Power creep, thy name is the 5* tier

ThaRoadWarrior

Emma’s repeaters need to have shorter timers and do something actively on fire. Also the Stepford Cuckoos synergy perk should have been built into Diamond Form. And Diamond Form should have a second stage nuke the way Miles’ purple does.

HoundofShadow

Her repeaters are only two turns. Any shorter and she's destroying 2 enemy strongest ap every turn or 4 enemy SAP tiles every turn. For her yellow power, she's buffing 2 special tiles and putting 3 strike tiles on the board every turn. It will be a fantastic synergy with Polaris's blue power.

Festival of Fights preview is up. I read the event rules and noticed some cheeky remarks:

"Oh, and while I find pummeling people senseless funny, I'm told there has to be 'balance', which means characters cannot be stunned."

Taganov

HoundofShadow said:

Her repeaters are only two turns. Any shorter and she's destroying 2 enemy strongest ap every turn or 4 enemy SAP tiles every turn. For her yellow power, she's buffing 2 special tiles and putting 3 strike tiles on the board every turn. It will be a fantastic synergy with Polaris's blue power.

Festival of Fights preview is up. I read the event rules and noticed some cheeky remarks:

"Oh, and while I find pummeling people senseless funny, I'm told there has to be 'balance', which means characters cannot be stunned."

Frost's repeaters are bad. You have to gather enough AP to throw them out there, (optionally fortify them against random matches/cascades) and wait another two turns for them to have any effect. You are already dead. Nothing she does warrants her costs.

Against Polaris and Carbage, who return multiple specials to the board, Frost's repeaters can't keep up. God forbid they should both be on the same team. Teamed with Polaris, Frost still has no synergy because Polaris can easily fill the board before Frost can get her yellow to go off once. Kitty, Flaptain and Minoru are all better, more reliable tile buffers. If Frost didn't feed Kitty I can't imagine there would be reason to roster her at all.

ThaRoadWarrior

HoundofShadow said:

Her repeaters are only two turns. Any shorter and she's destroying 2 enemy strongest ap every turn or 4 enemy SAP tiles every turn. For her yellow power, she's buffing 2 special tiles and putting 3 strike tiles on the board every turn. It will be a fantastic synergy with Polaris's blue power.

Festival of Fights preview is up. I read the event rules and noticed some cheeky remarks:

"Oh, and while I find pummeling people senseless funny, I'm told there has to be 'balance', which means characters cannot be stunned."

In practice she just doesn’t work though. 2 turns is an eternity for what those powers do and how much they cost to fire. It takes 10 purple to drop an unfortified repeater that does nothing for 2 turns, and 8 yellow for the same. Her strikes are ultra weak and the buff is also weak - my Frost is level 350 (been chasing Kitty, just finished her) and her strikes are 159, and the buff is 103. My Polaris is 70 levels lower than that, and her free strike tile is double the strength, and the ones she created by matching are trivially lower than Emma’s (114 at level 284) and come with an immediate slug of 1097 damage on the match. 

HoundofShadow

Initially, I thought I was looking at Emma's original stats from her PvP and I was wondering why your Emma's level is higher than mine but the non-boosted buff is lower. So,  I was actually looking at her boosted stat instead.

Polaris aside, after comparing Emma's buff with Hellcat and Nico at the same level, her buffs as a whole are really weak.  I suspect that it was "balanced" due to her 325% increase in match damage. Back then, she was the first character to have such a huge increase in match damage activated by ability.

Even if her repeaters are one turn, it still won't help her compete with Nico or Hellcat. Her purple might be useful but it still costs 10 purple ap. What she needs is a total remake, like Mr Fantastic.

Jacklag

I was considering a totally different approach to fixing Emma. I was thinking her Diamond Body should trigger whenever there is a friendly fortified tile on the board and her Purple and Yellow should have second versions while she is transformed. Maybe one that reduces damage taken by 40/50/60/75/90% and the other an active damage or a stun.

ThaRoadWarrior

HoundofShadow said:

Initially, I thought I was looking at Emma's original stats from her PvP and I was wondering why your Emma's level is higher than mine but the non-boosted buff is lower. So,  I was actually looking at her boosted stat instead.

In her PVP, mine is doing 447/289 boosted to level 484. But since that happens after let’s say 3-4 turns worth of yellow match-3s THEN 2 turns of waiting for the repeater to tic, it’s a power that doesn’t get used. She was DOA at launch, it was a real bummer because the character was highly requested and the art is good.

Kolence

Emma's repeaters are bad. Too expensive and unreliable. Her black is also unreliable to return back to original form and allow her to use yellow or purple again.

Jacklag said:

I was considering a totally different approach to fixing Emma. I was thinking her Diamond Body should trigger whenever there is a friendly fortified tile on the board and her Purple and Yellow should have second versions while she is transformed. Maybe one that reduces damage taken by 40/50/60/75/90% and the other an active damage or a stun.

I'd like to see her fortify yellow tiles when she matches purple, and vice versa. And black increasing her base match damage so she would be usable with 5-stars for those effects alone. Also wouldn't mind some resistance when in Diamond form.
For turning back, she could lose fortification from a tile whenever she takes damage (also why increasing base match damage would make sense), and when no fortified tiles are left or a number of them has lost fortification, she goes back to original state and can fire her powers again. Probably would need to start with a few more tiles fortified too.

