**** Puck (Eugene Judd) ****

HoundofShadow

Just another quick note from playing with him: if you down an opponent with his red, the 1-turn stun will be "carried over" to the next enemy. 

DAZ0273

Took me 4 attempt's on his 1v1, had to use boosts in the end. His red animation is sort'a weird - I can't really work out what it is he is attempting to do? His green animation is so cute! Like he won a prize at school for cartwheels! He is mostly miss so far for me.

jsmjsmjsm00

I beat his 1v1 trivially without any boosts or team ups. I don't understand the difficulty people are having with it. 

I will say I used Vulture too during the shield training and even with firing Puck's green every other turn, it had minimal effect. It was like throwing away my green AP. 

KGB

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

I beat his 1v1 trivially without any boosts or team ups. I don't understand the difficulty people are having with it. 

I will say I used Vulture too during the shield training and even with firing Puck's green every other turn, it had minimal effect. It was like throwing away my green AP. 

Maybe you just got lucky.

Why not try it a few more times and let us know how you make out.

KGB

AlexR

After climbing his pvp, Impression 2.0:

The negative: His green continued to do nothing for the AI as well during the 27 battles I fought, which was relieving.

The positive: His passive is more annoying on defense than I gave him credit for!

It's still not difficult to deal with, considering he's so unthreatening that you can just leave him for last. But if you can't stun or oneshot, America or Polaris on autopilot are going to make you eat some k team damage.

Although of course, courtesy of her cheap stun, Polaris doesn't really need to be afraid of revenge mechanics like that on attack. America on attack on the other hand wouldn't enjoy this when Puck's actually champed. I mostly just got away with MEHulk/America because the loaner Pucks had low enough health that MEHulk's purple oneshotted them. Champed Puck would have successfully made me not run America, so there's that.

I think if his actives were slightly better (or alternatively, just 1 of them truly good. Like, if his green was actually reliable and worked as suggested, for example.), he'd be solid midtier. Right now he's mostly just his revenge passive.

LavaManLee

As a 5* player who has played since late 2013, he is definitely one of the worst 4* I have ever played with in PVP.  Emma Frost comes to mind also.  He does not bring much interesting other than his annoyance at clearing a row every now and then, but even boosted that won't do much (IMHO).

HoundofShadow

I think Valkyrie/R4G + Nico/Gertrude + Puck should be fine. The power to focus on is his black passive, so we need to get him up front. I'll try my Lokigator team with him later today.

Crowl

While he seems okay in the regular pve (other 2 characters doing the heavy lifting), it seems like his 1v1 node in his training was designed specifically to make him look really bad.

His red loses the stun so is just a weak attack, green moves so few tiles even at 5 covers that it is lucky if it does anything and his black delivers a few weak protects along with a passive that isn't going to do enough in the 7 triggering hits that it would take to kill him.

I can understand the reasoning behind blocking stuns on some of these special nodes, but the one where you are forced to use the new character anyway and part of their kit is a stun, they should be able to use it.

HoundofShadow

It was difficult to test out my teams because it's filled with goons. I got to wait a few months later.

jsmjsmjsm00

Does Puck's green team up have any bonus damage effect at all then? There is no Puck to make the matches to proc the extra dmg. 

PiMacleod

Puck is the first character I've been this down on in a long time.  I'd rather use Emma or Talos.

The red stun NEEDS 2 black protects.  Color specific protect tiles.  So... fire his black first... which mean you can't really get his stun rolling without 6 black AP either.

The green needs 8 AP, and feels like I'm just throwing away the AP.  You're relying completely on RNG to make matches for you to get that damage... there's many better ways to spend that much AP.

That black is okay... but as a passive it's nice.  It's based on current HP, like Gertrude.  So, there's that.

At least Talos has a decent, no strings attached stun.  And Emma has extra match damage if you use her black.  I can pull together repeater peeps to make Emma shine a bit more.

I dunno... maybe I'm missing something.  I like to find uses for characters... but there are those that just don't seem to have a lot of play.  Puck is highly lackluster for me, and I hope to be proven wrong.

MoosePrime

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

Does Puck's green team up have any bonus damage effect at all then? There is no Puck to make the matches to proc the extra dmg. 

Considering how often you get matches from it, it doesn't matter.

AlexR

PiMacleod said:

Puck is the first character I've been this down on in a long time.  I'd rather use Emma or Talos.

The red stun NEEDS 2 black protects.  Color specific protect tiles.  So... fire his black first... which mean you can't really get his stun rolling without 6 black AP either.

The green needs 8 AP, and feels like I'm just throwing away the AP.  You're relying completely on RNG to make matches for you to get that damage... there's many better ways to spend that much AP.

That black is okay... but as a passive it's nice.  It's based on current HP, like Gertrude.  So, there's that.

At least Talos has a decent, no strings attached stun.  And Emma has extra match damage if you use her black.  I can pull together repeater peeps to make Emma shine a bit more.

I dunno... maybe I'm missing something.  I like to find uses for characters... but there are those that just don't seem to have a lot of play.  Puck is highly lackluster for me, and I hope to be proven wrong.

