Captain Hammertime and his broken friends

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  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,455 Chairperson of the Boards
    Ok, I have a 451 Hawkeye/ 467 JJ/ 289 WCap queued up against my 315 Kitty/ 301 G4mora/ 274 Bishop.

    My Kitty isn’t strong enough to trigger Bishop on the jump on front. Would that work with Nico also?
     Had a really lucky board, and with only bishop taking match damage. He ended at 425 health, but I was able to win. That’s a decent team, I’ll have to try it more with some variations. Thanks!
  • Kolence
    Kolence Posts: 969 Critical Contributor
    @fight4thedream
     This "balance" of 5-stars you put in quotes may not have been perfect in those earlier times, but it was far better before the time of release of Gambit and onward. At least in so far as allowing bottom tier 5's to still beat other teams and compete.
    I may not have as much experience in pvp (at least at higher competitive levels), but I've champed my 1st 5-star Spidey (PP) just in time to see what variety of teams there were in the wild, then. Most often Panthos, but also Bolt (often with Surfer, I think, or BW? I forget), Phoenix, Cap civil war, Ironman (especially when featured 3-star was team IM), Goblin... I've seen old Octopus (new one is better, imo) and even Banner Hulk (and wiped to his team a few times). Hawkeye, Star Lord too.

    Currently, the best, "meta" teams are more numerous than pretty much ever before, and that is good. But at the same time, the divide between their level of strength and the level of those chars at the bottom or the next tier above the bottom one is way bigger. That is very bad. Especially considering the dilution wouldn't be such a problem if older 5's could still be somewhat competitive. I think? Maybe I'm just deluding myself thinking so... :)

    As for 5-star / 4-star teams and combinations. I like those too. There were always 4's that had such complementary abilities to a 5-star, that you could use them better, be faster, than pairing that 5-star with any other from the pool of available champs you had. That was the case with Miles and Spidey for me, over OML or IM 46.
    Those were always poor on defense though. With these broken 4's, it's more a question of which 5-star do I bring to abuse the 4-star (passive) abilities the best way? Instead of the other way around.

    For a possible (part) solution to Bishop or HammerCap/HE stunlock, I would love to see BW buffed (in part because I've finally champed her recently :p , how many years did that take?). She could just be immune to stun while she has allies alive and awake, plus a bit longer counter-stun, for instance, and it would possibly throw a wrench in Bishop teams. 
  • tiomono
    tiomono Posts: 1,654 Chairperson of the Boards
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    I have a 3/2/0 kitty, will this still work?
    Possibly. Worse case scenario is 3 healthpacks drained. I have a champed kitty. I pounce on every worthycap/hawkeye I see with this team. Its rough if jessica hits a trap early on and takes bishop out fast. I have recovered from that though. Without champed kitty it's probably done if jessica hits a trap. Stun worthy first and hope the 2nd stun hits jessica. If not let Hawkeye come out of stun then stun jessica so the 2nd stun hits hawkeye again. Always match damage on worthy while he is stunned. Leave hawkeye for last.
  • Painmonger
    Painmonger Posts: 167 Tile Toppler
    KGB said:
    Painmonger said:
    A fix for all of this & a meta shake up would be a character that dropped a 5-8 turn fortified CD at the start of battle. As long as it's on the board passive powers won't trigger on the enemy team. KO that character or take out the CD, you get rid of that speedbump. Make them a 4* so they're accessable & don't have a huge health pool. Have it vary scale with covers, at 1 cover it reduced all passive powers by 1 cover for 3 turns, each additional cover increases the power reduction & CD by 1 & 4th cover fortifies it. That character would see a ton of use, though.
    This kind of power would be incredibly hard to code to prevent all kinds of unintended bugs. Like what happens in mirror matches (does the player prevent the AI from putting down its own blocking CD since it technically should do so. Or teams with this character and Grockets and would it stop his strikes being placed etc).

