Character Feedback

F0nt
F0nt GLOBAL_MODERATORS, ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 4 Just Dropped In
in MPQ General Discussion

Hi Everyone,
My name is Finn, and I'm one of the designers on Marvel Puzzle Quest.

I'm posting here to check in on what people think of the new characters being added to the game.

Sword Master - Lin Lie, Iron Fist - Lin Lie, Falcon - Jaoquin Torres, and Toad - Mortimer Toynbee - How are we feeling about them?

I'm hoping we can get a bit of open feedback with characters going forward to be more active in making characters that the community can enjoy and see a use case for with existing ones.

Cheers!

«13

Comments

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,298 Chairperson of the Boards

    Hahahahagaha good luck with this.

    Sword Master -- probably ok when boosted/lvl672, just because of numbers, but doesn't do anything unique or interesting. Non-blue stuns are generally useful, his red is fine, but black/the entire locked tile situation is just way too much work for way too little reward. If I play the lock/unlock game or whatever it needs to be ending the game, not doing some mediocre damage.

    Joaquin -- seems built to counter a strike tile metagame/Sam specifically. He's not going to do that, because he's just way too slow at it. The Sam/Juggernaut team makes a billion strikes every turn at 10 million strength, so reducing a few of them by a % is not helpful. Red is fine. Yellow is a bit weak, although I think there's a good, annoying "flap around forever" Airborne team out there because we have zero good counters for Airborne at the moment. Blue is fine, and probably does decent damage against the Sam team, except that you're dead by the time they have enough strikes on board.

    Toad just showed up like 5 minutes ago so no idea yet.

  • ThisisClemFandango
    ThisisClemFandango Posts: 1,307 Chairperson of the Boards

    I will make a ridiculous knee jerk reaction as this forum expects it.
    5's have not been as good as the 4's.
    I think its important that some players will like the character and others will only see their pvp viability, if they aren't meta they will be tossed aside but I wouldn't see that as a design issue.
    I've been a huge fan of the art direction since ip2 take over so overall I doff my cap to you all

  • Borstock
    Borstock Posts: 3,286 Chairperson of the Boards

    It's tough to get excited about new characters if they can't stop what turn 0/1 teams are doing. It doesn't appear as if these characters can and early word is Toad just created more of those teams.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,298 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Borstock said:
    It's tough to get excited about new characters if they can't stop what turn 0/1 teams are doing. It doesn't appear as if these characters can and early word is Toad just created more of those teams.

    Yep. In this metagame, new characters either need to win turn 0 or somehow stop turn 0 wins to see play.

  • F0nt
    F0nt GLOBAL_MODERATORS, ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 4 Just Dropped In

    @ThisisClemFandango said:
    I will make a ridiculous knee jerk reaction as this forum expects it.
    5's have not been as good as the 4's.
    I think its important that some players will like the character and others will only see their pvp viability, if they aren't meta they will be tossed aside but I wouldn't see that as a design issue.
    I've been a huge fan of the art direction since ip2 take over so overall I doff my cap to you all

    Thanks, Clem, I'll pass on your praise to the art team; they've been having a lot of fun making them. With 5 stars not being as good as the 4 stars, what parts are making them not worthwhile to you?

    Yeah its pretty challenging to create new characters that can appease all aspects of the community, some will be more PVP-centric, or PVE.

    Ultimately, we do want to make characters that feel meta-relevant, but also look at potentially shifting that as we go along.

    I’ve been sticky beaking the nerf forum post a bit and taking notes for the future.

  • F0nt
    F0nt GLOBAL_MODERATORS, ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 4 Just Dropped In

    @entrailbucket said:
    Hahahahagaha good luck with this.

    Sword Master -- probably ok when boosted/lvl672, just because of numbers, but doesn't do anything unique or interesting. Non-blue stuns are generally useful, his red is fine, but black/the entire locked tile situation is just way too much work for way too little reward. If I play the lock/unlock game or whatever it needs to be ending the game, not doing some mediocre damage.

