MPQ Halloween 2021 Activities

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  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    Is this the first time he has had a PvP?
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    I feel like he pre-dates the character release PVP for 5*s by quite awhile, so I would imagine so.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited October 2021
    Since Ghost Rider was my first 5* champion, I'm pretty curious what his new situation is going to be. I think that Hell Ride is one of the more flavorfully and mechanically unique powers in the tier, so I kind of hope they don't mess with that one too much, maybe just a power cost adjustment down - since it feeds the others but takes awhile to get moving, I think it should be cheaper even if the others aren't. As for red and black, Black is serviceable if inferior to Johnny blaze and Ghostpool's version, but red is by far the dumpstat power as mentioned earlier in the thread. Ghostpool's red stun is definitely the better stun of the head-on-fire characters. 

    I do wish that as part of this rebalance they would unlock the restriction to run him with Johnny Blaze, since it's a different host and different spirit of vengeance fictionally, then you could have an all-flames trio if you were so inclined.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    Are players looking forward to a tweaking of GR like Archangel got, or like a rebalance of what Dr. Ock got? I'm in the Dr Ock camp.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited October 2021
    Personally, I am far less interested in Doc Oc now that he doesn't have his insta-win cunning scheme nonsense green power and make an auto-turn for every tentacle tile in play when he gets stunned blue power, I think he went from being a quirky weird character who was a puzzle unto himself to just one more middle of the road 5*. But I see him a lot more often than I used to, so I guess it was mission accomplished on that one. I just hope Robbie gets a strong concept out of it.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    His red power is the more interesting power to me. It reminds me of Knull's purple cd a little. You could use it on Colossus and it should go off frequently.  I suppose Ghostpool's red was inspired by GR's red.

    If his green could be fixed on the board like Silver Surfer's does, it could be good but I'm not sure if it would be broken. Maybe turn it into a 2-turn special repeater tile instead.

    Again, giving GR a new set of abilities would probably be better. 
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    It's kind of weird that they picked him because he's really not awful.  He's definitely not good, at all, but the characters they've chosen to buff in the past were, like, brutally terrible -- completely unusable for anything.  I've seen GR a few times in PvP when he was boosted.

    I'm very interested to see what they do with him.  If it's a small change I don't think it moves the needle.  He's solidly mediocre now, and with a small buff, he's still going to be mediocre.

    If it was me, I'd fix his health and match damage, possibly reduce cost on green, redo red completely, and give him a Penance Stare.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    Making his green a 2-turn repeater would make it a 3/x/x for me. You absolutely need that to go off every turn or it isn’t helpful.
  • Sekilicious
    Sekilicious Posts: 1,766 Chairperson of the Boards
    Everyone seems to think he is getting bosted, probably correctly. We probably shouldn't forget Capt. Marvel got an undeserved nerf. There is no reason to think he will be even marginally playable after his rework. 
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited October 2021
    I remain thoroughly baffled by the Danver5 nerf. You may recall that that nerf was famously unannounced and unexplained - to my knowledge still the only time that has happened to a 5* without a sellback option and explanation thread, so I don't think that this one is going to make him demonstrably worse personally. That being said, I'm more on the side of Entrailbucket in my thinking that they don't really know what will make a character good or bad in actual play against actual rosters in the actual game modes that we are playing with timers in place.
  • MegaBee
    MegaBee Posts: 1,040 Chairperson of the Boards
    Everyone seems to think he is getting bosted, probably correctly. We probably shouldn't forget Capt. Marvel got an undeserved nerf. There is no reason to think he will be even marginally playable after his rework. 
    Undeserved and unannounced.
  • sinnerjfl
    sinnerjfl Posts: 1,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    Everyone seems to think he is getting bosted, probably correctly. We probably shouldn't forget Capt. Marvel got an undeserved nerf. There is no reason to think he will be even marginally playable after his rework. 
    She got nerfed because she was trivializing Challenge Nodes and it was a form of winfinite once it got going.

    Can't have that!
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    sinnerjfl said:
    Everyone seems to think he is getting bosted, probably correctly. We probably shouldn't forget Capt. Marvel got an undeserved nerf. There is no reason to think he will be even marginally playable after his rework. 
    She got nerfed because she was trivializing Challenge Nodes and it was a form of winfinite once it got going.

