*** Ragnarok (Dark Avengers) ***

NorthernPolarity

-Xios- wrote:

If Ragnarok's Green was changed to have the ability to gain AP, would this massively change his condition? Would it be too much? Too little?

Assume no other changes. I'm not someone who had a high-level Ragnarok so my opinion is sort of irrelevant. My assumption is that people like mStorm's battery, and this would essentially be both a cheaper version and not as random (as you can see what colors you get, but the colors themselves would be 'random' but able to be manipulated)

Purely hypothetical of course, as I doubt the devs are planning to make someone else a potential infinite turn character, as the character balance queue suggests.

Thoughts?

Completely overpowered. That would generate 16AP for 6 green, which is almost the same amount as the hood's twin pistols for what, 14ap? Maybe it could be reworked to do that, but itd make the ability cost a lot more which goes against rags design of an ability spammer. Back to the drawing board!

Dormammu

-Xios- wrote:

If Ragnarok's Green was changed to have the ability to gain AP, would this massively change his condition? Would it be too much? Too little?

Assume no other changes. I'm not someone who had a high-level Ragnarok so my opinion is sort of irrelevant. My assumption is that people like mStorm's battery, and this would essentially be both a cheaper version and not as random (as you can see what colors you get, but the colors themselves would be 'random' but able to be manipulated)

Purely hypothetical of course, as I doubt the devs are planning to make someone else a potential infinite turn character, as the character balance queue suggests.

Thoughts?

I'd love to see his green ability generate AP, but that's only my greed speaking. If that were to happen (with no other changes) Rags would once again become ridiculously powerful. They'd either have to increase the AP cost of his green (from 6 to 12 or so) or eliminate the green-tile generation from his red to balance things out.

Unknown

-Xios- wrote:

If Ragnarok's Green was changed to have the ability to gain AP, would this massively change his condition? Would it be too much? Too little?

Assume no other changes. I'm not someone who had a high-level Ragnarok so my opinion is sort of irrelevant. My assumption is that people like mStorm's battery, and this would essentially be both a cheaper version and not as random (as you can see what colors you get, but the colors themselves would be 'random' but able to be manipulated)

Purely hypothetical of course, as I doubt the devs are planning to make someone else a potential infinite turn character, as the character balance queue suggests.

Thoughts?

mStorm's battery is one of the best skills in the game and this change would make Rags have an almost strictly better skill for 4 AP less

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Completely overpowered. That would generate 16AP for 6 green, which is almost the same amount as the hood's twin pistols for what, 14ap? Maybe it could be reworked to do that, but itd make the ability cost a lot more which goes against rags design of an ability spammer. Back to the drawing board!

Dormammu wrote:

I'd love to see his green ability generate AP, but that's only my greed speaking. If that were to happen (with no other changes) Rags would once again become ridiculously powerful. They'd either have to increase the AP cost of his green (from 6 to 12 or so) or eliminate the green-tile generation from his red to balance things out.

Right, this is about what I was expecting, and you guys are probably right.

gamar wrote:

mStorm's battery is one of the best skills in the game and this change would make Rags have an almost strictly better skill for 4 AP less

I agree, but competing color abilities that are 'strictly better' already exist, for example: Iron Man's Ultra-Freon Beam to Storm's Wind Storm (less stun, less damage, no AoE, +8 cost).
I get that's not the point you're trying to make, you're just saying it's too strong, which I'm inclined to agree with.


So let's take it a step back. It's established that we'd want the move to stay at around the same cost, and for the sake of mechanics we want it to stay a board clear. What is required for it to get that leg up? Assume the move stays the same as far as cover scaling.
a)i. What if it was like cHawkeye's Arrow Stab, but vertical, and granted AP? or ii. As previous, but you don't get to choose the column [AP Generation]
b)i. What if it struck two/three random columns (side by side) or ii. Two/Three Columns Randomly (No AP) [Board Clear: Random]
c)i. What if it struck one/two/three columns of your choice [Board Clear: Choice]
d)What if it struck three/four fixed columns [Board Clear: Focus]
e)i. Some sort of flat damage prior to tile destruction, scales with levels ii. Scales with covers iii. Scales by some other resource / board condition [Damage]

Thoughts?

Just so we're clear I'm not trying to come in and just shout 'here's how you fix Rag' I just thought some discussion and theorycrafting would be fun.

NorthernPolarity

-Xios- wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Completely overpowered. That would generate 16AP for 6 green, which is almost the same amount as the hood's twin pistols for what, 14ap? Maybe it could be reworked to do that, but itd make the ability cost a lot more which goes against rags design of an ability spammer. Back to the drawing board!

Dormammu wrote:

I'd love to see his green ability generate AP, but that's only my greed speaking. If that were to happen (with no other changes) Rags would once again become ridiculously powerful. They'd either have to increase the AP cost of his green (from 6 to 12 or so) or eliminate the green-tile generation from his red to balance things out.