    Joaquin -- seems built to counter a strike tile metagame/Sam specifically. He's not going to do that, because he's just way too slow at it. The Sam/Juggernaut team makes a billion strikes every turn at 10 million strength, so reducing a few of them by a % is not helpful. Red is fine. Yellow is a bit weak, although I think there's a good, annoying "flap around forever" Airborne team out there because we have zero good counters for Airborne at the moment. Blue is fine, and probably does decent damage against the Sam team, except that you're dead by the time they have enough strikes on board.

    Toad just showed up like 5 minutes ago so no idea yet.

    Yep, Sword Master was our earliest addition and likely could use a bit of a rework in the future to make him a bit more interesting. He locks up the board too much for the little payoff that he gives.

    Thanks for the input on Falcon; his intent was to make those kinds of team combos less viable. The Sam/Jugger spam wasn't on our radar, so we'll look into that and what characters can possibly combat later on.

  • ViralCore
    ViralCore Posts: 201 Tile Toppler

    The problem with your question is that most of the 1s (Spider-Man, yelena, juggernaut, and venom), at the same level, are better in every way. The 1s all need to be rebalanced or the characters mentioned need to be

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,298 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 20 February 2026, 02:24

    @F0nt said:

    @entrailbucket said:
    Hahahahagaha good luck with this.

    Sword Master -- probably ok when boosted/lvl672, just because of numbers, but doesn't do anything unique or interesting. Non-blue stuns are generally useful, his red is fine, but black/the entire locked tile situation is just way too much work for way too little reward. If I play the lock/unlock game or whatever it needs to be ending the game, not doing some mediocre damage.

    Joaquin -- seems built to counter a strike tile metagame/Sam specifically. He's not going to do that, because he's just way too slow at it. The Sam/Juggernaut team makes a billion strikes every turn at 10 million strength, so reducing a few of them by a % is not helpful. Red is fine. Yellow is a bit weak, although I think there's a good, annoying "flap around forever" Airborne team out there because we have zero good counters for Airborne at the moment. Blue is fine, and probably does decent damage against the Sam team, except that you're dead by the time they have enough strikes on board.

    Toad just showed up like 5 minutes ago so no idea yet.

    Yep, Sword Master was our earliest addition and likely could use a bit of a rework in the future to make him a bit more interesting. He locks up the board too much for the little payoff that he gives.

    Thanks for the input on Falcon; his intent was to make those kinds of team combos less viable. The Sam/Jugger spam wasn't on our radar, so we'll look into that and what characters can possibly combat later on.

    Falcon's debuff would work well against a team that creates a few strike tiles then buffs them every turn (maybe something like Rocket/Kitty, although that hasn't been high-end tech in years now).

    The big, big problem now is that his major value is defensive, and in a metagame where the enemy never even gets a turn, that's kind of a dead end. Defensive powers need to be CRAZY strong right now, because I've got 18 ways to kill you turn0 with offensive guys -- why would I bother with defense unless it helps kill you?

  • dokiy
    dokiy Posts: 270 Mover and Shaker

    Oh boy. Lol. Best of luck on these comments, but I'll add in my two cents:

    Sword-Master seems ok. Nothing great. Plays pretty solid when boosted.
    Falcon-JT: Seems meh

    The 4 stars I probably won't ever use unless a required character.

    I do really like the art work on Sword Master and Iron Fist though!

  • CASSIDYFROST
    CASSIDYFROST Posts: 12 Just Dropped In

    Not talking about the gameplay, but about the art and animations, Toad is PERFECT, especially the abilities arts which has finally returned to how it was about 2 years ago (approximately) in the game and not just two pieces of art for the character.

    Lin Lie 4* and 5* also have great art, right behind Toad.

  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 7,089 Chairperson of the Boards

    If I were looking for ways to make a character relevant feeling I'd look at what potential synergies they have. Check the Your latest fun team combination thread and look at what people find.

