Taskmaster
Ok anyone who are friends on me on Facebook knows that this is my agent name (since day 1 of the game) and I have already written a long explanation on why I loath the design of Taskmaster in ever aspect. So here lets just focus on how strong he is in the game.
While the fucked him up hard, Playdom at least got one thing right Trick Shot its a combination of Modern Hawkeye suit.
And this is the jewel of Taskmaster move all otehr moves are shit compared to how OP Trick Shot is really (another reason they are bad and their job as Trick Shot is the first ability for him....).
Its really so badly done that getting another class who cant use Trick shot is a determent to his damage output by a large margin no joke. The secret to beating him in AI defence is really to attack him with e.g an infiltrator to remove his Trick Shot. The weakens ( and cohesively bad design towards his Comic powers) is that he has to be attacked its the enemy who decide his powers not himself.
Thats a major flaw in his strength for PvP. So he has that flaw in defence, but in attack. Wow he is broken. And as everyone knows AI gets lucky :)
First of all its because of his passive, while I hate how it works. Its much safer then Mockingbird or Punisher (or uber useless Moonknight) as he never becomes weak to anything. This is a huge difference from where MB usually would be exploited by another team mate if she changed class. Which is very obvious as Player A has Scrapper he likely have a Blaster with him. So MB turning to Bruiser would leave her vulnerable to the otehr character.
Punisher likewise turns into one class he wants but then also gains the weakness of that class.
While Taskmaster is uncontrolled class turn, he only gets the class bonus and stays as a Generalist!
This is actually makes him really strong in defence. There is never a character he is bad against, on the contrary he is really strong vs Tactician in general and well against any class really. But especially Tactician is hard countered by him.
Another reason for this is because of Taskmasters second part of the passive and his ultimate.
His passive, gives him 50% chance for one more turn just like Mockingbird. So if he gains the Tactician bonus he gets to not do one Trick Shot but 3 50% of the time. Just doing it twice usually kill one character. Overall getting more turns in a turn based game is of course veyr strong, however it do has his inherent weakness that he has to be attacked to get it. Mockingbird can attack into someone and swap classes. Still most people uses aoe attack so he do swap a lot, plus he can actually swap into Generalist. He got 5 set of abilities + his start abilities of Generalist and he can swap into Generalist again and gain the ubiquitous bonus (plainly more stats) and that can also happen while he is the already a Generalist (start of the game, well he is always a "Generalist").
Another thing that makes Taskmaster better then Mockingbird (and the other 2 who are clearly just bad). Is that he is not immune to Generalized, which removes class bonuses but as he don't turn into a class he don't turn into something with just a weakness. That's given really. But a major plus for Taskmaster is that he is not immune to Disadvantage! While this buff started off as unique ability it has quickly been put on more an d more characters so likely its gonna be even more common. But it does not work on Taskmaster as he don't actually have a class just the bonuses. So even if hes in Blaster form he don't gain impaired (which would negate the critical from Blaster plus reduce his damage by 25%).
His Ultimate is an extension of his passive, its boring and blend...like really boring and blend well it do fit his theme as a trainer but..still they could have done so much better more on that later and why it causes an issue for him gameplay wise.
What it does is that he can give his class to the team, which is just a lot like The warrior 3 design is it not. Its quite strong depending on what class he gets at the start, its a Quick action move but with a very long cooldown,, so sometimes it might be worth not using it right away.
This ultimate again is why Taskmaster primarily is great to get Tactician bonus as then he can give to to someone else.
- On my personal games/account and i want to emphasize on that as on that one my main team right now in attack is Sandman(more on him in the coming article) and Taskmaster this team can 1 turn kill everyone with the right start easy. If Taskmaster gets Tactician and gives that bonus to Sandman, Sandman can hit 2 people the first turn with is 3 third ability that does like 80-90 of their max health with no critical effect ( I note its my team as I got all possible Blasters on 14 I got huge attack (E-Penis)
For some team mates also possible the agent that is really, strong. But Tactician he can only give to one. Its nto bad giving everyone Scrapper (when its not Tactician it goes to everyone including himself). Makes the damage outburst be much higher and he still retains that when eh changes. That everyone counters from infiltrator is very strong sometimes and so on.
Ok now the abilities..... 1 good 19 bad moves. Pretty much sums it up. This is a general problem many games has not only Marvel Avengers Alliance, while this game always shows this bad move of having a character with more then the standard abilities, 4 for this game they will always give the cahracter several shit abilities who really have no value. But this is also the same for e.g League of Legends some of the more then 4 characters there usually get a bunch of mediocre abilities (not as bad as in this game but still its a common design fault).
Taskmaster has first of all no ultimate expect as Generalist but thats a really shitty move it does a lot less damage then his first move as Generalist the noted imba Trick Shot. Its really stupid. But thats how it is, his other ultimates as mentioned are just more of his passive.
So he then hes 3 abilities per class 18 abilities left, but some of them are the same, luckily for him its Trick shot.
It truly is a huge thing for him that Trick shot is available for the Tactician instead of the much weaker attack, e.g Infiltrator has.
Tactician also has the best support ability of his and you can of course attack once and then buff the team.
He is a jack of all trades like he is supposed to be but as you cant control what he gets it really lowers his value. One game its that you want to get Bruiser to Get the neutralise's ability because the enemy team is spamming buffs but you get infiltrator...
