Who will be the new PvP duo once 4hor's nerfs hit?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’ve been pondering this for since the announcment, while I still think 4hor will be a strong character, until some other charge tile creators come down the pipeline I think she’s too slow now since she can’t 1-shot, so, what’s going to be the new way to go?

XForce/IF?–The obvious out of the gate will be Iron Fist IMO. Even with a nerf to his purple, it shoud be enough to accelerate Surgical strike.

XF/Xavier? I’m not sure Xavier plays well with X-Force. You may get the occasional match 5 off of an X-Force or Surigcal Strike to do an extra 4K but it won’t be consistent.

XF/Fury? Fury would still pretty much 1 shot guys with his blue, but you have to have them match it which can cost you time and health packs, plus Fury’s squishy

Xavier/Mystique?–The combo can still work once you get enough blue for Mystique to hopefully match 5 black and purple to get more blue to do it again, but it is inconsistent.

Iron Fist/Mystique–This probably allows the highest chance of the Winfinite combo and Xavier, but only works in 2 out of 35 PvP’s.

Patch/Hulk?–This is probably going to be the fastest PvP duo, but it will cost you more health packs then Sentry to make long push.

XF/LThor?–could the true asgardian could reclaim his title as Thor with Thoress down for the count?

Cyclops/X-Force?–I don’t see this really be the thing, because if you have a maxed 4hor, their reds do basically the same damage, with 4hors doing slightly less but she also has 9K more hitpoints.

No change at all?–This could be also likely. I think with her being taken down a peg you see a slightly higher variety of characters but I do beleive she will still remain dominant.

It comes down to 2 things at high PvP, speed and having enough of a fear factor to deter all by the highest of team comps. Someone push with Patch/Hulk would think twice before going against XForce/4hor, but now? As I said I still think she’s the go/to but she is definitely slower than before but is anyone going to be faster?

2

I will not be retiring my 4hor. She’s at 4/4/4, and really swift. Not so scary on defence, but a great sword to cut through PVP. I’ll have her 5/3/5 soon enough, and she’ll be stronger in red than now, and the same in blue. So, at least for me, you’ll see her around. Though The Hood still is a terrifying partner for XF if you don’t focus on black and green.

3

The question is, will Xforce still be #1 after his upcoming overnerf?

4

It’s noticeable that you have Hulk bombing, 2 completely unrealistic pairings with Mystique (who’s use in PvP extends to when she’s featured) then every other pairing has XForce… I suppose threads like this are a good way to work on getting him nerfed too.

In answer to your last question yes… a LOT of pairings will be faster than XF/4Thor post nerf. Occasionally those 5 charged tiles will be matchable (and not yellow) and you’ll get some acceleration but it’s a very low percentage play compared to the 12 tiles it used to be (and her damage per AP is going to be absolutely nothing special). The main question is will people favour her 16k health over faster damaging pairings (XF/Fury is a good example, although there are several more including a few 3*s).

Oh… and XF/Xavier being a good pairing is a very strange thought. Minimal match 5 potential and board shakeup to have a go at destroying any special tiles Xavier might make. I can’t think of many top tier heroes that go less well with Xavier. A moot point though, XF will be “the man” so it’s about who plays well with him (and that’s not really Xavier).

5

The dominant team will still be SexGoddess I’m sure. She’s slower, but not completely useless like Sentry is. On the other side of it, I think this opens up the doors for the 3* players and the ones that have X-Force, but not Goddess, to be able to compete more. I’m not saying that I agree that 3* players should be able to compete with 4* players, but the changes to Goddess are good for them.

6

Don’t laugh: GSBW / Professor X with 5 blue and a team strong color of Purple or Green for offense (nobody is scared of them for defense)

Once boosted with 6 purple and making 2 purple matches, on turn 3 you could be looking at +8000 damage from Xavier’s Master Plan for making 2 match-5 with Deceptive Tactics and either a fully loaded Sniper Rifle (if green is strongest) or another +8 AP in Purple to almost go again with another Deceptive Tactics leading to another +8000 from Xavier and 3912 team from Sniper Rifle.

To summarize: by turn 3 you could be doing +12,000 to one enemy character and 3,912 to the other 2 team members. It doesn’t get you a total team kill by turn 3, but it looks very fast and deadly.

