***** Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes) ***** - Rebalance Details (10/26/21)

Tiger_Wong

His red is REALLY good. It can’t be reduced, it can be enhanced. The damage is really good now and punishes the match damage meta and characters whose level is higher than everyone else (like boosted character).

entrailbucket

HoundofShadow said:

It's probably be broken with his increased match damage, which will be even higher than Colossus. Assuming 3 repeaters with new match damage, his highest damage possible is (968 x 3 (triple match damage)) x 3 tiles destroyed x 3 repeaters = 26,541 per turn.

Yeah, I mean..."they can't make stuff that's broken" is a good argument until you consider that there is a ton of stuff they've made that is broken. 

If other characters are allowed to do stuff that's too good, why can't Ghost Rider do stuff that's too good?

ThaRoadWarrior

Alternatively just put his match damage where you want it so this power isn’t “broken,” but just “better?” It’s not like they aren’t controlling the entire picture of the changes 

sinnerjfl

HoundofShadow said:

It's probably be broken with his increased match damage, which will be even higher than Colossus. Assuming 3 repeaters with new match damage, his highest damage possible is (968 x 3 (triple match damage)) x 3 tiles destroyed x 3 repeaters = 26,541 per turn.

Make it destroy less tiles, remove bonus damage, only give him 2 repeaters...  heck even 1 just repeater of the old ability would still be better than the new one. There are ways to make it not crazy good while retaining the original idea.

Tiger_Wong

I’m actually quite shocked at the damage the new green does unboosted. 

ThaRoadWarrior

New Ghost Rider team: Cable/C4rol. Try and get some of Cable’s strikes out, and Hell Ride.

HoundofShadow

I know it sounds weird considering other broker characters like Okoye is still around. However, when you allow it to be a norm, GR will be the yardstick for tiles destruction damage and ap gains. Look at what Apocalypse, Okoye, Kitty, iHulk, Thor or BRB etc had done to all other 5* releases. They made them look unusable unless they are paired with the the meta.

St_Bernadus

Well I had fun climbing in his pvp. And I got my wins as well. 

Bad

I used shang for to fast climbing, there were too many tough health bars. My GR's green is just level 2, still it was great for SC and GR another good partner for him now.
And GR ghost repeater lasted for a lot of turns, so I would use it at level 5 if I had it.

LavaManLee

I made it to a little over 1000 points in his PVP and then shielded.  I really liked his boosted black.  When paired with 5*Storm, it was pretty easy to save up to fire black twice in a row, which could either take down or tear a huge chunk out of anybody.

ThaRoadWarrior

Focusing on his black turned out to be the move. I ran up to 1200 last night using Storm and then let it fall back without shielding. I was poking at it some today with Jessica Jones and C4rol today as a way to get decent strikes out quickly with some additional green generation when you stumble across those traps. It would be a lot better if she were also boosted, but I think JJ is still a solid 5* mechanically.

darkwatcherDEZ

Given all the feedback and our own testing, the Robbie takeaways are an overall appreciation for the increased / rebalanced HP and match damage... and in general that the Devs took time to rework a classic 5*

The changes to GREEN Hell Ride gets the mixed feelings. We do miss the AP generating repeaters, and the countdown is very fragile and too random. It does allow for play changes. We closed out the last PVP exploiting 5*Hawkeye's fortification and AP generation while keeping him behind  5* Iceman.

In closing, and per an old adage, you can't please all the people all of the time. Meta chasers only care if the character changes feed into their Meta. Robbie may not do that, but all will appreciate come 5* boost rotation. In that case, he does provide an opportunity to change things up a bit. That and 4 to 5 transitioners get a "Hell of a Ride."

ThaRoadWarrior

For me, Robbie now hits harder but fell out of his old niche pretty completely. I love his new health and damage, but here is the thing about Hell Ride:

Regardless of the amount of damage it did or didn't do, it was an excellent green control power. It filled up 3 greens right away, and would then keep the board dry of it for essentially the remainder of the match from nibbling every turn. This gave you Thor and then hulk protection, though it was a little expensive to get out in time against Hulk. And the gathered AP fed his other powers, which is a big loss now.

