5-star Carol Nerf?

Vhailorx

Borstock said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

PiMacleod said:

what are your thoughts on 4* Thanos?  

Just wanted to say that I've been trying to convince people Th4nos was better than everyone thought he was for awhile now, but even I wasn't using him all that regularly.

There are so many characters in the game now that there are a lot of characters that get totally ignored even though they are well designed and sneaky good. It's a shame and makes me long for the days when they forced you to choose from a specific group of characters when playing certain PvE events. Those were annoying when rosters were small, but now they'd probably be a blast.

Heroic events and cl10 would not work well.  There are very few characters that can reliably handle challenging level 650 opponents.  Locking those characters put would make cl10 very frustrating. 

And in general, I think heroic events would be fun for those select few of us who have extremely deep rosters (the variety would be a welcome change of pace). But heroics were very hard on new players when the game had less than 75 characters, let alone more than 200.  I think there would be lots of frustrated players if they were reintroduced now.

But what about node lockouts (i.e, player can't use any characters on the ai team)?  Could they come back without hurting the average player experience?  It might be a middle ground.

DAZ0273

The lack of compensation offered is interesting. It is like they are saying we knew she was useless, we accidentally made her useful and now we have returned her to her correct state!

Vhailorx

DAZ0273 said:

The lack of compensation offered is interesting. It is like they are saying we knew she was useless, we accidentally made her useful and now we have returned her to her correct state!

The term "compensation" is pretty amusing, given how little they have offered for nerfed characters in the past.

MegaBee

Vhailorx said:

DAZ0273 said:

The lack of compensation offered is interesting. It is like they are saying we knew she was useless, we accidentally made her useful and now we have returned her to her correct state!

The term "compensation" is pretty amusing, given how little they have offered for nerfed characters in the past.

Heck, I don't even want compensation. I wasn't using 5-star Carol before Polaris, and I didn't add a single cover to her; she was already at 5 green thanks to RNG. Just some kind of in-game notification so I knew that it wasn't some kind of error. I almost contacted customer support!

pheregas

MegaBee said:

Vhailorx said:

DAZ0273 said:

The lack of compensation offered is interesting. It is like they are saying we knew she was useless, we accidentally made her useful and now we have returned her to her correct state!

The term "compensation" is pretty amusing, given how little they have offered for nerfed characters in the past.

Heck, I don't even want compensation. I wasn't using 5-star Carol before Polaris, and I didn't add a single cover to her; she was already at 5 green thanks to RNG. Just some kind of in-game notification so I knew that it wasn't some kind of error. I almost contacted customer support!

You should have.  Danvers is one of my highest 5s, but only by accident.  She exists in a pre- HP/CP nerf state in the days of 4/4/5/4/4/5 releases.  I've only ever used her as an essential, but even I'm annoyed that they'd just stealth change a character, even if I don't ever use her.  It just seems unnecessarily shady.

FWIW, I just took my own advice and reported it at as bug through the in-game HELP.

MegaBee

pheregas said:

MegaBee said:

Vhailorx said:

DAZ0273 said:

The lack of compensation offered is interesting. It is like they are saying we knew she was useless, we accidentally made her useful and now we have returned her to her correct state!

The term "compensation" is pretty amusing, given how little they have offered for nerfed characters in the past.

Heck, I don't even want compensation. I wasn't using 5-star Carol before Polaris, and I didn't add a single cover to her; she was already at 5 green thanks to RNG. Just some kind of in-game notification so I knew that it wasn't some kind of error. I almost contacted customer support!

You should have.  Danvers is one of my highest 5s, but only by accident.  She exists in a pre- HP/CP nerf state in the days of 4/4/5/4/4/5 releases.  I've only ever used her as an essential, but even I'm annoyed that they'd just stealth change a character, even if I don't ever use her.  It just seems unnecessarily shady.

FWIW, I just took my own advice and reported it at as bug through the in-game HELP.

