Invisible Woman (Classic) gets the rebalance treatment and a brand new Future Foundation costume.
*The below is a screenshot to make formatting easier on the forum, but you can also click below to visit her character page on our website:
Also, our last rebalance of the Runaways was a bit too repetitive so I’ve formatted this version to consolidate text. Hopefully it’s easier to read, but happy to take any feedback you may have.
To help clarify some of the questions we’re seeing, @IceIX and I went to our design team to get some more insights on why they certain rebalancing choices. Here’s what they said!
Grant Invisibility - 7 Yellow AP
This ability is cheap and pretty powerful for what it does. The biggest strange thing with it is that it doesn’t actually Grant Invisibility until level 3. Even at risk of making it a little OP at levels 1-2 (and does that REALLY matter?), it was updated so that it does this. The rest of the ability starts to concentrate its budget into Protect tiles, which is has flavor, but doesn’t really do much of what it says on the tin since it’s an ability that specifically Grants Invisibility. Obviously, removing the Protect tile would be a bad idea and make the ability weaker overall. However, the ability at higher levels stops spending any of its budget on what the ability is meant to do, instead pushing it all into the Protect tile. It feels a lot like Wolverine’s Feral Claws, but if levels 3-5 just stopped increasing damage and instead made Strike tiles better. It’s functional, sure, but not really the only thing the ability is built for.
Changes
- Levels 1 and 2 should gain turns 1 ally Invisible.
- Level 1 gains 1 low strength protect tile at strength 2 so that the Protect always exists.
- Level 2 should technically lose its Protect tile for balance, but that’d be really bad for ability feel. Reduced the strength of the Protect a little to compensate. Still technically OP, but given that the minimal “complete” character has a level 3 ability, not a huge thing.
- Level 3 stays as-is. It’s actually a little overbudgeted, but didn’t want to reduce the power.
- Level 4 is overbudgeted because it adds a second Protect tile and doesn’t fully account for that. Pulling that second tile gives the budget to make the granted Invisibility tile Fortified.
- Level 5 currently uses ALL the budget to ramp up Protect tiles. We can still eat budget with this, but the focus of the ability is Invisibility. After keeping the Fortified Invis tile from level 4, we have enough budget to let the allies go Invisible for 3 turns from 2, then still increase the Protect tile from Level 4’s strength 5-> 6.5.
- Overall, this focuses the ability more on it (and the character’s) namesake, making it bar none the best Invisibility ability out there, which it darned well should be.
Force Bubbles - 8->6 Blue AP
The idea in meta when this ability was created/updated was to prevent enemies from using SAPs if they have them, and provide Strike tiles in general. But it also doesn’t affect any tiles but the SAPs, so as you level it the chances of putting out a good number of bubbles actually goes down, depending on the opponent to really do anything first. Easy fix, just have it prioritize enemy tiles instead of requiring them. Great.
Even WITH that change, it’s pretty massively underpowered. This is because since the ability was created, balancing around the budget strength of Locked tiles was adjusted. Again, pretty simple solution, we can lower the AP cost to 6 and STILL end up with extra balancing budget. So lets do that. At the same time, we’ll smooth out the oddity of level 2 having higher Strike strength than level 3 and 4 (which is made up for by adding more tiles, but still). This does result in Levels 1 and 2 losing a bit of per-Strike strength in rebalancing, but it’s not a huge amount, and as above, a completed character won’t have a level 1 or 2 ability anyway.
Overall, this allows the player to push out more Force Bubbles in general due to the lower AP cost while creating stronger Strike tiles in the process. We could lock even more by reducing Strike strength, but decided against it because while the game does handle lots of Locked tiles on the board, players find lots of Locked tiles difficult to parse matches. So if they’re going to do that, it should be because of multiple casts instead of a one shot burst.
Changes
- Change ability to “random non-friendly tiles prioritizing enemy Strike…” instead of only working against those.
- AP Cost 8->6
- Level 1 / 2 - Per Strike strength reduced slightly. Level 2 reduced Locked tiles from 3->2 (level 3 stayed at 3, so no loss in a completed character)
- Level 3/4/5 - Strike strength increased from 22-35%
Force Field Crush - 10->8 Green AP
The ability itself is fine and the overall thresholds feel reasonable. However, it’s pretty under budget in general. Could do all kinds of futzing with numbers and leave it at 10 AP, which is slow. Lowering AP cost to 8 immediately brings level 1 and 2 into line. Actually slightly overbudgeted, but not by a huge amount.
In filling in the extra budget at the higher levels, decided that simply increasing the per tile conversion damage would be the best way to go instead of improving the already outstanding under threshold damage or increasing the number of bubbles created. The latter we didn’t want to go with because that can cause the same issue as with Force Bubbles in creating too many Locked tiles too quickly. 4 “feels” about the max we realistically want to do for any given cast. So that leaves increasing the per tile damage for converted tiles. Doing that brings it up to par. The under threshold big boom damage did end up getting reduced a little in the bargain, but on a per-AP cost basis, it wasn’t by much. And our analytics show that most people are using this with the conversion damage as it is. Which should actually increase due to the AP cost reduction in both this and Force Bubbles. So maybe a little sticker shock there, but in practice, not really a nerf.
Changes
- AP Cost 10->8
- Reduced big boom damage (~33%), raised per tile damage by quite a bit (10%-90% depending on level). This is affected by the AP cost reduction, minimizing the per-AP damage loss from the big boom while magnifying the per-tile damage increase.