Ascended Winners and Losers

JoeHandle

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Daniel2121

@JoeHandle said:

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

BriMan2222

@Daniel2121 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

If her damage boost only applied to team iron man or technologist or any other affiliation I'm sure you would see many more people ascending her to 5 star and much less people actually using her. Comparing someone with a team based boost to a character with a universal boost is apples and oranges.

entrailbucket

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:
Kinda bad if you asked me though... having the choice of more stun and bigger percentages is always gonna be better. And I wouldn't want her to do the tanking (which she will if she gets bigger match damage) if you screwed up the winfinite, or couldn't get it rolling on the first turn.

What team are you using her in that takes advantage of the percentage buffs? The second yellow passive only buffs her own damage, and as a 4* it's going to be pretty meaningless.

Why don't you want her to tank?

I'm using Taskmaster with Sniper Rifle on his black. And yeah he has the Thunderbolts affiliation so...

I don't want her to tank because 1) in case you couldn't start the winfinite on turn 1 from not using AP boosts/supports and 2) haven't looked into this but there might be some cases where another character could get better benefits from doing the black matches.

I think there are much better options to use her with. Do you have Taskmaster ascended?

I don't understand what you're saying about the tanking, at all.

No, I don't have him ascended yet. What are those better options? I've seen people using her with things like 1A5 Venom, he just deals damage and 1-turn stuns with his purple, but has like no utility at all. Taskmaster has a bunch of different powers so he gets to be useful on top of dealing some damage

I dunno what to say about the second point. I don't want her to get hit by things. I thought that was clear enough...

There are a lot of really good combos with her. Some options are in this thread: https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/91879/pvp-meta-counter

I wouldn't bother with Venom, he's ok when boosted but not great overall.

I remain confused about why you don't want Moonstone to take damage. As a 5*, at lvl450, she has 80,000 health -- far more than your 4* Taskmaster. Is this a comic lore thing or something else I'm missing?

entrailbucket

@Daniel2121 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

I've seen her a few times at 5*. Yes, she has a lower buff, but she no longer dies to one move, so she can actually hang around and cause trouble for more than one turn. With Leapfrog finally gone, running some random unboosted 4* is an even bigger liability than it was -- you're painting a huge target on your back.

JoeHandle

@Daniel2121 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

Daft.

Do I have a 3>5 iMay yet? No, not yet. Finished a 370 about 6mos after her release, so further covers are going into dupes and they will eventually amount to a maxed out 5* copy, of course ... but ... what relevance to discussion of 4* Moonstone?

There are some fun lineups leveraging her as a black battery, but 1) they involve her being ascended to 5* land, and 2) they don't involve pairings with any other Thunderbolts.

Daniel2121

@BriMan2222 said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

If her damage boost only applied to team iron man or technologist or any other affiliation I'm sure you would see many more people ascending her to 5 star and much less people actually using her. Comparing someone with a team based boost to a character with a universal boost is apples and oranges.

I thought this was about team based perks, not AFFILIATION based perks. Iron May boosts her whole team's damage and max health regardless of affiliation.

Daniel2121

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:
Kinda bad if you asked me though... having the choice of more stun and bigger percentages is always gonna be better. And I wouldn't want her to do the tanking (which she will if she gets bigger match damage) if you screwed up the winfinite, or couldn't get it rolling on the first turn.

What team are you using her in that takes advantage of the percentage buffs? The second yellow passive only buffs her own damage, and as a 4* it's going to be pretty meaningless.

Why don't you want her to tank?

I'm using Taskmaster with Sniper Rifle on his black. And yeah he has the Thunderbolts affiliation so...

I don't want her to tank because 1) in case you couldn't start the winfinite on turn 1 from not using AP boosts/supports and 2) haven't looked into this but there might be some cases where another character could get better benefits from doing the black matches.

I think there are much better options to use her with. Do you have Taskmaster ascended?

I don't understand what you're saying about the tanking, at all.

No, I don't have him ascended yet. What are those better options? I've seen people using her with things like 1A5 Venom, he just deals damage and 1-turn stuns with his purple, but has like no utility at all. Taskmaster has a bunch of different powers so he gets to be useful on top of dealing some damage

I dunno what to say about the second point. I don't want her to get hit by things. I thought that was clear enough...

There are a lot of really good combos with her. Some options are in this thread: https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/91879/pvp-meta-counter

I wouldn't bother with Venom, he's ok when boosted but not great overall.

I remain confused about why you don't want Moonstone to take damage. As a 5*, at lvl450, she has 80,000 health -- far more than your 4* Taskmaster. Is this a comic lore thing or something else I'm missing?

