The state of colour balance

Unknown · June 2014

So I think everyone's noticed that green is becoming more and more important, lately. What used to be a board shake-up colour is now the primary damage colour. With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at what each colour can actually do, and see if that said anything interesting.

So:

Red:

Huge single target damage:Obviously.
Limited tile destruction: Generally not more than 9 tiles; often limited to a specific type. MNMags being the significant exception.
Self damage as cost: At the moment, this is only Juggs, Hulk and Sentry, but worth mentioning.
Limited tile generation: Thor and Rags, generating yellow and green respectively.
Limited strike tile generation

Yellow:

Limited direct damage: Ares and Lazy Thor being the only exceptions; possibly NF.
Protect tile generation
Limited but powerful strike tile generation
Healing Despite OBW, yellow is still *the* healing colour in MPQ.
Significant tile generation: Recharge, Thunder Strike
Utility tile upgrading
Self damage as cost

Green:

MASSIVE AoE damage: GSBW, Sentry, Thor, oh my.
Significant single target damage: Hulk, Human Torch, Ares
Board Shakeup: All the Storms, Juggs, Sentry, Punisher, Hulk and GSBW
Tile destruction generating AP
Powerful strike tile generation
Enemy AP Gain/Friendly AP Loss as cost: These abilities tend to have the phrase "for each X AP" somewhere in the description.

Blue:

Stuns
AP Theft: Excellent in The Hood's case, pretty abysmal otherwise.
Limited direct/AOE damage
Powerful protect tile generation
Traps
Healing and Board Shakeup: Mentioned more for completeness than anything else - this is pretty much just OBW and MnMags
Colour Conversion: Blue to black, and blue to green so far
Special tile control: Technically this is just Falcon, but you can see this in the direction of a number of other blue abilities - cMags and the Cap, for example.

Purple:

AP Theft
Limited strike tile generation
Tile Swapping
Protect tile generation
Two instances of high single target damage
Critical tile generation: Pretty much just cHawkeye.

Black:

Attack Tiles
Enemy special tile manipulation
Critical tile generation
Limited self-healing
Limited AP Theft/Additional damage: (OBW)
Mostly minor single target/AOE damage: Black Panther, of course, being the exception.
Friendly countdown timer reduction

I'll go through and edit this list for clarity later; in the meantime I welcome any suggestions and thoughts people have - I threw this together, I could certainly be wrong in my wording.

First impressions?

Strike tiles are overused and overpowered - 4 out of 6 colours can generate strike tiles, and they're far too strong compared to attack tiles. When was the last time you felt threatened by an attack tile? How often do we talk about tiles and abilities as "a way to abuse strike tiles"? I'd like to see strike tiles restricted more closely to green and red, and balanced against attack tiles in power.

Critical tiles are deeply underused. I actually think cHawkeye's Take Aim is one of the best designed abilities in the game. You get to make a precision alteration to the board, take out problem tiles, get a nice reward spike from seeing the critical explosion go off, and you get to generate as big a cascade as you can plan out in advance. We have tons of Hulk/Juggs style board shakeups - why not an ability that generates random critical tiles?

Deadpool. O.O Deadpool needs to have an ability that generates random critical tiles. I can't think of anything more fitting.

Damage and utility are becoming increasingly broadly spread across colours. Red was originally the direct damage colour, and in exchange it has the least utility. Now, green easily matches or exceeds red for damage, but it still retains absurd amounts of additional utility in terms of strike tiles and board shakeup - small wonder it's becoming the most important colour. Yellow is still mostly utility based, but with the releases of Black Panther, Lazy Thor and Sentry, it's moving closer to something like green - too much going on at once.

Blue I think would be fine as mostly the colour of stuns, except that the stun abilities created to date have been consistently under or overpowered. I think something like mBW's blue on a 3* would be excellent. Blue AP theft is a mess, but I have no idea how to fix it.

Purple and Black, though, are the real problem children. Purple feels like a bit of a grab bag of random, leftover abilities, and very few of them feel satisfying. Colour conversion works well, and mBW's/OBW's purples are excellent, but aside from that? Purple doesn't seem to have much of an identity. Black, at least, knows what it's about: Attack Tiles! Sadly, they're typically underpowered and there isn't much else going on in the colour. As I said before, I'd like to see more use of critical tiles here.

Anyways, that's enough for now. Thoughts?

