We are so close to a 'balanced' endgame!

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

We’ve had a recent influx of VERY powerful 3* options added to the game…

  • Rocket & Groot
  • Cyclops
  • Luke Cage
  • Blade
  • Iron Fist

We have several great revamped and long term 3* characters as well…

  • Magneto
  • Thor
  • Doctor Doom
  • Hood
  • Black Panther
  • Captain America
  • Deadpool

Not to forget characters that shine when used in combination with others…

  • Patch and Loki/Daredevil
  • Daken, Blade and Falcon

I’m sure I’ve missed a few (especially 3* combos with AP generators) but the point is we have a fairly healthy and diverse 3* character list going on right now. Even adding in the 4* pool of IW, Fury, Star-Lord, Devil Dinosaur and Elektra doesn’t throw this off.

With all that setup aside…imagine MPQ with the following changes.

1) Thor: Goddess of Thunder

  • Health reduced to 12,000
  • Power Surge now only applies charge tiles to Red and Yellow tiles.

This allows her to still one shot anything with her red/blue combo but then lack the ability to sustain the combo after the initial stun. Making charge tiles more of a risk/reward prospect as was originally intended by design. The health reduction makes her a bit more reasonable to deal with when it comes to 3* character damage output.

2) X-Force

  • Green Power deals 500 less base damage
  • Surgical Strike: Steals and adds AP based on how many covers the skill has. At 5 black surgical strike can drain 5AP and gain 5AP. All other damage and tile destruction mechanics remain unchanged.

X-Force’s green is mostly okay. It’s supposed to be a powerhouse as he’s a 4* character but the damage he does with the potential to cascade really makes certain low hp characters like Hood and Loki trivial. Lowering the damage slightly makes put this skill more in line with other powers around the same cost without making it so weak that it’s useless. Whether the damage reduction should be 500, 750, 1000 or more is certainly up for debate. But an adjustment feels appropriate given the skill cost to benefit ratio.

The suggested black skill change should be obvious. Draining and gaining less AP helps keeps this skill from chaining other skills as reliably. So rather than chaining SS into 2x Green vs Hulk you’ll only be able to chain it into 1. This is still a potent 8k+ damage combo with mass cascades but that’s okay because other characters have these kinds of combos (Mystique, GSBW, and Doom for example). XF’s is made more powerful as a 4* by nature of generating AP from cascades.

3) ALL bonus AP generating boosts are removed from the game.
We’ve got plenty of characters who can help with that now (Hood, Loki, X-Force, Cyclops, Doom, GSBW, Mystique, etc). No more absurd competitive advantages that automatically make any offensive match trivial (barring AI cascades).

4) Hood - Dormammu’s Aid rework
As someone who now has 3 hoods this one is particularly hard to recommend. Hood’s blue is already somewhat problematic in the current game. Remove the ability to use boosted AP bonuses to take him down quick and the problem just intensifies. I realize that Hood negates enemy Hood but this leads to a character tax when selecting a team of only 3 people. The game would inevitably devolve to ______/ ______ /Hood. Lets be honest…that’s how most of the game operates now until you bring boosts into the mix.

How do we change his blue?
Any number of ways. I think passive non-interactive AP steal is simply harmful for the game. Rather than further nerf the passive ability I’d much rather see it become an active skill. Something more along the lines of OBW, Mystique or even Loki’s.

What do these changes even achieve?
Don’t you realize there will ALWAYS be ‘best’ teams for optimal play?
I realize that the nature of a competitive game means that we’ll always have PvP’s dominated by the same team. These suggestions instead offer a more varied selection of viable alternative characters to the top tier. They might deal a little less damage and kill a little slower..but it’s not the enormous gap that we have now.

From here D3 would simply need to continue revisiting older characters and improving them over time as you have been in order to further balance out the playing field.

Do you think some of these changes go to far? Not far enough?
Are these characters fine as is?
Most importantly, do you think these changes would make for a more fun game?

2

Leave SheThor alone or face my trolls!

3

I just gotta say, after this last event, I was seriously tempted to make my 3rd Hood. But the reason to have a 2nd and 3rd is his health. I think that keeps him balanced.

4

No…just…no.

