Every so often, usually when evaluating new characters, I see someone say that the devs overvalue board shake. Is that true, or do the players undervalue it?
I would not say overvalue, but they definitely highly regard it.
Tin foil hat on: those pesky Ultron sentries that destroy the bottom of a half a column… I could swear they have some bonus cascade advantage. Almost every time I play against those they get some CRAZY cascades. Makes me want to have a playable character that has a similar power.
Seriously tho, I guess there’s the whole conformation bias thing where AI board shake seems more effective than player board shake so I doubt you can get a truly objective outcome in that regard.
Overall, I’d say the board shuffle/shake pricing is quite different. 5 AP for 3* Loki is pretty cheap, but Quake’s blue or 5* Storm’s yellow seem pretty expensive for what they do (in my opinion). So can’t really say it is uniformly overvalued or undervalued.
It feels like the “overvalued” comments come up when a character is underwhelming and one of their powers relates to board shake.
5thor’s board shake is super useful but nobody complains about that one.
I don’t think the devs think that hard about trying to make characters have similar quality in most cases, it just happens that another bad character has a board shake move.
It’s all a perspective thing.
You don’t remember good board shake because it’s just one moment in one of 40+ matches you’ll play any given day.
You DO remember bad board shake because it can end a match (when you might go undefeated otherwise).
This results in characters being treated one way (players undervalue board shake, and claim that devs over-value it by comparison), but enemies and RNG treated another way (they actually tweaked the damage on cascades because strong cascades against the player FELT bad, regardless of whether or not they were mechanically fair/sound).
It doesn’t help that it’s “swingy” as a mechanic. The same power that creates board shake could be useless one turn, and devastating another. They rely on both board state and the RNG of generating new tiles. But that also means they combo well if you use other powers that set up cascades (powers that change the color of tiles work well for this).
2 reasons why 5 Star Thor’s board shake is so good (and probably one of the best passives in the game):
So every turn you get at least 2 to 3 free match combinations of Red, Yellow, or Green a turn, both as damage and AP, and then any cascades after that.
Donno who can be made at that.
Only a few board shake powers gain AP (Storm Greens, Scarlet Witch Green, etc.), and all of them cost AP to use, and are generally not cheap.
Looking back in MPQ History, here’s a tale about how the devs feel about board shake powers VS their cost/return:
When Scarlet Witch was first released, her Green was bugged and it gave back DOUBLE AP for each tile destroyed, even though the description didn’t say so. But it felt about right for how much it cost, how little it actually destroyed, and that it was random what was destroyed.
But then they “fixed it” and everyone felt like it was a massive nerf to that power. Now the only time you use it is if you don’t have someone else with a better Green (very unlikely), you’re one AP away from firing a non-Green power, and there’s a cluster of that color next to each other so you can guarantee you’ll RNG destroy that needed color.
I had fun with this at 5 Green hunting Purple tiles on Charlie’s Angel’s teams back in the day…
This example shows a bit more into how the devs feel about board shake overall I think. Which is to say they think it’s worth a lot, especially chosen non-RNG board shake.
I am someone who says this frequently. When i say that Demi “overvalues” boardshake (and charged tiles and repeaters), I don’t mean that these mechanics lack value, I mean that Demi does not value them appropriately in relation to other mechanics. You could just as easily say that Demi undervalues some mechanics (e.g. strike tiles and AP generation). But since I am a player and want fast, easy clears, I complain about the powers that don’t perform well and love the ones that make my life easier.
As far as we can tell, Demi’s design process involves some sort of internal budgeting, so each type of power, each HP, etc has an assigned value. This let’s Demi do quick-and-dirty comparisons across characters with very different abilities and keep everyone in roughly the same power envelope. This is why characters with very good abilities (e.g. 5* strange) tend to have lower health and vice-versa. There are a few, very obvious exceptions cough okoye cough that are among the best characters in the game).
Over several years’ worth of new releases, many of us think we have identified a pattern whereby characters with certain mechanics tend to feel underwhelming over and over again as compared to the rest of the game’s roster. This strongly suggests that Demi’s internal budgeting value is wrong on these mechanics and Demi is therefore systematically crippling any characters that rely on them. Charged tiles, random boardshake (as opposed to targeted board control) and repeater-based powers are the most common offenders (c.f. cable, namor and 5* danvers respectively). Look at characters with direct damage aoe powers. Then look at characters with aoe powers on the same color with the ~same cost that also have a board shake component (obvious example is Ragnarok v 3* Thor). Which one is better? It’s almost always the pure damage power. This happens so often with particular mechanics that I am pretty sure it’s not coincidence.
Thor is not at all good because of his boardshake. If his green passive had just board shake and no AP generation, it would be only a little bit better than meh-hulk green and Thor would be a very solid, but unspectacular 5*, on par with someone like DD. But add in 5ap/turn in useful colors and it becomes meta.
There’s no doubt that Thor’s AP generation is what makes him so effective as a character, but the board shake itself is super useful because it removes the colors he generally tanks (key for his survivability), and often helps with strike tile destruction against gritty, the main meta threat. Being free is a good thing, but I don’t care much for the meh “free swap” component in that it often takes away a good move and gives nothing in return, where Thor’s causes so much chaos that good things come just as often.