    The suggestion I've seen before that makes the most sense is a 5* character with a passive that reduces/blocks passive enemy AP gain (Bishop, 5Hawkeye, Medusa, Coulson, Miles etc). Maybe at 1 cover it reduces any passive AP gain by 1, 2 covers by 2, 3 covers by 3, 4 covers by 3 and steals 1 of that passive AP, 5 covers by 3 and steals up to 2 of that passive AP. This character would get a lot of play since the passive would handle a lot of other characters besides just Bishop / WorthCap&Hawkeye.

    KGB
    My thoughts are Start of Battle is already isolated from the phases/turns of the game, so those passives would trigger first, then the CD takes effect on the player's first turn. Not hard to code at all, if (turn > O) {powerStuff}.

    The other suggestion would work for a smaller scope of it just stopping the AP gain, torn on it being a 4* vs 5*. On the one hand, 4* is wildly easier to build, so helps those below or in very early stages of 5* play. On the other, it would be yet another 4* messing up things in 5* land.
  • fight4thedream
    fight4thedream GLOBAL_MODERATORS Posts: 1,973 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    You bring up a good point and I think a fair assessment between previous metas and the current one. In terms of game design, I don't like the idea of every 5* team being able to beat every other 5* team, all things being equal.  I prefer a system that prioritizes synergies and counter strategies meaning certain characters or teams would simply be unfit to fight against other types of characters/teams. And I acknowledge such a system is more difficult to balance and can potentially be more restrictive for players with less developed rosters.

    With that said, the main problem with previous meta iterations is that high end players often gravitate towards the most effective, efficient teams meaning you would basically be fighting the same team over and over again. Sure, winning isn't much of an issue but it doesn't make for interesting game play.  On the other hand, as long as the best team wasn't too OP a player did have the option of utilizing other characters to beat them.

    I suppose the ideal is somewhere in between these two meta types. Whether or not that is possible is another question, but certainly something the dev team should consider.

    And I, too, would like to see BW get a proper buff that made her deadly against stun characters. :)
  • Twomp_thaDJ
    Twomp_thaDJ Posts: 237 Tile Toppler
    DAZ0273 said:
    You guys do realise that the people with these already Champed Worthy Cap's and level 330+ Bishop's are not likely to actually be 4* players, right? The people causing you problems are clearly 5* players - your own peers! You can come crush my 1 cover Hammer Cap with Uber Apocalypse if you like though, lol!

    Nobody wants to talk about this tho lol!!!!
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,455 Chairperson of the Boards
    I have a 274 Bishop and a 209, just champable WCap, so don’t look at me lol
  • Soaresx4
    Soaresx4 Posts: 3 Just Dropped In
    Vhailorx said:
    I disagree with very many elements of your analysis fight4, but can't type my whole response on a phone.  More later.

  • fight4thedream
    fight4thedream GLOBAL_MODERATORS Posts: 1,973 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    I appreciate your insight @Vhailorx but a part of me suspects a lot of your argument comes from arm chair theorizing rather than from actual experience. 


    For instance, your counter argument that Bishop affects all 5* players negatively.  Let me ask, how often are you running Bishop? I run him quite a bit and despite what others may have you believe, there are other players who have figured out ways to defeat him. I learned about the effectiveness of 5* Black Panther/*Thanos from a whale who had feasted on my team despite having Bishop (or more likely because of) on it. We both understand that Bishop will trigger off of 5* match damage, but where you see a broken mechanic, I see a new sort of challenge and opportunity for a viable defensive meta. From your discussion above about using a 5* rainbow team to fight Bishop, it seems rather clear you have very little actual experience fighting Bishop teams or are uninterested in approaching a match with Bishop seriously. For starters, if you are aware that 5* match damage is what is causing you trouble, then one obvious solution is to make sure you bring a 4* character that can help you deal with Bishop so you are not triggering him every turn (I recommend using someone that stuns like Gamora or Iceman). It also begs the question of why a rainbow 5* team would be the defacto standard to measure whether he is a problem or not.  You argue that unavoidable mechanics are bad game design but there other characters with unavoidable mechanics such as 5* Prof X's Xavier Protocols, 4* Medusa's Entanglement, 4*Carnage Alien Instincts, and so on. 