Please just go away and play PVE. You can have your roster diversity there.

5

People on this forum do not want a balanced metagame, they just want to stomp with their xors. I attribute this to Demiurge traumatizing everyone with the Ragnarok Spidey nerfs: everyone has PTSD. Say the word ‘nerf 4or’, and you’ll have a crowd of pitchforks waiting to lynch you.

Honestly the only way we’re going to see any progress is to start buffing the other 4s to at least X-Force tier. If you touch a hair on their baby 4or, even something relatively innocuous as your changes (well, the surge change, probably not the HP change), then everyone just goes up in arms. It’s frankly disgusting, but that’s the world we live in right now, so yeah. I would try to aim the changes more at promoting a healthy 4 metagame instead, which can be accomplished without any nerfs and inciting the mobs.

6

For X Force, if you’re going to lower the green’s damage, just make the tiles destroyed don’t generate damage similar to Power of Attorney. The black change suggested sounds workable, and while we’re on the subject we probably should change all true healing abilities because the game’s way too dependent on it. I think only R&G’s true healing sort of make sense because at least you’ve to some risk to use it (dip below 25%). For X Force, Daken, and Patch, there’s no drawback to their true healing and if they’re remotely playable, then true healing is still going to dominate in a game that is definitely constrained by health packs.

For Dormammu’s Aid, it needs to be weaker but he needs to have way more HP to make up for being in such a low HP tier status. One idea I had was make Dormammu’s Aid reduce damage taken from activated abilities by 10/20/30/40/50% on top of whatever a balanced version of it might be. That’d make him quite resilient which is needed if Dormammu’s Aid is no longer game breaking, but he’d still die very quickly to attack tiles/strike tiles and that’s probably okay because the strongest attack/strike tile characters currently aren’t top tier minus possibly Black Panther (who seems slightly overpowered but probably within acceptable limits). Well, Iron Fist is going to be a top tier character as is, but he’s also not balanced either so I don’t particularly care what further imbalance happens with a character that is obviously not balanced.

7

Balance is overrated - let’s turn everyone into Vergil in UMvC3.

8

If all 4*s are as powerful as X Force most games would end in 2 AP consuming moves since X Force effectively decides most games with 2 moves (Surgical Strike + X Force + whatever you cascade into) and if we made other characters that strong then it’d just be any 2 moves end the game. That might be balanced but it’d just be two sides playing with an atomic bomb kind of balanced. His offense is obviously way too much even for himself, as he can trivially kill himself with ease and even if it’s balanced, the ‘everyone dies in 2 moves’ game is just not very fun.

I do think the game might benefit from a ‘back in the days…’ mode where you do get to just stomp some hapless victim forever. Bring back the 2AP Thunderclap there. Maybe make it a weekly version of DDQ or something. It’s okay to totally stomp everyone for fun once in a while.

9

The 3* metagame + X-Force devolves into the situation that you described. The 4* metagame, which involves 10k HP+ characters, does not. Remember that X-Force / Fury are the equivalent of a 4* 6800 HP character. While it’s true that X-Force ends the game vs a 3* team composition with say 2 guys at 6800 and 1 guy at 10k, if you’re facing a 4* team composition of LadyThor / X-Force / and some other tank that has 10k+ HP, X-Force obviously gets a lot worse. X-Force takes either one surgical or two X-Forces to kill a 4* 6800 guy, and that seems relatively balanced. Of course I would prefer a metagame where the 3* featured actually mattered and an average 4* was between X-Force / Fury, but given all the crap I’ve seen from saying the word ‘nerf’, I’ve bitterly given up on a route that involves nerfing xor for the moment.

10

Ah sorry for the rantiness. For some feedback regarding your ideas:

The problem with the health reduction is that 4* Thor is supposed to be in the same health class as 3* Thor is for 3s, and 12k HP isn’t quite that. The only reason why this is currently imbalanced is because of the metagame: all of the other 4s are basically in the 6800HP class for 3*s, so it seems like 4or has massively more HP when really it’s just the other characters being squishy. Really good idea with the blue change, seems like it would definitely help out.

