Champions 2.0 Post-launch FAQ and Discussion

entrailbucket

@StanleyBurrell said:
Well 4’s are the new meta. A 475 Rogue/Nico/Medusa easily handles a 550 Colossus/Shang/Mighty Thor.

If this is “balance” I don't know what to say. 5* are immediately worthless.

I was thinking about this one -- I gave a bad, sort of trolling answer last night.

I think this might BE "balance?" I haven't tried it yet, but my guess is that Medusa is healing and making attack tiles every turn, Rogue is stopping Thor's cascades, Nico is buffing whatever Thor doesn't hit, which can kill Colossus through his defense...you've inadvertently (?) created a team that perfectly counters Thor/punishes her for what she does.

That's great! That's a rock paper scissors metagame. Thor should struggle against some teams. As long as the ascended 4* team can be beaten easily by some other team, we're in business.

MoosePrime

@trenchdigger said:
So, I just ascended 2* Thor using a 144 max champ with a 94 unchamped.

For starters, my ascended character is level 167, but I believe should only be 166.
Because he is now 167, he has earned the 167 champ reward which is an LL token, but my total LL tokens have increased by 2.

The changes in stats are all over the place:
Health +28%
Match damage +8% (this is consistent across all colours)
Red power +32%
Yellow power +191%
Green power +50%

I have double checked all these figures, particularly the yellow damage is significant.

How do these numbers compare to a similarly leveled 3* Thor?

StanleyBurrell

@entrailbucket said:

@StanleyBurrell said:
Well 4’s are the new meta. A 475 Rogue/Nico/Medusa easily handles a 550 Colossus/Shang/Mighty Thor.

If this is “balance” I don't know what to say. 5* are immediately worthless.

I was thinking about this one -- I gave a bad, sort of trolling answer last night.

I think this might BE "balance?" I haven't tried it yet, but my guess is that Medusa is healing and making attack tiles every turn, Rogue is stopping Thor's cascades, Nico is buffing whatever Thor doesn't hit, which can kill Colossus through his defense...you've inadvertently (?) created a team that perfectly counters Thor/punishes her for what she does.

That's great! That's a rock paper scissors metagame. Thor should struggle against some teams. As long as the ascended 4* team can be beaten easily by some other team, we're in business.

It should be rock paper scissors at similar levels. At these levels they made the most “desirable” tier worthless. If that trio was 550 or close it would make sense and actually be neat.

jsmjsmjsm00

A 475 team that counters a 550 team should absolutely be able to win. I don't understand your point. You think that the 550s should just win because they are higher level?

MegaBee

I stopped selling off max-champed 3-stars a while back, so I just ascended them all. Now I've got a surplus of roster slots!

entrailbucket

@StanleyBurrell said:

@entrailbucket said:

@StanleyBurrell said:
Well 4’s are the new meta. A 475 Rogue/Nico/Medusa easily handles a 550 Colossus/Shang/Mighty Thor.

If this is “balance” I don't know what to say. 5* are immediately worthless.

I was thinking about this one -- I gave a bad, sort of trolling answer last night.

I think this might BE "balance?" I haven't tried it yet, but my guess is that Medusa is healing and making attack tiles every turn, Rogue is stopping Thor's cascades, Nico is buffing whatever Thor doesn't hit, which can kill Colossus through his defense...you've inadvertently (?) created a team that perfectly counters Thor/punishes her for what she does.

That's great! That's a rock paper scissors metagame. Thor should struggle against some teams. As long as the ascended 4* team can be beaten easily by some other team, we're in business.

It should be rock paper scissors at similar levels. At these levels they made the most “desirable” tier worthless. If that trio was 550 or close it would make sense and actually be neat.

That's a pretty good point. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.

This is really just a massive, massive disruption to the current metagame, and I don't know how it'll all shake out. I don't think traditional 5* are worthless, but some of them might be worth less in the new world. One reason characters like Thor were so good before was because they had no counters, and now they do.

entrailbucket

@jsmjsmjsm00 said:
A 475 team that counters a 550 team should absolutely be able to win. I don't understand your point. You think that the 550s should just win because they are higher level?

Well, there has to be some point to putting levels on your guys, otherwise there's no reason to build your roster. If a 450 team is stomping 550s, then that's (potentially) a big problem. The question is how big that impact should be, and how universal it should be?

trenchdigger

I have also noticed that the 2* ascended rewards do not match the 3* no feeders rewards on the spreadsheet included in the original posting of this announcement on page 1.