    I understand and fully acknowledge that Bishop/JJ teams and Hawkeye/Cap teams are difficult to fight against, especially if you approach with the mindset that your team 5* characters should win. But they are the only teams that offer any real challenge for me and finding solutions to them is one of the few novelties left in the game. Sure, I might get bored or annoyed with them if they become more prevalent but as long as the dev team creates new characters that potentially offer good solutions to them, I think the game will stay interesting. 

    To your second point, since you seem to think I am making an absurdly vague assertion, let me ask you at what point do you start seeing Bishop teams in the game?  In regular PvP, I might see one or two players during my climb up to 900 but, for the most part, I don't really encounter them until I break 900. Similarly in Simulator, I don't see Bishop teams until around 1600-1700 points in. The reason for this is rather simple. Using Bishop costs health packs so most players are not going to climb in an event using him when they can rely on other, more efficient teams to do the bulk of their climb. You might be asking why I am bringing this up but since you like to talk about good game design I want to ask you isn't it good game design for the best rewards to be the most difficult to achieve? 

    Before Bishop, hitting 2000 points in SIM was a cake walk for anyone that had Okoye/Thor. That I argue was problematic. A game that offers players no real challenge is simply a mindless grind. I would be more sympathetic if Bishop were pervasive at every phase of PvP the way Kitty seems to be for many 4* players but he is being used for the most part as an end phase character which to me makes sense. If you want the best rewards in an event, there should be some level of challenge or difficulty. Or are you going to argue that all 5* player should have an easy time getting the highest rewards in game? 

    And just to make my position on the matter clear, I give far greater preference to team synergy than to star/champ levels. I thought that was rather obvious but it seems you misconstrued my argument. 

    To your third point, we are going to have to agree to disagree here. The Okoye/Thor meta in my opinion was problematic, and I go into greater detail as to why in this thread.

    Finally, as to why I brought up PvE it was simply in your response to your comment: "that subset (low end 5* players) has almost perfect overlap with the highest, trophy tier of play that everyone is theoretically chasing.  That is bad for the game as it would seem to provide a rather compelling incentive against leveling up your roster."  I was actually a bit perplexed by this argument since the best rewards in the game are not even in PvP but PvE where the use of 4* characters is still a common practice even among high end 5* players. So I felt it worth pointing out that 4* characters play a relevant role in high end PvE meta, so why shouldn't they have a part to play in the high end PvP meta too? 

    Furthermore, if you want to keep your argument strictly in terms of PvP play, it still isn't a tenable position because that subset of players chasing after the highest trophies in PVP is still doing well in PvP regardless of the existence of Bishop and Worthy Cap and the reasons for that are simple: coordination and/or knowhow. 

    The fact of the matter is a nerf to Bishop and Worthy Cap has more negative outcomes:

    1. It removes an effective tool for younger rosters who struggle against Kitty teams.
    2. It makes Hawkeye nonviable for competitive PvP, and drops Jessica Jones back down to B tier status.
    3. It is a strike against rock-papers-scissors-lizard-spock meta
    4. It kills defensive teams as a viable strategy for PvP
    5. It cuts off potential bridge teams that can help with the transition from the 4*tier to the 5* tier

    I am not saying the meta is perfect. I do believe with proper counter mechanics the situation can get better. But a nerf would definitely be step back in terms of meta diversity and harm a lot more players than leaving Bishop/Worthy as they are now. 

    Those that are competing for top rewards in PvP are not significantly impacted by the existence of these two characters simply because they either have the means to deal with them or bypass them through organized cooperation.  
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    fight4thedream said:
    I appreciate your insight @Vhailorx but a part of me suspects a lot of your argument comes from arm chair theorizing rather than from actual experience. 


