*** Sentry (Dark Avengers) ***

Unknown

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.

I am actually fairly comfortable with this. As long as the meta keeps changing often enough to keep from getting stale. Sentry is getting stale and it is time to let someone else be the go-to OP character.

Unknown

Sentry bombing is so boring but unfortunately incredibly effective. Even old Magneto required you to consider the board and figure out the best way to exploit blue to keep the infinite turns going. It was actually kind of fun.

Sentry bombing requires you to make one green and yellow match then win the round. With the speed/ease that you can complete 2-3 fights, they could just replace it with an easy button costing 75hp that gives you 50pts and reshields you. It is so weird that they sped up the animation.

Staggered countdown tiles would make him still playable and retain the flavor of his abilities. A reduction of the number of WR tiles or an increase the countdown on all of the tiles to 3 turns might also work.

Unknown

If sacrifice stuns, people will likely stop hopping with and start hopping with Much more sustainable when you use Battleplan instead of Sacrifice, and you're not worrying about a single tile being matched destroying your strategy. If you're used to gathering for , just get another match in along the way, and anyone who's left standing gets to experience the Rage of the Panther after having the world fall down on them.

Sure you get 525 power worth of strikes instead of 674, which yes can mean a loss of up to 2384 damage to the enemy team, but it also means 1304 less damage to , which means more matches before you need

I think if it moves to WR tiles shattering all of your WR tiles ala 's traps, that removes him from the shield hop team completely, which is not necessarily something you want either. It's fine that he's a good character. There will always be a best team, even if it's by percentages.

I'm guessing it's likely a complete rework of the skill, or skillset. If so, we just have to hope he comes out like and not like .

GrimSkald

It seems to me that the thing that's really broken about WR is the sheer number of strike tiles and how they resolve. If they were, say, twice as powerful with half as much, it would reduce the damage by an order of magnitude. If they resolved differently (contributes damage to the World Rupture effect which resolves its damage at the end of the turn) then it would reduce the damage by a whole heck of a lot.

xKOBALTx

j12601 wrote:

If sacrifice stuns, people will likely stop hopping with and start hopping with

I was thinking exactly this in regards to the options that would add stun or just reduce the strike for Sacrifice. I don't think that they would necessarily stop Sentry-bombing much, just change his partner-in-crime. Maybe require an additional match every few battles or slightly improve Hulk as a better defensive option, but not much more.

mohio

xKOBALTx wrote:

j12601 wrote:

If sacrifice stuns, people will likely stop hopping with and start hopping with

I was thinking exactly this in regards to the options that would add stun or just reduce the strike for Sacrifice. I don't think that they would necessarily stop Sentry-bombing much, just change his partner-in-crime. Maybe require an additional match every few battles or slightly improve Hulk as a better defensive option, but not much more.

Exactly, but also the stun option doesn't preclude hood as a partner, it just requires you to have 5 in black. Then you shoot off sacrifice with the CDs at 1 and intimidation to end the match.

I like the CDs increasing as you get away from the center as the best solution that changes him the least. I don't think changing sacrifice and leaving world rupture alone will "fix" him, and sacrifice is both powerful and flavorful so I wouldn't mess with it. Basically world rupture just needs to be changed so that it keeps it's power and flavor (sentry after all should be one of if not the most powerful character of the ones released so far), but loses a bit of his speed. Whether that's fewer, more powerful tiles, increased CDs, or costing more (10 does seem fairly reasonable and still incredibly powerful) I will leave up to the devs to decide.

Spoit

Yeah, what mohio said. It makes me wonder how much some of the people voting for this stuff have actually played with the abilities. Intimidate counts down tiles even if the person who owns the countdown tiles are stunned (you can also use this to get around a staggered IM40 recharge). Similarly, I'm surprised that the +3 AP one is winning. As someone who only rarely actually uses the AP all boosts, an extra match really isn't going to slow him down that much on offense.

Anyway, the whole problem is the multiplicative strike tile damage on WR. By itself, sacrifce is fairly in line with BP's BP, considering the self damage, and WR itself without strikes is really not that big a threat. (and if WR does get nerfed, the reduction to supernova's self damage does make it pretty useable @5 covers). Which is why I think that the main way to fix him would be the ones effecting the number of countdowns (making them all detonate at once, making them hit one target, reducing the number for higher damage). I do like the staggered countdown idea, though I'm not sure how effective it would really be

turul

Changing sacrifice to a casually useful, not self damaging move would be the best.

It would make sentry playable for multiple matches. and would bring charactr dependency on WR

NorthernPolarity

turul wrote:

Changing sacrifice to a casually useful, not self damaging move would be the best.

It would make sentry playable for multiple matches. and would bring charactr dependency on WR

So instead of bringing hood along, you bring bp? World rupture is the problem, not sacrifice.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

turul wrote:

Changing sacrifice to a casually useful, not self damaging move would be the best.

It would make sentry playable for multiple matches. and would bring charactr dependency on WR

So instead of bringing hood along, you bring bp? World rupture is the problem, not sacrifice.

I laughed so hard when I read this. I'm beginning to realize how many ppl don't want sentry nerfed and offer every solution short of fixing wr. Am I wrong? Are there genuinely ppl unaware how sentry works and sentry bombing for shield hopping works? If there are, why are they chiming in on this thread?

xKOBALTx

stephen43084 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

turul wrote:

Changing sacrifice to a casually useful, not self damaging move would be the best.

It would make sentry playable for multiple matches. and would bring charactr dependency on WR

So instead of bringing hood along, you bring bp? World rupture is the problem, not sacrifice.

