Will there ever be another good LL 5* trio ?

tonypq

You guys think there will ever be another LL store with 3 worthwhile 5*'s ?

Had enough tokens and CPs for over 300+ pulls and seems like the offerings keep getting worse and worse. Unfortunately for me the LL store is my best chance to cover a trio of 5s. I have most of the 5*'s but no reasonable way to cover any of them.

It's either settle for whatever slop is in LL at the time, or aim for a hail Mary in one of the special stores like Dooms, that I have incredible luck just of CP pulls. It's really aggravating there is still no good way to finish off non LL 5s. It's not fair to punish players that weren't around when said 5 was in LL.

Dragon_Nexus

How the heck could we know? 8S

I mean...yeah? Maybe? One day? Hope so?

JHawkInc

Following the 5/4/4 pattern and releases every 2 weeks, with a 5* around the time of Captain Marvel (the one we highly anticipate to be a 5* Carol Danvers), and one around the time of Far From Home (if it's NOT Mysterio it's going to be another Spidey suit, right?), and the two 5*s in between sitting neatly on either side of Avengers: Endgame, I think the odds of a "good trio" sometime in the near future aren't too bad.

Vins2

I know 5/4/4 is almost set in stone, but I'm still hoping Namor's a 5.  We got double 5s in the first run of civil war, so it's not unprecedented.

Quebbster

Probably. Devs want us to spend, after all.

I think they intended Kitty and Cable to be a desirable duo as Cable is an X-man and makes strike tiles Kitty can buff. They did expect Archangel and LumberCap to act as counters to Gambit after all. They just didn't take Cable far enough, maybe they were afraid of making another Gambit.

ammenell

i am SO prepared for a hilariously low tier 5* carol...

aquiring 300 latest pulls takes some time, and kitty seems to be awesome, but not worth the other two (of four) 5*s I'm not interested in - kitty suffers from placement.

but without any 5*s champed and a full 4* roster i have no problem waiting until i have at least two interesting options. 

bluewolf

At the minimum you have a lot of hoarding ahead of you with the incoming Latest store. At least 3 months. 

tonypq

Yeah I wouldn't min Kitty but not crazy about the other two. Being a big Doom fan, sucks that when he hits LL, thin Kitty would be swapped out ?

I'd like to finish some 5s have 6 or 7 covers in like Thanos, IM, OML, Panther, just not a great way to the classics and the covers in the store are often ones I don't need. Seems like the LL store is regardless how sucky the trio is, still my best bet to transition to 5* land.

Quebbster

tonypq said:

Yeah I wouldn't min Kitty but not crazy about the other two. Being a big Doom fan, sucks that when he hits LL, thin Kitty would be swapped out ?

I'd like to finish some 5s have 6 or 7 covers in like Thanos, IM, OML, Panther, just not a great way to the classics and the covers in the store are often ones I don't need. Seems like the LL store is regardless how sucky the trio is, still my best bet to transition to 5* land.

Yeah
, Doom will replace Kitty on February 4th or thereabout. I think the devs are trying to design desirable fivestars, they have just been too cautious lately. Design time is long though so maybe they will crank up the power levels soon...

bluewolf

Let's consider Doom for a minute.  God Emperor, Cosmic power level, created a planet Doom.  Before details were available, one would probably have imagined a strong, holy meatballs he's gonna hurt me, character.  Instead he heals a lot?  If I kill him he ruins my Gritty?

Making a character that defines the meta is actually pretty darned easy.  High match damage, fast power use/AP generation (Thor gets around his high AP costs by collecting AP every durn turn), high power damage.  Destroys your AP, generates it for himself, fuels his own abilities.  (Oh, we don't talk about Gambit anymore).  It's not a hard concept.

The developers do not want to just move the meta up.  There is, I believe, an upper limit of power and speed where increasing it would make the game boring to play, just a lot of tapping and not really doing anything.  (We may already effectively be there, barring SCL10.)  I believe their philosophy is create more characters that do different things that are interesting, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.  And sometimes it creates a new meta.

What if there were no Thor to go with Okoye?  What would you think of her?  Nice but she's not a big threat.   Adds a lot to various teams, she's a Support character.  Okoye and Thor were never in a store together.

