**** Black Cat (Master Thief) ****

DAZ0273

ZootSax said:

DAZ0273 said:

I am probably being harsh but I just don't see what she brings to the table. I can't see using her for her stun over Icy, Gamora or Energy boy Bishop and her black is deeply meh. Sorry to be the negative guy. I did want to like her too. 😶

She does bring more potentially bizarre interactions with Colossus to the table, which this game always needs.

For example, if Colossus throws her and her green power triggers on landing, does it resolve before her purple stun is applied or will she get the bonus damage?

It probably resolves by exploding the servers.

ThaRoadWarrior

DAZ0273 said:

If I am using Gamora then R4G is on my team, that leaves one slot available and it wont be for Cat.

G4mora is top tier, don't fall into the trap of thinking she can't be split off of 4ocket. run her with Vulture and enjoy the enemy team never taking a turn ever again.

DAZ0273

ThaRoadWarrior said:

DAZ0273 said:

If I am using Gamora then R4G is on my team, that leaves one slot available and it wont be for Cat.

G4mora is top tier, don't fall into the trap of thinking she can't be split off of 4ocket. run her with Vulture and enjoy the enemy team never taking a turn ever again.

Not at all falling into that trap but actually I prefer running Iceman with Vulture because he gets the benefit of free AP in both green and blue.

MrEd95

5/3/5

ThaRoadWarrior said:

DAZ0273 said:

If I am using Gamora then R4G is on my team, that leaves one slot available and it wont be for Cat.

G4mora is top tier, don't fall into the trap of thinking she can't be split off of 4ocket. run her with Vulture and enjoy the enemy team never taking a turn ever again.

Add in shuri, and then you’re really talking. 3ap to go airborne and three to stun. All you need is 8 red ap.

himatako

firethorne said:

Awesome! And the airborne bit looks vaguely familiar.  Looks like I’ll have to start on my Legion concept and try and get that to be a reality now.  

Edit: Legion concept up. Shadow King too.  Fingers crossed.

I remember reading your design and I recognized that airborne part too Too bad the Bad Luck passive didn't make it, since I love the reasoning behind it and would be fun to see if it's effective in the game. 

Right now, I wish her purple dealt additional damage after she returns from being airborne. The kick animation is wonderful and satisfying but it's kinda disappointing to see that it didn't deal any damage but just stunning the enemy. 

Other than that, I don't feel like there's much to this character. I like her and I wish she's more useful but right now she doesn't seem to bring anything interesting to the table. The returning from being airborne mechanic is still not meta-defining. Her green has high damage/AP ratio when the opponent is stunned, but she can only stun one and it takes her at least 1 turn so it seems like a very slow strategy to rely on her as a main damage dealer. Her AP stealing is too random to be reliable.

She doesn't seem to be really good at anything and her powers don't really help bringing the best out of other characters, so I'm not really sure. The training sim doesn't really help either. 

Vhailorx

Ok, finally played the loaner node.  Ick.  It's pretty bad.

But, on  the bright side, I think a big problem is that it's a TERRIBLE team combo.  Only 4/6 active powers, and much worse, all 3 characters have kits that absolutely key off purple.  And the other team has 3 characters that also use purple, so you are always fighting the ai for it.  And as a nice kicker, both ronin and BCs passives fill up all the black tiles.  So you really have to pick one or the other.

If you get good board luck and collect purple, you have to pick which character to use it for, which makes BC feel a bit less powerful, and if you can't collect purple you are basically screwed.  But her basic strategy is visible in this node.  Collect as much purple as possible, using black traps to prolong the match.  Then start cycling stuns with purple and hammer the opponent with green while stunned.

I think she will play much better outside of this node.  With switch to fuel her purple, or with someone like gamora to provide stunned targets for her green she will feel a lot better.

Also, I think there will likely be some as yet underrated utility for her with thorkoye.  Her traps will passively proc okoye as you collect otherwise useless black.  And she will also suppress the enemy with that AP theft.  And you can get some cheap stun from the excess purple (especially if okoye will tank for her). 

I don't think I will change my rating of "quite good but not meta" yet.  but I also don't think we need to panic because of the bad shield training experience.

himatako

After using her with various different characters in her PvP, I think she's similar to 3* Gamora in terms of her play style. You want a team where you can place many strike tiles on the board to benefit from her cheap damage dealing power. Her black passive really benefits from this, and if your black is at 4 covers, there's a high chance that you'll get free damage boost from making black match every turn. I used her with Okoye and when you have enough Team-up AP, it turns Black Cat into a 4* version of Jessica Jones, which isn't bad at all. Her cheap green + Okoye's boost also helped me finishing the opponent quickly many times too.

