The Top Tier aka 4* Thor and Wolverine

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

After discussing the matter with Northern Polarity for too long (almost five minutes), I have come around to the group thinking 4* Thor and Wolverine make everyone in PVP irrelevant. There were several levels to this discussion.

First, the 3* tier is mostly balanced. If the 4* were banned from PVP tomorrow, you would see greater diversity than prior to the the introduction of Fury and buff of X-Force. I belive not facing/using the same combo over and over would be good. What does this mean? This means that X-Force and 4or do exist; and therefore, all 3* don’t matter and there is not diversity. If a player has X-Force and/or 4or at usable (sometimes unusable) levels, those are the characters the players will use regardless of their 3*'s.

Second, because players will use X-Force/4or no matter what, the featured character does not matter. This defeats the purpose of each character having their own PVP. The featured character should be the one that the team is built around and not just there to take up space.

Third, if 4or and X-Force make all other characters irrelevant and if this irrelevance is concluded to be bad, then 4or and X-Force should be balanced.

Discussing with J and NP, X-Force seems pretty easy to balance. NP felt that just make SS not gain the player AP and it would be balanced. I felt in addition to that, the green ability should cost 10 AP and black 13 AP (or 2 more AP than they cost now). To me, the reason X-Force is so dominant in PVP is his speed. His green and black are so good, players do not even bother thinking about a non-3 yellow cover build because the battles are so fast. I believe slowing X-Force down, but keeping the damage the same (without the AP gain from SS), would make him powerful, but closer to being balanced with other characters.

However, in exchange for this, I would also tweak his yellow so players would also be tempted to get more yellow covers. Either a Patck constant regeneration, or A Wolvie regeneration with every yellow match (without the below 50% stipulation). At worst make the count down go down to 1 with 5 covers. If X-Force is going to be slower, he needs a regeneration that actually works better than a lottery.

4or was a little tougher. NP felt that 4or’s health was too high, I felt it’s 4or and should have higher health along the lines of the difference between the 2* and 3* version. I did not think health was the problem. I thought the problem was the combination of speed and health. The other thors have relatively high health, but are slower. I felt her blue ability was all that needed to be tweaked. NP disappeared (IIRC, which I probably do not), so he’ll have to pop on here to tell you his thoughts.

I think there are two options to tweak blue. One would be less charged tiles (not sure how much less, I do not do math). The other would be to tweak the stun. There are a lot of options here: (1) make the stun only 1 turn, (2) remove the stun, (3) stun 4or 1 or more turns to prevent smite right afterwards, or (4) stun the player’s team for one turn. The last one would create the charged tiles, but the AI would get the first chance to match the tiles. Since the primary way to balance 4or would be to slow her down, I would think blue needs to make less charged tiles. I would keep the number of charged tiles for each blue cover now, but have the 5th cover be the one that has the stun and the 5th would not increase the number of charged tiles. Given this option, I am not sure how many turns the stun would be, or if the stun would just be like Venom and stun the AI team for one turn. There are lots of choices, but without the number of charged tiles increasing for the 5th blue cover, 4or should be more balanced with other characters.

I’m not really worried about it. As others have posted many times, the list of OP characters that eventually get balanced has been established. I do not see what the fuss is. We all know eventually they will be balanced, and we all know it will not be any time soon.

2

X Force’s problem is that he has true healing. Sure his offense is off the scale but if he can’t trivially get back 100% of his health he’d still slow down a lot. At least you wouldn’t be able to just stick him in front to take any attack with impunity. So far as offense goes, Surgical Strike not generate AP would solve Surgical Strike. X Force can either have a cost increase or make the tiles destroyed not generate damage. The latter is probably not quite enough but I’m not a fan of ‘let’s make everything 4 matches’ becuase that is indeed a bit too slow and it also opens up the issue of AP drain dominance (The Hood, OBW, and to a lesser extent Loki) as the overwhelming strategy if all the good moves are 4 matches. X Force at 8 AP while not getting damage for the tiles destroyed would probably still be the best green skill but it’s okay to have the best green skill in the game for a 4*. For his true healing I have no solution that doesn’t involve getting rid of it but if it’s not true healing then the whole ability needs to be reworked, since it is not very useful in its current incarnation if it didn’t true heal. Unless it created a damage absorb at twice its current strength you’d never use it if it didn’t true heal (so about 9K for level 3, and 19K for level 5), but for some reason D3 seems allergic to the idea of making people able to absorb a huge amount of damage even though that’s not even all that overpowered.

