Gargantos Boss Event Change (Live) (6/23/22)

I give due credit for updating the event based on feedback from the players, and definitely things are more manageable with the changes that have been made, but I feel that this event was poorly conceived and poorly executed from the outset, with almost certainly no testing or real consideration given by the development staff.

Heroic events are a great idea, and many old players (including me) support their return. They make lots of extra characters who just clutter up the roster (except for the odd Deadpool Daily and required PvP/PvE nodes) have a little more purpose. The problem in this case was the choice of which characters to use.

The Dark Avengers are just a garbage team. They are. No offense to the Marvel employees who worked on the comics, or the D3Go employees who made the characters. Individually, there are some standout characters that are interesting, have good synergy with the existing roster of characters (like Scorpion or Agent Venom) or "feel" like their counterparts should (classic Bullseye), but this is a terrible team of villains filled with unlikeable characters who do not work well together. Mechanically, their synergy exists, but is limited, and even in the storyline of game events in MPQ we see the characters as inept, undisciplined and antagonistic toward each other. Read the dialogue of all their in-team bickering and how easily they are bamboozled by the heroes. How are we supposed to be excited about playing with this group? They weren't even a success in their own comics. In fact, I think the Dark Avengers is probably the least appealing affiliation of characters in this game where you could actually field a team of 3 of those characters -- excepting the Runaways, which is literally just three characters. 

To compound matters further, Gargantos is a horrible boss to put against this group. While the damage from his blue ability was toned down (and made 1 AP more expensive), he still eats away at 3 random AP per turn and hits for not insignificant damage if you don't have AP in that color. Why does this matter? Well, not only is it a really irritating boss ability, but the Dark Avengers are not filled with fast-acting characters who have powers costing 6 or 7 AP. Their passives are few (apart from those like 2* and 3* Daken that will actively punish you by creating special tiles for Gargantos to chomp). You're usually looking at three matches in a color to use its power, assuming that Gargantos doesn't eat that AP first. And while there are some team attacks available like Agent Venom's (even though he was a part of Thunderbolts, which should give us Red Hulk, Deadpool, Elektra and Punisher), for the most part if Gargantos does go invisible, you don't have much recourse until he comes back.

During the last Madness boss event, teams steamrolled Gargantos because they were fast, modern characters with effective passives, affordable powers, and the ability to combine synergies. By putting the Dark Avengers against a recent boss event (instead of the originals like Ultron and Galactus which were created in a different era of the game), all it did was remind players of why they don't like these dumpy, slow characters. The Dark Avengers, like their comic book storyline, are a relic of a bygone era and not one that will live on forever in the hearts of comic fans.