Marvel Puzzle Quest

[Don]

Great concept that's programmed by chimps. It'd be like someone traveled back in time to make WoW with people programming out of their garage, i.e. the game concept would still be great but it'd look pretty unpolished. The first hour or so is just horrible because you literally have no idea what you're doing and the tutorial doesn't explain jack. But once you get used to it, it's quite awesome. It plays more like a RPG than a puzzle game honestly. You really have to think about how to attack the other team and the PvE guys have very different strengths/weaknesses. For the PvP stuff, people tend to have either the same cookie cutter team, or it's the 3 highest guys they could level. I came in around #12 on the two tournaments I entered but getting the push to #10 is very tough (that's where the big prizes are).

Some random stuff that might be useful to you:

Your heal packs do not regenerate until it's under 5 (at 36m per one), so unless you're making a huge push to a tournament there's no reason to have heal packs above 4.

Black Widow is very good PvE unless you got lucky and have Spiderman (classic). She's also decent in PvP against any team that has only one particularly strong character and no AE character (e.g. Classic Storm). You only need her blue ability. She can even be level 1 and still stun stuff for 5 turns (if they don't AE).

In the tournaments with the loaned character, try to let the loaned character take all the damage because he heals up for free between fights.

The buff modifiers modifies environmental damage and crit modifier. In practical terms this means in a PvP tournament you should always fight in the computer room (top choice) against a significantly stronger team, and always fight in city (bottom right) if your team is significantly stronger. This is because computer room environmental tiles can completely dominate the outcome of a fight, so you want to use that if you're the underdog, and conversely city has the weakest environment effects so if you're ahead. The forest tile (bottom left) is pretty well-balanced. It obviously favors red players which describes roughly half of the characters so it's pretty even.

One strong hero is way better than 3 weak ones.

Thor and Classic Storm are probably the best 2 star heroes to spend your iso-8s on. They both have covers you can actually get, and Thor is featured in many tournament as a buffed hero. Classic Storm is generally considered one of the strongest characters overall (though not as strong as she used to be), though keep in mind Classic Storm is useless on PvP on defense. She pretty much always dies first unless you have Spiderman, who is a rare (3 star).

[Shrinweck]

This game is pretty fun. The AI is dumb as dirt sometimes, which is good in a Puzzle Quest game. Smart AI is fun and all but smart AND lucky AI makes Puzzle Quest games literally impossible to beat.

Good to know about healing packs.. I haven't fallen below 5, opting for the 1+ hour heal times, so I've been hoarding them... apparently uselessly.

I've mostly been leveling my Iron Man (24) and Storm (modern at 19) that you get in the beginning since they're so solid. I didn't opt for Black Widow in the beginning since she starts SO WEAK and it took a while to start getting her covers, so I've just been selling them. Instead, I opt for gem displacement/random destruction skills in order to build my resources for high damage skills. This kind of acts as a way to keep it my turn (basically a stun) while building resources and doing damage. This tactic was made easier by the fact that I got a Loki (level 15, three stars) when my Storm and Iron Man weren't even level four - he has a five purple skill that randomly shifts fourteen gems. Unfortunately Loki covers are basically impossible to find so he's still level fifteen and I'll probably sell him soon since I got him with a 500 iso cover purchase and that's probably like a one in a thousand chance.

I just hit 450 in the ranked SHIELD training stuff and got the 100 recruit points reward tier and bought the 350 recruit point reward pack and got the level 30 Invisible Woman cover and she'll be carrying my team now instead of Loki... The cover power I got with her kind of sucks though and basically only locks four gems. Her powers are purely defensive which doesn't really suit my style, especially since the power eats 14 blue, which is 5 less than my highest damaging Iron Man power (the freon beam that does like 750 damage). Gonna sell her off when I start getting Thor covers more frequently probably.

Edit: I take it back, Invisible Woman's gem lock out power stops count down gems... so VERY useful.

[Don]

The AI favors environmental tiles, so you've an advantage over them when fighting in City because the City bonus is basically useless.

The AI also places low weight on crit tiles.

If you play the lightning round where you're likely evenly matched against the AI, you'll find yourself getting spanked a lot of the time, especially if they get the first jump on you on the enviornmental tiles. However it's worth it for the lightning round because you're looking for a quick 3 wins for a recruit token, so it's perfectly fine to have an AI spank you in 30 seconds (in fact you can just surrender once it knocked out your loaned characteR) when you can also spank it in 30 seconds when things are coming your way. On Computer Room I have rounds where did I like 5000 damage (way more than the other team had in total) after critting an environmental tile, though the reverse is also totally possible.

You want to save medpacks if you're making a push for a tournament, because at the end you will face very strong opponents and 5 heals might not be enough if you don't have spare Hero Points to burn. That only make sense if you're making a serious push for the top 10 slot. I was #4 in a touranment with 3 hours to go at 600 rating, went to sleep and woke up as top 25 and lost 102 rating points. Now the being awake part I can't help, but if I had another 10 heal packs I can definitely recover that 100 rating drop in 3 hours. Without it, you've nothing to do. I guess you can use the loaned Spiderman to heal, but it a long time to recover this way too, and of course you can screw up and accidentally kill Venom (easier to do the more powerful you are).