Still he is not weak or anything and his class have the counter to the class they are. So its Bruiser who got neutralize, scrapper got winded, blaster got impaired, infiltrator has off-balance and Tactician got exhausted. Of course it would make like 10 times more sense if he had an ability with disadvantage instead but.... if you just want to counter the class disadvantage is the way to go.
Neutralize for example is more to counter a buffer to remove their 4 main stats buffs not to counter the specific enrage class thing. Off-balance so they cant counter is usually better against non infiltrators like Black Widow that counters everything, those kind of character has more reliable counter attacks and are then weaker to off balance, winded is better against characters like Iron Patriot who set them self up for massive follow up attacks not scrappers.
He has a tool box that sometimes is really strong, h can remove stuff and he got a few different buffs and he can heal himself, a little of everything but it all usually just means one thing.
SPAM TRICK SHOT
In the end this is way his strongest attack. What it does is that it shoots one arrow and then maybe some more. It was actually just nerfed it used to 1 shot people. He could stand there for ever and he needed no prep as it puts on pin target before the attack it was insanely over powered. Pre this current patch this was the strongest attack in the game. Getting an extra turn would mean a sure kill of 1 enemy. Becoming Tactician many games Taskmaster could kill all 3 enemies alone the first turn by Trick Shooting each one of them once.
So its weaker now hard to set an exact number on its current strength ands its a little varied. But give or take 1 character will almost always die turn 1 if Taskmaster gets 2 turns and retains Trick Shot.
And as mentioned buffing the rest of the team with an offensive boost or giving e.g Sandman or someone else with single target attacks (which should be the team up primarily with Taskmaster) there is potential for extremely strong first turn damage.
Taskmaster is really very, veyr strong. His weakness is teh unctrollend class swap as the player cant control what class he gets its the enemy. That's the big flaw with him. But the thing is that the current meta, is so much Tacftican. Pretty much every game. Hes weakest class is Blaster and as Blaster is the least used Class by far thats pretty good for old Tasky.
He as a character in the game definitely some meta weakness, depending on who is played that makes him stronger/weaker. But right now hes top dog and nothing makes it looks like a change is coming.
Rocket Raccoon
First of all Rocket has 2 major flaws, 2 major issues
Ammo is a horrible game design. It looks cool, it looks strategy but it just makes him so dam useless sometimes. Well it have some points but for the most time its a useless because the ultimate is so weak. There are rare occasions, e.g wanting to attack after Agent. Can make it ammo useful but this is the only time. H
While it looks like a good charge attack, as the player not only sacrifice 1 turn so that they the next turn can do a super bad ass attack they can change their mind and do 5 normal attacks instead.
BUT, Playdom with their absolute lack of game balance design (yeah no surprise to anyone) made Rocket's ultimate attack so weak so its no point spending 2 turns to do it. Scratch that its really weak as they put fucking wild shot on it so misses a lot as well. Which makes it even worse, you want to spend 2 turns on an attack that might hit and don't do so much damage anyway?
Another ridiculously huge fundamental issue Rocket has its that hes a blaster with almost only AoE attacks. Blaster is clearly the worst class in the game by far and only having viable attacks who are AoE. Yeah,,,,,fun. A very common team right now are mixes of 3 Tacticians. But just 1 tactician and that is annoying.
I actually do think Rocket is playable in Defence with the absolute perfect niche team for example with Taskmaster as I talked about a little. But other then that he can literally be the dumbest AI defence team mate ever. There is just no chance teh AI wont AoE attack and give Tactician a free turn.
Already from here Rocket is absolutely one of the worst PvP rewards in the game ever.
Hes probably the worst anti Tactician character in the game and he got no real strengths.
And..to even considering playing him you need to get the ionizing A-Iso. Now I already have 4 of these its not that expensive but still another idiotic issue for him.
Anyway, if you put Ionizing on his first attack he actually becomes quite strong, in the right teams.
This is very important as his first attack does almost no damage but you can do it 3 times per turn. This means he can at turn one right away put 3 stacks on everyone its also his self coordination move(his passive) and counter etc. So its very, very important to boost this ability.
Having done this Rocket with his third ability an attack that puts pyrophoric on everyone becomes really good at chipping down enemeis. What this means is that he will do very low but stable damage. So hes actually will kill the enemeis eventually.
But from this he got major issue vs characters that can remove his debuffs or the agent in general. Especially if the Agent starts with Mystic, you can do nothing then with Rocket. This is actually the only case really were it helps having ammo set as then its worth saving ammo for the next turn and let your agent first remove the mystic shroud.
However, again this comes back to a huge miss match of abilities. Damage over time, takes time but its safe. But at least it has to start right away as it takes longer time then otehr strategies. Many games Rocket just stands there for a turn before anything happens and the Pyro to radiation strategy takes at least 1 turn to set up many games 2 turns. As Marvel Avengers Alliance PvP is so fast faced and often ends in 2-3 turns, some games even at turn 1. This is of course sickly slow.
That being said when Rocket has gained pyro on all enemies and does his first attack 3 times and with coordination he deals a lot of damage. In the end he becomes a build up character who instantly loses to anyone who can remove stuff, horrendous bad for build. And he also loses in general to any of his counter class characters. Oh yeah he also needs to have a follow up / counter attack team mates or he wont do much (or like Sunfire to set up Pyrophoric for him). He is one of the most limited characters in the game and he is also one of the most vulnerable characters, which is really retarded. If hes gonna be super stuck in just a few teams at least make him strong...
1/10. Really bad character, bad design better go and play him in MvC3 instead.