I decided to check the power description before reporting the bug and saw that it had been changed.

pheregas

MegaBee said:

pheregas said:

MegaBee said:

Vhailorx said:

DAZ0273 said:

The lack of compensation offered is interesting. It is like they are saying we knew she was useless, we accidentally made her useful and now we have returned her to her correct state!

The term "compensation" is pretty amusing, given how little they have offered for nerfed characters in the past.

Heck, I don't even want compensation. I wasn't using 5-star Carol before Polaris, and I didn't add a single cover to her; she was already at 5 green thanks to RNG. Just some kind of in-game notification so I knew that it wasn't some kind of error. I almost contacted customer support!

You should have.  Danvers is one of my highest 5s, but only by accident.  She exists in a pre- HP/CP nerf state in the days of 4/4/5/4/4/5 releases.  I've only ever used her as an essential, but even I'm annoyed that they'd just stealth change a character, even if I don't ever use her.  It just seems unnecessarily shady.

FWIW, I just took my own advice and reported it at as bug through the in-game HELP.

I decided to check the power description before reporting the bug and saw that it had been changed.

It may  have been changed in-game, but not on the official forum.
 
(Health and match damage listed at level 450)
60586 Health
 797 |  709 |  620 |  394 |  101 |  94 |  86 |  4.0x

Mean Right Hook -  8  AP
Captain Marvel soars up swinging, blasting, and bashing in skulls and ships as she rockets through the atmosphere. Creates a 3-turn Red Repeater tile that deals 5,846 damage and creates 2 Red strength 213 Strike tiles.

(Passive) Whenever a friendly Strike tile is destroyed by any means other than a match, gain 1 Yellow AP.

• Level 2: ...strength 240 Strike tiles...gain 2 Yellow AP.
• Level 3: ...strength 266 Strike tiles.
• Level 4: ...and creates 3 Red strength...
• Level 5: Creates a 2-turn Red Repeater tile...

Event Horizon -  Passive
Captain Marvel draws power from within and readies herself for an attack. At the start of her turn, if one does not exist, create a 3-turn Green Repeater tile that generates 2 Green AP. 

When Captain Marvel has 10 or more Green AP, this power becomes Photonic Rush and Captain Marvel's Event Horizon Repeater tile is removed. 

• Level 2: No Change
• Level 3: ...generates 3 Green AP.
• Level 4: No Change
• Level 5: No Change

Photonic Rush - 10  AP
Captain Marvel goes binary, unleashing a massive surge of photonic energy. Captain Marvel places a 3-turn Countdown tile that destroys its row and deals 6643 damage. If the destroyed row contains friendly special tiles, destroy one additional row for every friendly special tile destroyed. Destroyed tiles deal damage but do not generate AP.

(Passive) When Captain Marvel has less than 10 Green AP, this power becomes Event Horizon.

• Level 2: ...places a 2-turn Countdown tile...
• Level 3: No Change
• Level 4: ...places a 1-turn Countdown tile...
• Level 5: Captain Marvel destroys a random row...

Got Your Six - 8  AP
Danvers is back in the cockpit, and she's pretty sure she remembers how to fly this thing well enough to save the day. Captain Marvel sends a chosen ally Airborne for 2 turns. When they land, heal the ally for a burst of 1727 and deal 3853 damage to the target.

• Level 2: ...burst of 2126 health and deal 4916 damage...
• Level 3: ...burst of 2657 health and deal 5979 damage...
• Level 4: ...burst of 3587 health and deal 7972 damage...
• Level 5: ...burst of 5447 health and deal 11958 damage...

Dogface

It looks like this change would actually be a boost if Polaris didn't exist. Same number of rows destroyed, while keeping the friendly tiles.

jp1

Dogface said:

It looks like this change would actually be a boost if Polaris didn't exist. Same number of rows destroyed, while keeping the friendly tiles.