    Can't have that!
    I mean you say that, but there are so many replacement characters who fill that roll at least as well. My pet theory is that she was nerfed ahead of Magneto for Yellow, and/or Ronan for the repeaters, but I don’t think either was really necessary. See my post above about what is and isn’t good.
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    And yet they keep creating characters and teams that easily go infinite and trivialize the challenge nodes.


    What's truly bizarre about stuff like this is that we have to guess what their design philosophy and intentions are. 

    Like, they could just tell us why certain things are ok and certain things are not...or when and why they choose to do buffs and nerfs, why some characters are so much better or worse than others.  Are certain characters overperforming or underperforming?  What are their expectations?

    For example, is Ultron meant to counter the SW/Colossus meta?  Is Gamora?  We guess that that's the case, but there is absolutely no reason they can't just TELL us that.  What were the decisions behind those characters' design?  How are they monitoring the metrics to see whether it's working?  What does success look like?

    I understand why they don't ask us for feedback anymore (we've all seen the kind of feedback they get on here!), but I don't know why we can't hear from a designer occasionally about these kinds of decisions. It wouldn't be a huge amount of work, it wouldn't give anyone an unfair advantage, and they could just completely ignore whatever feedback they got. 

    Other games do this constantly -- it's actually bizarre that this one doesn't, and it's created this sort of philosophical black box where we all have to try to guess what's going on in it.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    Remember when we used to get design blogs along with new releases? They never read like a designer wrote them, and would do things like suggest you run a 5* with a 1*, but at least they happened I guess.
  • Sekilicious
    Sekilicious Posts: 1,766 Chairperson of the Boards
    sinnerjfl said:
    Everyone seems to think he is getting bosted, probably correctly. We probably shouldn't forget Capt. Marvel got an undeserved nerf. There is no reason to think he will be even marginally playable after his rework. 
    She got nerfed because she was trivializing Challenge Nodes and it was a form of winfinite once it got going.

    Can't have that!
    I trivialized the 5e and challenge nodes with Shang-Chi (undercovered at 3/0/3, but boosted), 3* Medusa, and 2* Magneto today. I expect both Medusa and Magneto be nerfed forthwith. Granted it was pretty slow. 
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    It's not like they don't want to explain, but it probably has to do with the size of the audience/demand.They used to explain the rationale behind some characters' designs in their blog. I read almost all the entries before they took it down. You learn and understand why they design character in certain ways. They also used to do regular/monthly video updates/sneakpeaks, but due to lack of demand, they stopped doing it.

    If veterans like you aren't aware that they used to share their rationales/the thinking behind design, then it more or less prove that not many players are interested in that. Fortunately, when drastic nerfs are being made, the will explain their rationales. For example, they did some explanations for Bishop/Gambit/Captain America. 
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    It's not like they don't want to explain, but it probably has to do with the size of the audience/demand.They used to explain the rationale behind some characters' designs in their blog. I read almost all the entries before they took it down. You learn and understand why they design character in certain ways. They also used to do regular/monthly video updates/sneakpeaks, but due to lack of demand, they stopped doing it.

    If veterans like you aren't aware that they used to share their rationales/the thinking behind design, then it more or less prove that not many players are interested in that. Fortunately, when drastic nerfs are being made, the will explain their rationales. For example, they did some explanations for Bishop/Gambit/Captain America. 
    They used to do it, and they used to have a coherent, predictable philosophy that was regularly expressed.  That was a VERY long time ago.

    Now they don't.  We have to guess about why they do the things they do, and the things they do no longer track with the things they used to tell us philosophically.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    The only constant is change. Things change when context changes. When people applies the philosophy of the old to new contexts, they are highly unlikely to get the same result. They went through changes like different ownership, designers changed etc. Since designing is a creative process, therefore; when there are shifts in team members, thinking and ideas change as well. 
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited October 2021
    The only constant is change. Things change when context changes. When people applies the philosophy of the old to new contexts, they are highly unlikely to get the same result. They went through changes like different ownership, designers changed etc. Since designing is a creative process, therefore; when there are shifts in team members, thinking and ideas change as well. 
    That explains why their design philosophy is different. 

    It doesn't explain why we've had no idea what their design philosophy is for the last 3-4 years, or why it's seemed incoherent.