Marvel Puzzle Quest: Character Rebalances Insights

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  • KGB
    KGB Posts: 3,957 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 15 November 2025, 03:52

    @entrailbucket said:

    @BriMan2222 said:
    How do you create a character that wins by sending people away and then another character that sends everyone away and not see that interaction coming?

    This is the team that gave us Chasm, when Hulk already existed. They gave us Sidewinder (with M'baku) and Frankie in their original forms. They gave us Sam Wilson when Juggernaut already existed.

    They don't see any interactions coming. They don't play the game like we do.

    And, like, playtesting characters for overall balance and weird interactions is a hard job! There are a ton of characters and abilities (and supports!), and the big games get this wrong all the time too! But these guys consistently miss on pretty basic stuff.

    I'd suggest the same thing everyone else has (just ask the players to help!) but that would probably make things worse. Most of the players who offer to help prefer overpowered stuff, and would likely not bother reporting these kinds of interactions.

    Ultimately I think the only solution that's going to work for all these winfinites (and there are way too many to easy squash out given more appear all the time) is to put caps on the number of times you can fire a given power (or have a passive trigger) in a turn. For example you can stop 1 star Hawkeye winfinite by capping his Red and Purple powers to say a max of 2 times a turn. Same with KangVeil and any other winfinte.

    KGB

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,747 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 15 November 2025, 04:19

    @KGB said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @BriMan2222 said:
    How do you create a character that wins by sending people away and then another character that sends everyone away and not see that interaction coming?

    This is the team that gave us Chasm, when Hulk already existed. They gave us Sidewinder (with M'baku) and Frankie in their original forms. They gave us Sam Wilson when Juggernaut already existed.

    They don't see any interactions coming. They don't play the game like we do.

    And, like, playtesting characters for overall balance and weird interactions is a hard job! There are a ton of characters and abilities (and supports!), and the big games get this wrong all the time too! But these guys consistently miss on pretty basic stuff.

    I'd suggest the same thing everyone else has (just ask the players to help!) but that would probably make things worse. Most of the players who offer to help prefer overpowered stuff, and would likely not bother reporting these kinds of interactions.

    Ultimately I think the only solution that's going to work for all these winfinites (and there are way too many to easy squash out given more appear all the time) is to put caps on the number of times you can fire a given power (or have a passive trigger) in a turn. For example you can stop 1 star Hawkeye winfinite by capping his Red and Purple powers to say a max of 2 times a turn. Same with KangVeil and any other winfinte.

    KGB

    I think there's a significant difference between board control infinites like Hawkeye or Shang-Chi or Moonstone and the Darkveil combo.

    The board control infinites typically require some modicum of match-3 skill and at least a tiny bit of board luck. I honestly don't have a problem with any of these guys, because unless you're some kind of match-3 savant, they're WAY too slow to be competitive in anything. The game has basically always had stuff like this, and they've mostly never bothered addressing them (pour one out for 3* Magneto, who did not deserve to die!).

    The Darkveil combo is just another instance of the old Bishop problem that they've (again, hilariously) already had to fix twice.

    (Ok, somebody is going to jump on that comparison. Darkveil is nowhere near the problem that Bishop and Cap were. That is not what I'm saying. The "old Bishop problem" is characters with fixed damage thresholds on passives, that get worse as you level them up.)

  • KGB
    KGB Posts: 3,957 Chairperson of the Boards

    @entrailbucket said:

    @KGB said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @BriMan2222 said:
    How do you create a character that wins by sending people away and then another character that sends everyone away and not see that interaction coming?

    This is the team that gave us Chasm, when Hulk already existed. They gave us Sidewinder (with M'baku) and Frankie in their original forms. They gave us Sam Wilson when Juggernaut already existed.

    They don't see any interactions coming. They don't play the game like we do.

    And, like, playtesting characters for overall balance and weird interactions is a hard job! There are a ton of characters and abilities (and supports!), and the big games get this wrong all the time too! But these guys consistently miss on pretty basic stuff.

    I'd suggest the same thing everyone else has (just ask the players to help!) but that would probably make things worse. Most of the players who offer to help prefer overpowered stuff, and would likely not bother reporting these kinds of interactions.

    Ultimately I think the only solution that's going to work for all these winfinites (and there are way too many to easy squash out given more appear all the time) is to put caps on the number of times you can fire a given power (or have a passive trigger) in a turn. For example you can stop 1 star Hawkeye winfinite by capping his Red and Purple powers to say a max of 2 times a turn. Same with KangVeil and any other winfinte.