Thor’s problem is from the format. For one, Power Surge should never have been blue, because blue is currently the weak color and a character with great stats should not also have a great ability on an off color. More importantly, though, the way Power Surge is designed Thor is probably the best 2on2 character in the game, but PvP is supposed to be 3on3. However, as the rate of new characters are released and graviate toward 4*, this means it is increasingly less likely for anyone to have the featured 3* that’s weighted toward new characters to have the featured character at a threatening level. Outside of someone like Blade you’re not going to see too many new 3* that are even level 100 even if you have all the covers because it’s not worth it and you need to save your iso for 4*s. So given the increasing likelihood of the featured character being a deadweight even for strong players, this means most PvP turns into a 2on2 match which Thor excels. I don’t think it’s fair to nerf Thor solely because of the format, because 2on2 is supposed to be a niche. If you can select your entire team, the part you should be most worried is how to take down the first guy, not what happens after you take down the first guy. Thor really doesn’t help you there since Smite does a relatively low amount of damage without Power Surge but Power Surge with all 3 characters alive is dangerous. Sure, you can definitely get it to work sometimes, but the risk is there and inline with the reward. It’s only because in the current PvP format you’ve a high chance of fighting a level 60 loaner that pretty much dies right away so that you can easily get the fight down to a 2on2 which bypasses Thor’s inability to pitch in on the first guy you need downed. At any rate, the irrelevence of the featured character is more than about Thor, since it’s just impossible to keep up with the new characters and what’s the fun in playing when one of your character is perpetually useless? So to fix Thor the format needs to be fixed first.

To illustrate, suppose your team is featured + X Force + Thor, and I get to pick my team and I pick X Force, Devil Dino, and Hulk. Although my team breaks the rules it is most definitely not very strong, and in this case you’d have to come up with the 10K to down X Force plus another 2K or so for Hulk (because Smite + Power Surge can’t drop Hulk from full), and until you do about 12K damage and collect enough for Power Surge + Smite, you’re likely stuck with X Force as your only source of damage (assuming the featured doesn’t contribute) which is exactly the same as my team. Of course I do not expect to win, but picking two guys who literally does no offense and not even in a significant hole until 12K worth of damage + 10 red + 9 blue collected is not bad. If such teams can even be picked on a regular basis you’d end up with a lot of 1on1 X Force duels (or whoever else is strongest) since Thor has to wait until someone is downed, and I think that’s an acceptable amount of risk.

3

Taking away the AP gain from Surgical Strike would really suck. Making his powers cost more too? Please no. If you want to nerf him, just make his green and black do less damage (and let it keep its awesome utility). Or even better, make them do more damage at lower ranks; if the jump from 3 to 5 wasn’t so insane on his Green, we might see more players go yellow.

Overbalanced 4s are a problem for a very small percentage of players, but I’m with you on the need for balance. There will be more 4s soon to take the spotlight from Thor And Xforce–but more players need time to accumulate the covers to make them viable. So how about instead of calling for a nerf, let’s just be patient and wait for equilibrium. E.g. 4* Gold Ares would make X-Force’s G/Y comparatively useless and we’d be begging for a buff.

I don’t have much to say about Thor, because she’s nuts.

4

But they are not going to change the PVP featured character format. I really almost feel that 4*'s should be banned from PVP unless their the featured character. They should be PVE powerhouses. The problem with that is they affect scaling for your other characters as well. It would be nice if PVE scaling was determined by the level of your characters that you use for that node. I digress.

  1. X-Force shoud have true healing. His healing his not the problem. In high end PVP, where most of these 4* vs 4* battles take place, speed is key. No one is going to stop in the middle of a push (especially with shield cool downs) to take X-Force for a stroll in prologue. The reason X-Force can take damage now is because he’s so fast that it limits the damage that he and the team takes. Between the low ap cost of green and the AP gain of black, X-Force can really make a battle fly. Once battles slow down, X-Force is going to take a lot more damage. Similar to Patch, even though Patch has great regeneration, he can be slow and so he needs the regeneration and even then it’s not always enough.

  2. I do not think changing PS to a different color would make a sufficient difference.

5

You inadvertently made the argument for balancing 4or and X-Force. You are saying that all future characters will be measured against them. Meaning that they are so powerful, the only new characters that will matter are those that are as strong as these two.

