*** Spider-Man (Classic) ***

Nonce Equitaur 2

gamar wrote:

According to bug pop he made a mess of purples viewtopic.php?p=132353#p132353

Bombul made a detailed post about the Loki nerf, and the devs responded.

Demiurge_Chris wrote:

Bombul, thank you very much for your well thought out post! Our lead designer (as well as many others here at Demiurge) here have read it and are working on a response which we hope to have out shortly. Thanks again for your time and we hope you'll stick with us as we try to get balance right.

And that was his only post. He was never heard from again.

NorthernPolarity

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

as is I don't see him doing anything except being a prologue healbot.

Agreed.

He reminds me of the Hulk in a way: he's fine for newer players transitioning into 3*s since he's probably still an upgrade to OBW, but once you complete your transition, you're just straight up almost never going to use him ever again. I guess he's a better investment than the Hulk simply because you will always be at least able to prologue heal with him. Hulk just doesn't do anything once you get LT/BP/Hood.

Realize his healbot utility is geared towards hardcore players who actually play longer than health packs can sustain them. This means he will be worthless to a lot of people.

I don't think he will be a decent transition from anything the way he is. Players would be best off avoiding him like the plague unless they are apart of the small percentage of hardcore players who need a healbot to replace OBW at levels 110+.

I haven't been in the 2*->3* transition phase for a while now, but I would imagine that getting off a 3k heal at the end of every round is still pretty good with a maxed out 2* team right? I would imagine with the way that MMR changes have been going, 2* players are now facing a lot of equal 2* teams, which should do more damage than OBW can heal up if you're grinding to 700-800 in PvP. I would imagine people burning a ton of health packs in this situation, which is what Spidey can help with. How long does 5 health packs usually last for a transition player that has something like 85 thor / 85 obw / 85 wolvie?

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

gamar wrote:

According to bug pop he made a mess of purples viewtopic.php?p=132353#p132353

Bombul made a detailed post about the Loki nerf, and the devs responded.

Demiurge_Chris wrote:

Bombul, thank you very much for your well thought out post! Our lead designer (as well as many others here at Demiurge) here have read it and are working on a response which we hope to have out shortly. Thanks again for your time and we hope you'll stick with us as we try to get balance right.

And that was his only post. He was never heard from again.

At the time of the Bombul post and response, trickery swapped half as many tiles

Mawtful

My Spider-Man is L75 with 3/5/5. I haven't used him in PvE or PvP for quite a long time now (maybe 2-3 months).

I'm definitely not a fan of these changes simply for the fact that he remains a pure support character - stuck dealing match damage. I was hoping that they'd replace Purple entirely.
My wish was to keep Yellow as a heal, turn Blue into a lightly damaging ability that also leaves behind a web tile, and then turn Purple into an active that stuns, but clears Web tiles. That way you would still want to use blue whenever you had the AP for it, with web tiles fueling his other two abilities but then having to make a choice between a longer stun or a larger heal each time to wipe away the webs.

I can't see myself using this incarnation of Spider-Man in PvP, but I'm already accustomed to not using him, so I don't think it'll be that hard for me.

Dauthi

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

as is I don't see him doing anything except being a prologue healbot.

Agreed.

He reminds me of the Hulk in a way: he's fine for newer players transitioning into 3*s since he's probably still an upgrade to OBW, but once you complete your transition, you're just straight up almost never going to use him ever again. I guess he's a better investment than the Hulk simply because you will always be at least able to prologue heal with him. Hulk just doesn't do anything once you get LT/BP/Hood.

Realize his healbot utility is geared towards hardcore players who actually play longer than health packs can sustain them. This means he will be worthless to a lot of people.

I don't think he will be a decent transition from anything the way he is. Players would be best off avoiding him like the plague unless they are apart of the small percentage of hardcore players who need a healbot to replace OBW at levels 110+.