    For instance, your counter argument that Bishop affects all 5* players negatively.  Let me ask, how often are you running Bishop? I run him quite a bit and despite what others may have you believe, there are other players who have figured out ways to defeat him. I learned about the effectiveness of 5* Black Panther/*Thanos from a whale who had feasted on my team despite having Bishop (or more likely because of) on it. We both understand that Bishop will trigger off of 5* match damage, but where you see a broken mechanic, I see a new sort of challenge and opportunity for a viable defensive meta. From your discussion above about using a 5* rainbow team to fight Bishop, it seems rather clear you have very little actual experience fighting Bishop teams or are uninterested in approaching a match with Bishop seriously. For starters, if you are aware that 5* match damage is what is causing you trouble, then one obvious solution is to make sure you bring a 4* character that can help you deal with Bishop so you are not triggering him every turn (I recommend using someone that stuns like Gamora or Iceman). It also begs the question of why a rainbow 5* team would be the defacto standard to measure whether he is a problem or not.  You argue that unavoidable mechanics are bad game design but there other characters with unavoidable mechanics such as 5* Prof X's Xavier Protocols, 4* Medusa's Entanglement, 4*Carnage Alien Instincts, and so on. 

    I understand and fully acknowledge that Bishop/JJ teams and Hawkeye/Cap teams are difficult to fight against, especially if you approach with the mindset that your team 5* characters should win. But they are the only teams that offer any real challenge for me and finding solutions to them is one of the few novelties left in the game. Sure, I might get bored or annoyed with them if they become more prevalent but as long as the dev team creates new characters that potentially offer good solutions to them, I think the game will stay interesting. 

    To your second point, since you seem to think I am making an absurdly vague assertion, let me ask you at what point do you start seeing Bishop teams in the game?  In regular PvP, I might see one or two players during my climb up to 900 but, for the most part, I don't really encounter them until I break 900. Similarly in Simulator, I don't see Bishop teams until around 1600-1700 points in. The reason for this is rather simple. Using Bishop costs health packs so most players are not going to climb in an event using him when they can rely on other, more efficient teams to do the bulk of their climb. You might be asking why I am bringing this up but since you like to talk about good game design I want to ask you isn't it good game design for the best rewards to be the most difficult to achieve? 

    Before Bishop, hitting 2000 points in SIM was a cake walk for anyone that had Okoye/Thor. That I argue was problematic. A game that offers players no real challenge is simply a mindless grind. I would be more sympathetic if Bishop were pervasive at every phase of PvP the way Kitty seems to be for many 4* players but he is being used for the most part as an end phase character which to me makes sense. If you want the best rewards in an event, there should be some level of challenge or difficulty. Or are you going to argue that all 5* player should have an easy time getting the highest rewards in game? 

    And just to make my position on the matter clear, I give far greater preference to team synergy than to star/champ levels. I thought that was rather obvious but it seems you misconstrued my argument. 

    To your third point, we are going to have to agree to disagree here. The Okoye/Thor meta in my opinion was problematic, and I go into greater detail as to why in this thread.

    Finally, as to why I brought up PvE it was simply in your response to your comment: "that subset (low end 5* players) has almost perfect overlap with the highest, trophy tier of play that everyone is theoretically chasing.  That is bad for the game as it would seem to provide a rather compelling incentive against leveling up your roster."  I was actually a bit perplexed by this argument since the best rewards in the game are not even in PvP but PvE where the use of 4* characters is still a common practice even among high end 5* players. So I felt it worth pointing out that 4* characters play a relevant role in high end PvE meta, so why shouldn't they have a part to play in the high end PvP meta too? 

    Furthermore, if you want to keep your argument strictly in terms of PvP play, it still isn't a tenable position because that subset of players chasing after the highest trophies in PVP is still doing well in PvP regardless of the existence of Bishop and Worthy Cap and the reasons for that are simple: coordination and/or knowhow. 