[Shrinweck]

Man fuck those loaned heroes sometimes.. There's more than one where the hero they give you is drastically underleveled. Sometimes that's to compensate for the 100% bonuses they give you, but most of the time there's nothing like that to help you out. I hate those spider-man powers. The only truly useful loaner that comes to mind is Hawkeye since at least he can snipe countdowns and create crits wherever he wants. I guess Thor is a decent loaner too.

I burned my spare medpacks already. I like the tournaments but I'm not shooting for top 50 spots... My 191 rank didn't even last half an hour though in the latest one, though. I kind of want that wolverine with three covers, 500 iso, and 50 hero points. With 2.5 days left I guess it's still up in the air heh.

[Don]

Keep in mind the multiplier applies to crit mod and environment damage. For example say you got a generic hero with 3 environmental damage and 3X modifier. You get a +200% boost, that means you get 9 per environmental and your crits are modified 9X. In Computer Room this means you pick up 5 environment tiles and now you have a chance of doing 9X damage which will quickly put the game away (and of course if your opponent gets that he'll totally put you away too). In fact for extra fun do a crit on environmental tile, even 2 gets you 2X9X9 = 162, and then you can spam 4 crit abilities in a row. Thankfully, the AI can only use one of the same ability once per turn. I've seen games where they've 400 environmental and even though making 10 crit tiles will pretty much kill my team more than a few times, they can still only put one crit tile, though obviously you're not living very long when they get to that point.

If you've a higher level hero than the loaned hero you'll have the option to use your hero. That said even +100% mod on a loaned 2 star is like having a level 15 hero at the very least. If you're talking about the heroics, they're just that, heroics. At the end you'll see guys at level 230 so your loaned hero isn't going to stand much of a chance. Having them at least gives you a chance to take down some of the level 40 minions along the way. That said the heroics have very good reward so you should try to push as much as you can.

I'm currently at #1 in my bracket with more than a 130 point lead on the Bad is Good tournament. I'm sure I'll drop at least 200 points by tomorrow though.

[Don]

The crit mod modifier is no longer boosted so you no longer have one round kills with the 200% boosters, so now you're probably want to do Forest if you're confident you can grab the environmental tiles better than the computer.

Got #1 in the Bad is Good tournament. I was ahead by 824 versus 823, but the 823 guy either tanked his score or got attacked. The reward for #2 is probably better (Spiderman with all 3 colors) but not like I'm in a position where I can even contemplate tanking on purpose, so I got Invisible Woman (yellow), 1000 Iso-8 and 100 HP. Honestly would rather have Spiderman but can't really complain.

[Shrinweck]

Going to give Doctor's Orders the ol' college try to see how well I can place. Tied for 7th/8th by the time I ran out of medpacks. Not expecting to do better than 50th +/- 25, but we'll see. I'm hoping I can get enough points to get all the progression rewards for Moonstone more than anything. The rank rewards don't really interest me at all in this one. TBH I'd rather have three standard one star tokens then a two star Captain America cover or two.

It's kind of sad that in a lot of cases the reward tiers are better when you get multiple covers then one, more valuable cover. I barely participated in Bad is Good so I only got like 150 iso or something.

Which Dark Avengers were you using?

[Don]

Moonstone (54) Bullseye (6) Daken (6), with Yelena (1) as backup when one of the fodder inexplicably died (usually from Moonstone being stunned).

The best team for attack would be Moonstone/Daken/Ragnarok, and defense would be Bullseye/Daken/Ragnrok (e.g. before you to go to sleep fight a guy with the defense team so everyone that isn't retaliating will go against that team instead).

The 3 star heroes are considerably better than the 2 star due to their rarity. I mean, you can now get a 2 star for 100 HP every day, so it shouldn't be that hard to fill them out eventually. The 4 star is kind of tricky because Invisible Woman isn't really that great and most people would rather have 3 covers for any 3 star, but on the other hand having a 4 star hero is kind of cool. The 4 stars do have better overall stats when you get them maxed out but their special ability is rather unexciting (maybe on purpose, otherwise it'd be too much of an advantage).

What I found is you want to just play it as soon as medpacks are up early on when relatively few people play, so you don't get attacked often. That way you can climb the rating reward. In the last 2 hours of the tournament you'll have massive falling of rating as people start to play more. Obviously you'll eventually hit a point where you can't progress depending on the quality of the hero but getting the rating based reward is pretty important. I didn't see any heroic token offered for that event so I think I'll just shoot for the 2 covers for Moonstone (I got 4/4/1).

[Don]

I saw this massive rage thread where everyone thought they were supposed to place in top 3 in The Hunt out of a bracket of 200. Well, that's literally statistically impossible. I placed around 25th and got red Punisher. I didn't spend too much effort on it since I was busy with the PvP tournaments. Got a purple/blue Spiderman (classic). Honestly, I'm finding the PvE opponents to be significantly harder than PvP. I don't know why people run classic Storm + Thor so much. I know Storm was overpowered but even back then she didn't really synergize that well with Thor since Thor's green tile creator is way expensive, and while Storm's passive used to give red APs, it's not exactly a good idea to have Storm getting hit for 20% or more of her HP at once, while it's actually pretty hard to do that much damage to Thor.

