Reason Chasm’s counters failed

entrailbucket

@Codex said:
My win rate against chasm ihulk is easily 85-90% of the time. The next best defensive team is beatable 99% maybe even 100% of the time. If that's the case then I would use chasm ihulk all the time, just for the sometime wipes.

Maybe one solution would to to create multiple strong defensive teams that can win 10-15% of the time on defence.

This would go over quite badly.

The strongest defensive character in the history of the game (pre-nerf, but post...uh... adjustment Gambit) had a defensive win rate of about 10%. A 10% defensive win rate in this game is completely insane. It totally breaks the game.

Think about how often you win when you're on offense vs how often your defensive team gets wins. Do you ever get a significant amount of legitimate (non-dump) defensive wins, or do you lose pretty much every time you're attacked?

I'd guess that Chasm's defensive win rate is something around the 5% range (just a guess, based on nothing but feel) and that's also completely insane. The game is simply not set up to support characters who are that powerful in the hands of the AI.

BlackBoltRocks

oh hey look it's intestinepail hijacking yet another thread and people still engaging with that creature.

As for the topic: I've mentioned this before. One huge reason for Chasm's so-called counters failing is because none of them passively counter or shut down ALL of Chasm's passives AT THE SAME TIME.

• passive stun right at the start of battle, and whenever he revives
• passive AP drain every turn

Ok these next two are pseudo-passives, because they require Chasm to make a match:

• healing when Web tiles are matched
• creation of Abyss tiles when Chasm makes a match. Abyss tiles themselves already don't gain AP when matched, to the further detriment of Chasm's opponents (and to a lesser extent his teammates)

Another huge reason is because this game is largely 3v3. 1v1, Kang is probably the best check to Chasm. Just go about collecting 9 Blue AP - which Kang's AP regain happily helps by ignoring Chasm's AP drain - and you're good. 3v3 however is a whole different ball game, as all of us know. Team Chasm up with iHulk or She-Hulk, or even Jane, and the difficulty multiplies exponentially.

If Chasm stays the way he currently is, attempts to counter him will continue to fail until and unless they come up with an exact and total Anti-Chasm character who does ALL of AP regain, heal block, prevention of Abyss tile creation. Since they said they're planning to nerf him, let's see how than pans out.

ThaRoadWarrior

Whenever they “fixed” the order of operations on Thano5 so that lost the race to stun after downing Chasm and didn’t hit a revived hulk for damage was a bummer since he used to be at least a partial tool against that team.

pepitedechocolat

I mostly agree with you @BlackBoltRocks and I think one underlying issue of 3vs3 is that devs designed several char that need to be taken out 'last', so combining them is instantly a problem.

The current take "opponent downed by this ability cannot revive" is both very narrow and ineffective. Maybe a brutal counter to revivers could solve the issue at the cost of making all of them useless. This is something I could live with. (when I say brutal counter, I'm thinking of something of the level of "when an opponent revives, down the enemy team")

DrClever

@BlackBoltRocks said:
Team Chasm up with iHulk or She-Hulk, or even Jane, and the difficulty multiplies exponentially.

Chasm + iHulk is pretty easy with Electro + HEvo

I definitely agree that Chasm does too many things and this makes strong counters difficult to design (and risky for game balance because they would then also do too many things) but the balance has definitely shifted since Chasm first came out, so I'm not too down on the efforts so far.

It would be really interesting to know what the aim of the upcoming nerf is. "Stop people whining about Chasm" would be an understandable goal but you'd hope they'd have something measurable with game metrics in mind - reducing Chasm success on defence or (preferably IMO) reducing the number of times Chasm teams are skipped perhaps.

If they also succeed in making him fun to play with / against that would be a huge win, but it's probably asking a bit much.

ThaRoadWarrior

I do hope whatever form this rebalance takes just makes him less effective with iHulk, because he is only an issue with that partner.

DrClever

As I say, that particular combination is unproblematic now we have HEvo.

Partnered with Electro he makes any iHulk team easy to beat.

I don't know if that was a deliberate consideration in his design, but it really does sort out what used to be a very tricky pairing.

Bowgentle

@DrClever said:
As I say, that particular combination is unproblematic now we have HEvo.

Partnered with Electro he makes any iHulk team easy to beat.

I don't know if that was a deliberate consideration in his design, but it really does sort out what used to be a very tricky pairing.

While being a cupcake on defense, which is a problem in itself.

DrClever

I gather that it is unacceptable for a team to win on defence so that's surely a good thing, right?

Bowgentle

Lol well played 🤣

ViralCore

y'all are leaving out that a skip is as good as a defensive win. A 450 sc/jane team will likely hit a 550-chasm-counter-team but will skip a 450-chasm/hulk team.

DrClever

Almost as good, yeah.

This is definitely a problem, with people thinking both that they might well not be able to beat Chasm (much less true than it used to be) and that playing him is boring (still as true as ever).

I lose more matches to MThor + Shang / Riri than to Chasm but I'm still more likely to hit them because it's less dull.

ViralCore

@DrClever said:
Almost as good, yeah.

This is definitely a problem, with people thinking both that they might well not be able to beat Chasm (much less true than it used to be) and that playing him is boring (still as true as ever).

I lose more matches to MThor + Shang / Riri than to Chasm but I'm still more likely to hit them because it's less dull.

Not "almost" - "is". Keeping +40 pts that you would lose otherwise.

DrClever

Um, maybe it has been so long since it happened to me that I've forgotten how it works but if you win then you don't just not lose points, you also gain them, don't you?

If that is indeed the case, and here I feel I'm on quite solid ground in terms of analysing the relative merits of the two things, then winning is in fact as good as being skipped plus a bit of extra good - or as people who value succinctness might have it "better".

DAZ0273

@DrClever said:
Um, maybe it has been so long since it happened to me that I've forgotten how it works but if you win then you don't just not lose points, you also gain them, don't you?

If that is indeed the case, and here I feel I'm on quite solid ground in terms of analysing the relative merits of the two things, then winning is in fact as good as being skipped plus a bit of extra good - or as people who value succinctness might have it "better".

I can see how you graduated from the University of Clever to become a Doctor because this logic works for me.

DrClever

TBH both parts of my moniker are deviations from the absolute truth, but Mr Smartarse got rejected by the username filter.

(Incidentally do we have any idea how many ex City of Heroes/Villains players we have here? Dr Clever was one of mine from that era.)

DAZ0273

In the old days that would have been Mr. Smarttinykitty. I never did understand the tinykitty thing.

Never got to play City of Heroes sadly.

Edit: Hmm...wait a minute, let me try something:

****!
Feck!
Drink!

Wait...dammit! That wasn't like that when it first posted! Feck!

DAZ0273

Yes - the board censor is not partly Father Jack proof!

Girls!

DAZ0273

OK...weird, now I can see ****! again!

Sorry about this people...I am waiting for my office to move somewhere else and so basically have time to attempt to break the forum.

****?

DAZ0273

Oh goddamit!