Discussion on Beta Ray Bill and Bishop

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Has Apocalypse change the meta?.

jredd

BigSoftieFF said:

Bill = broken beyond belief.

glad i'm not the only one that sees this.

remember when they nerfed oml cause he was used upwards of 10% of the time they said? not sure how the characters that are in 98% of the teams i see in pvp fly under the nerf radar...

Daredevil217

jredd said:

BigSoftieFF said:

Bill = broken beyond belief.

glad i'm not the only one that sees this.

remember when they nerfed oml cause he was used upwards of 10% of the time they said? not sure how the characters that are in 98% of the teams i see in pvp fly under the nerf radar...

This has been discussed to death with different characters, but OML was used by 2-5* players as long as you had one yellow cover. His tanking/healing/match damage with that one cover made him must-play. Just because Bill is in 98% of PVP teams (half the game; PVE being the other half) in the 5* meta (maybe 10-15% of the playerbase? No idea), that’s not close to the type of usage OML saw. 

[Disclaimer: I never believed that stat was why OML was nerfed, but that aside, I guarantee OML was used way more overall (read: not just 5* meta) than Bill is.]

Vhailorx

jredd said:

BigSoftieFF said:

Bill = broken beyond belief.

glad i'm not the only one that sees this.

remember when they nerfed oml cause he was used upwards of 10% of the time they said? not sure how the characters that are in 98% of the teams i see in pvp fly under the nerf radar...

The stated rationale for nerfing OML was always a pretense and never held up to even modest scrutiny.

As for BRB being broken beyond belief, I continue to resist that claim.  He is definitely very good.  But he is really only a problem with a select set of teammates and/or in cl10 when vastly overleveled.  And even then it is generally possible to work around him without too much trouble.

Brbitty in pvp is the biggest issue, but even that is more of a quality of life challenge than anything else (as discussed ad nauseum elsewhere, slow/defensive matches suck in mpq for entirely extrinsic reasons like the number of matches required to be competitive). 

GrimSkald

Vhailorx said:

jredd said:

BigSoftieFF said:

Bill = broken beyond belief.

glad i'm not the only one that sees this.

remember when they nerfed oml cause he was used upwards of 10% of the time they said? not sure how the characters that are in 98% of the teams i see in pvp fly under the nerf radar...

The stated rationale for nerfing OML was always a pretense and never held up to even modest scrutiny.

As for BRB being broken beyond belief, I continue to resist that claim.  He is definitely very good.  But he is really only a problem with a select set of teammates and/or in cl10 when vastly overleveled.  And even then it is generally possible to work around him without too much trouble.

Brbitty in pvp is the biggest issue, but even that is more of a quality of life challenge than anything else (as discussed ad nauseum elsewhere, slow/defensive matches suck in mpq for entirely extrinsic reasons like the number of matches required to be competitive). 

I agree with this 100%.  I'll take BRB/Kitty teams with ThorKoye any day of the week - the only real disadvantage is that it makes people more willing to attack me when I'm above 800ish, so I only like to leave ThorKoye out for a single fight or so.

Sure, you'll very occasionally wipe or need to pull the plug on the fight (if those protect tiles get so out of control that Okoye can't keep up,) but this is true of a lot of teams.  Heck, Prof X on his own can take you out if your luck is bad enough.

BRB/Bishop is the worst.  I will not attack that team, but that's not BRB's fault, it's Bishop's.   He's stupidly OP against 5* players.  Only reason I don't run it more often is it's slow, cheesy, and health-pack intensive.

Okoye/iHulk(iHulKoye?) has added an interesting wrinkle to the PVP meta - it's pretty solid against ThorKoye but not so great against BRB/Kitty, at least defensively (unless the CPU lucks into a ton of TUs, you've locked down iHulk's damage by the third or fourth round and sometimes spamming out attack tiles to boot.)

Honestly, if it wasn't for Bishop I think we'd have a decent game of rock-paper-scissors going on here..

Vhailorx

GrimSkald said:

Vhailorx said:

jredd said:

BigSoftieFF said:

Bill = broken beyond belief.

glad i'm not the only one that sees this.

remember when they nerfed oml cause he was used upwards of 10% of the time they said? not sure how the characters that are in 98% of the teams i see in pvp fly under the nerf radar...

The stated rationale for nerfing OML was always a pretense and never held up to even modest scrutiny.

As for BRB being broken beyond belief, I continue to resist that claim.  He is definitely very good.  But he is really only a problem with a select set of teammates and/or in cl10 when vastly overleveled.  And even then it is generally possible to work around him without too much trouble.