    The fact of the matter is a nerf to Bishop and Worthy Cap has more negative outcomes:

    1. It removes an effective tool for younger rosters who struggle against Kitty teams.
    2. It makes Hawkeye nonviable for competitive PvP, and drops Jessica Jones back down to B tier status.
    3. It is a strike against rock-papers-scissors-lizard-spock meta
    4. It kills defensive teams as a viable strategy for PvP
    5. It cuts off potential bridge teams that can help with the transition from the 4*tier to the 5* tier

    I am not saying the meta is perfect. I do believe with proper counter mechanics the situation can get better. But a nerf would definitely be step back in terms of meta diversity and harm a lot more players than leaving Bishop/Worthy as they are now. 

    Those that are competing for top rewards in PvP are not significantly impacted by the existence of these two characters simply because they either have the means to deal with them or bypass them through organized cooperation.  
    That's some serious condescension there Fight4.  Thanks so much for coming down from on high to explain how little experience I have.  (If you actually want to know the answers to those questions then I can go into the details, but I mostly got the sense that you just want to undercut my credibility.  So snark for snark and I am moving on.)

    I think you are confusing actual challenge with resource sinks.  Bishop/Worthy teams aren't impossible to beat.  But doing so generally requires a greater investment of consumable resources (e.g. running panthos or mirror stunner bro teams that chew through healthpacks and/or boosting heavily.  Or running 4*-reliant teams that win efficiently, but are easy pickings in PVP and thus require more shield hopping).  In a game that wants more than 60 matches a day and strictly limits consumable usage, that is basically tantamount to a straight tax. resource draining systems != challenge.  They just = more $ for demi/d3.  No thank you.
  • Vins2
    Vins2 Posts: 183 Tile Toppler
    The actual challenge is what to do with all the saved HP from being able to float at 1000+ with Bishop/5* and not worry about hits except from monster Panthos teams
  • fight4thedream
    fight4thedream GLOBAL_MODERATORS Posts: 1,973 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited February 2020
    Vhailorx said:]
    That's some serious condescension there Fight4.  Thanks so much for coming down from on high to explain how little experience I have.  (If you actually want to know the answers to those questions then I can go into the details, but I mostly got the sense that you just want to undercut my credibility.  So snark for snark and I am moving on.)

    I think you are confusing actual challenge with resource sinks.  Bishop/Worthy teams aren't impossible to beat.  But doing so generally requires a greater investment of consumable resources (e.g. running panthos or mirror stunner bro teams that chew through healthpacks and/or boosting heavily.  Or running 4*-reliant teams that win efficiently, but are easy pickings in PVP and thus require more shield hopping).  In a game that wants more than 60 matches a day and strictly limits consumable usage, that is basically tantamount to a straight tax. resource draining systems != challenge.  They just = more $ for demi/d3.  No thank you.
    I am not sure why you are offended. I do want to know how much experience you have fighting Bishop because a lot of what you proposed either doesn't make much sense or doesn't match my experience fighting teams with Bishop on them. 

    For starters, your 5* rainbow team thought experiment. If you are aware that both members of your team are going to trigger Bishop's passive and have no means to counter it, this is the worst possible team to use against him. So it seemed to me that you were either arguing in bad faith or simply lacked first hand experience actually fighting him. I chose to believe the latter, thus my assumption that you were simply arm chair theorizing and thus my questions on how often you are using him and how often you are fighting against him. 

    Because if you are fighting against him, you wouldn't propose such an argument. Fighting Bishop requires nuance. He isn't a character you can simply steamroll with your top squad. However, if your opponent is using a fully champed lv 370 Bishop, there are ways to work around his passive using 5* characters. Bishop's Overclocked Passive at this level triggers at 1859. Interestingly enough, many of the first generation 5* like Surfer, Phoenix, Cap and Green Goblin won't trigger his passive at lv 450 with their match damage in any of their colors while others like Black Suit Spider-man, DD and IM are still able to collect 2 out of their 3 major colors. Obviously, none of these characters are in the meta and as you said would be easy pickings for meta teams. Additionally, not everyone is running around with a max champed Bishop either.