I haven't been in the 2*->3* transition phase for a while now, but I would imagine that getting off a 3k heal at the end of every round is still pretty good with a maxed out 2* team right? I would imagine with the way that MMR changes have been going, 2* players are now facing a lot of equal 2* teams, which should do more damage than OBW can heal up if you're grinding to 700-800 in PvP. I would imagine people burning a ton of health packs in this situation, which is what Spidey can help with. How long does 5 health packs usually last for a transition player that has something like 85 thor / 85 obw / 85 wolvie?

Im assuming your 3k heal is assuming their spidey is level 144 and has 3 webs on the board? This seems unlikely, but even so they would have to have 15 blue and 12 yellow saved up and use it at the same time.

The equal level stats are much more revealing:

"Level 85 5/5: 1534 base healing + 619 with Web tiles = 2153 max healing
Compare to Black Widow (Original) max level - 1228 healing"

Now if you manage to drop 3 web tiles on the board by hoarding 15 blue and then get 12 yellow (a lot of work here) you can get a bonus 900 health? This is vs OBW 0 obligation 9 blue cost heal. Even if we are considering using her for heal botting, for 3 more blue and 12 less yellows she can heal for more than spidey AND gather AP faster thanks to stealing from the opposing team.

I think there are plenty of casual players that hop on and play until their health packs run out, and it is not dependent on levels since casual players can obtain that, it just takes more time since they play less. Healbots are great for players who sink lots of time into the game, and sinking lots of time into a game puts you into the "hardcore" ranking.

NorthernPolarity

Dauthi wrote:

dlaw008 wrote:

In all honesty, he looks fine. None of us have played with him yet, but from an objective view I would say he looks about right. Any ability at 5 ap is pretty cheap, and the cost is not too out of line with other stun abilities. Venom has a one turn stun at 4ap, but Spiderman may potentially stun for 3 turns for 5. MBW stuns for multiple turns, but at 9 ap, so a higher threshold. In my opinion, 'stunlock' shouldn't be a thing, anyway. The ability to stun the entire enemy team repeatedly is ridiculous.

Yes, 5 ap is cheap when the ability is worth while. Tell me what a 1 turn stun is good for or a 3 turn stun on one target if you save up 10 ap? Don't kid yourself, he is not going to pay 5 blue ap to stun anyone for 3 turns unless you save 15 blue ap. Have you tried keeping IM 40's yellows on the board? Now instead of waiting 2 turns wait for more blue after having harvested 10-15 blue from the board.

Venom's stun hits the entire team, that is useful. So does MBW for 9 blue and she stuns one person for 5 turns. Honestly the only stun his is better than is DD.

And the protect tiles should be less valuable than Panther's or anyone with an active protect ability, because they are completely and totally free. They should be less valuable than bullseye, too, because frankly, what else does bullseye do?

They are free, but they are completely dependent on webs that cost 5 blue ap a piece staying on the board. To make matters worse if you use it asap like purple wants you to you are likely going to lose the extra stuns and healing due to putting webs out on the board too early and getting them destroyed. That is a huge risk, and the payout should be huge as well and yet having 1 web tile on the board post nerf is worse than having 0 pre-nerf.

He deserved to be nerfed, but not to below average usefulness. He is one of the most beloved characters in Marvel. He should put his bag back over his face and be ashamed.

I think something to think about is what a balanced Spidey would look like in the first place. Spidey was designed to be a completely defensive character focused on supporting your own team with heals, stuns, and protect tiles. I would expect to his heal to not be able to completely heal your team back to full but heal maybe 30-50% of your max hp for a good amount of AP, his stun to lock down probably one member of the enemy team throughout a good portion of the match, and his defense tiles to be reasonable. From a balancing standpoint, it makes sense for his stun to only be able to lock down one character since anymore than that would be what we have right now, which is clearly overpowered. His current iteration looks like it does almost exactly that: yellow is reasonably efficient, his protect tiles seem fine, and his stun probably locks down one character for probably half the match once you get going with it. I think the reason why he feels underwhelming is that due to current game mechanics, there's just no place for a character that does this.

For PvE, you don't really want to heal due to scaling, so you straight up just can't use his heal in PvE, which means that one of his core strengths is unused in the format. His stun alone isn't enough to warrant his use (which is fine, since if you took out the main ability for other characters, they would probably be near unusable as well: imagine Thor without his yellow, for instance), so he doesn't really have a place in PvE.

