** Moonstone (Dark Avengers) ** [PRE 2015-05]

NorthernPolarity

Lerysh wrote:

Something I bet a lot of you don't realize about Moonstone: If she pops a tile with Gravity Warp you get 1 AP. I keep all my Gravity Warp TUs for this reason alone. 1 AP of any color you want is totally worth 8 TU (after you used your OBW TU, of course).

I always find it funny when people criticize characters without fully understanding them, like thinking Deadpool and Colossus aren't super best buddies when they are. Throwing Deadpool is a guaranteed death to anyone with <5000 health, and sometimes bonus whales. Whatever reason people assumed the Fastball Special damage came before the power use and thus throwing Deadpool and getting aLOtT was useless. That is far from true.

JCTthe3rd81 wrote:

Maybe they meant for low level players. I remember when I was early on in the game, with Zero maxed 2 characters, I used Moonstone quite a bit. For a fully maxed 3 roster, not so much when there are much better ways to deal with special tiles, i.e. Steve Rogers.

Except for the fact they tried to pair her with IM40 to feed her red to make her good? I guess you could technically use a level 40 IM40 standing behind Wolverine and Moonstone but still...

I might give you underrated. But I will not give you the MOST underrated. She is, if anything, only slightly underrated.

DP/Colossus are a bad combination because the main reason you bring either character is for their red ability. This team has 1 good color (red), 2 average colors (purple since it's slow without board shakeup abilities, yellow), 1 mediocre color (black). Compare this to say, LazyThor where you have three good colors (red, yellow, green) and one mediocre color (black), and you can pretty easily see that building a team solely for fastball synergies is probably not a good idea since if the fastball whiffs, then you're kinda screwed with mediocre abilities otherwise.

Unknown

Moonstone isn't very useful because she overlaps a lot of colors with OBW who is by far the strongest 2*.

Gravity Warp can turn 8 purple into a match 4/5 + whatever tile you crushed on a board without special tiles, and at the 2* level there isn't anyone besides Daken that can easily spam a lot of special tiles. Even with Daken it's always going to be on the same color so it's not hard to make a match 4/5 on red and that might even be a good thing since you get more control on the color you get. It's just that you can also turn purple into an AR so this doesn't get used very often.

Unknown

So as budget player cadet pointed out the Devs love Moonstone..

Q: Which characters do you think are underrated and why? (Looking at the forum voted character rankings - viewtopic.php?f=14&t=18101)
A: I’ve always felt Moonstone was an undervalued character. Her Photon Blast gets wildly more powerful the more Red tiles are on the board. If you use Iron Man Model 40’s Recharge, you can generate enough Red AP to fire this ability without diluting the amount of Red on the board. Gravity Warp is extremely useful for dealing with powerful enemy special tiles. For the most part, characters only make special tiles on one color, so you can frequently force that tile to move into an auto-match. Control Shift is very expensive, but I’ve found there’s nothing more satisfying than stealing X-Force’s Recovery Countdown tile.

[/quote]

Well I find it hard to believe ANYONE has ever done this, ever, in the history of the game.

So I'm challenging anyone to pull this of , just to see a screenshot of this would be impressive and I will have some serious respect to whoever manages to make this happen.

If you can please post it here!

Unknown

'You know what the sad part about this is? The very most you could possibly get from that 17 AP in this situation is about enough healing to not survive Surgical Strike. Which costs 11.

Unknown

Well, Heavy Metal is already around the corner, its the chance to prove with a bonus buffed IM40 that Moonstone is "awesome"

orionpeace

I don't think the Devs could have proven more clearly that their vision and view of the characters is so skewed from ours than by touting Moonstone as undervalued and underrated.

In theory, in a perfect board, sure she can be effective. But that window of effectiveness is SO narrow and there are so many others who are so much better, why would you risk being able to pull off her abilities. Why would you waste the time. And there would be no reward to taking that additional risk when you would get the same reward and spend less time using someone who was actually good.

Unknown

Do we need THREE threads for complaining that the devs made the completely uncontroversial statement that Moonstone is, in a pinch, actually a fair damage dealer for the 90% of players running on 2*s and a couple of undercovered 3*s?

Unknown

orionpeace wrote:

I don't the Devs could have proven more clearly that their vision and view of the characters is so skewed from ours than by touting Moonstone as undervalued and underrated.

