As you may have recently heard - Star-Lord is blasting into Marvel Puzzle Quest! To find out more about this “incorrigible cosmic cowboy” you’ll want to catch this new interview with MPQ producer, Joe Fletcher and Legendary scribe, Sam Humphries at Marvel.com.
The chat explores what went into capturing the humorous side of Peter Quill while making sure this powerful 4-star character holds his own on the battlefields of MPQ. Preview screenshots and ability sneak peeks for the galactic hero are included.
PIECING TOGETHER MARVEL PUZZLE QUEST: STAR-LORD
Quote: "Marvel.com: Quill might have missed out on all the Doombot destroying fun, but now he’s here looking for a fight. What can the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy do?
Joe Fletcher: Star-Lord is a leader, but not your normal one. He doesn’t lead from the front, nor does he play Armchair General from behind the lines. Instead, he sort of entices his team into doing what needs to be done and does his part in whatever plan is enacted—which usually involves a bit of stealthy thievery, suicidal charges, and outright deviousness as the case may be."
For those too lazy to read the whole thing…tl;dr version with bolding;
Quill is a 4* (Legendary) Purple/Yellow/Red character and has the moves to go along with it. His first ability, Sleight of Hand, exemplifies his talent for messing with his opponent in some potentially lethal ways. Here Peter replaces a tile on the board with an explosive surprise that goes off in a few turns. This deals an unhealthy amount of damage to the target when it goes off as the unwitting dupe gets in the way of the booby trap. At higher levels, Star-Lord can even replace Countdown tiles with this, allowing for a good amount of board control ability at a respectable 10 Purple AP per use.
His Yellow ability shows off Peter’s unique style of leadership with Everyone With Me. Here, Peter puts together the bare minimum of a plan, enabling his team to enact their own flourishes a bit more easily. What this accomplishes in game terms is he places a Countdown tile on the board that reduces the AP cost of ability uses in certain colors while it’s out. Raising the level of this ability gives Peter’s plans a bit more polish, increasing both the colors it affects and the amount of AP it reduces. At max level, it reduces the AP cost of all friendly abilities except Black—Quill’s not into helping out the vindictive side of his friends—which can have a noticeable effect on the battle.
Lastly, Star-Lord uses the “Oldest Trick in the Book” to keep his enemies on their toes. While distracted, enemies have a harder time getting their abilities to work and giving Star-Lord and his team a bit of breathing space. In a flip on Everyone With Me, Oldest Trick increases the AP cost of enemy abilities while the Countdown tile is on the board. In addition, when the Countdown tile finally goes off, Peter gently taps the poor victim on the shoulder before belting them in the face—assuming they have one—with a smashing right hook. Damage and AP increases in one Countdown tile! At higher levels, the tile increases all but Purple abilities, as he has a hard time hindering other sneaky type attacks with his own sneakiness.
As for Double Iso-8, that’s also live as we speak with the Coversquirrel Versus tourney, which uses some wonderful custom art by the talented Erica Henderson. The upcoming Blade and Modern Thor Versus tourneys will also be running a Double Iso-8 bonus, so for anyone needing a little more scratch to level their characters, get into the arena!
Looks like that’s a screen capture from our test server - our testers need to be able to get at all our upcoming events at once. We have no short-term plans to double the number of Versus events that can be overlapping
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Will, while we still (hopefully) have your attention, I wanted to mention this: Ice_X used to post the full description of each character power at all covers in the characters forum shortly after release, but he’s been absent for a while and we are missing the power descriptions for all new characters since the release of Elektra. Can you have someone do them?
Compared to Elektra, who has one power that’s useless unless you’re against a strike tile spammer, and another power that does no damage at all, and another power that’s a trap (random).
Besides that, you’re not going to use Starlord for his damage, you’re going to use him for his disruption (not to imply he’ll be “top tier”), so the “randomness” of his tiles is irrelevant, because they’re just earmarks. It’d be like saying Colossus is garbage because you can’t place his Yellow - it doesn’t matter, it just needs to exist.
Wait till there are no available matches in the color you’re about to cast.
Cast countdown.
…
Profit
You don’t have to play like the computer and use an ability as soon as you have the AP. Using the above method, your countdowns will usually last a couple turns, which is the duration of most. How else do you make sure the AI doesn’t match your Recovery tiles?
On #2. that’s also taking into account that the AI doesn’t have enough AP to use a skill that will alter board, overright countdowns, cause cascades, blow out a part of the board, stun the coundown tile caster, make a 5 match that causes a cascade, ect, ect, ect.
They are pretty unrelaible. My recovery tile could be tucked away from all other yellow, and in a mimatched glorious field safe from harm and often I use it near game end with only 1 opponent left and it still doesn’t get to go off 50% (or more) of the time.
The yellow countdown doesn’t really matter on offense, but the fact that it lasts more than one turn is just a benefit if you get a lucky cascade in the next few turns. If you’re not using another ability in the same turn you place that yellow countdown, you’re doing it wrong. Purple is more of a disarming technique than a damage technique.
Red is more of an annoyance defensively. You’re forced to spend more turns trying to match away the tile so you can cast your ability at regular cost, instead of gathering the AP you need. It hampers all the cheap cost ability characters, eg Juggernaut/Ragnarok, or goons like the Thug in PVE.
Not to mention that the wording of the ability makes it look as though at higher number of covers, it will set up more than 1 countdown, and you only need 1 of them in the board to receive the benefit.