For PvP, the name of the game is speed, and you want to take down your opponents as fast as possible due to retaliations and having to grind up to 1000+ points. Being reasonable on defense is also a big plus. Spidey inherently isn't supposed to do this at all: having a purely defensive character on your team is obviously going to be terrible when you want to be as offensive as possible, and so it's pretty intuitive that he won't be used at all in PvP either: again this doesn't change much since he isn't even being used now in PvP except in transition teams.

I feel like there probably doesn't exist a balanced version of Spidey that will see play while adhering to his original design goals: the systems in the game simply don't allow for it. Maybe we'll see after PvP slows down once C. Mags gets nerfed.

NorthernPolarity

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

as is I don't see him doing anything except being a prologue healbot.

Agreed.

He reminds me of the Hulk in a way: he's fine for newer players transitioning into 3*s since he's probably still an upgrade to OBW, but once you complete your transition, you're just straight up almost never going to use him ever again. I guess he's a better investment than the Hulk simply because you will always be at least able to prologue heal with him. Hulk just doesn't do anything once you get LT/BP/Hood.

Realize his healbot utility is geared towards hardcore players who actually play longer than health packs can sustain them. This means he will be worthless to a lot of people.

I don't think he will be a decent transition from anything the way he is. Players would be best off avoiding him like the plague unless they are apart of the small percentage of hardcore players who need a healbot to replace OBW at levels 110+.

I haven't been in the 2*->3* transition phase for a while now, but I would imagine that getting off a 3k heal at the end of every round is still pretty good with a maxed out 2* team right? I would imagine with the way that MMR changes have been going, 2* players are now facing a lot of equal 2* teams, which should do more damage than OBW can heal up if you're grinding to 700-800 in PvP. I would imagine people burning a ton of health packs in this situation, which is what Spidey can help with. How long does 5 health packs usually last for a transition player that has something like 85 thor / 85 obw / 85 wolvie?

Im assuming your 3k heal is assuming their spidey is level 144 and has 3 webs on the board? This seems unlikely, but even so they would have to have 15 blue and 12 yellow saved up and use it at the same time.

The equal level stats are much more revealing:

"Level 85 5/5: 1534 base healing + 619 with Web tiles = 2153 max healing
Compare to Black Widow (Original) max level - 1228 healing"

Now if you manage to drop 3 web tiles on the board by hoarding 15 blue and then get 12 yellow (a lot of work here) you can get a bonus 900 health? This is vs OBW 0 obligation 9 blue cost heal. Even if we are considering using her for heal botting, for 3 more blue and 12 less yellows she can heal for more than spidey AND gather AP faster thanks to stealing from the opposing team.

I think there are plenty of casual players that hop on and play until their health packs run out, and it is not dependent on levels since casual players can obtain that, it just takes more time since they play less. Healbots are great for players who sink lots of time into the game, and sinking lots of time into a game puts you into the "hardcore" ranking.

I would expect a level 85 Spidey to heal for roughly the same amount as a level 85 OBW, so I don't think that's a fair comparison: 3*s aren't expected to surpass 2* until they hit 100+ anyways. The real comparison here is a maxed out Spidey vs OBW, and in this case, a 2.3k+900 conditionally heal for 12AP is obviously superior to a 1.2k heal for 9AP. I don't know if the 3 blue tiles on board is that big of a deal since i'd imagine it to be very similar to how spidey works now: you drag out the game until you get enough blues on the board to heal to full anyways, so getting 3 tiles on board doesn't seem like that hard to do.

NorthernPolarity

I don't think these changes really change how people use Spidey: he's been delegated to a prologue healbot already, and post-nerfs, he'll still be the same prologue healbot (although healing will take twice as long now). viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7389&start=220#p141163 and a couple more of my posts in that page has my thoughts on the nerf.

