Loki (Dark Reign)
3 Star Rarity (Rare) Discussion link
At Max Level: HP: 5950 Tile damage: 12/11/13/79/61/70
**- Trickery - Black 11 
**
Loki’s trickery turns the enemy’s tools against them. Transforms 1 enemy Strike tile into a friendly Protect tile and 1 enemy Protect tile into a friendly Strike tile.
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Level Upgrades
Level 2: Loki steals 2 Strike and Protect tiles.
Level 3: Loki steals 3 Strike and Protect tiles.
Level 4: Loki steals 5 Strike and Protect tiles.
Level 5: Loki steals all Strike and Protect tiles. -
**Illusions - Purple 5
**
You can’t count on anything when Loki’s around. Changes the location of 14 colored tiles.
Level Upgrades-
Level 2: Changes the location of 18 colored tiles.
Level 3: Changes the location of 22 colored tiles.
Level 4: Changes the location of 26 colored tiles.
Level 5: Changes the location of 32 colored tiles.[/color]
[/list] -
Mischief - Green PASSIVE
(PASSIVE) Loki is consumed by a cold rage as he moves to undermine his enemies. If the enemy team makes a match-4 of any color, Loki converts 2 basic tiles of that color into 4-turn Countdown tiles which steal 2 AP of a random color.
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Level Upgrades
Level 2: Countdown tiles last 3 turns.
Level 3: Loki creates 3 Countdown tiles.
Level 4: Countdown tiles last 2 turns.
Level 5: Loki creates 4 Countdown tiles.[/color]
[/list]Older Abilities:[spoiler] - Trickery - Black 15 AP
Loki’s trickery turns the enemy’s tools against them, converting enemy Protect tiles to friendly Strike tiles and enemy Strike tiles to friendly Protect tiles.
Level Upgrades - Level 2: Costs 1 AP less.
Level 3: Costs 1 AP less.
Level 4: Costs 1 AP less.
Level 5: Costs 1 AP less. -
Illusions - Purple 5 AP
You can’t count on anything when Loki’s around. Changes the location of 8 colored tiles.
Level Upgrades- Level 2: Changes the location of 9 colored tiles.
Level 3: Changes the location of 10 colored tiles.
Level 4: Changes the location of 12 colored tiles.
Level 5: Changes the location of 16 colored tiles.[/color]
[/list] - Illusions - Purple 5 AP
You can’t count on anything when Loki’s around. Up to 8 tiles change their color.
Level Upgrades-
Level 2: 9 tiles change color.
Level 3: 10 tiles change color.
Level 4: 12 tiles change color.
Level 5: 16 tiles change color.[/color]
[/list]Edits by Nonce Equitaur 1 April 2014.[/spoiler] Original post: "Loki’s nerf was overdone, period." Before I begin, allow me to say that I have been using a decently leveled Loki with Level 20 in all skills, and even taking part in the recently concluded week-long tournament. It was with utter shock that the Loki nerf was made 12 hours prior to the end of the race, and it greatly impaired my ability to compete with similarly leveled opponents. While the patch timing was poor, the extent of the nerf made my jaw drop. Loki had 2 skills: Transmogrify and Trickery. The latter is only useful in situations of enemy buff/debuff, and there are only so few heroes with strike/shield tiles placement. At high level PvP, almost no one uses Iron Man/Daken/Hawkeye, so Trickery is basically redundant. The one skill that defined Loki, and made him great, was Transmogrify. It gave a 50/50 chance of a combo chain, and probably 10% chance of a critical tile. The chance element was brilliant, much like gambling for high stakes. It could do anywhere from 0-1000+ damage, typically 400-500. In addition, it swaps out red and yellow tiles, making Loki a suitable counter for all the Thor spammage (more on that later). The whole Transmogrify idea of luck, chance and anti-Thor was the true essence of Loki. And then Transmogrify was nerfed, possibly in the name of balance. In its place came Illusions, which can be best described as pathetic. It swaps random tiles for random tiles, when previously it guaranteed purples. Since the end of the tournament I’ve had hours to try this new skill out, and it was useless. 90% of the time it would do nothing, and the remainder 10% would see a single tile combination, two if you’re really lucky. If I wanted to form a tile combination, I’ll go ahead and do it directly. Granted it does not take a turn (all skills don’t, anyway), and there might be times when you don’t see many favorable tile combinations (rare, since the board always resets when all possibilities run out), Illusions is really a joke of a skill. The description says, *”You can't count on anything when Loki's around”*, but I can always count on it… to do nothing significant. It could do nothing, or something absolutely amazing. As of current, it just does nothing for sure. I understand the Devs meant for Loki to be some kind of a game-changer, pseudo utility/damage character, but this is just killing him. Illusions does no damage, and hardly changes the game to your favour. I wondered if this skill was tested before it was rolled out, because it really is next to turd in terms of worthiness. If Transmogrify was deemed overpowered, simply increase the tile cost (9 purple cost at level 20 would be decent), or reduce the number of tiles involved. Maybe 9/9 or 8/8 for red/yellow tiles exchange. To resort to this total gank is uncalled for. Even if Illusions cost less in terms of tiles to cast, I still find it ridiculously useless. If the Devs are adamant on keeping Illusions, here’s what I suggest:
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- Level 2: Changes the location of 9 colored tiles.
