Nerf Thor, Okoye, Bishop, and Rocket...

ThaRoadWarrior

Depends on your goals - if you want to float unshielded in PVP then it would seem the answer is yes. If you want to climb fast I would propose the answer is no and you want to put your BH on Rocket. Perhaps it’s more correct to say he is the 5* Defensive Meta since he won’t help you climb.

mr_X

Current  state affairs with more than one viable 5* team seems quite healthy in my view.

Thorkoye. Kitty groot, New 5s coming online  such as prof x and iceman. Even panthos  is back being  used.

There are other decent 5s out there too such as Daredevil, Peter Parker and Bolt. 

I would  still like to see older and weaker 5s get a buff to make them more viable to use.

Apart from that the meta seems fine.  With  one exception. I do agree Bishop is kinda broken. 

Kinda crazy a 4* character at even lower levels can take down even 550 teams. 

Xair

i am reminded of a scene from the movie IP man, where IP man watches his father. 

spidyjedi84

Polares said:

Vhailorx said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Y’all notice when the new engine went live that a match-4 line clear is no longer destroying 4ocket’s countdown like it used to with no damage, but instead treating it like a direct match that causes it to explode? That is not my favorite...

a power that clears a line like Okoye’s spear kills it as before though.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but is the new engine treating match 4s as "matched" universally now?

And on topic: not thrilled with this idea.  The game is a grind-y slog.  Matches should get faster, not shorter (at least until Demi asks us to player fewer matches each day).

But this is the elephant in the room isn't it? Why people is so adamant to see Gritty nerfed? Because 5 rounds of PvE is A LOT to ask. They MUST update this. And give us other ways of getting 5s or CPs. If they fixed this, the changes wouldnt be that impactful.


All good games receive game balance updates. The problem here is that historically nerfs have been nuke-nerfs, and that is bad for EVERYBODY. We should get small balance updates, and we should get them more often. Said that, there is always going to be a meta. Some chars will always be better than others.

Then, for me Thoryoke is not in the same boat as Gritty and even less than Bishop. But I have been saying for a while that passives are SUPER crazy strong for a while (and so are Thor's and Okoye), so I would not mind them being balanced after the other three. Bishop MUST be balanced ASAP.

We haven't had a balance, a straight up rebalance of characters matches or damage for older characters in forever, though. So many of the early 5s would benefit and might get played more if their match damage was improved to levels of current 5s. The last balance updates I remember were Mister Fantastic and nuking his one good ability to give us two shittier powers and Doc Ock 5star.

spidyjedi84

And what bluewolf said. Bishop is a threat in PVP because he's being used as a cheap shield. Changes to how PVP decides what team is the one on defense would see a lot of Bishops disappearing from play, especially if that's not the team someone is using to climb. He's awesome on defense, but offensively unless you have another blue user on the team, he burns too brightly too quickly and leaves you with AP you can't use...
That's the reason I see Demi eventaly nerfing him, because HP spending is down on shields when people know you throw Bishop up, he's a deterrent to a lot of people swinging at you in PVP so why waste money on shielding?

Tony_Foot

spidyjedi84 said:

That's the reason I see Demi eventaly nerfing him, because HP spending is down on shields when people know you throw Bishop up, he's a deterrent to a lot of people swinging at you in PVP so why waste money on shielding?

I disagree, he's only useful for increasing your float point by a 150-200 points. Spending won't be down on shields because the ones who hopped a lot are still doing that. For people like me who chuck up one shield at the end he has increased my float point from 450 to 600ish until the last 3 hours. But I wouldn't have been throwing a shield anyway. All it means is my final climb is 150 points or 3 matches shorter.

For all you know people could be shielding more above in the scramble to pick through Bishop teams.

HoundofShadow

Top 10 in PvPs are still getting more than 2000 points for the last few PvPs.

Top 10 in Shield Simulator are still hitting over 2000 points.

If the top are filled with wall of Bishops, I wonder how they could climb so high. Points in PvPs should be lower due to Bishop walls because it's close to impossible to beat them.

Polares

spidyjedi84 said:

Polares said:

Vhailorx said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Y’all notice when the new engine went live that a match-4 line clear is no longer destroying 4ocket’s countdown like it used to with no damage, but instead treating it like a direct match that causes it to explode? That is not my favorite...

a power that clears a line like Okoye’s spear kills it as before though.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but is the new engine treating match 4s as "matched" universally now?