    KGB

    I think there's a significant difference between board control infinites like Hawkeye or Shang-Chi or Moonstone and the Darkveil combo.

    The board control infinites typically require some modicum of match-3 skill and at least a tiny bit of board luck. I honestly don't have a problem with any of these guys, because unless you're some kind of match-3 savant, they're WAY too slow to be competitive in anything. The game has basically always had stuff like this, and they've mostly never bothered addressing them (pour one out for 3* Magneto, who did not deserve to die!).

    You and I and others might see it that way. But I suspect the Devs view all winfinites the same way (especially turn 0 ones): A guaranteed win against a team of any level that not only allows massive punch ups in PvE/PvP (the REAL rewards as you know are in progression, not placement) but also makes creating new challenges vastly more difficult (if not impossible) because of the existence of the winfinite.

    So I'd expect them to come down on all of them rather than play favorites based on some skill level (Hawkeye requires zero skill, I've never once had the winfinte stop if I start with 5 purple).

    KGB

  • trenchdigger
    trenchdigger Posts: 247 Tile Toppler

    If anything, I’ve seen more Polaris and MThor since their nerfs, but maybe that’s just been people checking to see if they are still useable, so @KGB could be right.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,747 Chairperson of the Boards

    @KGB said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @KGB said:

    @entrailbucket said:

    @BriMan2222 said:
    How do you create a character that wins by sending people away and then another character that sends everyone away and not see that interaction coming?

    This is the team that gave us Chasm, when Hulk already existed. They gave us Sidewinder (with M'baku) and Frankie in their original forms. They gave us Sam Wilson when Juggernaut already existed.

    They don't see any interactions coming. They don't play the game like we do.

    And, like, playtesting characters for overall balance and weird interactions is a hard job! There are a ton of characters and abilities (and supports!), and the big games get this wrong all the time too! But these guys consistently miss on pretty basic stuff.

    I'd suggest the same thing everyone else has (just ask the players to help!) but that would probably make things worse. Most of the players who offer to help prefer overpowered stuff, and would likely not bother reporting these kinds of interactions.

    Ultimately I think the only solution that's going to work for all these winfinites (and there are way too many to easy squash out given more appear all the time) is to put caps on the number of times you can fire a given power (or have a passive trigger) in a turn. For example you can stop 1 star Hawkeye winfinite by capping his Red and Purple powers to say a max of 2 times a turn. Same with KangVeil and any other winfinte.

    KGB

    I think there's a significant difference between board control infinites like Hawkeye or Shang-Chi or Moonstone and the Darkveil combo.

    The board control infinites typically require some modicum of match-3 skill and at least a tiny bit of board luck. I honestly don't have a problem with any of these guys, because unless you're some kind of match-3 savant, they're WAY too slow to be competitive in anything. The game has basically always had stuff like this, and they've mostly never bothered addressing them (pour one out for 3* Magneto, who did not deserve to die!).

    You and I and others might see it that way. But I suspect the Devs view all winfinites the same way (especially turn 0 ones): A guaranteed win against a team of any level that not only allows massive punch ups in PvE/PvP (the REAL rewards as you know are in progression, not placement) but also makes creating new challenges vastly more difficult (if not impossible) because of the existence of the winfinite.

    So I'd expect them to come down on all of them rather than play favorites based on some skill level (Hawkeye requires zero skill, I've never once had the winfinte stop if I start with 5 purple).

    KGB

    We really can't know, because who knows what answer we'd get if we asked them. They just gave us Hawkeye, so either they don't know what they're doing (very possible!), or board-based infinites are ok. (And fwiw when I said Hawkeye etc take "skill," what I meant was that it's not just button-mashing. You have to actually sort of kind of pay attention to what you're doing, in a way that lots of the past overpowered characters in other categories didn't require).

    I said earlier that I think they'll go after Shang-Chi's healing, because I can't really see any other reason, with so many other characters of this type. True healing has caused problems before, too.

  • NMANOZ1
    NMANOZ1 Posts: 176 Tile Toppler

    The real reason is they want to make characters weaker, is to push people to spend money on 6 star$

  • WampaX
    WampaX Posts: 54 Match Maker

    @Bustapup said:
    The existence of a 'meta' in any game is bad news, it shows that something has fundamentally gone wrong with the balancing. There should never be a dominant 'meta,' especially one that has maintained a stranglehold on the game for years.