Same for me. Current Puck imo falls right in besides Talos, Emma, 4* Elektra, nerfedBishop and Thing. His actives are just so bad. And while his passive is useful on defense, it means on attack he'll basically have to almost die every time to accomplish anything. His green not working really hits him hard. If it did, he'd have both decent damage and board shake, that would have made him a lot better. 

Yeah, the drawback on his stun is stupid and unneeded on top of that - it's a 1-turn stun, for crying out loud, it has limited utility anyway!

The most use I've found for him so far was to pair him with 4* Black Panther. One thing I found with Panther is that for his passive (match friendly protect tiles for damage), there's actually not that many great partners because the overwhelming majority of 4* who make protect tiles - outside of Polaris - use yellow to do it, which BP wants to use himself. So he has massive synergy problems if you actually want to try to build something around his passive and not resort to Polaris or shackle him to Shuri. Puck makes protect tiles in an off-color for fairly cheap (more ammunition!), which is very rare. Adding Polaris as a third works, but is boring and once they get going don't need Puck's participation anymore. BRB instead of Polaris is beyond slow. Magik maybe? That way, spaming Puck's black makes Magik add more protect tiles which Panther uses for damage? And he'll still tank black and green so you can put him in front to eat damage for his passive to proc. Still kinda slow for my taste though.

Puck/4* Black Panther/Magik is the best I can come up with right now to make him do something useful in a team. Will revisit him when I champ him, but that's going to take a good while.

HoundofShadow

4* Beast creates black protect tiles passively if enemy matches your special tiles.

Timemachinego

Have we confirmed that green isn't just broken out of the gate? there's no reason for it to be as horrible as it is and I swear even when I get matches on Puck's colors with him being the "biggest" on those I still don't always get the damage and simply can't explain that.

jsmjsmjsm00

Timemachinego said:

Have we confirmed that green isn't just broken out of the gate? there's no reason for it to be as horrible as it is and I swear even when I get matches on Puck's colors with him being the "biggest" on those I still don't always get the damage and simply can't explain that.

I am not sure if it is working as intended. I will note that based on how the ability looks, it is forcing Puck to tank his colors (possibly by temporarily adding the extra damage to his match damage). By this, I mean that if you watch the board while his green is spinning tiles, Puck gets his icon on the tiles until it completes. I've only seen this when paired with similarly leveled characters, so it is possible this temporary match boost won't even let him claim ownership if you have strong 5*s next to him. 

Truly, I don't know exactly how this ability is coded, but thought I should point out my observation. 

HoundofShadow

What you mentioned somehow fits in with what I experienced in shield training.

A match-3 deals additional ~10k damage in 5* node. However, a match-5 deals ~35k damage instead.

I can't remember the damage in shield training now, but I found it strange. I noticed the changing of tiles logo as well.

Vhailorx

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

Timemachinego said:

Have we confirmed that green isn't just broken out of the gate? there's no reason for it to be as horrible as it is and I swear even when I get matches on Puck's colors with him being the "biggest" on those I still don't always get the damage and simply can't explain that.

I am not sure if it is working as intended. I will note that based on how the ability looks, it is forcing Puck to tank his colors (possibly by temporarily adding the extra damage to his match damage). By this, I mean that if you watch the board while his green is spinning tiles, Puck gets his icon on the tiles until it completes. I've only seen this when paired with similarly leveled characters, so it is possible this temporary match boost won't even let him claim ownership if you have strong 5*s next to him. 

Truly, I don't know exactly how this ability is coded, but thought I should point out my observation. 

This is interesting.  Do apoc and okoye boost puck's green?  If not that would seem to be strong evidence that the power works on the back-end by just adding temporary match damage like SC.  Too bad puck's green isn't good enough to justify a lot of testing.

AlexR

jsmjsmjsm00 said:

Timemachinego said:

Have we confirmed that green isn't just broken out of the gate? there's no reason for it to be as horrible as it is and I swear even when I get matches on Puck's colors with him being the "biggest" on those I still don't always get the damage and simply can't explain that.

I am not sure if it is working as intended. I will note that based on how the ability looks, it is forcing Puck to tank his colors (possibly by temporarily adding the extra damage to his match damage). By this, I mean that if you watch the board while his green is spinning tiles, Puck gets his icon on the tiles until it completes. I've only seen this when paired with similarly leveled characters, so it is possible this temporary match boost won't even let him claim ownership if you have strong 5*s next to him. 

Truly, I don't know exactly how this ability is coded, but thought I should point out my observation. 

I've seen this for the loaner Puck when paired with godboosted 5* in his pvp. (Was briefly worried about the boardshake with said godboosted 5* on the enemy team, then saw that somehow loaner Puck's icons was on all the tiles and promptly wasn't worried anymore.) So, I do think he gets to claim ownership even with strong 5* next to him.

HoundofShadow

Finally got this dude champed and I got to say this character stumped me.

I was focusing on triggering his passive destruction and his passive row destruction is a killer-edged sword instead of a double-edged sword. Many a times, his passive row destruction made matches for enemies as well. He got killed quickly due to match damage from champed 5*.

So, I focused on his green power instead and spammed his green power 7 times in a row. It didn't help much because he made matches only 2 out of 7 times.

There's nothing special about his red, besides being a cheap conditional 1-turn stun.

I think he would probably work well in Johnny Storm Puzzle Ops. Theoretically, I was thinking maybe Sersi/Storm could help him.