6-Star Characters

@entrailbucket said:
Oh, also worth remembering -- fully maxed lvl450 5* were very rare, but because of the massive discrepancy in health and match damage, under covered/sub-450 5* were pretty usable.

Yup, for a long time my most powerful character was a 4/5/0 OML. He just crushed everything with match damage and couldn't die.

@GrimSkald said:

@entrailbucket said:

@GrimSkald said:

@bluewolf said:
It's going to be very interesting to see how they balance out the need to make the shiny new tier powerful enough to need and yet somehow not make your time focused on lower tiers, ascending them etc, feel like wasted time.

6s may force a re-evaluation of ascension approach depending on what resources can be used, whether they obliterate lower tiers etc.

(Not to mention the upcoming rebalances).

This is going to be key. If the 6★s are far and away better than anything, then there's really no point in working up the rest of your Roster -- it will take too long to get anything other than 1★s there, so the top end will be dominated by native 6★s and 1|6★s (as noted above, when they allow ascension, which will almost certainly not be day 1.) At that point the top end can use cover swaps to bring up the top end 5★s there (many of us have dupe MThors, for example,) but it will still be pretty rare.

I can't help but think that a fully covered 6★ won't be better than a 550 5★ (even not boosted, but we'll see, it could be closer to a 672.) Otherwise it badly exacerbates the "only a few characters are usable" problem.

We can really only compare to the 5* rollout. They were extremely difficult to get at launch, so they were kind of irrelevant except for the most insane whales. They were beatable with top tier 4* but required a lot of effort, strategy, or luck.

We did catch up eventually but by that time there was more of a tier. Of course, only a few of them were usable, so it didn't really matter that there were more 5*. Hopefully they avoid that problem this time.

I think there was a very distinct change in philosophy after the first few 5★s. I suspect they intended the 5★s to be very hard to get but still very useful with even just a few covers. Keeping in mind that this was before Champion levels, ascension, and even weekly boosted characters this was much easier to accomplish. Heck, even their match damage was impressive -- there were 2★ and 3★ players doing a lot with a 1 yellow cover OML -- this was one of the reason he was nerfed as he was, not because he was too powerful, but because something like 80% of the player base used him regularly.

We may see this philosophy in use with the 6★s, particularly if they're horrendously difficult to cover. If a 4 or 5 cover 6★ is equal to a 450 5★, for example, that would add some granularity to the game.

I guess we'll see. At this point I'm cautiously optimistic.

I truly believe that they never anticipated the whales. Prior to Surfer, the biggest whales in the game had spent hundreds of dollars, and we all thought THAT was insane. You can go back and look at forum posts from that time. We could straight-up buy max 4* once you had the character at 1/1/1, and I think it cost maybe $50. The number of people who did it, though, was extremely low. $50 was way too much to spend on a max character!

I think they expected 5* to be super rare, such that almost no one would get them to 450, and it'd take insane luck or years to get there. When a few players started spending thousands to max out every new character immediately, they had to adapt. It was totally unprecedented in this game, and I believe that's what led to champions, CP, etc -- I don't think that stuff was ever part of the plan at launch.

@Read_Only said:
That one whale spent a hell of a lot more than hundreds per month prior to 5* Rumor was he spent money that didn't belong to him and got in a lot of trouble. Who knows but he was far far bigger than anyone other whale at that time.

Was this the guy who had like 12 270 dupes each of xforce and 4thor? That's the only one I remember who'd qualify from that time -- there really was nothing worthwhile to buy!