    A meta existing in a competitive collectable game is always inevitable. Some combination of components will always be better than others and most players will inevitably gravitate toward that as it is the easiest or fastest way to victory.

    I do agree that a dominant meta where nothing changes for a significant amount of time makes for a poor play experience, but it also encourages creativity to find ways around it.

    It does fall to the devs to break up dominant metas and this team has not had enough cycles to devote to it for so long that entrenchment has set in . . . and doing anything to shift that meta at that point is going to result in calls of "shots fired"

  • Timemachinego
    Timemachinego Posts: 617 Critical Contributor

    @Bustapup said:

    The very fact that s0kun felt compelled to make this post is frankly ridiculous and is a clear indicator of how unreasonable this community has become.

    Anyone with an iota of sense can see that these characters have been (and arguably remain) extremely broken and detrimental to the health of the game.

    The existence of a 'meta' in any game is bad news, it shows that something has fundamentally gone wrong with the balancing. There should never be a dominant 'meta,' especially one that has maintained a stranglehold on the game for years.

    Every single nerf and balance update will be welcomed by me, even if it affects characters I love because if the game is properly balanced, it should mean every character remains viable.

    Some people in here need to grow up, as the backlash to the Jane and Polaris changes has been genuinely embarrassing to read.

    I'm glad you'll be glad, but you seem to be missing how there will always be a new best thing. You can nerf everything and the least worthless of them will still be the one you pursue. With a game like this it's virtually impossible to reach true balance, even games with many fewer characters and no team power interaction struggle with it.

    I'm personally indifferent to the nerfs, I only ever use Mthor and Polaris for fun or quest completion at this point, but the people that are likely still paying to get ahead are the ones they hit hardest. It's foolish of the devs and I can't blame the response.

  • Read_Only
    Read_Only Posts: 60 Match Maker

    Believe this then I have a bridge to sell you.

    Quite simply they want to adjust Kang Juggs and more and just ran an anniversary vault where they took hundreds of thousands of HP with those characters and more in. May was also in there and with the criteria they suggested she must be on the list too. They just want to create some distance between that gouging and adjusting them.

    I mean not once have they slowed anything else down while this disaster continues.

    If they have thought this far ahead then quite simply give as a list of the ones intended to be nerfed. I'd rather that and have them change their minds that do what I just did and spend 200k HP to get covers for Kang, May and Juggs.

    I use a cheese team in Sim that no one else uses, I never see it. I never see it in pvp at all. It's use rate must be through the floor. But It gets me through the CN node with zero damage. It's so slow I watch a TV program while it all plays out. It will be interesting to see if that gets nerfed.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 12,026 Chairperson of the Boards

    One of the problems with all of this is that instead of balancing, they can't seem to help create more problems. Take 1* Hawkeye for instance. Was he bad? Yes. So what did they do? Did they make him good? No they made him ridiculous. I fought a 1a5 who was boosted, I won that fight as his health isn't too high but it was a close call because that Hawkeye fired his purple 5 times! Five lots of criticals! I mean it's hilarious but how does that happen?!?! Yet R4G starting with a few strike tiles that often get matched straight away is too much.

  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,632 Chairperson of the Boards

    I hope the “man, usage is still super high, what gives?” Window looks like considering how long it takes to grow alternatives? Hopefully the expectation isn’t immediate usage drops

  • BriMan2222
    BriMan2222 Posts: 1,934 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 15 November 2025, 14:42

    The real reason is they want to make characters weaker, is to push people to spend money on 6 star$

    If that is the case they're doing a really terrible job, since I currently have no way to buy with no deals for covers or shards for him.

  • BriMan2222
    BriMan2222 Posts: 1,934 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 15 November 2025, 14:44

    I just started pvp and I'm still seeing the same people who usually run mthor/ pol, pol/brb, or shang/mthor still running those teams.

    So if their goal was so stop people using them, it doesn't look to be working. I guess those people didn't get the notice that they can't win with those teams anymore and should be quiting the game.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,747 Chairperson of the Boards

    @BriMan2222 said:
    I just started pvp and I'm still seeing the same people who usually run mthor/ pol, pol/brb, or shang/mthor still running those teams.

    So if their goal was so stop people using them, it doesn't look to be working. I guess those people didn't get the notice that they can't win with those teams anymore and should be quiting the game.

    Since there was nothing about this communicated in the actual game, a lot of folks probably don't know they were changed.

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