Thor and Ragnarok are ruining this game

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So here’s the situation - you are have two characters who, if you have access to them (i.e., the covers because the ISO will come over time) basically trump anything else you can do at their colors and rarity level.

What you’ve done is developed a crutch on two levels. One - people rely on these characters too much. They don’t try out other characters or spend as much time investing in them. Why would they? Thor or Rag are good enough to get you through most things. Two - the developers rely upon Rag’s OP-ness to be the “end-boss” for anytime they need a hard level. Instead of coming up with a villain devil dinosaur that is fun or interesting - instead you just say up Rag’s level to 240… now that’s hard!

Look through the forums here. Almost every ability in the game is compared to Thor and Rags red. Because they are so far ahead of the curve as to be game-altering and game-breaking. If a player knows about these characters and chooses to use something else, they are doing it in an attempt to salvage some fun while knowing they are not being as competitive as possible. Game balance is increased when you let players make choices that can be interesting but also competitive. Gameplay fun is increased when you don’t face a 85 Thor in 90% of the matches in a PVP or feel like you have to go through around round of converting reds to greens or reds to yellows. Rote, predictable, boring. If even a relatively low level Rags matches red in PVE, you know what comes next - cascade after cascade into death.

The devs have shown they care about this because of how they responded to Storm. And Thor and Rag can still be very powerful - just right now they are beyond anything. Make them weaker and make the other characters stronger. You can do both. Introduce new characters that are interesting and different enough from Thor/Rag that they create more dynamic gameplay. Feel free to create villains (countdown tiles or not) that are interesting and not just a boosted broken character. Be bold.

2

Thor is not even stronger than Wolverine. He’s more of a annoyance with potential to get scary if the game goes on for long enough for him to get a Thunder Strike off, but he usually won’t if you play carefully. If anything I think Wolverine is ruining the 2 star game, not Thor. Both characters are a cut above the rest of the 2 stars, but Thor is not as far out of the pack compared to Wolverine.

Ragnarok, on the other hand, is definitely broken.

3

Phantron is smart and says wise things.

4

+1

Although in general I don’t care about this, for the reasons Phantron gave I could understand someone wanting a change.

5

Well, I have no problem using the 3 or 4 strongest character too, but it’d be nice if the rest of the characters on my bench gets to see some action.

6

If every character was equally mediocre then it’d be really boring to just have to go and slog through every match.

7

Agreed, and if every character was OP no one would ever have any real need to spend money on the game. I guess instead of saying I don’t care about this issue I should really say I have no idea how to fix the problem that is perceived by others.

And good job on the Hulk event!

8

Thank you sir!

I don’t have a high level Rag (only 2/2) so I can’t be said to have a bias towards him, obviously he’s annoying to play against. But so is every character in the right circumstances. Bullseye is annoying. Daken is annoying. Wolverine is a nightmare. There are lots of characters that can be not fun to play against.

I think the only way to “fix” the OP nature of certain characters is the way the Devs are currently doing it: run tournaments that force different team configurations and uses. The No Man’s Land tournament was great for that. I actually ENJOYED Moonstone in that tournament. If you boost certain characters, limit the use of characters, you’ll see different looks, and that’s really the best way to balance out certain characters without also ruining every character to make them all mediocre.

The thing that makes this game great is that it’s not just a match 3 game, it’s a strategy game. You need characters that are really powerful to provide a challenge.

9

You can have character that are stronger than others without being broken. For example Thor is clearly above the rest of the 2 stars not counting Wolverine, but he’s not an impossible matchup. Basically Thor punishes you if you try to overpower him, because he has very high HPs and if you get sloppy the AI will make enough matches to get off his big moves. He’s not an opponent you like to see but he can be worked around. Against a character like Ragnarok, about all you can do is either keep him stunned permanently or just hope he never grabs any red. Of course there will be some characters that form the backbone of any ‘A-team’ but the ‘A-team’ shouldn’t be overwhelmingly powerful that you never see anyone else.

Part of the problem, of course, is the massive score falling in a short time and the fact that most teams do not actually get hurt. In theory, even if there’s a clear ‘A-team’, you’d think those guys would get hurt at some point and you got to sub in some guys to continue playing. Currently, most of the time your A-team won’t even get hurt, and even if they do, it is simply too risky to have the B-team up since you can lose most of your rating in a hurry. PvP should be more about attrition and having depth in roster should be a strength, not a weakness. I shouldn’t have the same 3 guys fighting for 5 hours continously, and there should be an advantage to have characters that can backup your A-team when they get hurt. Let’s say they made a change such that Bagman instant kills Ragnarok and Magento the moment any match starts. It’d still be pretty dangerous to put him on your team even with this ridiculous power since the risk of being hit while you got Bagman on your team is too great, and we’re talking about an absolutely ridiculous amount of power here on a character. If Bagman instant killed the two most powerful characters in the game, it should be a plus to put him in your team (while fighting teams with those two characters), not a detriment, but right now, even if this crazy thing happened, you’d probably still do worse for having Bagman on your team.

10

Agreed, Thor is a great template for a character that is strong but not op.

I wish at this point that Rags in his current form had never existed. We obviously would have accepted anything in the beginning so a modified version would have been fine.

