ITT: How do healing changes affect characters in pvp?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Just want to do a quick rundown of impacts and ask for your input to help people move on and be productive again. Remember that the name of the game is now mitigating damage and true healing. I’ll start with the recent rankings top 9.

Final rankings:
Magneto (classic) - Temporary offensive buff
Simply for the reason that he can finish games in so few turns that it helps prevent damage for your team. Damage mitigation is the key here. Temporary because of the upcoming nerf bat

Thor - Defensive buff
Thor is relatively quick to get going and while it will take a long time for him to heal offensively, he will be less likely to get attacked since his yellow and green can hurt… A lot.

Wolverine (Patch) - Defensive buff, Major offensive buff with a caveat
Patch can true heal for about 370 a turn which makes him more offensively sustainable. He is a risk to fight against which helps on defense now as well. He’s still no hulk though from a tank perspective. However, one wrong rage can kill half of your health packs.

Punisher - Minor defensive buff, minor offensive nerf
AoE attacks are something to avoid now. Those plus judgement can spell defensive issues. His health will be an issue though.

***Daken - Buffs all around
Not only does he true heal, but when you fight against him, you will be taking damage. Theres just no getting around it.

Black Panther - Defensive buff
Take what I said about Punisher, then add 2500 more damage.

Black Widow (original) - Minor defensive buff, Offensive LOL!
A big part of her appeal was her healing to keep your offense going. This is gone now and she is now for AP theft. I expect to see her diminish greatly. Nothing changes defensively except that an AP thief can extend matches which is bad for the opponent because it leads to more damage.

The Hood - Defensive buff, Offensive nerf
See what I mentioned about OBW on AP theft. Extending the match is good for defense. It will be even tougher keeping him alive though

Hulk - Defensive buff
Either you are forced to whittle down a lot of health slowly or anger him unless you can OHKO him.

Thoughts?

2

For OBW I agree but otherwise I don’t see it mattering much with regards to 3* heroes. It more affects players.

If you were prologue healing a given hero then that hero is worse for you. If you were using OBW to keep a given hero healthy then that hero is worse for you. If you never did either then every hero is unchanged icon_e_smile.gif
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For example. If you were using Patch before but had to take him to the prologue to heal between fights then you still will. He didn’t actually improve in any way. Equally if you use lazy Thor a lot like I do but never had to heal him beyond the odd health pack then nothing has changed.

I will agree though that any hero that is a consistent source of at least some damage on defence is better against players who have been reliant on healing. So heroes like Daken with passives or cheap abilities like punisher have a bit more annoyance factor on defense but only against certain players.

3

The thing is that while the characters themselves haven’t changed, the meta has changed for offense. When people play for long stretches, they have to make more decisions and watch out for different things. Now that prolog healing is not a thing, the following affects take place.

  1. Large health actually means more. It allows for more sustainability and fewer health packs.
  2. Quick damaging opponents and AoE (area of effect) are dangerous since any damage you take is essentially permanent when it comes to long stretches
  3. Characters that can true heal have a big health advantage (besides ares)

Those are relatively simple changes but they affect a lot of people.

4

if on attack, characters with passive defense abilities like Spiderman and Bullseye actually become much more important. I can almost instantly mitigate 66% of the damage thrown at Spiderman the moment i make a single purple matchup to put down a protection tile. Although Classic Spiderman is limited to four of these, Bullseye isn’t.

So I suspect a lot of people might start using these two characters more especially in offense and probably a bit more in defense because it mitigates damage and prolonging a fight.

Not seen many of either one yet, but I did note I was getting a 50% win rate when attacked when I left spiderman on defense

5

In one fell swoop, this has made:

  1. OBW: almost purely defense now, and given that anyone with decent offense will usually off her before she gets off a strike, there are better characters to use.
  2. Lazy Daken and Patch: this has made these two characters, who were powerful enough already, even more so. Very valuable on offense to tank and heal, and will likely have people passing you over on defense. Alternating lazy daken + lazy Thor with Patch + cmags will give two very powerful teams, regardless of the third character.
  3. Hot dog stand: just when you thought it could not be any lamer
6

I dont think this changes the metagame at all.

  1. 3* players never had any issues sustaining their team long enough to do well in pvp. I havent prologue healed in 3-4 months, so im completely unaffected by the change for instance. This means that any 3*s are pretty much unaffected since not a lot of people were relying on prologue healing to begin with.

  2. Pure 2* rosters are completely unaffected as well. What are they going to do, switch out obw for moonstone? Obw is still a top tier 2* because she synergizes well with the three other good 2s (ares/thor/wolvie) and still has a bonkers purple. While the sustainability of the team took a hit, there simply arent any better options at the 2 level that is better than recon.

  3. 2->3* transitions are affected slightly more. I could see a case where you were using obw over some level 100 3* just because she healed. This meta would shift for the better since those people will actually make the transition now.

I dont think its likely that this change actually promotes roster diversity in pvp. 2* players still need to front their 2 best guys or else other people are going to attack their suboptimal defensive team, and ares/obw is still the best duo there.

7

OBW is easily stronger than most level 100 3*s even with the change to healing.

The only way this change would have a significant effect is if people actually are crazy enough to swap OBW out for someone else. Then they’d end up losing way more games than before and doing significantly worse.

8

how would one move to 3* from 2* roster, if you can’t compete unless you “pay to play”? if all you high and mighty “i don’t need to heal cause I have 35 usable characters”, would just use 2* characters only during PvP’s. then you can understand the usage of healing to continue to play. i doubt any of you would dare just use a limited roster like 2*'s only cause you’d rage quit faster than anyone else.

I wonder if they made a tournament where you can only play level 85 and under only characters for people with rosters with many 141’s and was mandatory to participate. if you don’t place within top 10 your whole roster is banned from all pvp’s and let’s see all you cry “this isn’t fair”, i need to buy health packs to keep playing.

9

All my post was saying was that the CHARACTERS themselves in the meta arent going to change, which is what the original post was asking. Its obviously going to be a lot harder for 2* players to do well now since they relied on obw healing, but its not like everyone is going to jump ship on their obw/ares team and switch to other characters like some people on this board believe. I guess i should have made that clearer in my original post given all of the negative energy that people have on this board.

10

If people do jump ship from Thor/OBW or Ares/OBW they’d likely do significantly worse, because there are no 2* and honestly no 3* under level 100 is on par with her if you assume a level 100 3* means no 5 covers in any one color. This pretty much rules out all the broken stuff. Yes OBW will demand a lot of health pack for her power, but using anyone is even worse. You can flat out lose if you run say Thor + Storm against Thor + OBW.

11

Well, a PVP with a “participate or perma-ban” rule would be unfair regardless of whether or not it has any other restrictions. Most 3* players participate in Lone Star tourneys, which require people to use only 1* characters.