[Shrinweck]

Took some doing but I placed in the 11-25 bracket like I wanted in the weekend tournament. I could have gotten top ten (but definitely not top two), but spider-man seems pretty useless unless you're running venom and building a web team just seems too resource/time consuming for not enough of a return. I'm not super happy about three Captain America covers either though. Kind of liked the Doc Doom tournament since you could just let him soak up damage if you knew something was coming. Got the Moonstone covers I wanted and this next tournament apparently offers two more. I'm probably going to try to place top ten in this tournament if possible since the 12-75 or whatever rewards are Black Widow classic whose covers I've never even seen before and since the progression rewards seem much more rewarding than the Doc Doom tournament.

I've had some luck getting Moonstone and Thor into their teens and my standard team has become Iron Man model 35 (45), Storm modern (34 or something), and Moonstone (16). Moonstone having a purple power seems more useful than Invisible Woman who I only have one power for that I never use. I really wish I could get some Iron Man model 40 covers since he seems so much more useful but I haven't gotten a cover past for him past the first one.

[Don]

In the loaned hero tournament you obviously want the loaned guy to eat the damage if at all possible, provided you can actually win.

Spiderman is used to cut down downtime, though his abilites are pretty good even without the heal. He's got a decent stun (very cheap when leveled), and Spidersense is a great passive.

Of course it's hard to get the exact cover you want. They have to try to make money somehow. You can use HP to get covers you already have. I might be spending some money once I get Ragnarok, though my current team is good enough. I'm pretty much guaranteed to see at least 1 maxed level 1/2 characters at where I am. Fortunately I haven't seen too many high level Ragnaroks yet.

[Shrinweck]

Top ten was a pipe dream in this tournament. I was getting attacked and losing points at a much higher rate than the Doc Doom tournament. I still managed the 11-25 bracket, though. Black Widow classic's heal apparently comes in real handy. Fought a team with one that just sat back tossing that massive 300+ heal. I'll keep her around to cut down downtime, I suppose. There was a bug in the Black Widow Classic brackets where one of the covers was for modern instead. Looked on the forums and other people have had the issue, including the people in the top 75 bracket who were supposed to get the one classic cover and just got the modern. Hoping I don't have to write a ticket, so I'll just keep an eye on the thread.

[Don]

I've come to realize the computer is way better than the best human player in this game. This is why Thor is so hard to beat, simply because he has a ton of HP so he can survive long enough for the AI to make use of its massive AP stockpile. The AI certainly knows the outcome of every cascade that you can see, and I suspect it even has a good idea of the stuff that it cannot see (it probably knows the probability of the colors dropping off screen). To play against the AI, you basically have to play very defensively. What you need to do is whenever you notice the AI isn't slapping you with a 15 chain combo, this implies the state of the current board is favorable to you. At this point, you want to break your gems at the top of the board besides from obviously advantageous stuff like match 4/5, because this minimizes the change of board so the AI cannot start doing its crazy combos again. If possible, avoid fighting guys with board scrambling move like modern Storm (red/green both scramble the board). While these moves are pretty much useless when you use them, the AI has no problem seeing where the new 15 chain combo is.

About the only weakness the AI has its propensity to match environment tiles (which is why you want to play it on city), and that it generally has no idea what it's doing with the targetted tile abilities. For example, classic Magneto is way more dangerous when played by a human because you can basically perma lock your opponent with his blue (place 2 blue tiles anywhere on the board for 5 blue AP). Bizarrely, when computer uses it they won't just put an endless of self-sustaining match 4/5s even though they obviously can do it easily. When the state of the board is uncertain, you need to do the move with the maximum entropy possible, because the more shaken up the board is, the more likely you'll at least partially screw up the AI's super chain combo. Just make sure once you're certain the AI no longer has a mega chain available you avoid matching anything on the lower part of the board (because this moves the board more) unless it's obviously a good move.

[Shrinweck]

I don't know about that. The computer gets lucky matches basically the same amount I do. If it could accurately predict what was falling and act accordingly the game would be next to impossible. The AI doesn't even bother making a match that leads to another match a lot of the time. It even ignores L shaped five matches in order to make a four match. It's just lucky sometimes. Sometimes those lucky streaks get really, really frustrating, though.

High level Thors are just a character I tend to avoid. The red match skill is just too damn cheap and feeds into other skills... all of which do too much god damned damage for their utility. I avoid teams that have a Thor that's within 5-10 levels of my highest character unless the characters that are supporting him are ultra low in level.

[Don]

It knows the outcome of every cascade it can see. Even if it doesn't know the pattern you can see that the fresh tiles that drops tends to be in a favorable setup (not uncommon to see 4 of the same color dropping in a vertical line, for example). The extra turn is not always better than a straight match 4, because there are generally better cascade capabilities. At any rate even if it's not playing optimally, it really doesn't need to because the goal is not to slap the player silly.

