Can't wait to spend 2 hours climbing in PVP (a discussion on the new passive damage reduction meta)

Theghouse

Colossus reduces match damage by over 80%.  Wanda's passive can reduce any damage by up to 80%, and reduce your characters' powers to single cover level.  Troll move, pair with BRB as a third in shield Sim.  1 damage, 1 damage, 1 damage...

HoundofShadow

The way her power is worded suggests an 80% reduction every 2 turns. So, time your firing when her repeater tile is not on the board. It slows down iHulkoye and many other teams.

Bring back the old formula: stun, stun, stun, unless her damage reduction is still activated even when she's stunned.

Theghouse

HoundofShadow said:

The way her power is worded suggests an 80% reduction every 2 turns. So, time your firing when her repeater tile is not on the board. It slows down iHulkoye and many other teams.

Bring back the old formula: stun, stun, stun, unless her damage reduction is still activated even when she's stunned.

It should be on the board every turn unless you target it for removal.  There's not a ton of great targeted tile destruction, repeater removal, or reliable stuns (especially recently) in the 5* tier, and if you match it away it already did it's job on any powers you fired that turn and then her passive just pops up a new one at the start of her turn.

The charges on her repeater drain at the start of her turn, meaning if you're running iHulk, Thor, Warlock, Polaris, or anybody else with passive damage or board shake at the start of your turn, or running anyone with a passive or tile based power that can deal damage after the start of the enemy turn, it will have at least one charge on it by the time you can fire powers and make matches on your turn, reducing all your damage by at least 40% or worse.

All the big speed teams like Hulkoye, Thorkoye, Thorpocalypse, anybody with Polaris, even Prof Onslaught are all slowed down by her incredible passive.  

Omegased

I do really feel like it's time to shift the meta. She will effectively shut down Okoye, and iHulk.

She'll also potentially slow down apoc and all in all an opportunity for new characters to take the front seat. 

Theghouse

Omegased said:

I do really feel like it's time to shift the meta. She will effectively shut down Okoye, and iHulk.

She'll also potentially slow down apoc and all in all an opportunity for new characters to take the front seat. 

I think this is fantastic, even if it does slow the game way down.  Her and Colossus are must haves on defense.  This is way more than an iHulk counter.  Every popular speed climbing team, passive damage team, and multi hit team in the game right now is weaker when facing Wanda.

HoundofShadow

The way I interpret her power is this, assuming you are fighting against iHulkoye

Start of game
Create 1 repeater with 0 charge
You make a match and ends the turn.

Turn 1: Opponent's turn
Eat AoE (full damage)
Store 3 charges

From here onwards, reduce damage by up to 80%...

Ihulk's tiles destruction
Makes a match

Turn 2: Player's turn
Removes all charges and deals damage
Counter resets to zero.

Repeat what happens on Turn 1 and Turn 2. Their active powers will take reduced damage though if they fire them.

Theghouse

HoundofShadow said:

The way I interpret her power is this, assuming you are fighting against iHulkoye

Start of game
Create 1 repeater with 0 charge
You make a match and ends the turn.

Turn 1: Opponent's turn
Eat AoE (full damage)
Store 3 charges

From here onwards, reduce damage by up to 80%...

Ihulk's tiles destruction
Makes a match

Turn 2: Player's turn
Removes all charges and deals damage
Counter resets to zero.

Repeat what happens on Turn 1 and Turn 2. Their active powers will take reduced damage though if they fire them.

When you are fighting against Wanda with Hulkoye, as long as they don't match away or destroy their own repeater, it will be active at the start of your turn, every turn.

I can't think of any 5* who has a start of turn passive that would have a chance to clear out the repeater except a Thor cascade but he doesn't pair with Hulkoye.

Then iHulks passive triggers. While iHulk's power wording lists adding a green tile, then AOE damage, then tile destruction, in the game the tile destruction comes before the AOE.

If the added green tile makes a match or triggers some other damage to your opponent, charge added and 40% reduction.  When the tile destruction triggers, charge added and 40% reduction.  When the AOE comes around, they are guaranteed to have at least 40% reduction, sometimes 80% reduction, unless his added green tile is able to trigger a lucky clear of their repeater tile.

Everything you do for the rest of the turn is then 80% less damage, unless you can clear the tile away with a power like Okoye's red or Colossus' blue, or a Cascade off Okoye's yellow.  If you match it away at the end of your turn, you avoid the charges dealing damage, but it has already done it's job reducing damage for the whole turn and then Wanda pops a new one out next turn.  

