Powers that get worse with higher levels

helix72

There are several characters that have powers that get worse in some way as the character's level increases. One example is Valkyrie--the higher her level, the higher the damage threshold you have to inflict before you collect on Bounty Hunter. Another example is Gr4cket, where Don't Push This Button's damage goes up, but so does the self-harm from matching it away before it goes off.

Am I the only one that thinks this counter-intuitive? Shouldn't powers get better the higher the level of the character? Kinda like being more proficient at the ability?

What character do you think has it the worst by their powers getting less useful the higher they are leveled?

Note--don't confuse higher level with more covers, there are some powers where more covers make it better while more character levels make it worse.

Pr0spect0r

Anything that requires you taking damage. Like both dead pools, hulk, 5 star black panther

BlackBoltRocks

These powers don’t “get worse”. They simply scale with that character’s level, which is to be expected. Because higher-level characters obviously do more damage, which is in keeping with the increased damage requirements. Look at the numbers:

lv78 Valkyrie with 5 in Red and Black
Red does 5 x 889 = 4445 damage.
Black requires 1437 damage.

lv278 Valkyrie with 5 in Red and Black.
Red does 5 x 1700 = 8500 damage.
Black requires 2753 damage.

In both instances, the damage required by Black is about 32% of the maximum damage Red is capable of doing.

Sure, in a vacuum such powers seem to get worse with every increased level. But such powers aren’t meant to be considered in a vacuum; you have to look at other factors, and try to keep everything else as constant as possible.

Like for R4G. Yes, the self-damage from Green increases as their level goes up. But you also need to take into account that their health increases as well, so it balances out.

Jaedenkaal

What’s really happening is that the thresholds are harder to hit when your opponents are lower level. And it’s more likely that your opponents will be lower level (relatively) the higher level you are.

Note that, I’m many cases, the damage thresholds do go down as you put more covers into them. So in that sense they do get better as they’re levelled.

Dormammu

BlackBoltRocks said:

These powers don’t “get worse”. They simply scale with that character’s level, which is to be expected.

I think what the OP is getting at is the powers don't improve. As characters level up, health goes up, match damage rises, and damaging powers increase to do more damage. But take 3-star Hulk's black Anger ability, for example; it triggers when Hulk is damaged for 5% or more of his health, so arguably it gets worse as you level him up and increase his health pool. It never generates more green. The countdowns don't reduce in time. The power never improves, it simply triggers less often the higher level you go.

Sure, in a vacuum such powers seem to get worse with every increased level. But such powers aren’t meant to be considered in a vacuum...

Sure, a player is going to eventually face stronger enemies, but that process is gradual. SCL is a 'vacuum' of sorts. So if a player is consistently playing in the same SCL for a while, enemies are stagnant in their level and 3-star Hulk's black is less and less effective with every level he goes up.

Hilk

Things that scale in ways that don’t help...
     Damage from Thanos to own team
     Things that create special tiles for the other team - TheHulk- Smartest guy in the room
     Black panthers red - takes more damage to set it off.

and a little different...
5* Strange not having healing like 3* does

Quebbster

I don't Think self-harm Powers Count unless the self-damage increases more than the character's hit Points do.

broll

BlackBoltRocks said:

These powers don’t “get worse”. They simply scale with that character’s level, which is to be expected. Because higher-level characters obviously do more damage, which is in keeping with the increased damage requirements. Look at the numbers:

lv78 Valkyrie with 5 in Red and Black
Red does 5 x 889 = 4445 damage.
Black requires 1437 damage.

lv278 Valkyrie with 5 in Red and Black.
Red does 5 x 1700 = 8500 damage.
Black requires 2753 damage.

In both instances, the damage required by Black is about 32% of the maximum damage Red is capable of doing.

Sure, in a vacuum such powers seem to get worse with every increased level. But such powers aren’t meant to be considered in a vacuum; you have to look at other factors, and try to keep everything else as constant as possible.

Like for R4G. Yes, the self-damage from Green increases as their level goes up. But you also need to take into account that their health increases as well, so it balances out.

I agree with this, however I don't completely disagree with the OP either.  The problem IMO, is these characters become harmed when boosted in some cases.  If you play Valkyrie as part of your main team and she's well scaled for your team and your normal opponents, then when she gets boosted her passive becomes useless, or at least less useful.  There's a trade off in that her boost damage and health and such go up.

R4G is even worse in the same scenario, because team damage goes up but only 1 team members health goes up.  

Pants1000

XFDP and Thing are the first that come to mind.  

You can argue that they don’t get worse, but the fact is that their passives will trigger less often when they’re boosted.  It’s pretty significant when 5* match damage will trigger XFDP unboosted, but not when he’s boosted.

I don’t know that it needs to be “fixed”, but one solution would be to have a hard cap on the triggers.  If XFDP’s cap was 1800, he’d be much more useful boosted against 5*.

