Captain Hammertime and his broken friends

ThaRoadWarrior

It's an interesting situation for sure that these characters become harder to overcome as my roster level increases. I'm at that point in this simulator season where i'm basically only seeing Hawkeye/Jessica Jones/WCap teams, and they are all at a level where just taking in 4*s of my own is a recipe for one of them to get 1-shot defenestrated. It would be one thing if I could drop back and just play them on their terms, but MMR being what it is, I'm not seeing any teams with "reasonable" to beat components on it, just teams with those characters that are competitive to my 6 5* champions.

I would propose that the situation as we have it today is not balanced very well. A row-sham-bow counter to that team I suppose exists in the form of Silver Surfer, but since mine is 2/1/3 I don't believe he is any better than taking a 4* into battle. I need 68 more Mr. F covers to get 5 more Silver Surfer covers. Given my tracking since shards went live puts me at 1 4* cover ~week from shards, and 1 5* cover from direct shards every ~63 days, I could spend the next 1.2 years trying to champ Silver Surfer to claw out of this meta, but I don't really feel like that is worth my commitment tbh.

Daredevil217

HoundofShadow said:

That's a pretty wide definition of "balanced" because I doubt any characters from 1-star to 3-star tier can beat a 5-star character. They will get match-damaged into defeat. I think that definition need to be tightened up.

Not right now. Because they’re not balanced. That’s sort of the point. I obviously don’t expect a 1* to beat a 5*  because in a game like this there should be balance WITHIN tiers but imbalance by design BETWEEN tiers, rewarding and incentivizing players as they move up the ranks. 

I have people in my very large alliance family with some very strong, fun 5*s who just stay (or stayed) in 4* land because they know they would get massacred if they transitioned with the “wrong” (ie not the best of the best) characters. And I don’t blame them. I did the same thing. 

We hear story after story of people who finally champ their first pair of 5s, only to regret it because the game gets harder. They get punished. “I hit the Bishop wall!” Just play Surfer; it’s not that hard. “I hit the Gritty wall!!” Just play Blacksuit or Thorkoye. “I hit the WorthyCap wall!” Just play Strange. Don’t have the handful of characters that allow you to be part of the wall? Enjoy climbing half as high or getting hit twice as much! At least you could run down the Thorkoye wall with just about any other 5*s. 

Games like Street Fighter or Diablo or most RPGs where you pick a “class” seem to do a much better job where characters have strengths and weaknesses but are more less at the same level.  There’s a trade off for choosing one character over another. 

To me a game that punishes you for advancing is not balanced. A game where in the ultimate tier, “paper” in the tier below beats everything, but “that’s okay because Silver Surfer sometimes beats paper” is not balanced game design.  Heck, it’s barely Rock Paper Scissors. But YMMV. 

DAZ0273

Well there should be a qualification here because we are talking about Versus and not Story Mode. Levelling/Champing your 5's for Story Mode is now a win ever since SCL were introduced, reducing play time and allowing for serious chances of placement rewards - it of course used to be the opposite with personal scaling. So it depends on whether you are a player who only plays half this game. Until recently when I decided my Alliance was wasting it's talent by not even playing low level PVP I hadn't realised how many people simply don't appear to bother with the Versus mode. So I instigated a little experiment and the results are startling: to the extent where we have gone from sometimes not even being top 750 to on the brink of being a Top 100 Alliance just by engagement at low level PvP! I am not even talking about asking people t go to 575. Over the space of 3 completed events we have climbed 500+ places! However PvE is a closed shop for Alliances from what I can see unless you have access to good 5* rosters in your Alliance.

It is a shame that Story and Versus seem to work against each other instead of hand-in-hand.

ThaRoadWarrior

It may be worth revisiting some of the discussion about Gambit's rebalance as we talk about WCap and Bishop, and why they are so problematic. Here is the thread from the (6/26/2018) rebalance of Gambit (the real nerf), with a lengthy description from then-lead designer Casey Malone:
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/73603/gambit-character-update-details-6-26-18/p1

"Unfortunately, this clearly wasn’t enough, and Gambit is now seen as a more or less mandatory inclusion for players’ teams. Variety is hugely important in any game, and Marvel Puzzle Quest is no exception. When you're forced to play with or against a character over and over again, things get stale. So we're making additional changes to Gambit (Classic)."

"Here is the big one. Gambit's Stacked Deck power sped up every match he was a part of, and the drawback of blocking ally Powers was not strong enough to make up for the huge gains it provided. In addition, this AP gain being purely passive means there's no opportunity for opponents to interact with Gambit's power." (emphasis added)

Here is another thread from the earlier nerf where Gambattery was addressed. (it was much harder to find)
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/69419/soul-gem-season-updates-updated-12-13-17/p1

"After looking though at Versus win rates (on both offense and defense), character usage rates (relative to ownership), and outcomes in Story missions, we had enough data telling us we needed to change both 3-Star and 5-Star Gambit sooner, rather than later.

