Monday, January 26, 2015

Quality maniac: World of Warcraft, Graphic Bugs. Hood of Dispassionate Execution


Why do I see this things all the time, its like being the ghost whisper of bugs, leave me alone god dammit its a feeling I often get.

I don't know why I saw this, but as soon as I got my new head item. I instantly spotted the graphic bugs on it.



Ok its the mythic helm from Butcher, Hood of Dispassionate Execution (that's a weird name). This is the mythic version and it has a unique item image, I did have the heroic version before but I rarely had it on display but I would assume this graphic thing only happens on the mythic (I sold my heroic one so..cant test it)

Compare the image to this one were the eyes of the helm don't shine


The eyes start shining when you use an ability and then those massive block of graphic comes.


It can be quite hard to spot if the angle is not correct,t it is visible during gameplay all the time but if the background has a similar color etc.


On this image one can see its 2 boxes on at the nose and one around the eyes.



Like for me it feels like the game got those massive red squares all the time when playing with this head.


Quality Maniac: World of Warcraft Inscription.

I am so dam tired of how the inscription works in WoW. Not that it randoms the cards, I don't care about that that's just the twist of the job. No I care about the dam way the player gets the resources needed for the profession.

In World of Warcraft their are a bounce of different professions and I got my main and my well I would call my hunter my second main. Both having inscription, its a decent money making way (although I hardly bother to sell stuff) it creates a trinkets which is always needed for everyone and often hard to get. So a great in game job in that aspect, but Jesus Christ its do am annoying to use it.

I have 2 scribe quarters buildings which uses the game resource cerulean pigments to get the inscription needed resource war paints. And here lies the problem. Getting the cerulean  pigments is so much time wasted. Its basically super easy but takes hours.

And it just makes no sense, no sense at all.

Personally I am quite, quite bored by it right now as I am traveling to Turkey on business tomorrow. I want to fill my 2 buildings to the max, they use the Garrison real time to give me more war paints. And it stacks up to 36 with storage room on level 3. I need 36 x 2 x 2 cerulean  pigments, so 144 ones. Not hard, not impossible but its just such a waste that the system cant be smoother.




The thing is the player gets them by milling herbs. Not any specific herb just herbs in the current expansion. Getting the herb are easier then getting herbs for e.g alchemy were a specific herb is needed. For inscription the player just need 5 of any herb to destroy to get 2-3 cerulean pigments. So I need 720 herbs as well.

 All of that is super easy, one can go and buy it or farm it etc. Just like with any other profession in World of Warcraft.

The major issue is milling.

Milling is for some reason just 1000 times more annoying then other similar things like smelting for blacksmith were the player smelts ore into bars.

 With blacksmith  the player can tell the game to melt all ore into bars. Or any given number 10, 20 etc.

And this has been in the game since Vanilla wow over 10 years ago!!!

For w.e reason inscriptions cant do that. Its just weird, seems like a massive miss in my opinion.
 For inscriptions the player has to personally press the mill button or the mill item and then press the herb. Basically its huge amount of unnecessary clicking in the UI. But that's not the worst part.
 Not only does the player have to that while in for example Blacksmiths the player has all the ores and so on in the UI of  the profession.

 They have to do it EVERY TIME per mill action!!!

IF you want to mill 100 herbs you cannot tell the game to mill the 100 herb stack 20 times, no you have to do this action of pressing the mill button, selecting the stack and repeat that 20 times.
 It just makes no sense.







And its like this every dam day, yes now I have to store up a lot as I am going away for a week. But why cant it just be like Blacksmith.

 Even with a macro that mills any herb easier, basically it just mills the pile of nagrand blooms or fireweed etc that is higher then 5 it still feels so tedious. Because that macro still means you have to press the macro button 20 times. Everyday you need 10 cerulean pigments for  the daily and another 2 for the book daily, which I do to go closer to 700 in skills. Just milling to get those 12 feels tedious by now.






Spam spam spam



 I could see a more advanced macro doing the actually mill per mill but that is probably against the game rules so I wont write it. But if I can script it, I mean I can really see how it is kind easy to write, why cant anyone at Blizzard do it. And please add it it to 6.1 mega patch coming out.

 I haven't used inscription before this expansion but I would also assume its been like this forever...just makes no sense to me.


Friday, January 16, 2015

Marvel Avengers Alliance PvP Season 18 Recap

Well what can I say.

Not much new.

This season 18 was pretty much exactly like 17 in the defense aspect at least.

Yes on my personal attack team I used Molly a lot instead of, well any character as she was uber. But the defenses team was pretty much exactly the same that went over in 17 recap. So its not much new stuff one can include for this season.

It was the same old Pestilence teaming with Red Hulk or Groot or the Groot/Gamora team.

All horrible, even some Gamora Pestilence...which just makes no sense.


