Character Update (11/25) - Namor (The Sub-Mariner) (UPDATE 11/28)

IceIX

Made some changes to Namor's abilities, more befitting a king of the seas.

Namor's Mercy - 10 Black AP

• 11/28 Update: Increased damage by approximately 100%. Level 270 now deals 2525-10597 damage
• Lowered AP cost to 10, while keeping damage the same.
• Removed the AP destruction in the opponent's strongest color.
• Removed giving the opponent 1 Black AP, instead they will gain 3-4 AP in their strongest color.

Imperius Rex! - 12 Green AP

• Now deals damage to the enemy team instead of a single target.

Atlantis Attacks - 9 Purple AP

• Now creates Fortified basic Blue tiles instead of standard Blue tiles. This makes it much more likely there will be 10+ Blue tiles afterward to proc the team damage.

Yepyep

Better, thanks. Since his debut, he has been my most disliked 4 because he should have been so.much.more.

EDIT: Oooh, my 888th post. Very auspicious! That it's about Namor, of all the rulers-of-subjects in the sea, is inducing waves of (pretty minor, actually) anxiety.

DeNappa

While better, it doesn't look like this rebalance lifts him all that much. But since I don't play 4*s that much any more I'm not sure.

Sekilicious

The fortified blues might be good with Shuri, Odin, or Heimdall maybe

dianetics

So he’s still just terrible. If you are going to put a lot of AP into a power it should have an equal payoff. Even with these changes he is far below moon knight who shares the same colors.

Vhailorx

Namor was never actually that bad, he just released to late to matter. His aie attack is fairly strong for the 4* tier (at tike of release) and relatively inexpensive. So he was solidly mid tier already even with his other two powers being meh. It's just that the play space for mid tier 4s was already basically gone by the time he came out. End game players were in oure 5 land, and there were already stronger 4*s to chase like iceman, c4rol, Medusa, etc, for transitioners to chase. and then polaris and Karnak came out and rendered the whole rest of the tier mostly pointless for transitioners.

Good to improve his two weaker powers and make the Purple more reliable, even if it doesn't change the status quo antenna very much. [EDIT: as pointed out below, his black is actually somewhat worse, and the obvious dump skill. one should only ever use this power in emergencies.)

AlexR

Namor's black got worse here, interestingly. We went from:
costs 11 AP, mediocre damage, destroy 3 AP in opponent's strongest color, give them 1 black AP
to
costs 1 AP less, still same mediocre damage, give opponent 3-4 AP in strongest color

So while it got cheaper by 1, the secondary effect went from beneficial with small downside to just straight giving the opponent 4 AP. And all that for an ability that still costs 10 AP and does mediocre damage.
Welp, that's an easy 3/5/5 for me then. Less mercy, Namor.

Besides that, I like the changes to green and purple! Those look great. His damage is very board dependent, but purple should take care of that.

Unfortunately, he remains quite slow.

Edit: Took him on a test drive. The green, while expensive, is solid now. You can reasonably expect 9-10 tiles of a color to be present on the board normally. More if you fired purple, but not strictly necessary unless the board is blue-starved. So, you'll commonly get ~7k AoE from this and board shake. That warrants it being expensive. Ideally, bring a battery.
Wished the purple was a tad cheaper for battery purposes, but instead you get another 5k AoE which is at least nice. So, I'd say "solid but needs battery" which is my definition of 4* midtier.

@dianetics said:
So he’s still just terrible. If you are going to put a lot of AP into a power it should have an equal payoff. Even with these changes he is far below moon knight who shares the same colors.

Moonknight is a black/green character, Namor seems to me to be an AoE-focused green/purple character now. So, more comparable to Tean Jean than MK, imo. Only where she makes/removes special tiles as a secondary effect to damage, he makes blue tiles instead and is dependent on number of blue tiles on the field.

HoundofShadow

I'll remember Namor as a purple to potential blue ap converter.

I've some theories on my mind.
We could put Namor with Sersi, Havok, Heimdall or Silver Surfer to create chained ap conversion.

Edit: Namor/Sersi/Heimdall do work. I had 7 Sersi's cd on the board.

MoosePrime

@Sekilicious said:
The fortified blues might be good with Shuri, Odin, or Heimdall maybe

If you're using him with Heimdall, you'll want to bring another blue user, as Heimdall doesn't decrease the cost of his own blue.

froggerjohn

The purple change is great. It was indeed frustrating when randomness caused the intended result to fizzle. (Also now doubles for fortified tile generation).