The AI most definitely gets more 'lucky' breaks, because it is always trying to maximize the number of gems breaking. The more you break at once the more likely you'll get a crazy chain. For example the AI will always take a 4 enviornment match 4, which may not be worth much in itself, but that's 8 tiles destroyed which gives you 8 more chances for a cascade.

I find that Thor requires you to pay too much attention if he's higher level than you, because you absolutely cannot let computer get one of those crazy combos and if you're pressed for time (like Lightning rounds or even just the end of a tournament) you don't have time to study the board and the AI will beat you up with a crazy combo at some point.

[Shrinweck]

Lol you bastard give me back my No Holds Barred points :D

[Lox]

I've been playing the heck out of this one, too. I am not a puzzle game guy and I cannot stand Candy Crush, but this game has got me hooked.

[Don]

I thought that name looked familiar. Was thinking of passing but the points looked more tempting!

This game is really a RPG except the resources are generated by matching tiles.

I'm seeing Modern Storm replacing Classic Storm in the 2 star bracket. Classic Storm pretty much gets eaten up by Moonstone, but Modern Storm is a hard counter. Unless you can get a Gravity Warp before Modern Storm gets enough to do Hailstorm, Hailstorm effectively shuts down Moonstone for the rest of the game. You can try to deny the black gems but black gems tend to be worthless, even for Moonstone (Control Shift is borderline useless). Moonstone is an extremely devastating character on offense but is pretty worthless on defense, but she's the only one I have maxed out covers for. I'm thinking Classic Storm, Wolverine, and Moonstone would be a very potent 2 star team. Wolverine seems strictly better than Thor due to his regeneration and their attack power is comparable. That team would probably suck on defense but you can't win them all.

[Lox]

I'm fatmumuhomer, if you ever come across my team.

[Shrinweck]

I was going to say it wasn't a problem since I was ranked 9th in my ladder before you attacked me and I'm shooting for the 11-25 bracket again.. but I logged in at 39th after sleeping :P

Competition is a bit stiffer in the final several then the last No Holds Barred. The last one had me being really careful because everyone in the 11-25 was within a small score range so grabbing too many points would have meant one grey suit Widow as opposed to three classics.

Edit: Crawled my way back up to 14th... 150 points in a single run this late in the tournament is pretty good for me. Don and I used our Steam names so you can find me as shrinweck

[Don]

I'm phantron.

The competition always heats up at the end. It's important to build a decent cushion early on. Not only does it give you some points to fall back, but retaliation are usually worth a ton of points because I think you get back the points you lost + whatever you'd have gotten for beating that guy. For examle say I have 800 points, and I got beaten by someone with 800 points whose team is same or weaker than mine. What you can do is just wait until your score drop to 700 or even 600 since that's going to happen anyway as time passes unless you play nonstop, and now you retaliate against the guy with 800 points and you'd get like 35 points back for essentially an 'even' match. The guy can't really retaliate against you because you beat him while you're at 600 and you're considerably tougher than other 600 point guys he can find, so hopefully he'll just fight someone else instead. You don't want to get bogged down against a lower point guy who has a reasonable shot at beating you, since the odds in favor of him point-wise if he does choose to retaliate. You should either fight guys you can completely bulldoze, or guys who are ranked at about your level or higher but that are roughly an even match (so they probably won't retaliate seeing your team is strong).

[Shrinweck]

Finished #1 in the all woman tournament woohoo. I was going to just get the original black widow cover, but my rank kept going up even though I wasn't attacking anyone so I decided to make a push for #1 from #20 in the last 35 minutes. Widow's heal is so powerful that I did it without using a single healing pack, ending nearly all of the fights at full health. Got hit three times in the final five minutes, falling to the #3 position, and attacked someone for 19 points in the last few minutes and I managed to pull the win out of my ass. I'm going to guess the two people ahead of me got attacked, as well.

Team was a 55 original Black Widow (started the tournament at 47ish), 50 modern Storm, and a 45 Moonstone. Kind been leaving Moonstone behind a bit since her powers are MAJORLY situational and her colors slightly overlap with Widow.

Ugh this next tournament.. I'd forgotten that every jerk has an ultra high level Thor. I hope I can at least get those wolverine covers.

[Don]

I got clobbered at the last 10 minutes, went from like 3rd to top 20 even though I won enough matches for 100 points in that timespan.

