*** Sentry (Dark Avengers) ***

Tredo

I really like the idea of focusing the damage on only one character. But, the same should be true for Sentry's team. He should be the only character to suffer from the WR tiles.

IlDuderino

There is also the total redesign option (AKA the CMags)

Unknown

Let's be honest here... What team will u see once sentry is nerfed? Chances r u will see a bunch of x-force/hood or daken teams monopolizing the game and upper 900+ pvp boards. This is going to be an endless cycle... People will then complain about x-force and so on and so forth...

Do I think sentry needs a nerd? Probably so but I think it should be a minor tweak like having all te bombs go off at once so that it doesn't have compound accumulation of strike tiles or increasing the cost of wr to maybe 10 to slow him down a bit but who really wants to play a 5-8 min battle? Yes people complain it gets monotonous playing the same team but playing 395 goons in pve is te same thing and wait until u have longer battles then that will be even worse. To me longer battles make me lose interest faster, gets a bit too boring.

It's a double edged sword we r playing with fellas!

CrookedKnight

Even then, it would still end the shield-hopping madness that requires 60-90 second wins to function. X-Force is fast, but he's not that fast, even with boosts.

NotYou13

One additional option:
Place one countdown (2) tile that destroys an x shape on the board and does damage when the countdown ends. That resolves the strike tile issue while keeping the rupture aspect of the move.

Otherwise, I'm pretty well on board with 5 and/or 6. And option 14 is one that I'd never seen before that seems at the very least interesting if not necessarily feasible.

Unknown

Hmmm... the debate has been opened for a long time, and everyone seems to focus on WR.

Sentry has 3 horribly dangerous abilities.

Only 1 of which can be "countered" relatively easily.
World Rupture has inherint flaws in it's a 2 turn countdown. 1 if Hood has 5 black and able to get it out and, and, and... So on offense, yes he is a monster. On defense not so much.

World Rupture can be countered with Defense Tiles. OBW can increase counters. And there a few other ways of getting rid of these or postponing them.

He has alot of health AND takes advantage of strike tiles (for WR).

If you are able to successfully counter/slow down his WR long enough to get him close to dead, you still need to be watching out for his count. If that SuperNova goes off - sure you get an end of turn, but the damage is still done and done pretty bad at that. Especially in events like Starfall where he is getting the super boost.
* * * * * * *
Increasing Sentry WR by 3 AP helps. But would also need to be accompanied by an increase in timer - 1 turn more minimum to help offset Hood's intimidation.

SuperNova needs to be reworked. When a "star goes SuperNova" the Star itself is no more. Remove the 1 turn stun and make it a death to you Sentry (or 1 random character on Sentry's team) or like Deadpool's red, where 1 person's health gets slashed off by 75%; potentially causing death?

Self Sacrifice needs to be a little less powerful of a strike tile or reworked into maybe an attack tile (a la Human Torch) instead?

* * * * * * * *
Of course, there is always he "complete rework" of the character... Which would suck. I am still looking for number 5 Red cMags cover now - since his red used to be his workst color.

We should be allowed to re-use our 13 covers when this happens. I was lucky enough that my XFW was already 553 when the rework occurred and I stayed (intentionally) with that build.

NotYou13

Tonzil wrote:

Hmmm... the debate has been opened for a long time, and everyone seems to focus on WR.

That's because this is the only ability that's truly broken. The problem is just that strike tiles count for each cooldown. Supernova and Sacrifice, while both strong abilities, are not really out of balance.

Unknown

Tonzil wrote:

World Rupture has inherint flaws in it's a 2 turn countdown. 1 if Hood has 5 black and able to get it out and, and, and... So on offense, yes he is a monster. On defense not so much.

World Rupture can be countered with Defense Tiles. OBW can increase counters. And there a few other ways of getting rid of these or postponing them.

Sentry on defense isn't really the issue. Sentry's ability to consistently end a match in ~30-45 seconds is his primary brokenness (as that is what enables shield hopping). World Rupture is primarily what enables the shield hopping to happen.

I actually am pretty comfortable with his overall power level. It's primarily his speed. Slowing him down by 2-3 turns wouldn't reduce the raw damage output he's capable of (depending on the solution they implement), but would significantly slow down shield hopping as a viable strategy (and would hopefully reduce the warping he's causing to the high end metagame). Hence my comparison to the critical turn zero from vintage MTG.

Unknown

Sentery on defence is an issues as well, I can't tell you how many times I have lost to him, seems the only way I tend to beat him is if I boost my self.

jojeda654

I like the Staggered Countdowns idea but I feel staggering EVERY tile is a heavy handed approach.

How about staggered sets? The center tiles are set at 2, and every 4 tiles going out take another turn to go off.

Probably too complicated to describe in the blurb box though.

MarvelMan

How about making strike tiles effective for both teams? So if a Sentry team bombs a team with Laken....it'll hurt a LOT more than currently, making people think twice about bombing.


It would raise the issue that everyone would run Sentry/Laken though, so maybe pair it with another "solution" such as fewer tiles/more damage. Im not terribly fond of that as I like the rupture portion where the board explodes.

Unknown

I'd be fine with increasing the number of AP needed for World Rupture (though not by much! I don't want another great character nerfed to mediocrity!), or with having them go off at the same time. I wouldn't entirely remove modifiers on World Rupture, or else the ability isn't overly useful, but cutting them by a percentage would be fine by me. I'd also be OK with making the Sacrifice tile less strong.