Srheer0

I ended up really enjoying the event once I switched from using ic5man as my third to St5rm.  

Goal was to just use Wanda to get as many black aps as possible. St5rm making black tile charged each turn helped a lot with that goal.

My ghostrider wasn't even champed, was at 12 covers. Will try him out in Sim to see if he is good unboosted. 

entrailbucket

ThaRoadWarrior said:

For me, Robbie now hits harder but fell out of his old niche pretty completely. I love his new health and damage, but here is the thing about Hell Ride:

Regardless of the amount of damage it did or didn't do, it was an excellent green control power. It filled up 3 greens right away, and would then keep the board dry of it for essentially the remainder of the match from nibbling every turn. This gave you Thor and then hulk protection, though it was a little expensive to get out in time against Hulk. And the gathered AP fed his other powers, which is a big loss now.

I think sometimes all of us (including me) lose sight of the point of the game, which is to kill the other guys.  (I also think the devs lose sight of this pretty often, but maybe not in this particular case).

If they don't have a good idea for a power, I will always, always take "massive single target damage" over something like "create a 1-turn repeater that puts out one strike tile, buffs one protect tile, and makes a 3-turn countdown tile that sends an enemy airborne."

"Spend x AP to do 100,000 damage" is boring, but it's effective, and powers like this are actually super rare now.  Look at how good Electro's black power played, vs what it looked like on paper.

ThaRoadWarrior

Sure, his black is decidedly good now. Maybe his red is good too, but it’s just not the power of his I like I guess lol. Green was interesting before, and I guess it still is in a different way, but now for me he is tied to C4rol until a CD exploiter like Hawkeye but for black/green hits the 5* tier.

I think it is a good rule of thumb to make sure every character has at least one good thing they can do, and one interesting thing. 

Sekilicious

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Sure, his black is decidedly good now. Maybe his red is good too, but it’s just not the power of his I like I guess lol. Green was interesting before, and I guess it still is in a different way, but now for me he is tied to C4rol until a CD exploiter like Hawkeye but for black/green hits the 5* tier.

I think it is a good rule of thumb to make sure every character has at least one good thing they can do, and one interesting thing. 

Ideally, that interesting thing would be thematic of the character as well. There are a few characters that would be cooler if they did something more in line with the comic/cinema version, like if Ultron creating sentry bots that eventually enveloped the board (like Ronan's blue) or something similar. I like Electro, but also think it was a missed opportunity that she creates strikes instead of does something with charged tiles. I'm sure other characters powers could be used as examples as well. 

entrailbucket

"Good vs interesting" or "good vs thematic" is another thing that exposes the fault lines among different kinds of players.  The best characters would ideally be good, interesting, and thematic. 

But, I bet if you really press people, what matters is that characters are good.  Players will value different stuff, but if a guy does nothing good, nobody will ever use them.

Look at someone like 5* Kingpin, who's definitely thematic/flavorful and really interesting, but is laugh-out-loud terrible.  Nobody uses him.  Banner is pretty flavorful!

Maybe there's a group of hardcore MPQ roleplayers that I'm not aware of who pretend the characters are talking during matches and act out their powers or something, and for them, flavorful would be the top priority.


One last somewhat related thing: when new characters show up, we generally evaluate them based on whatever thing they do that's interesting.  When we miss on guys it's almost always because we focus on that interesting thing, vs whatever stuff they do that's good.

ThaRoadWarrior

That's true, we do tend to latch on to what seems like their unique bit. I would say a recent "all interesting, no efficacy" release was probably Odin. I don't know, I probably just have more nostalgia goggles on for Ghost Rider than actual complaints. It just seemed to me like his old green was thematic, interesting, and good, and now it's less of all of those qualities to my eye.

entrailbucket

It's kind of weird that for a game that's 8 years in, with 200 or whatever characters and a new character every few weeks, almost every new character has something mechanically new and interesting.

Nobody really gives the devs enough credit for that (I certainly don't).  A lot of games would be pumping out reskins, remixes, and "lazy" star upgrades by this point.

I guess it speaks to the deceptive depth of a core game that looks pretty simple on the surface, but still...they do actually try to do new stuff. 

This is weird to think about.