There are three key issues with Gambit that we want to address:

• There are times when a Gambit with no Red or Purple covers is better than a Gambit with them. Using covers to train a character should always make them better.
• The AP generation of Stacked Deck is too strong, without any good way to play against it.
• A large number of players use 3-Star Gambit with only Black covers to fuel 5-Star teams. 3-Stars are an integral part of the game, but we never want your opponent's 3-Star character to trump your 5-Star.

Ragin' Cajun and Aces & Eights are also strong powers in the right circumstances, but we believe that there is plenty of space in the game for characters to have awesome, exciting powers, as long as they're good counter-play available against them. That's not the case for Stacked Deck."

I think it's just a shade of grey to pivot those bullet points about Stacked Deck to any number of problematic powers that we're discussing today. Especially since most of those exploiting Gambattery were doing so with a Thing/Spider-Gwen/0/0/5 Gambit that would present opponents with an unbeatable turn 2 stunlock, which is exactly what we find ourselves complaining about now with WCap and Bishop, though the ability to create and apply the rampant AP gain-to-Stunlock condition now all resides within a single character. So I guess make of that what you will.

Daredevil217

DAZ0273 said:

Well there should be a qualification here because we are talking about Versus and not Story Mode. Levelling/Champing your 5's for Story Mode is now a win ever since SCL were introduced, reducing play time and allowing for serious chances of placement rewards - it of course used to be the opposite with personal scaling. So it depends on whether you are a player who only plays half this game. Until recently when I decided my Alliance was wasting it's talent by not even playing low level PVP I hadn't realised how many people simply don't appear to bother with the Versus mode. So I instigated a little experiment and the results are startling: to the extent where we have gone from sometimes not even being top 750 to on the brink of being a Top 100 Alliance just by engagement at low level PvP! I am not even talking about asking people t go to 575. Over the space of 3 completed events we have climbed 500+ places! However PvE is a closed shop for Alliances from what I can see unless you have access to good 5* rosters in your Alliance.

It is a shame that Story and Versus seem to work against each other instead of hand-in-hand.

Well even that I’m not so sure of. If you don’t have the 5E, Thanos, Thorkoye (for tough 5E nodes) and/or can’t clear optimally, you probably aren’t placing significantly higher. I have 26 5*s champed- including all the meta- but when I drop down to CL7-CL8, I run all 4s most to all of the event (Juggs/Guardians).

I know plenty of 4* players who place T5/T10. I think Hound is one of them. I doubt champing Captain Marvel/Wasp are helping those players significantly. 

DAZ0273

Well the situation seems exactly the same to me in terms of what the results are (although Gambatt affected all tiers of play) but how we got there is the complete opposite. The Devs never intended to have players chase part builds of characters over and above completing whole cover builds. So Gambatt was the result of completely unintended (and unanticipated) player behaviour. Bishop as far as I can see is functioning as intended.

So you could certainly point the finger at players being too sneaky for the Devs with Gambatt but Bishop is 100% on the Devs and players are using him as designed.

DAZ0273

Daredevil217 said:

DAZ0273 said:

Well there should be a qualification here because we are talking about Versus and not Story Mode. Levelling/Champing your 5's for Story Mode is now a win ever since SCL were introduced, reducing play time and allowing for serious chances of placement rewards - it of course used to be the opposite with personal scaling. So it depends on whether you are a player who only plays half this game. Until recently when I decided my Alliance was wasting it's talent by not even playing low level PVP I hadn't realised how many people simply don't appear to bother with the Versus mode. So I instigated a little experiment and the results are startling: to the extent where we have gone from sometimes not even being top 750 to on the brink of being a Top 100 Alliance just by engagement at low level PvP! I am not even talking about asking people t go to 575. Over the space of 3 completed events we have climbed 500+ places! However PvE is a closed shop for Alliances from what I can see unless you have access to good 5* rosters in your Alliance.

It is a shame that Story and Versus seem to work against each other instead of hand-in-hand.

Well even that I’m not so sure of. If you don’t have the 5E, Thanos, Thorkoye (for tough 5E nodes) and/or can’t clear optimally, you probably aren’t placing significantly higher. I have 26 5*s champed- including all the meta- but when I drop down to CL7-CL8, I run all 4s most to all of the event (Juggs/Guardians).

You could be right but what I meant was that you are no longer handicapped by advancing to 5* land in terms of scaling. You get a wider set of tools to play with and it *should* speed up your play. If I champ Cable today I know from boost weeks that his green can kick out 20k which is a pretty handy weapon to have for PvE even if he isn't the fastest out there.

