Edit: I figured it was now a good time to readdress this topic, since we’ve got the full preview for the next character, Iron Fist, who also shares the 7650 health total.
In the character thread, Demiurge Miles describes health as a measure of how hard a character is to put down. It’s as I suspected, and was discussed in this thread originally.
(The post can be found here: https://forums.505go.com/discussion/24256)
I can definitely see the argument for giving Iron Fist the extra health, and I agree with it.
Should Cyclops share the same health as Iron Fist? That’s debatable, but there are certainly some good arguments that can be made both for and against.
I’m also not yet convinced that this isn’t the beginning of power creep in the 3* tier. Hmm, a double negative, that can be confusing. What I mean is, although there are good arguments for creating a new health tier for both of these characters, this could still be power creep (the two points are not mutually exclusive). Of course, it also might not, and I’m happy to accept that could be the case.
For me, Beast is still the enigma - 8500 health would have been too much, but 6800 doesn’t seem like it’s enough. For whatever reason, the 7650 tier wasn’t started by him. Perhaps it was still in design discussions at the time. Whatever the case, I would think that he should get bumped up when it comes time for him to be fixed.
Is there anyone else who should be bumped up (or down) to this health tier?
My original post is below, inside the spoiler tags. It might be fun to read for the sake of historical reference, but I think it’s generally agreed that this is not power creep at the moment.
[spoiler]Note: I end up taking this conversation along a few different tangents before I get to the point that I want to make, so tl;dr: Is a new health tier the equivalent of power creep? Why is Cyclops deserving of more health than, say, Beast?
Cyclops will introduce a new health tier, and I’m curious about the implications and/or consequences that provides.
Part of the problem in determining this is the way in which the concept of health is understood in MPQ; I think we often conflate health with strength, or physical endurance. We understand that a character has health, and they lose health when they take an attack, when they run out of health, they are “downed”.
I would propose a slightly different way of looking at this value. For starters, I want to call it “focus” instead. It’s a measure of a characters endurance, willingness, or ability to remain in a fight; once it hits zero, that character is out of the fight. For characters like Thor or Hulk, they get right into the thick of it and won’t stop until they are too exhausted to move. But characters like Loki or The Hood looks after themselves first, when people start raging or firing blasts of energy, it doesn’t take much for either of them to decide to get out of there. I feel that this also helps clarify the way healing currently works. Most healing abilities are supportive in nature. They’re keeping allies in the fight just a little longer to maybe turn the tide of battle. Physical endurance can still be a factor which determines “focus” - Hawkeye is just a normal human, but he runs with the Avengers, so he’s sticking to the fight right through to the end, but he just can’t take as many hits before he’s out cold.
Given this way of thinking, I’d probably want to shuffle some health values up a bit. I think Spider-Man should probably move up a tier - he’s an agile hero that’s kind of renowned for ducking and dodging his way through fights. A larger health pool would represent the fact that it takes more attacks to knock him out. A character like Storm should also be taken up a notch or two - she’s easily got just as much “focus” as the rest of the 6800 crowd.
So where does that put Cyclops? Right now, it means he can last longer in a fight than Punisher, Squirrel Girl and Psylocke. That’s probably valid. And I’m going to give Wolverine and Daken a pass, since their regen and fast recovery gives them fairly well inflated health pools. I think the two big outliers from the 6800 health tier are Beast and Magneto. Physically, Beast definitely outclasses Cyclops. Is there an argument that Beast would step away from a fight sooner than Cyclops? Maybe - Cyclops is fairly stubborn, so perhaps this extra bit of health represents the fact that he’s often unwilling to give up, even when the odds are stacked against him. So that leaves us with Magneto. He’s someone who is able to fight against multiple X-men simultaneously, but as a villain, he’s also known to partake in a bit of self-preservation and leave battles that are turning against him.
Is Cyclops deserving of this extra health? Or is could this be the beginning of MPQ power-creep?[/spoiler]