Teaming her up with Gwenpool was ok. While it's true that you can now stun on two colors (Blackcat's purple or Gwenpool's black), they have overlapping powers in Purple and Green. I suppose you get more flexibility since you can either spend 6 green for a single target nuke or 10 green for a multi-target one. I tried using Vulture as the 3rd member, but it didn't work as well as I hope. 1 turn airborne isn't enough for Vulture to collect that many APs.

One thing that bugs me about her is she introduces further confusion into "start of the turn" trigger time, since her black passive works on the player's first turn, which breaks the pattern we've seen so far. I also don't understand why the dev decided to do this, since on the player's first turn there is nothing to steal and you only get bonus damage. Or is this a sign that from now on any "start of the turn" power will not skip player's first turn anymore? 

RickOShay

Brigby said:

RickOShay said:

Gold_Dragon said:

Nova sends people airborne as well.

-snip-

Black Cat sounds fun. 
Wondering if you have a black match containing two traps if you get the damage twice, and the AP steal 2 separate times.

Also, does the steal always target a non-zero color pool? Sounds like it wouldn't 'miss', by randomly choosing an AP pool that happened to be empty. 

-snip-

If you get a black match containing two traps, then you will in fact get the damage twice and the AP steal twice, as well. So far in all my tests (did about 6), the steal will always target a non-zero color pool.

wymtime said:

Brigby question about her airborne  ability.  If she goes air born and ArchAngel downs her will she still stun the enemy and do damage or will she just get stunned?  Or will the game break and shut down because of the airborne mechanic?

That's a good question. I'm afraid that one I'll have to ask the designer!

Was able to test it out.
Thankfully/unfortunately Archangel's passive basically overrides Black Cat's efforts. Once she goes airborne, he grounds her, applies the stun and damage, and she does Not play her own stun effect once out of the stun. 

@wymtime

bluewolf

himatako said:

One thing that bugs me about her is she introduces further confusion into "start of the turn" trigger time, since her black passive works on the player's first turn, which breaks the pattern we've seen so far. I also don't understand why the dev decided to do this, since on the player's first turn there is nothing to steal and you only get bonus damage. Or is this a sign that from now on any "start of the turn" power will not skip player's first turn anymore? 

I was comparing this to Jessica Jones, and she sets the first trap at the start of  your second turn.  I like that JJ is investigating then finding the evidence (trap) vs BCat setting up traps/planning a heist. Early on, BCat was setting traps in the comics to try to make people think she had bad luck powers, but she was just setting up things when she cased the target location.  It's hard to say if this is the start of a trend, or an exception to the norm that fits BCat's character.

I'm not going to complain much about the traps - that you can see - being set out right away.  You could potentially try to position them for the second turn without matching them.  It's a nice twist on how things have been working.

Gold_Dragon

BC and BSSM are a really good duo and I have them both very undercovered. 

RickOShay

Gold_Dragon said:

BC and BSSM are a really good duo and I have them both very undercovered. 

Okoye is a perfect color-spread partner for that duo, no real surprise I guess. But the extra damage and tanking while the others are either airborne or invisible will be great, plus her big healing.
Honestly Old Man Logan wouldn't be bad either, with his strike tiles added for all the cheap abilities, plus you're chasing his black for those trap tiles.

Sabaton74

Supports for black cat? Ooh do match enemy tile for heals, master thief after all

TheNew02-'home of the 02 black cat'

ZootSax

5/3/5

ZootSax said:

DAZ0273 said:

I am probably being harsh but I just don't see what she brings to the table. I can't see using her for her stun over Icy, Gamora or Energy boy Bishop and her black is deeply meh. Sorry to be the negative guy. I did want to like her too. 😶

She does bring more potentially bizarre interactions with Colossus to the table, which this game always needs.

For example, if Colossus throws her and her green power triggers on landing, does it resolve before her purple stun is applied or will she get the bonus damage?

Because I was curious, I did have Colossus throw Black Cat, which triggered her Purple.  When it resolved, she landed and applied the stun the target, dealt her purple damage and then went airborne again.  This allowed me to switch targets so a different character got the stun the following turn.  I still haven't tried it again to trigger her green, but at least the purple ability responds like you expect it would from being thrown.

I'm not exactly sure what that comic panel would look like, but that's probably not a question to be asked of too much in MPQ...  

Sabaton74

@ZootSax thx for the Intel-collosus interactions