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

Dauthi

NorthernPolarity wrote:

2. A pure defensive character that is also bad on defense has no place in the current pvp meta, which is about minimizing retaliations through team comp intimidation and fast wins to minimize time spent unshielded at high point totals.


If you agree with point 2, then you agree that even the current overpowered spidey is useless in PvP. Put the two together, and you should see that regardless of how Demiurge decides to nerf Spidey, if they want to maintain his original character concept, then he's always going to be useless in PvP unless the meta shifts somehow.

Then isn't the logical conclusion make him good on the defense too? His Spidersense and healing could easily have been tuned to do this because players will avoid slow kills. I see no reason to create or reform a character so that it is unusable for PVP or PVE. It is pretty lazy and makes it harder to transfer to 3* (due to offering useless spideys as 3* prizes), and that is why there are a lot more players impacted by this at that level.

Do you believe that support characters will never be useful in end game pvp, or just ones that heal and create shields? I am trying to understand your line of thinking.

While I agree that blue is probably underpowered now and could have cost maybe 4AP or so, I would much rather have a weaker Spidey in the game than the current OP iteration that we have right now. I just feel like all of the complaining and crying is wasted when the usage of the character isn't going to change except for the small percentage of people in the game that actually have a 5 blue Spidey (which is pretty freaking hard to do without spending HP considering how little he's been given out) and do not have a fully developed 3* roster, which I doubt represent most of the users who are complaining.

So essentially throw the baby out with the bath water? I don't agree with this line of thinking. There is always an alternative to harming players, and a minority should never be considered unequal.

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I think people are way too caught up on having to use ATU just because ATU used to be incredibly broken.

Assuming you're going with a standard wimp-out approach you should just collect yellow because you heal considerably more for 24y versus 9y + 15blue and they're the same total amount of AP. Sure collecting 24y is likely harder than latter, but the former also heals for a lot more. If you happen to have enough blue along the way to do something useful that's good too, but 2 Web Bandages should allow a relatively safe victory. Since ATU can no longer stunlock you can no longer just challenge teams you've no business of beating, but the teams that you are around your level, 2 Web Bandages should still allow you to win while taking minimal damage, even though those fights will be pretty slow.

sure, for prologue healing (which actually probably will be faster now). But that's still wasting a slot on a character with very little marginal utility. Especially since that way you're just getting yellow, which is really only used by L. Thor. At least with blue, you're denying other, actually useful, powers.

If all you care about is rushing to a heal, again, OBW brings more utility. You can go for purple, and drain all the other powers too, or you can just go for the blue to heal

Exactly. I don't see anyone working to obtain Spidey covers and dump iso into him to get a marginal gain in healing, especially if they have OBW left over from their 2* roster (who doesn't). Don't forget she gains faster through stealing making healing that much more efficient.

NorthernPolarity

Dauthi wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

2. A pure defensive character that is also bad on defense has no place in the current pvp meta, which is about minimizing retaliations through team comp intimidation and fast wins to minimize time spent unshielded at high point totals.


If you agree with point 2, then you agree that even the current overpowered spidey is useless in PvP. Put the two together, and you should see that regardless of how Demiurge decides to nerf Spidey, if they want to maintain his original character concept, then he's always going to be useless in PvP unless the meta shifts somehow.

Then isn't the logical conclusion make him good on the defense too? His Spidersense and healing could easily have been tuned to do this because players will avoid slow kills. I see no reason to create or reform a character so that it is unusable for PVP or PVE. It is pretty lazy and makes it harder to transfer to 3* (due to offering useless spideys as 3* prizes), and that is why there are a lot more players impacted by this at that level.

Do you believe that support characters will never be useful in end game pvp, or just ones that heal and create shields? I am trying to understand your line of thinking.

I believe that support characters that have no offensive capability will never be useful in the standard PvP tournaments that we play. Support characters like Hood/OBW/Falcon are obviously perfectly viable in PvP, but that's because they all speed up your kills in some way as well: Hood/OBW through AP generation, Falcon through inspiration. Spidey's was designed to be a purely defensive character without offensive capability, and that's the main reason why I don't see him ever being useful in PvP.

Dauthi wrote:

While I agree that blue is probably underpowered now and could have cost maybe 4AP or so, I would much rather have a weaker Spidey in the game than the current OP iteration that we have right now. I just feel like all of the complaining and crying is wasted when the usage of the character isn't going to change except for the small percentage of people in the game that actually have a 5 blue Spidey (which is pretty freaking hard to do without spending HP considering how little he's been given out) and do not have a fully developed 3* roster, which I doubt represent most of the users who are complaining.

