Hmm, Have you guys ever looked at a message scheduling? It looks like all your press releases are hand issued. I’m sure they must have automation tools that enable you to automatically post a message at a specific time.
So specifically you can have the server post the support message automatically
Technically it’s both. When you unlock a new Perk you also unlock additional levels you can increase all Perks to. Level 250 is unlocked when you acquire Perk 5.
Just to continue a discussion from the other Atlantis thread…
Right now, very, very few players have 5* supports, but that will change in the future. Just like the release of 5s, it will take time for people to get them (maybe years), but eventually all top players will have them. So, whoever can get them first should have an advantage during this time. But unlike 5 characters, there’s not a huge gap between 4* and 5* supports (at least with the older ones) but it seems like Demi wants to create a significant gap by releasing new supports with perks at 1, 3 and 5.
For now, everyone seems to be slowly getting 4* supports, which is good because it gives people a taste of what they could do and drives them to want better supports. I think Demi is smarter than people think when it comes to getting people to chase after something.
I think this is disingenuous. Namor would cease to be underwhelming if he suddenly gained the ability to generate 1AP in each of his colors on a match-5? Really?
I would agree that there are a half-dozen problems with the character-specific bonus perks on Supports, but no one benefits from this kind of dishonest feedback. Namor clearly wouldn’t be a star if you just fused the Support into the character directly, so it’s pretty misleading to claim the Support is the reason he is underwhelming.
I think you are being a bit harsh here. There is nothing dishonest about wondering what Namor would have been had supports not existed. The onus is on the development team to present their reasoning behind character builds and the nature of the relationship with their companion support. Unfortunately, we are provided none which invites players to formulate their own theories as to why a character came out a certain way.
Namor is notorious for being short-tempered and quick-to-action and yet his character design suggests anything but that.
There is nothing disingenuous about wondering if supports influenced his high AP costs. While you focused on the character specific perk, you conveniently glossed over the fact that the Atlantis support also grants a chance to gain 6 green AP which would be half of the AP needed for Imperius Rex!
People have noted that Iceman, a character released pre-supports who shares two colors with Namor and has a similar purple, has a much more useful and better synergized skill set and I think it’s not unreasonable to wonder why a character released over 3 years ago is significantly better and, in my humble opinion, more fun to use.
Had Imperious Rex! been a 6 AP skill instead of 12, it would have at least been a more accurate portrayal to the character’s well known impulsiveness (although I have other problems with the design of the character that is a separate issue for another day). On the other hand, had Iceman been released now in the age of supports, it begs the question whether they would have given him a 6 AP 4 turn stun as he is or, if they had released a companion support that offers the chance at gaining blue AP, would they have increased the cost to the actual character ability.
The dev team does have to factor in how supports interact with not only the character tied to their release but with other characters who are able to use that support. To not do so would be irresponsible. Furthermore, they have to provide an incentive for people to want supports. For better or worse, all these things are now factors when considering a character’s design.
As a consequence, people will speculate that a lackluster character was intentionally designed to be less than their best in order to entice the player base to chase after their support tie-in. After the release of Victorious, I found myself wondering if the dev team intentionally limited Doom to one offensive ability so they could add on an offensive ability to his support (albeit a rather weak one). In a world without supports, would God Emperor Doom have been given a (hopefully stronger) yellow AoE instead of magic healing powers?
Now with all that said, it is important to keep in mind that the release of underwhelming characters is nothing new (here’s looking at you 5* Hulk). There have always been characters that didn’t quite make the cut. But now with supports, people will wonder how much the companion support influenced the design decisions of the character.
Will we ever get answers? Probably not. But I don’t think it’s fair to call such speculation dishonest or disingenuous considering the lack of explanation for these design choices. I do think it’s fair to ask why Namor is so slow when it goes against his very character. Is it unreasonable to wonder if his companion support was a factor in his character design?
Every power these days seems to be either passive or relatively expensive. Which then means that the meta at virtually every level ends up being defined by passives (Thor, Okoye, Kitty, Grocket, Medusa, BIshop…). The devs seem deathly afraid of cheap active powers, the likes of which we used to see quite a bit - like Iceman’s stun. If they’re doing it because they think we should be making up the AP deficit via supports, then they’re pretty wildly deluded.
Collect the Atlantis Support and improve 4-Star Namor (the Sub-Mariner)!
I guess that says everything I need to know about how they are approaching characters and Supports.
On the one hand, you can’t consider the design in a vacuum. The Support should probably be taken into account when balancing the character. Or? Supports are not in PvP (yet). Half the game is pvp; if a character is underwhelming there as released it doesn’t seem like the main event (a new character to play with) is being handled correctly.
And Supports remain pretty hard to get, especially without being willing to use resources or spend. So how much of a factor are they really for most players? Probably a very small one.
I don’t like the idea that the character’s Support is part of the design package. Not one bit. But I fully believe that it is.
Well, the meta has been defined by passives since at least 2015. There was a brief period at the very Dawn of the game when active powers dominated (2thorverine, 1 storm, 3* pun + one). Then there was another run in 2014-2015 with 4* thorverine. But since then, the game has basically been all about passives (hulkfist, jg, then OML and off to the races with 5* passives). So that doesn’t seem likely to change.
But yeah, cheap active powers are great and I would love to see more of them.
Also, this Atlantis support seems kinda meh. It has 2 of the worst types of support powers (add or reduce small amounts of damage from powers, which is basically worthless at the 5* level). And while starting with some ap is very good, it takes a huge amount of red iso to get the probabilities up to a useful level.
And the special cookie for namor isn’t great either. His power will create some match5s, but not enough for this to be a real AP engine.
I ignored the 6 green AP because it’s not an explicit “fix” to Namor. It can apply to literally any character (3* or higher) in the game. The logic that Namor’s green costs more because the devs expect that to be balanced with Atlantis goes out the window the instant you can equip Atlantis to Moon Knight or Iceman or Red Hulk or Sandman or Thing or Cho or any other green user that benefits from it. We can’t consider these things in a vacuum. If Namor’s powers would be cheaper if Supports didn’t exist, why do none of the other eligible characters change? If Namor’s powers need to be more expensive to balance the benefit of Atlantis, why didn’t Iceman’s costs go up as well?
Why are all of them just as balanced before and after an 80% chance of 6 free AP enters the game, but Namor’s design theoretically had to be changed pre-release to compensate for it? (nevermind the reality that anyone capable of acquiring the support at a high enough rank to get free AP isn’t going to be using it on 4* characters in the first place)
I don’t think there’s enough evidence to point at the Atlantis support as a specific reason for Namor being lackluster. There might be if the Atlantis support could only be equipped to him. But the idea that they made Namor “meh” so the support could make him “okay-good” doesn’t hold up when that same support makes so many other “good” characters “even better.” Because if you’re going to equip it to someone else, then it isn’t even improving Namor in the first place.
There are several problems here (Namor is disappointing, Supports following new characters solely as new shinies to chase), but complaining about Namor and blaming supports isn’t getting to the heart of either problem, nor is it attempting to approach a solution. And that’s what I mean by disingenuous. It’s more about gesturing in disgust at two problems and lumping them together than it is about trying to explain or fix either one.
There is as much evidence on either side of the argument: zero. Plenty of speculation, but no concrete evidence. Here on the forum, i dont think there is any reason not to speculate, and the original post you called disingenuous was very speculative.
You want to disagre, fine, and you made a decent case for it. But we have seen plenty of disingenuous stuff here, and i really have to disagree that the above post fits that definition.