Kitty is fantastic in a lot of situations but works best with a 2 year old 4*.  Think about that for a minute.

I don't believe we'll ever see a home run, all 3 characters knock it out of the park, again.  The devs may release 1 or 2 but their philosophy seems to run against just 3 overwhelmingly powerful characters in a row. 

Cap IW is kinda neat but certainly was a weak spot in the store with JJ and Okoye.  Also note that sometimes, the tech available limits what the characters end up doing (Cap was supposed to be a stronger Gambit counter but they couldn't fully implement it).  So even when they have ideas they can't always execute them the way they want as the work with a 5 year old game.

Daredevil217

^^^

This is a great post, lol.

People are saying “I have no good way to get Thorkoye now”, and later when Kitty and 5* Sabretooth and his Grocket-like strikes and awesome tanking/healing (hint hint devs, make this happen) are running the meta, people will be saying “I have no way to get Katebretooth”.  In both instances you’d have had to pull from separate stores to get a meta pair.

If I had enough pulls for Kitty today I’d go for it and then hoard for months until she, Cable, and Kingpin are gone. By then you’d have another I think 2 releases until Marvel is gone to build up another 300 pulls. Then you might find out Marvel- despite forum hype- is really just “okay”. I mean, if I knew nothing about this game and you told me that Okoye, Jessica Jones and Kitty Pryde were more powerful than MCU Loki, #1 most requested by fans Cable, and freaking God Emporer Doom, it’d be very hard to believe. But it’s where we are. 

Daredevil217

Also I’d be all for Namor as a 5 pushing Fisk out sooner. I just don’t want more frequent fives to be the normal trend because I play this game wayyyy to much and can barely keep up with resources for releases as is. 

Dragon_Nexus

bluewolf said:

Cap IW is kinda neat but certainly was a weak spot in the store with JJ and Okoye.  Also note that sometimes, the tech available limits what the characters end up doing (Cap was supposed to be a stronger Gambit counter but they couldn't fully implement it).  So even when they have ideas they can't always execute them the way they want as the work with a 5 year old game.

What's this about? I didn't know they were planning other things with him. What was the plan?

fight4thedream

bluewolf said:

Let's consider Doom for a minute.  God Emperor, Cosmic power level, created a planet Doom.  Before details were available, one would probably have imagined a strong, holy meatballs he's gonna hurt me, character.  Instead he heals a lot?  If I kill him he ruins my Gritty?

Making a character that defines the meta is actually pretty darned easy.  High match damage, fast power use/AP generation (Thor gets around his high AP costs by collecting AP every durn turn), high power damage.  Destroys your AP, generates it for himself, fuels his own abilities.  (Oh, we don't talk about Gambit anymore).  It's not a hard concept.

The developers do not want to just move the meta up.  There is, I believe, an upper limit of power and speed where increasing it would make the game boring to play, just a lot of tapping and not really doing anything.  (We may already effectively be there, barring SCL10.)  I believe their philosophy is create more characters that do different things that are interesting, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.  And sometimes it creates a new meta.

What if there were no Thor to go with Okoye?  What would you think of her?  Nice but she's not a big threat.   Adds a lot to various teams, she's a Support character.  Okoye and Thor were never in a store together.

Kitty is fantastic in a lot of situations but works best with a 2 year old 4*.  Think about that for a minute.

I don't believe we'll ever see a home run, all 3 characters knock it out of the park, again.  The devs may release 1 or 2 but their philosophy seems to run against just 3 overwhelmingly powerful characters in a row. 

Cap IW is kinda neat but certainly was a weak spot in the store with JJ and Okoye.  Also note that sometimes, the tech available limits what the characters end up doing (Cap was supposed to be a stronger Gambit counter but they couldn't fully implement it).  So even when they have ideas they can't always execute them the way they want as the work with a 5 year old game.

If I remember correctly, the Golden Period included four great characters: Peter Parker Spider-man, Daredevil, Gambit and Thor. The problem was that Gambit shined so brightly the other characters lost value. I remember people thinking Daredevil and Thor weren't all that great upon release because the 50% mechanic was new and not well understood and because you had a character that generated his own AP, depleted the enemy AP and could hit harder than anyone else without the health penalty. 

