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

fight4thedream

@IceIX said:
Changes:

• Updated text to be a little shorter overall.
• Limbo On Earth's Demon Repeater damage reduced by about 50%.
• Limbo On Earth now always creates 2 additional Demon Repeater tiles if possible instead of only doing this at level 5.
• Limbo on Earth's multiplier reduced from 25% to 15%. These two changes bring her Demon ability much more into line. It started to get out of hand pretty quickly in practice due to its self replicating ability. Still ends up pretty powerful, but not dealing tens of thousands of damage a turn per Repeater.
• Phoenix Claw's base damage decreased by ~50%. Since this is permanent damage and is also being affected by other Phoenix Five's affinity Passives, this pretty quickly got to the point where Magik could singlehandedly demolish enemy health bars with no recourse for extremely cheap.

I normally like to wait until a character is released in the wild before I comment but this news is honestly quite disheartening. She is already hard countered by Chasm and Mighty Thor:

Chasm's beginning of the match stun prevents her from spawning demon tiles at beginning of the match. His AP denial will make it difficult for her to actually collect the necessary AP to cast Limbo on Earth. By the time she has enough to do so, the board will already be filled with Abyss tiles or Web tiles.

Mighty Thor's Doctor Thor will remove her repeater tiles.

Permanent damage is mainly relevant to healing type characters, notably Chasm and iHulk, so why that is a tick against her is baffling.

The current top meta combos in PvP are:

Chasm/iHulk
Mighty Thor/Riri Williams
Mighty Thor/Shang-Chi
Colossus/Wanda

Even before this nerf, it looked very doubtful that she was going to make a big dent in PvP because she is already hard countered by the meta. I suppose in pick 3 she could do some crazy things but there are already crazy damage teams like low health Colossus/Jubilee/Emma and Shang-Chi/Mighty Thor/Melinda May, not to mention the permanent stun option presented by Mighty Thor/Riri/5* Thor and the new hotness of Kang/5* Hawkeye/4* Deadpool.

To put it simply, there are already established teams that could handle a Magik team relatively easily. To be honest, I wasn't all that enthused that her skill set seems to be another attempt to deal with Chasm/iHulk as I much rather think in terms of lore her power set should be geared toward countering Mighty Thor considering she is a magic user, but if that was the intent then she should at least be a respectable counter.

I won't deny she has the potential to be problematic for non-meta teams since she has a pretty decent damage output when not directly countered but no more so than Chasm/iHulk or Mighty Thor/Riri already are. I think there are enough tools in most 5* players tool kit that she wouldn't have been unmanageable or dominated PvP.

Or maybe I am just missing something. But this nerf definitely leaves me unenthused.

DAZ0273

Maybe a S'ym Support might be coming after all then to repair some of the damage?

Borstock

Holy moly, we're all sitting here debating on whether she's anything to write home about and then they NERF the blonde out of her. Okay. Very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.

I don't even know what to say about her, anymore. Maybe there's some synergy we're all missing where she gets ridiculous, which is why the nerf happened. I don't know. But I will say this... Her store art is mighty pretty. I feel like the art department did a nice job.

dianetics

Her permanent damage didn’t seem problematic to me. But I guess none of us took into account the Phoenix force team bonuses from Emma?
…

…

But who runs Emma? I have yet to even pull her out when she was boosted.

Vhailorx

I kind if thought the consensus was focusing too much on her black and ignoring the potential if all her cheap permanent damage on red and, especially, purple.

But I definitely did not expect a 50% nerf pre release. Now I am definitely more curious to see her in action to see whatever it was they found in her playtesting.

ThisisClemFandango

@dianetics said:
Her permanent damage didn’t seem problematic to me. But I guess none of us took into account the Phoenix force team bonuses from Emma?
…

…

But who runs Emma? I have yet to even pull her out when she was boosted.

If you are interested Emma and Deathlok and 3 star arcade is absolute madness.

I'm not a fan of this nerfing either, I never was a major complainer about chasm but this does seem a bit much.

entrailbucket

Well, that's pretty weird. So they care about power level on this character but not on literally any other character? Why bother now?

killahKlown

Please un-nerf Magik. She didn't deserve it

Bowgentle

@Borstock said:
Holy moly, we're all sitting here debating on whether she's anything to write home about and then they NERF the blonde out of her. Okay. Very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.

I don't even know what to say about her, anymore. Maybe there's some synergy we're all missing where she gets ridiculous, which is why the nerf happened. I don't know. But I will say this... Her store art is mighty pretty. I feel like the art department did a nice job.