Just to emphasize on this again. Damage over time effect is a good, if not the best strategy in almost any turn based games. Its usually is wonderful for safe damage. IN the players control. It never favors the AI. Its atrociously bad for the AI to use that. If anything its a given mechanic in RPGs but for the most part how many enemies in typical RPG is status effect really an issue? Its almost always the player that can get any real use from them.
 In Marvel Avengers Alliance, its so easy to remove stuff, even with Pestilence and the AI will never work with those teams. You want high damage burst teams or teams based on high number of luck mechanics.

SO going back to the whole meta thing and the higher ranks. Emma did work better then Molly, because just like I analyzed on Magneto VS Emma a few months back. Depending on the meta Magneto was better then Emma, in this season with so much tank teams. Almost every team had a tank, psychic attack are the go to response.
 Emma is far the best counter to Pestilence to. Mental tap him- and hes dead. Plus she can herself remove his debuffs after she is dead leaving her to always win the 1v1 if the enemy has for some reason managed to kill anything. Usually she will remove the shit on the agent so he can be utilized right away and take less damage from the stuff in a 2v2 or a 3v2 scenario which is still really good, she clearly a very hard counter to Pestilence in any scenario but in a 1v1 having to fight the last of  their team(usually the agent) she is also then the best to just get free from the debuffs and taping the agent.


Lets talk about how was Molly to climb the ladder with, I basically did like 75 games in a row with her the last day, well unfortunately I faced as mentioned mainly the same team all the time but wow did she beat them.

 What surprised me the most was that I found myself using her ultimate a lot actually. After weakening them with a mental tap (---vs over used Pestilence) he would often be behind a tree wall so I would just spam her ultimate until he died (as her ultimate goes past tanks.
 Other times were it was even better was vs people with lower stats then me, especially lower they have. If they got low stats = Emma using her ultimate instead and then X character to use AoE as well. So by replacing Magneto, which also did fantastic AoE as his third ability is also catastrophic (cant be blocked).

If anything playing so many games with Molly in a row made me realize how even better she is then what I tough on looking at the data!!!

YES BETTER

I put skullthumper on her to give her attack a chance to stun. So by using the ultimate I got a double chance for stun, not only does this stop the enemy team very hard as you can throw like 10 fucking trucks at them for a ludicrous high chance to stun. But stunning them mean she wont get counter attacked anymore. The only drawback for Molly is that they might have a team with stronger counter attack that's will wear her down when she does her 10+ turns. Its huge being able to start with a her ultimate and then usually finishing them with her second attack.
 In other scenarios were I wanted to focus on AoE. I would just throw 10 trucks after having done 1-3 Emma ultimates as well  +1-2 agent signpost(15+% of their max life). I found it some what obvious now in Hindsight but Molly is the best AoE damage character in the game as well. Her damage is just a joke. Being able to do an unblockable AoE attack so many times will surely kill them all. Combine that with another unblockable AoE from Emma and the AoE damage the agent can do. It should be noted Agent does so save damage with signpost and status effects so its around 25% life less everyone has at least with the right geared agent.
 Its almost impossible not to win at turn 2 with Molly as long as she gets her turn. But as she is immune to stun etc they have to pretty much kill her at turn 1.
 Also being scrolled or other type of removal so she loses her buff that gives her taunt is a good thing many games as it just means she wont be attacked as much. She can still user her temper tantrum(infinitive turns) regardless if the raspberry buff is still on her or not.





( I switched to some old good Magneto in the end as I was getting tired of the same spam strategy:)


Getting Nova was not that hard I played from 1450 ca ranking to 1900( then I wanted to test Mag with some new isos) with Molly and Emma losing zero attacks. The only hard time ranking up with this kind of team is....Playdom's servers.

I went to 1650 and couldn't rank up for 5-6 hours. As for 3 hours the game didn't work. This of course happened several more times.. and then during the other 3 hours the game would implement "updates" after each win.

I do not know what is more insulating the always horrible game quality or that they still have the pop telling players to refresh to look at the game improvements. 99% of the player base know that there is no improvements no update, that pop up is just pouring salt on the wound. I really don't get it, feels like one of those obvious bad design flaws.

 But yeah, the hardest part getting to Adamantium is the dam shitty servers. Luckily after that time passed the game suddenly worked flawlessly.
 I mean really flawlessly, the game started loaded instantly and I could gain 300 points or so in 1 hour. After that...it got the normal mediocre speed, a few more hours unplayable.

I often talk about the buffer is more important then any defense team, get higher then a certain t threshold and you wont get attacked anymore.
 I would implore using that buffer even more if the game continues like it has. And I am sure it will. One have to be higher then Adamantium by 300+ or so at least 4 hours before it ends to be safe. That being said its clearly been super easy staying in Adamantium this last season. In previous seasons I would get attacked constantly and lose a lot, as most have dreadful experience from.
 But these 2 latest season means I earn more in defense from their attacks.

Why?

