Fingers crossed the next 5 to push out Kingpin is decent

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  • Daredevil217
    Daredevil217 Posts: 3,966 Chairperson of the Boards
    DAZ0273 said:
    HoundofShadow said:
    It's quite predictable what kind of abilities those competitive players will come up with. 

    For example,

    1) No 5* will have drawback to their abilities. Think Kingpin and Gambit. It has been proven time and time again that drawback are always frowned upon.

    2) All 5* will have fewer than 9 or even 8ap for any of their abilities.

    3) repeater will be 1-turn at 3 or 5 covers and fortified. If it's a 2 turn repeater, the effect of the repeater will be activated once immediately after firing the power.

    And more...

    To summarise, it's going to be filled with strategy where new 5* are bruteforcing the game. You don't need veterans to playtest these type of abilities. Even new players can come up with these kind of bruteforcing abilties. The balance of the game will be greatly disrupted due to power creep.  :D
    I'm not a 5* player and I actually agree that having players who are currently engaged in this game involved DEEPLY in any design process is probably not an ideal situation because whilst they might understand how to play the game, they won't understand a great deal else about how and why the Devs design characters in the way they do. However, I don't quite understand your bias against the longtime Vets and would point to the following:

    1.) I don't agree with what you say here and think it is in fact completely devoid of factual basis. Does not 5* Thor have a drawback? His best power requires him to be at half health, no? Yet the playerbase clearly has him as a meta. Does Kitty not have a drawback? She needs a certain amount of enemy specials. Gambit blocks red & black powers. Thanos kills your team...yet all have been or are Meta.
    2.) As far as I can tell the majority of meta-characters in the last few years have mostly been defined by passives, not active powers. Thor's green passive, Kitty's yellow passive, Gambit's black passive, Thanos black passive, OML yellow passive for example.
    3.) Don't you find repeater tiles to be a little frustrating? A player has worked to get the AP to fire that power and then it is lost in a cascade. Not trying to be funny but I don't play this game to see my characters powers not benefit me. So fortifying Repeaters or having them work faster when they are so vulnerable doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. Who doesn't have 4* Captain Marvel at 5 in black to get the fortification of her countdown?

    The other thing to say also though is that neither you (from what I can gather from the forums) or I have ever played truly at the 5* level, so we probably aren't qualified to say the Vets are wrong about things gameplay wise  either because we don't have the experience they do of these characters week in, week out.

    One thing that the playerbase might do better at is not sticking slavishly to a "This happened before so it must happen again" type assumption. People are flagging up Endgame as the next "meta" 5* and maybe that will come true however if we look at what happened with Infinity War, the meta 5* we got was actually from the Black Panther DVD/Bluray release which just happened to pop up in the middle of IW.
    Thank you for posting this. I would also add, Hound often mentions how vet players want every character to be a one-turn win, but the forums/vet players were the very first people to say Gambit was TOO strong, TOO broken, etc. it seems to work both ways with the playerbase here where they’ll say if someone is too strong just as quick as they yell “too weak!”, but I often see Hound only pointing out when the playerbase cries “this character sucks!”. That’s not a problem with the playerbase. That’s a problem with character development. And the fact is we’ve gotten far more duds than broken characters. 

    I agree that a select team of vet players isn’t ideal, but hell... use the forums. When the VAST majority are saying, this character is awful, and bottom tier compared to what we have in the game right now, you can go back and tweak some numbers. I’m not talking about Doom here, who I persobally wish was stronger and they’d tweak. I’m talking the Wasps and Fatpins of the world who were released trash and remain not so much as given a second look. You don’t need a crack team of experts to tell you Banner sucks. It’s just known. 

    And people aren’t asking for every person to be Okoye. Carnage and Wasp in the 4* tier and IM40 in the 3* tier are the gold standard for character reworks imo (no 5* reworks happened since I’ve transitioned).  Each went from not played, to given a clear purpose that works when  paired with other characters. Fun, in-game synergy that makes for interesting teams. This is more what I see people asking for when requesting reworks than anything else. 
  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 5,822 Chairperson of the Boards
    Here are some 5's that aren't meta but fun to play with:

    Hawkeye
    Spidey (BSSM is OK, but mostly just a defensive addition)
    Daredevil
    Doctor Strange
    Cap IW
    GRRR

    People may have others.  I hear Cap First Avenger is fun but mine only has 8 covers.

