**** Moondragon (Heather Douglas) ****

Tiger_Wong

This is a cool looking kit. Lots of combo potential.

Punisher5784

@entrailbucket said:

@DAZ0273 said:
So 1 X Polaris vs like 10 X Polaris counters. It really is a kind of bizarre situation now. And this one helps the revive meta? Smashing.

It's one of two things, one is kind of sad and one is cool in a weird way.

Either they keep trying (and utterly failing) to reduce Polaris usage by introducing increasingly good counters,

OR...they created Polaris, saw the 4* meta become focused on her, and thought "hey what if we just turn the 4* tier into the special tiles tier?"

I think the current counters already work fine. I still haven't jumped to 5* land yet and I typically use Polaris. In PvP, I often see the counter teams with Sabertooth, Blob or Mantis (sometimes Mobius, Thanos4, Gorr). I will either skip those teams or use a different team against them

I just don't see the point in more of these special tile counters when we already have good ones. They need to create more characters we can pair with 5s. The 4s I often see paired with 5*s in PvP are America Chavez, Deathlok, Karnak, Valkyrie, Silk, and Melinda May.

dxanders

Has to be Moondragon right? I wonder if she'll be tagged GotG.

will7612

I think most of the NEW 3* and 4* are not good enough to make a difference (for the 5* players); too many releases, but not good ones at all, IMO just Dr Thor and Kang have shaked the scenario on the 5* and Chasm on the 4* of late

will7612

I posted a poll about the use of the NEW 2023 4*, most people agree they are "just in case/boosted" characters

AlexR

@KGB said:
Well if this character doesn't neuter Polaris, nothing will. [...]

It's not going to neuter Polaris.

The kit looks like a decent, functional counter against Polaris. Thing is, we already have decent, functional counters vs Polaris (Sabretooth, Morbius). They do their job. Unlike revival meta in 5* , you can climb on Polaris meta teams quite well and easily in 4* land.

The reason Polaris still dominates and is still used almost exclusively is because she is the fastest option by a landslide. Like, the speed and power gap between her and the rest of the 4* is not even remotely close.

She will not be dethroned until either
1) an even faster 4* character is released (unlikely, considering how fast Polaris already is)
2) she is nerfed to be slower so the gap isn't quite as wide
3) everyone else in PvP switches to Polaris counter teams so Polaris offense has trouble climbing and is therefore not the clearly-always-best option. (Extremely unlikely, unless the counter character happens to turn out to be a meta character themselves, too. e.g. Chasm countering BRB and because Chasm is so prevalent now, pushing BRB down.)

A counter helps you win against the team it counters. So against a team that is difficult to beat, a hard counter is awesome and does what it's meant to do.

A counter does nothing to make a fast team less viable, unless the counter itself is competitively very strong. Because as long as the fast team finds non-counter targets to climb on, it will prevail on its speed advantage.

Polaris has counters. She just has zero competition in terms of speed, so she dominates.

entrailbucket

@AlexR pretty much exactly. Until they release a character that makes running Polaris a liability -- a character that she cannot beat when she's on offense and they're on defense (like they did with Scarlet Witch and Hulk) -- she'll continue to dominate.

The problem with Polaris is that I have no idea how you design that character without utterly breaking the game. They'd need to be passively stun-immune to start, but that's not enough on its own. You'd have to stack that with passive abilities that punish special tiles, and possibly also drain AP.

Both sets of devs have figured this out exactly one time, with Scarlet Witch, and she actually sort of breaks the game. (The idea seemed to be "let's make a guy who counters passive AoEs, but instead they built a guy who just counters ALL DAMAGE.) I'm not sure if it's because they're not really trying, or they don't know how to do it consistently.

KGB

@AlexR said:

@KGB said:
Well if this character doesn't neuter Polaris, nothing will. [...]

It's not going to neuter Polaris.

The kit looks like a decent, functional counter against Polaris. Thing is, we already have decent, functional counters vs Polaris (Sabretooth, Morbius). They do their job. Unlike revival meta in 5* , you can climb on Polaris meta teams quite well and easily in 4* land.

The reason Polaris still dominates and is still used almost exclusively is because she is the fastest option by a landslide. Like, the speed and power gap between her and the rest of the 4* is not even remotely close.