There is a difference between calling for a nerf and a balance. I think they should still be two of the most powerful characters in the game. It’s actually you arguing for a nerf. You are saying to leave them fast, but make them weaker. I"m saying leave them powerful, but make them slower. And let’s not exaggerate, I"m talking a few extra turns slower, not impotent.

6

Edit to address your comment: Once there are other good 4* options, Surgical Strike is all Wolvie has. Making it cost more and do less would doom him to obsolescence as soon as there is a new green-using 4*. Cost more or do less, I could probably deal with (the AP drain seems especially overkill).

Further speculation on boosting 4* by improving others instead of nerfing the top two:
Invisible Woman’s inevitable buff could completely change things. E.g. X-Force buff gave him much cheaper, better powers. So let’s say Force Bubbles gets dropped to 7 blue with a similar effect, Force Crush doesn’t end the turn (or only does when you detonate.), Invisibility makes one tile per team member for a little cheaper. Now, get 7 blue and you can shut down black red and blue while you get a little green, detonate for a ton of AP and mop up; Once you hit 15Y or something you go invisible to make your whole team invincible while the AI pounds you uselessly with Surgical Smites.

Boosting IW is a great way to address the current imbalance, especially because high tier players probably have a well-covered IW they’re not using, so she could be immediately relevant (unlike Elektra or Star-Lord).

7

I don’t think a surgical + xforce nerf is necessary. X-Force needs a niche, and true healing + 5k damage for 8ap seems reasonable given the impending meta. I also completely disagree with Thor being reasonable in a 3 on 3 format. The main problem with Surge+Smite is that it effectively kills two guys of arbitrary amounts of health for 10 red AP + 9 blue AP, as long as one guy has less than 12k HP, which is completely insane. No other character in the game can do that with that efficiency. Demolition can kill 10k HP for 10 AP, Surgical kills roughly 10k AP on average for 11 AP, but no one can kill 12k HP + any amount of AP off of 10AP + 9AP in different colors.

I’d like to see the stun on Smite reduced down to 2 turns, and smite’s damage reduced to ~9k at level 5: this would make it harder to stunlock and just destroy the entire enemy team after a surge smite like we’re seeing now.

8

This is the big problem I see with the 4* powerhouses and any future 4*'s for that matter. Outside of 4s existing, a lot of the subpar 3s are useful when their event comes up and they’re buffed, which adds a little variety and brings them into balance with the better 3s (obligatory notice of exceptions like Beast). But if 4s are so powerful that buffed “good” 3*s still can’t hold a candle to them, what’s the point of the event structure? It really got brought home during the recent Human Torch Event - HT has a great Red and a pretty decent black and green. When he’s buffed to 249, you’d expect him to pull a lot of weight. But with a 4hor and Wolvie, he might as well be Bagman.

9

The shield hopping stuff is just a matter of spending more money and it wouldn’t matter if there was no X Force. It’d just be someone else that you pump your AP+3 all boosts to for the quickest win. Yes his offense is also what keeps the incoming damage low but you still take damage and it adds up over time. You don’t need to take a stroll in prologue to heal, because half of the time you can just drop a Recovery toward the end of a fight.

If Power Surge is on green, doing 10K damage by using 9 AP for an attack that does conservatively at least 5000 damage (X Force) and likely a lot more due to its cascade potential is suddenly not much of a net gain. You’d still come out ahead in the case where you’re able to establish a stunlock but otherwise the damage would be behind. The PvP featured character format must change. Otherwise your idea of banning 4* from PvP is about the only thing that can make this work. 4* obviously are meant to be at least somewhat more powerful than 3*, since if not why even use them?

10

The problem with buffing other characters is power creep. Ask yourself, "Would the game be better if 4s were balanced around Fury’s power level or around X-Force / LadyThor’s power level?" Like let’s say X-Force / LadyThor disappeared, and now Fury / Starlord were the best 4s. This would make the metagame MUCH more diverse because

  1. Fury and Starlord aren’t miles better than a boosted 249 3* character. The problem we’re seeing with LadyThor specifically is that you run her in pretty much every single PvP, regardless of whether or not she works well with the featured character. C Mags as the featured character? Who cares if he 100% conflicts with LadyThor, XF / LadyThor / CMags is still the best team in the PvP for defense.
  2. Fury is good enough that he’s better at dealing damage than pretty much any other 3* in the game, but not so good that 3* teams can’t at least have a small fighting chance against him. The 270 wall that we’re seeing right now would simply be hard to overcome as opposed to near impossible.

