5-star Carol Nerf?

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  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited November 2020
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    Game developers love numbers and metrics. 

    A few changes I remember is they placed the last CP reward from 50 wins back to 75 wins in PvPs.  And the recent change, correct me if I'm wrong, is that players can get 4* cover simply by playing easy nodes in SCL 10. After a while, they shifted it back and I'm not sure how far it was shifted to. So, from these two changes, one can infer that they have metrics that guide them on how much time players are required to spend to get certain rewards.

    I guess some sharp spikes in SCL 10 data must have alerted them and they decided to analyse them. Why wait two months to nerf C5rol? Probably they have to monitor those data for a certain period of time before taking the next step. 

    C5rol is way faster than Th4nos. 450 C5rol has an average of 400 match damage. Multiply it by 64 and you get 25600. Add another 6600 and you get about 32200 damage per 10 green ap.
    To calculate a 255 C5rol, divide the damage dealt by 4. And I'm sure players are not bringing a 255 C5rol to SCL 10 if they can max out her level as high as possible.

    A max champed Th4nos deals a maximum of 19470 damage and it's difficult to hit a max champed Th4nos for newer players. I think your average players' champed Th4nos is around 275 to 280.  So, a C5rol can finish a match 1.5 to 3 times faster than Th4nos or any other replacement. I used 5* Storm as replacement a few times and I think she is slow and you need to think a lot when you are using a power. Compared to C5rol, you don't need to think much. 
  • loslupus
    loslupus Posts: 6 Just Dropped In
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    And just to rub it in regards to stealth-nerf and no-communication, first post-nerf pve event is Cosmic Chaos, which has C5rol hopping around Marvel universe. If, instead of nerf, the devs had re-specced all of C5rol's powers, then it would have been nice re-introduction event for her. Now, the nerf and Cosmic Chaos just seem like a combination of negligence.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited November 2020
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    4* teams can be used to beat many challenge nodes, and her replacement can beat challenge nodes too. For example, 1* Juggernaut, 4* Eddie Brock, and 4* Thanos can do that too. 

    Players want things to be balanced only when it is towards their advantages. When the balance is not towards their advantages, they dislike it. I don't think it is a fair deal, and such deal don't happen frequently in real life unless you are a very influential person. 

    It's easy for you to ask them to forgo all these revenues because you are not the owner of D3 or Demiurge. Let's be honest, if you were, you wouldn't be saying such things.

    If you were a dev and then you see a character who has been deemed trash tier and her utilization has been really low for the past one year, and all of a sudden, she pops up in your radar consistently, surely, you would investigate it? I'm giving them another two to three months to see if they will nerf C5rol's successor.
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 9,631 Chairperson of the Boards
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    If the Devs came here more often they wouldn't have needed a radar to learn about the broken winfinite - they could have read the thread about it!
  • MegaBee
    MegaBee Posts: 982 Critical Contributor
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    HoundofShadow said:
    4* teams can be used to beat many challenge nodes, and her replacement can beat challenge nodes too. For example, 1* Juggernaut, 4* Eddie Brock, and 4* Thanos can do that too. 

    Players want things to be balanced only when it is towards their advantages. When the balance is not towards their advantages, they dislike it. I don't think it is a fair deal, and such deal don't happen frequently in real life unless you are a very influential person. 

    It's easy for you to ask them to forgo all these revenues because you are not the owner of D3 or Demiurge. Let's be honest, if you were, you wouldn't be saying such things.

    If you were a dev and then you see a character who has been deemed trash tier and her utilization has been really low for the past one year, and all of a sudden, she pops up in your radar consistently, surely, you would investigate it? I'm giving them another two to three months to see if they will nerf C5rol's successor.
    I don't think it's too much to ask for in-game notification when a character is nerfed. Heck, they don't even have to announce it here (though that would be ideal).
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,166 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Tweaking 5*s in such a way that you burn them to the ground is a horrible player experience. That isn’t balance, that’s pulling the rug out from under someone. 
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 9,631 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Lowest hanging fruit. 
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,166 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Remember how Mr F got that...rework? nerf? pivot? to make way for Bishop we all assumed? I think that's the next closest situation to this one
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited November 2020
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    I agree that her nerf should be annnounced in advance.There's no dispute about that. However, the players will demand for the reason if they simply state the nerf without an explanation, which won't be a surprise. It's like how moving CP back from 50wins to 75wins was left unanswered, but players already guessed why.

    I'm not justifying her nerf, but exploring different possibilities of her nerf. Since my time with MPQ, I witnessed only 5 nerfs to characters: 3* Gambit, 5* Gambit, Bishop, 4* Captain America and C5rol. The rework of 5* Ock and Mr Fantastic is subjective because I saw comments stating that both reworks are nerfs. I'm sure there are veterans who lived through more nerfs than I did. For example, the winfinite with 2* Magneto(?) or Ragnarok(?) that I seen mentioned once in a while, and the infamous OML nerf. 

    Moving on, I think this is where PvP participation comes into play. It's a fact that participation is low in PvPs. Both Bishop and later Captain America were left broken/dominant in PvPs for close to two years. Probably, they were enjoying the uptick in participation, so they let it slide. Likewise, Polaris might have helped to increase participation in PvPs. For C5rol, she doesn't appear in PvPs and she's skewing whatever % badly in PvEs enough to nerf her in two months.

    Alternatively, C5rol was considered trash tier before the arrival of Polaris and then she skyrocketed into meta tier suddenly. The dev was still holding a grudge about how players viewed C5rol back then. So, they decided to send her back to where she truly belongs: trash tier.