In theory, in a perfect board, sure she can be effective. But that window of effectiveness is SO narrow and there are so many others who are so much better, why would you risk being able to pull off her abilities. Why would you waste the time. And there would be no reward to taking that additional risk when you would get the same reward and spend less time using someone who was actually good.

Pretty much this. What they gave us was exactly what one would think in theory about moonstone. If you looked at the character, assumed she wasn't terrible, and extrapolated about the game state from there. However, all of these things are trivially shown to be **** by just using the character for a while. Gravity Warp turns out to be virtually unusable, with how much it costs and sheer variety of special tiles even in the 1-2* range, let alone against goons, where virtually every fight will have 2-3 different colors of special tile.

Chrono_Tata

gamar wrote:

Do we need THREE threads for complaining that the devs made the completely uncontroversial statement that Moonstone is, in a pinch, actually a fair damage dealer for the 90% of players running on 2*s and a couple of undercovered 3*s?

The controversial part isn't that she is a decent damage dealer, it's the statement that Gravity Warp is useful for taking out powerful special tiles, when anyone who has spent any significant amount of time trying to play her knows this is completely false.

Dayv

Jimilinho wrote:

So as budget player cadet pointed out the Devs love Moonstone..

Control Shift is very expensive, but I’ve found there’s nothing more satisfying than stealing X-Force’s Recovery Countdown tile.

Well I find it hard to believe ANYONE has ever done this, ever, in the history of the game.

So I'm challenging anyone to pull this of , just to see a screenshot of this would be impressive and I will have some serious respect to whoever manages to make this happen.

If you can please post it here!

I don't have a screenshot, but an AI Moonstone stole a recovery countdown from me yesterday. I was very amused. And then I killed her with Surgical Strike.

Unknown

Jimilinho wrote:

Well I find it hard to believe ANYONE has ever done this, ever, in the history of the game.

So I'm challenging anyone to pull this of , just to see a screenshot of this would be impressive and I will have some serious respect to whoever manages to make this happen.

If you can please post it here!

Thank you for the challenge! I played with my Moonstone and Iron Man Model 40 in the Hulk event this morning and snagged these screenshots. Not only did I steal Wolverine's Recovery tile, but I also used Gravity Warp to set up match-4 Yellows to get him to charge it

I'll be the first to admit that this is not the most practical strategy, but boy was it satisfying. (the look on his face!)

We've been really enjoying this conversation in the office and I certainly didn't expect my off-the-cuff Q/A response to be so controversial. So, let me qualify my answer by saying: "No, she is not a top-tier character, but I think she's a little bit better than folks give her credit for." I kind of want to make T-shirts that say 'I think Moonstone is underrated.'

I challenge anyone to find the craziest tile to steal with Moonstone, lets see 'em!

orionpeace

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

Thank you for the challenge! I played with my Moonstone and Iron Man Model 40 in the Hulk event this morning and snagged these screenshots. Not only did I steal Wolverine's Recovery tile, but I also used Gravity Warp to set up match-4 Yellows to get him to charge it

Just out of curiosity, how many retaliations and attacks did you receive after leaving that team on defense in an active PvP event?

Cause I, for one, would have hit it faster than you can say "Moonstone is underrated".

Unknown

I once stole Maggia Don's black and killed him with it but of course I don't have a screenie. This was a very long time ago.

Unknown

You shouldn't use Moonstone because of significant overlap with OBW. But otherwise she's quite usable. Back when the hard nodes in PvE have a static high amount of levels I relied a lot on her ability to steal a Deadly Shot or Threaten to defeat guys I'd otherwise have no way of doing enough damage to. Even Trap for some reason uses the enemy's number of CDs for damage which means it's pretty much always instant kill when you steal it. Surgical Strike pretty much obseletes the existence of every black skill in the game, but there was a pretty long time where Surgical Strike didn't even exist, not to mention a lot of players don't have level 5 Surgical Strike either. Even when I was running pre nerf Spiderman, I sometimes bought Moonstone along against certain goons because stealing a Threaten means the fight ended in 1 minute instead of 10. Sure you weren't ever going to lose a battle with pre nerf Spiderman but if I can win a battle in 1 minute instead of 10 minutes, I'd still take that for a very small amount of risk.

