Character Rebalance Survey for 2024

ThaRoadWarrior

Danver5 red passive now creates 2 yellow ap whenever a friendly strike is destroyed by a means other than a match as opposed to the previous 1. Her green wasn't reverted to destroy friendly tiles. I'm curious if it's bug where it wouldn't always blow out as many additional rows as it is supposed to. I'll have to check.

MoosePrime

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
Danver5 red passive now creates 2 yellow ap whenever a friendly strike is destroyed by a means other than a match as opposed to the previous 1. Her green wasn't reverted to destroy friendly tiles. I'm curious if it's bug where it wouldn't always blow out as many additional rows as it is supposed to. I'll have to check.

Fairly certain it's been creating 2 yellow AP for a while now. I was using her last puzzle gauntlet (with Polaris and Mr. Negative), and it was creating 2.

ThaRoadWarrior

Hm, yeah i guess so. I went back to her character thread and evidently i made the same observation in 2021 lol.

Daredevil217

As far as rebalances go, this one sucks. Probably rushed for the movie so we got a “lazy” rebalance. That’ll probably work for someone like DD when Born Again drops (hint hint, devs), but I feel like Carol needed more than a numbers boost. Interested in other people’s thoughts though as I haven’t tried her yet.

ThaRoadWarrior

Her green needed to be reverted to original, and red needs to do something on cast, ideally create a lot of strikes. If the repeater needs to stay, it needs to be a 1-turn fortified. Yellow should be her nuke if she is built to generate it in large quantities,

GrimSkald

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
Her green needed to be reverted to original, and red needs to do something on cast, ideally create a lot of strikes. If the repeater needs to stay, it needs to be a 1-turn fortified. Yellow should be her nuke if she is built to generate it in large quantities,

I think saying "needs" is not helpful, they don't need to do anything and that's just your point of view, but regardless I agree with you that those would be good tweaks. There's a good character in there somewhere -- with the AP gen she has potential, but as she stands she's profoundly MEH.

entrailbucket

Health and match damage alone will probably make her playable boosted.

That's the problem with the dregs, and why the glacial rollout of buffs is SO frustrating -- most of them just need those numbers fixed and they'd be fine. They won't be good, of course, but +100 levels does an awful lot of work.

skittledaddy

Her yellow ability used to send a teammate Airborne, now it says Away.
Not sure if a typo or a deliberate change?

BriMan2222

@skittledaddy said:
Her yellow ability used to send a teammate Airborne, now it says Away.
Not sure if a typo or a deliberate change?

Hopefully a typo, this change would make her weaker. Just bring Kang and let her send her own teammates away while you send others away with his blue.

ThaRoadWarrior

@GrimSkald said:

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
Her green needed to be reverted to original, and red needs to do something on cast, ideally create a lot of strikes. If the repeater needs to stay, it needs to be a 1-turn fortified. Yellow should be her nuke if she is built to generate it in large quantities,

I think saying "needs" is not helpful, they don't need to do anything and that's just your point of view, but regardless I agree with you that those would be good tweaks. There's a good character in there somewhere -- with the AP gen she has potential, but as she stands she's profoundly MEH

for it to have been an impressive rebalance, it "needed" to do something effective with the powers, and it didn't. Nothing got cheaper or more effective, and yellow arguably got worse somehow. I was just suggesting some ways they could have tweaked the existing powers to keep the flavor without a total redo. I'm pretty curious why the change from airborne to away. sending friendlies away has no mechanical benefit to the player that isn't already present with airborne, and it has the massive kang problem.

Jinx

Competing with Wasp for the most useless rebalance ever. Possibly the worst characters in the game and both 4* versions are much better than the 5*s.

ThaRoadWarrior

Their 4* versions will be 5*-able before too long here I'm sure.

entrailbucket

There's no way either Wasp or Marvel are playable unboosted, but none of these buffs have really made anybody playable unboosted (and also: nobody should ever be playable unboosted). Banner is probably the closest, followed by Kingpin or Gambit.

I have Wasp almost 550 and I imagine she'll be usable boosted, just due to health/match damage. I have a feeling Carol will be the same way, maybe a bit better.

KGB

@entrailbucket said:
(and also: nobody should ever be playable unboosted).

Obviously I presume you are talking PvP only and not PvE.

The only problem with what you wrote is that it only works if you have everyone (or virtually everyone) champed (or @ 550 or some similar point where the bulk of the roster is the same level). For new players just making the jump to 5* land who only have a few 450 characters they'd be hosed on any week they don't have boosted characters (unless of course MMR is changed to factor boosted characters.

From a personal standpoint I'd hate PvP to only be the boosted characters each week. I realize for many of you, variety is the spice of life. But I'm perfectly OK just casually playing PvP with the same handful of teams to reach X amount of rewards. I don't really want to have to rotate in and learn tons of team play each week in order to play some PvP matches and potentially manage health packs.

