Week 25 Boost: Daredevil (Matt Murdock), Loki (God of Mischief), Professor X (Classic), Star-Lord

entrailbucket

Regular reminder that Daredevil is super good when he's boosted

entrailbucket

Actually, as a fun thought exercise: Daredevil is one of the best Tier 2 characters. 

What would they need to do to him to get him into Tier 1?

mdreyer93

entrailbucket said:

Actually, as a fun thought exercise: Daredevil is one of the best Tier 2 characters. 

What would they need to do to him to get him into Tier 1?

I don't have a useable DD, but I think he would be Tier 1 (always useful) if they:
- Brought his HP and match damage in line with recent releases
- Removed the below 50% requirement from his yellow passive, or removed the cap on strike tiles. Convert a basic tile to a green strike tile, instead of yellow.
- Lowered his green AP cost and upped the damage a bit. Forget the green AP gain on friendly match and just make it deal damage and respawn if matched or destroyed by either team. Allow multiples at once.
- Lowered the AP cost of his purple to 6 or 7 and convert to friendly green strike tiles)

EDIT - tweaked his green. reverted purple to tile conversion. creating green strike tiles to self-trigger his green h2h CD

BriMan2222

mdreyer93 said:

entrailbucket said:

Actually, as a fun thought exercise: Daredevil is one of the best Tier 2 characters. 

What would they need to do to him to get him into Tier 1?

I don't have a useable DD, but I think he would be Tier 1 (always useful) if they:
-Brought his HP and match damage in line with recent releases
-Removed the below 50% requirement from his yellow passive, or removed the cap on strike tiles
-Lowered his green AP cost and upped the damage
-Lowered the AP cost of his purple to 6 or 7 and made it destroy 4 random tiles, starting with enemy specials but including basics (this would cause board shake to proc his strikes and trigger his green)

I would agree with you on every point except for the last one.  There are so many times that I've used DD to beat challenge nodes like the ones with mindless ones by using his purple to steal their ridiculously strong special tiles and turning them into friendly strikes and then winning easily because a match 3 does 300k dmg with those strike tiles.  Just destroying those tiles instead of stealing them would make him much, much weaker.

mdreyer93

BriMan2222 said:

I would agree with you on every point except for the last one.  There are so many times that I've used DD to beat challenge nodes like the ones with mindless ones by using his purple to steal their ridiculously strong special tiles and turning them into friendly strikes and then winning easily because a match 3 does 300k dmg with those strike tiles.  Just destroying those tiles instead of stealing them would make him much, much weaker.

I can see the utility there. How often does it do nothing but stun though since the enemy doesn't have any specials? I was just trying to think of a way it could be useful against all teams as well as synergize with his strikes and green. 

EDIT - I took your suggestion and kept purple as tile conversion. I further tweaked his green though and the others to synergize with it. For me, my favorite thing with 3* Daredevil was to team him with 3* Cyclops and spam red with Cyke's yellow to trigger DD's red.

entrailbucket

I'm not sure that'd do it!  Remember, the bar for a Tier 1 guy is pretty high, we're talking about putting him on par with Okoye, Apocalypse, SW, etc.

I think they'd have to give him some kind of passive stun.  Maybe lean into the Polaris combo? 

"If there are more than 8 friendly special tiles on the board, convert 4 of them to basic tiles and stun the target for 4 turns?" You could play around with the numbers a bit to tune it.

mdreyer93

True. Tier 1 is basically "what would make this character broken", lol. A passive stun that's better than Iceman's would be nice. I like your idea, but it may be TOO broken. DD/polaris could stunlock pretty much any team that way. I guess that would make him always useful... 

LavaManLee

I must be missing something (and I certainly could be) but I have a 5* champed DD and I'm just not seeing it.  Does he need to be brought in at half-health to work best?  I tried him in a few PVP but imagine I am playing him incorrectly.  His match damage was good but it took way too long to get anything and his green/purple just are very dependent on the board itself.  He seems to need some help to be good.

Captain_Trips88

Stun + cascades = lots of extra DD damage from his passive. Half health is a better option than full health for the boost each turn

Phumade

LavaManLee said:

I must be missing something (and I certainly could be) but I have a 5* champed DD and I'm just not seeing it.  Does he need to be brought in at half-health to work best?  I tried him in a few PVP but imagine I am playing him incorrectly.  His match damage was good but it took way too long to get anything and his green/purple just are very dependent on the board itself.  He seems to need some help to be good.

Yes,  He's at his best at 1/2 health like Thor

BriMan2222

Phumade said:

LavaManLee said:

I must be missing something (and I certainly could be) but I have a 5* champed DD and I'm just not seeing it.  Does he need to be brought in at half-health to work best?  I tried him in a few PVP but imagine I am playing him incorrectly.  His match damage was good but it took way too long to get anything and his green/purple just are very dependent on the board itself.  He seems to need some help to be good.