In the Black Widow tournament, just do original BW, your most powerful character, and Classic Hawkeye in the forest (and original BW can only be in the forest). You can basically setup an infinite combo once you get 8 purple AP by using Take Aim to form 3 environmental tiles for about 80 environmental damage, which will get you on average 8 purple AP (and every other color) back to repeat the it until you've 30 AP of everything else and then just totally own the other team. However, crit tiles have priority in matching tiles other than environmental, so you've to be somewhat careful there. I'm running level 61 BW, level 85 Wolverine, and level 1 Hawkeye. I guess I can technically level him up, but it actually doesn't matter because Hawkeye is useless on defense and on offense, all he has to do is hide back there and do Take Aim. It's not like he'll ever match any tiles. I guess I should get him up in case I'm matched up against Classic Storm and accidentally triggered her counter. The game is basically over as soon as you hit 8 purple AP because most of the time you can just go into an infinite combo until you have 30 AP of everything but purple and the worst case scenario usually means it'll take one more turn to kill them (because you had to flip some tile to do a match 4 enviornmental on a crit). That said I'm sure people look at the presence of Hawkeye and figure you're an easy kill so perhaps you need to switch out at the very end to hold your ranking. This combo can literally defeat any arbitarily strong team as long as you can manage 8 purple AP before they kill you.

There was one fight I did a Forest Fire and had like 25 red tiles on board that are all strike tiles. My normal hits are like 2500 damage.

Thor really isn't nearly as intimidating as he looks. Wolverine pretty much owns him just fine unless he gets an extremely good drop. You just can't be careless while matching tiles, and pretty much have to play to deny as opposed to matching your colors.

[Don]

I've noticed that Modern Storm is ridiculously good when used by a computer. Invariably when they use the 5 red AP Mistress of the Storm they go on to a super combo and then you die horribly. In fact Modern Storm is also the only character in this tournament that can stop Moonstone's Gravity Warp, which is by far the most efficient damaging ability available in this cast of characters (Grey Suit BW needs wayyyyyyy too many APs to do anything). People still cling on to their level 85 Classic Storm which is pretty much Moonstone fooder. By the time you've 8 purple AP, the enemy's Clasisc Storm is going to be halfway dead and then you kill her with Gravity Warp and watch the opposing team's blue AP is now totally useless since nobody in this roster can make good use of it (even if they've OBW she'll just use heal as soon as she takes any damage which is a total waste).

[Don]

So far I'm enjoying this game with the exception of the Lightning Round. Basically, you have no chance of actually doing well in them unless people are all asleep or at work, because your team is never going to be able to compete against the level max villians that can often one hit kill weaker members of your 2 star team when all the villians are boosted 200%. Of course, two of the most powerful characters in the game are villians (Ragnarok and Magneto). With the addition of shields, at least you can try to shield around 15th or so and hope it will last. Prior to that, you literally have no chance. The Lightning Round needs to be reworked because it's just not fun.

It's also pretty sad that you see the guys with 3 maxed *** characters that religiously tank so that they show up in your 2 star bracket. I can't imagine how hard you'd have to be at tanking to actually hit a 2 star bracket with a maxed Ragnarok, who can probably take out a team of max level 2 star characters by himself. Even the computer on defense can do a ton of damage with Ragnarok, and humans aren't limited to the 'no repeated ability in a turn' rule that the AI has.

Right now I'm almost done with Spiderman so far as heroes go, and he's pretty much the only one that matters (the other guys have their uses but none are really comparable to the villian powerhouses). I got all the villians minus Dr. Doom, and exactly 2 cover all the villians I have. I guess I should start saving up to either upgrade Magneto's blue, or buy a Diabolical Token.

[Don]

Major nerf to Ragnarok pretty much put an end of the Thunderclap first round kill. The guys who paid several hundred dollars for Raganarok (who previously swear they didn't spend any money on this game) seem to be all quitting the game en masse, which bodes well for the game's future in a simple addition by subtraction deal.

Honestly anyone who can't tell 2 AP Thunderclap wasn't grossly overpowered shouldn't even be allowed to play a video game.

[Shrinweck]

Lol yay Ragnarok was annoying. I've finally been hitting a stride again the last couple days with this game. It was getting a little old for the last week or two. I wasn't progressing hardly at all with who I wanted and iso felt like it was getting annoying to get, but the Aries event is a nice addition as opposed to what I was worried about - ANOTHER Hulk event.

I've never really been able to bother with lightning rounds since I don't have any villains besides Moonstar. I've started keeping a few Hood covers around, but I'm not holding my breathe for getting enough covers to actually start using him.

I got top four in that one tournament that rewarded iron man model 40 covers, but three covers (in addition to the one I had) only means max level thirty, which just isn't doing anything for me. These days I'm using Thor (mid 50s), Black Widow classic (got her up to 71 or 72), and Moonstar who has been at 45 for weeks, even though I have enough covers to get her to 60-something. I sold my model 35 Iron Man and modern Storm since 10k isotope seemed more useful than keeping them around. I miss Storm, but Thor's direct damage and hit points just make him more useful than she was.

I just need one more black power cover for Widow and a couple more for Thor (I don't really care about which ones I get with him, I have max red and ideally the last two would be yellow, but it isn't a priority) to get them to maximum power. I'm considering bumping Moonstone for Wolverine (two star), but I'm not even going to bother thinking about that until I've maxed out Thor and Widow. I'm a good 40k isotope from that even being a notion to get into my head.