But you do make a good point that it seems like the developers are currently trying to accomplish two things: 1. create a character with an interesting power set, and 2. avoid creating another Gambit. 

The problem, as it seems to me, is now that they have wandered off focusing on strictly straightforward attacking abilities into the realm of support abilities that offer attack enhancement, they don't know how to properly evaluate such abilities.  

I think a comparison of Doom with Kitty Pryde demonstrates this. Putting aside the issue of the appropriateness of certain aspects of his skillset, his powers are pretty straightforward. He has a rather high nuke ability, healing abilities, can rearrange the board, steals AP and if he is downed he removes enemy attack, shields or strike tiles.  Kitty, on the other hand, buffs attack, strike and shield tiles once a certain number is on the board, can create 3 shields or attack tiles herself, and can passively remove enemy tiles and do damage.  Doom has higher health while Kitty has higher match damage.

Now on paper, looking over these two power sets, it would seem they are roughly equal. In fact, if there were a 5* version of Crash and the two faced off, Doom may even have the advantage as Kitty would have to fire off her powers twice to even start buffing them and Doom would be steal her Yellow AP. But in actual practice, Kitty pretty much has Doom dancing in the palm of her hand since she partners so well with characters that generate strike tiles quickly. 

One would hope that this sort of interaction (or lack thereof) were included in their character design evaluations. Ostensibly, Kitty was intended to help bring back Phoenix and OML and to partner with Cable, but in practice her perfect partner is 4* Rocket and Groot. 

The question is: was this interaction intentional? 

If you are cynical, you might be inclined to think this was an oversight. But I think a question we haven't really thought about before is what is the nature of the relationship between 5* characters and the rest of the star levels. 

As early as CW Iron man and Cap, the dev team had assigned affiliations that affected the powers of 5*. Even 1* characters like Classic Hawkeye and Modern Black Widow were included. Then there was Black Bolt and his yellow ability. After him, the Hawkeye/Coulson bromance. A little later came Peter Parker Spider-man who works best with web generating characters or characters that generate green/red/blue AP which restricts him mainly to his 4* tier Spidey-verse friends (and foe, here's looking at you Vulture and shout out to 3* Iron Man).  Daredevil partners great with stunners like Ice-man and Gamora. Archangel became a forum laughing-stock since his passive ability of stunning airborne opponents only is currently only useful dealing with 4* characters (and the occasional Colossus fastball special). 

So I think it's safe to say, the dev team do keep in mind the interactions 5* characters will have with the lower star levels.

But last year, the devs introduced a new type of character, Okoye: a power enhancement character, or what I like to refer as a "bridge character". What I mean by "bridge character" is that it allows a 4* player to gain a footing into the 5* realm by only using one 5* character. Now obviously, Okoye is best partnered with 5* Thor. But with the right 4* character boosted, a player can still do wondrous things fighting against a double 5* team. 

What Okoye did for characters with cheap attack or constant attack powers, Kitty is now doing for special tiles characters. And there's no better partner than one that has already a set of strikes on the board turn 1. There's no question that Kitty/Grocket is the best defensive team in the game and is currently challenging Thor/Okoye for the top spot. 

It will be interesting to see if the new generation of 5* will be able to balance out the current Scissors (Kitty/Grocket) to Paper (Thor/Okoye). I have seen some suggest that Daredevil/Black Suit Spider-man is a good Kitty/Grocket counter, and while to some extent that is true, unfortunately it's not really fast enough to be competitively viable. It would be awesome if the dev team gave Black Suit Spider-Man a boost to make the pair faster at dispatching the cat and the rabbit but I wouldn't hold my breath. (But still it really would be awesome!)

Unfortunately, the Death of Doom strategy, while it works if you intentionally go into battle with a low health Doom, is quite impractical and my least favorite skill in his power set.  But that's a story for another day. 

Anywhoo, I have babbled on enough about the current meta and 5* meta history. I should do a tl; dr. 


tl; dr: It would be nice if the next set of 5* characters helped balanced out the current Scissors (Kitty/Grocket) and Paper (Thor/Okoye) meta we have going on right now.  Or buff Black Suit Spider-man and/or Doom. The end.

helix72

fight4thedream said:

I have seem some suggest that Daredevil/tinykitty Spider-man is a good Kitty/Grocket counter

tinkykitty Spider-Man? When did he get released? No wonder I can't seem to progress in this game...

