Devs, stop releasing dead-on-arrival 5s !!! What is the point of releasing mediocre chars?!?!?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I think the tittle says it all. I have never played a Hero Collector game with so many chars dead on arrival (DOA), completely mediocre and outclassed by previous releases and almost unusable. Some of these chars are not even worth to use when buffed !!!

Assuming in a year we get 12 5s, we get 2 meta chars, we get 5-6 decent/good, worth using when boosted and then 4-5 mediocre chars, most of the time not worth using even when boosted!

What is the point of chars like Ultron, Odin, Knull, (maybe even Ronan, he is in the limit as he will probably be decent when boosted), Cyclops, Magneto, etc. Sure they add a bit of variety, but most of them will only be used when required.

Almost all new content we get in this game are new chars, when most of them are mediocre, that means the content we are getting is mediocre. So again, why keep playing Devs??? what is the point!!! Give us exciting and cool new chars, not boring and medicore ones!!!

PS: Not all new chars should be meta, but all of them should be good. 4 meta, 8 good would be the ideal ratio.

2

How do you define “good”?

How do you define “mediocre”?

What criteria do you use to define whether a character is “good” or “mediocre”?

Without defining all these terms properly, it’s difficult for them to understand your feedback because it is vague.

3

Sometimes it feels like the characters being released are for a different game than the one we have. For me the most frustrating thing is when a high profile character like Magneto or probably Knull comes out and they’re just like…not good. Emma Frost was another one - just classic characters many of us were waiting for, and they arrived in such a way that even at very high levels they are un-playable in the current game modes. For instance I have a level 363 Emma Frost and she makes about as much difference to a match as bringing an unchamped 3* character would due to her high AP costs and do-nothing powers that even after several turns of AP collection take several turns for repeaters to resolve. 5* Captain Marvel has the exact same problem regardless of her nerf status. I don’t like to think it’s a deliberate choice to put out characters who are actively bad, but I also don’t like to think the design team fundamentally doesn’t understand their own game either, so I don’t know where to land on that.

I think in the case of 5* characters, they really need to operate from the assumption that every 5* character is going to be somebody’s transition champ character, so having someone like Ultron come out only able to do (generously) 12-14k damage actively against even an un-boosted Knull’s health pool of 100K+ is a very good example of what DOA looks like. It takes weeks, months, or years (real ones, not like dog years or something) of significant daily play to champ a specific 5* character, especially one you missed in Latest, so it really is a letdown when they can’t compete with the very good ones. And then to pivot to trying to chase those really good ones and having to start over? not that rad…

4

As a 4* player looking to transition to 5* play these ‘mediocre’ characters are better than anything I have. There is a thread that showed we can transition using the Robbie Reyes Ghost Rider as a solo champ. In a meta with Griity and Thoyoke.

I get everyone’s philosophy is if you’re not first you’re last but this is kind of ridiculous

5

I was just thinking this recently. We’ve had a couple of decent 5 stars this year, but so many of them are just “meh”. Some interesting mechanics, but none of them are what I’d consider hard hitters. I’m not really interesting in spending my hard earned LT & CP to champ “meh” 5 stars that I’ll rarely, if ever use.

I think part of the problem is the devs assume that a new character will used with boosters (Okoye/Apoc/Kitty), and neuter them as a result. It basically means that we’re forced to use boosters to make these new characters playable, which really limits the variety of teams we could be putting together. It’s also got me to thinking that I’ll invest my CP in moving up my meta characters instead of trying to keep up with new releases.

6

Your perspective depends on where you’re at in the game, but it’s really not ridiculous. Once you have 20 five stars, and you end up only using maybe 5 of them regularly, you won’t want to invest your LT & CP into more five stars that you likely won’t use. There are many four star champs on my roster that I’d use long before some of my five star champs.

7

For those of us who are transitioning into 5* Land (15 fully-covered 5s, almost all the metas finished) still trying to build up the rest of the 5s, the “break” of a couple dud 5s is a welcome reprieve to allow the hoards to build back up.

8

It’s a huge problem. You can only ignore character balance for so long in a game like this.

There’s two ways they can fix it: either make every character as good as the best characters, or make the best characters less good, somehow.

Ultron only looks bad if you compare him to Okoye, Apocalypse, Beta Ray Bill, etc.

9

I think it is pretty subjective question as I wouldn’t tag odin as a bad character. If I had him certainly I would use him in pick 3.
Knull can pass as a 5* for all his passives.
Also this year, still not finished, we have 3 meta characters: wanda colossus and Shang-chi( he is being used right now even unchamped).
So I think the only one recently actually deserving a rant is ultron. If just his red was AoE…
There are a lot of characters and possibly it is not easy to innovate and making them tops at the same time.
Right now obviously the jackpot is to pull SC and the others just a consolation reward.

10

D3 have to be a bit subtle with the power creep lol.

