Ascended Winners and Losers

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  • Daniel2121
    Daniel2121 Posts: 280 Mover and Shaker

    @JoeHandle said:

    @Daniel2121 said:

    @JoeHandle said:

    @bbigler said:
    Dropping from 175% to 75% Thunderbolts damage buff is a big deal. Losing a turn on the stun is disappointing too. Her 2nd yellow passive usually never happens because you have more AP. The Red AOE is OK, not great. I think she'll fall into the Aunt May category of stopping at 370.

    Nah. Team-based perks are barely a hair above worthless. In practice, not losing anything, no reason to hobble a character / pass up on yet another stream of 5* rewards.

    Should I assume you have a 5* Iron May by now, then? :D because, for some reason, no one EVER uses her fully ascended to 5*.

    Daft.

    Do I have a 3>5 iMay yet? No, not yet. Finished a 370 about 6mos after her release, so further covers are going into dupes and they will eventually amount to a maxed out 5* copy, of course ... but ... what relevance to discussion of 4* Moonstone?

    There are some fun lineups leveraging her as a black battery, but 1) they involve her being ascended to 5* land, and 2) they don't involve pairings with any other Thunderbolts.

    The relevance is because your words from your previous post sounded like "not ascending a character fully to 5* is stupid because you're missing out on its 5* rewards". I dunno if that was what you MEANT to say but I did read it that way. No one uses a 5* May, because her boosts to her team's damage and health are inferior than they are when she is at 4*.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,096 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Daniel2121 said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @Daniel2121 said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @Daniel2121 said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @Daniel2121 said:
    Kinda bad if you asked me though... having the choice of more stun and bigger percentages is always gonna be better. And I wouldn't want her to do the tanking (which she will if she gets bigger match damage) if you screwed up the winfinite, or couldn't get it rolling on the first turn.

    What team are you using her in that takes advantage of the percentage buffs? The second yellow passive only buffs her own damage, and as a 4* it's going to be pretty meaningless.

    Why don't you want her to tank?

    I'm using Taskmaster with Sniper Rifle on his black. And yeah he has the Thunderbolts affiliation so...

    I don't want her to tank because 1) in case you couldn't start the winfinite on turn 1 from not using AP boosts/supports and 2) haven't looked into this but there might be some cases where another character could get better benefits from doing the black matches.

    I think there are much better options to use her with. Do you have Taskmaster ascended?

    I don't understand what you're saying about the tanking, at all.

    No, I don't have him ascended yet. What are those better options? I've seen people using her with things like 1A5 Venom, he just deals damage and 1-turn stuns with his purple, but has like no utility at all. Taskmaster has a bunch of different powers so he gets to be useful on top of dealing some damage

    I dunno what to say about the second point. I don't want her to get hit by things. I thought that was clear enough...

    There are a lot of really good combos with her. Some options are in this thread: https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/91879/pvp-meta-counter

    I wouldn't bother with Venom, he's ok when boosted but not great overall.

    I remain confused about why you don't want Moonstone to take damage. As a 5*, at lvl450, she has 80,000 health -- far more than your 4* Taskmaster. Is this a comic lore thing or something else I'm missing?

    I didn't see anything good there besides 5* Electro which is obviosly a counter to AOE damage, but not a really good candidate for a Moonstone winfinite imho.

    I don't like Venom either, no utility as I've said. I'm looking for a good Moonstone partner, not just any random character with a black power.

    80k health is good if you're tanking damage, but not stuns or other kinds of disabling abilities. Moonstone increases Thunderbolts damage, idc if there's lore involved between her and Taskmaster... it's just how this game goes.

    Uh, so her high health pool at 5* means she's...bad at being stunned? I'm even more confused now.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,560 Chairperson of the Boards

    @entrailbucket said:
    So all the percentages get lowered quite a bit and she loses one turn on the stun (for friendly and enemy, so that might be a bit of a wash?) but the tile manipulation stuff is unchanged and the damage numbers go up. She has a ton of health for some reason, so that's a point in favor of the 5*.