    But that's what makes fighting him interesting. A player with high level 5*s  can't bring their best offensive team. So they have to find other solutions or simply skip fighting that particular team. And that's not so say there are no solutions among some of the newer 5* characters that suffer from the match damage problem. I have found Beta/Kitty to be somewhat effective as long as you are able to keep Beta's shields on the board for 1 or 2 turns and let Kitty do her thing. I imagine with a high level Beta and/or Kitty the success rate would increase as Beta has a strong, cheap blue.  

    Forgive me if I am wrong but it seems you are enthralled with the idea that "Speed is king" in PvP. And for a long time that was true and to a great extent it's still true for PvE but the meta for PvP is changing. LRs are seeing the rise of time waster characters like Beta, 5* Carnage and Bishop due to the short event duration of the event, the lack of compelling rewards for casual players and because people will skip them for the exact reasons you have already mentioned. It takes twice as much time if not longer to fight those teams than it does to hit other 5* teams.

    But I think regular PvP events haven't quite made that leap yet. For one thing, the event is longer and using Bishop to climb is a resource burn so you aren't likely to encounter many Bishop teams in the initial phases of your climb. He is, as I argued, best used as an end phase character either for the final stages of your climb or for shield hopping. So unlike Gambit, it's unlikely players will encounter a sea of Bishops until they start reaching the final stages of their climb. I believe the situation is somewhat similar in Simulator.

    I know you are in favor of the glass cannon meta but we have already seen what happens in such a meta: everyone simply uses the best team and PvP becomes a sea of the same teams. Easy climbs but boring matches. But with the arrival of the Stun Brothers, we have a proper defensive meta that sacrifices some speed (rather significantly for the Hawkeye/Worthy pair admittedly) but makes up for it in deterrence. 

    Thus my argument that nerfing the stun brothers rather than giving the player base better tools to deal with them does the meta more harm than good. 

    To your last point, not every counter to Bishop is a resource sink. As I mentioned previously,  Beta/Kitty are actually pretty good as long as you have a favorable board and aren't going up against high level JJ. You can generally walk away from that match with very little damage. Hawkeye/Worthy are also great, especially against 370 Bishop's because the only color you have to be careful with is purple (unless you have a really big Hawkeye). Unfortunately my DD's level is too high but I could see a full health DD partnered with Bishop being effective as well.

    As I have mentioned previously, I acknowledge the current situation isn't perfect, there is a group of players that Bishop is negatively affecting and I would like there to be better tools for them to use against him. But I do believe the meta has been changing for the better.
  • _Vitto
    _Vitto Posts: 113 Tile Toppler
    fight4thedream said:
     As I mentioned previously,  Beta/Kitty are actually pretty good as long as you have a favorable board and aren't going up against high level JJ. You can generally walk away from that match with very little damage. Hawkeye/Worthy are also great, especially against 370 Bishop's because the only color you have to be careful with is purple (unless you have a really big Hawkeye). Unfortunately my DD's level is too high but I could see a full health DD partnered with Bishop being effective as well.
    My JJ is lv500+ and I have yet to fight a brb+kitty/carbage team that doesn't put me on the ropes. :neutral:
  • fight4thedream
    fight4thedream GLOBAL_MODERATORS Posts: 1,973 Chairperson of the Boards
    Yeah, Beta + Kitty + Carnage or Prof X can be a pretty nasty team if you don't find a way to deal with Kitty and/or Beta quickly. I usually use Bishop to stun one of them, which one to stun depends on the board condition. 
  • Soaresx4
    Soaresx4 Posts: 3 Just Dropped In
    Vhailorx said:
    fight4thedream said:
    Vhailorx said:
    Fight4,

    I agree that bishop/worthy are only a problem for the specific subset of the population.  But that subset has almost perfect overlap with the highest, trophy tier of play that everyone is theoretically chasing.  That is bad for the game as it would seem to provide a rather compelling incentive against leveling up your roster.

    No, it doesn't.

    What it encourages is careful consideration of which characters you should utilize your resources on and which ones you shouldn't waste resources chasing. 

