*** Sentry (Dark Avengers) ***

Unknown

locked wrote:

Nice. It took you more than a minute, though, Bugpop. Thanks so much for the video!

Yeah. I'm accustomed to my phone so I'm here fumbling around.

Unknown

Here's another sentry quick win. Again, Not my best. Spider man came in handy this time.
http://youtu.be/vYSBKfo9qq8

Unknown

If he had Daken instead of The Hood nobody would've survived the first World Rupture, but of course not having The Hood means your Sacrifice tile could get popped and thus completely killing your plan, so it's a reasonable tradeoff.

I'm wondering if the training for APM and stuff matters too because if you're consistently a few seconds faster than whoever is trying to attack you, that actually makes it awfully hard for anyone slower than you to successfully hit you while you're unshielded, since your attacker also cannot know instantly the moment you unshielded so they're already operating from a delay. I recently moved MPQ from my regular hard drive to my solid state drive because I noticed that if it's on the hard drive it'd randomly perform HD seeks at the start of fights which would take at least 5 seconds. It seems to me that you should almost play these games like a build order in say Starcraft, like you just have to memorize like the exact order to match stuff in (and ignore even potentially good match 4s).

reckless442

Anyone who has followed my posts on the nerfing of characters knows that I am generally against it. I was pretty furious when Ragnarok got nerfed. I had not used the character during most of the pre-nert period, but after finally getting tired of losing to him in PVP, spent a bunch of HP to get his covers and then more HP and ISO to build him to 5/5 -- the day before he was nerfed. I've also argued against the nerfs to Spidey and Magneto. So it isn't lightly that I ask if Sentry needs to be nerfed.

If we believe the explanation for the current scores, max-Sentry's green and yellow, in combination with boosts, can effectively end any match in under a minute. All you need is to match one yellow and one green. 3* Daken really is not essential to that win; other combinations will result in equally speedy matches (Sentry/Psylocke; Sentry/Hood, Sentry/2* Daken). So if this explanation is true, it raises a few major issues.

First, for this combination to work as claimed, the player must use the +3 ap boost, which costs 100 HP for 10. That translates to spending 100 HP every 3.33 matches in a PVP. If you only used Sentry between 500 and 1300, and averaged 30 points per match (a very conservative figure), that amounts to 800 HP spent on +3 ap boosts.

Second, with players using this speed-win method, how do other players cope? If you are trying to reach a high score, you already are vulnerable to attacks that can lose 40+ points in a single hit. But now those attacks can take less than one minute. Previously, players avoided being attacked by shield-hopping, but how can you really do that if you can lose points so quickly? There really are only two options: (1) play the same Sentry/X team between shields at considerable cost; or (2) only do one match at a time between shields, but even then anticipate that, while your Modern Thor- or Patch-led team is winning in 3-5 minutes, you could be losing numerous matches to opponents using Sentry.

This seems like a major turning point for the game, because I think this is the most significant instance of a P2W option being game-changing. People complained that shields were P2W, but it has been possible to reach high scores without burning through massive HP on shields. Currently, a top-10 individual placement and a top-50 alliance gets you a total of 300 HP (100 from progressives, 100 from individual, and 100 from alliance). That's enough for four 3-hr shields. While it may not cover the full cost of hopping to 1300, it probably covers most of the cost. Moreover, shielding, unlike the Sentry + boosts strategy, does not confer a massive advantage -- speed in attacks -- that adversely reduces the scores of players not using the same expensive strategy.

Obviously, some players are happy to spend that amount, along with the HP for shields, to achieve scores in the 1300s-1500s for each PVP. But this may be the biggest advantage yet that spending HP on boosts provides, and seems to create a situation where players will be forced to use the same approach if they want to remain competitive. Or players may quit, deciding they don't want to spend several hundred extra HP per game so they can compete against players with the massive advantage that apparently exists for players using boosted Sentry. Still others will turn to the HP cheats that allow them to get HP without paying for it. I think we all agree that is not a good result for the game.

I can think of three possible modifications that could avoid this problem.

One option is to remove Sentry's yellow. Green on its own could be okay, even with Daken's or Psylocke's strike tiles, if 10 green countdown nodes survive, exploding would only do in the mid-3000s damage.