AXP_isme

It's a shame about Emma Frost. It feels like there's a decent enough concept in there trying to get out but she's just too slow. The game is all about delivering as much damage as possible as quickly as possible.

I remember getting some milage out of her when she was featured in PvE a little while ago. Her purple was ok against tile spammers if you could get two of them on the board alternating but it needed too much purple to be reliable. She can be a nuisance in the right circumstances but she lacks the speed and raw damage output to be useful in anything other than very niche circumstances. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I think that’s the missing element for her - either give her low effect, low cost powers that are spamable until they are worth it, or high cost high effect powers that are not spamable but worth it on the first cast. She won’t be viable with high cost, low effect stuff but that’s what we got.

sambrookjm

OJSP said:

One counterpoint for making Emma stronger than she is now: she goes up to lvl 605 in Cosmic Chaos in the 5* essential node. (If it’s not the 5* node, then her level would be lower, but I’m quite sure it is that node). If we’re not fast enough or they managed to get some cascades, she could actually hurt us with her powers. With Cable and Psylocke as the other 2 opponents, Emma is already third priority on that team. If her powers are cheaper or her repeaters faster, that node could become a nightmare at higher levels.

I think many characters’ numbers seem lacklustre at their max levels, because of the possibility of making them our opponents at levels beyond that. For example, for Boss Event side nodes that still use personal scaling to determine their levels or as I mentioned above, SCL10 harder nodes.

Counterpoint to your counterpoint - Worthy's nerf made his SCL10 nodes far, far easier.

There are plenty of Challenge nodes that are just miserable not because of the characters in them, but because they're LVL 600+ in the SCL 10 5-star and Challenge nodes.  Green Goblin's black is essentially an insta-kill against a non-champed and boosted character, and he shows up in several of those higher nodes teamed with Daken (who also has a very cheap ability that deals massive damage at those high levels.)

Then you have the challenge nodes like the most recent one today with *good* characters like BRB/Carbage/Thor...those are "get someone stunned quickly or die"  I don't think there's a big "Nerf BRB or Carbage" movement afoot because of that node.

Emma (and Talos) are the two four stars I would definitely say need to be boosted, but saying that she shouldn't be buffed because she's damaging at LVL 600+ is not a very convincing argument.

Kolence

Ufff. Maybe a better example is the 5-star Carnage in 2 or 3 challenge nodes at least? Or 5-star essential nodes? I forget. Either way, those are super high levels and match damage with extra move and possibility for a cascade and game over. It more or less requires the player to deny the AI any move making.
Those few select challenge nodes or other high level nodes (Simulator, DP vs MPQ, I can't recall others off the top of my head) is why I don't believe the devs are categorically against using top characters as pve opponents. Up to a point, likely yes. It wouldn't be as fun to have only the hardest fights all the time. But this event or sub and that? It spices things up.
I'm always for improving the weakest characters in a tier, especially if they are clearly struggling to do what they're supposed to be doing, in practice. If I need to fight a harder battle when they are in a pve node, so be it. As a trade off, I'll get to use them more (and hopefully with better success) in all the other occasions.

helix72

Kolence said:

Ufff. Maybe a better example is the 5-star Carnage in 2 or 3 challenge nodes at least? Or 5-star essential nodes? I forget. Either way, those are super high levels and match damage with extra move and possibility for a cascade and game over. It more or less requires the player to deny the AI any move making.
Those few select challenge nodes or other high level nodes (Simulator, DP vs MPQ, I can't recall others off the top of my head) is why I don't believe the devs are categorically against using top characters as pve opponents. Up to a point, likely yes. It wouldn't be as fun to have only the hardest fights all the time. But this event or sub and that? It spices things up.
I'm always for improving the weakest characters in a tier, especially if they are clearly struggling to do what they're supposed to be doing, in practice. If I need to fight a harder battle when they are in a pve node, so be it. As a trade off, I'll get to use them more (and hopefully with better success) in all the other occasions.

Don't sleep on the last sub CN of Venom Bomb. BiB Spider-Man with 2 Green batteries behind him who generate 4 Green AP per turn means on turn 5 he's hitting you with a 70K nuke, and that's assuming he doesn't match any green on turns 1-3 or else you're getting it on turn 4. Reminds me of the GED + 2 Black batteries CN. But I still say 5* Carnage is worse as your tank is generally at 1/2 health after turn 2 no matter who his partners are. The only thing worse would be if they made a Carnage + PX + Onslaught CN (not that I'm trying to give them any ideas). Insta-death on turn 2 because you know the AI is getting a match-4 every time...

Kolence

The Spidey + green goons one was easy with Hela Yelena boosted Kitty. And any TU stun (1 turn) if in a hurry. Even without stun, Kitty's repeater was regularly blowing up in Spidey's face with reduced spamming from goons. 
I did wipe badly with BRB and Polaris on 2nd clear, just entering the node on autopilot...

Bad

On simulator they displayed a nasty team for a 3E. For me it was more difficult than the 5E. Polaris lockjaw and blade3.
Health packs tossing machine!.
And you had just 2 free slots for facing that lol.