Again, X-Force feels overpowered because we’re in the context of a 3* meta. In the 4* metagame, 4* Loki and Hood have 8-9k HP, in which case X-Force feels appropriately costed. I feel like black is a touch OP as well, but your change isn’t really intuitive from a player’s perspective: if I destroyed 12 red tiles, why am I only gaining 5 AP? Something else such as Phaser’s suggestion of draining the opponents AP, or boosting base damage but removing AP drain altogether would be a more elegant solution imo.

The thing is that players are supposed to win a majority of the time on offense. If you remove this and all of the sudden games become 60-40, people are going to be mad because they aren’t winning as often or getting screwed over by RNG. I feel like this is a necessary evil: defense already sort of matters, and removing the offensive advantage is really just asking for trouble.

Agreed on blue needing some sort of nerf as he dominates the 3* meta.

11

Due to the dilution of 3* pool it is very rare to find someone with 10K HP as a featured character because you don’t have the iso to level all the 3s (DDQ might have helped some, but I sure don’t see even a significant portion of 3s leveled to 166 anytime soon especially if 4*s are going to be released more frequently). Anyone under the 6800 HP class will not have 10K HP to begin with even when featured. I’ve said this before but if I can exchange my featured character for a 10K character with no abilities and no match damage I’d probably take that on at least half of all PvP events, even on ones where I have the featured character at level 100 or so, since having 10K HP allows you to have a shot at defending against X Force + Thor which usually way more important than hoping that featured character can contribute anything relative to the power of X Force, Thor, or a top support character like Loki or The Hood.

If it was common to fight 3 guys with at least 10K HP, Thor wouldn’t be all that good either since if X Force can’t quickly drop someone then all Thor can do is watch too until X Force finishes the work. Also the current format also precludes anyone under the 6800 HP class from being viable since X Force can drop those guys in one move and turn it into a 2on2. I suspect the new HP class at 7650 is probably there to address that, but that still doesn’t address the existing characters who are not fortunate to be part of this HP inflation. With the game’s over emphasis on offense, I don’t think even HP inflation would do anything meaningful. For example maybe Iron Fist is meant to be the 7650 HP support guy, except his support is so overwhelming, it’d just turn into a Iron Fist + X Force bulldozer so again no defense is possible against that kind of firepower. By defense, I’m not expecting the defense team to win on a regular basis, but defense should be more than ‘use the guys with the longest animation time to stall time’, which is currently what it is.

12

The whole PvP ranking is a mess precisely because people win an overwhelmingly of the time on offense. If I beat you 100% of the time and you beat me 100% of the time, which of us is the better player? You might be inclined to say we’re about equal, except in MPQ it can easily be the case that either you’re a lot better than me (as a function of skill/team strength) or the other way around and we can still easily beat each other near 100% of the time when boosts are thrown in. So then it becomes about shield hopping strategy or the random ‘you were attacked by soandso and OTHERS’ massive fall because that’s what happens when there’s no way to establish any kind of ‘stronger’ player. As far as MPQ is concerned, just about everyone is equally strong because everyone beats everyone else near 100% of the time, and the best player is either someone who spends the most (in case of shields) or someone who is luckiest (for those who do not shield).

Now, if boosts are removed I expect character regen rate or health pack system to be massively changed. I’d suggest have all PvP begin the fight with a burst of healing for 50% of your character’s max health. I tested this before and found that retreating is subtracted from your real health, so you still take the full penalty for retreating including being downed. Without this mechanism, if you did start out say 60-40, it’d quickly turn into like 10-90 as your team accumulates damage. For example, imagine your team has 60% chance to win at full health and we’ll say that a team has 40% chance of winning inflicts 40% of your team’s health before going down. So you start the next fight with 60% of your total health. Your chances of winning this fight is extremely grim, and it’d cost you 3 health packs to get back to 100%, which is obviously not sustainable.

13

I think that a change like this would be a lot harder to get right than something like character balance changes, since there is a lot more risk and variables involved in making this change. Focusing on getting the character balance metagame to a point where its not just endless xors destroying everyone is a much more obtainable and less riskier proposition than doing something that fundamentally changes the way PvP works. It’s a good stretch goal down the road, but we might as well go for the easier goal instead while that’s available to us.