A second option is to have strike tile value added once all the countdown tiles exploded, so that you don't get the 575 from the yellow for each exploding node. For seven ap, Sentry's green with 10 exploding nodes plus yellow would still do nearly 2000 damage to the entire opposing team.

Third, the costs for Sentry's powers could be increased. Make green and yellow cost at least 10 ap and red 15. That means, even with full boosts, the player would need two green and two yellow matches (or match-4s), and would slow down those matches somewhat. The red cost may seem high, but it would be consistent with powers that damage entire opposing teams. Black Panther does 3162 max damage for 12 black ap, but that is his only major power. Max-level Punisher at 7 black only does 663 to all opponents. Black Widow (Grey Suit) can do 3336 to all opponents, but for 19 green, IM40 does 2669 to all opponents for 20 blue, while sapping 3 ap from every other color. Sentry, with 9 red tiles on the board, currently does 3525 damage for only 11 red.

Unknown

I don't have a particular view on sentry, but my scores in the last 4 or 5 PvPs has been very similar - and this is the first in which i've used Sentry most of the time. Sure it is usually faster, but I'd dispute that it's game-changing compared to other teams with max boosts. It's extremely rare that I get hit within 1 minute of shielding (usually at least 3 minutes later) so 1 minute fight or 2 minutes makes no real difference to me.

And didn't colognoisseur say he had a couple of other teams that would achieve the same speed with the right boosts? I don't expect to use sentry all the time as I have others I prefer playing.

The key ingredient for high scores is the (expensive) shield hopping. I would be much more in favour of a change to the shield mechanics rather than nerfing anyone. Surely the cost of multiple shields is what locks a lot of players out of higher placement?

One final thought, does it really matter to 99.9%+ of players whether someone scores 1300 or 1500 - doubt it impacts placings or rewards in practice very often

Just my 2 cents of course

P.S. Unless of course this is all just a ploy to distract from nerfing cmags in which case I'm all for it

Linkster79

mikeydollar7 wrote:

One final thought, does it really matter to 99.9%+ of players whether someone scores 1300 or 1500 - doubt it impacts placings or rewards in practice very often

It matters to me when I get hit multiple times in very quick succession. However the sheer amount of HP that neds to be spent to do this regularly makes it prohibitive to pretty much anyone who doesn't have a sheikh for a relative.

Unknown

I'm kinda mixed feelings. I don't think he's nearly as bad as ragnarok was. Ragnarok was infinite awesomeness while taking little to no damage. Sentry yellow does like 1k to self. Then his green usually does 500+ to own team at least. Yes, he does incredible damage and he's incredibly fast but you can only do like 4 matches before you heal your team, on a good run. I don't run the +3 to all boost so I may not be getting full effect. I still climb with patch and c mags and the sentry only comes out at the end of runs and at 1k+

Point being, you have to pay to boost him and you have to pay to heal him in order for him to be top notch like you are seeing at x-men. He also is not a threat on defense like ragnarok was. I don't think it's a big deal but I dislike having to pay to use him. I think that's where the issue lies. The changes you suggest take away a ton of his damage. With the massive negatives already it would cripple him. Gotta think outside the box in this 1 maybe.

Colognoisseur

Reckless you are going after the wrong target it is shields and boosts which cause this.

With boosts I have five lineups that win in a minute only two with Sentry. There are three other characters that show up on two should they all be nerfed?

When i absolutely have to win fast I can boost and shield until I hit my target. I don't care about hitting 1500 because it makes no sense to me but I understand it does to other players. The use of 75 Hp shields and 100hp boosts make this as easy as any given player wants it to be.

You want to fix the perceived problem shields need to be 300HP for 12 hours period no shorter or longer options and the cost of all +1 boosts needs to go up to 150-200HP. When it costs 500 HP to shield hop boosted it will take a shaikh to afford it.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

If he had Daken instead of The Hood nobody would've survived the first World Rupture, but of course not having The Hood means your Sacrifice tile could get popped and thus completely killing your plan, so it's a reasonable tradeoff.

I'm wondering if the training for APM and stuff matters too because if you're consistently a few seconds faster than whoever is trying to attack you, that actually makes it awfully hard for anyone slower than you to successfully hit you while you're unshielded, since your attacker also cannot know instantly the moment you unshielded so they're already operating from a delay. I recently moved MPQ from my regular hard drive to my solid state drive because I noticed that if it's on the hard drive it'd randomly perform HD seeks at the start of fights which would take at least 5 seconds. It seems to me that you should almost play these games like a build order in say Starcraft, like you just have to memorize like the exact order to match stuff in (and ignore even potentially good match 4s).

