Timing observances

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

One of the aspects of this game that I appreciate is that the developers have put a lot of thought into the order in which abilities occur with the same trigger. I have played multiple games in the past that players had to dig out rulebooks and find obscure rules in order to know which event would occur first, etc. I like that abilities are coded into this game to happen a certain way, and we as players can adjust our playing accordingly if need be. A few that I have observed that I hadn’t realized before:

  1. Friendly Morbius vs Enemy Medusa:

When I match an enemy Medusa Entanglement CD tile, Medusa’s ability happens first, so she immediately places 2 attack tiles on the board. Then Morbius’ black kicks in, and he can potentially pull those enemy attack tiles immediately off of the board. This has happened to me numerous times, but the first time I saw it happen was enlightening, and made me say,“Oh, so that’s how that works. Okay.”

  1. Morbius and Polaris together:

This one happened to me this morning, and is the catalyst for this thread. I had both of these two on my team, and I matched an enemy strike tile, with other enemy specials on the board. Morbius black kicked in first, so he removed up to 3 enemy specials off of the board. Then, since the board was full, and Morbius had just effectively created a basic tile, Polaris then placed a strike tile on that now basic tile. So what was an enemy special tile, Morbius made into a basic tile, then Polaris made into a strike tile. That was kinda cool, especially with a board full of specials already.

  1. Captain Marvel 3* and Polaris together vs BRB/Polaris

This is the combination that I use to try and defeat a BRB/Polaris team, specifically because of their interaction. If there are enemy protect tiles on the board, (which there usually are against a BRB/Polaris team), when I fire Captain Marvel’s red ability, it destroys all enemy protect tiles, then the board settles, then Polaris creates all new protect tiles (at 3 per protect tile destroyed), then cascades happen. What this does is it effectively flips the board from (often) having lots of enemy protects to completely filling the board with friendly protect tiles. The first time I did this was eye-opening to me. But keep in mind, BRB also now just gained blue AP for each enemy protect tile destroyed this way, so you can expect either a Polaris stun or a BRB Clash of the Worthy coming on the enemy’s next turn. Add in enemy Medusa, and she has just healed her team for each enemy protect tile destroyed as well, so there are lots of abilities that trigger off of firing Captain Marvel’s red in this instance.

Are there other specific timing sequences that occur from the same trigger that you have found to be enlightening?

2

As I understand, the passive powers for your own team trigger in the order in which you’ve set up the characters (centre → left → right). So in example 2, if you switched the positions of Morbius and Polaris presumably Polaris would try and put down new specials before Morbius removes the extra ones. Although I haven’t tested this myself as I don’t have Morbius very high yet.

The first example is certainly very interesting. I was unaware of that.

3

As I have Morbius champed, I’m finding that I really enjoy running him more often. Lately I have been running him in the pve 5* required nodes, especially against goons that place CD tiles. Because all I have to do is match 1, and then 3 more of them are immediately removed. Usually the ones that get removed are ones that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to match, so by Morbius passively removing them, I’m avoiding big damage.

And so by running him more often, I’m finding that knowing how the timing works in certain situations and against certain abilities is crucial. I’ll post more timing “aha!” moments as I come across them.

You may be right about the friendly placement order mattering for multiple events occurring from the same trigger. I don’t know how the coding works, I’m just glad that it does. :slight_smile:

4

I’m surprised how often trap tiles get overwritten by goons and other effects.

The only other order of effect thing I am surprised about is if Apoc’s mutant teammate dies to damage on your turn, before you get to move a tile, Apoc still remains unstunnable. You have to really pay attention in that situation and remember the game did the check at the start of your turn, instead of when you can actually move tiles.

Just remembered one. D3ken.

You’d think his blue power does it’s damage like it says. But it can potentially make more strike tiles to convert at the point you fire it, thereby increasing the damage to the 4x strike tile removal threshold.

5

Okay , so my alliance has confirmed that the order friendly powers fire is based upon the selection screen. Center, then left, then right. So the order that I chose them did matter. Cool. Good to know going forward.

6

Certain teams definitely benefit from paying attention to the selection screen. Here are a few examples:

  • Medusa/Polaris: Both have a start of turn condition that places a special tile on the board (a strike tile for Polaris, a countdown tile for Medusa). However, since Polaris’ condition specifically checks for another special tile (not just another strike tile), you want to place her “ahead” of Medusa in the timing sequence (which, as noted above, is center → left → right). That way, Polaris will place her strike, then Medusa will place her countdown. If Medusa is ahead in the sequence, she will place her countdown, then Polaris won’t place anything (since there is already a special tile).

