Phaserhawk wrote: To me there is a very, very, very simple fix that just chips away at his blue power and that could easily be monitored and tweaked. What is it, first it has been stated before but I think it's the right thing and that is a threshold. I would start it off exactly as Falcon's, requiring 5 blue AP for Dormmanu's to kick in, that's it. If it's too much you can tweak it down to 4 or 3, if' it needs a little more you can try 6. What does this do? Well it adds strategy, just like when you run Daken/Falcon, is it worth using the Chemical Reaction if it means losing the special tile destruction? For Hood it would be the same way, is it worth Power Surging now if it means losing AP steal for a few turns? If this brings in his power too much, like I said you can change the threshold or perhaps beef up other skills, like have intimidation do more damage
dkffiv wrote: If a threaten goes off it doesn't matter how high your hp is, you're going to die to match damage within a turn or two. Bringing Hulk is mostly a losing proposition because his damage is so low and if you don't deal with the Hood and Muscle quickly its game over. You need to bring a fast rainbow team and hope you can down Hood and then kill off the muscle before everyone is dead. I like when threaten goes off and then the ai cascades 5 times, generating 4 anger tiles with hulk dying to the fifth match.
Phantron wrote: The problem is that D3 has this design philosophy where false drawback = justification for something to be more powerful. The best example would be the original Rage of the Panther where it usually killed everyone on the other team but hey, they got 5 AP in their strongest color so it's totally balanced. It's been toned back some compared to its original incarnation but ROTP is still nowhere near balanced compared to the average character. ROTP, like DA, falls under the design philsophy of 'it takes a bigger imbalance to hide an imbalance'. DA is obviously broken, so to make this up they allow X Force to one shot anyone under 5K HP half of the time in 5 turns, and figure that'll fix it. Well, it sort of does, except you just ended up destroying the viability of most characters in the Loki/The Hood HP class, just like how Surgical Strike makes ROTP looking not quite as broken. The weird corollary is that stuff with serious drawback, like say, all of Star-Lord's abilities, are surprisingly weak. If we assume X Force as balanced, Star-Lord's abilities all need to at least instantly kill one person every single time they resolve because the CD drawback is very real. From my observation, D3 seems to greatly overvalue stuff like self damage or an ability that requires you to have some remote awareness of the board (as in abilities that require such thing are way too good), while CDs are greatly undervalued. BTW, a 3* AR would still be totally overpowered. OBW is another person they tried to get rid of by giving her very few HP. I'd argue the whole level shift was an attempt to prevent OBW from being used in the high end (she has relatively less health after the 3*/4* all got a bigger level buff).
onimus wrote: This would make having Hood pointless. As I've said in other posts, Hood's nice to gain and take away their AP, yes. But his biggest strength is forcing the requirement to bring your own Hood if you want to attack him. If they did this with the threshold even at 1 ap, he'd be totally wrecked on defense, and would therefore have absolutely no purpose. You can't trust the AI to know it needs 1 blue match in order to "activate" one of its characters. This change would make Hood the worst defensive character in the entire game haha.
Lerysh wrote: onimus wrote: This would make having Hood pointless. As I've said in other posts, Hood's nice to gain and take away their AP, yes. But his biggest strength is forcing the requirement to bring your own Hood if you want to attack him. If they did this with the threshold even at 1 ap, he'd be totally wrecked on defense, and would therefore have absolutely no purpose. You can't trust the AI to know it needs 1 blue match in order to "activate" one of its characters. This change would make Hood the worst defensive character in the entire game haha. I don't usually bring a Hood to kill a Hood. It is a good strategy, but it's only one of a few that work on him. His HP are so low you can typically kill him with a Green/Black AP boost and XF alone. Also weather or not the AI 'knows' it needs blue, it will still take blue because the AI is random as hell. Since you don't see Hood/Thor/XF in PvP unless its a Hood featured, you are likely going Featured/XF/Hood in which case you may not even have an active blue, so the AI will turn on the DA eventually. And isn't the point of his low HP to make him a terrible defense character in the first place? He is a climbing offensive powerhouse, but so is iMags and C.Storm but defensively they are weak. He wouldn't see any less use IMO if DA took 3 blue AP to activate, and that number is low enough the AI can bumble into it, not to mention you could just boost it on offense to have it active right away.
hermanbloom wrote: Hey guys! If I am levelling Thor and Patch to 166, what level should Hood be at? Since his "tweak" do I just ramp him to 166 as well?