People simply crash all the time when they attack, so attacking in the last 2-3 hours means losing points. Not always of course but it looks kinda weird being up at a high rank way above the border and still gaining in defense as surely the people that attacked at this level should be maxed out with great teams. I used to have maybe 20-30% win ratio in High Adamantium defense. Last 2 season I had 80%+
 NOTE: I got shitty pvp armory stats so its not like I just obliterate anyone that steps on my lawn.

My point is that I get a lot of people telling me and they write on this subject on forums etc on "ALMOST GETTING IN" "Deserving to get in" etc.
 People that think as they were at 1500 or so should deserve Nova... fuck sake.

Get of that idea.

If you cant bother to be above 1550 . 4 hours at least prior you have clearly reached any safe deserving placement. And really being at 1550 is not close to being safe, get to 1800 at least I recompensed 2000+.


Side Note...God dammit why is it Kid Nova. I hate his character in Ultimate Spider-Man. Nova did not get to be in the Guardian of The Galaxy movie and we get Kid Nova----have Marvel just banned any use of classic Nova or something ,Which is weird he is playable in Marvel VS. Capcom 3 and that game is fairly new, well I guess it was more weird how in a Movie were there are 1000+ Nova Corp not a single glimpse of Richard Rider any were.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Marvel Avengers Allience PvP Tier List Season 18. Guide for best characters for PvP

Wow it finally happened someone is better then Emma Frost. I would be 10x more positive about it if it was because Emma was finally nerfed not that another character is just as broken as her.


BAM BAM BAM

Molly is higher then Emma.

However, its clear that Emma and Molly are way way higher then the other characters.
 And Emma is much better versus some character especially shes great Vs Groot that everyone plays.
 But what makes Emma still be the go to character is based on her mechanics.
 While Molly is better if you got amazing stats, or simple said even or higher stats then the opponent she fails under if she cant hit enough hard, miss to much etc. Emma instead is amazing vs people who have better stats then you.

All that being said this is my current attack team currently with a 100% win ratio.

But I will say that Emma X Molly is kinda meh, Emma is better with AoE team mates like the classic Magneto Emma combo, Emma War or Emma Iron Patriot.

 Molly is better with more single target damage such as Taskmaster. With Taskmaster and Molly is very, very easy to kill of 1 character. Also Molly Star-Lord is good.
 The good thing with using Emma and Molly, excluding the fact they are both individually uber overpowered is that Emma can boost Molly's stats with her cosmic power so 25% better stats with 15 attacks is quite the sure kill. Well It also removes all debuff on Molly, to make sure she deals damage. Quite the all right combo thanks to Emma's utility.

I just wrote an Article on why Molly is so good so I don't think its needed here, she basically gets a huge amount of turns and kills everyone the end.
 The tier list has not changed at all except Molly as only 3 new characters was added over the time of the season 17, very close in time these two.

Fixer is kinda good vs all the mediocre characters so he gets in the bottom of top 20, what I expected and makes him a decent choice.

Looking at the full list:

Karnak is 26 which also is kinda Ok. He do get better with other Inhumans who all are pretty bad unfortunately. But as mentioned he is straight forward so decent for defense even outside rank 20. Well most characters who are in just outside the top are always playable in certain exact teams that makes great use of them.
 While other characters like Taskmaster is always just amazing. Hes good in any team. Spiral is always uber good support, Kitty is always hard countering almost all characters and can almost always instantly kill 1 enemy and so on.

Its a difference being in top 10 and being close to it.

I say this as I want to emphasize on how Emma is still super good.

I went over the data, several times to make sure that Emma truly was under Molly. But what happened was not that Emma got lower on the scale, she actually gained a lot of points. I found old data stating stuff like Emma is good vs X when its really, Emma is freaking good vs X. So she actually ended up gaining a lot of points and went to even further have a huge lead over the characters after her. 

Emma is still broken, Molly is just even more broken.

When I get the second turn with Molly. The game is over, thats it. She will deal so much damage the other 2 characters don't have to be in the game as long as she can get of a turn 2. I can see Molly being played with heavy tank/support Agent and another tank/support character just so she easier can get to survive.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Casual Game Design, epic fails. Playdom -> Marvel -> Disney

I am not really in the mood to go in on a long list of points in how Playdom cant do good casual game design, fail moniziation and just overall miserable things.

I have worked on a few casual free to play games and its a fucking golden rule that the free player can get everything just with more time.

Hybrid...same as fucking Magneto. When Magneto was first released the player could do everything perfectly play constantly and don't get him if they got bad luck. However, this was the first character to use the lockbox system so it could in all honestly I guess be forgiven. The next character Omega Sentinel was instead to easy to get so took them some time to balance it.

Hybrid on the other hand is like 15 character with the lockbox system and after doing every daily, EVERY DAILY!!! And EVERY WEEKLY as good as I possible beating most bosses with 100% hp left and so on.
 I still have not been rewarded Hybrid. This is utter crap game design, its literately 100% impossible for me as free player of this game to get Hybrid without having to use the gold resource that you buy with money, yes they did change so that people cant now get gold by leveling past the max level..but come on. It takes a few days to get past that for 1 gold I need 100 gold to get Hybrid. Such a fucking Joke.