If I, today, champ Cable as my only champ 5* with the intention of continuing to play lots of PvP, would you, as a seasoned player who has now been in the 5* tier for a while, advise that?

ThaRoadWarrior

There was a lot of talk about Ubiquity in those days when it came to rebalances, from OML to Gambit. That really doesn't seem to be a factor to them anymore, or else i'm in a very interesting fishbowl of which characters I see people using. I think the most interesting comment there is that players should not be able to take a 3* character into battle and have a more effective team than their 5*s, which I would be curious to know why that doesn't apply here to 4*s vs 5*s.

As for 5*s, I would say that PVE didn't get harder when I champed Ghost Rider, but it didn't get appreciably easier either. It was still more effective to use a mostly-built Okoye + 4*s/3*s than to get his match damage. 

Painmonger

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.

ThaRoadWarrior

I've suggested that once or twice, I think a CD-based passive blocker is definitely AN answer to this problem. Honestly that power could come out on a 5* as long as it was available in some form at 1 cover, and still be a viable use.

DAZ0273

ThaRoadWarrior said:

There was a lot of talk about Ubiquity in those days when it came to rebalances, from OML to Gambit. That really doesn't seem to be a factor to them anymore, or else i'm in a very interesting fishbowl of which characters I see people using. I think the most interesting comment there is that players should not be able to take a 3* character into battle and have a more effective team than their 5*s, which I would be curious to know why that doesn't apply here to 4*s vs 5*s.

As for 5*s, I would say that PVE didn't get harder when I champed Ghost Rider, but it didn't get appreciably easier either. It was still more effective to use a mostly-built Okoye + 4*s/3*s than to get his match damage. 

But before SCL, it would have got harder at least that is my recollection of 5* players feedback back in those days and why players deliberately held themselves back from levelling their charactes to gain a competetive advantage. Who was the player who had that tagline "Friends don't let friends softcap" or something along those lines? Lol!

KGB

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

ThaRoadWarrior

That CD placement could be a 3-4 AP cost active, or it could be a passive reaction to this character getting stunned, or it could even be its own Start of Battle unique type a la Chekhov’s Gun that once destroyed doesn’t come back. There are ways I think to balance it. Even if it was itself a passive, it wouldn’t have to come out at Start of Battle.

fight4thedream

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. 

Borstock

"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."

Very well said. (it was easier to copy and paste than to deal with this forum's dumb quote mechanic)

ThaRoadWarrior

fight4thedream said:

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. 

"shouldn't expect to have an easy time of PVP" strikes me as a bit reductive to the problem being posed by these 2 4* characters that can stun lock your team after a single 5* match 3. It's not like we're describing a problem of being matched up against a bunch of lvl 550 Beta Rays Bill with nothing but a baby champ 5* roster, this is talking about having a baby champ 5* roster getting completely taken apart by a 4* character(s). And in fact, we're talking about a highly champed 4* that can take apart highly champed 5*s, which is very contrary to the idea of power differentiation between the tiers in my opinion.

Vhailorx

I disagree with very many elements of your analysis fight4, but can't type my whole response on a phone.  More later.

tiomono

ThaRoadWarrior said:

It's an interesting situation for sure that these characters become harder to overcome as my roster level increases. I'm at that point in this simulator season where i'm basically only seeing Hawkeye/Jessica Jones/WCap teams, and they are all at a level where just taking in 4*s of my own is a recipe for one of them to get 1-shot defenestrated. It would be one thing if I could drop back and just play them on their terms, but MMR being what it is, I'm not seeing any teams with "reasonable" to beat components on it, just teams with those characters that are competitive to my 6 5* champions.

I would propose that the situation as we have it today is not balanced very well. A row-sham-bow counter to that team I suppose exists in the form of Silver Surfer, but since mine is 2/1/3 I don't believe he is any better than taking a 4* into battle. I need 68 more Mr. F covers to get 5 more Silver Surfer covers. Given my tracking since shards went live puts me at 1 4* cover ~week from shards, and 1 5* cover from direct shards every ~63 days, I could spend the next 1.2 years trying to champ Silver Surfer to claw out of this meta, but I don't really feel like that is worth my commitment tbh.

Try gamora, kitty, bishop. Do not match kitty tiles. If you can match blue in your first 2 turns your golden. Use gamora stun not bishops. Gamoras will stun 2 opponents every turn getting you 2 special tiles. Do that 2 times and kitty will carry you through.

ThaRoadWarrior

I have a 3/2/0 kitty, will this still work?

Vhailorx

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I have a 3/2/0 kitty, will this still work?

Yes, but slower and therefore higher risk. 

On the plus side, your underleveled kitty might not be enough to proc bishop.  That would be good.