PRE 12.0 Champs
AwesomeKyloRen
Member Posts: 76 ★
I joined in March of last year and have been addicted to this game since. But whenever I browse Youtube or look at these forums, I always here about the nefarious 12.0 update. I have always wondered why 12.0 is so infamous, so I ask of you kindly, what happened in 12.0? Specifically, how were the god-tiers Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, Thor, and I think Black Widow nerfed in 12.0 and how they were like before. Really appreciate your replies, if any. Really just looking for how these (and other champs I probably can't think up off the top of my head) were like before 12.0.
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Thor had Unlimited armour break, not capped at 2. This meant he could one shot alliance quest mini bosses in a matter of seconds with insane damage
Scarlet witch had increased stun chance and duration, power lock chance and duration, regen chance and potency. You could stun lock and power lock a champ if you were lucky for minutes on end, and regen was so often that you could be 1% health back up to full in a ten hit combo
Dr strange had 7 second buffs, not 9 second, his fury was better, his armour buff was 0 damage on block and his health steal was based on damage dealt, not a flat rate. If you sp2 on fury and armour break then health steal. Each health steal hit could give you a couple thousand Hp.
Strange and Thor were hit the hardest. Strange is almost useless now and Thor is decent but not good for end game content. Witch is still awesome, as shown by a 4-40 completing act 5. Widow is around, but not used much.
The biggest math change was diminishing returns, basically a mathematical way to change how different abilities "added up." Pre-12.0 it was possible for many kinds of abilities to add up to values that escalated their value very fast. For example, different things that added to critical chance could increase critical chance to a very high value very quickly. In 12.0, certain values like most of the stats involving percentages were altered so they could no longer add up to 100% or even come close. 50% plus 50% was no longer 100%, but a lower value. This caused *everything* to be reduced in strength by at least some amount. That's all champions everywhere. But some champions were affected more than others - champs that used this kind of "add 'em up" abilities or just intrinsically reliled upon having a very high stat in one area rather than lower stats in multiple areas were hit harder in general.
On top of this, certain very strong champions were nerfed in targeted and different ways. Dr. Strange, for example, had his healing changed so that originally he healed for a fraction of the damage he dealt - hit harder, heal more - to just a flat amount of healing per attack. This dramatically reduced his healing and the way people played the champ. Dr. Strange was extremely "tanky" pre-12.0 because his block and armor were very strong (these were reduced by the change to mechanics above, not directly nerfed) and his healing was so strong he could heal back almost his entire health bar very quickly. Post 12.0, he wasn't anywhere close to being as indestructible.
Scarlet Witch was hit twice: once by the change to mechanics which reduced everyone's chance to critical hit and also by directly reducing her chances to trigger some of her effects, regeneration and stun in particular. The combination of the two effects significantly reduced her strength: although she is still strong now, her original strength was far stronger because there was a fundamental difference between high and low chance to proc these effects. When the chances are low, like they are now, they increase SW's survivability in a fight. But when they are high like they could be in 11.0, you could reach a point where SW was stunning so often and healing so often that the enemy was basically turned into a statue and your healing was on constantly. The difference between stunned 80% of the time and 100% of the time is not about twenty more percentage points, it is the difference between an easy fight with something that can only sometimes fight back and a ridiculous one with a mannequin.
Thor was also hit twice: once by direct nerf and once by mechanics. In some ways he was potentially hit the hardest. Basically, Thor can only stack two armor breaks whereas before he could stack an unlimited number. And today armor break works differently. Stacking armor breaks today has a more or less linear effect. In 11.0 it was multiplicative. In other words, if you apply 100% armor break, you double damage. Apply two of those, and you get triple damage. Apply three, which you can't do anymore, you'd theoretically get quadruple damage - 4x (and yes, I'm ignoring the effects of DR and negative armor for this explanation). In 11.0, the first one doubled damage, the second one doubled again - to 4x - and the third one doubled again - to 8x. There's a youtube video out there where someone managed to stack 5 breaks and get 32x damage. That's not a typo: thirty-two times damage per hit. Yeah, that doesn't happen anymore.
There were other changes, to Black Widow, to Captain America, and to other parts of the game. And I'm skipping many details to the changes for simplicity. But this is a reasonable summary of how dramatic some of the changes were.
Also it did cripple large swaths of synergies including things like crit chance and damage, armor, block+, and various others.