    They aren't fast necessarily but they do something fun or interesting.

    Doom may fall more into this category. He's probably the best of the recent Latests, and maybe I should give a bit more credit to him.
  • Polares
    Polares Posts: 2,643 Chairperson of the Boards
    Sincerely, I would not get my hopes to high.

    I still can't understand first how we have not had a communication from Devs acknowledging that Carol sucks hard, that the three chars in Latest suck hard (sure Doom is meh), and that they are going to tweak all of them ASAP. @Brigby do they even care???? Like seriously, do they want us to stop  playing? I know this has never happened before, but sincerely, I can't think of a worse batch of 5s in Latest.

    If you don't care about Doom or Carol as characters, the most clever thing to do would be to wait 5 months until 3 new 5s are released. 5 MONTHS WAITING !! This is nuts. 

    I have my stash of 300 Cps/LTs just waiting there. Because of this, I also dont get enough 4s, and then my 4s don't become stronger. Every day, I am playing less and less, because I don't have any motivation to do so, what do I want the CPs/LTs for? I have decided I will wait until the next 5 is released. If he is not good I am done with this game, after 5 years, I think this will be the final straw. I might even stop, if Devs don't buff at least Carol and Doom.

    PS: And I dont want meta chars, but I want good and fun chars. Sometimes it looks like Devs don't know how to create those :(
  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 5,822 Chairperson of the Boards
    As I pointed out in another thread, the lead designer left for MSF recently.  Maybe he wasn't much concerned about the characters he was leading on as he had his foot out the door.
  • tonypq
    tonypq Posts: 557 Critical Contributor
    What's also super annoying is the constant release of characters with countdown and or repeater tiles. These abilities are insanely boring, so they decide to give 5 Carol both lol.

    Anyways these abilities wouldn't be quite as bad if they allowed you to at least place the them where you choose and not being randomly placed. Nothing sucks more to build up the attack power to use the ability just to have it placed near like colors and be matched away instantly. These abilities double punish players being on countdowns and also on a lot of characters randomly placed. 
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    Let me clarify, the drawback that I'm referring to is something like Kingpin's Forced Hand, Gambit's current passive ability etc.

    I hardly call Thor's passive a drawback. Do you expect his passive to kick off at full health?

    Players mainly use Kitty for her buff. Her overwriting special is secondary.

    That's the thing about passive power. That's why they don't like power that requires more than 2 matches. Anything more than that is slow.

    Repeater tiles allow you to passively activate the effect every 2-3 turns with just one cast of the ability. Of course that's the nature of repeater. Do you expect every repeater to be a 1-turn repeater?

    I'm not saying that anyone is wrong. Based on reactions to past 5-star characters, these are the typical things they dislike about certain abilities.

    Then, comments about 5-stars that are not fast enough are typically along the line of "This game is about speed." Nice kit but I won't use it over <insert meta character> in PvP or PvE.

    I have never said vets want one-turn victory. It's more like fewer than four or five turns. Anything more than that is slow. The typical reasons why 5* sucks are because they are slow or they have certain conditions in order to use that abilities.
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,283 Chairperson of the Boards
    HoundofShadow said:
    Let me clarify, the drawback that I'm referring to is something like Kingpin's Forced Hand, Gambit's current passive ability etc.

    I hardly call Thor's passive a drawback. Do you expect his passive to kick off at full health?

    Players mainly use Kitty for her buff. Her overwriting special is secondary.

    That's the thing about passive power. That's why they don't like power that requires more than 2 matches. Anything more than that is slow.

    Repeater tiles allow you to passively activate the effect every 2-3 turns with just one cast of the ability. Of course that's the nature of repeater. Do you expect every repeater to be a 1-turn repeater?

    I'm not saying that anyone is wrong. Based on reactions to past 5-star characters, these are the typical things they dislike about certain abilities.

    Then, comments about 5-stars that are not fast enough are typically along the line of "This game is about speed." Nice kit but I won't use it over <insert meta character> in PvP or PvE.