She will not be dethroned until either
1) an even faster 4* character is released (unlikely, considering how fast Polaris already is)
2) she is nerfed to be slower so the gap isn't quite as wide
3) everyone else in PvP switches to Polaris counter teams so Polaris offense has trouble climbing and is therefore not the clearly-always-best option. (Extremely unlikely, unless the counter character happens to turn out to be a meta character themselves, too. e.g. Chasm countering BRB and because Chasm is so prevalent now, pushing BRB down.)

A counter helps you win against the team it counters. So against a team that is difficult to beat, a hard counter is awesome and does what it's meant to do.

A counter does nothing to make a fast team less viable, unless the counter itself is competitively very strong. Because as long as the fast team finds non-counter targets to climb on, it will prevail on its speed advantage.

Polaris has counters. She just has zero competition in terms of speed, so she dominates.

The thing about Sabretooth and Morbius is that they are old now. By old, I mean they have disappeared from 'latest 4's' which runs for about 3 months time letting new players cover a 4 star. So they must continually release counters for SAP users (not just Polaris) in general for new players because it takes forever (many months, if not a year) to cover them via shards.

Personally I don't see that much of Polaris in PvP. Yes, she's there but maybe on 1/4 of the teams now. That's because 5 star boosted characters rule 4 star PvP now and if you try and run a Polaris team (which I do often) you have to skip a LOT of teams that will either beat her or force a health pack. Even with BrB boosted you'd think she'd be everywhere in the Valk PvP but she's not, at least for me anyway. That's because there are some other good boosted characters this week (America) that have allowed a bunch of other viable teams to climb.

Where Polaris continues to rule and will rule for a VERY long time is in PvE where her power runs virtually unopposed when paired with Grocket or BrB.

KGB

entrailbucket

With Beta Ray Bill boosted today, once I climbed high enough to see small rosters for 5 point matches (I think these players have 500 or 600 points), 90% of those teams were BRB/Polaris. The rest was Kang/Deathlok.

Polaris is still very much alive in PvP.

AlexR

@KGB said:
The thing about Sabretooth and Morbius is that they are old now. By old, I mean they have disappeared from 'latest 4's' which runs for about 3 months time letting new players cover a 4 star. So they must continually release counters for SAP users (not just Polaris) in general for new players because it takes forever (many months, if not a year) to cover them via shards.

Personally I don't see that much of Polaris in PvP. Yes, she's there but maybe on 1/4 of the teams now. That's because 5 star boosted characters rule 4 star PvP now and if you try and run a Polaris team (which I do often) you have to skip a LOT of teams that will either beat her or force a health pack. Even with BrB boosted you'd think she'd be everywhere in the Valk PvP but she's not, at least for me anyway. That's because there are some other good boosted characters this week (America) that have allowed a bunch of other viable teams to climb.

Where Polaris continues to rule and will rule for a VERY long time is in PvE where her power runs virtually unopposed when paired with Grocket or BrB.

KGB

They really don't need to continually release latest 4* counters, no. You can build the existing counters up perfectly fine via 4* favourite. In the exact same way that Polaris herself is being built up as well. Don't forget, Polaris herself is an "old" character, too. And that's apparently not a problem. Many people do 3-4* transition with her and GRocket, not one of the latest 4* .

And yes, you are absolutely correct about the boosted 5stars. I disagree that Polaris has disappeared, but I fully agree that she has to share 4* meta spot with boosted 5s.

(And also, boosted America is hard to pass up; she also has insane passive damage output. So fewer Polaris users than usual in an America boost week isn't that outlandish to me. )

ThisisClemFandango

@entrailbucket said:
With Beta Ray Bill boosted today, once I climbed high enough to see small rosters for 5 point matches (I think these players have 500 or 600 points), 90% of those teams were BRB/Polaris. The rest was Kang/Deathlok.

Polaris is still very much alive in PvP.

This is true, try BRB and mantis wall to wall wins

KGB

@AlexR said:
They really don't need to continually release latest 4* counters, no. You can build the existing counters up perfectly fine via 4* favourite. In the exact same way that Polaris herself is being built up as well. Don't forget, Polaris herself is an "old" character, too. And that's apparently not a problem. Many people do 3-4* transition with her and GRocket, not one of the latest 4* .

I disagree about this entirely. Building up Polaris via favorites makes sense because she is SO valuable in PvE. Those same players will also be building Grocket and/or Juggs to complete the PvE trio while gradually building up either Kitty or BrB for the future 5 star jump.

