Nerf Thor, Okoye, Bishop, and Rocket...

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
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… and would the game be balanced?

I’ve been thinking more and more about this as I look at my roster and see a huge gap between the meta tier and the rest. But imagine a world where Thor, Okoye, Rocket and Bishop do not exist. They all got blipped tomorrow.

Who would be the top team? Are Jessica/Daredevil better than Hela/Kitty? Are either better than Professor/Storm, Doom/Loki or Hawkeye/Iceman? Would Panthos or Gambolt once again be viable?

I’m a firm believer that there will always be a strongest team. And people will inevitably gravitate to what is best. But looking at my roster beyond Rocket/Kitty, Thor/Okoye, and Bishop/Anyone I don’t really see anyone who stands out as miles ahead of the rest. Notice I didn’t add Kitty to the nerf list, because without Grocket, she’d be a fun solid 5* who is easy to beat but could amplify people like DD and OML.

I think that with Rocket gone, it would shake up the 4* meta as well. You have over 80 characters, but most teams are built around Rocket’s strikes. I think that the power team there could be something like the spider-verse trio (Peter, Miles, Gwen). Fun, synergies like this would be played more instead of JuggerGroot, Gritty, Grockmordusa, etc.

After these 4 get snapped out of existence, the biggest backlash people would (rightfully) have would be that the characters they worked hard for were taken from them, and that their best options for speeding though mindless grinds were taken from them. But as compensation in this fantasy world, 50 wins would be the new max PVP progression and 7 clears would be reduced to 4 in PVE! Not only that, but people would get 1:1 cover swaps for any classic characters of their choosing within each respective tier.

I feel for the developers when they make a solid character like Xavier and we hear, “he’s not supplanting Thorkoye or Gritty”, or “can’t run him anyway, because I need Bishop on defense”, etc. we could instead talk about the best synergies and counters and get excited to use these characters.

Would this kind of major overhaul be healthy for the current end game? Would it be healthier for the long term sustainability of the game? Would we lose more players due to rage quitting after the snap or due to being bored with each character release not being better than their auto-win and auto-skip teams? Would you be on board with such a radical shift, or are things fine as is?

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Its unclear if you are talking toning them down or just removing them.

Tone em down, sure I’m in.
Remove them, no sir.

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Don’t ruin the meta! Don’t slow down my game.

That said, there is a difficulty for new-to-tier players who will be at a disadvantage when their best options work less-well than what vets have.

It’s also weird when my Spidey is boosted in Basilica, is now 9 levels above Thor, and Thor still tanks red and green. Match damage power creep is real…

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I never ran Rocket much as a 4* player. Vulture/G4mora was my team. I don’t have any meta 5s champed, nor Bishop. I function just fine without Rocket. This is kind of already my life, offensively at least. I’d have to drop out of SCL9 Pve if Okoye got detained probably though; I have her at a functional level even if unchamped.

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I know it’s a radical idea and I’m all over the place with with my thought process, as I’m speaking to several issues at once. I know it’d never actually happen. Just a hypothetical would the game be better/more enjoyable if these 4 didn’t exist and the game demanded less time from us to compensate.

I already play random combos myself just for fun anyway, so not much would change. The two exceptions are Gritty, which for me involves playing a specific counter team (Thorkoye) or character (BSSM who will be champed soon); and Bishop, which for me involves just skipping altogether at this point.

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Rocket isn’t a threat though. It’s only when he’s paired with someone like Kitty or Medusa that the fight gets more skippable and even then he’s still not going to be the primary focus unless he’s able to get off his green. Hell, Gamora is a bigger threat than him.

Rocket: 7 strike tiles, decent repeater, aoe nuke
Gamora: cheap stun, solid red attack, can instantly kill anyone

Would you rather take a fight against Vulture and Rocket or Vulture and Gamora? How about Vulture/Rocket or Vulture/Iceman?

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Rocket is a part of many more threatening teams though. Vulture is not a good pair for rocket because he does nothing meaningful with grockets free 7 strikes. Nico is a better partner for the buffs or medusa for the healing. Or any guardian for a little extra punch on the strikes. Rockets 7 free strikes at match start makes him a bigger threat than many of the 4* tier.

To me vulture is never an issue because I have 5* characters. He is usually downed fast if I just chase black myself. I also have archangel champed. In the event I see a big enough boosted vulture I will simply laugh at him with archangel.

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Y’all notice when the new engine went live that a match-4 line clear is no longer destroying 4ocket’s countdown like it used to with no damage, but instead treating it like a direct match that causes it to explode? That is not my favorite…

a power that clears a line like Okoye’s spear kills it as before though.