DyingLegend

Valkyrie, XFDP and Thing are the prime examples and were probably mentioned a few times above me. 

CNash

Dormammu said:

I think what the OP is getting at is the powers don't improve. As characters level up, health goes up, match damage rises, and damaging powers increase to do more damage. But take 3-star Hulk's black Anger ability, for example; it triggers when Hulk is damaged for 5% or more of his health, so arguably it gets worse as you level him up and increase his health pool. It never generates more green. The countdowns don't reduce in time. The power never improves, it simply triggers less often the higher level you go.

Powers aren't meant to improve with levels. They improve with covers. They should have the same, consistent effect at each character level, but with varying effectiveness based on how many covers they have.

Hulk's black is not a great one to study for consistency as although the percentage of max health damage he needs to take remains the same despite his maximum health increasing with level, it's also dependent on who he's fighting and how hard they're capable of hitting him. At level 250+, i.e. nearly or fully max-champed or boosted, it means he needs to be fighting some seriously heavy hitters in order to have Anger reliably triggering - only 5-star opponents are commonly able to hit for ~1000 on match damage alone, everyone else needs to have strike tiles out or be using powers. PVE opponents almost never reach those levels.

Rhipf

CNash said:

Powers aren't meant to improve with levels. They improve with covers. They should have the same, consistent effect at each character level, but with varying effectiveness based on how many covers they have.

Hulk's black is not a great one to study for consistency as although the percentage of max health damage he needs to take remains the same despite his maximum health increasing with level, it's also dependent on who he's fighting and how hard they're capable of hitting him. At level 250+, i.e. nearly or fully max-champed or boosted, it means he needs to be fighting some seriously heavy hitters in order to have Anger reliably triggering - only 5-star opponents are commonly able to hit for ~1000 on match damage alone, everyone else needs to have strike tiles out or be using powers. PVE opponents almost never reach those levels.

Which kind of makes sense. The stronger you are (i.e. the more health you have) the more is should take for an opponent to make you angry. If you only have 100 health someone hitting you for 50 health would probably make you angry. If you were at 1000 health that same 50 point hit probably would be laughed off instead of making you angry.

Jaedenkaal

It's also a difficult issue to resolve differently than it's being done today. Clearly, having (for example) Hulk's damage threshold be the same 5% of his starting 2790 HP (ie, 150) no matter what level he is would not be a good solution. 3* Captain Marvel would similarly be horrible to play against if she generated 8 AP every time she took 223 damage.

So not scaling at all is obviously not the answer, and if normal HP or power scaling is also not desirable, then... what else?

Dormammu

CNash said:

Powers aren't meant to improve with levels.

If powers weren't meant to improve with levels, then why do damaging powers increase their damage?

ThaRoadWarrior

Does Hulk scale with his current health, or his current maximum health?

Jaedenkaal

Dormammu said:

CNash said:

Powers aren't meant to improve with levels.

If powers weren't meant to improve with levels, then why do damaging powers increase their damage?

You should read the rest of the paragraph, then.

CNash said:

Powers aren't meant to improve with levels. They improve with covers. They should have the same, consistent effect at each character level, but with varying effectiveness based on how many covers they have.

The -character- improves with levels. The -powers- improve with covers.

Interestingly, I'm guessing this was less of an issue with roster-based scaling, when enemy levels actually did increase along with your character's levels.

I'm thinking, actually that the main place this is actually an issue is with boosted characters, as Broll mentions above, although I think it's really only isolated to some specific ones, namely, characters who are already bad.

For example, a fully leveled 266 3* Hulk has 18240 HP, and so triggers Anger when taking 912 damage. 

Boosted to level 412 in his PVP event, he has ~52430 HP, and so only triggers Anger after taking 2622 damage, nearly 3 times more (he does, of course, have nearly 3 times the health, for what that's worth).

For regular weekly boosts, at level 367, he's still got a respectable ~37,065 HP and triggers Anger after taking ~1853 damage.

In most cases, boosted characters have enough additional utility or damage that being boosted is, overall, still immensely better. For Hulk, I'm guessing that's not the case since he's pretty bad otherwise and still doesn't really bring much to a team if he's not consistently generating Anger tiles.

Malcrof

Dev's do in fact read the suggestions pages. If you find something is too far out of balance, and you think you have a good solve, toss it over in here: https://forums.d3go.com/categories/mpq-suggestions-and-feedback

Can't wait to see some solutions!

shartattack

Necrocap's Yellow is worse when you go over 4.  Then it revives Thor above 50%, so no passive goodness.

Unknown

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TPF Alexis

shartattack said:

Necrocap's Yellow is worse when you go over 4.  Then it revives Thor above 50%, so no passive goodness.

That's less of an issue with Lumbercap's design, and more with Thor's.