**** Northstar (Classic) ****

Razuhlui

The airborne is problematic in this Trainingmission anyway, cause the dmg is dealt when both are landing, not before going airborne.

DAZ0273

The only thing that even remotely worked for me was his holding hands stun thingy but that isn't very good either. So I just ignored him beyond that and let Vulture kill everybody. Bishop got a few hits in but he was stunned and then that was that. Fortunately Northstar was very dead by that point and Spidey and Vulture just got on with it.

Maybe when they release Aurora she makes him good?

Painmonger

I'm tempted to keep him 5/0/5. Good enough for Shield Training & still getting active blue & black dumps for Thorkoye without messing with Okoye's tanking or healing when his PvP comes around.

ThaRoadWarrior

Why limit your cover stack? That doesn't change your color damage number on match, does it?

Kojubat

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Why limit your cover stack? That doesn't change your color damage number on match, does it?

It does not.

I think they are saying they don't want the AI to use Northstar's yellow when on defense, since it has a lower cost and would be less desirable.

I personally think the AI using any yellow power on that particular team has no impact on my success rate attacking, but it may be relevant in other tiers of play.

ThaRoadWarrior

Well, it'll get used one time, create a CD, and generate 1 extra team up for Okoye to collect for 1 less ap than hers costs, so it's possibly superior to using hers that first time?

bluewolf

It's a lot of stressing out for what is very possibly something that will never occur, although since he's gay they may run his PVP in June again.  Otherwise I'd think you are likely to never see it, or maybe once every 3 years or something if that.

PVP is a stinking mess so I don't think worrying about your build on a 4 is going to significantly impact your outcome when there are so many garbage teams to deal with, and if you aren't running Bishop or a BRB/Carbage combo you'll get hit no matter what.

RickOShay

Painmonger said:

I'm tempted to keep him 5/0/5. Good enough for Shield Training & still getting active blue & black dumps for Thorkoye without messing with Okoye's tanking or healing when his PvP comes around.

Yep I discussed with a few alliance mates about not adding in yellow covers until Northstar's pvp is over. 

Think about how many times you are thankful that the team you are playing against uses a lame red, green, or yellow 3* ability instead of 5* Thor's against you? Happens enough to consider this for your side temporarily.

Painmonger

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Well, it'll get used one time, create a CD, and generate 1 extra team up for Okoye to collect for 1 less ap than hers costs, so it's possibly superior to using hers that first time?

That's true it'll make one more TU for Okoye, but it won't heal her. The other, more serious drawback is that it could target Okoye, making her invisible. If that happens she'll stop tanking for you on offense & you'll lose TU at the start of the turn while whoever you pair her with has to eat the damage for a few turns. Maybe the best use of his blue is to clear the row the CD is on?

I'm not sure what the interaction is with Invisible + Jump-in-front characters, I tend not to use them much anymore. Either way is bad. If you're using Worthy Cap for example & he's invisible, either you can't target him to nuke him down on the enemy team, or on your team he won't jump in so you don't trigger his passive. 

If they still jump in front, Bishop will be even more of a problem. Imagine him jumping in, getting blue to stun, then going invisible to heal. 50/50 chance, but would still be a pain to deal with in Simulator even when his PvP is over.

RickOShay

himatako said:

He's really underwhelming and boring. The only way to actually make him useful in the Simulator node is to use his blue to gather black, send Vulture flying, then when you have enough blue, use Spider's blue on Bishop then Vulture's green and black. You don't even need Northstar at all if you can collect enough black by yourself.

His yellow power is terrible and once you fire it you can't fire it again, making a power that could have been less terrible by spammability  becomes useless. 

His black is complicated and unintuitive. Should I send Bishop airborne for one turn but then dealing damage to Red Hulk and makes him angry, risking giving him more purple or green anyway? Or should I send Red Hulk airborne in order to reduce the enemy's green AP but I must not forget to switch target to someone else that isn't Bishop or otherwise his passive will be activated? It sounds interesting on paper but in practice it's unreliable and not fun to think about. It might help if this power has a direct damage component instead of just relying on number of tiles destroyed for consistency/reliability. 