Daredevil217

fight4thedream said:

bluewolf said:

Let's consider Doom for a minute.  God Emperor, Cosmic power level, created a planet Doom.  Before details were available, one would probably have imagined a strong, holy meatballs he's gonna hurt me, character.  Instead he heals a lot?  If I kill him he ruins my Gritty?

Making a character that defines the meta is actually pretty darned easy.  High match damage, fast power use/AP generation (Thor gets around his high AP costs by collecting AP every durn turn), high power damage.  Destroys your AP, generates it for himself, fuels his own abilities.  (Oh, we don't talk about Gambit anymore).  It's not a hard concept.

The developers do not want to just move the meta up.  There is, I believe, an upper limit of power and speed where increasing it would make the game boring to play, just a lot of tapping and not really doing anything.  (We may already effectively be there, barring SCL10.)  I believe their philosophy is create more characters that do different things that are interesting, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.  And sometimes it creates a new meta.

What if there were no Thor to go with Okoye?  What would you think of her?  Nice but she's not a big threat.   Adds a lot to various teams, she's a Support character.  Okoye and Thor were never in a store together.

Kitty is fantastic in a lot of situations but works best with a 2 year old 4*.  Think about that for a minute.

I don't believe we'll ever see a home run, all 3 characters knock it out of the park, again.  The devs may release 1 or 2 but their philosophy seems to run against just 3 overwhelmingly powerful characters in a row. 

Cap IW is kinda neat but certainly was a weak spot in the store with JJ and Okoye.  Also note that sometimes, the tech available limits what the characters end up doing (Cap was supposed to be a stronger Gambit counter but they couldn't fully implement it).  So even when they have ideas they can't always execute them the way they want as the work with a 5 year old game.

If I remember correctly, the Golden Period included four great characters: Peter Parker Spider-man, Daredevil, Gambit and Thor. The problem was that Gambit shined so brightly the other characters lost value. I remember people thinking Daredevil and Thor weren't all that great upon release because the 50% mechanic was new and not well understood and because you had a character that generated his own AP, depleted the enemy AP and could hit harder than anyone else without the health penalty. 

But you do make a good point that it seems like the developers are currently trying to accomplish two things: 1. create a character with an interesting power set, and 2. avoid creating another Gambit. 

The problem, as it seems to me, is now that they have wandered off focusing on strictly straightforward attacking abilities into the realm of support abilities that offer attack enhancement, they don't know how to properly evaluate such abilities.  

I think a comparison of Doom with Kitty Pryde demonstrates this. Putting aside the issue of the appropriateness of certain aspects of his skillset, his powers are pretty straightforward. He has a rather high nuke ability, healing abilities, can rearrange the board, steals AP and if he is downed he removes enemy attack, shields or strike tiles.  Kitty, on the other hand, buffs attack, strike and shield tiles once a certain number is on the board, can create 3 shields or attack tiles herself, and can passively remove enemy tiles and do damage.  Doom has higher health while Kitty has higher match damage.

Now on paper, looking over these two power sets, it would seem they are roughly equal. In fact, if there were a 5* version of Crash and the two faced off, Doom may even have the advantage as Kitty would have to fire off her powers twice to even start buffing them and Doom would be steal her Yellow AP. But in actual practice, Kitty pretty much has Doom dancing in the palm of her hand since she partners so well with characters that generate strike tiles quickly. 

One would hope that this sort of interaction (or lack thereof) were included in their character design evaluations. Ostensibly, Kitty was intended to help bring back Phoenix and OML and to partner with Cable, but in practice her perfect partner is 4* Rocket and Groot. 

The question is: was this interaction intentional? 

If you are cynical, you might be inclined to think this was an oversight. But I think a question we haven't really thought about before is what is the nature of the relationship between 5* characters and the rest of the star levels. 

