Now we know who was right (it was not the developers)

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/29852

The character rankings are out. Big thanks to Ebolamonkey84 for taking on this cumbersome task. Players told the developers over and over they were overnerfing the 4*'s. To the surprise of none of the players that play with these characters on a competitive level on a daily basis, there was exactly one 4* on the top 10.

Px was the only 4*in the top 10 and that is more the product of him being one of the next defense characters in the game. One ai miracle cascade and a match can go sideways quickly. Barring that occurrence or having to match away house invisibility tile, he’s not that much of a threat. But with so few defensive threats, he stands out.

I’m sure we’ll all hear again about how their numbers and metrics show 4s are better than 3s. We’ll hear lots of things that try to invalidate the first hand experience players have work these characters. However, there is a difference between reading a book on how to swim, and actually getting in the water and trying to swim.

Players have told you (to deaf ears) the 4*a were not up to snuff. Players have told you scaling is currently broken. Players have told you roster slot prices are broken. We are not telling you this because we think it would be fun to repeat ourselves over and over. We are much rather be playing the game or discussing gameplay than spending our time again and again pointing out the same issues.

You conceded that roster slots prices were a problem. But months later, nothing has been done.

You have totally disregarded player feedback regarding scaling.

You have told us 4a are correctly powered now. Look at the data from players that have used the characters that your numbers say are theoretically correct. It might be time to revisit your current idea of what a 4 should be. However sound an ideal it was, in practice, it is not working out as intended.

P.S. Yes, xforce green still needs a buff. I didn’t know how much til this past week. This about how strong it should always be. It almost seems you make 3a in a vacuum, but you look at 4a by how strong they’ll be when buffed, get that number correct, then back off that number to determine how strong a 4* should be without a buff. That might explain why so many 3a are currently better than 4s.

The goal should be for 4*s too be at the top of the rankings. If that is not the goal they’re is a problem.

2

Rankings aren’t the same as in-game power.

I’m using mainly 4s in the Simulator, and they’re breezing through. Everyone keeps saying Simulator is too hard, but level 395 enemies are no problem when I have level 350 4s. I’ve been in 1st or 2nd place the entire event easily, and I don’t even try hard in PVE anymore. Seriously, 30 min for a clear twice a day, and play an hour before the sub ends.

Yes, if 3* and 4* heroes were the same level, most 4* abilities wouldn’t be up to snuff. But that’s not the case. 4*s have more health and more power.

People complain that X-Force and 4Thor suck now. Ok, I must be using them wrong then. Because for some reason they’re good when I run them.

3

You beat me to it.

Popularity means nothing, and can’t be used as an actual metric other than showing how much people like a character. For example, Iron Fist #3? icon_lol.gif
He has the most broken ability in the game with his cheap purple producing a ridiculous amount of blacks coupled with 2 other great abilities. While thor is strong, folks probably voted for him over IF just because many still don’t have IF covered and can’t really compare the two (another flaw with this popularity based system).

I also agree that 4s are superior when they have levels over 3s, and yes XForce/Thor are still great, they just aren’t broken anymore.

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Do remember, though, that a significant percentage of voters doesn’t have 4s or just a few covers of them, so their opinion on them is either hearsay or based in the limited experience with their uncovered, underlevelled ones. It is clear to every vet, if you read the thread that IMHB should be a clear top 10 character if not top 5. Kingpin should also be somewhat higher, though perhaps not top 10. Nevertheless, most 4s are lower quite than they should for this reason.

5

This is probably going to seem pretty obvious to most, but XF and 4T are great right now in large part because they’re currently boosted…

They have more health and power the same way my 2hor has more health and power, right now, because they’re all artificially boosted. My 2hor is pretty sweet right now, but after the boosts are dropped, well, yeah, different guy then. Weaker, squishier, like a 2*. He’s actually beating some 3* characters, again, because he’s not specced the way he would normally be.