Otherwise groups of players will leave when they aren’t being pulled along with the unspoken promise of the next new 4 or 5 being awesome.

Can you imagine champing someone you really like, and then 1-4 5star releases later they are obsolete?

More characters is good because it gives us more feeders and more team possibilities (if not playing in the fastest pve and pvp way possible).

And new characters can make older ones relevant.

Like how old pre-nerfed bishop made H5wkeye much much better.

Just because someone is a dud on arrival doesn’t mean they will be a dud forever. I predict IronmanHulkBuster being used quite often with Shangchi as an example. His blue and black are great for making red tiles or making red ap. @polares

11

I don’t believe you are being fair and I say this despite my qualms with the current PvP meta.

I think for the most part 2021 has seen some pretty good additions to the 5*tier.

  • Adam Warlock: Great for PvE with high level Okoye
  • Yellow Jacket: Good all-around character and fun to use
  • Cyclops: Currently considered one of the best potential partners for Shang-Chi
  • Colossus: Current meta
  • Wanda: Current meta
  • Knull: Decent skill set, especially paired with Kitty and Ultron
  • Ronan: Decent offensive skill set
  • Electro: Good all-around character, has a really strong nuke, pairs well with Onslaught
  • Odin: While I think the devs really missed the mark with him in terms of character flavor, he has potential if somewhere down the road they release a character that goes heavy on fortify tiles and has a good nuke.
  • Shang-Chi: easily the most interesting, creative and fun skill set released in a long time. Unlikely to see much play in top tier PvP but will definitely see love from casual players and those who like variety
  • Ultron: Will pair well with BRB and Knull. A bit too early to say but at least on paper Beta/Ultron looks like it will end end up as second or third best defensive pairing
    With that said, there are two issues to consider when talking about the 5* tier this year:

First, the meta for top tier PvP play is currently focused on defensive mechanics, namely the Colossus/Wanda combo. (As a comic fan, this pairing really gets my goat because mutants in general despise her, and the Phoenix Five specifically considered her their greatest enemy. Shakes fist in air with righteous comic nerd indignation) But I digress.

Returning to the issue at hand, so the current meta is defensively heavy meaning slower matches. I assume the devs did this for two reasons:

a.) to address the iHulk/Okoye meta (which they did successfully without nerfing either character, kudos to them on that)

b. ) in anticipation for the weekly 5* boost. Not everyone has all the 5* characters so a new player hopping into the 5* tier is able to mitigate the weekly boost with this defensive heavy team.

The second issue is more a matter of hindsight. It’s a debatable point but I don’t think it was the wisest move releasing Colossus and Wanda together (granted my comic-nerd bias may be influencing my feelings on the matter).

It would have been more fruitful to have released Electro earlier, prior to Wanda’s release when there was a high demand for an iHulk counter. Had Cyclops been pushed back to be included together with Shang-Chi, people would have a much more favorable view of his skillset. (It’s worth pointing out that none of the current 5* characters have any real synergy with Shang-Chi).

Obviously the dev team has to adhere to the MCU schedule somewhat so we can’t really shift those characters around too much but me thinks if the release order had looked something like this:

  1. Electro

  2. Colossus

  3. Yellow Jacket

  4. Adam Warlock

  5. Scarlet Witch

  6. Odin

  7. Knull

  8. Ronan

  9. Cyclops

  10. Shang-Chi

  11. Ultron
    The meta wouldn’t have been skewed so heavily toward one defensive team combo. Theoretically speaking, there would probably be two defensive heavy meta teams:

  12. Electro/Colossus

  13. Wanda/Odin

Additionally, other competitively viable teams would be:

  1. Apoc/BRB
  2. Wanda/Okoye
  3. Wanda/Apoc
  4. Wanda/Yellow Jacket
  5. Electro/Onslaught
  6. Electro/Yellow Jacket
  7. BRB/Ultron

But alas! What’s done is done and cannot be undone. It will be interesting to see how the dev team plans on dealing with the current defensive mechanics dominating PvP.

12

But alas! What’s done is done and cannot be undone. It will be interesting to see how the dev team plans on dealing with the current defensive mechanics dominating PvP.

Here’s an idea. 5star invisible woman or another similar character.

Passive - If an enemy does a jump infront mechanic, [Character] sticks their foot out, tripping up the enemy, and either stunning them or causing a chunk of damage / make countdowns that do something cool.

And they could implement ways to bypass damage reductions like they have with Ultrons red. Maybe have a character who absorbs and then dishes it out. Similar to maybe Rhulk, H3lk or Rogue maybe.

13

I am obviously exagerating a bit, but I still think what I say is mostly true. Most of the chars released we champ and we dont use ever again, only when they are featured, not even when buffed. This is not good for any game.