Build building up 1 character as a counter for PvP like Morbius (Sabretooth is useless vs BrB) makes no sense. His only value is PvP vs a specific team. By the time they build up the trio above for PvE it will take a year's time (one cover via favorites takes 26 LTs so covering just 1 of that trio takes ~200 LTs assuming some bonus shards/feeders and covering all 3 takes ~600 LTs) which is a TON of resources for a 3 star player transitioning to 4 / 5 star land. There is no viable path to move favorite shards on a counter until after getting that trio finished.

That's why regularly releasing new counters is needed. A newly released 4 star counter can be covered by new players in 3 months time just from regular PvE/PvP playing.

In this case the counter is especially good because it constantly limits SAP tiles to 4 so a cascade that creates a ton of SAPs gets removed immediately while healing the team AND doing damage to the enemy based on number of SAPs removed. Plus this character is immune to all damage so it can't be targeted first and must be stunned so that will also allow this character to form some meta teams of its own with Chasm, IHulk and the rest of the revive meta or just anyone with exceptional match / power damage reduction (Juggs in the 4 star tier etc).

KGB

entrailbucket

This stuff should be required reading for the devs -- I wonder if they're aware of just how important Polaris is.

If there's meant to be a path like this through the transition or whatever, if this is all by design, one wonders why they'd choose Polaris as the character to accomplish that, and why they've never attempted to create another key character who can work the same way.

Bad

To make a meta character like Polaris is easy. Make a damaging passive at start of the turn, a cheap and long stun, and damaging passives many times per turn.
Hey! This new character accomplish 2 of them. And without any stun they do some more interesting, being a 4*: an ally will take the damage they would take.
So as I said this character can be a great partner for a Polaris, but also a great partner for any 5* SAP specialist. There are quite a few.
So a successful character, time will confirm it.

pepitedechocolat

@KGB said:
Build building up 1 character as a counter for PvP like Morbius (Sabretooth is useless vs BrB) makes no sense. His only value is PvP vs a specific team. By the time they build up the trio above for PvE it will take a year's time (one cover via favorites takes 26 LTs so covering just 1 of that trio takes ~200 LTs assuming some bonus shards/feeders and covering all 3 takes ~600 LTs) which is a TON of resources for a 3 star player transitioning to 4 / 5 star land. There is no viable path to move favorite shards on a counter until after getting that trio finished.

That's why regularly releasing new counters is needed. A newly released 4 star counter can be covered by new players in 3 months time just from regular PvE/PvP playing.

@KGB U get 4* shards from heroic, mighty, and limited token, and also from milestones for new players, and in the case of polaris/jugg u have just one feeder fot both. Besides you can get covers from spicy tacos vault with minimal hoarding and sweet tacos vault with a bit more. The above calculation is quite inaccurate.

Back to the real topic (because polaris crusade is out of topic), this goon seems super strong with and against SAP. I really dislike getting 6 powers in 4* land (3 active + 3 passives). I wished it gets super low health so it does not become an issue, and tbf I think this kit in 5* land is instantly chasm level of opness.

Also how the combination of damage redirect to ally + damage reduction + reflection works will most probably be bugged. Which is cool because we will probably get some freebies after its pvp.

DAZ0273

Morbius has value beyond just being a Polaris counter. There are quite a few PvE where special tiles are a pain, so I could easily see him getting use in those as part of a team as well as his use against special tile abusers in PvP.

nwahs086

Moondragon confirmed on twitter.

Jacklag

@KGB said:
and the rest of the revive meta or just anyone with exceptional match / power damage reduction (Juggs in the 4 star tier etc).

KGB

We'll have to see how her power interacts with damage reduction mechanics. If the damage not dealt to her will count as match damage or ability damage, if it will count as enemy damage or ally damage, etc.

entrailbucket

Since there's been no news on changes to resurrection, do we expect her launch PvP to be completely unplayable?

This character has to be killed last...if she would take any damage, she redirects it to another ally. The problem is that Chasm and Hulk also must be killed last.

So running a team of Moondragon + Chasm or Hulk would mean that it's impossible for that team to ever lose (short of Whales or Kang, I guess?)

Is that really the plan?

DAZ0273

I guess you have to use Kang, get 27 blue and send everybody away. Hardly a recipe for variety.