The problem with this plan (other than defense) is that Xavier must be purposefully underlevelled so Black Widow has strongest team color with Purple or a 3rd character with green (like X-Force). I’m not sure what damage Master Plan would do at that lower level.

7

Using GSBW repeatedly in these events, I definitely underestimated the purple, because not only are you creating 2-3 crits, but the crits themselves have a non-zero chance to create other crits. That initial purple blast combined with Master Plan has some potential to one shot everyone.

Master Plan will do ~3875 per if you max him to the point where GSBW still is strongest color (level 221). The other kicker is you’d need an underleveled featured. So I think it will help a little bit in PvP, but I think Sim climbing is a better fit. In Sim, you can run max Starlord-Professor-GSBW because StarLord’s strongest is purple, which saves you the underleveled problem. You also have Star-Lord’s yellow which speeds the combo up a little bit.

I’m guessing XForce-Fist becomes the thing, only because unless you already have XForce-Thor, it will in theory be easier for a player to get XForce-Fist first.

8

Don’t give them any ideas.

They don’t know things unless we tell them. icon_e_wink.gif

easy…marc

9

I don’t know what the new “best” PvP team will be, but until people figure it out, I expect to see nothing but xforce/hood or xforce/loki pairings at the top end of PvP events…it’s what i’ll be using.

10

Personally I will be dusting of my maxed 5/5/3 Fury after the nerf. Before I had 4Thor there was nothing more satisfying than boosting blue and watching the enemy destroy themselves with traps and his yellow is incredibly satisfying when you have all the required colors. Not as fast or efficient as xforce/4Thor but a decent substitue.

11

I forgot about this one, yeah that could be a new combo, lots of damage, very fast, but squishy as you said. It meets 1 of the 2 “best PvP duo” requirements but I think really falls short on the hitpoints.

As we have seen from past best duo’s, you need a certain amount of speed(damage/skills) and a certain amount of endurance (hitpoints/endurance) to be a great PvP duo. Sentry/Hood was light on endurance but had extra speed to offset this issue. XF/Thor while not as fast had more endurance to make up for a slower speed. Is Xavier/BWGS as fast as Hood/Sentry, because they would have less hitpoints then that duo.

I mean if I saw Xavier/BWGS I would hit that up everytime because they would be an easy win, barring an insane match 5 cascade, that’s what made Hood/Sentry so dangerous, they could easily beat you if they got a good cascade or you had poor matches BWGS/Xavier wouldn’t be scary at all unless her green goes off, and I’m pretty sure she’ll be dead before she gets 19AP.

Side Note and reality check
As for X-Force, we all know he’s going to get nerfed, the question is, by how much? I figure his green will get a damage reduction and possible AP increase, possibly a destroyed tile reduction, who knows, I don’t think this gets hit terribly. Surgical Strike is the one that will probably get the biggest changed, I’m just hoping it’s still usable when done. ( I have proposed that the AP stolen comes from the player not from the board) That way you can still do 5K worth of damage, you just won’t be stealing 10 AP from the board, you might steal 1-6 AP from the player, if that’s all that happened to Surgical Strike I would be the happiest player ever. It still would be the best black skill in the game, it would just be 10/10 instead of 15/10. As for Recovery, this probably doesn’t get changed at all

12

This. I have X-force only, and a GT/XF team will remain a scary D - huge amount of health and damage still possible. It’s just not as fast, so harder to shield-hop with it. I see the comment with Fury and have wondered if he is almost equal to GT, but I’m not sure he is.

IF/XF will be a thing - but I think XF gets his nerf before to many have a high level IF (are people still buying his covers post-announcement?). Then it might -still- be a thing, unless IF gets a purple nerf.

Hopefully they simply remove black gaining AP from XF, that is the broken part. Removing it from the opponent isn’t a bad mechanic, as long as you aren’t gaining it as well. I don’t think green is terribly “broken”, goddess has 10AP for 4025+ damage, X-force (a more natural “quick” damage dealer?) has 3441 damage for 8AP. If green is left alone, we might still see XF/GT as the top team six months from now…just being a team that 3*'s can more easily beat [and I also don’t think that 3*'s should consistently beat 4*'s].