IMO, he's another character that you only need one cover just for the required nodes and you can move on  

Boring? 
Two of his abilities have board destruction / chaos, and the other sends people airborne. These are nearly the definition of 'not boring'. 

Underwhelming? 
YEP. Where the heck is the damage, geez! We can compare this guy to Quicksilver, but at least that guy's green can dish out some real damage for the tier. Northstar's blue does just low damage although the effects are quite good at gaining AP (not necessarily in the AI's hands of course).

His yellow could easily have dealt 3K damage upon the CD resolving. Or his black dealing 2K-3K upon landing from airborne (a 1 turn stun would also be good, therefore a better Bishop counter).

His black isn't that complicated. Is it great? No. Can it be very useful? Yes.
** It was simply troublesome to plan how to play his black during this poorly assembled Shield Training team battle ** 
It's just not going to be smart to take black AP away from Vulture if he's required on our team.

Imagine if the Training team was with Domino and Coulson (or Fury) for example? Lots of black to send people airborne & cheap abilities for Phil to go nuts with CD's. AND, the enemies could have been planned much better to showcase what Northstar can do. 

Ultimately Northstar's black will be easy and useful against enemies with a dangerous 2nd strongest color / ability:
Yellow: Okoye 
Red: Thor, Carnage 
Blue: Hawkeye (think about Hammer Cap)
Purple: Prof X 
Green: Iceman, Hela, DD
Black:Jessica, GE Doom 
And more. Then of course, countless 4* dangerous 2nd-strongest color abilities.

RickOShay

To sum the above, of course I'd like all new 4* characters to be relevant in non-broken ways for upper tier play (Sabretooth, Chavez, etc). Northstar NEEDS much more damage to be part of any measurable game play use.
That said, I will still enjoy playing him against specific teams or bosses, or when blue can help a lot from the chosen row destruction and AP gen. 
I'm definitely looking forward to destroying 5* DD's CD and potentially earning some more blue & black AP each time. 
We can also destroy a row that sets up extra moves and match-4's for Professor X. How about destroying some of Gritty's strikes, then send Kitty airborne for a turn? Fun. 
Maybe I'm a bit different since I enjoy clever ability designs over 'can I win faster now with this guy?'. 

Dilution IS a big deal and makes it a bit harder to cover everyone, so some players may have to choose how to direct their resources. But new character releases will not be stopping, unless we come up with a way to essentially 'require' each player to spend 1K HP every two weeks in a different way.  

Can we offer Crash of the Mad Titan (the DDQ-like event featuring Thanos) to be unlocked for 1000 Hero Points every 14 days, and allow us to skip a new character release for that time?  Let's make suggestions like this and better.

himatako

RickOShay said:

His black isn't that complicated. Is it great? No. Can it be very useful? Yes.
** It was simply troublesome to plan how to play his black during this poorly assembled Shield Training team battle ** 
It's just not going to be smart to take black AP away from Vulture if he's required on our team.

I guess I read the black power wrong. I thought it was destroying AP in the second strongest color of the character you sent airborne BUT dealing damage to the character currently tanking the enemy's team. Now that I read the description again, you're right that it isn't complicated.

RickOShay said:

Boring? 
Two of his abilities have board destruction / chaos, and the other sends people airborne. These are nearly the definition of 'not boring'. 

If you don't find them boring, I'm happy for you. For me, these are hardly exciting anymore. Hood could do targetable board destruction + gaining AP before he was nerfed. Invisible Woman did that too in one of her previous versions IIRC. Sending people airborne was already done by Nova and Riri. Sure, you can set up for a match-4 or a match-5 with his blue, but then you can do the same thing with Bullseye or Coulson. 


That leaves non-turn ending targetable AP gain and AP destruction that targets the second strongest color as something new from this character. To be honest, I was excited with his black since I complained about how many AP destruction powers are useless since they target only the opponent's strongest color ages ago. I remember bringing up Red Hulk as an example, since the power you want to stop is green which is his second strongest color. Naturally, I was excited to finally see Northstar's black power AND Red Hulk in the simulator. But then... it was boring and I'm disappointed.

