Character Feedback

I concur with what others have noticed about Joaquin and Lin Lie, but I may have a solution that's already in-game: Silver Surfer's blackhole.

Although a new character might be needed. Please add Xorn. He makes blackholes and can manipulate gravity.

Blackholes (passive): converts any special tile generated into a blackhole immediately. If there are 5 or more, then it does damage or whatever.

Heavy Load: Xorn manipulates gravity reducing match damage to 10 points and destroys the bottom row each turn. (Maybe use the same mechanic Blob has)

That should stop Sam and Jugg teams and even M'Baku. It would be nice to finally be able to use Repeater and Countdown tiles again. And find a use for that black hole. I'd recommend looking at the old mechanics, find a way to reuse them. Go back to the first couple years of the game and see how those abilities can be expanded into new characters.

Would be nice to also find a use for Invisible Woman's bubble/force field tiles. There are characters that do the same like Quasar, a newer mutant Dr. Cecilia Reyes (and she was in the New Mutants movie), and someone I'm surprised wasn't added for this month..... Wonder Man (he can make ionic force fields along with so many of his large list of powers, maybe make two forms of him and changes his 3 skills when he goes pure Ionic). I have a big list if you guys want to reach out directly

I don't recommend a band-aid rip of banning characters completely from PVP. I am not sure about supports.

The problem being that many people have spent money or resources on certain things and the more you remove things without giving new toys, the worse things feel to at least some players.

There are a lot of people who chase M'baku and others because supports exist in PVP and would be annoyed if that's taken away, so balancing that out is crucial when most players aren't interested in the meta balance of the game, just winning their matches etc.

Removing supports from PVP just makes SamJugg more dominant since you won't have a counter to their oppressive Strike tile/aoe spamming, you just would eat it while chasing AP the hard way. There may be a few other teams like that now. IMO if supports are taken out, it would be smart to offer some additional play option or QOL benefits; balancing things like that (losing tools) out is historically an approach the game has taken. Recently they haven't done so as much.

Anyway.

My teams are usually the team everyone uses but some stuff I enjoy messing with are putting a strong match dmg person like Colossus in front of Agatha and May, or Hobgoblin/Coulson teams (adding in Hawkeye or Cosmic Iron Man or Zero). Admittedly like a lot of vets I am often looking for the fastest wins; in PVP you need a team that's reliable at minimum. This usually means fast because you're facing opponents who often get enough AP to possibly/probably win if you give them a turn or two to get going.'

Immortal Hulk teams with Moondragon or Purple Man are fun to run because they can't really lose, or it's hard to do so.

When designing characters one big question is who the main audience is; if you give a useful tool to newer folks who aren't as locked into high MMR because of advanced rosters, they can have more fun with it than the vets will who are forced into optimal play by their opponents' strengths. Just because vets don't get excited doesn't mean the design is a failure, but at the same time a huge number of players are in SCL10 where losing is definitely on the table with subpar teams, much more so than before. And the PVP meta is what it is, you win immediately or in 2 turns max or you often lose vs other meta teams.

A list of fun characters who can be useful ascended (but also good at base) can be found in a @WhiteBomber comment in the "Advice on ascended 4*s please" thread.

Swordmaster - I do not have a glowing opinion of him nor do I have a fun teams best team I came up with is SM/TAH/Sersi or 4As5Doc Ock. I can barely call this team interesting.

His big hitter is black but the conditions for it to hit big are hidden in his purple, where he locks a bunch of tiles called puzzles. This is important because if it was just a locked tile, I could MAYBE combo him with one of the other 3/4 locked tile creators. But no, SM’s are “puzzle boxes”, thus making him more difficult to team up with. You have to not only match (not destroy) the puzzle boxes but for every THREE you match, you get the damage bonus on his black. These end up feeling like wasted turns. You basically need 9 matches of puzzle boxes to get your moneys worth out of that black. It’s a chore more than minigame.

His red is decent. Supposedly better vs supernaturals. I honestly dont know because those arent exactly overflowing in the game right now.

Grade C- (subject to change of course if another character is released that makes him more fun or his kit gets adjusted).

I really hope you aren't going to try and rebalance (cough nerf cough) everything around the bleeding edge PvP Meta game (huge rosters with L450+ characters loaded down with R4/5 supports). That's 1% of 1% of players and less than half the MPQ game play.

You can remove almost all the winfinites in the game by adding cool downs to powers (both passive and active). If HE couldn't fire his Red/Purple more than 2x a turn he could not go winfinite. If Polaris couldn't passively spawn SAPs more than 2x a turn she'd be reigned in and so on.

You honestly only need cool downs on PvP play anyway.

KGB

Lin Lei Iron Fist - this character feels good and very useful. I can throw him on a bunch of teams as support and I’d love to see the numbers on his red when ascended.

His purple makes yellow, which is VERY rare. This is a very good character with a lot of potential.

Grade B+ (subject to change based on ascended numbers)

You want an honest answer, you‘ll get one

Swordmaster
His red passive perm damage is nice but too specific to be really good
His other skills need these puzzle boxes, that makes him a bit too slow
B-C tier

Iron Fist
I like his yellow, passive heal plus protect tiles, still wouldn’t actively use him, only in essentials
B tier

Falcon
He‘s actually pretty nice but is too close to Brave New World Sam Wilson, I could see him as a 3rd to Juggy Falcon still or as an enhancer for strike tile spammers
A-B tier

Toad
I like his blue passive a lot, it can end in lots of AP avalanches or even an infinite, nice battery char but it would have been nice if he actually would do something with these charged tiles he creates a lot of…
B tier

All in all no bad chars but also not awesome, still non of them broke the game, that’s actually worth a lot these days

@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.

@bluewolf just want to call out the second part of this comment.

The Sam/Juggernaut combo was not on their radar.

The most used PvP team (right?) that everybody knows about (right???) that obviously was specifically designed to be dominant (right?????) is something IP2 wasn't aware of.

Do you still think they're actively managing the high end metagame? Still think they're restricting Galactus shards as part of some weird scheme to sell Hawkeyes?

@ThisisClemFandango said:
Eb i love you but lord have mercy your posts come across as needlessly antagonistic. We all know you get your yaya's from pvp.
Let's give ip2 the benefit of the doubt and let them find their feet before we start pointing out what they aren't doing.
Also if you use electro & elektra (both 5 star) you can use juggernauts damage against him.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not faulting them for not knowing that. Why would they? We're a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase.

But I think it's pretty unlikely that they're playing 4D chess with counters and recounters and offer schemes etc when they aren't aware of the most used combos.

None of what they're doing is a conspiracy, they just don't pay attention to the stuff we do. That other guy has been posting wild conspiracy theories about how they're designing characters and doing offers.

I understand where EB is coming from because there has been some negative conspiracy type stuff posted recently that has no factual evidence to back it up but I don't think this is a debate for this thread. @Scofie @Alfje17 could we maybe have this split off into a new thread so the Devs can concentrate on the feedback that helps them? That way, the debate, if such as it is, can go on in that.

@ThisisClemFandango said:
Oh if only there was a moderator who was always on hand to handle these things.

I nominate myself. I'm level-headed, thoughtful, and definitely don't have a list of enemies I would immediately ban and sandbox because they didn't laugh at my forum jokes.