Except for the loss of synergy with her red passive.

Borstock

Vhailorx said:

Borstock said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

PiMacleod said:

what are your thoughts on 4* Thanos?  

Just wanted to say that I've been trying to convince people Th4nos was better than everyone thought he was for awhile now, but even I wasn't using him all that regularly.

There are so many characters in the game now that there are a lot of characters that get totally ignored even though they are well designed and sneaky good. It's a shame and makes me long for the days when they forced you to choose from a specific group of characters when playing certain PvE events. Those were annoying when rosters were small, but now they'd probably be a blast.

Heroic events and cl10 would not work well.  There are very few characters that can reliably handle challenging level 650 opponents.  Locking those characters put would make cl10 very frustrating. 

And in general, I think heroic events would be fun for those select few of us who have extremely deep rosters (the variety would be a welcome change of pace). But heroics were very hard on new players when the game had less than 75 characters, let alone more than 200.  I think there would be lots of frustrated players if they were reintroduced now.

But what about node lockouts (i.e, player can't use any characters on the ai team)?  Could they come back without hurting the average player experience?  It might be a middle ground.

There are probably only 2 nodes that would be a real problem in SCL10 during a heroic event. If they were that concerned, they could unlock rosters for just the CN. Or maybe SCL10 is exempt.

There's a fairly easy way to make sure heroics don't hurt new rosters. Don't lock out the newest releases. New 4's often get buried on vet rosters and the goal here is to invite players to use characters they don't use. The new characters would fit that mold perfectly so there is every reason to leave them unlocked.

Either way, the Carol nerf re-buried a character for a lot of people who were excited to finally have a reason to use her. On top of everything else, that's really disappointing.

Yepyep

This nerf is underhanded, clandestine. It feels like cheating to me and seriously soils my estimation of d3's ethics. Out the window goes ALL of the goodwill they have built up in the last 12-18 months. This kind of maneuver full-on disgusts me. There is nothing OK about it.

HoundofShadow

One of the jobs of the dev is to balance the game. Any game developers will nerf items or characters if they deemed it a negative impact in the long run. It's not like we, the players, are not expecting nerf to this new winfinite. The only thing unexpected is nerfing C5rol and not the other two.

The only mistake the dev made is not announcing this change in advance. Hopefully, we get a proper full rework of C5rol down the pipeline because just this one change nerfed two of her abilities.

AXP_isme

Edit: thought better of this one.

@HoundofShadow - credit for the way you bait your hooks - I bit here initially.

OTOH this strawman is a bit lazy. There are numerous ways in which these arguments - if that's what we're calling them, arguments - could be demolished, and pretty easily too. I'm not getting involved though. 

HoundofShadow

Past histories from multiple game developers have shown that if something is breaking their games based on their criteria or metrics, they will do something about it. It happened in the past, and it will happen again in the future, regardless of whether it's MPQ or any other game. It's not something unique to MPQ. Even GI Joe (our neighbour) nerfed a few characters because they were OP and rendered defensive play meaningless. I'm sure MTG also nerfed a few cards to balance their game.

On top of that, a lot of MPQ players were expecting nerf to this winfinite. Why did they expect that? It's because of past experiences. The two unknowns were "when?" and "Who?" The only thing that caught many off-guard is that C5rol got nerfed instead of Polaris or BRB.  And it seems like those who were surprised are likely to be 4* players or players new to 5* land.

Just accept that Polaris/BRB/C5rol were helping a lot of players to push way above their weight in SCL 10 and the dev is not pleased with that. At least they have not killed winfinite yet and you can find other replacements easily.

BlackBoltRocks

I agree objectively with what hound said. The devs do have a job to balance this game.