HoundofShadow

You are right. His tile destruction triggers before his AoE. However, using BRB as an example, BRB puts out protect tiles after both tile destruction and AoE have triggered. It doesn't intercept between the tile destruction and AoE. So, BRB team is still taking full damage from AOE and tiles destruction. However, if a match occurs due to IHulk's passive green tile, it triggers BRB's CD. Someone try this again. 

Likewise, I believe the same thing will happen to Wanda's repeater. She will store 4 charges in one go, which is actually worse than I thought. Unless they programmed Wanda's repeater to work differently, else Wanda will still get eaten by iHulkoye. This team don't really use active power on their turn anyway. 

Theghouse

That's a fair point. We'll have to see the timing before we know for sure.  

If it doesn't give any damage reduction on iHulk's passive, she's still a fantastic character but that really lowers her value in the current meta.  She will still definitely be effective against Polaris and halfThor with their passives going off at start of turn and multi hits like Apoc and BRB, and would be a defensive deterrent for every popular speed climbing team EXCEPT Hulkoye.

HoundofShadow

The timing of her charges will determine whether she's anti-iHulkoye or not. If she's not, iHulkoye is continuing to reign supreme in PvPs. 

Using characters with self damaging ability like Warlock to trigger her charge could be interesting, provided that it does work. Based on my memory, triggering certain effects due to self-damage isn't consistent among all the characters involved.


Anyway, stunning her is one of the solutions. 

fight4thedream

***Mod note: Removed a couple of posts. Please keep the discussion civil and on topic. Thanks!

entrailbucket

The problem with running a very strong defensive team in PvP is that these teams tend to be quite weak offensively, or at least very slow. If you want to leave a defensive team out, at some point you have to win a match with that team. 

If you want them to be on defense the whole time, you have to use that team exclusively, and that just ends up being really suboptimal in most cases compared to the turbo-speed offensive teams.  If it takes you 5 minutes to win a fight and it takes me less than a minute, I'm generally going to come out ahead.

The exception to this would be characters that are extremely strong defensively *and* offensively (old 5* Gambit, old 4* Bishop + some blue damage dealer), but those characters tend to get...addressed.

Theghouse

entrailbucket said:

The problem with running a very strong defensive team in PvP is that these teams tend to be quite weak offensively, or at least very slow. If you want to leave a defensive team out, at some point you have to win a match with that team. 

If you want them to be on defense the whole time, you have to use that team exclusively, and that just ends up being really suboptimal in most cases compared to the turbo-speed offensive teams.  If it takes you 5 minutes to win a fight and it takes me less than a minute, I'm generally going to come out ahead.

The exception to this would be characters that are extremely strong defensively *and* offensively (old 5* Gambit, old 4* Bishop + some blue damage dealer), but those characters tend to get...addressed.

Except that Wanda, Colossus, and BRB are all great characters because they DO have offensive power on top of their defensive greatness.  BRB not only drops protect tiles but self accelerates and his offensive powers hit hard.  Colossus not only passively reduces match damage for the whole team but has his own match damage boost and a nasty cheap nuke.  Wanda is not only a damage reducer but an every turn passive damage dealer, a damage booster, and a pick-your-color accelerator.

While a pick 2 combo of these three might not be your go-to climbing team, and they don't have the current absolute dominance of Hulkoyes speed on offense and defensive deterrence, they will certainly be effective to leave on defense for a float as a counter to all of the current meta's fastest climbing teams, and likely fast enough offensively to shield hop with.

Seeing how the meta matchups really shift is going to be interesting.  I said in another thread that the meta has been missing the rock paper scissors type balance for a while and I think this helps restore that balance.

If you want to play using Wanda, you'll need to queue non-Wandas, because as a passive damage dealer she's a terribly slow mirror match.

If you want to fight Wanda, you'll need to bring something other than an iHulk, Thor, Apoc, BRB, or Polaris team unless you want to spend about three times as long as an average battle doing partial damage. So if you want to climb quickly on Wanda teams, you will need to bring a non passive damage, non multi hit team, which is the entire current meta.  

If more non-meta teams are out, that's cannon fodder for the current top climbers like Hulkoyes, Thorkoyes, Thorpocalypses, and Grittys.

And coming full circle, those are the teams you want to queue with your Wanda.

Sekilicious

That seems to be how it works in the Polaris meta. Polaris/Grocket < Polaris/Sabertooth < Karnak/Chavez < Polaris/Grocket. If all champed, sprinkling in some boosted characters,  you never run out of matches. Perfectly balanced, as all thing should be...

entrailbucket

Theghouse said:

entrailbucket said:

The problem with running a very strong defensive team in PvP is that these teams tend to be quite weak offensively, or at least very slow. If you want to leave a defensive team out, at some point you have to win a match with that team. 

