Buff, don't nerf. Reccomendations for fun mid game rosters

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edited June 2014 in MPQ General Discussion
I tend to get a little wordy, so feel free to skip ahead to the characters if you want to add/comment on the specifics. I'd love to actually have an interactive dialogue with the devs for how to actually make every character fun and useful, but chances are it's all been said before.

Without going too much into it, let's just say that I'm 300+ hours into the 2* to 3* transition with my only real prospect anytime soon being IM40. A week ago I started selling off my 2* chars to make room for all the single cover 3*s i was getting. I currently have 16 3* characters and my highest is IM40 at 80. So any experienced player should already know I'm not in a good position and with the healing nerf, my prospects are pretty slim, if I continue to play the game. That said, I know people are ranting all over the forums and this update finally motivated me to sign up for the forums to hopefully be listened to, or at least get some constructive criticism going on. This is mostly directed at the devs but hopefully other people have ideas for things they'd like to see. I was going to add in ideas for regen/healing/acknowledgement of the role system the game has but doesn't mention (dps, tank, utility/heals) but this post already got ridiculously long in short order.

I prefer to see characters buffed to be in line with other characters as opposed to being nerfed again and again until everyone is bland across the board. I played before the Thorverine funbalance and while it was irritating to see Thor/Wolverine as every other fight, all the "funbalance" did was swap one of them for OBW. More recently they added Ares who outclasses just about everyone in the 2* tier for offense. There's potential there in the 2* range but everyone needs to be buffed or tweaked to be a viable alternative. I know D3 is fine with dud/joke characters (bag man anyone?) The problem with that mentality is that you immediately start to shrink the available hero pool. I'm focusing mostly on 2* since I'm guessing the majority of the game is in either 1*-2* range, 1* is fine and with the seasons out now, the transition is pretty quick, considering I had to earn my 2*s from progress rewards and tourneys, and now you get them randomly from participating in pvp. it's great for moving people along, but then you hit a brick wall for a long, long time while you build up 3*s and if you want people to stop using OBW/Thor/Wolverine/Ares as the goto team comp, YOU HAVE TO GIVE MOTIVATION FOR PEOPLE TO DO SO.

Basing each ability off 5 covers, obviously abilities should scale down with covers but a big complaint I have now is that a lot of characters have a pretty defined "best build" and the lack of customization is part of the same problem, you should have to choose between several viable options instead of looking at someone and saying "yeah you're pretty stupid or incredibly unlucky with covers if you build anything but 5/5/3 on them." Keep in mind, I think a linear reduction of damage and AP cost is still a buff, doing 1400 damage for 6AP vs 2800 for 12 to me is a huge buff because you can potentially just burn through 2 people.

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Ares :
Honestly, he hurts, there's not much i can really say about him, he's a very strong character that I will almost constantly skip over for the sake of saving myself from randomly getting 1 shot if his green/yellow gets out of hand from cascades

Black Widow (Original) :
At this point she's still great for AP control and shutting down the enemy, still good for her utility but with healing removed, you might as well make her blue into protect tiles, as there's really no reason to have a temporary heal anymore (Two weeks ago I was ready to sign up to say please add more healers to vary the character pool)

Bullseye:
His kit is technically fine in theory, but his black is just too expensive for practical use, I haven't used him myself but let's be realistic, 16 black AP to place 2 crit tiles with NO ACTIVE DAMAGE is a terrible idea unless you're fortunate enough to spawn a crit tile with a 5+ match that isn't immediately burned, or you're fortunate enough to be in the "high tech" tile set, you're not going to get your APs worth out of him and he'll just sit there generating protect tiles until he's the only guy left. I'd remove his situational bonus and just give him a flat base damage + crit tile generation and lower his black cost to a reasonable level or just scrub the crit tile entirely and give him decent damage on an actual ability, or if you want to follow in Daken's footsteps, just give him a move that generates strike/attack tiles, maybe on a short countdown tile or it could be a weak version of Psylocke's black that adds an attack tile

Captain America:
One of the simplest fixes on this list, and I would have used him before I sold him had this been the case.
Yellow : Needs to be to be in line with realistic usage scenarios. 10AP for 2-3 protect tiles at half their current strength, get them out there earlier so you can mitigate damage as soon as possible, if he's supposed to be a defender, get him defending, otherwise he just stands there being unhelpful for the whole match, hell even cutting him down to a 6 yellow cost for 33% of the current protect value would be useful especially paired with IM40 for recharge.

Red needs to do more damage, plain and simple, 11AP puts him 1 behind wolverines 2900 dmg slash, and while it returns AP when you compare it to anyone similar(Thor, Ares, Wolverine), the fact that you'll lose the tile half of the time means his red should hit for about 1k at max level so at least it's not a complete waste if you lose the countdown tile like it is now. The fact that it was buffed to almost 6x current damage for gold cap shows just how underpowered this is.
Blue : No real recommendations for this, his blue pretty much does what a decent stun should in the current game.