Specifically, my 2* Thor does not reward any classic tokens. At 215 the reward is 50 gold and at 265 the reward is 5000iso.

This dilutes the value of continuing to add levels after ascending. Would be interesting to know if there are differences at any other levels and what the impact of these changes are on the various pieces of analysis that have been created.

trenchdigger

@MoosePrime
My native 3* Thor is at 225, so can't directly compare, but I would say the yellow is definitely the outlier as it is the only stat on the 167 2* ascended Thor that beats the 225 3* Thor.

StanleyBurrell

@jsmjsmjsm00 said:
A 475 team that counters a 550 team should absolutely be able to win. I don't understand your point. You think that the 550s should just win because they are higher level?

If you can’t see how that is bad I’m not sure what to say. Able to win? Possibly. Able to obliterate? That’s silly.

KGB

@Daredevil217 said:

@Markot said:
My theory - every cover used towards a level gives a reward of this level even if you need 3 or 4 for one level. Therefore its 4 times more for merged 4* as it takes 4 covers for one 5* level. For merged 3* you need 3 covers for a level, so you get 3 times more rewards. And obviously for 2* merged you get twice as much rewards as you should.
Confirmation of the theory are CPs for 3*. 3x40 (40 is the amount counted on reached levels) would be 120, but 100 covers are 33 levels and one cover extra which goes to level 304 where the reward is 4CP. This reward you get just once for this one cover, hence the total is 124CP.

And this error is only from covers used from merged characters. I used 2 extra covers for ascended magneto at 303 and 1/3 level. First one was without rewards, second one took him to 304, so I got 4CP. This is the way it was planned, I think.

So this is a bug and we should merge all we can now?

It's possible this is intended since you are using 4x as many covers to gain 1 level in 5* land. Without the extra rewards you essentially apply 3 covers and get no reward for them. This would also help alleviate the cover tax when ascending multiple tiers (a 3* to a 5*).

KGB

Punter1

@KGB said:

@Daredevil217 said:

@Markot said:
My theory - every cover used towards a level gives a reward of this level even if you need 3 or 4 for one level. Therefore its 4 times more for merged 4* as it takes 4 covers for one 5* level. For merged 3* you need 3 covers for a level, so you get 3 times more rewards. And obviously for 2* merged you get twice as much rewards as you should.
Confirmation of the theory are CPs for 3*. 3x40 (40 is the amount counted on reached levels) would be 120, but 100 covers are 33 levels and one cover extra which goes to level 304 where the reward is 4CP. This reward you get just once for this one cover, hence the total is 124CP.

And this error is only from covers used from merged characters. I used 2 extra covers for ascended magneto at 303 and 1/3 level. First one was without rewards, second one took him to 304, so I got 4CP. This is the way it was planned, I think.

So this is a bug and we should merge all we can now?

It's possible this is intended since you are using 4x as many covers to gain 1 level in 5* land. Without the extra rewards you essentially apply 3 covers and get no reward for them. This would also help alleviate the cover tax when ascending multiple tiers (a 3* to a 5*).

KGB

Probably a bug as you ONLY get the extra 2x, 3x, 4x rewards during ascension. Once you are correctly applying covers to ascended characters, you only got the rewards when going up a level.

LHammer

Okay, so what am I missing here...?

I ascend my one star Iron Man. Then I decide I probably still need a one star Iron Man for DDQ so I go to recruit one to rebuild and... all his inbox covers are now locked on "ADD LEVEL" and there's no "recruit this character again" option anywhere on the two star version. Did I just lose the one star version forever?

Fortunately, IM35 was not a key member of the team but I would be really upset if I had lost Spider-Man Classic this way.

bigjojo04

@LHammer said:
Okay, so what am I missing here...?

I ascend my one star Iron Man. Then I decide I probably still need a one star Iron Man for DDQ so I go to recruit one to rebuild and... all his inbox covers are now locked on "ADD LEVEL" and there's no "recruit this character again" option anywhere on the two star version. Did I just lose the one star version forever?

Fortunately, IM35 was not a key member of the team but I would be really upset if I had lost Spider-Man Classic this way.

Isn’t there an icon you can select on your inventory screen for that cover that you can then decide what you want to do with that cover? Or is that what you’re clicking on and it’s not giving you the option to recruit the character again?

entrailbucket

@Tony_Foot said:

@entrailbucket said:

Well, there has to be some point to putting levels on your guys, otherwise there's no reason to build your roster. If a 450 team is stomping 550s, then that's (potentially) a big problem. The question is how big that impact should be, and how universal it should be?