So essentially throw the baby out with the bath water? I don't agree with this line of thinking. There is always an alternative to harming players, and a minority should never be considered unequal.

My original comment was just referring to how a lot of people compared this nerf to making Spidey utterly not viable, which I disagree with. I might have overreacted there, but I'm just sick of hearing all of these complaints and negativity in general.

Unknown

There needs to a lot more nerfs before a purely defensive character is competitive in PvP because offense is still way too strong relative to defense right now.

AP acceleration greatly favors offense over defense. Starting with 30 yellow, purple, and blue with Spiderman/IW/Falcon and you get no meaningful advantage despite dropping 1500 worth of protect tiles by turn 2. Start with 30 red and green with anyone that's halfway decent and the game should end on the first turn.

Dauthi

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I believe that support characters that have no offensive capability will never be useful in the standard PvP tournaments that we play. Support characters like Hood/OBW/Falcon are obviously perfectly viable in PvP, but that's because they all speed up your kills in some way as well: Hood/OBW through AP generation, Falcon through inspiration. Spidey's was designed to be a purely defensive character without offensive capability, and that's the main reason why I don't see him ever being useful in PvP.

So in order to make a support with no offense viable is to give a reason for attackers to avoid fighting him. The best way to do this is slowing down their win through annoying healing/shielding mechanics (like Bullseye). Lowering his heal so it is more likely to go off (like OBW) and making his shields an annoyance without the AI's need for strategy would do the trick.

If these 2 worked better I wouldn't care much about his stun anyways. The developers had a chance to make him work well in PVP while nerfing him. Sadly, they failed on both accounts.

Unknown

The funny part is how people keep thinking that anyone who complains is just pissed that we can't stun lock anymore
I know that for at least me I couldn't give a tinykitty if they completely removed Spideys stun.
Let me repeat that. I don't give a tinykitty about losing the stun.
I hope that sinks in.
However what does aggravate me is is that these changes completely ruin the usefullness of all 3 abilities to be used in any meaningful way.
They could have just made his blue a passive that gave a webtile for each match nothing fancy nothing else needed,go ahead nuke the rest to what it is now but at least then he'd still be somewhat viable to use for the defense tiles if nothing else.

-edit- yes I know prologue healing but even then I would just use him ANS obw + who I was trying to heal rather then use Spidey alone as that would take forever.

Dauthi

After discussing in the other Spidey threads I felt it important to summarize why his nerf is bad so that others will not have to sift through pages of the other threads. Here is why you will not see Spidey anymore after his nerf:

Spider-Sense

It is passive, but is completely dependent on webs that cost 5 blue ap a piece staying on the board because at 0 webs it has almost no protection. If you use it asap like purple wants you to, and drop webs down, 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. Don't forget that dropping webs on yellows early stops you from matching yellow. That is a huge risk, and the payout should be huge, but 1 web tile on the board post nerf is worse than having 0 pre-nerf. If you do manage to get a shield tile with 3 webs you are awarded with a protect tile half the damage reduction of his previous spidey-sense. Worth it!

All Tied up

A 1 turn stun is virtually useless. If you are lucky you might get 5 more blue before your web brakes and get a.. 2 turn stun! Again though, it would be virtually useless. I guess you could stall an opponents ability that is about to go off for 2 turns? There is a slim chance either web will survive until you hit another 5 blue, so forget about the bonus heal or stun. Again he is dependent on a web you can create 3-4 times per battle. It makes him the most circumstantial and unreliable support in the game now.

You could hoard 15 blue and 12 yellow to take advantage of his heal, his stun, and his spider sense. This means he will be absolutely useless until 15 blue though and 12 yellow. When you hit 15 blue and 12 yellow you will get to stun the opponents all together for 1 turn if there are still 3 opponents or 2 turns if there are 2. Essentially you had better hope you have killed one opponent by 15 blue to make his stun worthwhile still. After you drop that you can get your bonus heal. If you are even luckier you can take advantage of his purple if there is a purple match that round, which you had better hope there is because those web tiles are going to break fast. There is a reason IM 40 gives so much AP if you protect 3 yellow tiles randomly dropped on the board, now you have to protect them for the entire match.