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@Daredevil217 you’re wrong about kitty. People would use her and carnage instead of rocket. She’s gotta go too in this hypothetical world.

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Sorry to hijack the thread, but is the new engine treating match 4s as “matched” universally now?

And on topic: not thrilled with this idea. The game is a grind-y slog. Matches should get faster, not shorter (at least until Demi asks us to player fewer matches each day).

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It is possible to have a diverse meta in this game. In fact, it can be achieved with a single character. Imagine someone with a passive that simply disables all other passives on both teams. In addition, they have two active abilities that are generally useful but not particularly amazing. None of the meta characters would be good with or against this character.

You’d end up with passive teams (the current meta teams), nullifier teams that use this anti-passive character, and teams that only use actives (to make the anti passive power worthless). The passive teams would crush the active only teams, but get destroyed by the nullifier teams. The active only teams would have a more moderate advantage over nullifier teams, but you could easily make this more extreme. For example, the nullifier passive could also make enemy active abilities do X% more damage. And you could make the nullifier teams faster against passive teams by adding something like “At the beginning of each turn gain 1 random AP for each enemy passive”.

With extreme counters, I think many players would be happier. It would be easier and faster to win, and you’d get a lot more variety. There are many other ways to ensure that there is no strongest team, you just need to have sufficiently awesome counters.

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I would still say “no”, actually.

While many games do regular, often minor, rebalancing to keep meta ever adjusting, this game has never at any point done that. Characters have been rebalanced, certainly, but never with the intent of tweaking (much less course-correcting) the dominant meta characters. The game’s method has always been about chasing the new releases for “The Next Big Thing” ™.

We, as players, have generally come to accept this fact and if any character get’s “too strong” by some I’ll-defined criteria known only to the development team, they get smashed down hard with a nerf.

To the game’s credit, they’ve provided other, less competitive avenues to still progress, albeit slowly, if you want to take a step off the hamster wheel many people often refer to, but by it’s very nature, this game at its highest levels of competition will never be balanced in any long-lasting, meaningful way without a fundamental change in how things operate.

That’s my take, at least.

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There is at least one other power that behaves this way that didn’t used to, but I forget which one off the top of my head. I meant to test Dar3devil’s red trap to see how it behaved since it lost a lot of utility after the original trap nerf.

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I think it’s Medusa. I remember quite a number of reports about hers being a bug by players.

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I hadn’t noticed that one in particular, but it likely has the same underlying cause as Medusa producing 4 attack tiles on a match-4, and 3* Dr Octopus’s black triggering on match-4s for special tiles outside of the match. I think the tiles outside of the match are now generating both a “tile destroyed” and “tile matched” event, when previously they just triggered “tile destroyed”.

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But in 4* land Vulture is a big threat and there aren’t exactly a lot of 4* players that have a well covered 5* Archangel to counter Vulture. If there were then I’d be seeing a ton of him this week since Vulture is boosted. It’s still incredibly dumb that the devs went with a 3* Angel instead of an awesome meta-changing 4* version to counter Vulture but whatevs.

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How about a weekly nerf list alongside the buffs. The three characters in each tier (5, 4, 3 perhaps) used most often over the last week or month or whatever get debuffed by some amount, 50% or 100 levels or… It might have the side effect of creating a rotating meta every rotation period where Thorkoye and Gritty swap with Doom/Daredevil or iceman/Prof$ but it might freshen things up a bit.

Just putting an idea out there, it probably has a lot of holes in it that other people will point out but maybe it’s worth adding to the discussion.

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That’s the one. I noticed that in his PVP. I haven’t tested either one with Wiccan yet to see how that behaves, mostly because I’ve never been able to get him to survive a match…

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But this is the elephant in the room isn’t it? Why people is so adamant to see Gritty nerfed? Because 5 rounds of PvE is A LOT to ask. They MUST update this. And give us other ways of getting 5s or CPs. If they fixed this, the changes wouldnt be that impactful.

All good games receive game balance updates. The problem here is that historically nerfs have been nuke-nerfs, and that is bad for EVERYBODY. We should get small balance updates, and we should get them more often. Said that, there is always going to be a meta. Some chars will always be better than others.

Then, for me Thoryoke is not in the same boat as Gritty and even less than Bishop. But I have been saying for a while that passives are SUPER crazy strong for a while (and so are Thor’s and Okoye), so I would not mind them being balanced after the other three. Bishop MUST be balanced ASAP.

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