Wakanda Forever! How does it even work?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

4* Juggernaut’s release initially had me excited about his interactions with Okoye, but then @Demiurge_Anthony
came in to the thread to say that Collatoral won’t interact with Wakanda Forever! because it’s based off of a tile match.

“Juggernaut’s power Collateral Damage will not activate Okoye’s power Wakanda Forever as it is associated with making a match.”

The official wording of the WF! is:
Okoye fights to protect Wakanda at all costs. Damage from friendly powers is increased by 1321 for each Team-Up AP you have. Okoye’s base Team-Up match damage is increased by 90%. At the start of the turn, if Okoye is not in front, destroy 1 friendly Team-Up AP.

The wording on 4* Juggernaut’s Collatoral is:

Collatoral - greentile.png
Passive
(PASSIVE) Clear a path! Whenever Juggernaut makes a match, he deals 41 damage to the enemy team.

Update R154 (https://forums.505go.com/discussion/73117/r154-release-notes-6-4-18) changed Wakanda Forever! with the following patch notes:

What’s Changed:

  • Okoye’s power Wakanda Forever! now correctly adds extra damage to Daredevil (Matt Murdock)'s Hand-to-Hand, Medusa’s Entanglement, and Gamora (Awesome Mix Volume 2)'s Deadly Strike powers.
  • Okoye’s power Wakanda Forever! no longer adds damage to powers that destroy tiles without dealing additional damage.
    So the rule here seems to be that if the power specifies a number for damage, it should benefit from Wakanda Forever. In this Juggernaut scenario, what I would expect to happen is the direct damage to the target, which is match damage, would be base damage that gets no benefit from WF. Then the specified extra damage to the team, which is absolutely bonus power damage not tied to a tile destruction value, SHOULD get bonus damage from it.

There are few powers lately that I’ve noticed aside from this that seem like they should meet the requirements for this power and don’t:

Ghost Rider: Robbie Reyes Hell Ride destroys tiles and then does 3X damage per tile destroyed. We already got a ruling on this one that it’s “working as intended” even though I continue to believe that 300% damage should qualify as “bonus damage” personally.

War Machine’s Gatling Gun countdowns do a fixed amount of damage each, then break some tiles. That seems like it should benefit, but it doesn’t

Gambit’s first firing of Aces and Eights just breaks tiles without doing bonus damage, so you’d expect that to not benefit. But then the second firing breaks charged tiles and then adds specified bonus damage to it, and that bonus damage doesn’t benefit from it either. Why not?

There was a thread about Ragnarok’s Godlike Power only benefiting from it on the wingpersons and not on the target when there is only one enemy left.

I’m sure there are others, but I would like to know: Wakanda Forever!; What is the deal?

2

From your list of what works and what doesn’t it would appear that the rule is ‘anything that deals damage from tile destruction’ doesn’t benefit from WF.

So Matt Murdock/Medusa/Gamora’s powers all benefit because their damage isn’t tied to tile destruction.

On the other hand, Juggernaut, GR, War Machine’s powers all involved tile destruction (match damage or destroying tiles and doing damage from that destruction) so they don’t. For example in Gambits case, the +X bonus damage is probably just tied directly to the base tile value rather than added as a separate additional damage (which would benefit from WF). My guess is the reasoning for this is so that powers that reduce match damage by X (like Juggs power) can reduce this extra bonus damage.

I am surprised the Gatling Gun damage part of War Machines power doesn’t benefit from WF but I am not surprised the destroyed tile damage doesn’t.

KGB

3

I have a feeling it’s the ones that lump the damage together that are hurting from it, yeah. All of this stems from it’s interaction with Gladiathor’s green at launch, so i think the earth was salted to fix that problem. I also think the “working as designed” party line is in fact “this bug is too hard to fix” or “this super common edge case would be too much effort to sort out” personally. And that’s fine too, but the power descriptions in game need to be clear.

Aces and Eights is worded: “Destroys up to 2 random Charged or basic tiles, dealing an extra 1201 damage for each charged tile destroyed this way.” WF should stack on to that “extra” damage as worded.

