Rebalance & New Costume - Cable (Nathan Summers) 5*

S0kun

Cable is the latest 5 Star to get a rebalance along with a fresh new costume variant inspired from the X of Swords series.

General Notes

Increased Cable’s match damage to modern standards and increased his overall health slightly. We could have increased his health more, but we instead took a lot of that budget and pushed it towards his abilities to make them much faster than previous. Since he’s not designed to be a front line fighter, he really didn’t need the very tanky HP values he was using before. Let Thor or Hulk handle that sort of thing.

Health & Match Damage

Feeder Flow

Abilities

Ability: Cyborg Strategist

One of the things we noticed with this ability’s usage is that most players would use it for Charged tiles, but would only use it once, maybe twice a battle (on battles that lasted long enough for multiple uses of course), indicating that once it hit the tilting point of having the ability create few/no Charged tiles, it stopped being as worthwhile. With this change, it not only creates more tiles at the outset, but also deals some damage if the ability would be otherwise useless in the Charged tile area. Along with the slight boost in speed through lower AP cost, we’re thinking this ability should be more potent in stunning, Charging, AND damaging.

Color: Blue

AP Cost: 8 (Previously 9)

5 STAR: LEVEL 550

Before:

Cable uses his cybernetics and future tech to get the drop on his enemy. Choose a basic tile to become a 3-turn Blue Countdown tile. Whenever you make a Green match while one of these tiles is on board, stun the enemy for 2 turns and create up to 2 Green Charged tiles.

At Level 2: Green matches create up to 3 Green Charged tiles.At Level 3: Green matches create up to 4 Green Charged tiles.At Level 4: Creates a 4-turn Countdown tile.At Level 5: Creates a 5-turn Countdown tile; Green matches create up to 5 Green Charged tiles.

After:

Cable uses his cybernetics and future tech to get the drop on his enemy. Choose a basic tile to become a 5-turn Blue Countdown tile. Whenever you make a Green match while one of these tiles is on the board, stun the enemy for 2 turns and create up to 3 Green Charged tiles. If Cable runs out of tiles to convert Charged tiles, deal 2309  damage. 

At Level 2: Create a 6-turn tile. Create 4 tiles. Deal 5387 damage.
At Level 3: Create a 7-turn tile. Create 5 tiles. Deal 6927 damage.
At Level 4: Create a 8-turn tile. Create 6 tiles. Deal 11159 damage.
At Level 5: Create a 9-turn tile. Create 7 tiles. Deal 20012 damage.

Ability: Plasma Barrage

So… slow… The ability is decent for what it is and has a very unique flavor to it, but the AP cost meant that by the time it was ready to be used, you’ve whacked 1 or 2 enemies, or at least brought them low enough that you’re going to get a much reduced effect from the ability. So we poured every bit of budget into lowering the AP cost to make it as fast as it could be without actively lowering the damage dealt. There was still a little bit of budget within the tiers to soak up a bit more damage improvement, so the last bits that weren’t used for AP reduction made for some additional bang for Cable’s post-apocalyptic buck.

Color: Green

AP Cost: 9 (Previously 12)

5 STAR: LEVEL 550

Before:

Cable lets loose a blast from his massive future-tech plasma rifle. Deals 26134 damage to the target. Any damage beyond the target’s remaining health is dealt to each of their allies.

At Level 2: Deal 28747 damage.
At Level 3: Deal 31361 damage.
At Level 4: Deal 36588 damage.
At Level 5: Deal 47041 damage.

After:

Cable lets loose a blast from his massive future-tech plasma rifle. Deal 43870 damage to the target. Any damage beyond the target’s remaining health is dealt to each of their allies. 

At Level 2: Deal 48082 damage.
At Level 3: Deal 52732 damage.
At Level 4: Deal 61593 damage.
At Level 5: Deal 78878 damage.

Ability: Veterans Instincts

Similar to above, the Strike tile creation works fine for what it is, but it’s not very fast at doing its job. Could have bumped up the strength of the Strike tiles, but instead we made the ability much faster instead. That way if you want the Strike tile strength, you can use the ability twice (and quite a bit more quickly for the first use in any case) which allows you to pump out more damage. We left the Passive portion of this alone, using the delta that it would have gained in balance points to get that AP down just a little more (it “costs” more to bring AP from 9->6 than it does from 12->9).

Color: Yellow

AP Cost: 6 (Previously 9)

5 STAR: LEVEL 550

Before:

Years of battle-hardened experience allow Cable to make his team into true soldiers. Create 1 strength 820 Yellow Strike tile, plus 1 additional Strike tile for each of Cable’s allies still in the fight.

(PASSIVE) When you make a Yellow match, fortify 1 random friendly Countdown or Repeater tile.

At Level 2: Creates 2 strength 820 Strike tiles.
At Level 3: Creates 2 strength 888 Strike tiles.
At Level 4: Creates 2 strength 1025 Strike tiles.
At Level 5: Creates 3 strength 1093 Strike tiles.

After:

Years of battle-hardened experience allows Cable to make his team into true soldiers. Create 2 strength 1154 Yellow Strike tiles, plus 1 Strike tile for each of Cable’s allies still in the fight. 

(PASSIVE) When you make a Yellow match, fortify 1 random friendly Countdown or Repeater tile.

At Level 2: Create strength 1347 tile.
At Level 3: Create strength 1481 tile.
At Level 4: Create 3 tiles.
At Level 5: Create strength 1884 tile.