However, I do feel compelled to point out that if Sentry gets nerfed, he'll just be replaced by another powerful character for shield-hopping. First Sentry and Daken was the big item, after the Daken nerf (which was an indirect Sentry nerf, technically) it mostly was Sentry and Hood, but I'm seeing another combo emerge more and more: X-Force Wolvie and Hood. With Sentry out of the picture, I predict a massive increase in Wolvie sightings. As in, every other shield-hopper team. I have shield-hopped with that combo as well, against Sentry/Hood teams among others, and they're perfectly capable of taking them down quickly. Will people call for a Wolvie nerf then? Or a Hood nerf, since he has become a supporting character just as common as Spidey before his nerf?
You can't eliminate shield-hopping by eliminating one of the most popular characters used in it. You can slow it down a little, perhaps, but I've played less-than-a-minute matches with Wolvie and Deadpool, just saying. There was shield-hopping before Sentry (I recall it emerged in that very first buy-in tournament), there will be shield-hopping after Sentry, unless the game mechanic is changed.

Like I said, I'm not opposed to a bit of tweaking. But some of these suggestions... Careful what you wish for, that's all I'm saying. Remember what happened to Spidey.

NotYou13

Staggering the cooldowns is another interesting option which throws Hulk and Captain Marvel into the meta as hard counters.

Unknown

NotYou13 wrote:

Staggering the cooldowns is another interesting option which throws Hulk and Captain Marvel into the meta as hard counters.

Not to forget Falcon - that would give Redwing time to remove more than one or two.

NotYou13

Rico Dredd wrote:

NotYou13 wrote:

Staggering the cooldowns is another interesting option which throws Hulk and Captain Marvel into the meta as hard counters.

Not to forget Falcon - that would give Redwing time to remove more than one or two.

Eh, I don't see removing one or two of the cooldowns as that big of a counter. Giving Hulk or CapM that much AP could be devastating and knock Sentry out entirely.

Unknown

One other possibility would be to make it MORE destructive. Have each individual countdown timer destroy a random yellow tile. How many will it take before that sacrifice tile gets obliterated?? Lets watch and find out. Also kinda fits his theme as the guy with more power than he can always control. Knocking down his own strike tiles just seems like it fits.

(wouldn't do anything about his synergy with other strike tile makers but would make people choose between Daken and Hood as the obvious partner )

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

One other possibility would be to make it MORE destructive. Have each individual countdown timer destroy a random yellow tile. How many will it take before that sacrifice tile gets obliterated?? Lets watch and find out. Also kinda fits his theme as the guy with more power than he can always control. Knocking down his own strike tiles just seems like it fits.

(wouldn't do anything about his synergy with other strike tile makers but would make people choose between Daken and Hood as the obvious partner )

Or similarly...

Each time a WR tile activates, there is a % chance that a friendly strike, attack or defense tile is destroyed.

loroku

I still believe it will end up being more than one of those suggestions; probably a combination of 3 or 4 (or more) is required to really make this power something other than game-defining.

Nellobee

I would prefer it to just be reworded:Sentry deals 50% of the damage dealt to his own team. (That way, if he deals 12k AoE, his own team takes 6k.)

Unknown

jojeda654 wrote:

I like the Staggered Countdowns idea but I feel staggering EVERY tile is a heavy handed approach.

How about staggered sets? The center tiles are set at 2, and every 4 tiles going out take another turn to go off.

Probably too complicated to describe in the blurb box though.

If you read the blurb that Nonce quoted, you'll see that's what the intention was:

Riggy wrote:

Staggered World Rupture countdowns. When World Rupture is cast, have a third of the countdowns be <x>, a third be <x+1>, and a third be <x+2>. This would mean more time to react to the ability as well as a longer time to protect and/or create strike tiles.

So if we look at the current setup, X = 2, so the center-most tiles would have a countdown of 2, the next couple rings would have 3, and the outermost would be 4. Greatly slows down Sentry's speed and also has a nice "ground zero" feel with a wave of concussive force moving outward.

dragma wrote:

Sentery on defence is an issues as well, I can't tell you how many times I have lost to him, seems the only way I tend to beat him is if I boost my self.

I don't mind strong characters on defense. I regularly boost against several teams. However, I still stand by my assertion that his popularity is solely b/c of his ability to shield hop in the 1100+ point range.

Rico Dredd wrote:

However, I do feel compelled to point out that if Sentry gets nerfed, he'll just be replaced by another powerful character for shield-hopping. First Sentry and Daken was the big item, after the Daken nerf (which was an indirect Sentry nerf, technically) it mostly was Sentry and Hood, but I'm seeing another combo emerge more and more: X-Force Wolvie and Hood. With Sentry out of the picture, I predict a massive increase in Wolvie sightings

There will always be a top tier of characters, and not all characters need to be created equal. But good game design says that when a single character warps the meta so completely, something should be done. Otherwise, every match becomes identical, tactics and strategy go out the window, and every character besides the broken one becomes a trophy character and never gets used. It just makes good business sense and good game design sense to keep meta-warping characters in check.

To your point, X-Force wolvie isn't as strong of a shield hopper b/c I'm not aware of anyone consistently winning matches with him in less than a minute (and perhaps I'm wrong). That "consistently" part is the killer. X-Force is certainly a beast when he has 5 in black, but even boosting you still need 2 more black matches to use his best ability. So he can burn a single target down quickly and hamper the opponent's opportunity to respond, but by himself he isn't going to consistently win every time inside of a minute. That's where Sentry warps the high-end meta.