Right, this is about what I was expecting, and you guys are probably right.

gamar wrote:

mStorm's battery is one of the best skills in the game and this change would make Rags have an almost strictly better skill for 4 AP less

I agree, but competing color abilities that are 'strictly better' already exist, for example: Iron Man's Ultra-Freon Beam to Storm's Wind Storm (less stun, less damage, no AoE, +8 cost).
I get that's not the point you're trying to make, you're just saying it's too strong, which I'm inclined to agree with.


So let's take it a step back. It's established that we'd want the move to stay at around the same cost, and for the sake of mechanics we want it to stay a board clear. What is required for it to get that leg up? Assume the move stays the same as far as cover scaling.
a)i. What if it was like cHawkeye's Arrow Stab, but vertical, and granted AP? or ii. As previous, but you don't get to choose the column [AP Generation]
b)i. What if it struck two/three random columns (side by side) or ii. Two/Three Columns Randomly (No AP) [Board Clear: Random]
c)i. What if it struck one/two/three columns of your choice [Board Clear: Choice]
d)What if it struck three/four fixed columns [Board Clear: Focus]
e)i. Some sort of flat damage prior to tile destruction, scales with levels ii. Scales with covers iii. Scales by some other resource / board condition [Damage]

Thoughts?

Just so we're clear I'm not trying to come in and just shout 'here's how you fix Rag' I just thought some discussion and theorycrafting would be fun.

And fun it is! I may have been a little blunt with my original post, I think I was feeling snarky at the time: I like randomly theorycrafting in general so it wasn't meant to be discouraging. So given that we want the same cost and board clear, I think that we should first take a step back and consider why it is bad now and see if any of your options fix that inherit problem. My beef with the ability is that even though it's a board clear, there is a good probability that it doesn't actually take out the tiles that you care about. The damage is also negligible, so the ability just feels like it doesn't do anything a lot of the time. With that in mind, heres how I look at your options:

a) Either of these options seem pretty good. This makes the ability generate 8AP for 6 green, and allowing the user to target a row would make it a ton better. I'm not sure how I feel about it being random, but it would still be a good AP generation. My main problem with this line is that it doesn't fit the flavor of Ragnarok: he's supposed to be a strong cyborg thor thats all about randomly smashing things, and AP generation that destroys a single row feels more like something that a smarter, but physically weaker character would do. Only destroying one column doesn't feel very godlike either, so I think it's a nogo just based off of flavor purposes.

b) Doesn't fix the main problem I had with the ability of it randomly not doing anything.

c) Destroying two/three fixed columns would actually make the ability somewhat relevant, and keeps the flavor of rags being strong and godlike or whatever. Minor flavor loss with the choice feeling more like targeted strikes as opposed to being rags randomly smashing things.

d) This gets interesting: the more columns you have destroyed, the greater the chance of Rags actually killing something that you want it to kill. One crazy idea is what would happen if it just straight up destroyed the entire board? That might be too good, but maybe a sweet spot from 2-8 columns could be found that make this choice relevant.

e) Could be okay, but seems boring unless the condition is strategic.

I think out of the options available, d) makes most sense thematically and could be tweaked such that it actually becomes relevant. c) would be a very good ability, but i dunno if it feels ragnaroky. Would have to see what options e) would have in order to make further judgment on that.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I think out of the options available, d) makes most sense thematically and could be tweaked such that it actually becomes relevant. c) would be a very good ability, but i dunno if it feels ragnaroky. Would have to see what options e) would have in order to make further judgment on that.

Well, you could always combine the two ideas of d) and e).

For example, you could make the attack do more damage based on the number of environment tiles, or go a ramping route and perhaps have additional columns destroyed based on a resource (Since you want to be spamming red/green, it probably wouldn't be these colors) or a board state (like the previous point). You could do some other funky stuff based on enemy/ally/self health or enemy resources as well.

I'm not extremely familiar with Ragnarok himself, so maybe you could judge which of those could be thematically justified.

Spoit

gamar wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Thunderclap is essentially lazythor's colorshifted thunder strike, so Rags definitely has its uses as a green battery. Godlike power is for the most part completely useless, but it does have fringe playability now for clearing human torch's black ability. I think he has some use on a team that is trying to spam green abilities and lacks a good red, like with lazyThor or GSBW if you have someone else covering the other colors. I don't get why people think he's bag-tier: while he's obviously not the greatest, at least he has one good skill whereas bagman has none.

I don't think anyone literally thinks Rags is as bad as Yelena or Bagman (heck, in the most recent rankings he's rated higher than two other 3* chars and both 4* chars, as well as most 2*s), but I just cannot think of any team where I would pick rags over some other option else unless it's something like Dark Avengers where the roster almost forces you into it.