Dauthi

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

dlaw008 wrote:

In all honesty, he looks fine. None of us have played with him yet, but from an objective view I would say he looks about right. Any ability at 5 ap is pretty cheap, and the cost is not too out of line with other stun abilities. Venom has a one turn stun at 4ap, but Spiderman may potentially stun for 3 turns for 5. MBW stuns for multiple turns, but at 9 ap, so a higher threshold. In my opinion, 'stunlock' shouldn't be a thing, anyway. The ability to stun the entire enemy team repeatedly is ridiculous.

Yes, 5 ap is cheap when the ability is worth while. Tell me what a 1 turn stun is good for or a 3 turn stun on one target if you save up 10 ap? Don't kid yourself, he is not going to pay 5 blue ap to stun anyone for 3 turns unless you save 15 blue ap. Have you tried keeping IM 40's yellows on the board? Now instead of waiting 2 turns wait for more blue after having harvested 10-15 blue from the board.

Venom's stun hits the entire team, that is useful. So does MBW for 9 blue and she stuns one person for 5 turns. Honestly the only stun his is better than is DD.

And the protect tiles should be less valuable than Panther's or anyone with an active protect ability, because they are completely and totally free. They should be less valuable than bullseye, too, because frankly, what else does bullseye do?

They are free, but they are completely dependent on webs that cost 5 blue ap a piece staying on the board. To make matters worse if you use it asap like purple wants you to you are likely going to lose the extra stuns and healing due to putting webs out on the board too early and getting them destroyed. That is a huge risk, and the payout should be huge as well and yet having 1 web tile on the board post nerf is worse than having 0 pre-nerf.

He deserved to be nerfed, but not to below average usefulness. He is one of the most beloved characters in Marvel. He should put his bag back over his face and be ashamed.

I would expect to his heal to not be able to completely heal your team back to full but heal maybe 30-50% of your max hp for a good amount of AP, his stun to lock down probably one member of the enemy team throughout a good portion of the match, and his defense tiles to be reasonable. From a balancing standpoint, it makes sense for his stun to only be able to lock down one character since anymore than that would be what we have right now, which is clearly overpowered.

You bring up a good point. His stun should have only locked down a single character. This would make him useful in stopping opponents who are about to use a devastating ability as well as easily finish off a single target. It would also fall in line with what his webs can actually do in the canon. The way they could have solved this is up his blue cost a point or two and make his stuns cumulative based on the last person he hit with it, and resets when he chooses a new target.

His current iteration looks like it does almost exactly that: yellow is reasonably efficient, his protect tiles seem fine, and his stun probably locks down one character for probably half the match once you get going with it.

The risk of his web tiles breaking do not allow him to lock down anyone down, not even a single character. Then you have the sheer cost of it vs time stunned. The risk/reward does not pay off. You would have to wait until 10 blue ap giving you 3 turns to get 5 more and IF no webs break you can stun them for another 3 turns. His stun is really bad and his purple exacerbates the problem by being useless without forcing you to use stuns in a non-strategic manner.

Dauthi

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I haven't been in the 2*->3* transition phase for a while now, but I would imagine that getting off a 3k heal at the end of every round is still pretty good with a maxed out 2* team right? I would imagine with the way that MMR changes have been going, 2* players are now facing a lot of equal 2* teams, which should do more damage than OBW can heal up if you're grinding to 700-800 in PvP. I would imagine people burning a ton of health packs in this situation, which is what Spidey can help with. How long does 5 health packs usually last for a transition player that has something like 85 thor / 85 obw / 85 wolvie?

I would expect a level 85 Spidey to heal for roughly the same amount as a level 85 OBW, so I don't think that's a fair comparison: 3*s aren't expected to surpass 2* until they hit 100+ anyways. The real comparison here is a maxed out Spidey vs OBW, and in this case, a 2.3k+900 conditionally heal for 12AP is obviously superior to a 1.2k heal for 9AP. I don't know if the 3 blue tiles on board is that big of a deal since i'd imagine it to be very similar to how spidey works now: you drag out the game until you get enough blues on the board to heal to full anyways, so getting 3 tiles on board doesn't seem like that hard to do.