Have a look at those thighs.
NOBODY has thighs like that...

dianetics

@ThisisClemFandango said:
If you are interested Emma and Deathlok and 3 star arcade is absolute madness.

I'm not a fan of this nerfing either, I never was a major complainer about chasm but this does seem a bit much.

Her black was nasty and I mentioned it on the first page. If you paired her with a booster she would crush even challenge nodes fairly quickly.

In the end I don’t consider this a nerf, but a balance adjustment pre-release.

If the change came after she was released it would have been a nerf.

I just wonder if her permanent damage bonus was being counted as ability damage. If it was then it could have also been broken.

StanleyBurrell

@illusionist_KA said:

@IceIX said:
Changes:

• Updated text to be a little shorter overall.
• Limbo On Earth's Demon Repeater damage reduced by about 50%.
• Limbo On Earth now always creates 2 additional Demon Repeater tiles if possible instead of only doing this at level 5.
• Limbo on Earth's multiplier reduced from 25% to 15%. These two changes bring her Demon ability much more into line. It started to get out of hand pretty quickly in practice due to its self replicating ability. Still ends up pretty powerful, but not dealing tens of thousands of damage a turn per Repeater.
• Phoenix Claw's base damage decreased by ~50%. Since this is permanent damage and is also being affected by other Phoenix Five's affinity Passives, this pretty quickly got to the point where Magik could singlehandedly demolish enemy health bars with no recourse for extremely cheap.

wait, but it's ok for chasm to heal uncontrollably, take away ap, make every 5* character useless and never die to demolish an entire team. but we can't have something new to destroy Chasm with? please explain this logic? it just seems like the devs don't want PVP players to win, and continues my theory - that the developers really do hate pvp.

Gotta agree…Chasm is fine! What a joke man, let’s run some more broken events for her release?

DAZ0273

@Bowgentle said:

@Borstock said:
Holy moly, we're all sitting here debating on whether she's anything to write home about and then they NERF the blonde out of her. Okay. Very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.

I don't even know what to say about her, anymore. Maybe there's some synergy we're all missing where she gets ridiculous, which is why the nerf happened. I don't know. But I will say this... Her store art is mighty pretty. I feel like the art department did a nice job.

Have a look at those thighs.
NOBODY has thighs like that...

Could be worse...

Bowgentle

Oh goodness.

dianetics

Is that Tod McFarlane? He’s really good and drawing terrible proportions. I’m confused because I don’t see any pockets and I see feet.

Bowgentle

Dat waistline.

DAZ0273

@dianetics said:
Is that Tod McFarlane? He’s really good and drawing terrible proportions. I’m confused because I don’t see any pockets and I see feet.

It is confusing, I agree. I can see how the green things attached to the legs could be seen as being something resembling "feet" which means it surely can't be by that other Image chap. I bet she rebounds like a champ.

fight4thedream

@dianetics said:

@ThisisClemFandango said:
If you are interested Emma and Deathlok and 3 star arcade is absolute madness.

I'm not a fan of this nerfing either, I never was a major complainer about chasm but this does seem a bit much.

Her black was nasty and I mentioned it on the first page. If you paired her with a booster she would crush even challenge nodes fairly quickly.

In the end I don’t consider this a nerf, but a balance adjustment pre-release.

If the change came after she was released it would have been a nerf.

I just wonder if her permanent damage bonus was being counted as ability damage. If it was then it could have also been broken.

A team consisting of Magik/Colossus/Emma definitely had high damage potential and would be a very difficult fight for a lot of non-meta teams. The problem is that there are already difficult teams like Chasm/iHulk/She-hulk or Mighty Thor/Riri/Colossus so why they decided to pick on this potential team is what's baffling.

Furthermore, they just released Kang who can win any challenge node match within 3 turns with the right supports and team build. Not to mention the 3* version can be used effectively against a lot of 5* teams. Or the buff to Jubilee that has further pumped the match damage of Colossus and Chasm.

I guess what's got my goat is we finally had a decent team of characters who are actually teammates in the comics that would've worked well together but it's been taken down a few notches because she crosses a supposed power line but the match damage meta has been buffed and we now have a character who can easily be fed blue to away full health teams to victory.

So it all seems rather arbitrary.

Bowgentle

I mean the thing attached to her shoulders are supposed to be arms, I guess?

DAZ0273

Can't we just have a go with un-nerfed Magik in her PvP and see if she breaks things? Then you can nerf her after that and feel good about being right!

DAZ0273

@Bowgentle said:
I mean the thing attached to her shoulders are supposed to be arms, I guess?

I assume she was made in a Lab out of spare lady parts and there was a photocopier screw up on the plans.