  • Sabretooth/Mantis: This is a really fun team for shutting down special tile based teams (especially ones with Polaris). However, you want Sabretooth to be ahead in the sequence. That way, when you match a strike tile Sabretooth’s passive board destruction will trigger before Mantis’ passive countdown tile placement. If Mantis is ahead, she places her countdown before Sabretooth destroys a block of tiles, thereby greatly increasing the chance of losing the countdown.

  • 5* Scarlet Witch: We learned when Wanda appeared that even AoE (area of effect) damage – which is damage done to the enemy team – is processed according to the above-mentioned timing sequence. Wanda’s passive counter ticks up and applies damage reduction even between hits of AoE damage. So when she is standing to the right on the character selection screen, the center character takes the first hit at full damage, the left character takes the second hit at reduced damage, then Wanda takes the third hit at doubly reduced damage. In this case, it’s not the order in which the characters are standing during the battle, but the order in which they are set during the selection screen; even if Wanda is standing in front, she benefits from this timing structure.

7

Wasn’t this fixed?
For a while it was working in 2 steps, first converting tiles and potentially creating more strike tiles, then removing strike tiles and doing damage. I thought they fixed it so that it did everything at the same time.

8

Daken one got fixed at some point this year, I was quite surprised when his last PVP ran and that bug didn’t trigger

9

Wanted to add one since it just happened and I wasn’t sure how it would all play out.

I’m running Hydra Stomper, Peggy, and Mantis against three 5*s, Cyclops, Adam, and Colossus.

I used Mantis green ability Sleep! on Cyclops, so now he’s in front. I then used Peggy’s Blue ability to stun the other 2. Well, when the Sleep countdown tile hits 0, there is a split second there where the target is awake before they get stunned again. Well, Cyclops’ teammates were both stunned, so it was during that split second that I was afraid of Cyclops’ Dark Phoenix Unleashed would kick in, making him unable to be stunned again with the Sleep CD tile.

Timing sequence:
Cyclops stunned with Sleep!
Cyclops teammates both stunned
Sleep CD tile gets to 0, thus “waking him up” before it resets.
This is where I was afraid of Dark Phoenix Unleashed kicking in, which would prevent him from being stunned again with the Sleep tile.

But it didn’t. The Sleep! tile reset before DPU was triggered, which meant that Cyclops was back to being stunned for 3 more turns. So that’s how that played out.

10

I noticed that in a fight with Apoc and Blob (those two remained), Blob got downed and I wanted to stun Apoc with Polaris blue immediately and it didn’t work.

11

Blob isn’t the problem. What happens is that the game runs the code for checking the condition of Apocalypse’s stun immunity only once at the start of each turn. You can stun him only at the next turn.

12

Here’s one that happened to me today that was note-worthy:

The Hood fired Twin Pistols, which is an end-of-turn ability. But during the cascade a match-5 happened, which results in an extra turn.

So does he get the extra turn, or no?

Twin Pistols took precedence here and ended the turn with the crit still on the board. He did not get his extra turn.

13

There are definitely some proc’ing quirks that take practice (Quicksilver mirror matches come to mind as unusually complicated), but by and large the proc order for passives is set by the team order (center>left>right on the team selection page as stated above). The tricky stuff is when multiple passives on different teams proc off the same event (or series of events). That can take some experimentation.

14

This is likely an artifact of the way the games checks for the conditions on sighclops’ passive (ie when does the game check to see if he has an active companion).

15

Found this one out yesterday, but if Thanos makes a Match 5 that kills an enemy on the other team, Teen Jean will stun your team before Court Death triggers. An extreme corner case, but it happened to me in the Deadpool vs MPQ node with her in it.

16

Does anyone know how the game decides how to order two match threes from placing a single critical?

17

It goes by the highest match damage, regardless of position.

18

Is it not yellow, red, blue, green, purple, black, teamup?

19

This would also make sense. I definitely had a 115k with a 41k match-3s from a crit that only killed one opponent today. The two remaining both should have been dead.

20

Powers are fired in that order. Now, I’m doubting what I said about match damage order. :smiley:

I probably need to do a slow-motion of the damage dealt in a crit double match-3.