    Personally I find the more convoluted or conditional the powers, the less interest I have in trying it out and making it work. Or if it's conditional it should feel fun and fast.

    Both Toad and Iron Fist offer decent passives that interact with other teammates and thus they can be experimented with and tried out in different teams. That's the interesting and fun part. Personally I probably won't use them much but maybe I will try to make them work sometimes for fun.

    Sword Master is his own show, doesn't do much with other people. His only real built in synergy is making more locked tiles with a few characters in game on his team and so he's not interesting to use, for me, other than "boosted guy's nuke is strong when he's essential".

    Falcon..for me, is a victim of overly complicated/conditional powers without enough payoff. I refer to his design as "flowchart design" which means you can imagine some board somewhere with a flowchart showing how his powers work etc, which probably looks cool or is interesting in the design stage, but the user experience is a bunch of text you're trying to parse through and give up and just use SamJuggs or Iron May and your 550 Spidey or Shang Chi or whoever instead. Maybe this is just me but I think a lot of players run out of patience with overly complicated power designs.

    I don't envy someone trying to come in and make the 393rd+ character feel relevant without making them OP and breaking the game further. Last February Sidewinder released with insane power boosting and everyone used him until they nerfed him; now no one uses him. He's not that bad but doesn't do anything that other people don't do better. Which is a hard problem, even sub-meta characters need to be powercrept to make them worth using over other similar characters.

    Lastly, if you were looking for some counters to metas which might cause some shakeup or at least offer options, here are some power ideas:

    Strike immunity or after a certain number of strikes are on the board, any additional ones get reversed/dmg gets reflected back on their turn and the character takes over some amount of strikes over that floor each turn

    A passive or cheap (maybe fortified) repeater that stuns a random opponent(s) every 2 turns for 1 turn

    A passive that blocks every power type or color power except

    A passive that after some number of hits from match dmg in the opponent's turn, the character learns counters and deals the same amount of dmg (or some smaller amount) back at the character.

    Another restriction is of course that powers need to reflect the character since they are all Marvel characters and so that limits options sometimes.

    Maybe these are poorly thought out, just spitballing. Don't be afraid to rebalance things that aren't working at least sometimes if you have the bandwidth.

  • F0nt
    F0nt GLOBAL_MODERATORS, ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 4 Just Dropped In

    @bluewolf said:
    If I were looking for ways to make a character relevant feeling I'd look at what potential synergies they have. Check the Your latest fun team combination thread and look at what people find.

    Personally I find the more convoluted or conditional the powers, the less interest I have in trying it out and making it work. Or if it's conditional it should feel fun and fast.

    Both Toad and Iron Fist offer decent passives that interact with other teammates and thus they can be experimented with and tried out in different teams. That's the interesting and fun part. Personally I probably won't use them much but maybe I will try to make them work sometimes for fun.

    Sword Master is his own show, doesn't do much with other people. His only real built in synergy is making more locked tiles with a few characters in game on his team and so he's not interesting to use, for me, other than "boosted guy's nuke is strong when he's essential".

    Falcon..for me, is a victim of overly complicated/conditional powers without enough payoff. I refer to his design as "flowchart design" which means you can imagine some board somewhere with a flowchart showing how his powers work etc, which probably looks cool or is interesting in the design stage, but the user experience is a bunch of text you're trying to parse through and give up and just use SamJuggs or Iron May and your 550 Spidey or Shang Chi or whoever instead. Maybe this is just me but I think a lot of players run out of patience with overly complicated power designs.

    I don't envy someone trying to come in and make the 393rd+ character feel relevant without making them OP and breaking the game further. Last February Sidewinder released with insane power boosting and everyone used him until they nerfed him; now no one uses him. He's not that bad but doesn't do anything that other people don't do better. Which is a hard problem, even sub-meta characters need to be powercrept to make them worth using over other similar characters.

