I know the game has a lot of other problems right now, but the recent buff to Hawkeye’s abilities is insane - way too overpowered. These characters see massive amounts of play, even consistently beating level 672 5* characters while remaining under level 266.
1* Hawkeye
3* Iron May
Hawkeye was a mistake. A winfinite should always require the interaction of two characters. Not just one character.
He was already a winfinite with a cost reducer like 4BW, but they just added that in.
Thank you for your suggestion. I concur.
You’re talking about two characters who don’t hit hard on their own, have no self-protection against stun or away, and can easily die to match damage on turn 1.
I don’t see either one as threatening or a problem.
Hawkeye is a winfinite by himself. They’ve nerfed cmags, 4px, dino, and others, for being able to winfinite with other characters.
3may makes the other 1a5 characters oppressive (yelena and spider-man). Unless all of your ap supports proc, one of your characters is dying to them on the first turn. That’s untrue of any 5*. 1s shouldn’t outclass 5s. It defeats the whole purpose of having tiers.
@ViralCore said:
@Borstock said:
You’re talking about two characters who don’t hit hard on their own, have no self-protection against stun or away, and can easily die to match damage on turn 1.I don’t see either one as threatening or a problem.
Hawkeye is a winfinite by himself. They’ve nerfed cmags, 4px, dino, and others, for being able to winfinite with other characters.
3may makes the other 1a5 characters oppressive (yelena and spider-man). Unless all of your ap supports proc, one of your characters is dying to them on the first turn. That’s untrue of any 5*. 1s shouldn’t outclass 5s. It defeats the whole purpose of having tiers.
Just to be clear a 1a5 IS A 5 STAR CHARACTER. It’s not a 1* character so beating other 5* is normal and intended.
Interestingly enough we had a defense against turn 1 deaths back when Frog was allowed. Of course the whining that players themselves couldn’t win on turn 0 against Frog meant we lost Frog as a defense against this nonsense. Why not instead petition for Frog to be returned?
KGB
@KGB said:
@ViralCore said:
@Borstock said:
You’re talking about two characters who don’t hit hard on their own, have no self-protection against stun or away, and can easily die to match damage on turn 1.I don’t see either one as threatening or a problem.
Hawkeye is a winfinite by himself. They’ve nerfed cmags, 4px, dino, and others, for being able to winfinite with other characters.
3may makes the other 1a5 characters oppressive (yelena and spider-man). Unless all of your ap supports proc, one of your characters is dying to them on the first turn. That’s untrue of any 5*. 1s shouldn’t outclass 5s. It defeats the whole purpose of having tiers.
Just to be clear a 1a5 IS A 5 STAR CHARACTER. It’s not a 1* character so beating other 5* is normal and intended.
Interestingly enough we had a defense against turn 1 deaths back when Frog was allowed. Of course the whining that players themselves couldn’t win on turn 0 against Frog meant we lost Frog as a defense against this nonsense. Why not instead petition for Frog to be returned?
KGB
Rather petition to remove supports from PVP again as that ALSO solves the issue of first turn kills. And lets variety breathe again.
No Frogs please. Thank you.
@LuxAurae said:
@KGB said:
@ViralCore said:
@Borstock said:
You’re talking about two characters who don’t hit hard on their own, have no self-protection against stun or away, and can easily die to match damage on turn 1.I don’t see either one as threatening or a problem.
Hawkeye is a winfinite by himself. They’ve nerfed cmags, 4px, dino, and others, for being able to winfinite with other characters.
3may makes the other 1a5 characters oppressive (yelena and spider-man). Unless all of your ap supports proc, one of your characters is dying to them on the first turn. That’s untrue of any 5*. 1s shouldn’t outclass 5s. It defeats the whole purpose of having tiers.
Just to be clear a 1a5 IS A 5 STAR CHARACTER. It’s not a 1* character so beating other 5* is normal and intended.
Interestingly enough we had a defense against turn 1 deaths back when Frog was allowed. Of course the whining that players themselves couldn’t win on turn 0 against Frog meant we lost Frog as a defense against this nonsense. Why not instead petition for Frog to be returned?
KGB
Rather petition to remove supports from PVP again as that ALSO solves the issue of first turn kills. And lets variety breathe again.
No Frogs please. Thank you.
I highly doubt supports are ever leaving PvP.
So I guess we have to settle in for endless turn 0 wins for the player or turn 1 retal deaths of our own characters.
