**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
Whenever I am in content with random nodes, like Incursions or random node side quests, I occasionally run into node combinations like Tyranny when the defender is a hero and essentially the defender is just not ever going to have any power. Those fights remind me why the devs are hesitant to release Magik as a 6*. It will happen eventually to be sure, but it isn't going to happen just because. Someone is going to have to decide that the problems she creates for the content designers is worth it.
Until then, people can claim she and Quake are not problems, but the fact that people keep asking for them is proof that they aren't trivial additions. If they were just any old champ, people would ask, the answer would be no, and the players would move on. People keep asking, because they *know* what the impact of those champs would be.
The content designers know what they would have to do to accommodate those champs, they don't want to do that right now, and that's the end of that. There's no argument that will convince them that the problems they think are problems are not actually problems. You could sooner convince me bean sprouts are delicious in spite of the fact I find them repulsive. If you love them, great. When you cook, you use them. I'm not gonna, and you can't make me.
Fundamentally, that's why Magik and Quake aren't released as 6* champs yet. It is a matter of judgment and opinion, not an objective decision you could argue against.
We already have better dmg dealers than magik and quake in the current 5 star pool, as I mentioned Herc, Doom and Valk, and Claire earlier.
I think being able to fight a match in quake style and convert it into long duration fight should not be the reason to Hold back a character while having other high dmg dealing champs.
Magik isn’t in the 6* pool because she is one of a small number of champions who can take almost any defender in the game and turn them into a potato. 100% power lock uptime is an incredible piece of utility that completely shuts down a huge amount of defensive threats.
Now, it can for sure be played around. A simple tenacity node would render her unreliable since her power lock is a debuff. Or a power lock immunity node. Those nodes have knock-on effects though and make other champions less viable unnecessarily. That’s why I’m not sure she’d be fundamentally game breaking, but I can understand why she’s not a champion release priority as a 6*.
Quake, on the other hand, would be straight up bad for the health of the game. I remember Elsa players being distraught with the influx of true strike nodes because it turned off one of the best parts of her kit. I remember the true focus debacle for Ghost making it impossible for me to play Silver Surfer. Power Lock is a fairly niche and uncommon game play mechanic, but evade is extremely common even as an attacker and having to combat that from the Dev side means harming a lot of player-favorite champions. A lot of people love using Spider-Gwen against unblockable special throwing opponents. If 6* Quake were in the game, I guarantee you that defender would have some kind of counter to evade built in and now Spider-Gwen suffers.
I use Gwen as the example, but there are so many more that could just as easily fit there. Conversely, the proliferation of true strike nodes would make Spider-Man 2099 absolutely busted because he’d always have 75% damage reduction (Nova would also get 70% but… I don’t think that’s enough to make people who don’t like him play him). The point is that Quake coming back into mainstream usage would have more collateral impact than the Dev team is willing to deal with and I don’t blame them for that.
For example, messing with Herc’s buff acquisition and maintenance dramatically reduces his effectiveness. Same is true for most cosmics and so it makes sense for a fight that is supposed to be challenging for a cosmic attacker. Same deal with Kitty, the things that mess her up mess up a lot of mutants, aka punishing prowess acquisition and reducing special attack potency.
That’s not the case for champs like Quake and Magik. The best counters to Magik are things that make her power lock fail like tenacity or reduced ability accuracy, which are things that hit across the board, not just the mystic class. For Quake, you need to prevent evasion (which frequently has knock-on implications for either miss or auto-block as well, depending on the node). This, again, carves out a huge swath of champions outside of the science class.
I hope this makes sense because I’ve been rambling for a while. The design team likes to make content that leans in one direction or another along the class wheel, but Magik and Quake both buck the wheel entirely.
Quake can shut down a big majority of BS node combinations without even touching the opponent. That is stupidly overpowered. Think about how many lanes in act 6 you came across that had a 200% energize with defenders like Dormammu and Thing, and some other bs node like Aspect of Death where getting hit by the sp3 is an instant KO. Quake trivializes those fights. In fact, Quake trivializes a lot of fights.
Same thing happens with Magik. Once you get to the sp2 you can keep the opponent power locked and at 0 power for the rest of the fight and it just becomes a braindead fight at that point.
Now you take that utility and combine it with the stats of a maxed out 6* and you have 2 game-breaking champions and the only way to stop them is to either target them specifically (and once again what's the point of getting a champion if I can't use them in relevant content?) or add nodes that will affect other champions across the board.
And we also have him as 6star in game. Dude is 'The Over powered champ' in game till date.
How is magik a game breaker character and Doom is not?
Magik is better at it than he is. Arguably, the only champ ever better at this than Magic was broken Gwenpool, and she was nerfed because "better than Magik" was totally broken.
Doom doesn't actually have a lot of power control. He can power steal while his aura is up, but that requires using either SP1 or SP3. He can't keep the aura up indefinitely unless he himself is getting a lot of power, which typically requires feeding mystic dispersion at a high tier or eating a lot of opponent power gain buffs.
Magik just needs to get to SP2, and its all over. She has both power lock and power drain, and while technically speaking her power lock is not 100%, her 85% power lock is per hit so her two hits of SP2 combine to have a 98% chance to apply at least one power lock. The combination of power lock *and* power drain on SP2 combines to not just lock power, but reduce whatever power the target has, so even if they get lucky and escape the lock, the odds are pretty good they won't have any power and you can just reapply it.
Magik power lock is a fire and forget mode. Experts can do amazing things with Limbo. I am not an expert, but I was in a BG fight with Magik where I couldn't power lock the target (they were shaking off the lock) and I lost control of the fight. But I did get to SP2 before the defender got to SP3 and used it, then the defender slammed me with his SP3 and knocked me down to about 2% health, and then what do you know, Limbo brought me right back to 100%. And I don't even know what the heck I'm doing. Imagine Magik in the hands of an actual expert.
Doom is not a better version of Magik. Doom is what developers who are afraid of Magik let us have instead.
What do you do?
I faced a 5 star magik with my 6 star rank 5 doom and lost 40% of my health to limbo.