As early as CW Iron man and Cap, the dev team had assigned affiliations that affected the powers of 5*. Even 1* characters like Classic Hawkeye and Modern Black Widow were included. Then there was Black Bolt and his yellow ability. After him, the Hawkeye/Coulson bromance. A little later came Peter Parker Spider-man who works best with web generating characters or characters that generate green/red/blue AP which restricts him mainly to his 4* tier Spidey-verse friends (and foe, here's looking at you Vulture and shout out to 3* Iron Man).  Daredevil partners great with stunners like Ice-man and Gamora. Archangel became a forum laughing-stock since his passive ability of stunning airborne opponents only is currently only useful dealing with 4* characters (and the occasional Colossus fastball special). 

So I think it's safe to say, the dev team do keep in mind the interactions 5* characters will have with the lower star levels.

But last year, the devs introduced a new type of character, Okoye: a power enhancement character, or what I like to refer as a "bridge character". What I mean by "bridge character" is that it allows a 4* player to gain a footing into the 5* realm by only using one 5* character. Now obviously, Okoye is best partnered with 5* Thor. But with the right 4* character boosted, a player can still do wondrous things fighting against a double 5* team. 

What Okoye did for characters with cheap attack or constant attack powers, Kitty is now doing for special tiles characters. And there's no better partner than one that has already a set of strikes on the board turn 1. There's no question that Kitty/Grocket is the best defensive team in the game and is currently challenging Thor/Okoye for the top spot. 

It will be interesting to see if the new generation of 5* will be able to balance out the current Scissors (Kitty/Grocket) to Paper (Thor/Okoye). I have seem some suggest that Daredevil/tinykitty Spider-man is a good Kitty/Grocket counter, and while to some extent that is true, unfortunately it's not really fast enough to be competitively viable. It would be awesome if the dev team gave tinykitty Spider-Man a boost to make the pair faster at dispatching the cat and the rabbit but I wouldn't hold my breath. (But still it really would be awesome!)

Unfortunately, the Death of Doom strategy, while it works if you intentionally go into battle with a low health Doom, is quite impractical and my least favorite skill in his power set.  But that's a story for another day. 

Anywhoo, I have babbled on enough about the current meta and 5* meta history. I should do a tl; dr. 


tl; dr: It would be nice if the next set of 5* characters helped balanced out the current Scissors (Kitty/Grocket) and Paper (Thor/Okoye) meta we have going on right now.  Or buff tinykitty Spider-man and/or Doom. The end.

Good post. I’ll say at least we have a Paper and Scissors in the meta and not just a “boulder that crushes everything. Was there ever a time where  there were two meta teams simultaneously?

And yes to buffing Doom! It’ll likely never ever happen but I’m on board. 

fight4thedream

helix72 said:

fight4thedream said:

I have seem some suggest that Daredevil/tinykitty Spider-man is a good Kitty/Grocket counter

tinkykitty Spider-Man? When did he get released? No wonder I can't seem to progress in this game...

lol! So apparently abbreviating Black Suit is a no-no. Had to fix it. Thanks for catching that!

Daredevil217 said:

Good post. I’ll say at least we have a Paper and Scissors in the meta and not just a “boulder that crushes everything. Was there ever a time where  there were two meta teams simultaneously?

And yes to buffing Doom! It’ll likely never ever happen but I’m on board. 

Actually, to the dev team's credit, this is perhaps the most robust meta period we have had for high end game play. I similarly hope that we don't get a crushing boulder that ruins everything but a good counter-balance Rock. 

I was hoping it would be Doom, but alas! If his yellow ability were a bit cheaper, preferably around 7 AP cost and removed or even better stole all enemy tiles on the board instead of the burst healing, he would have been a decent Kitty/Grocket counter. In fact, it would have left Kitty/Grocket team with an interesting conundrum: take Doom out first and lose all your strikes, or leave him last and risk him turning the tables and stealing those strikes (or getting hit with his black). But unfortunately, he currently doesn't really fit the meta and I have my doubts he ever will. Ce'st la vie. 

Borstock

They might be better off never having 3 good ones. That would lead to everyone spending their hoard at the exact same time and then the game is taken over by those characters. With only one or two at a time, some will buy and some will hold.

That's probably why not everyone has Kitty. So if you're still running an outdated meta, you can still hit others running that meta.