    Lastly, if you were looking for some counters to metas which might cause some shakeup or at least offer options, here are some power ideas:

    Strike immunity or after a certain number of strikes are on the board, any additional ones get reversed/dmg gets reflected back on their turn and the character takes over some amount of strikes over that floor each turn

    A passive or cheap (maybe fortified) repeater that stuns a random opponent(s) every 2 turns for 1 turn

    A passive that blocks every power type or color power except

    A passive that after some number of hits from match dmg in the opponent's turn, the character learns counters and deals the same amount of dmg (or some smaller amount) back at the character.

    Another restriction is of course that powers need to reflect the character since they are all Marvel characters and so that limits options sometimes.

    Maybe these are poorly thought out, just spitballing. Don't be afraid to rebalance things that aren't working at least sometimes if you have the bandwidth.

    Thanks for the detailed and thorough response Bluewolf.

    It is a pretty challenging design space to introduce new characters that hit all those marks you’ve listed, while being fresh and not shaking up the meta to the point that people throw in the towel.

    Developing characters that can both stand on their own and create synergies with others is very tricky, seeing how we're nearing a roster of 400. Falcon and Swordmaster are definite attempts to do that, and from player responses, sound like they may have missed some of that mark.

    Looking at the Sam/Jugg build its pretty clear what both of them do and how you can combine them.

    I think the design space is a lot easier to open up when the characters speak more to how they can work together and be easily parsed by players, while still reflecting those core traits of the character.

    I really like those ideas you’ve put forth, and will consider integrating them in future designs.

    That team thread wasn't on my radar. I'll look into that! What sort of builds do you find yourself running most often?

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 8,298 Chairperson of the Boards

    Honestly it's going to be very, very difficult for any new character to see much use at this stage unless they're off-the-charts powerful, and doing that would be pretty dangerous.

    Characters like Sword Master or Joaquin are fine -- they should be playable, and they would be, if we weren't all doing degenerate nonsense with supports and the handful of characters who can win fights before the opponent gets a turn.

    I'd look at those guys, and at supports in general, because otherwise you're just putting a lot of work into reward factories that nobody will ever use.

  • MCPenance
    MCPenance Posts: 90 Match Maker

    Sword Master is good as a stand-alone to take out Supernatural enemies. Give him the Power Stone support and pair him with Iron May and 3* Namor for a decent team. Perhaps there's a better 'supernatural' killer out there to replace Namor. Sword Masters artwork and secondary costume are brilliant.

    Falcon is average, in his kit and his aesthetic, if I'm honest. While boosted and paired with Deathlok and another Technologist, he was quite fun.

    Iron Fist - Lin Lie has stunning artwork and animations. His kit is also really digestible and flows well. @Bustapup just found a great wee team for him where he shines.

    Toad seems good even at one cover of each colour, has potential to be a game changer.

    Honestly, I really like the direction you guys are taking - art, character choice, kits, mechanics, etc. It's hard to please everyone and even harder to consistently bang out top tier characters. Well done on what you've achieved so far. Looking forward to the future.

    Sidenote: please consider reevaluating 5* Gambits' black ability which hinders allies' abilities! Oh, and if you put 3* Namors costume in the offer store I will buy it!! That's all my cheek and nerve, thank you.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 12,297 Chairperson of the Boards

    Having been able to champ him early thanks to the generosity of the Season Pass I got to use Sword Master quite a bit and struggled with him to be honest, there really isn't any fun to be had with abilities that restrict board manipulation.

    I really like 4* Iron Fist, I have already found his ability to make protect tiles very useful for some of the quests.

    5* Falcon isn't bad but his animations seem a bit copy and pasted.

    I haven't tried Toad yet - early talk sounds promising.

    As you mention with all these characters already in the game this must be a dizzy task to keep coming up with stuff that also fits the character so my advice would be just keep experimenting, throw stuff at the wall and see where it lands.

