Which characters win more often on defense? (3*s and oBW)

over_clocked

A poll mostly for 3* players, but transitioning players are welcome to vote, too. I know that some 2* teams are strong enough to beat an average 3* team reliably enough (*cough* oBW/Ares(Thor), cStorm/MMN *cough*).

Barring using Magneto on offense, in the aftermath of the Spidey nerf there are plenty of characters that can straight up kitty you up, including many, many recent releases. So, while the devil is in the details and success usually lies in character synergy, not individual strength, I believe it would be interesting to see the results by the end of the week. I did not include the non-factor 3*s that no one ever runs outside of their respective tournaments (Ragnarok, Loki, Doom, IM 40, Daredevil). I also excluded GSBW in favor of oBW because honestly, Daredevil is more likely to win on defense than GSBW.

You are encouraged to vote for characters that you personally have lost to recently in Versus events*, since you don't know for sure which defensive team won for you in a given tournament unless you never changed the characters. If you are 100% sure about a particular team of yours being victorious, you can vote, too.

The poll will close in 6 days. You may choose up to 7 options.

* Nothing to do here for those perfect beings that never lose on offense.

Unknown

Hood
OBW at 3 Purple
Hulk if I miscalculate dmg.

Spoit

Hood is fairly predictable, so as long as you focus on one or two colors, you can usually limit the effects of his AP stealing until you can use a power to take him out.

OBW, on the other hand, can easily turn the whole match around if you aren't keeping an eagle eye on the AP bar, or if she gets a cascade off.

Hulk, is usually just a HP wall, but if you miscalculate, can easily wreck you if there are multiple anger tiles. Or if you finish off the other 2 with enough strike tiles to trigger anger with match-3s but not enough to use a power to finish him.

And sentry....is really really fast

HairyDave

I feel special - I've got the only vote for Lazy Cap so far

Granted it had a lot to do a rubbish board but once he got that shield-throwing train going I couldn't stop him. I got him down to about 250 health and then he just tore me apart. He took down Punisher, Psylocke and OBW for the total loss of about 30 more health

Other than that freak occurrence, I generally only lose to Thor (either version) and OBW, and in both cases it's because the AI got a lucky cascade.

over_clocked

Could a mod merge my thread into that one viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9847 ? Seems redundant to have both.

Unknown

The Hood is devastating when there's a color mismatch. Suppose my duo is Thor + Daken, and your duo is BP + The Hood (yeah I know this doesn't make sense, but let's just say you have that). Since my team has no use for black, I'll probably not be matching it, which means not only is the computer going to pick up black relatively unopposed, but if I happen to get any black via cascades they'll likely to steal it and possibly get enough for a Rage of the Panther. But if the opposing team is say Thor + The Hood, then you'd never concede green/yellow to that team to begin with. Either you match all the yellow/green and then there wouldn't be enough on board for The Hood to easily steal, or the worst case is the other side got them all, but in that case there still wouldn't be enough tiles on the board for AP steal (not to mention you have no AP of that color if they got them all).

Of course, color mismatches do happen quite often in this game which is why The Hood is almost always dangerous. OBW doesn't need a color mismatch at all, since she steals everything, though she has less HP compared to The Hood.

Mawtful

oBW, lThor, cMags. Through the power of cascades.

oBW would need to be covering at least two out of purple, blue, black for the stacking epsionage/strike/cascade effect to really hurt, but it's not uncommon for an opposing oBW to cascade from 0 into 8-11 purple AP in a single turn and after the first cast, it can become increasingly difficult to play catch up, even for fast characters like Punisher and Psylocke. I think a lot of my losses to oBW are also when she's paired with my second pick, lThor.

The losses to lThor can probably also be mostly attributed to cascades. It can be difficult to deny yellow/green when you don't even get the chance.

I only fear defending Mags when it's a level 5 purple around max level. Without a way to deny/steal purple, that AP pool can creep up, and a strong Translocation can one shot squishies.

Unknown

I have generally been losing to Hulk, if my OBW gets downed and I use too many of Punisher's strike tiles because then his anger triggers like crazy and I have no shot of beating him. But generally, it hasn't been that big of an issue because my OBW rarely gets downed anymore.

LThor is a huge pain as well because sometimes he can cascade and receive a lot of AP to fuel Thunder Strike and/or CtS.

I would vote for Sentry, Black Panther, or Lazy Daken, but I avoid them because I don't feel my roster is strong enough to deal with them right now.

over_clocked

BP is not that bad because you only have to deny black and he can't cascade like LT does. Not many people run BP in Versus these days, he's actually rarely seen outside of his tourneys. Sentry is hard to counter without amazing board control like Magneto or mStorm who is not prime PvP material.

Unknown

To counter Sentry you need to deny green and red, not all that dissimilar to denying yellow and green vs L.Thor BUT Sentry does need a bit less in the way of those colours so a bit more dicey.

The way the thread is phrased makes voting tricky because I can't remember the last time I lost on offence when I wasn't trying to lower my MMR BUT I will use a +3/+3 boost sometimes (and no... I don't (ab)use C.Mags every match, been rocking Daken + Fatty Thor + featured lately to prepare for C.Mags to get the Spidey treatment).

IMO Sentry + Daken is the best defensive team but it takes BOTH. A Sentry without Daken is fine on offence but the odds of the AI getting sacrifice off before world rupture aren't that great and without strikes you're down to his red which is ok but not exactly amazing.