The problem for me is currently if Thor Shang and Emma frost is the meta I can easily work towards having a competitive team to join in. If I'm getting smashed by 475 Winter Soldier, Gwenpool and Venom that's a train I cannot join for years. And if the counter to that 4* now 5* team is Medusa Blob and Polaris I can't do that either.

What will happen if you cannot be separate from the elevated 4* MMR. People will stop playing PVP. I don't mind the long game, just don't put me in the MMR of people who I cannot compete with.

Again you have a layer of have and have not supports to go on this soon. I think it's a disaster, I'd rather have 6*. But again I'm happy to walk away from PVP is the last bit on tiny joy it gives me vs rewards goes away.

I really don't know. The problem you describe here is a problem for sure, but we don't know if it actually exists yet. And we won't know for awhile.

One mitigating factor: they just added a TON of 5* in one shot. The interactions, counters, etc, are going to take awhile to work out, but there's a decent possibility that multiple characters will be able to fill multiple roles. So you may not NEED Winter Soldier, for example -- some other guy might be able to do whatever job he needs to do.

ThaRoadWarrior

Medusa sort of counters thor in that when her CD is getting busted it splits down into attack tiles. Maybe resists Thor is a better way to say it than full on counters.

KGB

@Punter1 said:

@KGB said:

@Daredevil217 said:

@Markot said:
My theory - every cover used towards a level gives a reward of this level even if you need 3 or 4 for one level. Therefore its 4 times more for merged 4* as it takes 4 covers for one 5* level. For merged 3* you need 3 covers for a level, so you get 3 times more rewards. And obviously for 2* merged you get twice as much rewards as you should.
Confirmation of the theory are CPs for 3*. 3x40 (40 is the amount counted on reached levels) would be 120, but 100 covers are 33 levels and one cover extra which goes to level 304 where the reward is 4CP. This reward you get just once for this one cover, hence the total is 124CP.

And this error is only from covers used from merged characters. I used 2 extra covers for ascended magneto at 303 and 1/3 level. First one was without rewards, second one took him to 304, so I got 4CP. This is the way it was planned, I think.

So this is a bug and we should merge all we can now?

It's possible this is intended since you are using 4x as many covers to gain 1 level in 5* land. Without the extra rewards you essentially apply 3 covers and get no reward for them. This would also help alleviate the cover tax when ascending multiple tiers (a 3* to a 5*).

KGB

Probably a bug as you ONLY get the extra 2x, 3x, 4x rewards during ascension. Once you are correctly applying covers to ascended characters, you only got the rewards when going up a level.

Glad I just went and ascended all my 2 and 3 star characters then (none of my max champed 4s has a 13 cover dup yet). Just doing that netted me 90 LTs, 500 CP and 6K HP and freed up 17 roster slots.

Dunno what they are going to do about this. Obviously some players making out like bandits compared to others. Would be best if they just changed the apply 1 cover at a time to work like the ascend and give out the reward multiple times. Yes, it's a ton more rewards but it also makes sense since you are otherwise applying cover(s) that generates zero rewards when it takes 2, 3 and 4 to go up 1 level.

KGB

LHammer

@bigjojo04 said:
Isn’t there an icon you can select on your inventory screen for that cover that you can then decide what you want to do with that cover? Or is that what you’re clicking on and it’s not giving you the option to recruit the character again?

No. There is a button which says one of three things depending on your character's situation - Recruit, Add Level, or Train. Normally, if my maxed IM had five reds, a red cover would show Recruit and allow me to start another IM. Now because of my ascended IM, the button for all three colors is "Add Level".

Edit - I guess I should clarify that I'm a filthy Steam user so it's my own fault if my interface doesn't work properly right?

BlixTheFrog

Everyone gets more counters I guess. What is apparent, even more than before, is that the days of all-powerful meta is over. Boost lists will be what’s relevant. Expect Sim to be mucn more diversified.

DrClever

@Tony_Foot said:
The problem for me is currently if Thor Shang and Emma frost is the meta I can easily work towards having a competitive team to join in. If I'm getting smashed by 475 Winter Soldier, Gwenpool and Venom that's a train I cannot join for years. And if the counter to that 4* now 5* team is Medusa Blob and Polaris I can't do that either.

Sure, but who can?

Only people who have already put in those years and / or the money equivalent.