I want to note that this is not my emotional opinion writing something about the people that work on Playdom,. no its my professional opinion that those people suck at their job. They should design so its a 100% chance to get the character if the player does everything during the timed event. Its not even hard.

As the cover to get a character is 100% secured if the player fails enough times.

It work like this.

First cover - unique 100% chance

Second cover 7/8 chance and if failed then the next one is 100%

Third cover 6/8 then if 2 are fail 100% chance.

Fourth Cover 5/8 then if 3 are fail 100% chance

and so on until the dreaded

1/8 chance and the need to open 7 fails tries to get a 100%.

Its easy to calculate that the 100% sure chance to get a character is

10+20+30+40+50+60+70+80. 310 Boxes..

If the player does everything in every daily event during the limited time frame they should get 310 boxes, its no harder then that. I can even go so far to say that as the chance to get the character on average is much, much higher then 310 boxes. I did the math in some other article is like 175 or something. Its actually reasonable to put it lower then 310, in my professional opinion it should be somewhere on the outskirt almost impossible to fail so something like. 270 or so. Barbecue the player can farm gold the days and get gold at roulette etc (not farmable but they cant by lucky of the daily roulette) so it doesn't have to be 100% to 310 but close to it.

Now I unfortunately did not keep track of the exact number of boxes that the player got but its something like, 5 x 30 = 150 + 4 weekly. So 190 that's just barely over the assumed number of boxes to get.

 And yes I am not saying that most people wont get it. But its some players who spend full game time to get do everything hey possible did and they are lacking more then a 100 gold that's a lot, A LOT of GOLD MISSING.

Its tragic when a F2P game stop being F2P, yes Marvel Avengers Alliance has always been Pay2win in PvP but its even more P2W when the free player cant get all the characters even if they do every shitty retain mechanic the game has to offer.

 Nothing in the game should force the player to use GOLD simple as that.

I wrote this about Magneto pretty much the exact same 2 years ago..but then like I said it was the first attempt of this game system. Now this system design is just bad when they have done it for over 10 times before and makes it go worse then previously. Greed I guess, it does not take amazing math skills to do a much better set for base value of box to get.


TL.DR
The basic problem is that they put the hard value of getting the game resource just barely over the mean value. There is a base value which is 190 and a mean value of needed resource of 175. But with a big disparity of up to 310 of a true needed value. The result is a user can be over a 100 resources to little which one look at it its a huge value miss as that's more then 1/3 of the total needed value.


 So that's the math side of it, which is easy to do better. What is more miserable is the gameplay experience, which is were its a huge design fail.  Its  horrible emotional bad for the player.

 The place the player gets to his just so bad designed. Not only can do they everything and still not get the reward but now they have to use the money resource to buy boxes and these boxes might also fail.
 This is another huge design mistake its not, "omg omg I got the character" its not the epic win feeling the player get instead its 4-5 tries of, "fuck this shit I still got another duplicate"

 If I would put it in to some kind of happy meter its something like this.

No reward (1/8 chance to get one so)  -10  happiness
No reward again -20  happiness
And so on.

While final getting it DOES NOT give the epic win feeling, its more of a "eh..finally got it fuck I hate playdom". Because the player truly did earn the reward before its not a lottery farm thing. Were the player beats a boss x times and eventually gets an item.

A similar play would be e.g World of warcraft beating a raid boss and getting an item. There is a chance to get an item but its not 100% at all, its 20%(personal loot). getting an item means +10  happiness. Getting the right most wanted item, like a weapon its +100  happiness.
 Not getting an item its like -1 happiness. Because you don't expect to get an item. So its a lot better gameplay going into being exited getting something and not so angry not getting one, of course one can get unlucky and not get items. And then the - happiness will increase each time.

But this situation in Marvel Avengers Alliance is a severe design flaw. Here the player instead comes from the other side of expectations. The player assumes to get the reward and not to have a chance for it. So its pretty ,much the reverse, not getting is a hard -10 happiness at least while getting the reward is a +1 happiness.
 That's clearly not you want with the gameplay experience.

One good way to compare this, is with WoW again. In Warlords of Draenor there are Daily mission, nothing new with this typical Blizzard.
 In WoD, its the apexis which gives 1000 a day. Farm these for 5 days and you can buy the chest, farm them for another 12 days and you can upgrade the chest and its then an epic item. Very clear progression.
 THe daily missions for Marvel Avengers Alliance follows the exact same basic formula do some daily stuff, kill enemis get a boss etc. Get boxes, which is just another name for an important limited in game currency, so just a time limited game resource. Farm it for X days to get the reward.

Exact same basics, but then MAA adds into the chance of failing and its just so stupid. You have players who have done the dailes for 30 days, not just 5 or so 30! And get no reward. They have to use money for the last 5-120 resources.

