Ebony Maw Rebalance Information
Kabam Miike
Posts: 7,727Administrator∙Moderator ›
IF YOU HAVE NOT, READ THIS POST FIRST.
Offense:
Additionally with the boost to damage, Ebony Maw will be much more dangerous on attack-enhancing nodes across all modes.
These changes will allow Ebony Maw to ramp up throughout a quest much quicker, and have him deal a lot more damage in the fights he is suited for. Additionally we expect to see his win rates rise to a respectable level in Alliance War Defense, and other modes where players encounter him.
Summary:
Ebony Maw was designed to be a Defensive Champion, built to excel in Alliance War Defense and specifically counter some of the most dominant Attacking Champions in this mode. On Offense, Ebony Maw was supposed to focus on needing to ramp up over multiple fights to be more useful. We will be making a number of changes to give him more use in Attack, and make him a more fearsome Defender that forces opponents to respect the rules of fighting Ebony Maw.Conclusion:
Defense:- Ebony Maw uses a building resource called “persuasion” to trigger “Falter” effects which cause the Opponent to Miss their Attacks if they don’t play around the “persuasion” mechanic.
- However, even with this mechanic in play, most players disregard his mechanics and power their way through Ebony Maw encounters. Below is a graph showing his overall performance on Alliance War defense across all active Defense Tactics.
Offense:
- Ebony Maw sees extremely low usage in every “Attacker” focused scenario aside from a few very specific matchups.
- Even though he’s built as a Defensive champion, no champion should fall below our baseline and be “practically useless”. To put this into perspective, Ebony Maw’s damage is so low that he’s currently out-damaged by many 3* Champions.
- Below you will see his numbers in comparison to other Champions that we believe are also eventually in need of an update to their ability to deal damage. These include Abomination, Agent Venom, Cyclops, Daredevil, Karnak, Hulkbuster, Howard the Duck, Groot, Dormammu, and Drax.
Objective of Changes:
Ebony Maw’s performance on both Attack and Defense do not fulfil the minimum baseline requirements for a “well balanced” Champion and ranks worse in many ways in comparison to Champions on the roadmap to be buffed. Maw needs to be brought up to fit in line within our baseline.Changes:
Persistent Charge:- Change Persistent Charge (PV) mechanic to stack up to 20 from 6
- PV charges gained from completing all missions increased to 5 from 1
- Persuasion timer reduced to 0.5 from 0.7
- Potency of Black Tongue up to 40% from 30%
- Deterioration Passive timer decreased to 2 seconds from 6
- Degeneration effect changed to modified attack from base attack
- Degeneration damage increased to 0.3 attack from 0.2 attack
- Signature Ability
- Changed to a % increase rather than a flat amount to increase overall damage potential.
Additionally with the boost to damage, Ebony Maw will be much more dangerous on attack-enhancing nodes across all modes.
These changes will allow Ebony Maw to ramp up throughout a quest much quicker, and have him deal a lot more damage in the fights he is suited for. Additionally we expect to see his win rates rise to a respectable level in Alliance War Defense, and other modes where players encounter him.
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Comments
Nice buff for ebony though, hope it turns out as good as it sounds.
Once was against corvus in Varient 4.1.1 Works great. The second was when in the off season someone put Corvus as a war boss... worked great for that also. He had some minor effectiveness on electro, as most of his hits aren't physical, he can sort of fight Korg... but if they are at all stacked get ready to play perfectly for 10 min plus to do a fight someone else can finish in 30 hits. Or if it is possible to time out, hope you like timeing out.
Considering that we may be talking years before a statistical likely hood of dupeing this champ as a 6 star... I am curious to see if he will ever get to fight anyone except Corvus? He does SO much less damage than any of the other random 6 stars I have gotten.
Unduped I think he is probably still going to be one of the worst 6 stars currently available to play as. But maybe the Degen will be more meaningful than it appears from these numbers. I am not convinced that even if I am unlucky enough to dupe him... that my experience will change much.
The goal of this balance change was not to make him the new "best mystic in the game", it was to raise the floor on his baseline damage to be more reasonable. The intention is that he can now participate in fights where his utility is valuable such as needing the steal a Power Gain Buff or land non-contact attacks. Ebony Maw won't close out fights faster than top damaging champions but with his mechanics he can take little to no damage while fighting and reduce and control the opponent's power.
Many thousands of summoners took their Ebony Maw to Rank 5 even before this change as you can see by the data above, and after this change we expect to see this number continue to climb even higher!
These changed should have no effect on Ebony Maw's PI.
Hope this clears up some of the questions posed here!
This seems like it's going to be more harmful than helpful
No new offensive improvements, no reason to take off the bench.
I believe he will be a better defender even without his signature ability but he’ll never be taken on attack without it.
I am assuming the persistent charge will work by carrying over all 20 every fight after you complete the missions in fight 1 and 2... meaning he should be hitting around 40K Degen for the first degen of every fight after fight 2??
Is anyone else able to confirm or provide clarification on this?
The champion spotlight is normally based on 4* r5 right:
5* r5:
Current Missions Description (which is definitely not the new info from the "balance":