Brbitty in pvp is the biggest issue, but even that is more of a quality of life challenge than anything else (as discussed ad nauseum elsewhere, slow/defensive matches suck in mpq for entirely extrinsic reasons like the number of matches required to be competitive). 

I agree with this 100%.  I'll take BRB/Kitty teams with ThorKoye any day of the week - the only real disadvantage is that it makes people more willing to attack me when I'm above 800ish, so I only like to leave ThorKoye out for a single fight or so.

Sure, you'll very occasionally wipe or need to pull the plug on the fight (if those protect tiles get so out of control that Okoye can't keep up,) but this is true of a lot of teams.  Heck, Prof X on his own can take you out if your luck is bad enough.

BRB/Bishop is the worst.  I will not attack that team, but that's not BRB's fault, it's Bishop's.   He's stupidly OP against 5* players.  Only reason I don't run it more often is it's slow, cheesy, and health-pack intensive.

Okoye/iHulk(iHulKoye?) has added an interesting wrinkle to the PVP meta - it's pretty solid against ThorKoye but not so great against BRB/Kitty, at least defensively (unless the CPU lucks into a ton of TUs, you've locked down iHulk's damage by the third or fourth round and sometimes spamming out attack tiles to boot.)

Honestly, if it wasn't for Bishop I think we'd have a decent game of rock-paper-scissors going on here..

Yup, bishop remains the most broken/OP character in the game because he does everything by himself.  Kitty needs someone to make special tiles, and BRB needs someone to boost his tiles or get his blue-->tile spam-->yellow passive engine working.  Worthy and HE need each other.  Thor needs someone to tank for him and Okoye needs a yellow battery.  but in 5* land bishop, all by himself, is a guaranteed (i) 5-10 blue ap per turn, or (ii) an opponent who is drastically altering their playstyle/team composition for the sole purpose of avoiding bishop.  (and again, the easy solution is just to differentiate between base match damage and everything else, so that bishop cannot be proc'd by base match damage alone.  only power damage or match damage boosted by strikes). 

All that said, I still think Brbitty is currently a bigger problem in PVP because a defensive (i.e., long match time) meta is unbearable in MPQ.  When I have several dozen more matches to grind through for my remaining, daily pve/pvp goals, slowing the game down is not exactly high on my list of priorities, even if playstyle variety is nice in theory.

_Vitto

There is one 5* character in this game that has a 6 ap ability that self-fuels. On top of that, the said ability happens to conveniently be of the same color of the most broken 4* character's regeneration mechanism. Doesn't get better than that.

Unless for some reason the above characters disappear from existence, meta ain't gonna change.

Vhailorx

_Vitto said:

There is one 5* character in this game that has a 6 ap ability that self-fuels. On top of that, the said ability happens to conveniently be of the same color of the most broken 4* character's regeneration mechanism. Doesn't get better than that.

Unless for some reason the above characters disappear from existence, meta ain't gonna change.

Kinda feel like your complaint about BRB is relying heavily on bishop.  Bishop is the problem with brbishop. and bishop isn't even particularly broken as a 4*.  he is just broken because of the interaction of 5* match damage with 4* jump-in-front abilities.  BRB's self-accel is pretty slow without a blue battery and/or tile boosting.  it's hard to proc his yellow more than once or twice a turn, even with a board that has a lot of special tiles out.  That certainly adds up over a long match, but by itself is not sufficient to make a character broken (e.g., new gambit's black currently adds 6 ap every two turns.  So the enemy team would have to match 2 special tiles every turn to make BRB more efficient.  but it's not like gamibit is particularly meta these days).

edited to refine the argument.

_Vitto

Vhailorx said:

_Vitto said:

There is one 5* character in this game that has a 6 ap ability that self-fuels. On top of that, the said ability happens to conveniently be of the same color of the most broken 4* character's regeneration mechanism. Doesn't get better than that.

Unless for some reason the above characters disappear from existence, meta ain't gonna change.

Kinda feel like your complaint about BRB is relying heavily on bishop.  "Saying character X is broken because he plays REALLY well with character Y who we all agree is broken" doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  BRB's self-accel is pretty slow without a blue battery and/or tile boosting.  it's hard to proc his yellow more than once or twice a turn, even with a board that has a lot of special tiles out.  That certainly adds up over a long match, but by itself is not sufficient to make a character broken (e.g., new gambit's black currently adds 6 ap every two turns.  So the enemy team would have to match 2 special tiles every turn to make BRB more efficient.  but it's not like gamibit is particularly meta these days).

It's a matter of two broken characters, that as a plus work perfect together.

If Bishop or BRB would exist separately, they would still be broken.