14

It’s a complicated issue but it has to be addressed at some point. How do you rank players when everyone beats everyone else 99% of the time? Even if the most powerful character you can use is The Punisher (decent but uncontroversial character), starting with just 3g+3 black is still a big advantage since in this hypothetical world, getting a Judgment in before your opponent can is going have a very significant impact in the game (by assuming The Punisher is the strongest character I’m assuming there are no better moves than Judgment in the game).

15

Strongly disagree with the suggestion to remove AP bonus boosts. Are you out of your mind? They (and Hood) are the ONLY hope that a transitioning character (even on the latter part of the transition) have to defeat the 270+270+249 X-Thorce+Buffed featured that start appearing as an impenetrable wall as early as 500 points depending on your slice and MMR. Not even with your suggested nerfs to those characters players with mere 3s would be able to do much or not waste 3 health packs per game without boosts and/or Hood. That change would basically assure that top players are eternally uncontested (and they don’t really need boosts to win, so they wouldn’t mind the change) since no one else could defeat their teams and aspire to the top progression reward which is the most reliable way of transitioning into 4s to eventually be able not to rely on boosts.

16

I love this solution. Simple and has precedence.

You’re probably right. I’m clearly not opposed to nerfs but that’s not true for everyone. Especially in a game where you can spend money to improve specific characters you want to work on.

This is one of those times that I’d ignore the intended progression. If we want 3* to have a reasonable chance at defeating 4* then we NEED to address their hp scaling. Imagine using Psylocke to take down Thor as she is now. You’d have to use about 90AP worth of skills, lol. Even a powerhouse 3* like Thor will probably have to use yellow+green combo at least twice to knock her out. I think it’s just healthier for the game as a whole to scale this stuff back.

For what it’s worth…I feel the same way about the ** damage vs *** health pool. Poor ** Captain America gets such a sore arm trying to take down Lazy Thor with all those shield throws.

I agree that X-Force begins to ‘feel’ more balanced when up against enemy TGT/XF/Fury teams. But he’s still an AP generator for other devastating skills. He doesn’t keep up with Demolition or Smite for damage but he’s doing so much more than just plain damage as well. Namely all the benefits that come with cascades be it AP gain, enemy specialty tile removal, or simply giving you a shot at a better move than what was available before you used the skill.

I see your point but I think there’s got to be a better middle ground.

Things are already extremely silly now with people being able to use XF green after 1 turn and then only needing 2-4 tile matches to bring TGT online. Iron Fist is going to enable players a fairly reasonable shot at turn 1 surgical strikes to start any given match as well.

Maybe capping the ap boost gain at 3 is the answer?
Meaning the +1 all and +1 to green/black no longer stack. The game would display this by removing the option to select them together as boosts. Tactically speaking you’d use the +1 all when you want the added advantage of other TU’s in battle.

Admittedly this is a complex issue and I’m not 100% firm on my stance on a solution. I more just recognize that boosts are problematic in that they make PvP semi-trivial and that they are a crutch for many level 395 nodes found in PvE.

But that was plan exactly!

Seriously though you could be right. That’s the whole problem with laying out plans on paper so to speak. Without the means to test these things my suggestions could just as easily make things much worse where the intention is to create a better balance.

17

The 3* vs 4* balance is really weird. For one, you can see that characters in the same HP class have the same HP per level regardless of their rarity. That is, in the Thor/Thor/Thor PvE only fight you can see they all have pretty much the same HP, since all 3 Thors are in the same HP class and in PvE they also have the same levels. So this means a character at level 270 automatically has 63% more HP than a character at level 166 for the same HP class for just having that many more levels.

Now is the point that 4* are supposed to be much better? But outside of X Force, none of them are better than 3* by the same %. For example Thor’s Smite/Power Surge combo uses 19 AP and averages out to a similar damage/AP ratio as Fireball, never mind that it is considerably easier to get a Fireball going than enough AP to a Smite/Power Surge combo. Certainly Smite by itself is far inferior to many 3* top tier skills in terms of damage/AP. Star-Lord’s moves might have superior damage/AP, but they’re obviously very limited due to the dependence on CD and a high chance of getting 0 damage/AP. If X Force is supposed to be an outlier, there isn’t even another 4* that clearly outperforms the top 3* in terms of damage/AP (and note that Smite/Power Surge has a significant risk if the enemy has 3 guys that has 10K HP and you don’t have X Force to easily remove one of them). The fact that featured characters are perpetually 3* seems to suggest that 4s aren’t meant to be better overall, because if the goal is to get everyone to buy 4, why on earth are you always forcing people to use 3s? If every 4 is indeed as powerful as X Force, you can still only use 2 of those 4s, so why would anyone have motivation to more than 2 4s, but if there’s no reason to have more than 2 4s for PvP why are you even making them P2W powerful and then deny people a chance to buy a third 4?