Unknown

KevinMark wrote:

I once stole Maggia Don's black and killed him with it but of course I don't have a screenie. This was a very long time ago.

I've done this before. I think the game considers the tile still the enemy's but it's just pointing at the wrong direction, since you almost certainly didn't have another 5 CDs down to trigger the instant kill criteria.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

I once stole Maggia Don's black and killed him with it but of course I don't have a screenie. This was a very long time ago.

I've done this before. I think the game considers the tile still the enemy's but it's just pointing at the wrong direction, since you almost certainly didn't have another 5 CDs down to trigger the instant kill criteria.

Yeah. I forgot what it did if it didn't meet the criteria. If it does a certain amount of damage without those 5 cds, maybe the damage was enough to down him in that particular instance because I wore him down.

Unknown

KevinMark wrote:

Phantron wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

I once stole Maggia Don's black and killed him with it but of course I don't have a screenie. This was a very long time ago.

I've done this before. I think the game considers the tile still the enemy's but it's just pointing at the wrong direction, since you almost certainly didn't have another 5 CDs down to trigger the instant kill criteria.

Yeah. I forgot what it did if it didn't meet the criteria. If it does a certain amount of damage without those 5 cds, maybe the damage was enough to down him in that particular instance because I wore him down.

It's a base damage + a certain amount for each CD on the board, but if there are 5 or more CDs it's an instant down. It does a paltry amount of damage if the 5 CD criteria is not triggered, usually below 1K.

Edit: turns out it's just base damage X number of allied CD on the board, but instant down if there are more than 5 CDs on the board. On the level 55 Don in the prologue he does 111 damage per CD and he has 3835 HP base, so even if you have the 5 CDs out it'd do only about 1/7 of his total health. Enemy HP/ability damage generally scales linearly so this should be true even when he's much higher level.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

You shouldn't use Moonstone because of significant overlap with OBW.

How so? They match in purp and black so you can either protect obw or activate espionage depending on how you choose to order them. They overlap on ONE active, and Moonstone's purple is usually pretty lackluster anyways, not to mention that AR fuels Moonstone while leaving red on the board. Seems no worse than many other combinations with OBW in terms of overlap

Unknown

gamar wrote:

Phantron wrote:

You shouldn't use Moonstone because of significant overlap with OBW.

How so? They match in purp and black so you can either protect obw or activate espionage depending on how you choose to order them. They overlap on ONE active, and Moonstone's purple is usually pretty lackluster anyways, not to mention that AR fuels Moonstone while leaving red on the board. Seems no worse than many other combinations with OBW in terms of overlap

If Moonstone is protecting OBW then you don't get Espionage on purple which hurts you way more than it helps. You'd pretty much never use Moonstone's purple (which is underrated, but it's still no AR). Decent red powers are easy to find in the 2* land, and while Control Shift can be used as a cool party trick, it's probably not the primary reason you want her. If you're not getting significant value out of Gravity Warp you shouldn't be using her. It's hard to say if using Gravity Warp to make a match 4 makes her actually better than Thor, but if you're not doing that then you might as well just use Thor or Ares instead. And, if you have OBW, you will never use Gravity Warp to begin with.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

Phantron wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

I once stole Maggia Don's black and killed him with it but of course I don't have a screenie. This was a very long time ago.

I've done this before. I think the game considers the tile still the enemy's but it's just pointing at the wrong direction, since you almost certainly didn't have another 5 CDs down to trigger the instant kill criteria.

Yeah. I forgot what it did if it didn't meet the criteria. If it does a certain amount of damage without those 5 cds, maybe the damage was enough to down him in that particular instance because I wore him down.

It's a base damage + a certain amount for each CD on the board, but if there are 5 or more CDs it's an instant down. It does a paltry amount of damage if the 5 CD criteria is not triggered, usually below 1K.

Edit: turns out it's just base damage X number of allied CD on the board, but instant down if there are more than 5 CDs on the board. On the level 55 Don in the prologue he does 111 damage per CD and he has 3835 HP base, so even if you have the 5 CDs out it'd do only about 1/7 of his total health. Enemy HP/ability damage generally scales linearly so this should be true even when he's much higher level.

Your original statement about it taking Don's cds into account after stealing his black cd when activating it is true then.