    Your argument hinges on players with a certain number of champed 5* rosters being a homogenized group but it isn't. Within that grouping you have megawhales who have basically maxed champed most 5* characters, whales and hoarders who have several 500+ characters they have chased or are currently building, players with one or maybe two 5+ characters above 500+ and then non-big spending collectors who have champed all characters to various levels. From there, you have people who only have a handful 5* characters like Kitty or Okoye that help them compete and then another group of players who have a handful of non-meta 5* characters. 

    Arguably it's the group at the low end of the the highest tier of play who are struggling the most but that was true before the stunner brothers came into play. Players who play PvP competitively will find ways to either deal with them or by pass them. 

    But let's be real here: If a player is not a big spender or hoarder and wants to champ all 5* characters then they shouldn't expect to have an easy time of PvP. They are basically utilizing their resources to fulfill one goal: collect them all at the expense of maximizing their potential competitive advantage by waiting for a strong character or set of characters. I think that is a fair trade off. 

    You mention the highest trophy tier of play which is interesting because the best rewards are CL9 of PvE. Setting aside certain character interactions with supports, the most effective and efficient teams for high level PvE play usually include teams that feature 4* (sometimes even 3*) characters.

    A player with a 500+ Thanos, 480 level Kitty and a maxed champ 4* Grocket and a few (or one) cover of every other 5* in the game will in all likelihood play just as well as or even better than a player who has managed to champ every 5* but have none that go beyond 460.

    Even a decent level Thanos with a maxed champ Grocket and GotG character will more often than not be the better team than the majority of potential champed 5* pairings for most of the more difficult PvE nodes.  The only notable exception is the 5* Essential node, but with a big enough Kitty even these nodes can be dealt with effectively with one or two exceptions. 

    But my point is, in the most rewarding events in the game, you only need a handful of certain champed 5* and 4* characters to compete. Team synergy is the key to successfully competing, not simply running your highest level 5*s. Why should this not be the case for PvP as well? 

    I see people throwing around this term "balance" but the 5* tier has never been balanced. Think back to the first three 5* characters; many players eschewed Silver Surfer to build up their OML and Phoenix. OML's heal mechanic, combined with Phoenix's own strike tiles and buff mechanic were so good they dominated the first generation of 5* characters. 

    I remember when people tried to argue that Green Goblin would be the next big thing since he was on paper offensively superior to OML but I knew right from the get-go that because his colors overlapped with OML and Phoenix, namely black and purple, and OML had a pretty crazy heal the Goblin wouldn't make much of a dent in the meta. OML could eat a Goblin Glider and heal it off before Goblin would have enough black AP to try again and the AI is unreliable in terms of his purple power use. 

    Skip a few generations to Okoye/Thor and you had a new problem. A combo so powerful that they had little trouble taking down older maxed champ 5* characters if you managed to have Okoye high enough to tank and basically made new 5* characters obsolete. I mean Jessica Jones, who is arguably the strongest offensive character in the game, was basically relegated to benchwarmer status because she didn't have the right partner. 

    Traditionally, the dev team would have nerfed them by now but they haven't. But this was obviously an issue that needed to be addressed and now we have two 4* characters that put the breaks on this pair and a meta that is incorporating a mix of 4*/5* and 5*/5* pairs. 

    Is it perfect? No, obviously the current meta shouldn't be left as it is. But it has moved away from the "one team to rule them all" structure which is definitely a step in the right direction. Nerfing Bishop and Worthy Cap essentially devalues Hawkeye and JJ for competitive PvP play and reduces available strategies and challenges. 

    I am interested to see where the dev team takes the meta this year. Unfortunately I don't have time to address the matter of counters (PvE grind in a few minutes) but I will try to get to it later. 

    I think there are four main arguments at play in your post Fight4:

    (1) Stunner bros are only a problem for the low-end of the 5* playerbase

    (2) The low-end of the 5* playerbase *should* struggle in pvp

    (3) There is no such thing as "balanced."