I started arguing with Vale in the first place because I looked at Starlord’s release, thought to myself “oh, he seems balanced but who cares because he’s nowhere near as good as LadyThor / XForce”. I want to be able to actually care about 4* releases and think “Oh, Starlord could work well with X-Force!” instead of thinking “Who cares because Loki / X-Force is better with LadyThor”. And as long as LadyThor can stunlock the last guy and one shot a 10k hp guy, that’s not going to happen.

11

How does Surge + Smite kill 2 guys when there are 3 guys on the other side? Sure if there was a red match and you charged that red tiles that can work, but that’d just be luck. Surge + Smite can kill any 2 guys if there are only 2 guys left. It doesn’t work if there are 3 guys on the other side. It obviously works for PvP because the rate of new characters being introduced makes it almost impossible to keep the featured character at even a respectable level let alone maxed. The vast majority of PvP events you can easily kill whoever is featured with just an X Force and then setup your Smite/Surge combo, but X Force is only about 5000 damage upfront with a variable amount of indirect damage via AP collection, and any featured character at 249 can easily survive that, and it’s not unreasonable to ask for a maxed 3* against X Force/Thor, except the format prevents you from doing that since it’s heavily weighted toward newer guys that you can’t possibly have enough cover or iso to max.

12

I seriously doubt Surge on green does anything except force X-Force out of the metagame and make LadyThor the sole ruler of the metagame. You’re seriously underestimating the value of surge’s stunlock, since LadyThor right now is effectively:
10 red - kill the guy with 12k HP or less
9 blue - stunlock the last guy, effectively killing him for 9 blue.

Most characters only have one skill that can deal so much damage with such little AP (We’re talking 10k damage with 10 AP and then infinite HP with 9 AP: X-Force only has surgical, Fury has demolition). The fact that LadyThor has two makes her way better than any alternative option.

13

I’m waiting for the inevitable suggestion that D3 buff everyone besides GT.

14

Killing the first guy with 4 other colors and 2 characters is not a hard requirement for dealing 12k damage for 10 AP, and then infinite amounts of damage for 9 AP: I don’t know how you’d be able to argue otherwise. I don’t see how a 3v3 vs a 2v2 matters at all in this scenario: If LadyThor can singlehandedly down two guys (one with 12k or less HP, one with infinite amounts of HP) with 10 red + 9 blue and no one else can do anywhere near that, how is that balanced? The only thing I can see mattering in a 3v3 vs a 2v2 is if someone has an AoE spell good enough to be more efficient, but then we’re talking like 7k aoe damage for 12AP, at which point things have pretty much gotten way out of hand power creep wise.

Those are always the funniest to read: let’s get everyone to pre-nerf Rag tier guys!

15

Yeah, and that only works if they have only 2 characters left. That isn’t what’s supposed to happen at the level you see those characters, since asking for a level 249 (166 base) isn’t much against 2 4s, except the format prevents you from that. That’s a problem of the format, not the character. Even The Hood can take an X Force at level 249. You’re double counting Thor’s power twice on Smite. Smite can do 10K damage because it requires 10 red + 9 blue. It is effectively a 19 AP move and doing that kind of damage is appropriate. Now due to a format issue it’s very trivial to get into a 2on2 situation and at that point Power Surge can finish off the last guy, but that’s a format issue. Let me outline this hypothetical situation. The featured character is IM40, so your team would be IM40/Thor/X Force and you’re on O. My defense team is the same but my Thor has level 270 stats with no ability damage but you don’t know it (this is just to prevent you from immediately Power Surge had you known my Thor has no abilities) and IM40 is level 249 on both side. How do you propose to quickly win this fight? Well you can always gamble with a Power Surge anyway but that’s still a gamble. Your offense is limited to just X Force until you take down my X Force, and this is essentially a 1on1 at this point. Of course, we don’t even have a featured character that can reliably match the power of a level 249 IM40 which is why you don’t have to worry about this scenario. Certainly if the featured character is say, Squirrel Girl the chance of her being higher than level 100 even after buff is small. But even if it’s someone who’s been in the rotation longer like Gamora or Mystique you still wouldn’t expect to face a level 166 base version simply because there are way too many 3s to level up now.