I have MPQ on a SSD, it's an older Vertex 2 but it's still quite fast. Here's a fight that's more the speed I can get on my phone. This Fight is less than a minute.

http://youtu.be/M-0b-iAzq84

Unknown

The problem comes from boosts. Everyone should know that the match all damage and all AP+3 are pretty much P2W. If they're not you'd be stupid to ever buy them. Sentry just happens to be the character that is most optimized to take advantage of boosts. You can do pretty much the same thing with Magento with All AP + 3, blue +3, and match + 100% but that's twice as expensive. Starting with 6 AP in 4 colors is like taking an additional 8 turns before the game even started and getting exactly the colors you need. It'd be pretty weird if this didn't lead to some absolutely crazy wins.

There probably should be some kind of limit to the number of HP costing boosts you can use in a given event PvP. If they're limited to say 30 per PvP event that means you can't spend more than 1200 HP (for AP+3 and match all damage). I realize it's kind of weird to suggest a mechanism that can only reduce revenue, but I think 1200 HP spent on boosts is already crazy and somewhere you got to draw the line between spending HP or just handing D3 more money for a better placement.

In the case of Sentry one obvious fix is to make World Rupture not benefit up to 48 times from any strike tiles. The CDs should all explode at once and that'd limit its damage to at most Rage of the Panther range, which is still plenty powerful but not an instant team kill move. Sentry is still pretty overpowered in general but with this fix he'd not be able to drop a team in one move.

Unknown

Colognoisseur wrote:

Reckless you are going after the wrong target it is shields and boosts which cause this.

With boosts I have five lineups that win in a minute only two with Sentry. There are three other characters that show up on two should they all be nerfed?

When i absolutely have to win fast I can boost and shield until I hit my target. I don't care about hitting 1500 because it makes no sense to me but I understand it does to other players. The use of 75 Hp shields and 100hp boosts make this as easy as any given player wants it to be.

You want to fix the perceived problem shields need to be 300HP for 12 hours period no shorter or longer options and the cost of all +1 boosts needs to go up to 150-200HP. When it costs 500 HP to shield hop boosted it will take a shaikh to afford it.

There should be some kind of excessive shield tax like if you went through a shield amount that is significant greater than amount of time left remaining in the event, it'd increase the cost of shields. You've to at least allow using enough shields equal to the time remaining because I'm assuming D3 will think it's totally legitmate for someone to say play a lot in first 12 hours and then stay shielded for the next 2 days at 600 HP. Certainly nobody should have any problem with a guy spending 600 HP that way, so it'd be unfair to raise shield costs for the guys who are genuinely just using it to preserve their score.

Unknown

The solution is what I suggested many times long ago: the AP boosts should not be on sale, period.

That's even along some text D3 claimed: those are supposed to be for rare occasional use, and provide more strategy and variance to the game, blablabla.

Certainly that was not explaining the price hike at the time rather than make them drop-only... Obviously the real agenda was to use them as a regular money sink (see P2W).

Many character nerfs in the past were really due to the boosts, not the regular abilities and costs.

Of course I'm sure it will not happen. Sentry may get the treatment -- probably only *after* getting more widespread in use (i.e. people were milked for good).

An alternative midway solution could be that just *certain* characters had the extra "ability" that prevent certain boost usage, Sentry could be one of them. Providing the least disruption to the current system and state.

OnesOwnGrief

Short answer: No.

Unknown

When Countdown tiles process normally, the countdown timer is resolved one by one, and the remaining tiles cascade as each countdown timer is resolved.

With the hood, The countdown timers process one at a time, however the entire board is held in position until the countdown timers complete. Then the entire board falls in one drop.

The benefit of using hood, is that sacrifice can be used before intimidate, and the attack tile will remain safe.

The benefit of allowing the tiles to process normally, is the bonus AP from any cascading matches. The risk is that the AI may remove the sacrifice attack tile in the turn before the tiles activiate. Another risk is that cascades from during the player's turn will clear the attack tile.