[Don]

Moonstone isn't one of the featured villians in Lightning Round. The featured villians of the Lightning Round are The Hood, Dr. Doom, Magneto (classic), Ragnarok, and Loki. They get +200% to all their stats. You literally just die on second turn against Ragnarok in a LR if you don't have any villians on your side pre nerf. Remember, the AI cannot use the same skill twice in one turn, but a human certainly have no problem doing that. Even a base level 15 villian is comparable to a level 50-60 character in Lightning Round.

Wolverine has very good synergy with Original Black Widow, but OBW dies really easily. Thor/Wolverine/OBW seems to be the new rage but I can actually beat that team quite easily, because you can usually drop OBW before she does Aggressive Recon, and the blue/purple/black tiles she has collected is useless for the rest of her team. I guess this team will be okay on offense. Wolverine needs 5 green covers to be really powerful.

The first cover of a hero don't give much levels. After that you get like 10 levels or so per cover on a ***.

D3 announced that Wolverine and Thor are going to be changed (likely made weaker). Spiderman and Magneto (classic) are also on the list. Invisible Woman and Wolverine (X-Force) will probably be buffed, and Modern Hawkeye probably buffed.

[Shrinweck]

I know I was just saying that Moonstone was my only villain. OBW does a little better if you don't over level her aggressive recon and her heal can fuck up your day if you're on the wrong side of it, but yeah teams that have her around are generally not that bad to take out. But I'd rather have her zeroing out my downtime then just about any other hero.

[Shrinweck]

Man these Ares tournaments are bogus. It's like an I love you letter to people who give them money. If the game just ends up being them introducing new characters and then running tournaments based on them then I'm just going to stop playing. Especially since this shield shit makes hitting top five basically impossible without shelling out money on every tournament. The people at the head of the pack are just going to get more and more powerful while we crawl around for scraps. I already do that enough in real life. A buffed high level Ares basically isn't even worth fighting against. At least model 40 needed like 20 blue to blow my team apart with its buffed ass.

The events are cool and kind of fun, but immediately starting a tournament buffing the character you GET from the event is just annoying.

[Don]

Ares is buffed +175% as opposed to Iron Man 40 which was +100%. He's also meant to be a DPS character instead of tank, which is why all his ability tends to hurt himself in some way. Of course, it's kind of hard to tell that when he has 10K HP from the general boosts and him missing 2K HP to kill one of your guy in one hit isn't a big deal.

I started out late in this tournament because I didn't have Ares cover but now I"m up to 1200. Not sure if I'll want to push for 2400 this time around.

Shields give players with a ton of play time a huge advantage. It's not really P2W, or rather even if you were handed unlimited amount of shields to use for a tourament, you're not going to get anywhere close to the guy with 2000+ rating unless you're playing for like 5 hours in a row multiple times.

[Shrinweck]

Now instead of people at #1 having 1-200 more than me at the most it's over a thousand. That's bullshit. It's beta so I'm not going to throw a fit, but they need to tweak the system. Not saying shields shouldn't be in the mix but it's giving people a HUGE advantage. The point differential is insane. The difference in points between the #10 position and the #11 position was two hundred points in my ladder. People who drop 5+ hours at a time into the game are already going to be top three in a tournament. They took the fun out of vying for the top three spots out of the game and replaced it with certainty bought by using ingame currency.

Any excitement you can bring to a Bejeweled knock off should be kept at any cost.

[Don]

They're increasing the price of shields (double) which should curb some, and also they're making highly rated people can always be seen by people.

What's happening right now is that you have a few guys who just all hit a very high rating early by playing a ton (say, 1000+ while poeple are still in the 400 range). At this point, they can only see each other because they're the only guys with that kind of rating, and nobody else can see them. So they just throw up a shield and put a level 1 team there so the other guys repeatly beat them down for free points. It's basically win-trading and you'll never catch up to those guys since they're getting their points off other players of similar rating that put up a level 1 team on purpose. Though, even if they didn't do that, just the fact that people with super high rating can't be seen anyone else makes it very safe they'll hold their rating. This is no longer the case. I had no luck getting past 1200 today when people with 400 rating can see me and nail me for a -50 every time.

With the new changes, it should be impossible to stay at top unless you're spending like 400 HP X 3 to stay shielded for 3 days (anyone with this kind of HP is surely maxed on all covers except the 4 stars, and even for 4 stars, it's only 2500 for one so spending 1200 HP for not necessarily a guaranteed cover is risky), and even then it's pretty hard to get ahead even in the initial blitz now that high rating no longer prevents you from being seen. Further, even if guys are putting level 1 tanks to help their friends, this also means anyone else can still see those level 1 teams so you can get a free 50 points.

The Ares tournament is pretty insane. He's pretty much a bulldozer. I got off a 4500 Rampage, which is enough to wipe out most normal teams at full health. Of course, Ares is also boosted so that wasn't enough to take him out and everyone else was dead already, but still, even for boosted characters, that's pretty crazy.