    I have never said vets want one-turn victory. It's more like fewer than four or five turns. Anything more than that is slow. The typical reasons why 5* sucks are because they are slow or they have certain conditions in order to use that abilities.
    But it is a drawback, he gains the AP tile destruction but at the risk of being vulnerable. I've seen players agonise on the forums about how to stop him tanking to protect him. And I thought Kitty's buff only started also depending on how many specials the player has, so she has 2 drawbacks - my Kitty has no yellow power so I know she is pretty mediocre without the buffing but the buffing has a drawback? Or is that wrong?

    Repeater tiles - if they were fortified it would be no different to C4rol's Black countdown (except she can even reduce that to zero just like that!). Is that OP? Or is it what makes her work? I have no idea about 1 turn repeaters.

    And I'm not remotely qualified to say much about him but I do have a 2/1/2 Kingpin which I used yesterday in Webbed Wonder. He is horrible, his blue is bad - why do I want to give my opponent my special tiles? Why would the Kingpin do that? I want my special tiles! At no point in the Into the Spiderverse film does Kingpin say "Hey Spider-man, you look like you need some help, here take this gun!".

    Maybe if you phrased the things you say in a less hostile way (and bear in mind it isn't me you are talking at with these things as I'm a nobody in this game!) people might take your feedback/criticisms on board instead of feeling attacked?

    Likewise I don't mean to attack you Hound but you could possibly do with a course in diplomacy!
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,759 Chairperson of the Boards
    bluewolf said:
    Here are some 5's that aren't meta but fun to play with:

    Hawkeye
    Spidey (BSSM is OK, but mostly just a defensive addition)
    Daredevil
    Doctor Strange
    Cap IW
    GRRR

    People may have others.  I hear Cap First Avenger is fun but mine only has 8 covers.

    They aren't fast necessarily but they do something fun or interesting.

    Doom may fall more into this category. He's probably the best of the recent Latests, and maybe I should give a bit more credit to him.
    I like the idea of fun 5* and useful 5*.  I think about thei pairings of teams.

    so
    Hawkeye/ Coulson
    Spider-Man/vulture
    Thanos/BP
    Kitty/ Grocket
    thor/ okoye
    OML/Phoenix 
    BB/gambit
    DD/BSSM (anti kitty team)

    wht\at happens with some of the new characters is they become poor substitutes in stronger teams, or are a 3rd wheel when you have a required character, or have major design flaws.  I look at GR and he is in the 3rd wheel category.  I used to use him in sim with Thor Okoye as an extra meat shield and black user.  I tried to use his green and even his red and it was just underwhelming.

    for others like KP, Banner, Marvel, Loki, they all have design flaws that he devs should really address.  For example my KP is at 458 and I have used him in PVP with DD and his green is just poor.  His blue can be good, but can be awful depending on the conditions.  If the devs just tweeted these characters a little bit they could be really good.

     For example a repeater active power fires once then places the repeater.  Possible reduction of the repeater tile.  KP blue always does damage. Simple small changes will make these characters stronger, but also feel more playable, useful and fun.



  • fight4thedream
    fight4thedream GLOBAL_MODERATORS Posts: 1,975 Chairperson of the Boards
    Vhailorx said:
    Fight4:

    I basically agree on you re: JJ.  She is good and her powers synergize well.  But she is slow.l, and her offensive abilities are painful, but not very power by 5* standards.  When playing against JJ, her red and black are rarely devastating (in order to get her black to do more damage than Doom'd, you must have special tiles on 2-3 colors, which means you likely have to cast her red, so now you need 20 AP to exceed the da mage that doom can do for 9 (potentially 9+3), or rely on a teammate.  Her biggest attribute is her trap tiles.  On offense you will chase them for the damage/AP, and on defense, even the dumb ai will proc them randomly.  When matches go badly against JJ, it's because several traps get proc'd quickly, and that hurts a lot.

    Doom has only 1 nuke, but it hits much harder than either of JJ's.  It hits hard enough to cause trouble for 1/2 Thor's or 1/2 DDs.  And when playing against doom, the player must choose to either let doom fuel his nuke, OR chase black to suppress doom and proc his healing/ap gen.  This means that doom is likely to get his black nuke off a time or two unless he is downed quickly.  But he cannot be downed quickly by a team that depends on special tiles.  It's a solid 'pick your poison' design.  Plus he brings true healing to the table (disclaimer, I might value true healing more than the average player), which I think makes up for his lower total offensive output as compared to jj.  His yellow is almost worthless without victorious. But having the option to reset the board is not terrible, especially if you don't have a better yellow outlet. I would like him more if his healing/ap gen worked against goons. 