KGB
I think the broader problem is stuff that beats any enemy of any level turn0. I think it’s ok if some of those exist, but they need to be pretty hard to get, or only exist certain weeks.
Otherwise you end up where we are now – roster, boost week, etc are completely meaningless. Hundreds of players have access to turn0 wins against infinite enemy health. That’s not good for the metagame.
I’m not sure how to fix it. They could give us leapfrog again! (Please don’t). I do think Hawkeye is too good, but I also think he’s an accident. Iron May should apply her buff based on what tier of character she’s buffing, not her own tier.
Oh, and Galactus completely turns off turn0 wins (except Kang I guess). But nobody can buy him at the moment so it’s sort of irrelevant.
Personally, I think 1* HE is… fine… on his own… The big mistakes are the stupid supports (granting 12AP at start, and it ALWAYS DOES IT for the AI) being enabled on PVP, and possibly the ascension mech. Do away the supports in PVP will simmer down the heat… 
They could just take away the free AP supports, but then we go back to a metagame where active powers are useless and everybody only runs passives all the time.
I don’t think removing supports from PvP will happen at this point. (Of course, there’s Leapfrog etc which were actually banned, but only in PvP, just until they could be rebalanced, and I’m sure that one’s coming any day now, right?)
There are just a lot of moving parts, and pulling one lever over here will cause something else to move over there. I don’t envy the new devs if they try to sort all this out – they’ve inherited a game with a ton of obvious bugs and issues, but also some really insidious metagame/character balance problems. Flinging infinite Hawkeye into this at the last minute was truly an excellent parting gift from BCS.
@KGB said:
@ViralCore said:
@Borstock said:
You’re talking about two characters who don’t hit hard on their own, have no self-protection against stun or away, and can easily die to match damage on turn 1.I don’t see either one as threatening or a problem.
Hawkeye is a winfinite by himself. They’ve nerfed cmags, 4px, dino, and others, for being able to winfinite with other characters.
3may makes the other 1a5 characters oppressive (yelena and spider-man). Unless all of your ap supports proc, one of your characters is dying to them on the first turn. That’s untrue of any 5*. 1s shouldn’t outclass 5s. It defeats the whole purpose of having tiers.
Just to be clear a 1a5 IS A 5 STAR CHARACTER. It’s not a 1* character so beating other 5* is normal and intended.
Interestingly enough we had a defense against turn 1 deaths back when Frog was allowed. Of course the whining that players themselves couldn’t win on turn 0 against Frog meant we lost Frog as a defense against this nonsense. Why not instead petition for Frog to be returned?
KGB
Hawkeye and May do not need to be ascended to 5* let alone maxed. Hawkeye does his thing at 13 covers with no levels. Same with may.
@entrailbucket said:
@kuntilanak said:
Personally, I think 1* HE is… fine… on his own… The big mistakes are the stupid supports (granting 12AP at start, and it ALWAYS DOES IT for the AI) being enabled on PVP, and possibly the ascension mech. Do away the supports in PVP will simmer down the heat…Flinging infinite Hawkeye into this at the last minute was truly an excellent parting gift from BCS.
You want to know what was another excellent parting gift? That vault in early December that had a 1A5 Juggs in it that you could get tokens for from doing quests so that anyone had a legit shot to pull him.
You know my softcapped roster runs in the 370ish range so I queue a lot of teams with so-so covered 5s and high level 4s etc. Well since that vault ran I’d say my queues are FULL of teams with 1A5 Juggs and some trash character (often a true 2 star < L144 or a 3 <166). He’s boosted this week so I peeked at a couple of rosters and was astonished to see multiple players with like 10-15 total characters on their roster but one of them was a 1A5 Juggs at 450 and the rest were <L00. What’s been done to those players is an abomination since they are forced to play in PvP way way beyond what they should see and I imagine their PvE to be boring as hell as they are stuck in CL3 or CL4 and have a vastly OP Juggs winning everything effortlessly.
KGB
The careful monitoring of the ascended tiers that was promised never happened - they just sat back and unleashed chaos and then doubled down on Supports in PvP. The Ascension mechanism was obviously a tool for high end player retention but they seemed to underestimate the sheer level of resources some players had to immediately be able to progress. Throw in broken PvP last year allowed a lot of players to 550 the 1*. Then they gave us Hawkeye. If there was some sort of plan involved in all of the above then it was either pure genius from a broken mind or the Janitor kept sneaking ideas onto the strategy board when nobody was looking.