Daken:
In general, Meh. I don't personally like the idea of a completely passive character but given that he's the best healer in this tier now, he could be a lot worse, i still see a fair number of daken's and I have a feeling I'm going to see a whole ton more right away (yay :/ ) All I'd say is maybe buff his strike tiles by about 5% to give him a bit of an edge since you can usually just ignore him until you can pop him with Thor/Wolverine in one turn. Alternatively, make him lazy Daken scaled down so he can actually hit 85 and flood the 2* tiers

Hawkeye (Modern):
There's nothing wrong with Hawkeye if the countdown is removed from his abilities or if you can pick the tile to be made into a countdown tile and reduce the max to 1 turn. He does amazing damage and is squishy as hell because of it. His avoid is the only thing keeping him alive to do any damage, which is all in all a perfect kit BUT I've been hit by his abilities maybe twice in 300+ hours because he's fairly easily mitigated. If people think this is OP, then maybe tone down his damage by a couple percent but really, he fills the role of a squishy damage dealer, right now he's squishy but does on average, little to no damage.


Magneto (Marvel Now):
Honestly, he's pretty underrated for what he CAN do, but again,a bit of tweaking and he'd actually be pretty fun and optionally terrifying
Blue : He's hampered by the countdown on Iron Hammer. 4 turns to do 1400 damage on a full board clear is nothing when you start looking at Ares who can do 1400 damage every 2 turns with his green. The obvious bonus to Iron Hammer is that since the whole board is cleared, there's the chance for cascades and AP generation instead of giving it to the enemy, I've seen one Iron Hammer do about 2600 damage, but generally it's the last thing people bother with because I think most people dislike countdown tiles that can usually easily be sniped

Purple : Sure, a blue farm. Super helpful for feeding both himself and anyone that can use blues and the main reason you'd see CStorm and Magneto paired up, his purple is just fine where it is

Red: Not much incentive to go with 5 in the skill beyond more board shakeup... On a guy that can clear the whole board, does good damage, just make it a targetable non countdown ability (at 1 turn its basically there already)

Moonstone:
Unfortunately she's very good at one thing and one thing only, and with the majority of people not using countdown tiles as is, and special tiles aren't usually worth giving up a damage character for the sake of a Moonstone, it's hard to recommend her for anything beyond some PvE or situational engages with 3*s, so it's up to deciding if she should still be incredibly situational or just make her unfortunately more generic. but far more useful in average encounters. I don't really have a lot of ideas of how to keep her ability to control special tiles while actually being useful against OBW/Thor for example, aside from fixing the 17 AP stun.

Bag Man:
Just no, everything needs to go. Just start over. Unless you're going to have him in there as a blatant ripoff of customer's HP in heroic packs he needs to be changed.

CStorm:
Green : I'd love to see this ability do its own damage but I can obviously understand why it's relatively low(cascades for days AND AP generation) but maybe a bit of a buff for shattered tiles, from my own experience, I'd usually rather do up to 4000 damage to the enemy team and usually pop one or two people with Call the Storm than generate random amounts of random AP for potentially 300 damage at max level (mine was 45, buffed in PvE to 85, full 5/5/3 covers) unless I really need to gamble on breaking a countdown tile.

Blue : No recommendations, it's a great ability with solid aoe and a stun.

Yellow : I've been toying with ideas for her yellow for a while now but in general it needs a higher proc rate. 5% would give you 133 match damage to work with, any match damage below that would not proc her passive, your strongest attacks will BUT the damage needs to scale accordingly, the whole point of giving up an active ability is to get some use out of it and right now I just poke her to within 1 shot range or just keep poking her until she falls over with no retaliations, so why have it at all? Back to my point, either scale all of the damage back or make it situational based on whether you're attacking her or teammates; eg. If you're attacking storm, it triggers at 5% for 75 damage, if you're attacking a teammate, it triggers at 5% for 50. Some tweaking will obviously be needed as this is still relatively off the top of my head. There's other ways of approaching her passive but it(like every ability) shouldn't be a go to as your 3 cover ability, if you fully level up her yellow she should be scary to attack into.

Thor and Wolverine I'm just going to touch on since they're really the reason everyone is in this situation. Since the community has shown that these two are the benchmark for GOOD characters, you should plan to at least make every character as reliable as these two. I honestly didn't see a problem with old Thor and Wolverine aside from the fact that they absolutely were stronger than everyone else by a wide margin, if that gap was closed a bit it wouldn't be a problem, but I hate seeing strong characters in any game brought down to the level of others, if you find 3-4 people that are too strong, you should buff everyone else bit by bit until its more reasonable. Nobody wants to use bag man, when everyone is just slightly better than bag man, why would they want to use them either?

