (I've seen it happen a few times on cascades). I've not seen anyone say that power is OP.

Besides its actually impossible to get a Rank 5 power stone. The season winner in CL9 only gets a Rank 4 and lower CL's get lower Rank stones so no one is going to even get it to 12% even if they do have the Red ISO.

KGB

ZeroKarma

I think an alternative method of awarding these might have made more sense. I know that there are no mechanisms in place to follow this, but giving points for T1 or T5 finishes as an example rather than just season score.

As mentioned it definitely forced people to play differently, guaranteed certain slices would never have a chance at a support and had people waiting out season flips for easy shots at placement. Not that this doesn’t normally happen, but placement for season has always been pretty worthless and only good for bragging rights.

They SHOULD have awarded the Stones to the people with the most wins for the season. That would have been....interesting.

bluewolf

First, to the original topic:  I am guessing they might open these up after the initial 6 are released.  Maybe after the first 6 seasons, they will reward Rank 5 stones to the top players.  Will they ever be available to the average player?  Maybe?  Dilution is making it incredibly difficult to get any particular Support at this point anyway, so even if they were added to tokens or something, what are the odds you'll even get one at that point?  There are already 39 Supports in game. Adding another 16-18 by the time they finish this round plus one more round of Stone rewards....55-57 Supports?  

People who ask why the top players chase them..assuming you mean spend to get them...I am of the opinion that at least some whales spend on things just to get them.  The pursuit and having things first is half the game for them.  So thinking that something is valuable because people spent on them isn't really the way it always works.  There are 5's that aren't very good, but people spend on them anyway.

As far as these being the 6*...the Supports in general are not adding the next level of power to your 5* toons.  They are distributed as if they were the 6* tier in terms of difficulty in getting resources, but there is by and large a huge disparity in what a lot of them do for your play vs how easy it is to get them.  I almost feel like the developers came up with the idea for them being a fun way to accent your gameplay, and perhaps makeup for some roster shortfalls or make characters more competitive.  Then the people in charge of monetization of game assets decided to make them very difficult to acquire and costly to finish to see what they could get out of early adopters before opening them up down the road, perhaps.

Note:  Some Supports are more powerful and will add to your success, but they are a minority, in my opinion. 

I think if they were intended as the 6* tier, they would be much more obviously powerful, and the resources needed would be much more obviously available to purchase.  The best supports are locked into a vault which pops up for 2 days every 2 weeks and goes away.  There is no way to purchase Riso or even earn very much of it.  The pittances you see in vaults aren't even enough to add one level once you get beyond the first 20 levels or so.  And they just keep adding more and more Supports to the game, making it harder to pursue any one you might want and, through power creep, making some of them less desirable at the same time.

I have decided to take my Rank 4 Quantum Realm as high as possible.  I don't think I can add even one level after a week of playing PVP and PVE to max progression right now.  Maybe I can add one - it's at level 97 and needs 1845 Riso for the next one.

Everything about Supports creates a mixture of mild excitement and strong frustration in me.  Mostly anger and frustration when I spend some time thinking about it.  Which I try not to do.

AardvarkPepper

broll said:

Couldn't care less.  Support are bad and I'd rather them just admit they flubbed it and do away with them all together.

"Support is bad, go away" is too general a complaint for the Founder and President of the Anti-Supports Squad.  What about them is bad specifically?

Personally I like supports as they've helped me complete the DDQ 4* battle with level 120ish characters against level 270s.

Straycat

KGB said:

Supports *ARE* the 6* tier.

I cut out the rest since its been quoted enough, but I agree with most of your post. It makes sense, given the small level disaster the 5* tier was for a while, that they would learn from their mistakes with the "6*".

Usable at 1 cover. That was the promise, which they tried to made true with match damage. Supports make no such promise, and actually need high level and high tier before they get really good

Rare to get. They thought 5*s would be tough to get, but hoarders and/or whales showed them. So supports are heavily gated by vaults

I guess they are taking it slow too. They are showing them to us, giving us a chance to play with them before releasing them all to the wild. I think the main thing they are going at are the 100% completionists. Those people who have a champed Loki on release. With this support rollout, riso and token gating, there is no way for people to have all supports maxed. If thats true, the only question is when are they going to make supports more accessible?