Sure, but I thought the point was transitioning from 2* to 3* where Spidey is equal level or slightly higher than OBW, I bolded the original statement above. We can't accurately say when he will be significantly better than her for healbotting, but I would imagine it would be around 110 or so like I originally stated. Even maxed it is a 3200 hp gain vs OBW 2400 hp gain for 3 more blue and 12 less yellow while OBW can gain AP faster through her other skills too. It comes down to if that is worth the ISO and effort to collect his covers.

Unknown

Regarding obw: Spidey was one of the first 3-stars I used, long before obw was released. When obw released, I was already at the stage where I questioned what the point of me using her was. Then I tried her out and instantly knew I had to max her. I upgraded (yes, upgraded) from Spidey to obw.

Imo, Spidey was best at mid-level. He doesn't need high iso investment to be good. He allows you to take on opponents that you shouldn't normally be able to beat. His strat revolves around getting into wars with stronger opponents worth more points. Now, he doesn't even have that.

Taking this into account, I think the 85 Spidey vs 85 obw heal is a very valid argument. Lvl85 imo is where Spidey is in his money range. Dumping 200k iso to max Spidey just for a marginally better heal is now a waste imo.



When I say Spidey is (was) OP, I refer strictly to his ability to auto-win a battle. However, winning a battle doesn't mean winning an event. Other characters, like obw, are far faster and efficient.

Likewise, I think calling him terrible should also be clarified. I think he's still decent in his ability to win a battle, but the fact remains that he is still as slow as ever. Perhaps devs test battle simulations but not with the added pressure and meta-strats involved in winning a tournament.

NorthernPolarity

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I haven't been in the 2*->3* transition phase for a while now, but I would imagine that getting off a 3k heal at the end of every round is still pretty good with a maxed out 2* team right? I would imagine with the way that MMR changes have been going, 2* players are now facing a lot of equal 2* teams, which should do more damage than OBW can heal up if you're grinding to 700-800 in PvP. I would imagine people burning a ton of health packs in this situation, which is what Spidey can help with.[/b] How long does 5 health packs usually last for a transition player that has something like 85 thor / 85 obw / 85 wolvie?

I would expect a level 85 Spidey to heal for roughly the same amount as a level 85 OBW, so I don't think that's a fair comparison: 3*s aren't expected to surpass 2* until they hit 100+ anyways. The real comparison here is a maxed out Spidey vs OBW, and in this case, a 2.3k+900 conditionally heal for 12AP is obviously superior to a 1.2k heal for 9AP. I don't know if the 3 blue tiles on board is that big of a deal since i'd imagine it to be very similar to how spidey works now: you drag out the game until you get enough blues on the board to heal to full anyways, so getting 3 tiles on board doesn't seem like that hard to do.

Sure, but I thought the point was transitioning from 2* to 3* where Spidey is equal level or slightly higher than OBW, I bolded the original statement above. We can't accurately say when he will be better than her for healbotting, but I would imagine it would be around 110 or so like I originally stated. Even maxed it is a 3200 hp gain vs OBW 2400 hp gain for 3 more blue and 12 less yellow while OBW can gain AP faster through her other skills too. It comes down to if that is worth the ISO and effort to collect his covers.

Ah, we're talking about two different transitions: when I say transition, I refer to a team with 1 maxed out 3* character and 2 maxed out 2*s: I don't think it makes too much sense to refer to transition as a having a level 85-100 3* character: that would be like comparing an 85 Punisher to 85 A. Wolvie or something like that, in which case at that point they're similar in power level, but Punisher clearly gets better as he gets more levels. Agreed about whether or not it's worth the iso/effort to level up a Spidey: again, its probably like the hulk where if you aren't anywhere close to leveling up other 3*s, then its probably fine. I think that I'm going to recommend people leveling up Spidey if they have no other options since healbotting will always be useful, and he can help you get better 3*s.

Unknown

gamar wrote:

According to bug pop he made a mess of purples

As much as I know his Transmogrify converted 10 red tiles and 10 yellow tiles to purple tiles. For a very low cost in purple AP. I seem to recall it was nicknamed "purple forest fire", as a nod towards the second jungle environment special and the utter mayhem plopping down 20 purple tiles on the board would cause.