I’m kind of curious how people would actually respond to a nerf. I know we have talked about it ad nauseam but I wonder how people would actually react if in the next update it was just done. Despite having a max rag I wouldn’t mind at all but I wonder what the backlash would actually be.

11

I agree, Thor has too much hp and damage.
Wolverine on the other hand is easy to kill due to weak hp.

I only have Thor at lvl 45 capped,
so I wish there is some tournment with Thor as reward.
Then I would use Thor as well. Hahah

12

I would be totally bummed for one. I have had a lvl 5 red Rags for about 48 hours now (huge jump in power from 4 to 5!) after getting a lucky token pull. I have put a total of 3 rounds of 1250 HP into him (2 red and 1 green) and he is now a 2/5. I would very much like to be able to use him in his non-nerfed form for a little. Maybe try to get to top 25 in a lightning round to bump up his levels a bit.

13

Nerfs are never the answer, add more character’s of approximate power to the top dogs. Give many of them abilities that are situationally better and you’ll see much more variety in gameplay. As the game progresses and evolves, we should see more balance from character to character. However, as with all games like this there will almost always be a group of crowd favorites that are recognized as the best/strongest/easiest to win with…for now that’s mag classic, spidy, rag, Thor, wolverine 2*. Three months from now, they will probably still be good, but we’ll see complaints about the new top dog characters.

14

It is all about synergy, just wait as more characters come out and different combinations are found that are elegant in their effect. How about a 3* cover that pops out purples like GSBW does green. Magneto would be the most OP dude on the block, there are lots of things possible and the devs have plenty of room to come out with new combinations of characters. Rag is a hammer, other combinations will come up that will change the flavor of the week.

I am pretty sure that people will start complaining bitterly about maxed out hulks and the Anger ability damaging them every time they hit him, no one will want to have to grind on PVP battles where they take unavoidable damage (with the exception of stuns) to them. New things are on the horizon, do not worry so much about nerfing, instead wait to see what the devs do to balance the game. There are just a few hundred characters they can still introduce.

15

Making other character powerful while leaving one unchanged is the same as nerfing the one overpowered character. For example if you make all red skills do double damage except Thunderclap that’d probably keep Thunderclap in check. You didn’t ‘nerf’ Ragnarok but everyone can tell this is basically the same as just cutting Thunderclap’s damage in half.

5 black Anger is trivially countered by 5 blue Spiderman. You obviously wouldn’t attack a 5 black Anger Hulk first and then just chain stun him at the end. It’s not even very easy to get him to trigger his Anger unless you use Wolverine, since he has so much HP, most normal attack wouldn’t do 5% of his HP. The Hulk is an example of a reasonable meta-game. Anger pretty much counters Wolverine’s Strike Tiles, but that in term is countered by Spiderman. And if you don’t have Spiderman, Modern BW can certainly be subbed in against Hulk.

16

I’m enjoying this thread.

Almost as much as I’m enjoying the game!

17

  1. Ragnarok is overpowered.

  2. I liked how Ragnarok was a final boss in the Hulk Event, so that we cannot use him. That was quite a good mission!

18

By that very logic Thor is overpowered because he is all you see on 2* teams. Fighting a 2* team without Thor on it is a rare event.

And compared to IM35 or Juggernaut, the heaviest hitting 1* characters, he’s certainly absurdly overpowered. So is Wolvie. And C Storm. And OBW.

I do not understand why people keep crying out for a nerf on Ragnarok without realizing that the exact same relationship exists between 2* and 1*. Yes, Ragnarok is powerful. He’s also a 3*. He should be more powerful than a 2*. Is he a bit too powerful, even for a 3*? Maybe, but people always forget the drawbacks.

He only levels to 115. Yes, that’s a problem. It means that he won’t out tank higher level 3* characters (just as Juggernaut won’t for 1* or Daken for 2*) once they’re past L115. My Magneto now does all red matches, which is problematic.

He only has two strong colors, which is unique in the game. Every other cover, even if they only have two powers, has three colors. He doesn’t. Deny red and green and he does completely crap damage.

His powers, while low AP and spammable, are also relatively low damage. Put some protect tiles down, like from Spidey, and that 620 damage attack is quickly reduced to half or less. Godlike rarely does even half of that because, again, he has two good colors and the rest do 11 damage at most.

I think people are mostly angry at the version in Lightning Rounds (and they should be; the 200% buff is ridiculous and makes him utterly ridiculous), and at the hyper-overleveled versions in PvE, which is absurd to complain about. Yes, they are tough. They’re supposed to be. But I’m not going to complain about Juggernaut because of PvE content.

The final reason people complain is because he’s so freaking simple that the AI can handle him well. That’s more of a damning statement against the AI than anything else. There are many other 3*s that are as dangerous as Rags, but the AI is such crap that it doesn’t use them well. If it used Mags blue or Widow’s purple with even half the ability as a human then people would complain about them. If it used Widow’s green ever or Mags purple more consistently then there’d be howls for blood.

But, ultimately, it comes down to people not getting that there is, and should be, a difference in power between 2* and 3*, just as there is between 1* and 2*.

19

Punisher, the heaviest hitting 1* characters,
Erm, he’s 3*, no?

20

Oops. I meant Juggernaut. Fixed. At least I was consistently using the wrong character… three different places.