[Don]

One thing I noticed is that this game's message board community gets my vote for literally the dumbest group of individuals. I don't mean they're dumb as in they're anything particularly uninsightful to say. It's hard to stand out by just being dumb like that on the Internet. The thing is that beyond the usual Internet dumb stuff, none of those guys are willing to admit that they're secretly putting a lot of money into this game. So if you're not paying money for this game, why would any dev care what you have to say? If you're somehow able to place well without paying money, you're likely the worst kind of customer for a game modeled like MPQ. "I spent big money so I should own the peasants" is actually a very good argument, one that most devs of freemium game would agree with you. The hilarious thing is that from the Ragnarok nerf it's pretty clear people spent hundreds of dollars trying to get him, but none are willing to admit it until he was nerfed.

It's actually pretty hilarious people talking about how awesome they're at games because they always win all their game, and then see them come around crying about how they're always getting smacked by other players. Well, if everyone always win their games, that's the same as everyone always losing their games too in a game like MPQ. This community's problem is pretty much all self-inflicted but are too stupid to realize it and they still can't stop talking about it and citing all the wrong reasons for it.

There was a post from a guy saying "How am I going to continue play this game if I can't win by turn 2" that got a ton of support. I thought it was supposed to be sarcastic, and then I realized it wasn't. That guy was crying about how taking 7 turns to win is taking way too long (and he's obviously making this up, because you can't win in 7 turns after the Ragnarok nerf outside of truly awesome starts combined with boosts). I also see a lot of imaginary gameplay for PvE with the guys saying they grind the level 240X3 missions down to 0 but somehow never come anywhere near top 100 in the sub-bracket. If you can even do that mission 5 times, you'd have to try really hard to not place in top 5. I won my sub bracket earlier with about 6 total clears of the 240X3. If you actually attempted those missions you'll know there's no way you can reliably beat them in the post Ragnarok nerf era. Even with a maxed Spiderman, you're still talking about 3 guys that can often kill you in one move and there isn't enough blue tiles to keep all 3 stunned.

[M'k'n'zy]

I I've been playing this a lot lately myself. I use black widow modern a lot for that ridiculous stun for only 9 blue. I also use iron man, Thor, and a few others.

[Don]

Modern Black Widow is pretty good against the one man team, which happens a surprisingly a lot of time, especially on boosted character tournaments. Spiderman is strictly better but he takes a long time to get to the point where he is that good.

There's an impending nerf on Thor and Wolverine. The current tourament might as well be Thor's farewell tour. He's pretty much the only person that matters out of the 6 buffed heroes, though Classic Storm is still annoying if you fall asleep and let her get 11 blues.

[M'k'n'zy]

Ranked 18 right now on the current part of the maggia campaign can't really go higher without characters I don't have our facing a team of level 120s

[Don]

Enter a fight and retreat and do this over and over and it will lower the level of the opponents in all missions. You should do this where they loan you a hero since that guy never actually takes any damage. The effect appears to be random so it might take a while to see the levels drop. Obviously don't do this with anyone you plan to use (unless you're done for the day).

My fights were all level 230 and it took me about 80 retreats before they got to more sane levels. The final mission is pretty much guaranteed to be at level 230, but everything else can drop to something reasonable.

[M'k'n'zy]

Finished last roun in 28th. Not as hopeful this time around. The group with three maggia thugs is bs and I don't have the characters for others. Hoping for anywhere in the top 50

[Shrinweck]

That Punisher tournament finally got me the last two Thor covers I needed to max him out and I saved up 7k iso to pump into him once I got them. I also recently got the covers to max out two star wolverine and I still can't seem to find the one last black cover I need for classic Widow. It's a nice little team I've put together that doesn't seem to get attacked in tournaments anywhere near as often as the one I had a few weeks ago. And I can't see a nerf to Thor and Wolverine hurting me as long as Widow ties the team together with her heal.

[M'k'n'zy]

Finished that last maggia round in 18th. The muscle units are such bull there is almost no way to stop them from getting all that bs off especially if there are more than one of them.

[Shrinweck]

Yeah I ranked somewhere similar (#10 an hour before it ended but I had stuff to do so I don't know where I ended up other than in the top 25). Got a three star spider-man cover with the recruitment token that I'm debating keeping, although it would mean giving up one of my lowbie characteers: two cover hulk, one cover punisher, or one cover Dr Doom.

Widow's heal comes in real handy in those maggia fights since it also adds like 4-5 turns on each timer on the board.

These new tournaments that you have to pay to get into are an interesting addition... but at that cost I can't see ever entering one.

[Don]

Thor and Wolverine going to be nerfed:

http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2636

The muscule fight you should just quit if you can't stop their Tommy Gun from resolving, because it's going to do way more damage than whatever you take for retreating.

Dying also is roughly as effective as retreating enough times to get the same character down. If the missions are too hard remember to periodically send all your scrub characters to their doom.

I'm thinking of entering that tournament but not sure how well the placement is going to be. If you place top 1000 you roughly break even since you get 2000 iso8 + 3 heroic token (which cost 300 HP, but is probably not the best use of 300 HP). It's hard to tell how many people are in the tournament though but I heard it was 2K earlier the day and I can't imagine it going up that much, due to the cost.

