I agree that is a very well thought out, and well articulated post. Embedded within it is the best counters I’ve heard to nerfing Bishop. Way better than anything in the Bishop threads. That said, there are a lot of what I believe to be inaccuracies that I’d like to point out, and hopefully put some things into perspective.
“Of course, there were calls for a nerf. Those calling for the nerf argued the team had too much power, was too fast and immediately rendered newer 5* obsolete.”
I don’t remember huge rallies for nerfs to Thorkoye. Their rise to prominence happened right after Gambit’s nerf, so people were more relieved than anything to not have to face what many deemed a broken mechanic. If you search the forums you will absolutely find rumblings of people complaining about staleness after awhile, and ideas here and there on how to bring them in line with everyone else, but no huge cries or pages dedicated to discussing how unfair they are. Mainly because while they are certainly the fastest option, and a great team for climbing and hopping, they can be beat (and this part is important) BY ANYONE. So you could at any point, throw whatever three toons you have at them and can likely win 90% of your matches. Why? Because the strategy to defeat them does not depend on specific counter-characters. We’ve had “rumblings” of ways to nerf every single top character throughout the history of the game. The only truly big cries that went beyond handfuls of people here and there were Gambit and Bishop.
“Simply put, the Kitty/Grocket pairing revolutionized the PvP meta. Here is a team that forces a player running Thor/Okoye to take a gamble: do I risk it and hope I can remove enough strike tiles before things get out of control or do I skip? While Jessica Jones was a significant precursor to this, Kitty/Grocket took it to a whole nother level. With Jessica, you can see her trap tiles and can work around it somewhat or have Okoye take the damage and heal it off if all goes well. But with Kitty, the damage stacks. The longer it takes you to remove the tiles or down her, the more dangerous it gets.”
I don’t think either revolutionized the meta game. We’ve had defensive teams at least since Carndusa. So it’s not a new concept.
Jessica is the first and ONLY somewhat scary 5* character to face (you can say Kitty is scary but if Grocket didn’t exist and she didn’t have all those specials right away, she’d be upper mid tier at best).
Gritty does not make a 5* player running Thorkoye second guess, for the same reason you don’t second guess hitting Jessica. Maybe if there’s a particular required third that either works against you (3* Fist/3* Cage PVP) or for them (3* Daken PVP) you pause. Otherwise, Thorkoye is probably the second best counter to Gritty and a pretty safe bet to run. Why? It’s the same reason they don’t bat an eye at Jessica Jones. If you get unlucky and they place a trap and match it same turn, Okoye will heal up. Same way she will heal up after Thor smashes up the board and collects yellow. If worth enough points no one running Thorkoye has to think twice about hitting Gritty.
“And once again, a significant section of the forum community called for a nerf.”
To be clear, that “significant section” is called 4* players. As mentioned, Thorkoye is a great counter, you mentioned BSSM, and Doom does the job well too (perhaps at the cost of a pack). Both Kitty and Grocket are super reliant on those strikes. Get rid of them and both are pretty bad characters in their tiers. Doom dies and victory is all but guaranteed. Most 5* players really liked Kitty/Grocket because they shook up the meta and offered a viable second option. Over time we’ve seen way less Thorkoye in the wild and more Gritty. The cries were mostly from 4* players and mostly before several 4* counters were developed.
Because underleveled Kitties are a 4* problem, the counters were developed at the 4* tier. Prowler, Sabretooth, Dazzler, Thanos, and… BISHOP (I’ll get to this later). The developers decided to use 4* characters to fix a 4* problem.
“The top passive defensive abilities that come to mind are:…”
Add Professor X’s match-4 passive. Especially since the AI will hit match-4’s you may have missed 100% of the time.
“Any good defensive team is bound to cause player frustration
There is no escaping this fact. The reason for the outcry on the forum is simple: people are not used to losing anymore. In no uncertain terms, Okoye/Thor was basically an insta-win, especially if you have the ideal build of having Okoye tanking for Thor. The pairing allows players to punch way above their weight class. Before the arrival of Kitty/Grocket and Bishop, high level PvP was basically a sea of Okoye/Thor teams with the occasionally sighting of Thanos/Panther and sometimes a rare non-meta pair.”
