Puck (Eugene Judd) 4* - Rebalance & New Costume

S0kun

Puck (Eugene Judd) is our latest character to get a rebalance and we hope his new kit can stick the landing with our players! Here's a little insight from our team on his rework and peak into his Alpha Flight costume going live on Thursday July 18th!

Slap Shot (Red) - 6 Red AP
This ability is relatively simple in mechanics and execution, and doesn't really need much help to stay powerful. Did a little bit of rewording to bring that in-line with modern naming conventions, but other than that, the ability gained about a 20% damage boost across the board.

Spin to Win (Green) - 8->6 AP
Spin to Win is the victim of a bit of design hubris. The idea is neat, with Puck cartwheeling to change the locations of tiles on a row, doing some board shake and pushing out some extra damage. And in sims, it worked well. In the real world though, it's just too complex. The rotated tiles are random, and with multiple rotations, there's no way as a player to figure out what the ability is going to do besides rolling the dice. And at 8 AP, that's a fairly expensive roll.

What we've decided to do is rework the ability so that it still does targeted destruction through a cartwheel, but even moreso with a selected set of tiles, dealing damage but not gaining AP. Basically, the active is now functionally like The Hood's Twin Pistols, but with only one target instead of two. THEN, we kept the feeling of cartwheeling with a new Passive, which rotates the 8 tiles surrounding whichever tile he matches. This keeps the chaos that the ability originally caused and causes some interesting and controllable cascades once you're used to the mechanics of it.

Inner Demon (Black) - Black Passive
Inner Demon isn't bad for what it does, but it's one of those that you can't really count on for any kind of real damage since the trigger is somewhat high, and gets higher in concert with Puck's max health. It works for Storm (Classic) because the threshold is low enough, but that ability is designed to punish enemies from hitting Storm who is designed to be a back line character. Puck on the other hand should be in the thick of things, always giving and taking damage. And if we make the threshold low enough to work off that idea, the damage it deals is just going to be anemic.

So, what we've done instead is make this more of a guaranteed set of damage. He'll tote up the damage against him, then let out counter damage when he reaches certain thresholds. This means that facing off against Puck is almost sure to be a damaging experience, so you may want to bring some crowd control or super heavy hitters that can take him down all at once.