Unknown · June 2014

Strike tile bonus should be added to the match damage before the cascade penalty. That is rather than second cascade doing 75% or so base damage (might be 66%, I know it's in that range) + strike, it should be (base + strike) * 0.75. Without even considering all the ways you can abuse strike tiles with AP consuming abilities, just its interaction with ordinary match 3 is too much. Protect tile can still take X off every hit because protect tiles should be a counter to strike tiles anyway, given protect tiles do absolutely nothing to help you win the game faster.

Unknown · June 2014

Attack tiles aren't as bad as you claim IMO and their comparison to strikes will improve when C.Mags has his balls cut off.

If we take away Patch's beserk rage because it gives tiles to both sides, then lets consider some strike vs attack abilities

Pure strike abilities (no other effects) would be stuff like sacrifice, battleplan, pheremone rage etc. I'll pick sacrifice since it makes the biggest strike and IGNORE the self damage because i'm trying to prove a point about value of tiles

.

So... 8AP gives a 595 strike tile at 141, 5 covers. So if you don't cascade that's 595 damage per turn and when you use an ability you get another 595 (generally) plus obviously cascade potential.

For attack tiles i've got Doom and Torch as pure attack tile generators....

Doom at 115, 5 covers makes 6x185 attack tiles for 12 AP, so that's 1100 damage per turn which is roughly 2x Sentry's strike tile value. So on turns you get a cascade into 2 matches or use an ability it's fairly even, single match Doom wins, more cascades Sentry wins

HT at 141, 5 covers makes 8x196 attack tiles for 10 AP and drain to 3 colours. So that's 1536 damage per turn putting him at better than 2x sacrifice activations and a bit behind 3 uses.

Attack tile abilities also trigger strikes whereas strike tiles don't.... if you get my meaning

.

So attack tiles are decent enough IMO. The reason they don't get the limelight is they are bolted on a 2 colour 3* and a low health 3* who's not been given out much in events whereas strikes are on more popular and generally usable heroes. Also there are a few abilties that work excessively well with strike tiles but, IMO, that's an issue with the abilities rather than the balance between strike tiles and attack tiles.

mohio · June 2014

I'm not nearly as veteran as many of the regulars around here so I won't feel bad if someone tells me I'm wrong. Anyway, to the point I wanted to make: the reason I think attack tiles are underused is that they're almost exclusively tied to the color black, and people tend to gravitate more toward the AoE black abilities (BP's RotP and Pun's Molotov) as opposed to the attack tile generating ones (HT, Psylocke being the good ones I suppose). That or they ignore black altogether since you can generally kill the opponent much quicker by focusing on red/green/x.

Unknown · June 2014

mohio wrote:

I'm not nearly as veteran as many of the regulars around here so I won't feel bad if someone tells me I'm wrong. Anyway, to the point I wanted to make: the reason I think attack tiles are underused is that they're almost exclusively tied to the color black, and people tend to gravitate more toward the AoE black abilities (BP's RotP and Pun's Molotov) as opposed to the attack tile generating ones (HT, Psylocke being the good ones I suppose). That or they ignore black altogether since you can generally kill the opponent much quicker by focusing on red/green/x.

*tut tut* but Molotov IS an attack tile ability

. Good point though.

Unknown · June 2014

List of things strike tiles synergise with:
- Cheap powers
- Cascades
- Espionage
- Attack tiles
- Board shakeup (see also: cascades)

List of things attack tiles synergise with:
...Strike tiles?

Unknown · June 2014

Just run Falcon and Daken for a while on PvE (works in PvP too but threat of retaliation is too great) and you'll see why strike tiles are overpowered in general. No cheap combos are needed here. Just keep on match green and yellow and you'll soon be dropping 2 chain match 3 for 1300 and 1200. Attack tiles are probably okay on their own, but they don't compare to strike tiles at all. Attack tiles should start with much higher value than strike tiles since they only fire once a turn while strike tiles can usually do much better. If you work out the math, it goes something like:

Assume each side destroys X tile a turn.

Then the average strike tile is expected to last (32/X) turns, and doing strike * (32/X) * (X/3) ~= 10 times strike tile base damage.

An attack tile, under the same assumption, is expected to do attack * (32/X). This means the better you are at setting up cascades, the worse the comparison becomes. If you can destroy 6 tiles a turn, then strike tile is twice as good just from match 3 damage. To put things in perspective, that'd be like Daken adding 2X120 attack tiles on every green match, and even then I'd still take the strike tiles because this doesn't factor strike tile's favorable interaction with a whole mess of other abilities.

Unknown · June 2014

To the OP: Bullseye has the random crit generation you want for Deadpool. Black and Purple each have a stun. Black is also insta-kill in Devour and Don's Trap countdown.

This all probably only strengthens your accusation that those colors are grab bags.

The state of colour balance

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