13

I see Green getting a +1 AP nerf possibly 2, that’s it, I think the rest of the ability stays as is

Iron Fist will go from this

Level 5: Converts 9 tiles.
Probability of a cascade occurring: 0.780725
Average tiles destroyed: 8.72598
Average Tiles destroyed by color:
YELLOW: 0.53998 tiles destroyed
TEAMUP: 0.720015 tiles destroyed
BLACK: 5.311655 tiles destroyed
PURPLE: 0.537825 tiles destroyed
GREEN: 0.539935 tiles destroyed
BLUE: 0.53791 tiles destroyed
RED: 0.53866 tiles destroyed

to this

Level 5: Converts 7 tiles.
Probability of a cascade occurring: 0.636285
Average tiles destroyed: 5.747725
Average Tiles destroyed by color:
YELLOW: 0.354215 tiles destroyed
TEAMUP: 0.452115 tiles destroyed
BLACK: 3.519175 tiles destroyed
PURPLE: 0.355335 tiles destroyed
GREEN: 0.35486 tiles destroyed
BLUE: 0.357065 tiles destroyed
RED: 0.35496 tiles destroyed

So it’s close to a 2 black tile nerf, so for 5 purple I have a 64% chance of get 3.5 black? That’s not bad, before you were literally getting 5-6 black for 5 purple, that’s a wee bit overpowered IMO

14

A part from the typical teams of XForce + Hood (or Loki), wich is going to dominate again, I think a lot of people is going to start using Luke Cage + IF, specially the ones that don’t have a maxed XForce. Cyclops and IF could be a good team depending on the featured hero (Cyclops can use IF black to one hit a lot of players for 8100 hps), and then IF + BP could be scary too.

I still have to play XForce + Fury, I don’t know if Fury plays well with both XForce attacks changing the board that much.

After 4hor nerf I think IF is the best viable option until XForce gets nerfed.

PS: To people saying they are still going to play XForce+4hor, why not change 4hor for Devil Dino? More hitpoints and faster damage. I don’t have a maxed Devil dino but If I had one…

15

Meh, it’ll still be xForce/4Thor. She just has the HP and power to be a deterrent in PvP. As much as I like Hood or Loki, they’re still kind of slow on offense when the enemy has that much HP.

16

GSBW/PX might be the new Magstique. But, it’s hard to imagine them doing very well in PVP for the same reason that Stormneto wasn’t good in PVP in 2* land… it’s a 100% offense team that will be very attractive to attacking teams.

17

I posted a speculative thread/poll about this here: https://forums.505go.com/discussion/25328

Lots of people are predicting X-Fist to be the next meta. I’m not so sure, especially since XF/GT will essentially play the same way against that particular matchup.

18

It’s pretty clear that X-Fist > XHood in PvP since Fist is a direct counter to Hood as well as being a lot faster than Hood in the general case (except surgical on yellow I suppose). I think it’ll be primarily xor unless the featured conflicts with 4or directly (Cap / CMags), in which case we’ll see XFist. So… metagame progress! Woop.

19

The gsbw/prof x combo works better than ppl seem to realize, especially if you pair with mq.

I would not run out and buy prof x blue covers (although I really want to). Looking at gsbw, as nonce pointed out often, her strongest color should be green, not purple. This would hinder the combo a little. Also, as we saw mmn, selected tiles seem to be on the way out (phantron has long pointed this out as easily exploitable). So there will probably be a change to her purple at some point.

Before everyone screams bait and switch, gsbw purple is one of the oldest abilities in the game. However, empirically, mpq seems to be data driven. This means as they gather data they make adjustments. So even if gsbw is not changed now, I would not be shocked if it were changed as more people use the combo and mpq has more data.

The best pvp team will be sex goddess, although the pvp feature character may have slightly more influence on team comps than in the past.

20

But again, to all those that think 4hor is going to remain as XForce partner. Why not use Devil Dino instead? It has allmost 20.000 hps and hits for 2500 for 7 red or green AND IA can’t play him badly (at least if the player doesn’t have another purple ability). I get that 4hor is a little bit stronger on offense played by a human (with 4hor 19AP gets you 7000 and a stun, for 21AP you get 7500 but you don’t have to wait), but in defense DevilD is way more porwerful now that you don’t have 4hor to deal with him.

You are going to need A LOT of time to deal with DevilD now, and it is going to be very difficult not being hit by one or two bites from him…

PS: Maybe devs should nerf devilD too…