If you want them to be on defense the whole time, you have to use that team exclusively, and that just ends up being really suboptimal in most cases compared to the turbo-speed offensive teams.  If it takes you 5 minutes to win a fight and it takes me less than a minute, I'm generally going to come out ahead.

The exception to this would be characters that are extremely strong defensively *and* offensively (old 5* Gambit, old 4* Bishop + some blue damage dealer), but those characters tend to get...addressed.

Except that Wanda, Colossus, and BRB are all great characters because they DO have offensive power on top of their defensive greatness.  BRB not only drops protect tiles but self accelerates and his offensive powers hit hard.  Colossus not only passively reduces match damage for the whole team but has his own match damage boost and a nasty cheap nuke.  Wanda is not only a damage reducer but an every turn passive damage dealer, a damage booster, and a pick-your-color accelerator.

While a pick 2 combo of these three might not be your go-to climbing team, and they don't have the current absolute dominance of Hulkoyes speed on offense and defensive deterrence, they will certainly be effective to leave on defense for a float as a counter to all of the current meta's fastest climbing teams, and likely fast enough offensively to shield hop with.

Seeing how the meta matchups really shift is going to be interesting.  I said in another thread that the meta has been missing the rock paper scissors type balance for a while and I think this helps restore that balance.

If you want to play using Wanda, you'll need to queue non-Wandas, because as a passive damage dealer she's a terribly slow mirror match.

If you want to fight Wanda, you'll need to bring something other than an iHulk, Thor, Apoc, BRB, or Polaris team unless you want to spend about three times as long as an average battle doing partial damage. So if you want to climb quickly on Wanda teams, you will need to bring a non passive damage, non multi hit team, which is the entire current meta.  

If more non-meta teams are out, that's cannon fodder for the current top climbers like Hulkoyes, Thorkoyes, Thorpocalypses, and Grittys.

And coming full circle, those are the teams you want to queue with your Wanda.

I suppose I'd take issue with the idea of Colossus and Beta Bill "hitting hard," but that may just be a matter of my skewed perspective/matchmaking.  Those characters are theoretically capable of doing damage, yes, but if you're fighting an enemy team with 150-200,000 cumulative health, their DPS is just unacceptably low compared to an offensive team.

The issue of deterrence is worth considering, but ultimately the only thing that will deter attacks is a low points/team strength ratio relative to what else is available.  Even the very best defensive teams in the history of the game had something like a 5% defensive win rate, and I don't expect any of these new characters to improve on that.

KGB

entrailbucket said:

  Even the very best defensive teams in the history of the game had something like a 5% defensive win rate, and I don't expect any of these new characters to improve on that.

So Bishop got nerfed because of a 5% defensive win rate

KGB

Colognoisseur

This is the part of the program where I say,

”You know nothing Jon Snow!”

We go through this before every new character. Most of the time the collective gets it wrong. 

Once the sandbox accounts can champ her tomorrow then we can stop speculating and deal with some actual gameplay. 

SnowcaTT

Long climb due to damage reduction?

Huh. Have you met this BRB character?

(BRB partner Kitty gonna love some SW with that free tile every turn)

Sekilicious

As has been mentioned, Kitty doesn’t replace repeaters 

Borstock

KGB said:

entrailbucket said:

  Even the very best defensive teams in the history of the game had something like a 5% defensive win rate, and I don't expect any of these new characters to improve on that.

So Bishop got nerfed because of a 5% defensive win rate

KGB

Sure would be nice to be able to stun her.

Bad

Theghouse said:

That's a fair point. We'll have to see the timing before we know for sure.  

If it doesn't give any damage reduction on iHulk's passive, she's still a fantastic character but that really lowers her value in the current meta.  

Studying her power closely, it says:. At the start of battle and every turn, if one doesn't exist, create a 1-turn Repeater tile that deals 314 damage for each charge stored on it, then removes all charges.
So she always leaves her repeater. She will shield damage only when taking consecutive hits. So in all turns she will eat full AoE. She has low health pool almost 60k health. 
And so could that mean she is no good against hulkoye teams? No. She will be the hulkoye Slayer. Because if she is not dead on her turn, she will realease a serious beating of charges to the character in front. Guess who will be? Good old okoye hyper leveled to be tanking old buddy Ihulk. 
So while britty team were pushovers for hulkoye teams, wanda will be the same health pack waster than hulkoye teams have been for all other teams for a long long time.
So please wanda, come soon.