    I don't think she's a must ascend but I don't think it's a huge downgrade overall.

    I suspect they have just followed the theme of 2* Moonstone who has high health for a 2*.

  • WhiteBomber
    WhiteBomber Posts: 760 Critical Contributor
    edited 7 July 2025, 18:05

    Thanks for sharing Bucket. It's a bummer that she drops the percentage so drastically, but I think the match damage increase offsets this.

    IMO, her 2 best teammates are Namor3 (speed and efficiency) and Electro5 (team damage shut down). Having her at 5 would mean your Namor wouldn't need to be 5 to burn through people via match damage on her infinite. Electro is the real loss here, as her black damage was lovely because of the boost, but again, the match damage should help a lot with speed (you might want to stun Juggs now though due to his match damage resist).

    Her stun dropping a turn means nothing. Since her infinite has an incredibly low chance of dropping, her stun was only a nice to have addition anyway, and 2 turns is plenty to rekindle the infinite if needed.

    In the instance you are using her pink to stun, you would also want her to be 5star, because it sucks when you stun your only 5star and then get stuck with 4star damage during the infinite.

    Fortunately, she is awful on defense regardless, so it doesn't really matter if you ascend her. I would personally ascend her though for the health and match damage, opening up more use with other good unascended characters, like Emma, Veil etc.

  • Daniel2121
    Daniel2121 Posts: 280 Mover and Shaker
    edited 7 July 2025, 21:16

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Thanks for sharing Bucket. It's a bummer that she drops the percentage so drastically, but I think the match damage increase offsets this.

    IMO, her 2 best teammates are Namor3 (speed and efficiency) and Electro5 (team damage shut down). Having her at 5 would mean your Namor wouldn't need to be 5 to burn through people via match damage on her infinite. Electro is the real loss here, as her black damage was lovely because of the boost, but again, the match damage should help a lot with speed (you might want to stun Juggs now though due to his match damage resist).

    Her stun dropping a turn means nothing. Since her infinite has an incredibly low chance of dropping, her stun was only a nice to have addition anyway, and 2 turns is plenty to rekindle the infinite if needed.

    In the instance you are using her pink to stun, you would also want her to be 5star, because it sucks when you stun your only 5star and then get stuck with 4star damage during the infinite.

    Fortunately, she is awful on defense regardless, so it doesn't really matter if you ascend her. I would personally ascend her though for the health and match damage, opening up more use with other good unascended characters, like Emma, Veil etc.

    I use her stun to decongest the board and get it rid of tiles I don't want there. I said I use Taskmaster's Sniper Rifle specifically for this, but I don't always use him. Teams are flexible, you know. So having a longer stun sometimes helps there.

  • bbigler
    bbigler Posts: 2,180 Chairperson of the Boards

    I'll point this out again - if you put Refreshment Cart on Moonstone (which works perfectly with her winfinite) it also reduces the Friendly Stun to 1 turn. There are a variety of viable Thunderbolts out there, so the team buff of 175% really matters. One team I'm going to do some more testing with is 5*Bucky (and Aunt May). Bucky gets a double buff with May, which equates to an increase of 375%! Plus, Bucky duplicates his damage at 50% to his target. And don't forget his passive damage. It all adds up pretty fast when I played this team in PVE.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,560 Chairperson of the Boards

    Came up against a 3a5 Hulk and got destroyed! They had Gamma Ray or whatever it is called Support on and I couldn't make a dent with boosted Killmonger and Cap Marvel. Seems quite popular as I also saw a 672 one! No thanks!

  • BriMan2222
    BriMan2222 Posts: 1,720 Chairperson of the Boards

    @DAZ0273 said:
    Came up against a 3a5 Hulk and got destroyed! They had Gamma Ray or whatever it is called Support on and I couldn't make a dent with boosted Killmonger and Cap Marvel. Seems quite popular as I also saw a 672 one! No thanks!