4

I don’t think it has anything to do with Gladithors release. It’s probably an artifact from very early game design where there is a tile destruction engine (ie code) that gets called when tiles are removed in any way (match or powers). That engine determines the damage and AP gain for each tile and also resolves anything special about that tile (traps, special tile removal in cases like Lockjaw, extra damage like Juggys AOE match damage etc).

When Gambits power is fired it likely just called the tile destruction engine with 2 red tiles and attached a bonus damage to each tile (as per wording) and that gets resolved as tile damage. Tile damage does not trigger WF so that doesn’t happen. But powers that do mitigate tile damage (ie reduction like Juggy) are applied (or so I assume as I haven’t checked).

From a players perspective, the damage came from a power. But from the game’s perspective, it came from tile removal.

The change to the wording should be “Destroys up to 2 random Charged or basic tiles, dealing an extra 1201 tile damage for each charged tile destroyed this way.” Likely the person who writes the descriptions is NOT the person coding the power so there is ambiguity.

KGB

5

When she launched, it was doing extra damage on gladiathor’s green. That went away in R154 as part of a deliberate patch, the text of which I pasted above.

It’s possible the “problem” is in the code WF! used to add itself or not. Clearly the game knows when the conditionals are met when it applies bonus damage.

gambit:
destroy tile
If
Is charged=true
then
add N damage

(This is a made up logic statement to illustrate the example)

So Aces and Eights itself clearly knows when to add bonus damage. But whatever they did to Wakanda Forever doesn’t seem able to distinguish between bonus damage and destruction damage.

There’s nothing wrong with there being some problem under the hood that is too scopeful to fix, but it is a mega bummer to have power descriptions that are misleading in the game. Changing a text string should be trivial, depending on how much you care about localization.

6

I’m pretty sure it’s coded almost exactly like your sample. Games like this typically pass a set of rules into an ‘engine’ that parses and then resolves them. That way each power is fully self contained.

The question is the add N damage part. You read it as destroy the tile doing X tile damage (whatever the red tile damage is for the team) and then add +N damage as a separate damage. Which would trigger WF! since it’s a separate damage. What I believe is coded in Gambits power (that’s where it would be coded as part of the logic of that power) is that it gets the X value for the red tile then adds the +N damage if it’s charged so you have a single X+N value and that is passed as the tile damage value to the Damage engine. That won’t trigger WF! since WF! is clearly coded to ignore tile damage.

KGB

P.S. You’d think changing text is trivial. But as someone who writes S/W and has multi-language support in their S/W I can assure you that a simple change like this has to be translated into LOTS of languages and then has to be verified it all fits nicely on the displays (mobile/steam) in all languages. Getting exact wording like this correct in a lot of languages is very time consuming and costly.

7

I too am in industry, I am very familiar with how games are made and generally work. That’s why I made sure to say: if the problem is too hard to fix in code, it’s understandable, but the text in game should accurately describe what is happening. This isn’t a dynamic UI scenario like with Bamf!, this is a static text string.

at any rate, I don’t know how the game actually is coded, just how I would expect things to work based on the power wording. So I’m sorry for being contrary with you here, I’d just like things to work like they are described or for descriptions to describe how things work lol.

8

I think the code is actually trivial to fix. Inside that power they add up the damage (from 0-2 tiles destroyed plus the extra damage) to get a single number called X.

Then it’s calling a routine like Damage(X, TypeOfDamage) where TypeOfDamage is things like Tile, Power, AOE, Trap etc so that the Damage routine can correctly apply it to regular/airborne/invisible characters plus add in powers like WF!, damage reduction etc.

The only change needed would be to change the type from Tile to Power.

However it may be a ‘game convention’ by the devs that all damage coming from tiles must be marked as Tile damage (for things like damage reduction) in which case they aren’t going to make that fix. I suspect this is the case for this power and the others you mentioned above. It’s very consistent with that.

WF! is probably just coded as:
if (damageType != TILE) {
damage += WF!Damage

}

Wording wise, yeah, it would be nice if they added the word tile damage in the description of this and other similar powers. But given the multi languages I suspect its low on the list.

KGB

9

Right, they could just revert WF! To whatever it was doing prior to the change implemented in r154, but that (presumably) isn’t desirable. Which likely means fixing all these troublesome interactions would need to get fixed per-power, which is a lot more effort relative to editing WF!, and potentially introduces loads of opportunity for new issues.