You can do the math and argue for should the base value be 250 or 200 etc. The main issue is really this that the player is expecting to get the reward but getting nothing. Completely failing the retain of the player, to point is to retain the player to play each day for a little while so they might play more, invest money w.e. But if the player gains nothing from playing each day for a month. That's really pure insanity.

From my personal player perspective I would never in a million years give money to Playdom, or Marvel or Disney for that matter in this game. Its almost that is such a reverse of retain that I barely want to go and watch the next marvel movie etc. But for me as I write about each character etc I of course have to buy the new hero.....

I really want to emphasize on how the reward truly is zero!!! The player gets nothing but crap in those boxes so not getting the hero for a month of dailies amounts to zero gain in the game world. Unless then one pays for the last X lack of boxes.

 Then the question becomes, why return to the game and do dailies? Pointless, the only thing they do is make you have to pay less money. A lot of players, most players are by the nature of refusing to pay any money for w.e reasons. (this system alone should likely be motivation to not pay).
 A really weird incentive, play each day for 1 hour or so to get the chance to pay less. Not very motivation. Especially as in how social/casual games are a lot about the reward and clearly progression.

 No reward and while the boxes/covers do get closer to 100%. I have experienced going from having 1 box to get duplicates for every possible draw until the last 7 and 8th an then suddenly getting them right away. So its always a miss / hit chance even after a long progression of time except at the final 100% chance.  The weird expectations of chance for the player is just kind of hard to read into "how close am I really", even the progression is fucked up. Mainly as each step of the progression makes it a lot worse, the further the player gets the chance of getting the right cover decreases, the "fun game" time, only decreases over time.


I have a game dev friend who also play this game a lot. And we have always joked about how this game show how not to design casual games. And we started does joke back in 2012...this is more sad now how Playdom is going backwards, like this is worse then the Magneto. And that was way back. They should fix stuff not break them more. I was disappointed in the Magneto failure.
 A sentence I wrote back then was "Enormously short sighted game design." I think that sums it up pretty good. Making a retain system of - get player to play each day as they get reward, but not even giving them a reward will surely decrease the number of people doing following the retain mechanics the next reward comes.
 And also just in general, I blatantly refuse to give money to this company. I have a hard time not seeing a lot of other people doing the same for stuff like this. I know a lot of people have already told me they refuse, so again I come back to this topic  that I have discus over the years of license game ruining the licence? Maybe it does, I would think it does.

Like I worked on a couple of licence games, big licence games. And frankly some of those games, SUCKED. And I mean SUCKED, in my defense I told everyone at the company all the flaws pretty much everyday so(yes I am great at parties). No but jokes aside, I really have worked on some god awful license games and I don't take lightly to say this because I don't want to shoot my own CV in the foot so to speak, of course I did learn a lot:) (I truly did try to fix what I could).
  No but those games were bad, they could have been a lot better and I know that one of them ended up selling atrociously low. So basically my and other peoples salary was paid from other more successful games. And especially one of those games, I assume it made the player stop enjoying the other part of that huge merchandise franchise.

 I am trying to come up with an example of a my own childhood here but I had an overall bad experience of Licence games and then refused to buy any license games for like 10 years, until Marvel vs Capcom 2 was released that was the first licence game I bought in 6 years at least.

There is this economical concept called Long Tail. Basically if something is good enough it will sell eventually. Write a book if its a masterpiece in enough time someone will read it tell it to their friends etc and eventually it will sell. So with Marvel right now its the movies if anything, Movie X was good so I go and see the next Movie, Ok this is not really what specially long tail is about, but long tail is a kinda like having a good brand. Developing a good brand is a Long Tail. (I have an associate Degree in economy/industrial leadership I felt that I really showed it here)
 This game is an extreme short tail right and that it become worse with this 15 or w.e character is just bad design classic for free 2 play facebook games I guess but, its such a well recognized brand. That in my opinion its very shortsighted in how it ruins the well established brand. In my opinion the more I play this game, the less I want to pay for any Marvel/Disney product, Truly.

Its kinda the reverse of what Marvel Vs. Capom 2 did. Like one of my best friends really liked playing Marrow in that game, so he went and bought comics with Marrow (which is basically reading Murloc story lines in X-men). Positive effect of having a good quality products. Now instead I just feel like I want to avoid Marvel Products. And I really like Carnage USA too, feels like I should not get the next symbiotic comic event as how much Hybrid fucked me over.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Marvel Avengers Alliance: Best Team PvP Season 18. Guide for best characters for PvP. Review Karnak




God I really don't want to do Karnak. At least Blackbolt, Medusa and Crystal are known Inhumans, This is just Gorgon(Satyr) all over again, a background Inhuman character.

And with Karnak I got nothing I cant analyze why his name makes no sense like some other marvel characters.

And.. to no surprise his ingame mechanics are also extremely uncreative. Its just a preemptive based character with a fatal blow attack. Also he got a + to passive with other of his team, so the Inhuman of course this as well is so overly done already in the game and always leads to characters whoa re barely playable as they then have to be played with just a few options.
 Boring in every regard.