Venom stuns the whole team for 4 purple, MBW stuns the whole team for 1 turn and the main target for 5 turns, Spidey stuns one target for 6 turns for 15 blue and it is linked to how well his purple does? It is the worst stun next to DD.


Web Bandages

This ability can earn him the rank of heal bot in your team, well if it wasn't for OBW. Even maxed it is a 3200 hp gain vs 2 OBW heals for 2400 hp for 3 more blue and 12 less yellow while OBW can gain AP faster through stealing. If you have a fully decked out OBW (I know you do) why would you try for spidey covers and dump ISO for a minuscule gain? It seems OBW has stolen even this from our poor spidey.


The truth is he is going to be a terrible character and will have no place in the game making it harder to transfer from 2* to 3* due to Spidey's being offered in events instead of another useful 3*.

Who has this been done to? One of the most famous and prized characters of the marvel universe. His only redeeming quality is his healing, because that is what he is known for in his comics. Makes perfect sense.

Unknown

I apologize for not reading your post but I have two requests:

1) Can you change cancer in the title to nerf or something else? I know it might sound silly but I just don't see the need for using that particular word here.

2) Any chance you can discuss this in one of the other threads that are already focusing on it?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7389
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7709

Dauthi

beezer37_84 wrote:

I apologize for not reading your post but I have two requests:

1) Can you change cancer in the title to nerf or something else? I know it might sound silly but I just don't see the need for using that particular word here.

2) Any chance you can discuss this in one of the other threads that are already focusing on it?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7389
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7709

Sure, fixed.

I think it is important to have an analysis of why his skills are bad at the start of a thread instead of sifting through 15 pages of either of those threads.

Unknown

beezer37_84 wrote:

I apologize for not reading your post but I have two requests:

1) Can you change cancer in the title to nerf or something else? I know it might sound silly but I just don't see the need for using that particular word here.

2) Any chance you can discuss this in one of the other threads that are already focusing on it?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7389
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7709

Agreed. Not a fan of cancer used as a joke. The phrase "like a cancer" ..perfectly fine..but it rubs me wrong when its used purely in a joking manner. I also am not sure why it was necessary as the body of what you wrote didn't even seem to correlate to title? Not angry at the op, just how I feel on the subject.

On top of that, somebody within the last 2 pages is asking for well wishes for someone who I only assume is "taking off for health" due to cancer, cancer recovery, or something in some way linked to important surgery (9/10 cancer or somehow related). Since the actual issue is never explicitly stated...I don't blame you for not thinking in this manner, but for me at least it comes off a little cold.

And I am sure you didn't mean any harm, so bezzie and me aren't here to demonize you.

Added before posting: err...I guess sickness is better than cancer....still note great though....but whatever. It rubs me wrong more because I am.still correlating the phrase with what it said before than.the phrase all on its own I think.

Unknown

The current state of offense it is not remotely feasible to have defensive ability strong enough to slow it down short of a stunlock. I'll use Invisible Woman here because her abilities are much easier to compute as a number compared to Spiderman's. Let's say you start with enough for Grant Invisibility and Force Bubble in every game, which is used immediately, and for this purpose we'll assume you can't use the free Force Bubbles for Force Bubble Crush (because that's offense). What is the effect of having such powerful defensive abilities available on turn 1? Well, the Force Bubble protect tile is placed randomly, so we'll assume it lasts 10 turns (that's at least 60 tiles destroyed from both side's matches, which should have a good chance of hitting wherever the protection tile is). The invisibility tile might prevent you from targeting the best target, but it doesn't prevent damage. If you do 200 damage per match 3, that's 2000 damage prevented by having a Force Bubble for free as soon as the game started.

If we assume 1 of your team's HP is exactly as valuable as 1 of their team's HP, then preventing 2000 damage has a value of 2000 damage to the other team (not a great comparison but got to have something as baseline), and that's not enough damage to have a character that isn't doing any offense. Even in this rather crazy scenario of starting every game with enough AP to do a Force Bubble, you'll rarely get enough value out of it. The average 3* has 5800 HP, so you have to get about 5800 damage prevented to get equal value, and using our assumption that requires 3 Force Bubbles which is pretty darn unlikely. Yes you can get more damage prevented if Force Bubble is up while the enemy use their AP consuming moves, but even then that's still only about 500 damage prevented per single hitting move, so you'd still need say 2 Force Bubbles that happen to be up while 4 AP consuming damaging moves are used. Currently, games simply do not last long enough for that to happen.