    Also, I'll be shocked if they reworked C5rol because of MagAoa. Looking at recent comments, he's being put at trash tier. He's probably being categorised somewhere at Kingpin level, but not yet Wasp level. 

    All in all, I hope she's next in line for a proper rework, instead of this rush job.

  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,166 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Danver5/Polaris is probably the only way to get up to 24 yellow guaranteed across that 3 turn flight, but I admit it feels like a reach.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited November 2020
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    5* Storm and Nightcrawler can do that too, but it's probably not as fast. But, they can get 24 yellow aps in those three turns, and if you can hit 14 purple ap,  it's virtually a guarantee. This team does require some tactical thinking and monitoring though.

    Edit:
    4* Kingpin and Nightcrawler can do that too. Make sure the board is filled with purple and start spamming Bamf! until you have 24 purple ap and let 4* Kingpin convert those 24 purple ap to 24 yellow ap.  :D
  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 952 Critical Contributor
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    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    Danver5/Polaris is probably the only way to get up to 24 yellow guaranteed across that 3 turn flight, but I admit it feels like a reach.
    Hmm, I don't know what you're referring to. Could you please explain?

  • PiMacleod
    PiMacleod Posts: 1,724 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited November 2020
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    OJSP said:
    Yepyep said:
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    Danver5/Polaris is probably the only way to get up to 24 yellow guaranteed across that 3 turn flight, but I admit it feels like a reach.
    Hmm, I don't know what you're referring to. Could you please explain?

    With Carol's previous green power, she could destroy friendly strike tiles to make yellow APs with her red passive. Now, we can't do that anymore.

    They're actually not the only way to get that many yellow AP quickly, but they're probably one of the few teams with more health than the rest.
    The 'combo' in reference is that Carol's red passive states that whenever friendly strikes are destroyed (not matched), you generate yellow AP.  Carol actually has a somewhat decent and unique passive there, TBH.  It's just that we don't have many reasons to abuse it (yet).  

    But don't worry... we're looking for it... right, @ThaRoadWarrior?  :)
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,166 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Yeah, i've been trying to figure out ways to take advantage of it that don't involve a 4 person team lol. She's just so incredibly slow at doing anything she does, being a yellow battery is a cool niche. But now that you can't use her green to do it, you have to re-think the whole engine some. You need to flood the board with strikes, and her red is trash for that since it does nothing on fire, so that already puts you looking at like Polaris, OML, one of the Blades maybe... Then you need a tile blaster, since Danver5 can't do that anymore either...

    I was curious if there wasn't some synergy with Anti-Venom if Danver5' yellow heal will trigger his black passive, but that seems limited.

    There may still be a G4mora/Polaris/Danver5 option for maximizing Deadliest Woman, but Photonic Barrage is just too expensive without a proper battery to rely on.

    I wish they'd change that passive to one that steals all enemy specials and improves them, Prowler style, if they're hit by Photonic Barrage.
  • AXP_isme
    AXP_isme Posts: 809 Critical Contributor
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    So Carol gets nerfed and a few days later you can direct purchase Th4nos covers... This doesn't feel like an awesome way to wring some more money from the player base but you'll all excuse me, I hope, while I adjust my tinfoil hat. 
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,166 Chairperson of the Boards
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    I went into simulator with the intent of trying Polaris/Okoye/Danver5 out, and lo and behold, I had a retal from that very team. So to mix it up, i swapped in Valkyrie for Polaris. Due to the relative levels of my team, Red was the strongest color thanks to Danver5, so Bounty Hunter was accelerating Piercing Throw, which in turn would burn down the Valkyrie strikes to create yellow, and that was the loop. It worked on that team, but when I took it in again to attack a Kitty/BRB/Polaris team, it got served pretty hard, so definitely not a great choice. 

    I found that team, or a similar team again, and traded out Valkyrie for Polaris, and that's a reliable team. I don't know if Danver5 is adding anything to it that 50Thor isn't save a health pool though.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,166 Chairperson of the Boards
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    The "what happened to Danver5" debate has been revived in an unrelated thread, so I thought it might be better to necro this one and talk about some new theories I have. I know initial speculation was that this was done to break the BRB/Polaris/Danver5 winfinite combo, but since there are a million other green board smashers from 1* Juggernaut up through every tier, that team works as well as it ever did. So I've been wondering if it was done hastily to prevent some wild interaction with a subsequent character release. My first thought was 5* Magneto, since his blue will do a hit of 8998 damage for every 3 yellow in the bank, up to 8x hits, which is a pretty significant chunk of damage, and a Danver5/Polaris combo could generate that much yellow maybe faster than anyone. But that didn't seem like quite enough of a problem, and you can do it pretty easily using Thor to collect the yellow.

    So my current working theory is that this was done because Ronan was coming out. The way Ronan's blue works is that each repeater you match or destroy will do 1715 damage for that one plus every other repeater on the board. And that is what happens for every repeater in a given match/destroy incident, and if there are more than one tile in the mix each one counts as a unique hit. So you can test the vestiges of what this combo might have been on a sufficiently high HP enemy node using a serious blue generator and 4* Human Torch. So I went on to a PVE node that had Eddie Brock Venom and 2x goons, with as much black and blue AP I could stack as boosts. You need to get as many repeaters out as you can, i had close to 30 (admittedly this was not like an ultra fast process), and then you fire off Torch's red to blast them all at once, and it will do 30 x 1715 = 51,450 damager PER tile destroyed, so that number as 30x discreet hits in this case. So I can imagine if Danver5 were still in the mix for this it could be a Whales level match ender assuming the blue earn could be there to spam the repeaters quickly.

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