AP batteries a problem to be solved

Breadsticks · December 2021

I've been trying to catch up with some of what happened while I wasn't heavily playing or completely on break. In that time it seems that some characters like Bishop and Hawkeye caused some issues because of their ability to generate AP.

AP battery characters always pose a problem because of their ability to create non interactive and overly powerful strategies. There's another problem that I've learned about resource acceleration in games from my years playing games like Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering.

The problem is that strategies that are often considered suboptimal become viable with resource acceleration. This can be cards, characters or strategies in games which aids in more variety. A lot of revamping of characters could be eliminated with more and appropriately built battery characters.

It's possible that we'd need more viable tanks for this to truly work.

Breadsticks · December 2021

Maybe the go to solution should be stunning AP producers for 1 max 2 turns ala IM40. This would be a more controlled burst of AP preventing it from getting too far out of hand.

Any other AP producer that they don't want to stun follows the rule of half. Whatever AP you'd give a stun producer will be half rounded down to a non stun producer. I think this compensates for eliminating the stun.

Srheer0 · December 2021

The problem is game balance.

Character A has basic powers that cost 10, 12 and 14 AP each. No passive effects or other cool stuff.

Character B has advanced powers with passive elements and they cost 9, 6 and 7 AP each.

Character C has two entirely passive powers, a cheap power that is a 3 second stun and synergises with the two passive powers.

Character B is clearly better than A.
Character C is clearly better than character A.

Did I mention when you play Character C with a certain 5star, you get blue and green AP that again synergises with Character C's two passives?

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Sometimes cascades happen too, which gives that player a bunch of AP.

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The solution in my mind, is to make everyone viable. There are lots of strategies D3 could enable the players to do. Make a bunch of atk / strike / protect tiles and buff them. Use fortified or charged tiles. Use Web Tiles and spiderpeople teams. Use invis and be stealthy. Generate a bunch of AP and do big nukes. Get a bunch of +match damage and see big numbers that way. Manipulate the board into getting match 4s and higher.

Instead of taking a month or two and focusing on rebalancing characters that are not often used, D3 instead let them fade into obscurity and fall out of the meta. And they focus on making new more shinier characters and use FOMO and powercreep to make players want them.

To be clear, I understand they have a business and are focusing on selling players HP, LLs, shards and other deals. I have no problem with that because we can earn them from gameplay too.

The issue is, the game is not fun before you get the best characters.

I don't see AP batteries as a problem. Frankly if characters with a stun only get half AP from "batteries", that sounds hard or impossible to code. Doubling the cost of their stun seems like a more effective way to do what I think you are proposing.

Also the new 4star has AP generation in the cheap yellow power. :P

Srheer0 · December 2021

Have you played Gems of War at all? It's a match 3 game, but has slightly different mechanics to MPQ.

You get an extra turn whenever you make a match 4 or higher. But if you use a characters active power it would end your turn if it didn't result in a match 4 or more.
The board is bigger than the MPQ one (I think).

The game is full of batteries or board manipulation. I liked a dragon team I put together. One character turned all yellow tiles into red and maybe did some damage. One character exploded a bunch of tiles on the board and you earned half AP for exploded tiles. This obviously made cascades and was fun. It was used on a lot of winfinites.

And the above, was common for nearly all teams. Practically every strong character would convert or destroy all of a colour of tile into another one, There were 30+ architypes and they all had synnergy somehow with some characters of the same type (eg, defenders or team stark).

I liked it, it was fun and fast. The fall speed of gems was particularly quick if you chose so in the options.

Breadsticks · January 2022

I'd like for everyone to be viable but we know that won't happen. Haven't they basically let all the old characters that aren't up to today's design standards die? They're doing refreshes but those aren't happening with any significant speed or effectiveness.

They'd need to do something like card games have which is to set a line of demarcation between new characters made within the maybe last 4 years. They can selectively pull any particular unique, strong or thematic characters forward as stated above.

That's probably the best way forward at this point. However, we'd still need to reconcile any weak/sub optimal characters still in that new pool. The problem as I see it is that dilution works in their favor from a profit perspective. Either you're forced to burn resources to gather everything and/or you're burning resources to keep up with the deals they provide to catch up.

Creating a new smaller pool t temporarily could cost them and you know they aren't going to do that.(at least not right now) Now, in the long term the new pool eventually will grow like the current and require a refresh again. They'd make money just like before and if this refresh is done every 4 years there's the ability to sell "catch up packs" like they do now.

There's the potential for this refresh to be more profitable than probably any other part of the year.

AP batteries a problem to be solved

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