I disagree strongly here. The outcry is not about simply winning all the time. I lose to Gritty way more than any other 5* team before them, but they are still beatable more often than not. I have to put thought into playing them in terms of protecting tiles and making the right matches. And I have to put thought into playing against them (who to bring and how to play those I choose). Gritty made it so you can no longer play mindlessly fighting with or against them, and had to actually think. It’s because of this that the Kitty outcry never got too big in the 5-tier. Some complained. But mostly, people loved having a second meta option for maybe the first time ever.
If it was really about never wanting to lose as you claim here, then there wouldn’t be cries for nerfs to Thorkoye (which you assert earlier). The cries to nerf Thor, Okoye, Rocket, Kitty, and Thanos (back in the day), all come from the same place. There will always be those who think the strongest character is “too strong” and when everyone uses them, makes other characters obsolete. To lump Bishop in with with these characters and to generalize it as “people don’t like to ever lose or use packs” is disingenuous and not representative of the real problem. To compare Bishop and 5* players reactions to him to Gambit would be much more fair of a comparison.
“Bishop is the Okoye/Thor nerf”
No. Hela was an attempt at a Thorkoye counter. Iceman was an attempt at a Thorkoye counter. These are 5* counters to 5* characters (who honestly don’t need a counter character because anyone can beat them). But they are characters that I believed were designed to punish bringing Thor to a fight.
Bishop was designed to be a Gritty nerf. A 4* solution to a 4* problem. Take a hit, from a low level Gritty? Smack Kitty back and stun her enough turns to take out her strikes. With Sabretooth and Thanos released as ways to handle hard to reach strikes a little later, it seems like you have a pretty good 4* counter-meta. That’s great for 4* players. But created a broken mechanic for 5* players.
Bishop does not “nerf Thorkoye”. He nerfs the entire tier above him. He doesn’t punish bringing Thor to a fight. He punishes bringing 5*s to a fight. That’s where the outcry is coming from.
You spend several paragraphs talking about Bishop serving his “intended purpose”, but since I believe the premise is faulty, I can’t agree with most of what you wrote. So I’ll move on.
Viable Kitty/Grocket Counters:
Great: Black Suit Spider-man, Bishop
Ok: Sabertooth, 5* Daredevil
Poor: 4* Thanos
Thorkoye is an absolutely great Gritty counter and not on your list. Gritty’s best counters (Thorkoye and BSSM) were already available before Kitty was ever released which is why the outcry never got too big. There were not great counters in place in 4* land however, and I don’t think the developers intended 4* players to chase her and “play down”. So they created counter characters after the fact.
“For 5* rosters, there are only four viable options for countering Bishop:
OK counter: Silver Surfer, Bishop
Poor counter: 5* Doctor Octopus, 5* Black Widow”
Ock and Widow are not viable counters at all. I question if anyone who calls them “viable” truly understands the problem he poses for 5* players. I’d say high level surfer is okay (requires tanking), Bishop is poor (requires luck) and Ock and Widow aren’t viable counters. The only “great” counter is skipping. Otherwise you are punished for matching 3.
“I think the meta is in a better place than it was last year, at least at the higher end of PvP.”
I disagree. The meta is becoming “play 4* so I can leave Bishop on defense, knowing people will skip me”. I’d much rather get to play whatever team I want and face the same team over and over (I was rocking Cable/Daredevil for a minute against the sea of Thorkoyes when I transitioned. That was fun for me!) then having to play certain characters, so I can leave out a broken character, so I don’t get hit. OR, being locked into playing one pretty mediocre character that I don’t even have useable (Surfer) in order to get through a wall of the same broken 4* character. That is by no means better for me.
And by the way, as people are catching on, the wall is only getting bigger each season. As people realize that: Bishop = skips and defensive wins, more and more people are running him. And to run him and have him on defense, means running less 5* and having less diversity. And trust me when I say this wall will only get bigger and soon be as big as the Thorkoye wall once was. It’s already happening.
Again, I appreciate the write up but hope my equally long one gives you better perspective on where people are coming from. This call for a nerf is not just another “X is too strong or X is too hard to beat”. It is “X is broken”, just like with Gambit, who is the only other character that the forum got up in arms about wanting nerfed. There’s a reason people spoke out against him. And the precedent that his nerf set made me believe that Bishop will be nerfed as well, which I believe is ultimately good for the health of the game.