Patch Notes - 5/23 (More Spider-Man)

IceIX

Only one player facing change with these notes, affecting Spider-Man (Classic)

Characters

Spider-Man (Classic) - Spider-Sense

- Corrected a bug causing Level 4/5 Spider-Sense to be more powerful than 5/5 Spider-Sense - Corrected an issue preventing Spider-Sense from scaling properly for character levels over 85. Max level ability stats are:

Old stats - 20/54/115/210 Protect tiles depending on Web tiles on board. New stats - 104/133/163/193 Protect tiles depending on Web tiles on board.

NorthernPolarity

So a single match on purple protects ~2/3s of a 141's match damage now: this actually is like a pretty substantial buff to his purple, which now might become one of his most prized abilities. A single purple match-3 at the beginning of a fight can mitigate upwards of 1k+ damage throughout the match if it survives.

Unknown

I think purple was already one of his most-prized abilities pre-nerf.


Was the purple scaling a bug fix or a quick re-buff so that Spiderman has more than one usable ability? The patch notes from 5/21 make the 'Old Stats' in today's update seem like they were the intentional values.

Not complaining, but a lot of people probably relegated Spiderman to the dust bins yesterday and this is a pretty dramatic number change.

NorthernPolarity

platypusavenger wrote:

I think purple was already one of his most-prized abilities pre-nerf.


Was the purple scaling a bug fix or a quick re-buff so that Spiderman has more than one usable ability? The patch notes from 5/21 make the 'Old Stats' in today's update seem like they were the intentional values.

Not complaining, but a lot of people probably relegated Spiderman to the dust bins yesterday and this is a pretty dramatic number change.

My playstyle of Spidey was to just prioritize blue and other colors besides purple: I didn't shoot webs until I had a blue stockpile so my purple tiles never became beefy, and I think that a lot of players played this way as well. This change makes it so that going for an early purple match is extremely effective at mitigating damage throughout the match.

IceIX

platypusavenger wrote:

Was the purple scaling a bug fix or a quick re-buff so that Spiderman has more than one usable ability? The patch notes from 5/21 make the 'Old Stats' in today's update seem like they were the intentional values.

Not complaining, but a lot of people probably relegated Spiderman to the dust bins yesterday and this is a pretty dramatic number change.

It was a bug fix. When we did our final checks, everything matched up to the spreadsheet values, so it passed QA without a hitch. I then posted those values because, well... they're on the spreadsheet, passed QA and were double checked before it went Live.

Someone on the team noticed yesterday that while the values *were indeed* correct on the spreadsheet, the ability was using scaling as if max level was 85, not 141. This caused the math to get all wonky for the ability when Spider-Man was leveled up past that and resulted in those final values, and a similar issue caused the weirdness with 4/5 being more powerful than 5/5. So it *is* a general buff, yes. But it's really just a fix that happened to have that effect.

rixmith

Nice catch! Hopefully will address at least some of nerf-Rage.

Unknown

The protect indeed got much bigger without webs.

Unknown

Seems like The Hood or OBW + Spiderman is now a viable wimp-out strategy. Won't be taking down teams much stronger than you with impunity and still pretty vulnerable to attack, but you should be able to grind a victory slowly most of the time.

Unknown

The bigger problem I see now happening is those players who sold their spidey at the increased resell rate then this came up. Any compensation for those that seeing this probably would not have sold him?

I'm not one of them, just trying to be the voice that asks the question.

IceIX

Skyedyne wrote:

The bigger problem I see now happening is those players who sold their spidey at the increased resell rate then this came up. Any compensation for those that seeing this probably would not have sold him?

I'm not one of them, just trying to be the voice that asks the question.

I am not CS nor am I in charge of it, so I'm not a decision maker there. Can't really answer that from a policy point of view. From a more player-centric point of view, I would have a hard time thinking that the one ability that didn't change much got an incidental upgrade is the sole reason the character isn't suddenly "ruined forever". If it's anything like Thor/Wolverine, there will definitely be people with seller's remorse. I personally just don't see *this* as the reason for causing it is all.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Skyedyne wrote:

The bigger problem I see now happening is those players who sold their spidey at the increased resell rate then this came up. Any compensation for those that seeing this probably would not have sold him?

I'm not one of them, just trying to be the voice that asks the question.

I am not CS nor am I in charge of it, so I'm not a decision maker there. Can't really answer that from a policy point of view. From a more player-centric point of view, I would have a hard time thinking that the one ability that didn't change much got an incidental upgrade is the sole reason the character isn't suddenly "ruined forever". If it's anything like Thor/Wolverine, there will definitely be people with seller's remorse. I personally just don't see *this* as the reason for causing it is all.

Of course. I understand that completely. At least this will give those who are in that pool a direction they can go in/go to, and the answer can be found easily enough on the front page.