16

It’s not a 19 AP move because you get the 9 AP value off of surge as it effectively stunlocks the last guy to death. This is 19 AP to kill two guys, not one. And your hypothetical situation is pretty bad, since IM40 can recharge fuel LadyThor into double surge / smite trivially in order to kill the entire enemy team. Not to mention that since surgical gets red AP, you can just surge the LadyThor, surgical the IM40, and then double smite X-Force / IM40 down. You should have said something like LazyCap, since bringing along a LadyThor means Cap is actually dead weight, as opposed to IM40 basically fueling LadyThor to victory.

But yes, I see your point in that if your featured character is 100% useless (Cmags / Cap?) then LadyThor downside of having to down the first guy is more pronounced. But then again, X-Force 1 on 1ing that guy isn’t even that hard to pull off, and it’s obviously worth the defensive benefits of no one wanting to touch LadyThor unless they have a LadyThor of their own, making LadyThor STILL the best person on the team pushing highly in PvP. However, in the 95% of the time where the featured character isn’t completely useless with LadyThor, then my argument holds of it not being hard to kill off the first guy before killing the rest of the team with ladythor.

17

It’s not a hard requirement because of quality of the featured character has declined as time passes. Even Colo was unable to level everyone up to max after Star-Lord (or was it Elektra) and obviously if you need to make a decision on who to not level up you’d probably shelf a weak 3* over a 4*, and everyone else is even more affected by this. But this is backwards as you should not expect to not even see a level 166 when you’re using 2 maxed 4*s. Assuming X Force is held constant, and that the featured character is 249, a team with Thor can only attack from green, black, yellow, and purple on the first character they’re trying to down (you’re not going to Smite/Power Surge the first guy, or have featured character use those colors). Since the featured character is almost certainly weaker than X Force, this means the featured character can only contribute if he has a strong attack on yellow or purple, which is a very small subset of all characters. This means your total offense is likely limited to just X Force until the first person is downed, while your opponent’s offense is the total output of X Force + whoever they had instead of Thor. If the featured character has 10K HP instead of the usual irrelevent number of HPs, that’d mean you’re having X Force going 1 on 2 against himself + whoever they had instead of Thor for roughly the first 1/3 of the match, and for the last 2/3 of the match you’ve a very significant advantage. However since the beginning is generally the part where things can go wrong I feel this is an appropriate amount of risk. Note that this currently doesn’t happen because usually the featured guy has 5000 HP if that, so it’s only 1 on 2 for the first 1/5 or so of the fight instead 1/3 since you’d just down the featured guy first to get into a 2on2 situation.

18

Er, the point isn’t that you’ll somehow lose to this matchup given the attackers have an overwhelmingly advantage to begin with. The point is that you’re fighting at a significant disadvantage until you down your first guy and that’s not supposed to be trivial. You get nothing out of the featured guy unless he has a passive or an attack on yellow or purple because you’re not going to use his black/green/red/blue over X Force/Thor, while the opposing team gets to use all their available colors if they don’t have Thor. X Force has to do 1 on 2 and sometimes 1 on 3 until you can down your first guy. Now he’s quite capable of downing one guy quickly even going 1on3 especially if one of those guys has less than 5000 HP which happens all the time, but that’s a distortion created by the format. Why should you expect to fight guys with no more than 5K HP at the very top of PvP? Well it happens because the game forces you to, but in this case I’d say the game is the one in error.

19

If you think about a general PvP match, most of the time you’re prioritizing your two most powerful colors anyways to kill the first guy. Your scenario would make sense if it was actually hard to kill the first guy with X-Force + Featured, but in an overwhelming majority of cases it just straight up isn’t. Getting access to freely using red or blue on the first guy as opposed to hoarding it for ladythor is just far less important than being able to deal such a large amount of damage with surge + smite.

20

I can’t figure out why you’d want to balance 4 Star characters to 3 Star characters.

They’re a whole rarity grade higher. They’re supposed to be objectively better. We never discuss bringing the 3 Star cast in line with the 2 Star cast, so why would this gap be any different?

I know for a long time the 3 Star cast were the top of the metagame, but that time has passed. If anything, the other 4-Stars that are lackluster should be buffed to similar capacity to make a diverse 4-Star metagame. The star levels are stepping stones, not a melting pot.

The day is coming where PvP’s will have 4-Star featured’s alongside / instead of 3-Star, I think.