    I don't think he is a top tier character. But the community is treating him as a 'no value' 5* when I think he is a 'some value' 5*.  I think he is kinda like 5BW when she was realesed.  BB/OML were already out, so she was definitely not top tier.  But her damage output was strong at the time, if contingent, and she had some stun/board control utility, so she brought something to the table.

    (More disclaimers, I don't care about the comic book doom character at all, and it seems like a lot of pushback here on the forums is of the "but he is awesome in the comics!" variety. I think that might be clouding judgment on him.  Also, there are still very few GEDs in the wild because he was surrounded by so much 5* trash and the meta store also happened while he was in the pool. I am curious to see what people think when/if he becomes more widely covered.)
    Thanks for taking the time to explain your point of view. I appreciate it. 

     I do think it's a disservice to assert he has the same competitive value as Jessica Jones; they are comparable, yes, but certainly not equals. In short, all of Jessica Jones abilities are potentially helpful to the player under most circumstances, she has no real drawbacks. Doom, on the other hand, is much more situational. You, yourself, pointed out that Doom's tile stealing ability and heal are useless against goon nodes. Furthermore, Jessica Jones has the potential to synergize well with a lot of different characters, particularly special tile spammers, while Doom basically needs characters that feed him black (and yellow, I guess) of which there are far fewer. 

    But I suppose we should just agree to disagree and see how well he performs when, as you say, there are more Dooms out in the wild.

    From my discussions with other players, he might potentially have value as a one shot kill partner with Thanos for Essential nodes in PvE if you have supports with a high possibility of starting the match with  6 or 7 black AP but I remain skeptical of that potential trick (not to mention, that only a handful of people would be able to pull it off at it's full potential, supports being what they are). But I guess we shall see.

    For PvP, if he remains unchanged, he would basically need a partner that had a passive ability that did significant damage to an enemy team whenever a teammate was healed. (Putting the "burst" into burst healing, sorry couldn't help myself there). Additionally, that character would also have to a good nuke in any color but black and yellow.  

    As to the question for how fun he is @bluewolf: He isn't bad. I wouldn't put him at Daredevil/Peter Parker level of fun, but he won't trip you up too much with the exception that you don't want to use his yellow with a Thor or DD hovering close to 50%. I've tried running him with an all Villains team but the cover overlap among villains, especially in the 5* tier, is pretty bad although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since major villains rarely work well together in the comics. lol Still it would be nice to get a villain with a red ability in the 5* tier to help add variety among Marvel's baddest baddies. 

    Besides that and playing the third wheel for the tag team champions of Okoye/Thor, he pairs pretty well with Domino. So it's not all bad news for Doom fans. You could probably run him in LRs and Simulator for kicks but I don't see him having much of presence else where. 

    But to bring this discussion back to the OP, I think the main issue is that a lot of people are looking to move beyond the current meta and a lot of people were looking for at least 2 characters that are at least Okoye/Thor level if not better. And that hasn't come to pass.  For a true believer, characters like God Emperor Doom and Captain Marvel were seen as great opportunities to shift or expand the meta but by the looks of it they fall short of that meaning nothing changes for top end play. 

    In order to make the end game meta more interesting, the dev team really needs to focus on developing a good hard counter to challenge the ultimate tag team champs of Okoye/Thor. I have quite a few ideas on that issue but I am afraid the hour is late and I have said too much as it is so I will finish by stating that I do really hope the next few 5* are awesome and that God Emperor Doom gets buffed.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    Fight:

    Maybe I should clarify/refine what I meant by comparable.

    First if all, I did not mean to assert that they had the same competive value. Since you seemed to have read that into my comments, I assume that was that was poor phrasing on my part. I meant to assert that they are compatible insofar as they have similar total value across the whole universe if mpq activities. 

    So as an example, SS is totally surpassed by power creep now.  His high end PvP utility was always limited, but now they are 5*s with better powers and 20-30% more match damage.  However, he still has great value if he happens to be your first covered 5* because he can true heal (or if you have fight a lot of bishop teams because he ignores stuns).  SS is also still pretty good for PvP climbing.  Just don't user him for hopping unless you are desperate. He had more value in some areas than in others.