A budgeting system on new characters seems like a reasonable process to me, and though I don’t get the sense they are really trying to get every release to be equal, I don’t think that they release a character like 5Wasp fully understanding how unappealing she would be to the players. Like maybe “uniqueness” gets increased value in their minds, while we want effectiveness (which is almost always speed, i.e. damage). The board shakes feel relatively unique as powers.
Board shake is like any other ability mechanic. Whether or not it’s ‘good’ depends on the effect, AP generation, AP cost, secondary/passive effects, etc. One thing is for certain - the ability to trigger cascades is an effective one.
There are those who might remember an ancient time, a time when there was only one 4-star character and a handful of 3-star characters only had two abilities (and 10 maximum covers). One of those characters was Ragnarok. Board shake was his game and he was absolutely lethal with it. Ragnarok was so scary, he was even dangerous in the hands of the AI. Waaaaay overpowered.
So much of the early meta was centered around board shake. No one gave a crap about special tiles. Loki, 3Magneto, XFW…
Ever since Ragnarok’s nerf (and Mag’s nerf, and XFW’s nerf) in those times of antiquity, the developers have been really careful not to repeat their mistake with board destruction - it’s usually on a much smaller scale or it’s much more expensive (in AP) to cast. This probably lends some credence to the observation that the developers overvalue board shake.
Rags boardshake and infinite combo were great. But they had more to do with the 2ap power cost
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Rags was one of the few meta chars that was before my time. I would have loved to have experienced 2ap rags trashing column after column
Exactly. And ever since big board destruction powers have been expensive.
Thus the question: do the developers overvalue board shake? Obviously they undervalued it in those days and had to make a quick course correction.
But it was the AP cost that was the problem. Old rags at 6ap per cast would not be a problem in the current game. You can see this from juggernaut, who has a very solid, but in no way OP, boardshake ability.
Meanwhile, there are no more 2ap power in the game at all. Even with cost reduction everything floors out at 3 (alas poor dino purple!).
You might be right that Demi has been shy around boardshake since rags (as they are shy around AP theft since the hood), but if that is true, Demi learned the wrong lesson.
Straight up board shake for HP powers do tend to be pricy, but there are some really effective color-change powers that result in shake that aren’t too bad. Looking at Bamf! and most Thor incarnations. You can see them softening up on it over time though, like when comparing Thing’s green and Rogue’s red - basically the same power except the new one (rogue) gathers the AP it breaks. 2* Magneto is kind of a board shake hero I assume is left over from the olden days- being able to self-accelerate 2 different board shake moves, one that gathers AP and the other that can wipe the whole board. It’s just slow enough and he’s just squishy enough that you can’t rely on it to clear out 4ocket lol.
Being gun-shy about shake may explain why Banner just doesn’t quite work, which is a shame considering characters have come out since him doing what he does better on various colors at lower tiers. He passively makes green, which doesn’t work quite as well as C&D’s does (or Th4nos for that matter), and he gives you that free hit that doesn’t gather the AP when in hulk mode, which is basically the same as 4ocket, though with 4ocket maybe they feel the risk/reward of doing self harm when the CD gets matched away is worth it?
4* grocket generates AP with their free move. Making it worlds better than hulk.
And tile swap powers may do boardshake as a collateral effect, but they love or die on their AP generation ability. The good ones (like 3* if or bamf) are good because they can produce a ton of AP when used well. The bad ones (like sandman) are bad because they don’t reliably make enough AP to justify their cost. The boardshake they do is entirely secondary.
I’m taking this from 5* storm’s 10AP to destroy all of one color compared to Quakes blue for 7 AP destroying 8 of one color. Because the Dev’s has the ability say all of he one color they deem it to be worth 10 instead of 7,8,9.
Also in the 5* tier board shake is considerably ore valuable because of 5* match damage, but it also makes some powers poor in the 5* tier. Loki green, Captain Marvel green (situationally ok), starlord green, storm green all have to potential for board shake but because of that the rest of what the power does is underwhelming.
i think what the devs really overvalue is protect tiles.
Sugah, You’re Goin’ Down is actually way better than that. It’s targetable, while Yancy Street Special is random, in addition to not generating AP.
Generally, the dev design characters based on how those three powers interact with one another, which in turn affects the ap for each power.
Everything will of course look off when players take the best of one power type of that character and compare it with another power of another character.
So, if you want to compare powers between characters, compare all three.
I love board shakes, especially when they happens in chunk, because the chance of same coloured tiles dropping increases. Are they overvalued? No. It’s just that they are not meta-changing and most of them don’t gain ap.
I think there is a disconnect here. When people like me say “Demi overvalues boardshake” (or some other mechanic) we don’t mean that board shake is bad. We mean that characters that focus on boardshake are more likely to be underwhelming.
There are some very good boardshake powers in the game (e.g juggs green, quake blue, Domino green, sabertooth green). But for the most part, characters that rely heavily on boardshake are weaker than average (e.g. Carol, namor, war machine, drax, Thing, etc).
I was referring to the comparison between Quake’s and Storm’s ap cost. I should have mentioned that. 
I think most board shake are more of a non-offensive playstyle, rather than an offensive one. Therefore, it is weaker. So character which relies on boardshake are generally weaker as well.