I was annoyed a few weeks ago at the lack of utility/healing diversity in the tier but yesterday's patch was aggravating enough to vent some **** I've been annoyed about for a while now. I'd love to actually hear back from anyone on the dev team to know they're actually planning on doing anything with old characters or if the removal of healing (be honest, that's what it is, even the already worthless hot dog stand got nerfed. I was going to say they should change it to heal 5% of max hp, that's about 1 tile match of health back for matching 50 env tiles whereas the jungle only doing 100 damage isn't anything when you're looking at lvl 50+ to probably finish the match)

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TL:DR Removing healing won't get people to have more fun with random characters, it was the laziest and cheapest solution to deal with part of a symptom while completely ignoring the actual cause and I'm with most people in being pissed off, but I'm actually trying to contribute something to go with it. There's a lot more I can rant about but at least this is a start

Comments

  • emaker27
    emaker27 Posts: 285 Mover and Shaker
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    Character balancing is definitely the issue which is difficult to do without frustrating people. The best solution would be for D3 to announce that Season 4 will be a character balancing season where everyone gets rewards. Then each week they tweak the characters and see what works. It's impossible to accurately gauge character balancing in house when compared to the thousands playing the game.

    Sure they may 'lose' some money in that season, but would greatly benefit in every following season.
  • akboyce
    akboyce Posts: 283 Mover and Shaker
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    Am I the only one who read the "Buff, don't nerf" to the tune of the "conceal, don't feel" line from Let It Go.....?

    Buff, don't nerf, don't let them know.
    Well now they knoooooooooow!
  • GrumpySmurf1002
    GrumpySmurf1002 Posts: 3,511 Chairperson of the Boards
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    This might belong in suggestions/feedback moreso, but yes, the 2* world needs an overhaul. My own suggestions (some overlap here)

    Ares/Thor/OBW/Wolverine/Storm/Magneto - no change necessary. Can maybe argue Mags needs to remove the randomness of his blue, but he's good enough.

    Bullseye - needs a 3rd active or a massive boost to his protect tiles.
    Captain - needs an AP reduction across the board, but especially yellow. He'd have a lot more value spamming protect tiles like BullsEye in the new MPQ world.
    Moonstone - Fix her black entirely
    Daken - needs a 3rd active. Make him the 2* of LDaken and he's instantly valuable.
    Hawkeye - placement of his countdowns. Don't even need to change the countdown timer. Hell, you can increase it if you can dictate where it goes. Both are big nukes.
    Bagman - heh. He does actually have use as cannon fodder in PvE. If nothing else to eat health while your main guys healing. Can make a case you need him, but probably still better to double up on the big guns instead of keeping him.

    The final, and well more important thing than buffing those guys is to have a 4-character 2* release like they just did with Fury/Mororo/SheHulk/Sentry.

    Make it the entire Fantastic Four: 2* Torch (Lazy), 2* IW (new powers, not lazy 4* IW), Thing (lazy 2* Hulk), and Mr. Fantastic (brand new). That gives them two lazy versions and two new characters, just the way D3 likes it.

    16 characters, 10 useful, plus the flawed but situationally usable above would go a long ways to true "diversity."
  • Unknown
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    akboyce wrote:
    Am I the only one who read the "Buff, don't nerf" to the tune of the "conceal, don't feel" line from Let It Go.....?

    Buff, don't nerf, don't let them know.
    Well now they knoooooooooow!
    i believe you have watched Frozen too many times now icon_e_wink.gif
  • Cragger
    Cragger Posts: 316 Mover and Shaker
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    From the head of the company itself come the same unused wisdom

    http://almnop.tumblr.com/post/863062742 ... ce-changes
    "Listen to Blizzard – “Make Everything Overpowered” is a design motto at Blizzard and we try to adhere to that here at Demiurge. At the end of the day, you need to think not just about the numbers but the emotional impact of a character. When you’re done, aim to have players think you didn’t go far enough!"
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    Even in my own experience I was thinking about what happened with Left 4 Dead back in the day. For those that never played, flaming hunters were considered too strong, so they removed the bonus damage, then survivors were finishing too much, so they reduced the spawn rate of health packs, then they reduced hunter swipe damage, etc etc etc. Until Left 4 Dead 2 came out and I dare you to do a 25 damage(1/4 health) hunter pounce anywhere but about 3 locations in the new maps. Everyone likes to feel like they did a lot of damage and destroyed the enemy team/player/comp whatever.

    I guess suggestions would have been a good forum to drop this into, but I figured it was half me ranting so I dropped it in general. Not sure it'd get read either way.
  • Unknown
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    SlamDunc wrote:
    Red: Not much incentive to go with 5 in the skill beyond more board shakeup... On a guy that can clear the whole board, does good damage, just make it a targetable non countdown ability (at 1 turn its basically there already)

    MN Magneto's red COLLECTS AP. The description does not mention this, but it does. 3/5/5 is a fantastic build right now.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    Cragger wrote:
    From the head of the company itself come the same unused wisdom

    http://almnop.tumblr.com/post/863062742 ... ce-changes
    "Listen to Blizzard – “Make Everything Overpowered” is a design motto at Blizzard and we try to adhere to that here at Demiurge. At the end of the day, you need to think not just about the numbers but the emotional impact of a character. When you’re done, aim to have players think you didn’t go far enough!"

    Not even Blizzard follows that philosophy though. It's a catchy phrase, but not actually useful for game development. Where the real magic happens is when you make the players *feel* overpowered without them actually *being* overpowered. You do that and you've got a mega-hit on your hands.

    A thousand times easier said than done though.

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