10

No outsider can ever truly understand Wakanda!

11

“Wakanda survived for so long by fighting when only absolutely necessary” - Okoye

So it looks like Wakanda Forever! is on as needed basis, people! :wink:

12

I’m thinking the blanket rule may be to do with the order of operations on the damage vs the destruction. I tested 2* Magneto with Okoye, and his Blue (iron hammer) that just does destruction damage as expected doesn’t benefit from Wakanda Forever. However - his Red (magnetic flux), that does fixed damage AND tile destruction (and adds the destruction damage) does get the benefit of it.

Magnetic Flux: Turns a random basic red tile into a 1-turn countdown that, when activated, destroys a 5X5 block and deals 2762 damage to the current target

Dealt out 8,700 or so damage to an enemy in simulator on a magne2o/Okoye/Chavez team with 6 team up AP in the bank.

13

All you need to do is to team Okoye with characters that destroy tiles and also deal or doesn’t deal damage. Then compare their wordings. :smiley:

14

Hence the 2* Magneto experiment, which I just went back and repeated to make sure that wasn’t just Chavez/Okoye match damage stacking up. That power did 27k damage when I had 24 or so team up AP in the bank to a BSSM in eye for an eye, so it definitely destroys tiles and benefits from WF.

15

I’ve actually performed this experiment on many different characters to try and cross reference the difference. Up until Juggernaut, I thought I’d figured it out as being powers that specify a hard number in them get the bonus, and powers that do match damage or multiples of match damage do not. There is very little consistency in the wording on powers anyway, so it’s pretty hard to triangulate. Here are those findings, in no particular order (power descriptions pasted from character details threads where possible (unless they are old and deviate from in-game descriptions):

SWitch:
Hex Bolt - 8 greentile.png
AP
Wanda fires an unstable hex bolt at her target. Select one basic tile to destroy it and up to 2 random basic tiles around it, generating AP. -NO bonus damage applied

Domino:
Enter the Fray - 7 greentile.png
AP
Domino throws herself recklessly into battle, drawing enemy gunfire that will inevitably hit the wrong target and leave her unharmed. Destroys 15 random non-Black basic tiles. (Does not generate AP.) -NO bonus damage applied
Knock Them Down - 9

AP
When luck creates an opening, Domino uses her skills to reap the rewards. Destroys half of the Black tiles on the board, dealing 1474 damage for each tile destroyed. Does not generate AP. -DOES apply bonus damage

2* Magneto:
Iron Hammer
**Power Cost - 6 bluetile.png
**
Magneto forms a mass of shrapnel to hurl at his enemies. Changes a random basic bluetile.png
into a 1 turn that destroys the surrounding 8 tiles. Does not generate AP. -NO bonus damage
Magnetic Flux
**Power Cost - 8 redtile.png
**
Magneto creates an unstable magnetic field.Turns a random basic red tile into a 1-turn countdown that, when activated, destroys a 5X5 block and deals 2131 damage to the current target -DOES apply bonus damage, DOES accrue AP

5* Ghost Rider:
Hell Ride - 9 greentile.png
AP
Ghost Rider tears through the battlefield leaving trails of fire to scorch his enemies. Creates 3 Green Repeater tiles that destroy up to 3 surrounding Green, Red, or Black basic tiles every turn. Destroyed Tiles deal 3 times their damage -NO bonus damage

Thing:
Yancy Street Special - 12 greentile.png
AP
The Thing wallops his target so hard they go crashing through the battlefield. Deals 722 damage and destroys a random 3x3 block of tiles on the game board. Destroyed tiles do not deal damage or generate AP. -DOES apply bonus damage

Rogue:
Sugah, You’re Goin’ Down - 12 **redtile.png
AP:
Rogue flies headlong into battle with a punch that sends the enemy reeling! Deals 6172 damage and destroys a chosen block of 3x3 tiles, dealing damage and generating AP. __-DOES apply bonus damage__

Okoye:
Piercing Throw - 11

AP
Okoye hurls her spear at the enemy, striking them at their weak point. Deals 5841 damage and destroys a chosen row, dealing 1168 damage for each tile destroyed in the enemy’s strongest color. Destroyed tiles do not deal damage or generate AP. -DOES apply bonus damage

Vulture:
Hybrid Tech Slicer 10 **bluetile.png
**AP:

The vulture lets loose with a terrifying weapon of his own design, getting a better vantage point from the sky. Deals 6586 damage and destroys up to 4 random enemy Strike, Protect, or Attack tiles.