Maybe it's the way the simulator node is setup like you said. I might try him again when I have enough covers of him but at this point he's not that interesting to me.

froggerjohn

Suggestions:
Blue: Raise the damage level
Yellow: Select the ally you want to target. Or perhaps, lowest health, or anything deterministic -- not random.
Black: Get rid of the damage component. It's so low, it's useless anyway. Then consider bumping some of the other numbers.

Perhaps:
1 - 1 AP, 2 tiles
2 - 2 AP, 2 tiles
3 - 3 AP, 2 tiles (or maybe 3 tiles?)
4 - 3 AP, 3 tiles (or maybe 5 tiles?)
5 - 2 turns airborne

Vhailorx

So I get that the shield training example node was awful given both the strong opponent and less-than-ideal teammates.  But I still don't see any way that this character is not borderline trash.

Blue is fine.  I liked that power as just 8ap for 1 row cleared when it was 1* Hawkeye, so collecting some types of AP is a solid bonus. 

Yellow is boderline useless.  Trivial burst healing is trash and everyone except demi knows it.  But even if I wanted to use the healing or invis to protect my squishy teammates, it's randomly targeted, and therefore useless.  And collecting team up AP really has only a few purposes in mpq, like fueling 4* cyc or okoye, both of whom have superior yellow powers.

And black is very mediocre.  Active ap suppression has never been especially good (c.f., king pin and mockingbird's purple).  This damage and random board destruction is not bad, but also not nearly enough to justify even the low cost.  It's nice to target something other than strongest color, but not worth running the rest of **** Northstar (remember that he is squishy even by 4* standards).

So why would I ever run northstar?  That blue is ok, but if I want board control, then quake is right there with a better blue power and two more useful additional powers.  If I wanted a battery for blue, yellow, or black ap, there are also much better options at all tiers (IM40, 3* if, c&d, vulture, JJ, GED, etc).  He is yet another example of "powers that do a little bit of a whole bunch of things are bad in mpq." There are quite a few moving parts to his powerset, but none of them have enough value to actually justify using a roster slot on him.  I will be perfectly happy to use his blue when he is essential and will otherwise completely ignore his existence for the remainder of MPQs lifespan.

#4*tierisdead (by which I mean further development of the 4* tier is a waste of everyone's time/money).

Edited for typos.

LavaManLee

Playing him in his PVP, the word I would use for playing against him is "annoying",  He isn't hard to beat, and not fun to play with, but can definitely wreak havoc with your plans by throwing your character airborne for a turn.

TPF Alexis

His in-game art makes him look like kind of a ****. It's not doing anything to make me want to find any hidden potential there might be in his powers.

RickOShay

His blue is turning out to be quite fun. Yes we'll always use other options when possible, but it's a pretty decent power for aligning big match 4's and extra moves. Definitely needs to do more damage on it's own though!
It's especially fun with Professor-X of course. 

Northstar's black has had it's uses. Again, there's better outlets usually, but destroying that specific AP and removing some from the board can really help. Separately, there were 2 match-4's on the board at once. It was great to send enemy Prof-X airborne for that turn so that their unavoidable next match did just normal damage. 

Noticed a 'bug' with Archangel. I was hoping that using Northstar's black to send someone airborne would trigger the passive side of Arch's blue, but it didn't. No stun, no 7K damage. 
I'm expecting to hear this is 'as intended' but seems a bit unfair. Archangel should have been designed with his own way to send enemies airborne, and since we will not be getting that I was hoping Northstar's cheap black would do the trick. Even this as a Team-Up would have been interesting with Archangel. But dang. 

HoundofShadow

Could it be because Archangel's passive triggers after they land from space? If Archangel is in the middle, I suspect that 7k damage will trigger.

MoosePrime

RickOShay said:

Noticed a 'bug' with Archangel. I was hoping that using Northstar's black to send someone airborne would trigger the passive side of Arch's blue, but it didn't. No stun, no 7K damage. 
I'm expecting to hear this is 'as intended' but seems a bit unfair. Archangel should have been designed with his own way to send enemies airborne, and since we will not be getting that I was hoping Northstar's cheap black would do the trick. Even this as a Team-Up would have been interesting with Archangel. But dang. 

Would changing the order of your team make a difference here?  Maybe if Archangel is before Northstar, his passive would trigger.

RickOShay

Yep I hope to try that order logic in SIM soon. Thanks guys!