Unknown

Hah, I like it!

scottee

Phantron wrote:

If we assume 1 of your team's HP is exactly as valuable as 1 of their team's HP, then preventing 2000 damage has a value of 2000 damage to the other team (not a great comparison but got to have something as baseline), and that's not enough damage to have a character that isn't doing any offense.

But this assumption is only true in the vacuum of a single match where only winning matters, and not how much HP you walk out with. If we're going to talk about metagame negatives, we also have to talk about metagame positives.

Scenario A - You're pretty good within matches and can win coming out of a match with 10% of max HP taken as damage, average for each character. Let's say you're health pack threshold is at 50%, so you can play 5 matches in a row before using 3 health packs. That let's you play 13.33 matches in a row before you're tapped, with fairly generous numbers.

Scenario B - You use Spidey or OBW, and matches take longer, but you walk out with full health.


B is more helpful for sustained runs and can get you to about 900 points in one play session. A is more helpful when you need to unshield, get in as many quick victories as possible, and reshield.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

Phantron wrote:

If we assume 1 of your team's HP is exactly as valuable as 1 of their team's HP, then preventing 2000 damage has a value of 2000 damage to the other team (not a great comparison but got to have something as baseline), and that's not enough damage to have a character that isn't doing any offense.

But this assumption is only true in the vacuum of a single match where only winning matters, and not how much HP you walk out with. If we're going to talk about metagame negatives, we also have to talk about metagame positives.

Scenario A - You're pretty good within matches and can win coming out of a match with 10% of max HP taken as damage, average for each character. Let's say you're health pack threshold is at 50%, so you can play 5 matches in a row before using 3 health packs. That let's you play 13.33 matches in a row before you're tapped, with fairly generous numbers.

Scenario B - You use Spidey or OBW, and matches take longer, but you walk out with full health.


B is more helpful for sustained runs and can get you to about 900 points in one play session. A is more helpful when you need to unshield, get in as many quick victories as possible, and reshield.

But damage spikes way up when enemy hits certain AP thresholds, so you can easily argue prevent damage is worse than doing damage if it means lazy Thor gets a Call the Storm off. I use 1 to 1 because you got to start the comparison somewhere. I'm thinking it's actually worse than that, as in 1 HP prevented is not as valuable as 1 HP damage done, since Spiderman can easily heal for 5K+ HP on team with Web Bandages alone, but I do question his value after the nerf so I suspect I'd rather have someone that can do an extra 5000 damage instead of heal 5000. It's simply impractical to expect to heal from moves like Call the Storm or Rage of the Panther. Even single hard hitting moves like Fireball or Star Spangled Avenger is pretty hard to recover from, since there's a good chance of them taking out a vulnerable character the moment it's used which gives you no chance of to heal.

bahamut685

So now we know the changes being made... But when are the changes actually going through?

Spoit

bahamut685 wrote:

So now we know the changes being made... But when are the changes actually going through?

Right when it would cause the most disruption to season 1. Probably 2 hours before it ends

Dauthi

soenottelling wrote:

On top of that, somebody within the last 2 pages is asking for well wishes for someone who I only assume is "taking off for health" due to cancer, cancer recovery, or something in some way linked to important surgery (9/10 cancer or somehow related). Since the actual issue is never explicitly stated...I don't blame you for not thinking in this manner, but for me at least it comes off a little cold.

And I am sure you didn't mean any harm, so bezzie and me aren't here to demonize you.

Added before posting: err...I guess sickness is better than cancer....still note great though....but whatever. It rubs me wrong more because I am.still correlating the phrase with what it said before than.the phrase all on its own I think.

I was just trying to insinuate that he is sick and will be out of commission until his condition improves

Unknown

I'm glad spidey is getting a nerf. I almost get sick to my stomach when someone running a team of spidey, and two one stars manage to beat my max 3 star team. Something doesn't add up here...

Unknown

TropicYeo wrote:

I'm glad spidey is getting a nerf. I almost get sick to my stomach when someone running a team of spidey, and two one stars manage to beat my max 3 star team. Something doesn't add up here...

Wish I could like this post a gazillion times... and before someone asks, no, I never took advantage of Spidey in that way...

That's what Rags was for

Unknown

Nerf was needed, but they Ragnarocked him. So yeah, unhappy.

Unknown

So without over powered spidey, can we bring pve enemy level cap back to 230?
I really wanna see how the devs beat a 395 team without using spideys stunlock