    Same. I took out his team mates pretty easily but then hulk kept healing himself to full health everytime I got him almost dead, and he wound up with so much green ap that I was eating a gamma slap every single turn.

  • WhiteBomber
    WhiteBomber Posts: 760 Critical Contributor

    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,096 Chairperson of the Boards

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

    Killmonger was very, very strong in an America Chavez featured event a long time ago when he happened to be boosted -- so strong that if you weren't running him you were at a pretty massive disadvantage.

    I don't know what that means. I imagine he's annoying against the Shang-Chi infinite teams, but I don't know if anybody is doing that anymore. He's probably a decent counterplay against boosted 1* Spidey? I think he's a decent counter character against a metagame that mostly doesn't exist right now.

    5* Carol is pretty terrible. I have her at 550, and at 672 she's somehow still unusable, even after the buff she got. They need to just throw out her design and start over.

  • JoeHandle
    JoeHandle Posts: 738 Critical Contributor
    edited 9 July 2025, 17:07

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

    Was fun to be effective again, in a thematic way (don't make him angry!), while also not being impossible to defeat.

    And "all" it took was ascending him, waiting for a boost, and having a maxed out support.

  • WhiteBomber
    WhiteBomber Posts: 760 Critical Contributor

    @entrailbucket said:

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

    Killmonger was very, very strong in an America Chavez featured event a long time ago when he happened to be boosted -- so strong that if you weren't running him you were at a pretty massive disadvantage.

    I don't know what that means. I imagine he's annoying against the Shang-Chi infinite teams, but I don't know if anybody is doing that anymore. He's probably a decent counterplay against boosted 1* Spidey? I think he's a decent counter character against a metagame that mostly doesn't exist right now.

    5* Carol is pretty terrible. I have her at 550, and at 672 she's somehow still unusable, even after the buff she got. They need to just throw out her design and start over.

    His 1 niche ability doesn't even work; I'm not sure I've ever seen his locked crit tile stay locked through the end of my turn. I'm not sure what's happening with it because he was not good enough for me to figure it out, but that locking crit tiles never countered me, it still unlocked on my same turn.

    I've killed multiple of him boosted in this tournament where that was the result, on top of that, he contributed nothing else. Perhaps he reacts differently to Chavez crit tiles / tiles created in different ways or maybe he did something better on offense, but defense, he is useless.

    I love the concept of punishing crit / combo characters though! It just isn't him.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,096 Chairperson of the Boards

    @WhiteBomber said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

    Killmonger was very, very strong in an America Chavez featured event a long time ago when he happened to be boosted -- so strong that if you weren't running him you were at a pretty massive disadvantage.

    I don't know what that means. I imagine he's annoying against the Shang-Chi infinite teams, but I don't know if anybody is doing that anymore. He's probably a decent counterplay against boosted 1* Spidey? I think he's a decent counter character against a metagame that mostly doesn't exist right now.

    5* Carol is pretty terrible. I have her at 550, and at 672 she's somehow still unusable, even after the buff she got. They need to just throw out her design and start over.

    His 1 niche ability doesn't even work; I'm not sure I've ever seen his locked crit tile stay locked through the end of my turn. I'm not sure what's happening with it because he was not good enough for me to figure it out, but that locking crit tiles never countered me, it still unlocked on my same turn.

    I've killed multiple of him boosted in this tournament where that was the result, on top of that, he contributed nothing else. Perhaps he reacts differently to Chavez crit tiles / tiles created in different ways or maybe he did something better on offense, but defense, he is useless.

    I love the concept of punishing crit / combo characters though! It just isn't him.

    Not the locking ability, this one!

    Mine is only lvl504. This is the boosted number.

    I suppose you can play around it by having a ton of red AP on hand, but because he locks the tile, you'll often end up making 2 or 3 crit matches in a row and getting smacked for 100 or 200k.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,560 Chairperson of the Boards

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

    Killmonger is OK but yeah, Carol, not soo great.