The problem is that his green is pretty terrible, and while his red does have it's uses, red is one of the most competitive colors, so there's tons of better characters to use for it

Phaserhawk

He is suprisingly good with BP. They don't compete, they both can absorb lots of damage, and Rags generates cascades which feeds BP yellow, blue, and black as well as enviro tiles. Yes Rags is gonna blow some tiles up, but they work decently, especially defensively. You don't want to walk into say BP,Rags, and Patch. Sure Patch will never cast anything for the most part, but Rags is gonna spam red and green, eventually there will be enough black that BP is going to hit you and you have to chew through a lot of hp to get them down.

Unknown

hhm, i am slightly curious in this. Why doesn't rag have a 3rd strong tile to begin with ? Are there any other chars who are like that too ?

Unknown

I think my gripe is that most characters have 3 good tile damages - high/medium/low.

Ragnarok has 2 tile damage - medium/medium. I mean come on, he only does higher damage to two colors, can't it be high/high?

And I'd actually prefer to see a stronger Thunderclap (say generate 5 instead of 4 green tiles (allows for more Godlike spam), and does 1.4k instead of 900 damage at L115), rather than a reworked Godlike.

Godlike is incredibly hard to balance because if it destroys 4 columns the amount of damage will be insane, and if it generates AP it'll be way broken.

Unknown

What if Godlike destroyed additional random rows based on the teams black AP, but depleted it in the process? For example, it would destroy 1 additional row for every 9 black AP. Black isnt a super popular color, but youd probably never get more then 1-2 rows extra from the move which I dont feel is too broken.

That or I really like the idea of destroying 1 row and generating AP for it. Unless the row is seeping in Green, you probably couldnt infinite turn with this, and one vertical row doesnt make for very good cascade potential unless you get super lucky. And really your only gaining 2 more AP for its use, and thats not even taking into consideration environment tiles.

Best case scenario it would be a low-cost, low-damage battery move to support the team and provide that extra 1-2 AP you need to get one of your moves off. Worst case scenario the 6 Green is too cheap and people use him in tandem with Thor's yellow ability to demolish rows and go for an infinite turn loop. I guess I forgot that his red power generates green in the first place, which could make this slightly OP. But he is a 3 star character with only TWO powers and TWO match colors hes strong in... and after the way they lowered his red's attack damage so that now it only does like what, 1100 max on level 115? Rags could really use some kind of buff. Im building him now only because his red was the first 3* I ever got, from a standard recruit token nonetheless. But other then the current dark avengers tournament/lightning rounds, I never really use him because hes... well... not very good

Unknown

I feel terrible for Rags. When he uses this ability, he lets out as one of his sound effects this "urrr-ahhh!!!" It honestly sounds like poor Rags is having the worst bowel movement of his cyborg life or that he is pregnant and about to have a cyborg baby. Is it possible to put in a new sound effect so that I don't cringe when I hear it?

PS this is a serious request, although I have so many jokes in my head that would get me banned.

Unknown

I think his sound effects are cool.

Dormammu

Anyone else using buffed Ragnarok to get some work done in The Simulator? Reminds me of the good ol' days.

Spoit

Dormammu wrote:

Anyone else using buffed Ragnarok to get some work done in The Simulator? Reminds me of the good ol' days.

How much is the boost anyway? He used to be somewhat useable in LRs at least, but after they reduced the boost, there's no reason to use him there unless he's the required character

EDIT: Nope, it's only a 30 level boost, so 1.2k red. I.E. still completely worthless

Dormammu

It's enough to get the job done. That's the whole point of using the buffed PvE rosters - using characters you normally wouldn't. I've got Ragnarok doing the work in the Simulator which helps keep some of my other main guys fresh for other events.

Spoit

Even boosted, his red it terrible compared to most other 3*s, and the less said about his green, the better.

Hell, since he only has 2 medium power tile damages, you need to have him max level and use someone who doesn't have a red/green primary to actually get rag to take a hit, at max level when boosted

Unknown

I don't use Rags but I do find him to be one of the more difficult foes in PVE. I typically target him first of all Dark Avengers (even Ares, unless the level is high enough for one-shot KOs). I'm not sure if it's because I hate him ripping through my attack tiles, generating green, or both. He is still a nuisance and a somewhat formidable character.

With a third skill (and a third color for that matter), he might claw his robotic arm back into many lineups.

famousfoxking

His red doesn't bother me at all. I think in the ratings thread someone suggested you consider his red to be a 12AP power that does 1934 damage, and generates 8 green. That's not terribly far off from Modern Thor's yellow that does 2121 and generates 9. I often find myself wasting damage from Thor's yellow anyway, so Rag's red being more modular makes up for the ~200 damage and one green tile: I can effectively spread a Thunderstrike across two targets if some portion of the 2k damage would be urinated away on only one.

His green power needs help though. Honestly, I feel like I might be fine with it if it let me choose which two columns were destroyed. It doesn't really need AP generation at all. Ideally, I'd like to destroy two separate columns, but if the two columns had to be together but I could pick them, that might work too.

Dormammu

I've always thought Rags needed a yellow that worked like C.Mags' red, just with a bit more oomph and AP cost.