Vhailorx

_Vitto said:

Vhailorx said:

_Vitto said:

There is one 5* character in this game that has a 6 ap ability that self-fuels. On top of that, the said ability happens to conveniently be of the same color of the most broken 4* character's regeneration mechanism. Doesn't get better than that.

Unless for some reason the above characters disappear from existence, meta ain't gonna change.

It's a matter of two broken characters, that as a plus work perfect together.

If Bishop or BRB would exist separately, they would still be broken.

How is brb broken on his own?  his blue is only 6ap, but a 12k damage hit is fairly easy to absorb in 5* play.  his green hits very hard, but is expensive, and there are plenty of ways to suppress his ap (from hela to yelena to lumbercap).  His yellow passive is frustrating, but as discussed above, it's not terribly fast as an accelerator, and can be played around in a variety of ways (from avoiding special tile matches to stealing/overwriting tiles). 

but add bishop and all of sudden brb has enough blue ap to cast his blue once or twice every turn (or bishop can stunlock your entire team) and that is a whole different story.  bishop-in-5*-land is the problem.

BigSoftieFF

I think it’s ridiculous that Bills blue procs with every tiny single little hit. That’s why it’s broken. You don’t want cascades against Bill, which by the way you can’t control at all. 

**** mechanic 

Vhailorx

BigSoftieFF said:

I think it’s ridiculous that Bills blue procs with every tiny single little hit. That’s why it’s broken. You don’t want cascades against Bill, which by the way you can’t control at all. 

**** mechanic 

If you don't think you have any control at all over cascades then you aren't thinking hard enough about your moves.  Sure, sometimes you will get a line of 5 tiles of the same color populating the top row by random luck, and you can't control that.  But you can definitely look for moves that are less likely to produce cascades if you pay attention.

_Vitto

@BigSoftieFF dude, we must think harder and pay more attention. That's it.

krakenoon

And accept that sometimes there is nothing we can do about bad boards/RNG.

BriMan2222

BigSoftieFF said:

I think it’s ridiculous that Bills blue procs with every tiny single little hit. That’s why it’s broken. You don’t want cascades against Bill, which by the way you can’t control at all. 

**** mechanic 

There are soooooooo many characters that steal special tiles,  over write special tiles, prevent special tile creation, reduce special tile power,  boost damage,or ignore defense tiles;

Kitty, 5* daredevil, Medusa, ant man, 5 * dr strange,  5 * star lord, 5* thanos, 5* thor,  okoye, ant-man, kraven, and spider-woman are a few 4 star and 5 star options to deal with brb protects just off the top of my head. 

If you're going into battle against brb without at least one of the many characters and/or team ups to deal with his shields then you've kind of created your own problem. 

BigSoftieFF

_Vitto said:

@BigSoftieFF dude, we must think harder and pay more attention. That's it.

Done. I will now think and all will be well. 

I don’t need to be told how to deal with Bill or Bishop, I know how to play the game at a high level. Doesn’t change the fact that mechanics can be broken and called out regardless of how much of a crutch it is for certain players to do well.

bowla33

Make BRBs blue only able to be fired if one isn't on the board or drop the self-generating AP. 

Either way you fix that combo. 

Yepyep

bowla33 said:

Make BRBs blue only able to be fired if one isn't on the board or drop the self-generating AP. 

Either way you fix that combo. 

Or, since I don't think BRB is overpowered in his peer group, nerf Bishop so that his blue generator can only fire once per turn. Or once he hits 10 blue AP he self-stuns for one turn. Something like those options...

Palookaville

All this talk of BRB being overpowered, he is (kinda) but it's really more of a case that the majority of other 5*s are underpowered.

I mean for 6 blue he can do instant damage, lay down protect tiles AND gain HP.

Compare that to..... *randomly looks at a 5*

Captain Marvel.... um... red.

You have to wait for two turns and hope that your repeater does not get matched, before you can do damage and it takes 8 instead of six. 

Yeah, yeah, red and blue, apples and oranges, but you get the idea. A LOT of other 5* characters have terrible powers and yet BRB has a triple whammy with just one.

krakenoon

@Palookaville

How does BRB get HP?

BriMan2222

Palookaville said:

All this talk of BRB being overpowered, he is (kinda) but it's really more of a case that the majority of other 5*s are underpowered.

I mean for 6 blue he can do instant damage, lay down protect tiles AND gain HP.

Compare that to..... *randomly looks at a 5*

Captain Marvel.... um... red.

You have to wait for two turns and hope that your repeater does not get matched, before you can do damage and it takes 8 instead of six. 

Yeah, yeah, red and blue, apples and oranges, but you get the idea. A LOT of other 5* characters have terrible powers and yet BRB has a triple whammy with just one.

BRB doesn't have any way to gain back hp.