HoundofShadow

Once the dilution point has hit a satisfactory point?

jamesh

KGB said:

You think this is really that OP?

At L250 you get a 12% chance (roughly 1/8).

So *if* the character with the support makes a match 8 turns in a row they will roughly get to fire a power for free.

But how many times does one character make 8 matches in a row given you only tank 3 colors (4 if team ups). There will be some cascades / double matches that include colors the character with the support tanks so maybe it will take 10-14 turns to activate one time (remember multiple matches by the tanking character only give one chance at the free power fire).

Doesn't seem that OP to me given you also don't control which power fires. Remember other supports in that same 10-14 turns might generate 6-8 free AP that would also let a character fire a power thanks to the extra AP generation.

Well, the Power Stone will also likely generate some extra purple AP on the way to firing the free power, so it isn't either/or.

As for the number of matches you'd need to make, it looks like six matches is the point where you've got better than even odds of having fired a free power:

# matches	Chance of at least one free power
1	12%
2	23%
3	32%
4	40%
5	47%
6	54%
7	59%
8	64%

Of course, this is purely theoretical, since it is currently impossible to acquire a level 250 Power Stone support: even playing at clearance level 9, first place only nets a rank 4 support which will only go up to level 200.

HoundofShadow

I'm curious why the odds are increasing instead of staying at 12% for each match. 

Rockwell75

Straycat said:

 there is no way for people to have all supports maxed

I don't think there's a way yet for anyone to have any support maxed.  I've been peeping rosters here and there and I think I found someone with 550s and one 4* support mostly maxed.  No 5s though.

jamesh

HoundofShadow said:

I'm curious why the odds are increasing instead of staying at 12% for each match. 

I was listing cumulative odds.  So if you make two matches, the probability of at least one power firing for free is 23%.  It's not a simple case of 2*12%, because you could hits on both matches (which could result in two powers firing if spread over two turns).

bluewolf

Rockwell75 said:

Straycat said:

 there is no way for people to have all supports maxed

I don't think there's a way yet for anyone to have any support maxed.  I've been peeping rosters here and there and I think I found someone with 550s and one 4* support mostly maxed.  No 5s though.

There are people with maxed Supports. Rank 5, 250.  Not many... but some.  The primary way to accomplish this is $$$.

I’d say that’s the only way. I’m a pretty high end player, always getting the riso and a fair amount of Support tokens from vaults. Haven’t spent on any Support pack. And I’m far from having earned enough riso to max any support (my highest are 4’s anyway).

ZootSax

KGB said:

Just saying it hardly seems OP given it's not going to happen very often and may not even happen in a given match at all. For example in the 4* tier Mockingbird has essentially the same power (Opportunist fires a free power on enemy match 4 if you have 6 AP in that color) except hers can actually fire multiple times a turn (I've seen it happen a few times on cascades). I've not seen anyone say that power is OP.

In the current PVE format with three trivial nodes, three normal nodes and three essential nodes which must be cleared 4 times to start the countdown, you would statistically expect the Power Stone at 12% to trigger on the first turn in multiple nodes during EVERY SINGLE PVE SUB for both the initial clear and final grind (the odds of it triggering on the first turn at least once during the initial 4 clears in PVE are 98.997%; this percentage goes up on subs with one-time nodes, such as Florida in "The Hunt").  That puts the Power Stone on a completely different level than Mockingbird, whose power is conditional on a couple different levels (the minimum AP requirement and the need for a match-4 rather than any match like the Power Stone).

@jamesh rightly mentions that there's no current method in the game to acquire a maxed, Rank 5 Power Stone (although with a 10.59% chance for a Rank 4 Power Stone, the odds of occurring at least once during a 4x PVE clear drop down to "only" 98.222%).  It's also worth noting that there would be some instances where the stone triggering would slow down someone's PVE clears (specifically it could happen on the trivial nodes, depending on which power triggered--Gamma Powerbomb into a cascade instead of just Court Death, for instance).  Additionally, a vast majority of players in the game don't play PVE at the highest levels, so the difference in speed is irrelevant to a huge percentage of the player base.  That being said, considering how speed-based PVE is, high-tier players do have a legitimate complaint about the Power Stone, IMHO.  This concern skyrockets once supports enter PVP and impacts a significantly larger segment of the player base.

Bowgentle

It's not like someone was saying that the power stone needed a nerf months ago.