I haven't entered the tournament but I'm studying the top 10 board and seems like getting there would be pretty hard. I'll probably still go for it as long as top 10 didn't get past 600 rating.

[Shrinweck]

Thor and Wolverine going to be nerfed:

The nerfs are barely that and I can't see taking advantage of selling them. And it's not like I have a ton of two star characters with high maximum levels to put my isotope into. Widow, Wolverine, Thor, and Moonstone are the only covers I have enough of to approach the max level. Nerf or not, I'm putting my isotope into Wolverine and Thor (since I have Widow capped at 77 until a black cover makes it my way.. I've thrown out like five fucking purple ones). Hell, the nerfs will probably help me because I'll probably get to attack teams with high level Thor again, getting to worry less about having him get a lucky cascade and one hitting everyone on my team. Actually Wolverine has always been a pretty easy kill as part of a defensive team since I've always had to go after reds to feed Iron Man's repulsor or Thor's Mjolnr's thingy. Not that much hp.. as long as you have a skill to overwhelm his heal.

I think the changes are great. Thor should be about tanking and morphing the board to suit your needs. The damage for the cost was just stupid. Wolverine's green attack was just ridiculous and the heal sometimes made him impossible to damage until you had a skill to point at him. I'm less experienced with him so I don't know what he 'should' be but the nerfs to him aren't going to hurt me much either. And if they do I'll just sell him at the temporary rate and dump his isotope into Moonstone.

The only other character I have several covers for is Ares and I'm not crazy about him. I'm not crazy about characters that put countdown tiles on the board. Since I only have enough covers for him to max level at 45, I'm probably going to sell him in a couple weeks if more covers don't come my way. Since I have two star characters approaching their cap it feels like I should start working on three star covers rather than dwelling in two star purgatory. I'm 95% certain I could have a max level two star Captain America by now from the covers I've thrown out, but all his countdown stuff (and a blue power that conflicts with the Widow heal) makes me not care for him. I feel like I've gotten three Captain America covers for every Thor cover I've gotten.

[M'k'n'zy]

Honestly I'm surprised I've been able to rank as high as I have lately as I don't have a single character over level 29. Also with no patch wolverene and no amazing spider man of my own I haven't been able to even do all the missions. But I do only have about two weeks into it so I'm sure I'll get stronger with time.

[Don]

The game matchups you with opponents fielding similar level of teams whenever possible, though the drawback is that you don't necessarily place any better as you level up since your opponents keep pace with you.

The nerf to Thor/Wolverine just stops them from dominating 2* and even 3*. Other than Magneto classic (who is broken but not common seen due to his rarity) those two are the strongest offensive character in the game. Yes, Spiderman is pretty broken too, but he has no offensive capability by himself.

Thor simply did way too much damage for being a tank. His skill hits harder than glass cannon 2*. Usually 12r or 6r 6y (which you can start with boosts) can immediately kill someone as long as the board is relatively loaded with yellow (Mjoinir, cascade into yellow, then Thunder Strike). I always thought his skill should be used defensively, like you're supposed to use them to change the board when you got no good moves, or worse yet you know any move you make gives the opponent a match 4/5 next so you want to mix it up. He can also get lucky and nail Recharge/Sunder tiles with Mjolinar.

Feral Claws was simply the strongest green skill in the game by far. It's pretty much the most damaging green skill in the game even if you use it with 0 red AP unless you're horribly unlucky and immediately destroyed your own strike tile. It's common to simply blanket the screen with strike tiles and then every match 3 hits for 1K. Note that the strike tile bonus is added to the cascades after the multiplier penalty. That is, normally your damage for cascade is like 100%, 75%, 60%, 50%, and so on (not exact, roughly), but with strike tiles it's 100% + bonus, 75% + bonus, and so on, which means even cascades that'd normally do trivial damage still hits extremely hard.

Wolverine's regeneration is more of an issue on offense. He basically can tank forever on offense and nothing besides special moves will put a dent on his HPs. On defense this means you can't attack him until you've build up strike tiles, stuns, or enough AP to unload enough damage at once. It's not a huge balance issue but it's just kind of dumb how Wolverine was also the best 2* tank. It just seems unresaonable that you've to treat him like a tank when he's not supposed to be one.

[M'k'n'zy]

Just pulled off a near miracle and took out the final mission against a level 81 hood and magneto. I used black widow modern and wolverine along with the storm classic they saddle you with. It was close but widows stun lock saved the day.

[Don]

They actually removed Magnetic Translocation from Magneto or he'd just one hit kill anybody when he has 10 purple and that'd be pretty cruel.

The Hood sure is a nasty character with his AP steal ability, even if he doesn't do much damage on his own.

[M'k'n'zy]

Yeah he is. I have gotten lucky and gotten a lot of covers for existing characters lately, which is good at least. I am currently sitting in 4th for the current event though I don't expect that to last. I am also sitting in the mid 70s for the main event, gotta build that back up.

[Don]

Recent patch nerfed Thor and Wolverine. +3 AP boost are now 100 HP so don't continue to take them like drug addict (like I do).