Some thoughts on balance

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Hello everyone. I’ve been enjoying playing with a icon_spiderman.png
icon_venom.png

  • a greentile.png
    redtile.png
    yellowtile.png
    character in the Balance of Power event. Whilst I was playing I got to thinking about how the web tiles mechanic works, and how it’s very difficult to balance characters with the more unique special tiles (Web, Charged, and maybe more in the future?).

Currently, web tiles can only be placed on the board by two characters, Venom and Spiderman (and bagman, but let’s ignore him…). Both of these characters have 1 ability that places web tiles and the other abilities gain benefits from having web tiles out. I think most people would claim that this is currently balanced, and probably only viable in very certain situations (Like BoP), as Venom is a 1 star.png
and it takes quite some time to get sufficient web tiles on the board for a Devour.

Some people have been requesting that Carnage be introduced as a new character who would also utilize web tiles. The thing is though, that then you would have another character who would create web tiles, making it that much easier to generate web tiles for spider-sense or devour plays. The introduction of a new character, and their powers/colors, must be balanced against the existing character pool in order to balance the game.

This logic holds true to people who are calling for Gambit to be added and use the charged tiles mechanic added by 4-thor (which is very appropriate for his mutant power). If there are suddenly two characters that do extra damage for/generate charged tiles, then using those two characters together dramatically increases both of those characters power. Probably imbalancing them compared to other teams. The only reason Venom gets away with it is by being a 1 star.png
, and I don’t think anyone wants a 1 star.png
Carnage or Gambit.

The only plausible way for new characters to utilize special tiles is to have their power colors be deliberately designed to weaken their team-play (such as giving carnage a blacktile.png
web generation, or Gambit a redtile.png
bluetile.png
yellowtile.png
set of powers). But if a strong reason we want these characters is to use them in teams based on those special tiles, then is there any point in them utilizing those mechanics in the first place?

I’d like to know your thoughts on how characters are currently balanced around each other. I was thinking that a cheap blue special tile generator should be high on the dev’s priority list, as that could give Beast a way to be (more) useful without relying on his awful countdown ability.

2

There are far too many established and powerful characters for any interesting mechanism to go in unless it’s interesting like the original Rage of the Panther where it usually killed everyone on the opposing team so they can put the extra 5 AP by their graves. The most likely outcome is you thought of something really clever and people just say, “But X Force is still better” and you wasted your time, and if you’ve managed to create something more powerful than X Force you just totally killed balance. At this point I don’t think it’s particularly useful to add interesting mechanism to the game until they’ve some way to limit roster selection to something halfway between the FFA and the ‘3 3*s only’ heroic format. Web tiles and locked tiles is likely to fall into this category where they won’t be relevent until there’s a significant portion of the roster locked out.

3

I think web tiles are inherently a bad idea. They serve absolutely no function in the game other than to power-up other abilities, so they always fall in the category of either mostly-useless of completely-overpowered.

Charged and locked tiles have an effect on gameplay, at least.

I hate web tiles so much that I used to have a line about it in my sig.

4

Agreeing with this - I would much rather d3p focus on abilities revolving around countdown, strike, attack, and protect tiles and doing interesting things with them (which most of the recent characters have done… so yay?). Charge, trap, web, locked tiles… just add too much junk with little effect on the game

I don’t even think environment/TU tiles have ever meshed well with the game. Maybe they could go back to PQ roots and make them “damage” tiles? (Like doing 1.3 times the damage of your strongest char’s max color, but generate no AP)

And as I think board/special tile manipulation is much more fun than “match AP, kill the enemy”, I’d like to see “end the battle” type damage powers nerfed (boo, gamar! hiss, gamar!)