Karnak is extremely straight forward all his attacks are critical and cannot miss. His second ability is a quick action that gives opponent weak point so all attacks are critical...not very good for him but boost the team damage. Except this second ability he only has attacks.

 Non e of his attacks are good, they are just damage dealing with almost pointless debuffs. He will however preemptive attack people from any type of attacks so he got a great chance to preemptively attack at least once per turn. Karnak deals damage, that's it. He got no intelligent moves at all. Pure damage, no real support no defense except attacking first. His ultimate is a fatal blow that deals higher damage then most other fatal blow attacks first. So its a pretty ok move but still jsut pure damage.
 He is extremely limited and his preemptive passive is better with other Inhumans further making him more limited.

All that being said he is pretty decent in defense.

WHY?

because he is so straight forward I did a list way back for good AI characters. And Karnak for the AI is pretty much perfect. NOTE: Hes not the strongest long from it but just how badly the AI is coded for the most characters he is one of the best coded.. as he got no moves. He is just pure attack and with the AI chance for increased chance mechanics he of course preemptive strikes a lot.

The biggest issue I find with Karnak is actually not the limitation of him. Ignoring that he is one extreme trick pony, I would say that his biggest issue is his lack of damage!

He deals decent but not high damage. His primary attack which he will use all the time is not high enough on the damage output. As he only can do damage it would be a little better if he did high damage not just some mediocre level of damage.

Marvel Avengers Alliance: Best Team PvP Season 18. Guide for best characters for PvP. Review Fixer



FIXER

I have never been a huge fan of fixer but I did like the Thunderbolts especially the later years, until the end I guess which involved a time paradox with just Fixer.
 In the end of Thunderbolts (vol 1 - the real Thunderbolts not the surprisingly bad version that Red Hulk gathered) the bolts are going through time, and in the end meets their old self when they were still fully evil. 

Anyway, it ends by Fixer accidentally killing himself...which to not cause a time paradox they have Fixer takes his younger self place. Which clearly should cause a paradox right away as he knows all future events for like the next 15 years. But ok let say he place his part exactly like his younger self would.

Fixer is like 35 years old or something. So he would take his younger self place of I guess 5 years or so in marvel comic years. Then he would do exactly the same stuff until he would have to kill his other younger self in the next back in time event.
 This would lead him to be 40 years old in the next iteration and then this would go on. Clearly people would notice he is way to old in some iteration and eventually he would die from old age not being able to relive the last years again. I haven't read anything with Fixer since the end of the series but I haven't seen him in any other comic since then so I guess that is what is currently canon with him. Clearly this will create a time paradox, such a stupid plan. The only redeeming quality of it is that Fixer never did anything important in the comic so I guess him being dead 5 years to early don't make much difference 




Game wise, when looking at Fixer its hard not to compare him to Emma Frost. Emma with her mental tap e.i massive attack based on enemy life that has to be set up. Fixer is kinda similar with his mines. 
 I could also make a long, overly long argument why all characters should be compared to the top character in any type of game. Just in general there will also be a over the top character in a 100+ character game, I mean sure I sometimes go a little hard on Playdom but its obviously near impossible to balance a game with so many characters. When a game has like over 20 or so characters there will always be a few at the top and a few at the bottom which are useless and a huge middle. The more characters/factions/races the bigger the difference. Then of course this game is really imbalanced as well.

Anyway, Fixer damage aspect is very similar then to Emmas primarily broken ass attack. And its  a really strong one. My Fixer almost always insta kills people with 1 blast mine. Unless if they are maxed out thank characters. Same in PvE for that matter he just instantly kills most bosses.

Fixer do however lands in the undefined middle of strength He is clearly a lot better then the bottom tier of characters just having such a powerful attack. But his problem is that; he don't have much more. 

  First of all his mines are not as effective as Emma. She can debuff someone and they will attack the same turn and take 50% of their life lost. While Fixer has to first mine someone then attack them himself. Which means it takes 1 turn to set up. Of course this can be made easier with extra turns mainly trough usages of the agent but also with other characters.
 However, comparing that to Emma, with the same type of support Emma can instead then debuff 2 people and take away 50% life of both, facing a blaster she can get her bonus tactician turn and mental tap all 3. That's still a lot better then what Fixer will do. Well, Fixer deals more damage then 50% so he is not all bad.

 The positive  aspect of Fixer is that his mines cant be removed. So hes actually quite stronger then Emma in that aspect. His mines also ignore stuff like Mystic shroud so they can be used right away. So there is actually games were Fixer > Emma in the massive bomb attack.

His problem is that its the only thing he has. Emma also got her super good AoE attack that goes through everything and always deal great damage and its good for picking of characters. Her buff and passive is one of the best in game and her self passive is also extremely good. Fixer instead got an absolutely useless ultimate, its truly epically shitty.

Then he don't have more moves....

I have written about this before with several character and with League of Legends characters and its the same kind of bad design.

