DNA reviews Women's History Month fight designs
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,935 Guardian
Last year I did a review of the International Women's Day Boss Rush fight designs. It was a continuation of my previous review of the 2019 player contributed Boss Rush, where I was asked to submit a fight design (mine was Invisible Woman). I wasn't sure if I was going to post a review of the IWD/WHM designs, as instead of one single Boss Rush they were scattered into separate paths that were going to be unlocked weekly, but since some people expressed some interest in it, I decided to wait until the last paths were unlocked and review them all at once. As previously, this is not a guide to beating the fights. These are my thoughts on how the fights were designed, what I think works and doesn't work, and my overall thoughts on the difficulty and flavor of the fights from the point of view of a designer - someone who has dabbled in game design and specifically been given the privilege of designing a small piece of content in this game.
There are six fights designed by players and two fights designed by Kabam employees that are not specifically content designers (Kabam Boo and Kabam Sted). For simplicity sake I'm going to refer to these eight fights as the "player designed fights" even though two were not designed by players. These fights are, in the order they were unlocked: America Chavez, Hela, Kitty Pryde, Angela, Medusa, Gwenpool, Quake, and Peni Parker. Each fight is at the end of a separate path, and are "pseudo bosses" for the side quest. They are like minibosses in terms of strength, but Sigil Scarlet Witch is actually the final boss of the side quest map. I'm going to be reviewing the Legendary versions of these fights here.
America Chavez - Designed by Kabam Sted
America Chavez has four noteworthy nodes: Comeback, Long Distance Relationship, Make a Stand, and Right Back At It. Comeback basically boosts AC's attack and energy resistance bonuses from Dimensional energy when she reaches low health. Long Distance Relationship stacks weakness on the player when standing close to AC. Make a Stand is a 90% protection buff unless AC is knocked down, and Right Back At It makes AC debuff immune after being knocked down. The basic design idea seems fairly straight forward: make her super tanky unless you knock her down, but make her stun immune (and dot debuff immune) for a short period of time if you do knock her down. If you try to parry-heavy her and stay close, you'll get a lot of weakness. She'll get a little more dangerous towards the end of the fight.
Curiously, for a relatively easy fight, America Chavez is one of only two of the player designed fights that does not include any of the path buffs from the path she resides upon (Peni Parker is the other designed fight with this property). That seemed odd to me: it suggests that the Kabam oversight for the content felt this fight would be substantially harder than it turned out to be, or I'm vastly underestimating how tough this fight actually is.
In either case, I don't believe this is a difficult fight. If you are unfamiliar with AC's specials it can be a bit tricky, but by in large the nodes are not as dangerous as they might appear on paper. You just need to play reasonably safely and in control with any reasonably good attacker. Attackers that have strong damage over time passives (that won't get cleared by Right Back At It) are helpful, but completely unnecessary. What I think this fight lacks is some form of "gotcha." To make a fight challenging, either the defender or the nodes or some combination of the two has to have a "gotcha" - a circumstance where, if the player doesn't respond correctly or fails to act accordingly they will get into trouble. AC lacks this kind of gotcha, and the nodes don't add one. This makes the fight a somewhat conventional fight. Hit her, don't get hit, and try to knock her down a lot. The fight is very forgiving, and has no pitfalls. If you're looking for a simple fight this is it, but from a design perspective I find this to be a bit of a design flaw.
I'm using a different set of metrics for 2022. Fight complexity is basically how hard I think the fight is to understand. Skill requirements refer to literal twitch skills. Mental load refers to how much stuff a player has to keep track of to manage the fight, which is something I'm finding to be increasingly important in MCOC. Roster requirements is a general measure of how much benefit a player gets from having a more diverse roster for that fight. I don't think any of the fights impose real roster checks on the player: none of the fights *requires* specific champion counters in my opinion.
Fight Complexity: 4
Skill Requirements: 3
Mental Load: 5
Roster Requirements: 3
Overall Grade: C
Hela - Designed by Kabam Boo
Hela has Queen of Hel (regen 20% health before KO), Transducer, Languor, Stung Once Twice Shy, Mystic Ward and the two path buffs Recharge and Invade. This one is a little more interesting. Transducer, Recharge, and Languor basically work together. Transducer causes you to constantly leak power. It would also normally cause you to gain power faster, but Recharge reduces your combat power rate to zero. I believe the net result of the two is your offensive power gain is very small. However, SOTS and Invade both are gotchas. SOTS causes you to gain power sting when you reach a bar of power. This means if you want to use specials you can't just hold block to gain power and then use a special immediately, because you'll take power sting damage. But if you hold the power too long Transducer will leak that power away. And you can't just hold block until you reach SP3 and then hold it long enough for the power sting to expire, because using SP3 will also cause you to take a lot of damage (Languor). So managing power to use specials becomes tricky. Meanwhile, holding block to gain power is dangerous because Invade will cause you to take a ton of damage if you're struck while blocking.