Unknown

There's no pity for anyone that sold Spidey for that paltry sum. You do something stupid, you live with the results.

NorthernPolarity

IceIX wrote:

Skyedyne wrote:

The bigger problem I see now happening is those players who sold their spidey at the increased resell rate then this came up. Any compensation for those that seeing this probably would not have sold him?

I'm not one of them, just trying to be the voice that asks the question.

I am not CS nor am I in charge of it, so I'm not a decision maker there. Can't really answer that from a policy point of view. From a more player-centric point of view, I would have a hard time thinking that the one ability that didn't change much got an incidental upgrade is the sole reason the character isn't suddenly "ruined forever". If it's anything like Thor/Wolverine, there will definitely be people with seller's remorse. I personally just don't see *this* as the reason for causing it is all.

I think the change matters much more than you would think: with post-nerf Spidey most people were thinking that since all 3 of his abilities ramp up with web tiles that he would be far too slow before he did anything impactful. Changing the defensive tile from base 20 to base 100 makes him a 3* bullseye of sorts: 100 is large enough that you can prioritize getting 1-2 tiles almost immediately at the beginning and mitigate a ton of damage, whereas before you would have to spend 2-4 turns prioritizing blue (which turns into a relatively useless 1 turn stun that you can't use for value because you need it out to match purple). While this probably doesn't bump him back into high tier, it certainly helps him a lot in terms of getting out of Rags tier, since he becomes a lot faster at preventing damage.

Of course, this probably doesn't matter to the people who rage-sold Spidey, especially since the entire forumbase knows the value of having mediocre characters in your roster for events and such.

Twysta

This change in purple definitely will make him a lot more usable!

Spoit

NorthernPolarity wrote:

IceIX wrote:

Skyedyne wrote:

The bigger problem I see now happening is those players who sold their spidey at the increased resell rate then this came up. Any compensation for those that seeing this probably would not have sold him?

I'm not one of them, just trying to be the voice that asks the question.

I am not CS nor am I in charge of it, so I'm not a decision maker there. Can't really answer that from a policy point of view. From a more player-centric point of view, I would have a hard time thinking that the one ability that didn't change much got an incidental upgrade is the sole reason the character isn't suddenly "ruined forever". If it's anything like Thor/Wolverine, there will definitely be people with seller's remorse. I personally just don't see *this* as the reason for causing it is all.

I think the change matters much more than you would think: with post-nerf Spidey most people were thinking that since all 3 of his abilities ramp up with web tiles that he would be far too slow before he did anything impactful. Changing the defensive tile from base 20 to base 100 makes him a 3* bullseye of sorts: 100 is large enough that you can prioritize getting 1-2 tiles almost immediately at the beginning and mitigate a ton of damage, whereas before you would have to spend 2-4 turns prioritizing blue (which turns into a relatively useless 1 turn stun that you can't use for value because you need it out to match purple). While this probably doesn't bump him back into high tier, it certainly helps him a lot in terms of getting out of Rags tier, since he becomes a lot faster at preventing damage.

Of course, this probably doesn't matter to the people who rage-sold Spidey, especially since the entire forumbase knows the value of having mediocre characters in your roster for events and such.

Yeah, at least some of the criticism was that the actual practical levels of the defense tiles were (unnecessarily) nerfed on top of their reliance on web tiles. When the smarter thing would be to do this: making it so that it actually took into account the new scarcity of webs and increasing the lower level values, rather than halving them

Unknown

Might level up my spiderman with this news, but can't you add some sort of damage if he lays down a web tile? because the dude has no freaking offense.

Unknown

I can see Spiderman being useful against the very high level PvE guys too, because those guys start off doing 600 damage match 3s and you got to have something that slow it down, or otherwise you'd die to just match 3s before they ran out of HPs even if they never used a single move. One of the consistent problem I got into is someone like The Hood is good against level 300+ guys, but with 4000 HP he can only take 7 match 3s at 600 damage each before dying!

Unknown

Have a hard time believing this was a bug fix. How much feedback was given in the other thread and no one bothered to ask if that was right? I'm not buying it. Spreadsheet error. That's laughable. Let me try using that next time I screw up with my boss.

Unknown

Certainly makes him more usable.

I'd consider using him with Patch and Mags.

Unknown

UncleSam wrote:

Have a hard time believing this was a bug fix. How much feedback was given in the other thread and no one bothered to ask if that was right? I'm not buying it. Spreadsheet error. That's laughable. Let me try using that next time I screw up with my boss.

As a software engineer this sounds like a perfectly reasonable screw up.

Dauthi

Yeah, settle down guys it's not a big difference. It's only a buff to protect tiles with 0 webs increasing to 5 times the original values.

The protection at 0 webs is the most important value to this ability since you can use it immediately. The terrible initial value was the reason the nerf was unreasonable. Well, whatever. Just glad I didn't lose a character on my roster to nerfdom.