Ditto on the green, making the purple -> green combo a very nice double AoE. That said, 21 combined AP is an eternity in MPQ, rendering the combo all but moot. I would have liked the green AP cost lowered to 8 or 9 to make this combo feasible, even if that meant dropping the damage levels.

As already pointed out, the black definitely got worse. Perhaps thematically more in line with 'mercy', but now likely an unused power except as a final kill shot.

End result, one good power. But that's still better than a lot of others in the tier.

ThaRoadWarrior

There are very few powers that can inject enemy AP, and a few good ones that scale damage against it like Kraven, Nightcrawler, and (lol) Chasm.

Borstock

That black power is nonsense, now.

Easy 3/5/5.

sambrookjm

Interesting. The power description says that the enemy team gains AP of their strongest color. However, the descriptive text for Namor's 4th level when you are trying to update it from LVL 3 (mine was a 3/5/5 already) says "At Level 4: Deal 4495 damage and destroy 4 AP in the enemy's strongest color." If you do upgrade it to LVL 4, it does say "gains 4 AP"

Are you sure that this was coded correctly, and it's not supposed to be a destroy AP, rather than gain AP?

Edit - Adding AP to the enemy team is a nice way to reduce Chasm's damage.

Borstock

@sambrookjm said:
Interesting. The power description says that the enemy team gains AP of their strongest color. However, the descriptive text for Namor's 4th level when you are trying to update it from LVL 3 (mine was a 3/5/5 already) says "At Level 4: Deal 4495 damage and destroy 4 AP in the enemy's strongest color." If you do upgrade it to LVL 4, it does say "gains 4 AP"

Are you sure that this was coded correctly, and it's not supposed to be a destroy AP, rather than gain AP?

Edit - Adding AP to the enemy team is a nice way to reduce Chasm's damage.

Except Chasm can down Namor with match damage way before he ever fires a power. With a good board, he'll do it before Namor even takes a turn.

ThaRoadWarrior

That power is more of a 4* tier thing. Mordo’s Purple or Nightcrawler’s blue can combo with it. Probably Nightcrawler is the intended buddy, unless Namora is going to operate on enemy strongest.

fight4thedream

My original issue with the character design still stands: His character design feels too slow for Namor. I would have liked to have seen a passive ability added to Atlantis Attacks: "For every X number of blue tiles on board, lower Namor's power costs by 1 AP" to show he is super fast in the water.

ThaRoadWarrior

Yes, something to capture the hot headedness he is known for mechanically. These power costs still feel too high to me, but I don't think he got any worse at least.

AlexR

@ThaRoadWarrior said:

That power is more of a 4* tier thing. Mordo’s Purple or Nightcrawler’s blue can combo with it. Probably Nightcrawler is the intended buddy, unless Namora is going to operate on enemy strongest.

The problem is, Nightcrawler is also a "solid but needs battery" character. He far prefers to be run with Vulture to feed him his 12 blue AP in the first place (+a tiny bit red). Without that, you'd be stuck collecting 12 blue AP and 10 black AP manually for your combo. Which is a lot, considering you could also just let the AI make a single match in their strongest color (+3) for basically the same combo value and just not bother with Namor's black.

Shackling Nightcrawler and Namor together, both of whom want a battery partner instead, gives you a team that is slow as molasses. You're much better off running either of them seperately with Vulture instead.

It's not quite as bad for Mordo because his purple only costs 9 AP, not 12. However, Mordo has the advantage that he goes after the highest AP pool-- so adding +4 to enemy strongest color might not necessarily do anything to help your damage here, if the enemy is missing color X and has accumulated more AP there.

So yeah, not really prime combo real estate imo.

ThaRoadWarrior

I'm not really defending it - 10 black to add a couple thousand points of damage to somebody else's power is not awesome, but it's such a specific thing to do there has to be some intention behind it I would hope. That being said, Nightcrawler's purple is one of the best batteries in the game if you engineer the correct color density before you fire it.

IceIX

Making an update to Namor's Black after feedback, should be going Live with this evening's data patch. Namor's Mercy should be 100% less merciful in the damage department.

Bubba3210

I continue to be amazed at how quickly this new team responds to feedback.