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

Taking this into account, I think the 85 Spidey vs 85 obw heal is a very valid argument. Lvl85 imo is where Spidey is in his money range. Dumping 200k iso to max Spidey just for a marginally better heal is now a waste imo.

Absolutely. 75 is about a great compromise for him, 90 if you have spare ISO, mine went up to 106 that is absolute ceiling for playability before he start overtaking yellow matches from Patch. From that point it's more than 100k plus ISO to 141.

So for heal-compare 85 or 100 are the good numbers and 141 to forget.

ihearthawthats wrote:

I think he's still decent in his ability to win a battle

I don't agree with that even in raw terms, you need to mine 5U to add 3 more turns of stun. My experience shows the current one with 3 blue (4AP cost for 1-5 round stun) was a shaky proposition and run out of blues frequently. This one is just bound to run dry after 3rd triplet and leaves you collecting only 3 matches of actually useful AP in the meantime. The circumstances where you win are like where you win without him, or already would have won having an actual useful character on the team.

And if we leave the raw "able" thing and look comparison with other mates he might lose even to daredevil really. Win maybe over Loki considering ***s unless opponent uses stuff fitting trickery.

laz070

Congratulations! What I don't understand is that instead of weakening a character, why do they have to destroy it completely...

ronin_san

I get the idea that this change was implemented to make Iceman feasible, since Iceman will obviously turn a bunch of tiles blue.

That plus it enables D3 to release another healer and quiet Nerf obw's heal in the future.

The goal, above all, will be to release new chars so we hate our old ones. Spidey is old, and they're not making any money off of him. Of course they phase him out to encourage spending on new.

It's M:TG all over again. "Lightning bolt is too powerful; dark ritual is too powerful"...

Unknown

This is all well and good we knew for months now that this nerf was coming.
What I like to know is when is x force Wolverine going to get buffed?

Unknown

With the Spider not having the HP to really be worth leveling up to 141, and with no major improvements of his powers as he levels up, it seems to me that he's been Ragnarok'd. This is especially bad because one of his major assets without a stun lock would be to soft stun with patch, and patch really doesn't want Spidey to be leveled up.

So he has a healing power that is not really that much better than OBWs, if just due to pricing reasons (he does not steal yellow), a stun that is ok, and a purple that has been drastically weakened.

If I was to rework Spidey, I would be OK with the blue chnges you made, beef up purple a little more, and come up with a yellow power that is cheap, does a bit of damage, and places web tiles.

Unknown

All is not well.

Are we really ok with a Dev swinging the sword on a character this hard people took months to level up? In many cases spending money along the way. I can understand raising blue's AP cost if they want to change that trend in the game but the needed to make it more value that just keeping it a 1 character short stun for 5 ap. His purple had no need for such a huge hit.

I really cant believe the amount of people saying he's ok with these changes. He's very bad. Very. Everything depends on his tiles even more so now and its harder to put them on the board as often and hope they arent destroyed.



When games who have stood the test of time needed to make changes they made them in the framework. WoW had the same issue with stunlock 12 years ago. They didnt make stuns cost more energy for rogues and **** them. They adding dimishing returns for ALL classes. This is the type of fix that fixes spiderman or magneto. BTW it also fixes most any character issue of this type for all future characters too. Not simply raising ap costs or lowering damage numbers..... This is lazy this far into the games cycle.

15 ap to stun a single character for 6-8 turns (8 if you are lucky and web tiles arent destroyed ). Or spend 14 ap with thor to do 8k cleave damage.........


He's fine after this? What planet is everyone living on? If this is the future for this game I will not be putting anymore money into it. This is it. I have already put in a lot and now one of my only 2 characters over lvl 100 that I spent a month leveling to that is worthless. Framework changes are good, samll adjustments are fine. This is neither. Its a lazy attempt to shut everyone up about how pve is broken.

Unknown

Hope this change brings out how absurd OBW is into the light.