I laughed so hard when I read this. I'm beginning to realize how many ppl don't want sentry nerfed and offer every solution short of fixing wr. Am I wrong? Are there genuinely ppl unaware how sentry works and sentry bombing for shield hopping works? If there are, why are they chiming in on this thread?

It's almost like there wasn't a discussion by a small handful of people about how altering Sacrifice wouldn't really work directly above this post. Oy.

Spoit

xKOBALTx wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

turul wrote:

Changing sacrifice to a casually useful, not self damaging move would be the best.

It would make sentry playable for multiple matches. and would bring charactr dependency on WR

So instead of bringing hood along, you bring bp? World rupture is the problem, not sacrifice.

I laughed so hard when I read this. I'm beginning to realize how many ppl don't want sentry nerfed and offer every solution short of fixing wr. Am I wrong? Are there genuinely ppl unaware how sentry works and sentry bombing for shield hopping works? If there are, why are they chiming in on this thread?

It's almost like there wasn't a discussion by a small handful of people about how altering Sacrifice wouldn't really work directly above this post. Oy.

...why are you +ing his point when you're directly contradicting him?

laughingMAN

Ultimate fix: Only bracket people with 166 Sentry/Hoods with each other. No nerfs required, all the shield hoppers can have their fun, and so can the rest of us. It's win-win-win!

dr tinykittylove

I tend to think of Sentry as 3* Juggs. Supernova = AOE Headbutt, WR = Unstoppable Crash. I'd like if WR's countdowns are reduced in number and staggered, plus changed to single target. You'd still get respectable damage and board shake without wiping out whole teams in one move, which has to be the most nonsensical skill the devs have come up with.

I'm hoping he gets nerfed soon so I can actually start putting iso in him and start using him.

Unknown

c101nguyen wrote:

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!

it's going to be X-Force till most ppl have lady Thor covered, then ppl will complain bout her like ppl are complain bout sentry atm. Yes Sentry needs tweaking but so will Lady Thor (low ap for great powers).. It will be a never ending cycle like c101nguyen says.

NorthernPolarity

c101nguyen wrote:

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!

1. Do you see X-Force teams literally taking 45 seconds to finish a match? Even if the meta shifts to X-Force, at least the winningest team won't be 3x faster than the second winningest team. This is why characters like X-Force and LadyThor are fine. They're strong, but they take some time (say 2-3 minutes per match) to win the game for you. Sentry is literally, all AP boosts, green match, yellow match, WR Sacrifice, gg. 4 turns to deal 30+k damage to the enemy team, which LadyThor or XForce doesn't even come close to matching.
2. Your suggestion of having all the bombs go off at once is hardly a minor tweak (since it would basically destroy the current form of the character), and implies to me that even you think he's way above anyone else.

Unknown

Re: Making World Rupture hit one target: If you still calculate each countdown separately, at 7 and 8 you're still getting about 15-20 attacks at 858 damage, eg about 13-17k damage in total (for about 2k dmg to Sentry), making it still way better than GSBW's Sniper Rifle, which costs 19 . Seems vastly out of line for the cost.

turul

NorthernPolarity wrote:

turul wrote:

Changing sacrifice to a casually useful, not self damaging move would be the best.

It would make sentry playable for multiple matches. and would bring charactr dependency on WR

So instead of bringing hood along, you bring bp? World rupture is the problem, not sacrifice.

Sentry + Hood is bad because you need Sentry Hood to safely fight against.
But Sentry+BP lets u play non sentry teams with near as fast shield hopping, cheaper AP, less HP loss.

I think removing hood (by removing sacrifise) would gain a lot of team diversitety

Spoit

daibar wrote:

Re: Making World Rupture hit one target: If you still calculate each countdown separately, at 7 and 8 you're still getting about 15-20 attacks at 858 damage, eg about 13-17k damage in total (for about 2k dmg to Sentry), making it still way better than GSBW's Sniper Rifle, which costs 19 . Seems vastly out of line for the cost.

Ummm...what? He maxes out at 16 tiles, and that's assuming none are matched or filled with . Which is "only" 13.6k damage, which yeah, is a bit higher than other 15 AP moves, but considering the self damage and the fact that you wouldn't get all the tiles out unscathed, single target damage for it would put it a lot closer to the normal ranges (e.g. losing 2 tiles (11.9k) would make it less net damage than DP's whales for 14 at 3x4069 = 12.2k)

Unknown

Thor 4*'s move are 4/4/3 matches and the 3 match move doesn't even do damage directly. It's hard to see her being faster than X Force who has moves on a similar number of matches but is not dependent on certain configuration of the board to get going.

X Force might need Surgical Strike tweaked or some kind of other meta game changed because there's a relatively large number of characters with green as their strongest color, including himself, which allows Surgical Strike to turn into a game over in most cases without the need for any other character. If there's actually a strong character with purple as his strongest color then this greatly limits what you can do with Surgical Strike. Sure you can have Fury or Deadpool on the team, but they're not really top tier PvP characters so their inclusion on the team weakens your team's overall strength, but if you don't have them then Surgical Strike on purple is just a normal damaging move. Blue is another hard color to attack with for Surgical Strike (pretty much limited to Magneto/Fury but that'd also mean you don't have The Hood). Black can at least attack X Force pretty safely (AI won't attempt to kill Punisher/Daken with a Surgical Strike and then immediately Surgical Strike again, but a human will), so the math in theory works out but a lack of strong or even just competitive characters with blue/purple as their strongest color is making X Force more powerful than he ought to be.