(PASSIVE) Whenever Vulture goes Airborne, drain 10 Blue AP for the same effect, also targeting Invisibility and Countdown tiles.-DOES apply bonus damage even when situationally destroying tiles

Winter Soldier:
Precision Shot - 8 purpletile.png
AP
The Winter Soldier fires an expert sniper shot to take out the enemy’s weapons, giving Bucky a chance to strike again. Select a basic tile. Winter Soldier destroys that tile, dealing 1441 damage and stealing 4 enemy AP of that color. -DOES apply bonus damage

Wolverine (X-Force)
X-Force - Cost: 8 **greentile.png
AP
Wolverine unleashes his berserker rage, cutting with his adamantium claws. Deals 685 damage and destroys 5 tiles in a 3x3 X-Shaped pattern. Does not generate AP. __-DOES apply bonus damage__
Surgical Strike - Cost: 11 Black AP
Wolverine attacks with ruthless precision, crippling his enemy’s ability to retaliate. Destroys every tile in the enemy team’s strongest color, dealing 55 damage per tile. Does not generate AP. -DOES apply bonus damage
Recovery - Cost: 9 Yellow AP
Wolverine’s healing factor repairs his wounds, and he ferociously lashes out if interrupted. Places a 3-turn Yellow Countdown tile that heals for 1187 health when activated. If the Countdown tile is matched, Wolverine destroys 6 random tiles, dealing 55 damage per tile. -DOES apply bonus damage

16

Wakanda Forever also boosts trap tiles like JJ’s, which is technically “off of a tile match”.

17



Every time I read the thread title.

18

RoadWarrior,

Your tests pretty much confirm what I wrote above that WF! is just coded as:
if (damageType != TILE) {
damage += WF!Damage

}

The real question you want to ask is what is the damage type for every power in MPQ (good luck getting that answer from the hundreds of powers other than experimentation). Obviously powers like 2* Mags Blue is typed as Match and his 2* Red is typed as Power.

My guess is Gladithor was originally coded as Power by some Jr/New guy who thought this tile destruction comes from a power so it’s power damage. Then later they went back and changed the damage type to Match. Likely for consistency sake with other similar powers (eg Mags Blue) but also possibly for balance reasons.

Reecoh, does her trap damage get applied separately (ie match then trap) or as a single value (likely need strike tiles to figure that answer). If it’s separate then it’s consistent that tile=Match and trap=power but if it’s a single value then it would mean the damage type changed during the damage evaluation due to the trap being there.

KGB

19

I was very surprised that all three of XFW’s powers benefit from wakanda forever!, since all 3 are tile destructors. I ran out of health packs in simulator testing these teams out, so I’ll try some other potentially weird ones later. I’m curious to verify:

Kitty Pryde’s purple
Wiccan’s Green, also his Demiurge line clears
5* Loki’s green repeater
5* Carol’s Photonic Rush
3* Punisher’s green
IM40’s blue
2*/3* Torch’s red
Ragnarok’s Green edge case
3* Bullseye’s green
GSBW’s red and green
The Hood’s yellow
3* Magneto’s red
3* Storm’s green
3* Cyclops’s Red
Vision’s red (base state)
She Hulk’s red
TA Hulk: Green
EB Venom: green
Carnage: Green

20

Your work on documenting this needs to be saved in the ‘Tips and Guides’ forum and then stickied for players.

So far everything seems consistent. If the damage isn’t from tile, it’s marked as Power and if it is from tile (even if it’s a bonus added to the tile value like Gambits Red does to charged tiles) it’s marked as Tile. For example, Domino’s Green and Red, you can see the Green damage comes from the sum of the individual tile values but the Red is a fixed damage (that I assume does not add the tile value to that fixed damage) per tile that is her power.

Maybe after you are finished you can lobby for the wording changes on the powers that are ambiguous like Gambits Red.

KGB