The following video includes both instances
http://youtu.be/K44eKUfcxoE

Unknown

Hmm, I didn't notice the board was frozen if you used The Hood to pop the CDs until you pointed it out. I don't think there's too much to worry about the AI matching the Sacrifice tile assuming you get rid of all the immediate yellow matches, but having Sacrifice killed by your own cascade is a big concern since World Rupture is a very strong cascade move too.

Unknown

You can buy +3 boosts of two colors of 200 iso buy all three packs for 600 iso ands it's the same as 1 +3 all ap boost. So it's don't cost any hp if you have iso.

Unknown

You can buy +3 boosts of two colors of 200 iso buy all three packs for 600 iso ands it's the same as 1 +3 all ap boost. So it's don't cost any hp if you have iso.

Unknown

Anybody who thinks mags should be nerfed should think sentry should be nerfed. If mags is nerfed, then so should sentry. Heck, at least mags isn't good on def really. He doesn't need a nerf as much as just swapping how his green activates (which doesn't nerf the move, it actually buffs itbut it disallows it to abuse strike tiles in the same manner...and self damage would occur all at once as well). Why they made it one at a time, given all they already know about strike tiles being a rather broken mechanic atm, I don't know beyond the assumption that he was purposefully made as a pay2win character they they will subsequently weaken a month or 3 after release and have earned thier money-back from him.

What I don't get, iswhy release fury and intelligently make his tiles singularly detonate but then make a 3 *** detonate one at a time? Win speed is only a tinypart of the issue imo (as a few other reams cam win pretty fast too). The whole "trivializes def" is the problem. It's the same reason spiderman was nerfed and why mags likely will soon as well. It's also why a move like fury blue is so welcome imo.

I won't care if its not nerfed, but if the devs said "what changes would you make to the current char, this would be one of the changes.

reckless442

clf_02 X3 wrote:

You can buy +3 boosts of two colors of 200 iso buy all three packs for 600 iso ands it's the same as 1 +3 all ap boost. So it's don't cost any hp if you have iso.

The play is to use red/yellow and green/black plus +3 all ap, so the match begins with 6 green and 6 yellow. To win, you only need to match one green and one yellow to play World Rupture and Sacrifice in concert. So the cost is 400 ISO every 2-3 matches, plus 100 HP every 3.33 matches.

If the boosts only gave a total of 3 of any color, it would be less of an issue, because you would typically need at least four -- and usually more -- turns to get the number of green and yellow needed to cast both powers.

As for people who say it doesn't matter because it's not likely that people will spend that much HP on a regular basis, it sure seems like a lot of players are using this tactic and spending 3000-4000 HP per event. Perhaps that is because people are flush with HP from the recent sale. Or there are more whales than I previously thought. Or people are using a HP cheat.

Whatever it is, since pre-nerf Ragnarok, I don't recall any other power combination being strong enough to take out a full team team in two turns with just two powers. Patch/BP boosted (beginning with 6 green and black) still can't take out a team of 7000+ HP opponents like Sentry can. Modern Thor's yellow/green combo can do 5000 to one character and 1800 to the others, and his green still requires 14 ap. And while there are some powers that extend turns,they require a lot of steps by the player, so they take a few minutes for even a "quick" win.

Unknown

Everyone knew that World Rupture + any kind of strike tile was stupidly broken when Sentry came out. I don't know if he needs nerfs beyond making all the CDs of World Rupture explode at the same time (this also weakens World Rapture's ability to cascade). He'd still be too strong but it'd be within the usual 'pay up for this shiny new character for an edge on opponent' which is hardly anything new (Thor is pretty much exactly the same way).

But the HP consuming boosts are still going to be there and even without Sentry, people will find a way to make use of starting with 6 AP in 4 colors. While the easiest fix would be to not allow them to be bought, I doubt D3 will want to stop making easy money from the guys burning through boosts like crazy. If you limit the HP boosts to 30 per event, that's 1200 HP and even if you auto win every fight with these boosts, that's 10 fights and call that 25 points per win, that's 250 points, so that's nowhere enough to get to the 2000 scores we see on just boosts alone. Sure you'll still have all your usual shield hopping tricks but once your HP boosts are out, you at least have to take some risk at that point. I guess you can get 10 more games out of match all +100%, but those aren't as abusable as AP+3 (note that Magneto needs both AP+3 all and match +100% to do the crazy Magnetic Fields immediately).