I didn't see anything good there besides 5* Electro which is obviosly a counter to AOE damage, but not a really good candidate for a Moonstone winfinite imho.

I don't like Venom either, no utility as I've said. I'm looking for a good Moonstone partner, not just any random character with a black power.

80k health is good if you're tanking damage, but not stuns or other kinds of disabling abilities. Moonstone increases Thunderbolts damage, idc if there's lore involved between her and Taskmaster... it's just how this game goes.

Daniel2121

@JoeHandle said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@JoeHandle said:

@bbigler said:
Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

Daft.

Do I have a 3>5 iMay yet? No, not yet. Finished a 370 about 6mos after her release, so further covers are going into dupes and they will eventually amount to a maxed out 5* copy, of course ... but ... what relevance to discussion of 4* Moonstone?

There are some fun lineups leveraging her as a black battery, but 1) they involve her being ascended to 5* land, and 2) they don't involve pairings with any other Thunderbolts.

The relevance is because your words from your previous post sounded like "not ascending a character fully to 5* is stupid because you're missing out on its 5* rewards". I dunno if that was what you MEANT to say but I did read it that way. No one uses a 5* May, because her boosts to her team's damage and health are inferior than they are when she is at 4*.

entrailbucket

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:

@entrailbucket said:

@Daniel2121 said:
Kinda bad if you asked me though... having the choice of more stun and bigger percentages is always gonna be better. And I wouldn't want her to do the tanking (which she will if she gets bigger match damage) if you screwed up the winfinite, or couldn't get it rolling on the first turn.

What team are you using her in that takes advantage of the percentage buffs? The second yellow passive only buffs her own damage, and as a 4* it's going to be pretty meaningless.

Why don't you want her to tank?

I'm using Taskmaster with Sniper Rifle on his black. And yeah he has the Thunderbolts affiliation so...

I don't want her to tank because 1) in case you couldn't start the winfinite on turn 1 from not using AP boosts/supports and 2) haven't looked into this but there might be some cases where another character could get better benefits from doing the black matches.

I think there are much better options to use her with. Do you have Taskmaster ascended?

I don't understand what you're saying about the tanking, at all.

No, I don't have him ascended yet. What are those better options? I've seen people using her with things like 1A5 Venom, he just deals damage and 1-turn stuns with his purple, but has like no utility at all. Taskmaster has a bunch of different powers so he gets to be useful on top of dealing some damage

I dunno what to say about the second point. I don't want her to get hit by things. I thought that was clear enough...

There are a lot of really good combos with her. Some options are in this thread: https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/91879/pvp-meta-counter

I wouldn't bother with Venom, he's ok when boosted but not great overall.

I remain confused about why you don't want Moonstone to take damage. As a 5*, at lvl450, she has 80,000 health -- far more than your 4* Taskmaster. Is this a comic lore thing or something else I'm missing?

I didn't see anything good there besides 5* Electro which is obviosly a counter to AOE damage, but not a really good candidate for a Moonstone winfinite imho.

I don't like Venom either, no utility as I've said. I'm looking for a good Moonstone partner, not just any random character with a black power.

80k health is good if you're tanking damage, but not stuns or other kinds of disabling abilities. Moonstone increases Thunderbolts damage, idc if there's lore involved between her and Taskmaster... it's just how this game goes.

Uh, so her high health pool at 5* means she's...bad at being stunned? I'm even more confused now.

DAZ0273

@entrailbucket said:
So all the percentages get lowered quite a bit and she loses one turn on the stun (for friendly and enemy, so that might be a bit of a wash?) but the tile manipulation stuff is unchanged and the damage numbers go up. She has a ton of health for some reason, so that's a point in favor of the 5*.

I don't think she's a must ascend but I don't think it's a huge downgrade overall.

I suspect they have just followed the theme of 2* Moonstone who has high health for a 2*.

WhiteBomber

Thanks for sharing Bucket. It's a bummer that she drops the percentage so drastically, but I think the match damage increase offsets this.

IMO, her 2 best teammates are Namor3 (speed and efficiency) and Electro5 (team damage shut down). Having her at 5 would mean your Namor wouldn't need to be 5 to burn through people via match damage on her infinite. Electro is the real loss here, as her black damage was lovely because of the boost, but again, the match damage should help a lot with speed (you might want to stun Juggs now though due to his match damage resist).

Her stun dropping a turn means nothing. Since her infinite has an incredibly low chance of dropping, her stun was only a nice to have addition anyway, and 2 turns is plenty to rekindle the infinite if needed.

In the instance you are using her pink to stun, you would also want her to be 5star, because it sucks when you stun your only 5star and then get stuck with 4star damage during the infinite.