For what it’s worth… My opinion…
Iron May needs to be nerfed because when you are attacking a player who has Iron May you frequently need to win turn 1 against them.
Classic Hawkeye aka 1 star Hawkeye or (as I’m beginning to call him in my internal monologue) CHawkeye needs to exist because of Iron May (and a few others like Frankie) as a way to counter them. When you attack a CHawkeye player you don’t need to turn 1 win so it’s not a huge problem stopping you playing with most roster combinations you could run.
Ultimately Hawkeye is worse on defence than Shang-Chi and people were up in arms when the Shang-Chi nerf was on the table. The reason: “he is terrible on defence”
Maybe the more pertinent question would be why they chose to buff a 1* in the full knowledge that most of the 1s already scale insane, are constantly boosted and have been purchasable as a 1a5? What next? Does Juggernaut need more health?!?!?
I don’t understand why easy to retal against teams are ever a problem.
I also don’t understand why a self-infinite team is a problem when it takes forever for that to happen without a high synergy teammate. I can’t just break out HE and the game ends in five seconds. But NamBaku absolutely can and does wipe my team regularly on turn 1 (or does enough damage that I might as well retreat). JuggSam can and does wipe my team turn 1 all the time. At least when people are running around using low health characters there’s some quick and easy wins out there.
The game crashes a lot. Even if 26.2.1 fixes it some, it’s way more than before.
Large numbers of display bugs persist including reward screens showing double rewards to people. After almost 7 months of Unity.
They’re about to shift all events back a full day apparently and disrupt a lot of player habits.
The last thing they should do is nerf heavily used characters. Especially since they won’t bother offering any compensation based on recent history.
You nerf characters when a new one come along that offers a similar or better power bump, if you’re smart. Unless that character is utterly dominating high end pvp usage and making the game less fun/boring.
Also the game remains old as dirt and a newer player can pick up may and hawkeye and compete fairly well with the guys who have been playing for 12 years. You absolutely NEED some way for newer players who aren’t going to drop thousands, necessarily, on the game to find a way to be able to beat those massive rosters or they’ll just quit immediately or as soon as they realize there’s no effective way to build a team that can take them on.
HE is a bit over the top but he’s slow. He was buffed because he basically sucked before this and was mostly useless. Maybe they did too much but I’m sure some bought him when he came around after the buff and will buy him next time etc, that didn’t before. It’s called money, they like and need it. He’s a fantastic punch up character now.
May is also a bit much but also also building a 3-4 is several months of playing at a high level and a good way to get people into the game. She is a super important punch-up character and makes people feel like they have an inroad into higher tier play. Yeah she’s overused even by 550 players but what can you do? maybe someday they’ll have ways to control what characters are useable by what level of player or be able to reduce her buff if paired with 550s or (oh god) 700s. Bu:t maybe not ever, and/or maybe they never prioritize that, because they’re still a small team of a dozen folks max, probably.
IDK, there’s no way to manage this mess effectively at this point, unless you cleared the deck and nerfed like 180 characters or something. Just deal with it, or quit when the schedule changes happen next week. Asking new devs to try to massage things into some more balanced meta is just unrealistic.
Look…it’s a game. if you played it for years, congrats! You got a ton of enjoyment out of it. There’s no utopia of a perfectly balanced game that makes everyone happy. If you don’t enjoy the ride anymore, I’m sorry, but the devs need to try to keep it running, and try to make people who started playing yesterday happy (aka feel like they can make progress and catch up) as well as those of you who started in October 2013.
Well arguably they wouldn’t be nerfing 1a5 Hawkeye, they would be rolling him back to what he was after what was quite clearly a mistake.
Yes, perfect balance is a practical impossibility.
Yes, it would take hundreds of nerfs to even come close to a balance where every character is kinda playable if they just happen to be your fave from the comics or movies.
Yes, there are a lot of important things that arguably could be dealt with first.
Yes, some deliberate unbalanced is desirable because of capitalism.
However, could we more or less eliminate defensive 1 turn clocks in relatively even match ups with just a couple of nerfs? I think, maybe yes, and it would be really nice if I didn’t have to turn 1 win 90% of matches.
In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a turn 1 loss that didn’t involve Iron May. Even pre nerf Thorlaris tended to be a 2 or 3 turn clock.