Chasm - Coming Soon???

LavaManLee

@entrailbucket said:
The reason I think I'll see a wall of Thors is that basically everyone who 550d Chasm also 550d Thor, and many of those players have 3 550s and absolutely nothing else.

Agreed. I believe one will see either MT/Riri, MT/KK or MT/Shang.

KGB

@LavaManLee said:

@entrailbucket said:
The reason I think I'll see a wall of Thors is that basically everyone who 550d Chasm also 550d Thor, and many of those players have 3 550s and absolutely nothing else.

Agreed. I believe one will see either MT/Riri, MT/KK or MT/Shang.

Makes total sense in the same way that half-Thor came to prominence after Gambits nerf. The passive tile destruction, board shake and possible AP gain every turn is too good to pass up. The fact that passive actively targets specials of all kinds is just icing on the cake because it renders so many other character DOA similar to how Kitty's passive did back in the day.

KGB

entrailbucket

And that's the problem. Assuming the metagame becomes a wall of Thor/X (and we don't know this yet), any character who needs to put stuff on the board to work becomes completely worthless.

Any new 5* released during her (theoretical) reign who needs to put stuff on the board is DOA, no matter how good they are.

Yellowjacket is a good past example -- he was released when the metagame was Okoye/Hulk, and he was completely DOA. He was (and is) actually pretty good, but the "go invisible forever" gimmick is worthless when you're eating 40 or 50k AoEs every single turn.

revskip

@entrailbucket said:
Post-Chasm, I strongly suspect it will be a wall of Thor teams (unless or until they deal with her).

Yep. She is just as OP as Chasm imo. In fact if she gets a cascade or two she deals with Chasm teams well too. Once she gets rolling it is a world of hurt.

dianetics

@pepitedechocolat said:
I think from a design perspective mthor needs a nerf, but riri mthor is
Not even close to what chasm is doing. The team is strong but slow (need to fire a heap of powers) and with no sustain. Also mthor mirror accelerate the match while immortal mirror is a grind.

I was saying if the Chasm nerf works out and he disappears RiRi SheThor is going to show up a lot more and give people headaches. The team can often leave you waiting several turns while they do all their stuff. I know one time I was sitting there watching them and my phone locked.
I know it's not the same as Chasm, but they will give players a different kind of headache.

entrailbucket

That's the problem. When I was running my (admittedly pretty high level) boosted Thor in mirrors against other high level Thor teams, matches were essentially either won or lost on the first or second move. Either I got a cascade and then went infinite with Thor (not Riri, just Thor, and...I forgot who else) until they were dead, or the AI got a cascade and went infinite until I was dead.

It just feels very random. Dying to cascades in MPQ is the worst, but it's pretty rare, and you can minimize it if you're good at match-3. With Thor, though, there's really nothing the player can do, no matching strategy you can use, that prevents AI Thor from hitting a cascade once and then just chaining moves till you're dead.

Bowgentle

But without Jane we'll go back to wall to wall ColWanda.
I don't think we want that, either.

dianetics

@entrailbucket said:
It just feels very random. Dying to cascades in MPQ is the worst, but it's pretty rare, and you can minimize it if you're good at match-3. With Thor, though, there's really nothing the player can do, no matching strategy you can use, that prevents AI Thor from hitting a cascade once and then just chaining moves till you're dead.

When you add RiRi you can get essentially stun locked. I even mentioned this in RiRi's character thread. SheThor will blow the board up RiRi stuns your team, then Thor casts all of her abilities in one turn, and RiRi locks you down again.
Admittedly, I think it's funny to watch, but I'm sure the charm will weigh thin.

DAZ0273

The AI can work RiRi's stunlock, not as well as a player but it does it enough to cause issues so an MT/RiRi lording will not be much better than Chasm.

Bad

Do you want an awesome way to stop Mthor?
Just try to match or destroy charged tiles without mirroring her.
Ta-daaa! She becomes a wasted slot.

BriMan2222

Bring Colossus against Mthor. Target her and use her charged tiles against her with Colossus mega match damage. Once she's gone, riri isn't much of a threat without Mthor.

entrailbucket

She's much less of a problem than Chasm is, and she's not currently in every single fight. It's probably not worth worrying about until he's gone, and by then we might have some other guy who's a bigger problem.