KGB

entrailbucket

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:
(and also: nobody should ever be playable unboosted).

Obviously I presume you are talking PvP only and not PvE.

The only problem with what you wrote is that it only works if you have everyone (or virtually everyone) champed (or @ 550 or some similar point where the bulk of the roster is the same level). For new players just making the jump to 5* land who only have a few 450 characters they'd be hosed on any week they don't have boosted characters (unless of course MMR is changed to factor boosted characters.

From a personal standpoint I'd hate PvP to only be the boosted characters each week. I realize for many of you, variety is the spice of life. But I'm perfectly OK just casually playing PvP with the same handful of teams to reach X amount of rewards. I don't really want to have to rotate in and learn tons of team play each week in order to play some PvP matches and potentially manage health packs.

KGB

Unboosted characters shouldn't ever be more powerful than boosted characters. If you have everybody, and you're regularly reaching for a 450 Thor over, say, a Doc Ock boosted to 575 that week, something is wrong. Either she's too good or he's not good enough, or both.

Obviously if you don't have any of the boosted guys, this doesn't really apply -- you're going to need to use something.

KGB

Then when you wrote they shouldn't be playable, what does that mean?

Does it mean they can't win against boosted characters at all (ever)? Or only sometimes (<50%) or mostly (75%) or something else entirely? Or does it mean you't can play 2 unboosted vs 2 boosted but 1 boosted / 1 unboosted is fine vs 2 boosted etc? Does it mean you can play unboosted just fine to say 575 points but not beyond or maybe to 900 points and not beyond?

In other words what you wrote is wildly open to interpretation as to whether things are currently OK in the game or really bad or somewhere in between in terms of character balance.

KGB

entrailbucket

@KGB said:
Then when you wrote they shouldn't be playable, what does that mean?

Does it mean they can't win against boosted characters at all (ever)? Or only sometimes (<50%) or mostly (75%) or something else entirely? Or does it mean you't can play 2 unboosted vs 2 boosted but 1 boosted / 1 unboosted is fine vs 2 boosted etc? Does it mean you can play unboosted just fine to say 575 points but not beyond or maybe to 900 points and not beyond?

In other words what you wrote is wildly open to interpretation as to whether things are currently OK in the game or really bad or somewhere in between in terms of character balance.

KGB

Just FYI, the score thresholds you've got there don't actually mean anything -- there are no hard breaks like that. Everything varies by time, slice, and conditions. I often get my hardest fights starting from 0, for example, and things may get easier as I go farther up.

I'm not totally sure what I meant by "playable" up there, but like I said in the last post, +100 levels has to matter, and it has to matter a lot. They have to give you an incentive to build your roster, so characters should get better as they level up.

Any 550 character should be unequivocally better than any 450 character. This is, like, common sense, right? Does anyone think the opposite? What possible case can you make for that?

And if teams can punch up 200 levels, then yeah, I think that's a big problem. What incentive do I have to earn rewards if I can beat everything easily with the right low-level guys? What incentive do I have to build my own roster if low-level teams can easily beat me?

KGB

575, 900, 1000 etc aren't hard breaks in terms of MMR but they are hard breaks in terms of rewards (assuming your not grinding out the wins requirement). So what I meant there was, would it be reasonable to get up to 575 or 900 or 1000 etc with unboosted characters before it became impossible to progress much further (again, I'm understanding MMR shows lots of opponents regardless of what points you have until you break MMR. But also with the idea that they are changing MMR as we speak so maybe they'd be tweaking it with this kind of change in mind where breaking MMR happened more at specific point totals where rewards are rather than based on the points in the shard at that time.

100 levels matters, it always matters. But at the same time players should be able to punch up fairly easily too. We know win rates are 95% or higher (99% if you really have a deep roster and use boosted characters). So if win rates with unboosted are 90% vs 99 with boosted is that enough of an incentive? Presumably it is since pretty much everyone is always leveling up characters and looking for edges with supports etc.

As for being beat by low level rosters, do you take it personally? I don't care in the least how many I lose or who I lose to. If it's an easy retal, so much the better. There are shields for those who hate to lose to anyone. But really, unless your in the 1% of 1% of players playing for top PvP scores it shouldn't matter whether your team can be beat by far lesser teams since the AI is controlling the characters anyway.

KGB

entrailbucket

Matchmaking CAN'T work like that, at least not without a complete redo of PvP. It's Player Vs Player -- they can only show you other players who exist. If there are no players unshielded with a certain score, they can't just force them to break shield or something, to give you a fight.

If you want PvP to just be PvE, I guess that's fine. It might even be popular! But I don't think the devs would do that -- at least I hope they wouldn't.

KGB

They could let you to pound on shielded players. No loss of points for the shielded player but that would allow plenty more valid targets. It's no different than beating retal nodes or queuing players who then shield (cup caking) to avoid point loss.

Anyway, I'm anxiously awaiting to see what they do with PvP/MMR.

KGB