Looking at it from the other perspective though I can talk about defensive wins (sometimes get those ). IMO it relies most heavily on who the featured hero is than anything else. I get a LOT more defensive wins in unholy outlaw (whenever it's run) and Hood LRs (when I used to try in LRs because the rewards weren't ****) than any other PvP. My Hood has been lvl 120 for ages (finally decided to get those last 21 levels as ISO allows) but gave me more defensive success than a buffed 141 L.Thor or lvl 141 buffed Patch (probably second best).

Buffed utility heroes, or just lower health heroes in general probably give the best bang for your buck. They are normally hamstrung in PvP by how easy they are to shift, so the extra health on those is probably more useful than the extra health and damage on an L.Thor since it means the attacker's L.Thor just need to get his abilities off before your defensive one and your team is decimated not matter what you picked. On the other hand a buffed Hood doesn't increase attacker killing speed at all over his unbuffed counterpart (Intimidation damage ftw? ) so it slows things down and gives more time for the ai to get a cascade and potentially give you a win.

Unknown

From an even keel: Hulk and LThor.

Hulk if I run out of board manipulation while he has 10+ tiles out.

LThor on the cascade nightmare scenario.

OBW is no threat--far too squishy, and you usually know if you're going to get screwed by Recon early so you can dump AP or mitigate. She's a great character in her own right, but badly overused and holds many players back who could be forming better teams than OBW+Pun.

simonsez

I can't believe OBW is getting that many votes. There can't be anyone who skips a battle because of her. I'm not sure you could say that about most of the rest.

mags1587

I wouldn't skip a battle with OBW, but I have lost matches due to her. There are times when despite my best efforts, she's able to steal (often because she collects blue and heals while I'm denying her purple) and then suddenly lazy Thor has enough AP to wipe out my entire team. It says something that I have to pay more attention to an OBW-lazyThor team than, say, a BP-lazyThor team.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

I can't believe OBW is getting that many votes. There can't be anyone who skips a battle because of her. I'm not sure you could say that about most of the rest.

I never skip her, but if she gets a crazy cascade it can be game over. Admittedly, that's true for a lot of people, but she can pile on to it by healing her people up and stealing your AP before the Call the Storms (or whatever) start. Before I started using CMags regularly (who pretty much neuters her) I had this happen about very 20th fight with her (which was every 20th fight, since she's on every GD team).

Unknown

Zero votes for spiderman? D'Oh! i 've forgotten that it's useless now. Thanks D3!

over_clocked

You'd laugh at me but sometimes I lose to oBW/Pun teams (usually when I don't take Magneto and take my own oBW instead), enemy purple-black cascades FTW.

Edit: I will create a new poll with combos after this one, combos formed from the winners (like LT/Hood, LT/oBW, Sentry/Daken, Hood/oBW, etc.). It sucks that Sentry/Daken are fairly new, but maybe those who rock them on defense can contribute.

Unknown

It's just not that unusual for the AI to pick up 10 AP of some color and they don't even need a miracle cascade to do that.

So the question is who does the most damage when they do inevitably actually pick up the AP they can use? Well, Aggressive Recon is pretty high up there in terms of damage done. If you don't have a yellow user, it's not unusual for Thor to get close to 12. I used to let Spiderman pick up yellow even before the nerf since Web Bandages is pretty much harmless with the way AI uses it and I can reliably give the enemy Spiderman enough for a Web Bandages every game (because it's still much better they collect yellow and heal for 700 on one guy instead of collecting any other color that can actually do damage).

Punisher also makes very good use of that range of AP, but generally he lacks the firepower to finish the job. It'll certainly get rather uncomfortable if he fired off a second Judgment or Molotov though.

simonsez

Not saying OBW doesn't win, but the point of this thread is who wins more often, ie who are you better off skipping. Since no one's skipping her, the perception must be that she doesn't win enough to warrant a skip.

over_clocked

oBW/LT is quite a combo, so hopefully the next round with combos will shed more light.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Not saying OBW doesn't win, but the point of this thread is who wins more often, ie who are you better off skipping. Since no one's skipping her, the perception must be that she doesn't win enough to warrant a skip.

I almost never skip a team that's worth more than 25 points but OBW and Daken are probably the character I have to pay the most attention to. My team can usually come back from something like a Rage of the Panther, but it's awfully hard to come back from an Aggressive Recon when you're staring at 0 APs across the board.

Unknown

OBW is an interesting one... she has amazing cascade potential thanks to aggressive recon if it fires after a few turns (so there are AP to steal) BUT she has 3115 health (know that one off the top of my head). If you have lvl 141 3* heroes and you didn't pick literally the slowest heroes in the game (GSBW, L.Cap etc) then you would expect to down her before she can do much. Either she gets her purple AP too early and steals a few measly AP or she's too slow and you've either downed her or close to it.

She is most effective vs weaker rosters (although they are probably running an OBW of their own ) or if the board is INCREDIBLY uncooperative. If the board is giving you bugger all choice and you're picking up a rainbow of colours and ENV tiles then she can be a real pain, but so could a lot of heroes, Hood being a great example since he just needs YOUR board to be uncooperative and doesn't need to gather AP of a given colour himself.

She can contribute to wins vs 3* teams by delaying you and feeding a damage dealer but it's rare as hell. I literally can't remember the last time an OBW did much of anything to even annoy me. Also damn near hard countered by Lazy Daken's passive strikes (as is Hood incidentally).

So why is she getting lots of votes? Simple! Not everyone voting has a strong 3* roster (or even usable 3* heroes) and they'll be facing her a LOT more than anyone else because of their MMR bracket and the fact she is so damned popular. When you are relying on an Ares/Thor to get through 3115 health it's a lot more likely an AR will cause you issues, esp when the AP you've gathered is going to be useful to the other team's Ares/Thor.

Now if GSBW was actually Lazy OBW then that would be a bigger issue...