For me the worst part is that a lot of these chars would be at least decent with small tweaks (we have mentioned quite a few small tweaks in Ultron, Cyclops or Magneto thread), but Devs keep making the same mistakes over and over again, creating abilitites that do 3-4 things at the same time but none too great, instead of focusing in 1-2 effects but making the ability great at that. It is like abilities with charged tiles being super expensive or abilities with repeater tiles also being more expensive than they should considering they might actually never get to do anything at all.

Also, it is normal to make mistakes when designing these chars, it happens to everybody, but one the biggest problems in this game is that they almost never do small buffs or tweaks after a char is released. You see in other games that Devs are much more open, and they acknowledge when a cerrtain char falls short, etc. If you miss the mark you can tweak it after being released, chars are in latest for 3 months!!!. They have a LOT of data about the game, but it seems they dont use that data for anything at all!

In the end, you need to keep your playerbase excited about new releases because that is the only new content we have and I dont think they are doing a good job in this front…

PS: On a personal note I disagree with some of the analysis of single chars, specially with Adam. After Colossus and Wand/Elektro were released Adam has basically disappeared from my teams.

PS: Also, releasing super popular chars like Cyclops or Magneto with mediocre kits HURTS.

14

If you would kindly point me to the tier where all characters are useable that would be helpful. Or perhaps if balance does not exist in this game then another game where all characters are meta. This game, in all tiers of play, the meta is situated around mid-tier 5* characters being boosted. In 4* land, where most characters are champ reward bags, I can make it to around 900 pts using Polaris (the meta of metas) before I run out of targets because they all have multiple covers and over 100k health. If I do not shield I end somewhere around 500 pts. So maybe Ultron’s red and blue look weak compared to Apocalypse and Kitty right now. We will see during his boost week. Skip characters at your own risk.

15

I give them no credit for this. What’s the difference between releasing a totally effective offensive/defensive counter vs just doing a nerf?

Hulk went from a 100% share in PvP to a 0% share overnight and he is now completely unusable.

At least when they do a nerf we get (bad) compensation. Now Hulk is a dead roster slot. He’s been nerfed without actually being nerfed.

16

iHulk is only nerfed if you only play PvP. In PvE Okoye, iHulk and Adam Warlock (disregarding weekly boosts, though perhaps I shouldn’t) at 550 remain the fastest team available. Most players ignore PvP or play to they get the majority of rewards (let’s say 16 wins). So yes, if you want a infinity stone and do not have the weekly boost or one of the 5witch teams you are hurting on PvP and the difference between iHulk being nerfed and his counters being playable is hard to see.

17

If you’re counting by raw numbers/percentages, “most” players simply don’t play PvP. “Most” players don’t have a single champion 4* or 5* on their roster, so none of these changes affect them at all.

The group of players who care about PvP is much larger than the .000001% of players who are willing to put forth the money for shields, time, and effort it takes to finish #1 in a season (and that’s all it is, not roster).

18

That was my first Grand Experiment thread that seems to have been retired with the sub-forum it existed in during a site cleanup. Mediocre chracters from the above tier are definitely better than who you have, but as soon as you champ them, the threats you get matched up against in PVP will immediately scale up to a degree you are likely to find oppressive. The big takeaway from my GRRR experience was that he was thoroughly ill-equipped to combat the Kitty/Rocket meta, because the qualitative difference between Kitty and Ghost Rider is not something that MMR takes into account, except I was then exclusively matched up against single champ kitty and max-champ rocket basically until Sabretooth was released. Her ability to scale damage turn on turn immediately and passively was something that even a hard hitting (relative to the time) Ghost Rider was too slow to do anything about. At that time pre-shard, it was very difficult to chase counter characters, even at the 4* tier, so I spent the entirity of that meta trying my best to come up with some sort of reasonable team to exist in there. Main event Hulk, my second champed 5* Dr Doom could do it if he legit died in the match, so that left me trying to go solo…it just felt incredibly punishing and there was no reasonable time-frame character growth option for me besides sticking it out or selling off my 5*s to drop back down.

19

Lol. You clowns don’t even know wtf is DOA..

IHulk at one time was “DOA”.
Kitty was viewed as “mediocre” on pre-release.
Colossus was viewed as “skippable” and “there’s no point because a match damage meta will never happen!”

so, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t accept the words of a bunch of guys who are WRONG QUITE OFTEN when characters are revealed and not used yet.

Get over yourselves.

20

It’s no longer about “if you’re not first you’re last.”

For a long time I thought rotating 5* boosts would solve the 5* balance issue. They don’t.

Yes, players will always figure out who the best characters are, and will use those characters exclusively. That’s fine, and it’s to be expected.

This is different. This isn’t about a small edge that smart players exploit. The best 3-4 characters are easily +200 levels (or more) better than the entire rest of the tier. The good characters are so much better that they’re usable regardless of boost status, and they beat everything regardless of boost status.

They make every single 5* feel awful, mediocre, and slow in comparison.