***** Magik (Phoenix Five) *****

trenchdigger

Thanks for explaining.

So going back to your original calculation, if this is correct, the boost is 283% and therefore the damage per repeater should be 2,315 * 383% = 8,866 (considerably more than 6k)?

And 5 tiles would be dealing 44k damage per 2 turns, average 22k per turn as they will be phased differently.

entrailbucket

The problem is that matching red tiles generally means there will be less red tiles on the board. Her repeaters can only show up on red, so unless you have, say, Sersi, or you've turned on SW purple, you're going to quickly run out of red tiles for her to put the repeaters on. In PvE, goons that place their tiles on red will block her, and so will, say, (very common PvE opponent) Daken, who puts his strike tiles on red.

I don't think it's fair to assume that she can easily reach the max number of repeater tiles. I also don't think it's fair to evaluate her on her absolute theoretical maximum damage without factoring in the (very low) likelihood of reaching that threshold.

Magik may have a higher theoretical maximum, but I bet Okoye/Hulk will deal much more damage in practice, because their conditions are far easier to meet.

trenchdigger

But of course each time one is matched it can delay the damage by a turn as the new demon tile has it's timer reset to 2.
And requires you to fire black once to increase max demon tiles to more than 3.
And assumes none are destroyed by match 4/5, mThor, or never even created in the first place because of chasm.
I think the nerf probably went a bit too far.

Bad

It went too far.
Emma boosts her a lot? Well, finally emma should give someone a effective boost in P5 affiliation.
Magik would deal a lot of damage? And what is that compared to a instawin?
Would be her team a threat? Well, less than the chahulk team.
Her amount of repeaters are pretty capped.
With the nerf she is really slow now.

658_2

I screwed around with her a little bit in pvp and she’s definitely an offensive juggernaut with Okoye. I swamped a 521 Chasm running with IH and another that was like 516. I was running the loaner with my 512 Okoye and Thor, and full boosts. Did not hit any 550s because I would have lost the loaner enemy turn 1. It’s fairly similar to running Okoye with Gorr. Slower to start than that team but gets even crazier once the demon tiles start getting matched. I think Magik will be a better partner for Okoye than IH, in pve and pvp, because Magik will be much more reliable. Okoye/Gorr/Magik might be ludicrously fast in pve.

But for me, the best part about Magik is that floating Immortal teams above 1500 in SIM are no longer safe. People are going to be able to put together teams with her that regularly beat Immortals. The last few seasons of SIM, with lots of She Hulks joining the party, were probably the most miserable ones ever.

entrailbucket

Is Okoye boosting the part of Magik's match damage that does permanent damage? Or does she only boost the repeaters/active power damage? Sometimes Okoye boosts match-damage powers like that and sometimes she doesn't.

Tiger_Wong

Okoye boosts the extra permanent damage tacked on and of course she boosts damage of each demon.

Every magik match is a 2-hitter with Okoye pumping the 2nd hit.

entrailbucket

Ah, ok -- that makes her MUCH stronger. I wish they were more consistent with powers like that though.

Glockoma

Funny story: I was hitting grills climbing s1 in pvp. Used my Chasm/iHulk (L500/480 respectively). Wiped to a 550 Okoye/Mid-range Magik/Chavez because I refused to take the focus off the Okoye. They had a nice set of cascades that allowed Magik to fire off purple twice boosted by ~10 teamup AP.

Learned my lesson 🤦‍♂️

IrisRyu

Matching Magik‘s repeater tiles triggers KK’s damage boost. Add in Apocalypse and the incremental damage really adds up. Slowly.

entrailbucket

So, that's kind of weird. I guess it makes sense that they changed Magik because of her interaction with power boosters. But...some of the match-damage type passives don't get boosted at all. Like, Okoye doesn't boost 4* Juggernaut's passive or OBW (I think). She certainly doesn't boost Colossus.

