Passive Aggressive

PiMacleod

We've all read topics about how good passives are and how they are pretty much the foundation of what makes a good character.  An always on ability?  Sign us up.

However, we also know how hard it is to fight against these.  Sometimes it becomes frustratingly difficult... the best plans laid to waste by a bad board, or a lucky enemy cascade.  Sure, luck is always a factor, but not even Domino can see you through to success there.

With the new characters being released, we always have room for speculation.  Someone I always wondered about -- how they would work in this MPQ environment -- finally fleshed itself out a bit in my imagination.

Leech.

He's one of the only characters where you could feasibly give an ability to nullify other abilities, and it would feel right.  But let's color it up a bit...  this is all just speculation.  So lets be civil about it.  After all... what if a dev reads this and likes it?  Could help shape the future.

Theres only one ability I'm concentrating on, so if you can think of two others, go for it.  

Yellow passive ability -  "Nullify"  (come up with another name if youd like)

1 - At the start of the turn, randomly select one enemy team passive ability.   That ability reads as blank text until your next turn.

2 - Same as above.  Also, if your team has 10 or more yellow AP, randomly a different enemy team ability to read as blank for one turn. (Yes, this doesnt just include passives for this one)

3 - Same as above, but reduce the yellow AP threshold to 8.

4 - Same as above, but reduce the yellow AP threshold to 6.

5 - same as above.  If your team has at least 8 or more purple (or a different color if necessary) AP, randomly select a third enemy ability to read as blank for one turn.


The idea is simple.  Nullify enemy abilities.  This brings nothing on offense, but could stop enemy passives dead.  Kitty buffs, circuit breaker, bishop's defense, thor's thunder, wakanda forever....

The point is to make sure the first ability is a passive nullified.  Sure, if the enemy team has no passives, then this ability would do nothing until you get the yellow (and possibly purple) AP to work with... but if they have no passive, you're probably not bringing Leech along then in this case.

This could be the wrench in most of the meta's plans without actually being more powerful than the meta.  Of course, this all depends on his HP, his star level, and more.  

Anyways, have fun with the idea.  I've always had fun toying with game mechanics in my head, but this one was good enough (IMO) to share.

SirHuggyBear

Why not just stun, and nullify all of their abilities at once?

tiomono

SirHuggyBear said:

Why not just stun, and nullify all of their abilities at once?

Because this will remove an enemy passive for free. Also other abilities if you have enough ap available.

I think this is a great idea. It would be good if it nullified goons as well.

PiMacleod

tiomono said:

SirHuggyBear said:

Why not just stun, and nullify all of their abilities at once?

Because this will remove an enemy passive for free. Also other abilities if you have enough ap available.

I think this is a great idea. It would be good if it nullified goons as well.

Depends on the goon.  Theres that Sniper ability where they automatically put out a a 6 turn deadly green tile.   That's passive.  Also the self destruct black tile.  The three attack tiles upon death of those hand members.  Those are all passives that could be targeted. 

Not to mention having the AP laying around to nullify more abilities if needed.

As for the stun idea... maybe that's a nice idea for another separate ability, but I dont think it's quite fair to wrap ability nullification AND stunning in one passive ability.  Maybe make it like old school 1* BW, though, where it's cheap and effective and that's all it does.

Also, @SirHuggyBear... I was trying to stay within the idea of the character.   Most of the time Leech was active, the opponents could still act... but had no abilities.  Wolverine couldn't regen, Rogue couldn't absorb, Cyclops could look around without his visor and not destroy everything... the list goes on.  I know theres exceptions to this, but let's just take it as usable game value.

A passive free stun is pretty heavy.  Yeah, it nullifies the opponent alright, but then that character cant match or gain AP, which hurts even more.  I think there's a threshold that shouldn't be crossed (at least yet).

Borstock

If they ever released a character with this power, I would guess there would be a negative component to it. For example, I think your own passives might be forfeit or minimized, too. Just seems like something they would do.

Ed_Dragonrider

PiMacleod said:

tiomono said:

SirHuggyBear said:

Why not just stun, and nullify all of their abilities at once?

Because this will remove an enemy passive for free. Also other abilities if you have enough ap available.

I think this is a great idea. It would be good if it nullified goons as well.

Depends on the goon.  Theres that Sniper ability where they automatically put out a a 6 turn deadly green tile.   That's passive.  Also the self destruct black tile.  The three attack tiles upon death of those hand members.  Those are all passives that could be targeted. 

Ultron sentries!! Everything they do is passive... oh how i would love to nullify them!!

sambrookjm

Ed_Dragonrider said:

PiMacleod said:

tiomono said:

SirHuggyBear said:

Why not just stun, and nullify all of their abilities at once?

Because this will remove an enemy passive for free. Also other abilities if you have enough ap available.

I think this is a great idea. It would be good if it nullified goons as well.

Depends on the goon.  Theres that Sniper ability where they automatically put out a a 6 turn deadly green tile.   That's passive.  Also the self destruct black tile.  The three attack tiles upon death of those hand members.  Those are all passives that could be targeted. 

Ultron sentries!! Everything they do is passive... oh how i would love to nullify them!!

I regret that I have but one Like to give for this comment.

Jwallyr

"Why not just stun"?

Because nearly every stun in the game requires multiple turns of gathering AP (often 3+ turns), which itself requires a cooperative board, while the best passives in the game all require zero setup and are often at full power from turn 0?

The suggestion that the existence of activated stuns is a sufficient counter to characters with huge overwhelming front-loaded passives is just silly. Of course, the underlying issue is that most of these huge overwhelming front-loaded passives are themselves simply too strong to be balanced, but since that's not going to be fixed, the only way to have any kind of symmetrical response to such passives is to have similarly low-setup defensive passives. IMO this is one reason that Bishop is such a problem for so many teams- in order to be a useful defense against Grocket (the poster child for ridiculous zero-setup frontloaded passives) his defensive passives have to be huge and easy to trigger... which means he's also "accidentally" overpowered against most other opponents as well... because the underlying problem is still Grocket.

Malcrof

https://forums.d3go.com/categories/speculation-and-concepts

feel free to create a fully fleshed out char and post it, link it there as well!