Wouldn't player combos be fun and foster roster diversity?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I’m sure someone has thought of his before, and I don’t want to steal their thunder, so feel free to claim this idea as yours.

Why not have combo abilities based on which players are on the team? For example, Lt and im40 triples the strength of im40’s unibeam. Rags and Lt, a call of the storm that also destroys a number of tiles. M Hawkeye and mbw, an attack that stuns and makes opponent lose ap. Im35, cap, and falcon negate an opponent ability if have enough ap and that amount of ap gets consumed.

The way it would work is you would need a certain amount of ap in one color for each character in a combo. Say 12 red ap for im35 and 11 purple ap for classic Hawkeye.

  1. This would make using diverse rosters more rewarding and interesting.
  2. Often heroes have to team up to beat the harder villains, who would have their own combos.
  3. Often the weakest (see bagman) are the ones that some how help the group in the end.
  4. You could also base combos off idea of having all 2* or 1* teams, or combos geared for teams with one 1*, one 2*, and one 3 star.
  5. You would have one tab for each character (like now), and a 4th tab to choose combos. I just hope they don’t make get covers to unlock combo abilities, as that would pretty much defeat the rest of the idea.

I’m sure people can think of better combos or ways to make this work than me.

P.s. this is not a healing, scaling, cheating, MMR, tanking, etc. discussion thread.

P.s.s. as always memes are encouraged.

Edit: added “don’t”

2

Step 1 - Add Colossus to the game.
Step 2 - FASTBALL SPECIAL!!!

3

I think its interesting ina way, because nick fury’s yellow functions kinda like a combo and I think combination moves bases on characters as well as colors could work if done with a very very keen eye towards balance (too often in games combs are either grossly over or underpowered).

So to quickly sketch out how combos could work:

Part one: specific teams give somewhat trivial bonuses.

A team of xforce, psylocke, storm count as a “xmen” boost. The “type” of boost will depend on whomever you make your center cover. So , xforce being centered, let’s say the boost is an extra 5-10% to strike tiles. If in a im, cap, falcon team called"team America" maybe im being first increases red active ability damage by 15% while, in that same team, putting falcon first might add 5% to all att/def/strike tiles, and cap could add 10% to team hp. Im could also be part of a avenger team boost (any 3 avengers). The type of boost is always the same with a character, so IM still.does a boost to red actives in an avenger team, but the % boost changes depending on the team. Maybe “avenger teams” tend to five a nous to characters with Ap damage boosters. So instead of his normal 15% boost, he does a 20% boost on this team, while if the team comprised I’m, thor, cap…cap would still only (if centered) give a 10% team hp boost. Each character would have at least one group they fit with when launched, .and as new characters roll out, they coild update with more team combinations.

Part 2: move combos.

These are seperate from team compositions. It might even be 2 character that don’t normally have a combo together…meaning you aren’t getting forces to combo characters together JUST because of thier .combo. as an example, maybe cap and I’M have a red/yellow combo move (each team of two have 1 combo, and it will match one .of each characters color) where with 12 red (normally 13) and 10 yellow (normally an insane amount for cap) they would be able to.use a totally different “combo” move that takes the spirtof.both moves and does something new. In this situation 12 red and 10 yellow would allow a move called tri-beam.
"Captain .America uses his invincible.shield to refract and reflect tony’s uni beam into 3 seperate beams of destructive power before hurling his burning hot.shield at his enemies. Do 70% of unibeam’s damage to the enemy team, followed by cap throwing one yellow def tile that inflicts 1k damage and defends for (90% of one yellow def tile).

Another example: loki+Thor (no team composition bonus). Move: Brotherly mistrust. Cost: 8 redw 5 purple (note: unlike the last one where .cost decreased, some timebs cost stay thsame)e"Sometimes the bonds of brotherhood go beyond contempt. Thor wield’s his mighy hammer with the add of his brother’s confusion finds his mark. deal 120% Thor’s red and create 3 yellow tiles. after creation, shift all yellow tiles to the bottom 2 lines of the board.

3rd and final.example: hulk+shehulk. name: world smash. cost 20 red, 1 green (this time costs of one color greatly increase, but cost of the other are.infinitesimal).
"Combining thier point strength, the hulks unleash a raw and brutal combination on.thier foe. hulk 's red damages the entire enemy team and removes 50% of the Ap from each enemy color below 18 Ap.

so 2 seperately combo ideas both being.used. they could even find ways using this to make normally awful character viable. maybe bullseye + cap make triple damage purple def tiles passively or spidey + storm is a “whirlweb” move that allows you to inflict tick damage on ppl stunned by the move. or ht+iw creating a flame barrier that drops flaming versions of iw’s bubbles such that when the opponent matches a bible they receive damage. Etc. the top dogs likely stay tops, but it gives diversity to roster and more freedom. of course, def is a bug issue with why diversity isn’around much, but that is a seperately issue.

4

In short,combos would be a great way to buff some of these less used characters by instead of p buffing them generically they all of a sudden become “combo” characters that happen to allow really devestating combos. Might push team compositions to be “do I use a 2 main 1 combo team, forgo.combos for a 3 main team, or.do I go.for a weak but oddly effective combo team.”

5

I wouldn’t mind an Ultimate Alliance boost abilities. I.E.