Fortunately, she is awful on defense regardless, so it doesn't really matter if you ascend her. I would personally ascend her though for the health and match damage, opening up more use with other good unascended characters, like Emma, Veil etc.

Daniel2121

@WhiteBomber said:
Thanks for sharing Bucket. It's a bummer that she drops the percentage so drastically, but I think the match damage increase offsets this.

IMO, her 2 best teammates are Namor3 (speed and efficiency) and Electro5 (team damage shut down). Having her at 5 would mean your Namor wouldn't need to be 5 to burn through people via match damage on her infinite. Electro is the real loss here, as her black damage was lovely because of the boost, but again, the match damage should help a lot with speed (you might want to stun Juggs now though due to his match damage resist).

Her stun dropping a turn means nothing. Since her infinite has an incredibly low chance of dropping, her stun was only a nice to have addition anyway, and 2 turns is plenty to rekindle the infinite if needed.

In the instance you are using her pink to stun, you would also want her to be 5star, because it sucks when you stun your only 5star and then get stuck with 4star damage during the infinite.

Fortunately, she is awful on defense regardless, so it doesn't really matter if you ascend her. I would personally ascend her though for the health and match damage, opening up more use with other good unascended characters, like Emma, Veil etc.

I use her stun to decongest the board and get it rid of tiles I don't want there. I said I use Taskmaster's Sniper Rifle specifically for this, but I don't always use him. Teams are flexible, you know. So having a longer stun sometimes helps there.

bbigler

I'll point this out again - if you put Refreshment Cart on Moonstone (which works perfectly with her winfinite) it also reduces the Friendly Stun to 1 turn. There are a variety of viable Thunderbolts out there, so the team buff of 175% really matters. One team I'm going to do some more testing with is 5*Bucky (and Aunt May). Bucky gets a double buff with May, which equates to an increase of 375%! Plus, Bucky duplicates his damage at 50% to his target. And don't forget his passive damage. It all adds up pretty fast when I played this team in PVE.

DAZ0273

Came up against a 3a5 Hulk and got destroyed! They had Gamma Ray or whatever it is called Support on and I couldn't make a dent with boosted Killmonger and Cap Marvel. Seems quite popular as I also saw a 672 one! No thanks!

BriMan2222

@DAZ0273 said:
Came up against a 3a5 Hulk and got destroyed! They had Gamma Ray or whatever it is called Support on and I couldn't make a dent with boosted Killmonger and Cap Marvel. Seems quite popular as I also saw a 672 one! No thanks!

Same. I took out his team mates pretty easily but then hulk kept healing himself to full health everytime I got him almost dead, and he wound up with so much green ap that I was eating a gamma slap every single turn.

WhiteBomber

Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

entrailbucket

@WhiteBomber said:
Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

Killmonger was very, very strong in an America Chavez featured event a long time ago when he happened to be boosted -- so strong that if you weren't running him you were at a pretty massive disadvantage.

I don't know what that means. I imagine he's annoying against the Shang-Chi infinite teams, but I don't know if anybody is doing that anymore. He's probably a decent counterplay against boosted 1* Spidey? I think he's a decent counter character against a metagame that mostly doesn't exist right now.

5* Carol is pretty terrible. I have her at 550, and at 672 she's somehow still unusable, even after the buff she got. They need to just throw out her design and start over.

JoeHandle

@WhiteBomber said:
Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

Was fun to be effective again, in a thematic way (don't make him angry!), while also not being impossible to defeat.

And "all" it took was ascending him, waiting for a boost, and having a maxed out support.

WhiteBomber

@entrailbucket said:

@WhiteBomber said:
Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

Killmonger was very, very strong in an America Chavez featured event a long time ago when he happened to be boosted -- so strong that if you weren't running him you were at a pretty massive disadvantage.

I don't know what that means. I imagine he's annoying against the Shang-Chi infinite teams, but I don't know if anybody is doing that anymore. He's probably a decent counterplay against boosted 1* Spidey? I think he's a decent counter character against a metagame that mostly doesn't exist right now.

5* Carol is pretty terrible. I have her at 550, and at 672 she's somehow still unusable, even after the buff she got. They need to just throw out her design and start over.

His 1 niche ability doesn't even work; I'm not sure I've ever seen his locked crit tile stay locked through the end of my turn. I'm not sure what's happening with it because he was not good enough for me to figure it out, but that locking crit tiles never countered me, it still unlocked on my same turn.

I've killed multiple of him boosted in this tournament where that was the result, on top of that, he contributed nothing else. Perhaps he reacts differently to Chavez crit tiles / tiles created in different ways or maybe he did something better on offense, but defense, he is useless.

I love the concept of punishing crit / combo characters though! It just isn't him.