    (4) PVE is the best source of rewards, so we don't need to worry about PVP issues [not really sure why you quibbled with my framing of 5* play as the highest/trophy tier of play in MPQ]

    I disagree with all of these positions.

    (1) I think the stunner bros are an issue for all 5* play because of the combination of two factors.  5*s scaled so much higher than 4*s (*high* health went from ~18k to ~50k when 5*s entered the game, and 5*s have scaled even higher since then), and have, on a normalized basis, about 2-3x more match damage than 4*s.  This means that otherwise interesting mechanics (such as unavoidable effects that trigger upon the occurance of X) just break down when the triggering act is something that a player MUST do every turn.  Some characters have passive abilities that exert a very strong influence on opponent playstyle (4*JG makes her opponents avoid match5s, GED, Phoenix and  5* loki all make their opponents target them last, while characters like hood and vulture generally make their opponents target them first).  Those are all great mechanics.  And in 4* land, bishop and worthy fit nicely into this paradigm.  They make their opponents think carefully about order of operations for fear of triggering some unpleasant effects.  But in 5* land this isn't true.  It's impossible for a rainbow 5* team to avoid setting off bishop.  It's almost impossible for such a team to avoid setting off worthy.  And even if the opposing team intentionally avoids rainbow coverage to ensure one color won't trigger bishop, RNG is a tinykitty and sometimes there are no matches in that color.  Plus, if you level up your 5*s sufficiently high, even off-colors can trigger bishop.  Under those conditions, the stunner bros aren't an interesting obstacle to overcome, they are just a handicap.  Bishop on a defensive team means that team will generally start any match with 5-10 blue ap on its first turn.  Unavoidable mechanics that punish a player for any possible move are not a good idea in a match 3 game.  That's true for anyone in the 5* space, and in some ways it gets worse as you level up your 5* roster.  The fact that it is possible to overcome this handicap does not mean that the stunner bro mechanics aren't a design problem. 

    (2) This is an absurdly vague assertion.  You might say "a level 450 roster should do worse than a level 550 roster, all other things being equal."  Fine, but sort of beside the point since no one is suggesting otherwise.  Also, if you take that position, shouldn't it be true in both directions, so a level 350 4* roster should do worse than a level 450 roster?  Because, at least in terms of subjective player experience, and possibly in terms of raw outcomes too, I don't think that is currently true in PVP.  And as discussed ad nauseum elsewhere on the forums, a roster building game should not punish players for collecting or leveling up new characters. 

    (3) Balance is, indeed, a hard concept to define.  Your historical lessons are pretty much accurate, although as I recall, players like myself argued that GG was superior to OML if you want to win a single match (and this is true!).  But we also pointed out that, since MPQ asks for 60+ matches a day, OML remained the superior option purely on the basis of sustainability (and that remained true until Thanos came out, followed by BP.  In PVE and PVP, the speed advantage that panthos offered was so great that they blew sustainability out of the water).  But you actual argument is kind of a straw man.  I think we would all agree that original gambit was unbalanced because he was effectively essential for competition in PVP.  Any champed gambit at basically level was superior to just about any other possible 5* combination at level 500+.  That was a problem.  And I think those that object to bishop (and to a lesser extent worthy) object because they believe that a handful of Bishop + X teams at just about any level are superior to just about any other possible 5* combo.  You might well disagree with that assessment.  But just saying "the game has never really been balanced, so this is fine" misses the point IMO.  Also, I don't think thorkoye was ever really a "problem" in terms of balance.  Teams that are great on offense but weak on defense are actually great for the meta (IMO) because they allow players to achieve individual progress without punishing the community heavily.  Perhaps if MPQ didn't require such a high winning percentage from competitive players, I would say that defense should be a bigger part of the game, but in the system as it is, I think that glass cannon teams are a pretty desirable outcome.

    (4) I don't know where PVE came into this.  the stunner bro issues are almost entirely confined to PVP.  Maybe if the next 10 new story events all have Bishop + X teams in every node, this will become a PVE issue.  But until then, when people discuss nerfing the 4* stunners bros, they are talking about PVP. 

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