From what I can tell, minus the obvious outlier of X Force, 4s seem to be designed to be sturdier (62% more HPs) but have slower moves that aren’t necessarily even better than the top tier 3 moves, but that’s okay because if you got 62% more HP you have more time to get your combo going. Nick Fury, for example, is quite well balanced relative to a 3*. Sure he has great health and all his moves hit hard, but they’re also all 4 match moves and they’re not really immediate, so even though he’s expected to beat most 3* 1 on 1 you at least have a lot of time to work out a plan before he gets going. Star-Lord might be considered balance too, as his offense clearly beats just about any 3* except that his offense has a chance of end up hitting for 0, and certainly with the proper defensive moves you can reduce Star-Lord’s damage to 0 a lot of the time. But again, he does have more HP than a comparable 3*, so he might stick around long enough to get multiple shots for his rather powerful moves and as long as one of them slips through he’ll still come out ahead versus a 3*. Even Thor is the same, as she needs a staggering 4+3 match move to down any one person and without X Force trivially removing the first person, all you’re done is take out 1 guy with 2 moves and potentially leave a lot of dangerous tiles on board. Sure, you could collect 3 red tiles and get another Smite, but it’s also quite possible the enemy drops a monster cascade you and takes most of your charged tiles. In practice, though, this doesn’t really work because taking longer to get going means you’re taking significant damage because it gives opponent a chance to do something, and as long as this game is constrained by health packs it just doesn’t work. Nick Fury generally takes at least half of his health in damage before he can get going to take out someone, and since you’re not going into the next fight with Nick Fury at 5000 HP that’s just not very good for sustained playing.

18

Can we please add a “nerf XForce” forum so we can consolidate all 6 dozen of those threads into one place?

19

Xforce and 4or. No bc that would put them on the tier of 3s missing the point of them being 4s.

Removing boosts should be done, but some players lack the skill to son harder matches without them.

There is no need to change hood. People confuse having a great unique skill with being op. His low health is the balance for his ability. Hood is only op when fed by goons.

Ppl need to realize the 3* just got balanced. This was the result of balancing op characters and adding new characters. 4* should be better than 3* the same way 3* are better than 2*. The 4* tier is still new. It will get more balanced as more 4* characters are added to the pool.

Ppl also confuse how good characters are when players use them with being just as good with ai. For example 4or seems great when players control her, but she’s a bit ofa pushover when the ai is in charge.

Essentially, ppl complaining about 4* being too powerful the same way 2* rosters used to complain about 3* characters.

20

I really don’t get the calls for nerfs. Sentry was broken and was rightly nerfed, but xf and thorina and hood?

Can you beat 2s with 1s? Um, maybe, depending on your 2s. Can you beat 3s with 2s? Yes, with a non-trivial chance of losing. Can you beat 4s with 3*s? Yes, with some chance of losing. What’s wrong with that?

I like that the game ramps up in difficulty without becoming impossible. And when the buffed featured 3* is reasonably good, even the much maligned she-hulk, it even balances the odds by quite a bit.

Can you beat hood? Yes, there are lots of ways that do not include the words “hood” or “xforce”. Daken, Blade, Loki, Deadpool, and likely the new Iron Fist are all very effective, or no one would be able to beat the pve nodes with overscaled Hood in. He’s good. So are a whole lot of other characters.

And no it has nothing to do with boosts. I never boost in sim, pve, and not while climbing in pvp until I reach shield-hopping level, and half the time even then I only use iso boosts to speed things up a little.

A balanced game should include a chance of being defeated, especially against a superior enemy, which 4*s are supposed to be.