  • WhiteBomber
    WhiteBomber Posts: 760 Critical Contributor

    @entrailbucket said:

    @WhiteBomber said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @WhiteBomber said:
    Glad to hear hulk was actually viable. Killmonger and Cap Marvel on the other hand... those are some unfortunate temp buffs.

    Killmonger was very, very strong in an America Chavez featured event a long time ago when he happened to be boosted -- so strong that if you weren't running him you were at a pretty massive disadvantage.

    I don't know what that means. I imagine he's annoying against the Shang-Chi infinite teams, but I don't know if anybody is doing that anymore. He's probably a decent counterplay against boosted 1* Spidey? I think he's a decent counter character against a metagame that mostly doesn't exist right now.

    5* Carol is pretty terrible. I have her at 550, and at 672 she's somehow still unusable, even after the buff she got. They need to just throw out her design and start over.

    His 1 niche ability doesn't even work; I'm not sure I've ever seen his locked crit tile stay locked through the end of my turn. I'm not sure what's happening with it because he was not good enough for me to figure it out, but that locking crit tiles never countered me, it still unlocked on my same turn.

    I've killed multiple of him boosted in this tournament where that was the result, on top of that, he contributed nothing else. Perhaps he reacts differently to Chavez crit tiles / tiles created in different ways or maybe he did something better on offense, but defense, he is useless.

    I love the concept of punishing crit / combo characters though! It just isn't him.

    Not the locking ability, this one!

    Mine is only lvl504. This is the boosted number.

    I suppose you can play around it by having a ton of red AP on hand, but because he locks the tile, you'll often end up making 2 or 3 crit matches in a row and getting smacked for 100 or 200k.

    Makes me even more curious then, because I either had a lot of red on hand, or it wasn't workin. I think I would have felt that :smiley:

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,560 Chairperson of the Boards

    Killmonger's biggest issue is his lack of health, in a world where most 5* boost to at least over 200k he is 50k at least behind that, if you have a 3a5 Hulk who can hand slap you for 48K every turn, he doesn't last long (and even less in a non Leapfrog world).

  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,570 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 9 July 2025, 17:52

    For someone whose whole deal is retaliating against crits, the fact he has no defense against eating an incoming heavy crit match means it isn’t something you are doing more than a time or two. He is a lot more effective when the enemy isn’t running him. I bet that’s what was happening in the above scenario where crits were unlocking right away - enemy killmonger unlocked them at the start of his turn.

  • BlackBoltRocks
    BlackBoltRocks Posts: 1,253 Chairperson of the Boards

    I'm a bit bored (especially with all the hullaballoo surrounding the engine and now NovaFrankie), and it's F4 season, so here are both Johnny Human Torches

    2a5 Human Torch (Johnny Storm), lv550
    Red at 5: 51952 damage, destroys 2 tiles
    Black at 5: 8 x 4650 Attack tiles, depletes Blue, Purple, and Yellow AP by 30%
    Green at 5: 4225 damage per Green AP, max 38029 damage

    3a5 Human Torch (Classic), lv550
    Red at 5: 33769 damage, destroys 4 tiles
    Black at 5: 8 x 3556 Attack tiles, depletes Blue, Purple, and Yellow AP by 10%
    Green at 5: 4225 damage per Green AP, max 38029 damage

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,560 Chairperson of the Boards

    I don’t remember last time I used either. Does he get AP for destroying tiles?

  • BlackBoltRocks
    BlackBoltRocks Posts: 1,253 Chairperson of the Boards

    @DAZ0273 said:
    I don’t remember last time I used either. Does he get AP for destroying tiles?

    Yes. Based on that 3a5 Torch seems better than 2a5, but 2a5 has much more initial damage. And with the pace of the game today you’ll rarely get off more than 2 Fireballs per match on average

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