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.
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. 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.
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.
bluewolf said: Here are some 5's that aren't meta but fun to play with:HawkeyeSpidey (BSSM is OK, but mostly just a defensive addition)DaredevilDoctor StrangeCap IWGRRRPeople 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.
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.)