 Here's a character with 3 classes, so he got 12 moves right? Well ok he changes class with one button,,,,,which is actually quite stupid as there that can use abilities over their recharge so no need for limiting of 1 of his buttons, except laziness I guess.

So OK he got 9 abilities over 4. Well not exactly, all his abilities are just a slightly different one for the different classes. He got a shield on each class as an ultimate each of them bad. It just really bad design its like he have 9 really badly designed abilities instead of having 4 good designed abilities. Which is a classic problem for this type of character design.

All the shields are shit they only protect him and its only the infiltrator version that is barely any good(makes him not be countered attacked), if they had covered his team like Magneto it would be another story. It makes no sense why they don't.

Then his mines as mentioned are not triggered by the enemy moving but by Fixer attacking them. The + of this is in his pure damage as it means his first attack will trigger the mine over and over again after placing it once on them.

But it also means he arguably don't have even have 3 moves per class its 2!

He could have had 1 - place mine, After mine placed this move turns into detonate. Like many other character has.

I would say he got like 2 move per class but as each move is the same of the classes he ends up with 2 moves.

No joke, such lazy design. 

Gameplay wise this means he is utterly bad. The thing is that his tactician min e and infiltrator mine are absolutely utterly much weaker then the blaster version. THERE IS NEVER a reason to use the mines of the other 2 classes. 
 And as mentioned the shield is only barely good in infiltrator Hes extremely, extremely limited.

Also having to be blaster and use an AoE attack to trigger is mine is obviously bad as it will trigger all the tacticians extra turn, it is still worth to for the amazing damage but its clearly a drawback.



The only other good thing with him except his mine (blaster suit) is his passive. Its quite good actually in PvP.

He got 2 passives, one is a typical - immunity to X number of stuff, in his case what is interesting is that he is immune to obsolete tech so he can always use his abilities. Which is kinda weird as Fixer was never in the front of tech but w.e. That defensive passive is ok, its no Cosmic power like Emma but decent.


His other passive is on the other hand really strong. Strong but limited, when he dies he will explode like many of the annoying blaster enemies in PvE dealing high damage (if you have good attack power at least) to the enemy team.

So that is what Fixer does pretty much. He deals high damage with his mines and then deal high damage when he dies. Overall he does pretty well because he just purely does very high damage. But he got no tricks up his sleeves, yes can use other mines but their damage is a joke and never worth over doing high damage with blaster mines. He works good also as his blaster class + his aggressive nature works perfect with a class cannon build. Playing fixer there is no reason too fear death, as he explodes so its much better just going for full damage build which will makes his mines stronger and of course makes his suicide even stronger.


He is not a fantastic character but he is very straight forward and he will beat a lot of characters.

His weakness is tanks - they can protect his aoe attack so he cant trigger the mines this means he has to mine the tanks first , i.e he is very straight forward. (So this is really bad vs Tactician tanks like Captain America, Red Hulk etc). In this situation Emma is much better. 
 He is also limited with no real variation to strategy the other mines are not perform good enough and his shields are shit. 

Actually a last point I should make is how the shields are also disjoint with his passive. Hes a character that wants to die first, only protecting himself is really stupid and shields are based on the characters max health, he should absolutely be aimed toward dealing damage so going with high hp and defense etc also makes no sense, overall hes just not very coherent design.



Sunday, January 4, 2015

Marvel Avengers Alliance: Best Team PvP Season 18. Guide for best characters for PvP. Review Molly Hayes





Molly Hayes --- Could be the best character in PvP!!!!

Really, its another hard evidence playdom don't got no clue what they are doing with basic balance.
 I have written long texts about how Stamina aka the cost of using stuff is completely broken in the game.

I could go over it all again but basically nothing cost anything as an attack cost like 900 stamina and the cahracter has 10k+ in stamina...
 So it takes quite the long while to ever run out of stamina then you got a character like Emma Frost that gives the team stamina, agent with cube etc. And then the most major point why stamina dont matter is because pvp battles end pretty quickly. One battle is not 10+ turns.. more like 3-4 turn at the most. Not even close to get to 10 turns. I.e Stamina don't matter.

Another horrible point of this are characters who got stamina drain attacks, of course these moves will never matter. In similar games to Marvel Avengers Alliance draining/removing peoples resource can be a very strong valid tactic, here in this game it does nothing pretty much. Maybe if the game last for 8-9 turns it comes to effect.
 (Still an item like Signpost that drains stamina each turn can be of effect as its a Quick action it will drain and the agent can perform attacks meaning it drains 7.5% each turn without any drawback, "it can be spammed" this will lead the enemies to actually lose a lot of stamina in the long run so it comes to effect like at 6-7..which is still way late but the occasional battle it can be very good).


And then we come to Molly.

It don't really matter what Molly's moves are. Honestly what matters is that they deal some what of daamge.

BECAUSE BAM, her freaking third ability makes her have infinitive number of attacks. !!!!!

I am just mind boggled who the fuck thought of this idea...Its just ridiculous in every way. Molly third move is first a single target tank move with a counter attack. Classic Bruiser.