    Thanks for the job you are doing, this game feels in a better place than it has been in ages and I can't wait to see what comes next (hint hint Paste Pot Pete!!!!!)

  • Bustapup
    Bustapup Posts: 322 Mover and Shaker

    Here is my two pence on Sword Master. To be honest, he’s the only new character who feels objectively "bad" but it's worth noting that the only mode I play regularly is SHIELD Simulator so my view is through the lens of having to compete every single round against top tier meta teams.

    While it's a shame his Agent of Atlas affiliation isn't better utilised, his real issue is the mechanics and speed. Locked tiles are already a frustrating hurdle, but Sword Master makes it worse by differentiating between regular locked tiles and "Puzzle Boxes." His black power needs those boxes unlocked to do real damage, but his purple power just locks down the board even more. He is essentially sabotaging his own kit. It would be a massive improvement if:

    Any locked tile counted as a "Puzzle Box."

    Unlocking could be achieved by simply matching OR destroying the tiles

    He has a passive that allows him to interact with these locked/puzzle box tiles

    Even then, he has absolutely no way to compete with meta characters right now. Why would you ever choose him to go up against Mthor, Polaris, Bill, JuggSam, Mbak/Namor, Nova/Hulk etc.

    The way he is right now, Ill never use him

  • concillado
    concillado Posts: 176 Tile Toppler

    The details in the artwork is much appreciated compaired to the last two 6* which are a bit too simple and AI generic in appearance.

  • Grantosium
    Grantosium Posts: 175 Tile Toppler

    Welcome! It's really nice to feel that opinions are being heard and well done for wading through these threads as there are some very real and valid opinions amongst the bickering!

    You will need to feedback to your colleagues about turn 1 wins. It really restricts your design space and makes your job super difficult! See if they can run more PvP events without supports, it's probably the quickest and easiest way for us to have any sort of inkling of what a no turn 1 meta might look like.

    I noticed Sword master should have synergy with Luna Snow as they're both Agents of Atlas and both deal with locked tiles but I tried the pairing once and it was not a good time. I think maybe locked tiles are somewhat self defeating, unfortunately. Maybe you could try making locked tiles a one-sided mechanic? Eg. The opponent can't match them and they don't fall but you, the player who locked the tile, can still move them.

    Also, agree that the art has definitely improved!

  • Timemachinego
    Timemachinego Posts: 635 Critical Contributor
    edited 21 February 2026, 14:44

    I think one very general thing worth talking about re: character design is the power budget. I don't know if you're working off older teams notes on this, but given these underpowered 5 it sure seems like you are.

    In (not so) short, I believe the budget needs an entire rework. It greatly overvalues certain things like faction bonuses (which are often a negative since it shrinks the use case for any character) and pretty much anything based on a countdown. I'd also say that many SAP related powers are overvalued because in most cases you need a synergistic partner (or two!) to make play styles built around those stand up to other options. SAP stealing powers specifically are often treated as a "dead power" since they cost too much and are only useful as a counter... but there are already better counters available to us in game such as Gorr or Maximus. Jump-in-front powers (like Odin's, there are others that do work like Rogue's color conditional) never scale appropriately and become useless as you level said characters. Airborne is only good if they still do things while they're up there unless you're building an entire team around being annoying to play against in PVP (and in that case we need legit ways to punish airborne characters, no current "counter" is worthwhile).

    In terms of overall build philosophy... you don't always have to innovate, functionality is fine. There are plenty of good 4* abilities that could be "loaned" to new 5's, taking the pressure to ascend off and giving players that are new to the tier better choices on who to pursue. I don't think any of us mind a straight up damage stick and "color identities" have largely fallen off so maybe they don't have to default to red! Stuns are awesome, conditional ones aren't. I also don't think you should be afraid of creating "one power" characters like 4* Rocket and Groot, no one used him for anything but his opening strikes and that was fine because they were great!

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