Any Iron Man - Any Thor - Hulk = Heavy Hitters - Start match with +2 Red AP
Any Widow - Any Storm - She-Hulk = Girl Power - 10% more Match damage
Any Three Avengers - Avengers Assemble = Starts game with one protect and one strike tile that is equal to the average level of the team divided by 2.
Any Three Dark Avengers - Dark Avengers Assemble = Starts game with a 3 turn countdown tile that steals 1AP from all pools every three turns.

6

The problem is that first, you’d actually have to know all the character who suck, which isn’t as trivial as it looks, and second, you’d still forever shackle people in certain configuration and that would be the opposite of variety. Let’s say Daredevil + Bagman + IW has some kind of super combo bonus of +300% damage to everything. But you’d still only use that exact configuration. If it’s like ‘any 3 Avenger’ you’d still just have the 3 best ones you got.

7

I think it would be interesting to lightly buff a 1 or 2 star character when on a team with a higher tier character. Buff would perhaps be +10 level increase and/or a static attack/defense bonus. Not talking a huge bonus, just enough to make a one star/two star more viable with higher tiered character.

8

Saying “it would be hard to do” isn’t the best stance though. It could be awful if done wrong, of course, but you need to look at things with the chance of being done right or nothing gets done.

As for shocking them to groups, if the bonus is done right that wouldn’t be the case yes, I don’t particularly trust d3 with any balancing attempts really, but if done well it could work just fine without making you feel forced into only going with a certain team. There is only so much diversity you can ask for in a game where “skill” isn’t that effective at changing the course of a match. In fighters, skill allows diversity as I can use a low tier and still beat you, just off skill. Games like this are predominantly min/max based and so there is no way to have a truly balanced roat.Wr without it being boring .direct replica of other character. Combs hardly would be the end all to balance and roster diversity, but it would do something. Espexually if most of the best bombs are between weak characters and so as such it functions more as a boost to weak characters.

9

Sure, but there’s still always going to be that best 1* or 2* that you always use for the +10 level bonus then, unless you already know who sucks and only apply it to the characters who are weak. For example I’d imagine Modern Storm should never a level boost, nor should OBW, and on the reverse someone like Yelena or Bagman should always get boost. But, if you already knew that, why not just buff them up? And it’s quite possible in some marginal cases, you don’t really know. Should Classic Storm get a buff? She seems kind of weak, but are we really that certain?

10

Too many details. I like yelena’s payback mission. I should pester the devs for a gold yelena.

11

I think Falcon is kind of what you’re thinking here. Falcon’s Inspiriation can easily be considered as a bomb skill, but Falcon can’t actually do anything with Inspiriation offensively by himself, so it is only strong in combination with other characters. Unfortunately, this is also where the game falls apart. The best guy to compliment Falcon is obviously Daken, but Phermone Rage can easily be considered as a bomb skill too, so put those two together and you get some kind of atomic bomb combo with no real drawback in PvE, and it’s only weak in PvP because you can’t count on the AI to priortize green and yellow (if you can program the AI to always prioritize those colors they’d probably tear up most nonboosted teams even on defense). But let’s say you cut Daken’s Phermone Rage power to half, which will probably put him as an average character, is that really fair just because he’s still insane with Falcon? But you got to do something to rein in this combo. Or do you nerf Inspiriation because Falcon could be paired with Daken?

While synergy adds depth to the game, you also get a lot of “well X can’t do this because you can put him with Y and this breaks the game”, and it seems far beyond the capability of this game to add interesting combos without just making certain top combos the de facto top teams. So for now I’d prefer not having any kind of synergy but having characters that are roughly balanced baseline, because it’s really hard to imagine how you can possibly pull off balance with characters in combination if they’re not even balanced individually. While that’s not impossible to do, I don’t have much confidence and will settle for something less ambitious for now.

12

There is a ton of room to add interesting stuff for really low implementation cost. It could just start with trivial love/hate things (as many games adjust morale depending on good/evil alignment, race, etc). Possible tweak for health, AP generation, tile and ability damage. HMM-like “morale” would be a beast with random possibility to gain/lose an action. Specific pairwise interactions could be added later but the mentioned enhancing the existing abilities sound awesome. Thor+storm add some juice to each other’s storm effects? Yes please. icon_e_smile.gif

Put Thor and Loki on the same team and never be sure what will happen.

13

It’s all good until someone decided Thor and Sentry needs a bonus for being on the same team.

14

I thought it would be cool to add character combos into the environment AP system. If you are running a team that has a combo it would show up as a third environmental power on any map. Collect appropriate amount of enviro AP and fire it off. People would stop complaining about environments being unbalanced overnight, and just start firing off weird Doom/Magneto combo moves.

15

Team up is nice, but why no combos based off players selected. Team up does not seem to address roster diversity. It even let’s players use players for team up that aren’t a member of their roster. I like the ides, but hope they’ll look at ways to make more team compositions viable.

16

Team up is likely to lead to less diversity not more because a specialized ability like Settlement would be the prime candidate for slotting in your team up slot. You probably wouldn’t consider putting She-Hulk on your A-team, but if you could slot in Settlement that can get rid of all kinds of annoying stuff when you need it, but that doesn’t make you actually use She-Hulk.

17

I don’t see it. If you slot settlement, you’d still have to build your team around having no special tiles, which really isn’t that many teams. Probably just LT/hood, really