Why not change the power so it can't be boosted instead of nerfing it? As it stands, it sort of requires you to pair Magik with a power boosters to make her good/usable. It's too bad they had to scale her so far back because of other characters.

dianetics

Anybody else try to run her with Okoye and Emma?
Sure would be nice to have a training dummy to test this out.

With a 111 loaner I was getting 12k damage ticks pretty quickly.

She is still going to get destroyed by Thor and neutered by Chasm though.

IrisRyu

It looks like Emma boosts the base strength of Magik’s repeaters and then Okoye’s boost gets added to that. The repeaters are nice, but the boosted permanent match damage is where it’s at for me.

I have no idea how the boosts were getting applied, but Magik was doing something like 50k+ in boosted passive match damage. I never got more than 10 TUs, but I imagine her damage ceiling will be quite high if she’s tanking (and boosted). Kang/Okoye/Magik should do the trick.

Vhailorx

@entrailbucket said:
So, that's kind of weird. I guess it makes sense that they changed Magik because of her interaction with power boosters. But...some of the match-damage type passives don't get boosted at all. Like, Okoye doesn't boost 4* Juggernaut's passive or OBW (I think). She certainly doesn't boost Colossus.

Why not change the power so it can't be boosted instead of nerfing it? As it stands, it sort of requires you to pair Magik with a power boosters to make her good/usable. It's too bad they had to scale her so far back because of other characters.

It must have been coded as a "deal X damage" power, rather than "boost match damage by X" power. The former is generally affected by damage boosters (with 4*s juggs being a hard-coded exception) and the latter generally doesn't (hence colossus and SC don't benefit from okoye).

It is interesting that they have nerfed her explicitly because of her interactions with damage boosters. It reminds of the old days with demi where every new character that had an AOE or multi-hit power did ~150 damage because they were so scared of the okoye interactions.

In the larger scheme of things, I really do want to get a community consensus on magik. if she is bad (or REALLY bad) and the devs nevertheless think (not fib to preserve pre-release hype, but actually believe) that she is a "top contender" then there are serious problems on the way. I'm not saying anything specific about what happened in this instance, just observing that a vast gulf between dev and community perceptions of character strength is not healthy for the game.

HoundofShadow

For Magik, all you need is to apply the mathematical equation to find out whether she's good or bad. "Pre-nerf", she could deal ~180k damage every 2 turns with 10 red aps and 7 Limbo Demon out. And it's a 450 Magik doing that. 550 Magik would be doing ~360k damage every 2 turns. "Post-nerf", she's doing lesser, but more or less in line with Riri or whoever deals 30k-40k damage for 7 aps.

If you want to find out whether a character is a true top contender, one hint to look out for is whether (top) players are asking the dev to nerf top contender who are glass cannon. And I'm talking about Kang. There are already (top) players out there asking the dev to nerf Kang's blue. And the reason is probably he threatens their T5 or T10 placements.

Tiger_Wong

My Ph5 Magik is 4/2/2. Like I said before, I dig her with damage boosters and those props of boosted damage add up quick.

I don’t really fear FosThor as much as normal. It becomes a race to kill her with boosted match permanent-damage before she starts firing her powers and getting RNG cascades. If you start with +2 TUP with Okoye, you can take her out really fast with a little luck. And my Magik’s match perm damage is only at 15%. Im gonna make a run at her store with Collossus and see if I can champ her or get her red more covers. Then I’ll start cracking at chasm and IHulk and see what’s what.

2* BW’s extra hit of damage is boostable in the same vein as Magik iirc.

Bad

Her extra damage should'nt be boostable as it's a % of her match damage. Crystal's passive is boostable but it's only on red and it's a settled amount.
Magik is full of damaging passives so she paires well with a damage booster. Still on pvp damage boosters aren't tops anymore and pretty easy to deal with.