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Revert back to purple tiles conversion, random choice of other tile colours, keep it at 16 tiles at level 20 (preferred as this maintains the wide damage range of the skill)
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Add a base damage to it that scales with level -
Add a mana drain to enemy equal to total tiles converted, random colours.
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Add a 2 turn stun to the skill
Just one of them will do, this will maintain the utility aspect of Loki. Otherwise this skill is pretty much useless, especially for a character that only has 2 skills. Yes, only two skills, and neither particularly good. For a rare card, that's unacceptable. As it is, there are two other cards with black/purple skillsets. Venom (common), Daken (uncommon), and it’s 3 if you add in Loki (rare). It only makes sense that Loki has to be superior to the other two. However, if you look at the statistics for card usage since the latest patch, you’ll find Venom above Loki. That’s because it has skills that, while not fantastic, is currently better than Illusions and Trickery. It does not make sense. Venom has a stun, a damage nuke, and that outright kill. Loki has none of them. If you look at overpowered characters, Loki is hardly one of them, and did not deserve a nerf. Just look at Thor (uncommon) and Ragnarok (rare). It still befuddles me no end why Loki was nerfed, but these two remained unchanged. Look at the top 100 players; I would say almost 90% of them use either one or both. It’s easy to see why; they have ridiculous amounts of HP. Thor has 3 damage nukes, two of which easily surpass thousands of damage. Ragnarok has two skills that are brilliant, and chain almost endlessly. It also does a mega ton of damage, for extremely low cost. If you are looking for class balance, I’m sure these two are overpowered. Loki was designed as a pseudo utility/damage class with low HP, somewhat of a glass cannon. With that patch, he is now just glass. Let's put things into perspective. Many high leveled characters have a 1500 damage nuke with 10-15 AP cost. Loki had Transmogrify, which did damage on a range of 0-1000+, and it could cost 9 AP. That sounds fair, doesn't it? As I mentioned earlier on, I was in a tournament. It wasn’t easy against all the Thor spammage, but I managed to hang in there. After the nerf, I could hardly kill anything. I run a Wolverine X/Loki/Spidey build, which while not overpowering, synergized well. After Loki got nerfed, it fell apart. I could hardly kill anything until Wolverine charged up his enraged slash (15 AP! Not to mention I did not have this skill in the midst of the tournament), and most likely had characters die even battling lower leveled players. When taking on the top ten players, it was a nightmare. But, I will have to admit one thing the patch did right. That was to remove the higher damage for blue tiles. Loki had no business doing higher damage with blue tiles, and that meant he charged forward unnecessarily many times, exposing himself to damage. I’m not sure if my diatribe here helped change minds, but this is just the opinion of a player who has had pretty extensive experience with Loki. It’s an underused but fun class that quizzically got nerfed, which makes me question the development process behind this move. Transmogrify ought to have stayed; if it was deemed excessive, make changes to the cost or the number of tiles swapped. Having Illusions which swapped random for random tiles does essentially nothing except a board refresh. Granted this is just a preview version of the game, I am hoping you brilliant minds behind PQ1 and 2 consider my fair argument to restore Loki to his former glory, worthy of his rare card status. The whole idea of a game preview is to garner free testing feedback from the public, and this is exactly what I am doing.</span> </span>[/spoiler]