Yes,  He's at his best at 1/2 health like Thor

At one time half health thor with half health DD was my pvp A-team

entrailbucket

LavaManLee said:

I must be missing something (and I certainly could be) but I have a 5* champed DD and I'm just not seeing it.  Does he need to be brought in at half-health to work best?  I tried him in a few PVP but imagine I am playing him incorrectly.  His match damage was good but it took way too long to get anything and his green/purple just are very dependent on the board itself.  He seems to need some help to be good.

You probably need another stunner, or to chase purple.

It's his purple passive that provides the value.  It doesn't look like much on paper, but the effect of it is extremely powerful.  It says "when doing damage to a stunned enemy, Daredevil deals X damage to that enemy."

The reason it's amazing is that he adds that number to the damage for *every single hit* you do. 

So if you make a 3-match cascade, he boosts each of the 3 matches.  Then if you have attack tiles out, it triggers again for those.  His countdown is another separate trigger.  Polaris's passive (for example) is another trigger. 

I've seen his passive do like 70 or 80,000 damage in a single turn quite easily.

ThaRoadWarrior

If his purple stunned 2x enemies for that cost, they could leave it. Uncap the heal maybe, but really he needs to be able to stun spam and 9 purple for a single target won’t do that. 

Maybe give him something for matched strikes that generate purple, kind of like how Miles gets AP for matching webs.

i think he may need a damage increase as well - part of the reason he slaps boosted is just how much harder the sonar strike damage hits in the face of modern health pools. When you remove that he isn’t nearly that impressive.

entrailbucket

ThaRoadWarrior said:

If his purple stunned 2x enemies for that cost, they could leave it. Uncap the heal maybe, but really he needs to be able to stun spam and 9 purple for a single target won’t do that. 

Maybe give him something for matched strikes that generate purple, kind of like how Miles gets AP for matching webs.

Yeah, one thing you could do is give him BRB's passive, but for strikes instead of protect tiles.  Drop the stun to 6ap, have any matched strike tile generate green and purple, and you're pretty close.

mdreyer93

I like the BRB analogy. I don't know why this has consumed my thoughts, but how about:

Yellow: (passive) At the start of the turn, DD creates a strength 600 green strike tile, then restores 2000 health for each strike tile on the board (max 5 tiles). Whenever a friendly Strike tile is matched or destroyed, gain 1 Green and 1 Purple AP.

Green: 9 AP – Create a 5-turn green CD tile that deals 3000 damage at the end of each turn. While this CD is on the board, DD creates a strength 600 Strike tile each time he or one of his allies takes damage. If matched or destroyed, deal 12000 damage and create another CD if one does not exist.

Purple: 6 AP – Convert 4 random enemy S, P, or A tiles into friendly green Strike tiles, then stuns the target for 3 turns. (passive) when a stunned enemy is damaged, DD deals 2000 damage to that enemy.

entrailbucket

mdreyer93 said:

I like the BRB analogy. I don't know why this has consumed my thoughts, but how about:

Yellow: (passive) At the start of the turn, DD creates a strength 600 green strike tile, then restores 2000 health for each strike tile on the board (max 5 tiles). Whenever a friendly Strike tile is matched or destroyed, gain 1 Green and 1 Purple AP.

Green: 9 AP – Create a 5-turn green CD tile that deals 3000 damage at the end of each turn. While this CD is on the board, DD creates a strength 600 Strike tile each time he or one of his allies takes damage. If matched or destroyed, deal 12000 damage and create another CD if one does not exist.

Purple: 6 AP – Convert 4 random enemy S, P, or A tiles into friendly green Strike tiles, then stuns the target for 3 turns. (passive) when a stunned enemy is damaged, DD deals 2000 damage to that enemy.

Ha, glad I could be of service!

This character would be Tier 1 for sure.  He's crazy good but wouldn't necessarily completely take over the game (Is he better than BRB?  I'm not sure.)

It's fun to think about this because it makes you realize just how far ahead the good characters are.

helix72

DD needs a match damage boost. He was great but so hard to keep him tanking due to his low damage numbers so he’d throw out 1 or 2 strikes at most before healing over the threshold and stopping.

Daredevil217

DD is the perfect candidate for a numbers rebalance only. Give him super high match damage so he tanks, and give him a much needed numbers boost (bigger damage, much lower cost to his powers) and he’d be good to go. He wouldn’t be meta but I’d go back to using him all the time as I think he’s a fun character. He’s just becoming less effective with power creep.