For the record, I don’t even own fully-covered XF or 4Ts, so I don’t have a horse in this race, but yeah, just thought the “artificially boosted” part was pretty salient. People can argue all day about whether they deserved nerfs (I don’t think nerfing is ever healthy for a game, like ever, and I still don’t even own usable versions of any 4*s), but the current sim argument is kind of a stretch… you know, because of the artificial boosting thing. icon_e_wink.gif

DBC

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I haven’t been using 4* much just because Iron Fist dominates in general and the only 4* that goes well with him is IMHB that I don’t have covered. IFoKL decreases the tiles of all colors for black so it doesn’t work as well with Surgical Strike now that it no longer generates AP as it’s not unusual to find 20 black on the board which means any non-black color isn’t going to have much potential for Surgical Strike. In the nodes where it doesn’t make sense to use Iron Fist I find the 4* to work fine though they’re kind of specialized in their function. For example Thor is only if you expect to take a lot of unavoidable damage. X Force is good if you’re fighting one particular threatening guy or you need special defense defense and Captain America isn’t available (perhaps downed).

7

In previous pves when he was not boosted, when I have to take on overscaled Dark Avengers, it’s not the buffed 3*s I pull out, it’s my level 155 (fully covered 553) xforce. He’s not what he used to be and dangerously squishy compared to the health-buffed set, but he’s still very, very good at what he does, which is break the board into tiny pieces and kill things. You have to be more careful and pay attention to the board now, but with pre-nerf surgical, it was equally likely you would run into a bad board with only 3 tiles in tfhe enemy’s strongest colour.

8

Exactly. I’m romping through shield sim with variations on xf/imhb (xf 553, imhb 533) and they are a joy to use together. Characters should be ranked on tbeir unbuffed state, not compared to the buffed 3* of the week.

9

I have boosted 4s and boosted 3s. So it’s the same comparison if they were unboosted. When unboosted, the 4*s still have more health and power. So…

10

I find this topic funny because everyone in Line was rolling on the floor about how inaccurate the rankings were and how they were skewed from non-competitive players voting, but hey, go ahead and use it as evidence. It’s cool. icon_e_biggrin.gif

11

A boosted Nick Fury does 14K damage on Demolition for 10 blue AP. Outside of Iron Fist, no 3* is going to come close to that kind of damage. Sure Demolition takes some time to get going but 14K is still 14K damage. Now two IFoKLs is probably expected to do that range of damage after you factor in all the AP you picked up, but I hope people all know by now that Iron Fist is super dominant in PvE right now and pretty dominant in PvP as well.

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Shhhhh. Spoilers. It’s not as funny if you let everyone else in on it. icon_lol.gif

13

i think you identified the problem with most 4* they have good damage, but you have to wait a while to get it. as to opposed to most 3* damage from abilities are instantaneous. which doesn’t make too much sense it should be the other way around.

14

There is no meaningful logic here and it doesn’t prove that anyone was right.

Players whinged about the 4s in the forums.
Players whinged abot the 4s in the polls in the forums.
That’s the same data set just presented differently. I’d be worried if it was substantially different.

X Force didn’t make the top 10 yet I saw a heck of a lot of him in the week he was buffed. All those players who voted against him in a meaningless poll seemed to use him when given the opportunity. It was a rare opponenet who didn’t have X Force as one of their triad.

I know that’s anecdotal, but I would imagine D3 could produce actual usage figures to back up how pointless these polls are.

15

Was Lazy Thor dominating shield sim beyond 1500?
What about the last month of pvp’s beyond 600?
What about LR’s beyond 200 points?

I barely saw the guy beyond his featured week and yet he’s the absolute BEST in the game. I guess almost no one has LTHOR covered cause I mainly fought again 4Thor, XF, Xavier, Hulkbuster, Fury, Fist, Cage and buffed weekly characters.

4*'s are clearly the most consistent top performers in competitive play right now regardless of if they are buffed in said week or not. Seems clear to me this makes them more powerful than the vast majority of 3* which is exactly what people wanted.

16

Pissy people downvoted him intentionally.

Probably the same people who gave Yelena Belova 10 also gave XF a 1.

Plus, the wording of the poll was clearly intended to show bias towards characters based on how often you used them, which is obviously going to lead a lot of people to talk about 3*s positively.

If I look at the teams that you see in PvP, even when not boosted, X4s is the character that I see the most of. More than Cage, more than Hood.

I see X4s/3hor/3aken in PvP more than I see anything else. Maybe it is because so many people bought in to XF when he was the auto-killer and he’s still the best thing that they’ve got left, but the combination of Surgical Strike and Recovery means that you can go Prologue heal with Cage/3aken/X4s after every fight if need be.