Vhailorx

@Bad said:
Her extra damage should'nt be boostable as it's a % of her match damage. Crystal's passive is boostable but it's only on red and it's a settled amount.
Magik is full of damaging passives so she paires well with a damage booster. Still on pvp damage boosters aren't tops anymore and pretty easy to deal with.

it's a percentage of her match damage, but if it's being boosting then it would seem to be coded as "deal X damage" where X is a percentage of her match damage. It's not "deal 115% match damage." It works the same way as 2* OBW or 5* DD's purple passive. it's dealing a separate tick of damage with each match, rather than adding on to the match damage tick. It makes sense from a data hygiene perspective since the extra tick of damage here is qualitatively different from her match damage. I can see why they would want to create a separate instance of damage to avoid a potential bug where all of her match damage became permanent.

fight4thedream

Wait what? Am I reading that right? Her match damage can be boosted using booster type characters like Apocalypse, Emma and Okoye??

That certainly changes things. You'll definitely need to pair her with a booster, but I think it could potentially put her on par with Mighty Thor. As @Tiger_Wong noted, you are going to want to target Mighty Thor first, but with boosted match damage and the double edged sword that is charged tiles that should be doable. Still not certain how she will hold up against iHulk/Chasm teams in pick-2 but she should be able to take them down in pick-3. And it definitely makes it much clearer why the dev team felt the need tone her power set down.

@Vhailorx said:

@entrailbucket said:
So, that's kind of weird. I guess it makes sense that they changed Magik because of her interaction with power boosters. But...some of the match-damage type passives don't get boosted at all. Like, Okoye doesn't boost 4* Juggernaut's passive or OBW (I think). She certainly doesn't boost Colossus.

Why not change the power so it can't be boosted instead of nerfing it? As it stands, it sort of requires you to pair Magik with a power boosters to make her good/usable. It's too bad they had to scale her so far back because of other characters.

It must have been coded as a "deal X damage" power, rather than "boost match damage by X" power. The former is generally affected by damage boosters (with 4*s juggs being a hard-coded exception) and the latter generally doesn't (hence colossus and SC don't benefit from okoye).

It is interesting that they have nerfed her explicitly because of her interactions with damage boosters. It reminds of the old days with demi where every new character that had an AOE or multi-hit power did ~150 damage because they were so scared of the okoye interactions.

In the larger scheme of things, I really do want to get a community consensus on magik. if she is bad (or REALLY bad) and the devs nevertheless think (not fib to preserve pre-release hype, but actually believe) that she is a "top contender" then there are serious problems on the way. I'm not saying anything specific about what happened in this instance, just observing that a vast gulf between dev and community perceptions of character strength is not healthy for the game.

In regards to the difference in character strength perception, there are a few things to consider in this particular case:

1. I think a lot of forum members have stricter criteria in terms of tiering: basically, for them there are only two tiers: "meta" or not. On the other hand, the dev team probably takes a more holistic approach to their analysis of a character. I don't think anyone would deny that Magik is better than the majority of 5* characters. But the question on a lot of competitive players minds is "Is she better than the current meta"? or "What does she bring to the meta?" which you can't really blame them for since their main interests are being able to compete successfully.

2. Her boosts apparently can stack with other boosts, including her match boost. This is something the forum community wasn't aware of when making their initial assessment but the dev team took into consideration when doing their analysis. Traditionally, boost abilities don't normally stack together: the higher boosted power is defaulted to, ignoring the other boost. But it seems Magik's boost operates differently.

3. So without knowing the potential of her match damage being boosted, on paper it seemed pretty clear she is hard countered by Chasm and Mighty Thor which led to the initial assessment that she would be useless in PvP since for many playing in the highest competitive tier the majority of their matches include those two characters.

However, now that we know that her match damage can be boosted, she has much better footing facing those teams. I can see now why the dev team feels she is top tier.

In her original state, she would have been crazy strong. Now, with the right partner, she can compete against those teams. How successfully she is taking those kinds of teams down is still up in the air and will require some testing but the potential is there.

I guess now the question I am most interested in trying to figure out is who her best partner for pick-2 will be: Apocalypse, Okoye, or Emma?

Bad

Yeah but also her boosts shouldn't stack up. Why some characters don't and this one does it? It's a code problem or it was intended? Will be it this the new rule?
The repeaters should take just the best% like it has been working until now.