As flat values were also added which no longer stacked with nodes in terms of regeneration. It used to be that Regeneration was ABSURD! Everyone from Red Deadpool to Ultron to The Arc Overload ability was rather hard to fight without guillotine. This was because teen used to go off modified health.
Ultron’s regen used to be “self repair 25% when dropping below 50% and 25% health”
Now that only REALLY means 25% when you’re using him. But in war when you could huge ISO boost and Stun immune and let’s say after nodes had a health of 100k he’d regen 25k at 50% and 25% health making him and other regen fights challenging. However now it is always based off Unmodified health unless the node increases the regen amount.
This also means that Arc-Overlaod 2.0 SIM (Superior Iron Man SIM2.0) and Maestro were nerfed as well as Immunity RedPool in RttL.
Further more they spat in long term players faces by nerfing the juggernaut boss in 4.3 story mode making that chapter FAR easier as it used to be on par with Maestro in terms of difficulty
However, it didn’t break the game. I still enjoy the game as much, if not more than before. New god tier champs came out, replacing the old, I love the new modes. I wish they hadn’t have hit Thor, strange and widow so hard.
I think there was too much fuss over it (from myself included) but I guess if there hadn’t been, maybe things would be much different. Maybe kabam wouldn’t have realised how bad it was to the community. Who knows. I think it’s a good thing that it happened, looking back Thor and witch could steamroll anything, which just meant all new content was ridiculously hard trying to combat those god tier so the ones without just had no chance.
Before anyone moans at me, it’s just my opinion and yes I had each one of the god tier, duped and 5-50. I just hope that kabam don’t write themselves into a corner with blade, spark and Gr where they feel they have to nerf them. It would just show how little they learned
My recollection is that healing from base health predates 12.0. It isn't connected to the introduction of flat stats. Healing percentages are not a flat stat or affected by diminishing returns.
The Willpower and Leadership (aka perfect block) changes were definitely before 12.0. I think they arrived somewhere in the summer of 2016, while 12.0 was an early 2017 thing.
Doctor Strange
Cycles take longer, power gain slower, armor and fury weakened, and life steal is on life support (lol)
Thor
Massive Armor break nerf. I recall people ACTUALLY succeeding with killing RoL WS in 10 hits. Capped at 2 opposed to infinite (or as many as the durations of armor break and Stun would allow). Severely weakened armor break.
Scarlet Witch
If I recall her signature went up to 100% which means ALL her buffs and debuffs used to be far more common. Also crippled her regen to almsot no chance to activate.
Black Widow
Flat values required her attack largely as precision and cruelty aren’t as effective. Signature at max went from 100.02% to 85% (no class relations). Was later patched to include +/- 15% when fighting science or mutant respectively.
Bonus round:
Negative Armor (when armor break exceeds what the original armor was) is no longer as effective. Combined with flat values Iron Fist no longer has reliable Armor Break stacks and his ability to roll the enemy into “Negative Armor” isn’t as impressive.
Armor Break no longer enhances bleed. 2* Thor (for example) could kill max 4* in arena or duels if the 4* had Double Edged Sword. This slightly effected GwenPool (but not really)
Ghost Rider had a reduced life steal as well but not as bad as Doctor Strange.
Well, there's a lot that changed due to player complaints that would not likely have changed without it that we are still living with today. We aren't really living in a post 12.0 world, we are living in a post 12.0.1 world. Although Kabam didn't completely reverse any nerf or game change, they did dramatically dampen many of them. For example, critical resistance was zeroed out due to player complaints, and it is still a very rare thing. Without player complaints who knows how long Parry would have remained broken (it was originally a normal block bonus and thus subject to DR, which meant that overall Parry had almost no actual effect for many champs who were already at the diminishing returns end of the curve, like Captain America). And while they didn't reverse the nerfs, they did soften the nerfs on Black Widow, Dr. Strange, and Thor (who in 12.0 could only apply one armor break).
At the end of the day, I think the 12.0 protests didn't quite do enough to add transparency to Kabam. They *still* haven't actually fulfilled their promise to document all of the 12.0 mechanics changes. The only person that has ever mentioned the mechanical changes to armor break on the official forums is apparently me, and they've changed it twice since 12.0 without change notes in direct defiance of their promise to never do that again. But I think the protests did serve to at least slow Kabam down, and that deceleration probably did give them enough time to consider better some of the changes they were probably originally going to make.