GrimSkald

@entrailbucket said:
She's much less of a problem than Chasm is, and she's not currently in every single fight. It's probably not worth worrying about until he's gone, and by then we might have some other guy who's a bigger problem.

This. There were metas before Chasm/iHulk, but in general the dominant meta was "the best combo of characters you can make out of the boosted 5 stars." When the boosted list was particular bad, we did see some of our usual suspects (MThor, Apoc, Scarlet Witch, Colossus,) and that is not inherently a problem. It doesn't really matter if your unboosted MThor/Riri gets utterly destroyed by boosted YJ/Ronan, for example -- even though Ronan depends on putting tiles down, even just match damage can take out MThor quickly. The fact that you can win most of the time on offense doesn't matter if you evaporate in a few turns through raw boosted force on defense.

We'll see. I lean toward the "MThor is powerful, but fine," since most characters who rely on putting things on the board will destroy her pretty quickly once they're there if they're boosted and she's not. That being said, I could see it go the other way too, but since Chasm is so oppressive to the meta we won't know until he stops being the ultimate counter.

entrailbucket

There are games that do things like this (make balance adjustments to fix the current most popular strategy, and at the same time, adjust any strategies that that strategy is currently suppressing, that will be problematic). It helps to avoid the problem where you kill one dominant strategy and it immediately gets replaced by another equally dominant strategy.

I think that's expecting too much of these devs, though.
In this particular case it's even harder because Chasm is holding down so, so much stuff.

If it turns out that Thor ends up being super oppressive, well, we can just turn every forum thread into a Thor debate, get 1000 new 5* that are bad counters for her, and then wait 2 years for her to get fixed.

Bowgentle

ANYTHING will be better than Chasm ihulk mirror matches.
You might wipe against Jane, but it won't be a 45 minute match.

dianetics

@entrailbucket said:
There are games that do things like this (make balance adjustments to fix the current most popular strategy, and at the same time, adjust any strategies that that strategy is currently suppressing, that will be problematic). It helps to avoid the problem where you kill one dominant strategy and it immediately gets replaced by another equally dominant strategy.

I think that's expecting too much of these devs, though.
In this particular case it's even harder because Chasm is holding down so, so much stuff.

If it turns out that Thor ends up being super oppressive, well, we can just turn every forum thread into a Thor debate, get 1000 new 5* that are bad counters for her, and then wait 2 years for her to get fixed.

Then we will get a change in 1 year....after they nerf all the old characters nobody uses....

AlexR

I have no problem fighting MThor all day and often do; Shang Chi is imo usually a pretty solid bet, because he can take her random cascades and heal it all off again, then hit back going into winfinite. It's a far cry from "I need this specific character duo plus boosts to overcome Chasm..."

So yeah, let's wait and see what happens if we do manage to get past Chasm. Provided their rebalance actually happens at some point and it doesn't consist of "suprise! now Chasm drains MORE AP per turn!"

killahKlown

@AlexR said:
I have no problem fighting MThor all day and often do; Shang Chi is imo usually a pretty solid bet, because he can take her random cascades and heal it all off again, then hit back going into winfinite. It's a far cry from "I need this specific character duo plus boosts to overcome Chasm..."

So yeah, let's wait and see what happens if we do manage to get past Chasm. Provided their rebalance actually happens at some point and it doesn't consist of "suprise! now Chasm drains MORE AP per turn!"

Agreed... I don't get why people seem worried about Jane teams everywhere. They're fun to play against.. just a little challenging so you can't dumb your way though every match but not a problem to beat plus provides you with a lot of helpful charged tiles that help make the matches quicker

pepitedechocolat

I guess people freak out because of the random cascade that creates 40 ap turn 2 or 3 for mthor then proceed to spam abilities. at lower levels you can also get that with polaris for several proc of her passive every turn which is very strong

entrailbucket

A wall of anybody in this metagame is a problem that needs fixing.

It means that character is better than whoever's getting +100 levels that week, and it means that character doesn't have a counter that makes them a liability to run.