What stinks is when you get into the moralities/ethics/etiquette whatever you want to call it of it all. As mentioned by everyone (including hound), the devs really dropped the ball by not announcing anything. Not even a peep. Sure, players would still have been miffed, but at least there was some communication. The devs have hitherto always communicated any changes to any characters, even the big nerfs like OML, Gambit, Bishop (more of him in the next point), Worthy. No matter how much we didn't agree with their reasoning, at least they communicated. For Carol: zilch. Nope. Nada.

Next point, and this has to do with Bishop. He was undeniably broken ever since his release, and the devs took so freaking long to fix him. To a smaller extent, Worthy. They helped players punch above their weight, they made half of the game an absolute chore. Why did the devs take so long to do anything about it? They only nerfed those two - coincidentally or not - when Polaris was released. Read into that what you will.

And now, we have Carol, who likewise helped players punch above their weight, albeit only with exactly two other specific characters. And then without any warning, and at a speed much faster than they dealt with Gambit or Bishop, Carol got amputated. Players who used the Polar Express got a rude slap in the face. Sure, there's Th4nos, but how do you reconcile this with what has come before?

This is just very poor performance all around by the devs.

Yepyep

Exactly, @BlackBoltRocks, thanks for articulating it so well. 

Furthermore, it’s telling that this particular advantage was one being leveraged only against house money, i.e. PvE. You couldn’t (often) use it in pick-two and while it could get you wins in SHIELD Sim, it came with a dreadful defensive liability. 

So, basically, they secretly changed the odds built into the game because they didn’t like how their engineering flaw was discovered and being exploited  by customers to shift metrics marginally against house forecasts. 

Very sharp tactics. Anybody could predict this would be offensive. It’s kind of like Apple and their supersecret speed-throttling based on battery charge. Nobody likes secret rule changes. 

ThaRoadWarrior

There is a world where this change was a bad code merge from a test character rather than a deliberate change.

if it’s the former, I hope it gets corrected with the next data push. If it was the latter, it is within the rights of the team to do so but it 100% should have been a public patch note. The current implementation of Danver5 now has about the same self synergy as Spider-Ham, which is to me the low bar for design in the whole game.

HoundofShadow

It seems that they nerf "broken character" in PvPs slower than those "broken" in PvEs. Could it be due to the fact that fewer players are playing in PvPs, compared to PvEs, and the total reward gained vs time spent in PvPs isn't as good as PvEs, and those broken characters like Bishop helped to boost participation rates/numbers in PvPs?  One of the top complains by new players is that they are getting picked apart by champed 5* players. With Bishop, they encountered fewer retals. On the other hand, I rarely see C5rol in PvPs with Polaris. I can count on one finger the number of time I saw this team in PvPs. Even in Simulator, I rarely see them.

With Polaris/BRB/C5rol, the reward gained vs time spent went haywire in PvEs, that is to say, certain groups of players are clearing PvEs faster than they desired. SCL 10 is an end-game content. So, if you have 4* players blazing (relatively to their metrics) through SCL 10, then it's not end-game content anymore. The fact that they did not kill winfinite might have implied something: we still can play with this new winfinite but the time taken has to be longer. Out of all green powers that destroy tiles out there, C5rol destroys the most, up to 64, with 10 green ap. She feeds green, albeit not fast. Also, she deals the most damage out of all other green power tile destroyers, and also probably the quickest. 

Let's say if they don't nerf C5rol and they went ahead with increasing enemy level to 750, would it be better?

Daredevil217

Hound, I’ve seen this argument a lot, and I’m not saying you’re wrong about them not wanting 4* players punching above their weight and nabbing those rewards. But if that’s really the motive, why nerf Carol and not Thanos or Polaris?  Folks who have both Carol and Bill champed/highly covered probably aren’t 4* players. They are probably 5* players and thus would be end game players accessing end game content. 

ThaRoadWarrior

There are just so many other replacements for Danver5 in this combo; I immediately pivoted to 5torm and didn’t skip a beat. It’s just baffling they did it to Danver5 unless it was perceived as OP interaction with Magneto, which I don’t think it would have been.