And Kabam decided to troll players by capping StarLord’s combo bonus at 400 hits (this doesn’t even come into play in the Labyrinth so we assume they were just having fun and wanted to leave us 1 OG god)
I understood exactly why Thor, SW and DS were nerfed. They made the game out of balance -- I remember the first time I got killed by a Thor who parried me, then L2'd me, in an AW.
For 11,000 health.
As a 3-star.
Stuff like that makes the game one of the haves and have-nots, and while this game has always had that running through its meta, at some point, you have to be able to even characters out to some degree. Some will always be better than others -- and I want that. I don't want, say, I don't know...Captain America to feel the same as Thor, damage-wise. It's OK to have characters on a spectrum.
I like variety and utility, interesting mechanics, more than just total DPS and cheat mechanics that were never intended to work as Thor's armor breaks did.
I think, post-12.0, overall the game is more balanced. I don't love every single change -- Thor and DS were hit too hard, and even their adjustments didn't mitigate that. DS...it's tough seeing him how he is now.
But at the same time...I feel like a skilled player can do good things with a lot of characters in the game. There are various rankings out there that classify them online, but I always encourage people to ignore that stuff and test each character thoroughly. You might find that some characters "feel better" to you than others, that their animations and abilities fit how you think, better than others.
For example: Intercepting. It doesn't matter if Character X is the greatest ever if, in some content, you don't intercept well with them. For me, I intercept better with Winter Soldier than Archangel. So it does me no good to run Archangel in high-damage content if I am gonna miss one I would've nailed with Winter Soldier, then die. Stuff like that.
I guess that's my point: I feel, post-12.0, like there is some value to skill. It's still not better than having a high-DPS character than you are fluid with. But it's better than it was.
Truthfully, I wouldn't mind if Kabam introduced some of the changes they intended, the armor piercing kind of stuff, on a limited basis so we could see if the differentiation between characters would grow. I wouldn't mind a character who is a more skilled fighter in comics lore, like an Iron Fist, doing more damage in a fight at a fundamental base, than, say...Loki. Know what I mean? I think that's the biggest thing I would like to see, going forward: Characters that truly feel different based on their comics lore.
The end result for SW, BW, SL and Thor is that they are still good (but DS is a shadow of his old self). However, what you see now in the game actually arrived in 12.1, as a repair after 12.0 overnerfed them and messed up various mechanics. It was a huge mess at the time, but we got through it and the MCOC community stayed strong.
Yeah but look at everyone using star lord in LoL. I’d say the majority use him, and not many fights with a 5* rank 4 go over 400 hits
There is a content that survives Star Lord 1000 Combos? Is it visible only to very end game players? Lol....400 Combo cap was a joke really...If you reach 400 combo with Star Lord....That's bye bye everything...
Word to the wise - they will always find a way to counter perceived 'god' champs, or simply nerf them as they "aren't working as intended".
My poor Dr Strange...!! I had soo high hopes for him..!!!
It was awesome
FYI - A rank 4 5* Starlord can get 600+ hits on a labyrinth x23 and still die due to the enrage timer, even with 4 attack synergies (2xYJ, 2 Ant Man), depending on how unlucky they get with the special 2 healblock.
Let alone a r3 SL or 4* 5.50 SL, which many were likely to have at the time.
BW had 100% ability accuracy reduction(even against mutants)
Magneto had a double bleed on his s1.
Thor could stack like 5 armor breaks and do over 100k damage in health
12.0 forever killed this game for me. Never again will I put any trust into this company or expect any good.
Before I used to think, "Can't wait for my next crystal pull! Maybe I can get lucky!".
Now it's, "NOW WHAT?! What is it now?? Who's getting nerfed next? What's the point of it all?? Aw 15.0? 6 stars when we barely have 5s? Challenger rating killing our rosters? What's getting taken away next??".
12.0 forever shattered the illusion that this game is honest.
Agreed, but I’m happy with how the game is now, in general that is. Bugs and some other issues are annoying, I don’t like the 5* featured milestones for example. But I love act 5 and uncollected, really love a lot of the new champs etc
Oh yeah for sure, forgot about him momentarily. Must be my mind trying to block out the memory of him. If they’d made his Sp1 evadable, he would be the right difficulty. It makes sense his abilities are OP, he was the biggest boss so far back then. But his sp1 was BS.
285k from a 4* L3
Even if they did, Labyrinth has its version of safeguard making it impossible to scale your damage up indefinitely either way.
Only for specials. You don’t get to 50k damage on light and medium hits