And on topic: not thrilled with this idea.  The game is a grind-y slog.  Matches should get faster, not shorter (at least until Demi asks us to player fewer matches each day).

But this is the elephant in the room isn't it? Why people is so adamant to see Gritty nerfed? Because 5 rounds of PvE is A LOT to ask. They MUST update this. And give us other ways of getting 5s or CPs. If they fixed this, the changes wouldnt be that impactful.


All good games receive game balance updates. The problem here is that historically nerfs have been nuke-nerfs, and that is bad for EVERYBODY. We should get small balance updates, and we should get them more often. Said that, there is always going to be a meta. Some chars will always be better than others.

Then, for me Thoryoke is not in the same boat as Gritty and even less than Bishop. But I have been saying for a while that passives are SUPER crazy strong for a while (and so are Thor's and Okoye), so I would not mind them being balanced after the other three. Bishop MUST be balanced ASAP.

We haven't had a balance, a straight up rebalance of characters matches or damage for older characters in forever, though. So many of the early 5s would benefit and might get played more if their match damage was improved to levels of current 5s. The last balance updates I remember were Mister Fantastic and nuking his one good ability to give us two shittier powers and Doc Ock 5star.

Yeah, I didn't even remember the last one that was buffed (maybe Doc Oct?) and this says A LOT of how little Devs care about the state of the game right now. At the very least, half of the 5s are useless, and there is really very little motivation into using more than 4 or 5 of them. This is pretty pretty sad.

Healthy games have balance changes (balance, not nerfs) and tweaks all the time. This game has never had those, but at least for a while we had some char buffs. Now, not even that.

ThaRoadWarrior

I've never understood why numbers can't just be changed when someone is problematic as opposed to completely blasting a character design and starting over. 

Sm0keyJ0e

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I've never understood why numbers can't just be changed when someone is problematic as opposed to completely blasting a character design and starting over. 

You and everyone else. I can't even imagine how the internal conversation goes:

"This character appears to be too good within the tier."
"No problem, we can do some minor tweaks for the cost of 2 hours of dev time, and then let's see how the community reacts?"
"No, no, no... please spend 40x that amount of time, completely rework the character and change all their powers to be trash tier, and then completely forget about 'em and move on..."

ThaRoadWarrior

You know, I'm reasonably sure what happens is that there is a pool of un-skinned character designs floating around, and when things like this come up it is probably easier to just swap out the power set altogether than iterate. That's how character's like 5* Daredevil end up with a true heal even though the character daredevil doesn't have that as one of their powers in-universe.

DAZ0273

ThaRoadWarrior said:

You know, I'm reasonably sure what happens is that there is a pool of un-skinned character designs floating around, and when things like this come up it is probably easier to just swap out the power set altogether than iterate. That's how character's like 5* Daredevil end up with a true heal even though the character daredevil doesn't have that as one of their powers in-universe.

I actually thought that DD's true heal was a bit tongue in cheek by the Dev's as he tends to get absolutely battered more than anybody except Wolverine in the comics and TV show and so that explained why he wasn't dead already! 

ThaRoadWarrior

There are some characters that totally have powers you can see following a design theme that's obvious to the character. 4* Torch for instance, or maybe rogue - though in the latter case I expected her to actually swipe a usable ability from an opponent rather than an AP pool. I think that Gladiator Thor and Main Even Hulk probably have reversed powersets thematically from what I'd expect (hulks get more dangerous as you beat on them, thor spends his match in rangarok trying to talk to banner until he's had enough (collecting a million AP), and then he just nukes him)...but then there are others that feel more like an arbitrary collection of powers that was arbitrarily assigned to whoever is coming out next. 

Borstock

I have to be honest... the 3* Rocket and Groot PvP... where you can't use the 4* version.... so much more enjoyable than literally every other PvP.

LLohm

Borstock said:

I have to be honest... the 3* Rocket and Groot PvP... where you can't use the 4* version.... so much more enjoyable than literally every other PvP.

I feel the same during 3* Thor featured PvP as well. Matching actually matters and matching intelligently and swiftly matters more than the usual let 5* Thor smash and gather 5AP and cascade into some more free accidental AP.