But the next turn it turns to the most overpowered move in the games history, almost in any games history. She gains full stamina and can take actions until she runs out of stamina.............

I remember in my childhood when I managed to beat the last boss in Grandia 2 without taking damage on the first try on the boss..yes that was lame it was way to easy to use the strategy I had come up with during the game time to the boss. That game is amazing but it really hurt how easy it was to abuse stuff..

This game, just wow its even worse. You have a character with infinitive number of turns until you run out of stamina. That takes 10 turns at least. If you have really good stats it takes 15 turns or so. Molly can do 15 attacks before ending her second turn.
 And the cost of this is losing the next turn, I get the basics of it. Its called the Hyper attack mechanic, its a classic gameplay design pattern were a character got one massive move and then lose the next turn. However,... other games use it a little more reasonable like having an attack deal 2-3x damage then you lose the next turn. So its like taking 2 turns at once for the most part balancing it out.

Well In PvE. If you use up her stamina you can recharge her with quantum elixir get another turn and full stamina again - rinse and repeat to kill any boss in PvE. 

Marvel Avengers Alliance, Playdom..cant do basic basic math it seems. So heres a character that even if you got bad stamina pool will take at least 3-4 turns. 4 turns is clearly worth sacrificing 1 turn. Thats 2x in turn. But my Molly can take more then 10 turns!

So I gain 10 turns in the lose of 1 turn. This is so clearly the most broken ability in the game. 10 fucking turns. And I am not exaggerating, get even better stats by using gold(money) and you can get to 15 turns. 15 turns for the lose of the next 1 turn!

 There won't even be a next turn after 10. That was always be real strength of Hyper Attacks. Not that they would deal more damage then using 2 other attacks on 2 turns. But that they could deal it right away, good to use if the enemy is taking extra damage this specific turn or for most of the time to finish someone of before they get a turn. They are not supposed to deal more then 2x damage. This deals 15x damage... This frankly disgust me how obviously super broken she is. This is a joke from Playdom.

Note- That Molly is immune to fear effects, like Cower so she cant miss turns from that and she is also immune to stuns and incapacitated....so yeah she can always take all her turns. That's a really good passive on any character.
 Then her infinitive turn move also gives her immunity to exhausted so she can still take more turns and its a Quick action move but wont then be stopped by exhausted as she also gains immunity to that.
 Really like this is one of the best passives in the game, in any turn based games losing a turn is very detrimental. Clearly being stunned or similar effect is the worst debuffs in the game. She is immune to all versions of lose turn debuffs.

Simple said that is a one really good passive as well to have and

Of course Molly got the standard Marvel Avengers Alliance self combo set up.

Her first attack debuffs the enemy while the second attack exploit the debuffs.

Her Drop kick, debuffs the enemies with both "Wide Open" that makes them take extra damage from melee attacks and "Combo Setup" that makes them extra daamge from specifically unarmed attacks.

Then her second move is a of course both melee and unarmed it also have exploit combo to deal even further extra damage if they are combo setup. So she got Iron Fist moves pretty much, thats his classic move set. But also then Wide Open for extra damage.  She also have Deadly Crits so if it critical hit the move deal even more extra damage, which is exactly like how Iron Fist works...

TL:DR Molly is Iron Fist with 10 turns. Thats kinda sums it up. She can debuff enemy 1 deal some damage to them, then deal huge damage to them the next turn  same turn. After this if enemy 1 lives, she can use move her second move again to finish them of. But most of the time she can simply just repeat move one and two to kill them at least if it crits. So in 6 turns moves she can kill most of the enemy team alone. Probably 1-2 of them will survive so she has to finish them off, but that leaves her with another 2 extra attacks if they manage to survive that.

Ok that was a long Tl:Dr

Uber Short Tl.Dr - Molly can kill the whole enemy team in 1 turn by using her 1-2 move combo over and over again. 

Lastly her ultimate is an aoe incapacitation move so bascily an aoe stun move which a lot of Bruiser has (yes originality is not their strong suit). And it also intimidates everyone.

Its a pretty good move, AoE attacks that can cost enemies their turns is always very strong, and she can throw it if they somewhat have survived her 10+ attacks. Its also catastrophic so its unblockable (now the tank is probably long dead), so its almost exactly like Hercules, Cap B etc.
 But yeah shes really, broken as she can just throw in an aoe stun as an quick action.

 Still I would say one thing and why Emma is still better then her, becasue she do get stopped a lot by hard defence oriented tanks like Groot which is in every game. This dont mean shes bad, on the contrary she 2-3 punches Groot to deaht and then she can kill the enemy team anwyay...but given extreme differentions in stats. E.g the enemy having twice ur hp etc. Then a tank with a good counter attack will kill her first, while Emma can always just kill everyone easily with her mental Tap.

Of course I am currently using them both. Emma can then as always kill people of if Molly has not, she can also buff Molly so she deal more damage and protects Molly from debuffs.