    I will concede that JJ has a higher offensive ceiling than doom because all of her abilities do damage, including some very high spikes from her passive.  She is therefore a more reliable all around addition to a team for shield hopping (in 3 open slot settings).  But her utility is also lower than doom for climbing, and for pve grinding against tile movers because she can't heal and had no board control.

    So I think they are comparable not in the sense that GED is a perfect, 1:1 replacement for jj, but in the sense that their total value across all possible activities is similar.  How much that value is expressed will be heavily player dependent (e.g., if you just user thorkoye to climb, then doom's greater climbing utility as compared to jj is wasted. And like most mid tier characters, both JJ and GED will tend to languish once some one rosters the meta).  And in no way did I mean to throw shade on JJ.  I like her a lot  My 0/8/2 build in her when she left classics is about my biggest disappointments in mpq.  Especially because the 3 extra bucks can after CS swaps went away.

    Also re: doom.  Are you snarking about the victorious support passive, or do think that support didn't go far enough abd he needs to do team damage whenever an ally is healed by any source?

    In any event, I am fine to agree to disagree and move on to other topics.
  • Spudgutter
    Spudgutter Posts: 743 Critical Contributor
    DAZ0273 said:
    HoundofShadow said:
    It's quite predictable what kind of abilities those competitive players will come up with. 

    For example,

    1) No 5* will have drawback to their abilities. Think Kingpin and Gambit. It has been proven time and time again that drawback are always frowned upon.

    2) All 5* will have fewer than 9 or even 8ap for any of their abilities.

    3) repeater will be 1-turn at 3 or 5 covers and fortified. If it's a 2 turn repeater, the effect of the repeater will be activated once immediately after firing the power.

    And more...

    To summarise, it's going to be filled with strategy where new 5* are bruteforcing the game. You don't need veterans to playtest these type of abilities. Even new players can come up with these kind of bruteforcing abilties. The balance of the game will be greatly disrupted due to power creep.  :D
    I'm not a 5* player and I actually agree that having players who are currently engaged in this game involved DEEPLY in any design process is probably not an ideal situation because whilst they might understand how to play the game, they won't understand a great deal else about how and why the Devs design characters in the way they do. However, I don't quite understand your bias against the longtime Vets and would point to the following:

    1.) I don't agree with what you say here and think it is in fact completely devoid of factual basis. Does not 5* Thor have a drawback? His best power requires him to be at half health, no? Yet the playerbase clearly has him as a meta. Does Kitty not have a drawback? She needs a certain amount of enemy specials. Gambit blocks red & black powers. Thanos kills your team...yet all have been or are Meta.
    2.) As far as I can tell the majority of meta-characters in the last few years have mostly been defined by passives, not active powers. Thor's green passive, Kitty's yellow passive, Gambit's black passive, Thanos black passive, OML yellow passive for example.
    3.) Don't you find repeater tiles to be a little frustrating? A player has worked to get the AP to fire that power and then it is lost in a cascade. Not trying to be funny but I don't play this game to see my characters powers not benefit me. So fortifying Repeaters or having them work faster when they are so vulnerable doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. Who doesn't have 4* Captain Marvel at 5 in black to get the fortification of her countdown?

    The other thing to say also though is that neither you (from what I can gather from the forums) or I have ever played truly at the 5* level, so we probably aren't qualified to say the Vets are wrong about things gameplay wise  either because we don't have the experience they do of these characters week in, week out.

    One thing that the playerbase might do better at is not sticking slavishly to a "This happened before so it must happen again" type assumption. People are flagging up Endgame as the next "meta" 5* and maybe that will come true however if we look at what happened with Infinity War, the meta 5* we got was actually from the Black Panther DVD/Bluray release which just happened to pop up in the middle of IW.
    I have found that my forum experience is much more enjoyable since i discovered the "ignore" ability, where i can just glaze right over people that i assume are trolls and/or just diametrically opposed to my views and neither one of us are changing the other person's mind.

    They may bring something to the discussion from time to time that i may be missing, but that is more to do with "a broken clock is right twice a day" than anything else. 

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