The basic design concept appears to be "juggle the power bar without getting hit." This isn't a super hard fight, you just have to deal with your power bar carefully. The best and safest strategy I've found is to treat your power bar like a timer. Hold block to gain enough of a buffer of power so that when you're attacking transducer doesn't bring you to zero too quickly and have Languor blast your health. Don't use specials and spend that power unless you're certain you won't then drop to zero. A lot of champs work here. However, if you're not accustomed to fighting Invade, this can be a tricky fight to get past, especially as you also have to get past three other fights with Invade. I would say this is a well-designed fight. The nodes all work together very well to construct a reasonable threat that isn't very roster-restrictive. This is more of a skill fight, specifically dealing with Invade. From a design perspective, I like the fact that Invade works with Recharge, Recharge Transducer, Recharge, and Languor work with each other, SOTS works adds additional power control gotchas, and Mystic Ward works with Hela to prevent players from just nullifying her Indestructible too easily.
If the player actually had to keep track of their power bar constantly to deal with Languor and SOTS, I'd probably say this fight approaches mental overload. But it doesn't have Power Shield, you don't have to use specials, and thus some players can try to navigate the power effects to use specials and some players can simplify the fight by forgoing specials and just trying to keep a reasonable power bar buffer. I think this is an important escape hatch for the fight.
Fight Complexity: 7
Skill Requirements: 7
Mental Load: 7
Roster Requirements: 3
Overall Grade: A-
Angela - Designed by Royal
Angela has Aspect of Evolution, Buff Duration, Fight or Flight, Recovery, Transducer, Vigorous Assault, and Mystic Ward. Although it has a boat load of nodes, personally, I think this fight comes down to Fight or Flight and Vigorous Assault. Fight or Flight either gives Angela unstoppable if you're close or gives you unstoppable if you're far away. If you can manage that well and either deal with unstoppable or just keep track and get it yourself, all is well. And if you can fight Angela while unblockable, which she's going to be a lot while she is healing, then all is well. Keeping track of both is not easy. There is some cheesy options here: while Angela has a lot of protection against nullify, she doesn't have protection against buff immunity or buff ability accuracy reduction, so champs like Claire and Tigra can prevent Angela from getting heal buffs. No heal buffs, no unblockable.
The concept is the pretty straight forward unstoppable/unblockable we've seen in other fights, wrapped around a champion that is herself not too difficult to fight. Unblockable plus unstoppable plus regeneration sounds rough, but Angela herself is not a particularly dangerous defender nor does she have any attacks difficult to dodge. So I think this is a reasonable fight. Just enough gotcha to be interesting, a couple of lanes of cheesy options for wide rosters, and otherwise fairly straight forward. I found this one easy cheesy, and still manageable when going dairy free. The biggest challenge might be for players to read through at least six node descriptions and reach Vigorous Assault. If you go in blind without knowing this fight has that node, it'll probably be a bit more challenging.
Fight Complexity: 6
Skill Requirements: 7
Mental Load: 4
Roster Requirements: 4
Overall Grade: B+
Kitty Pryde - Designed by Dragon
Kitty has Counterstrike, Footloose, Buffet, Spite, and Turtling. Now we're talking. In 2021 I jokingly said that Dragon loves Jubilee and really hates you. In 2022, this is no joke: I'm pretty sure Dragon hates us all. If Kitty gains prowess and dashes forward she phases. If you dex, Kitty goes unblockable. If she uses a special attack she goes unstoppable and starts evading you. If you gain buffs she regenerates or gains power, whichever one will mess you up more.
The design concept of this fight is layered complication. Kitty's phasing throws a complication at the player that is unusual. Overuse of dexterity to avoid phase causes Counterstrike to throw a separate complication. Footloose adds an additional complication. Spite, buffet, and turtling make it difficult to play conservatively to deal with the complications. You have to play aggressively and overcome them on demand.
I originally fought this fight with Kitty, just to be funny. As it turns out, Kitty is actually a pretty good option for this fight. Dragon Kitty is just constantly flipping in and out of some state of being un-punchable, but DNA Kitty was similarly playing not-it throughout the entire fight, so I got out of it relatively easy. In preparing this review, I went back into the fight and tried more conventional options. Other options work: G2099 works (she doesn't crit) and Claire works (immune to incinerate and she can nullify) but you have to fight Kitty well, in particular you have to not reflexively dash into her at the wrong time.
I think this fight is not as hard as some people think it is, but its most important challenging element is that it fights against muscle memory. Kitty alone is a fight you have to unlearn how to fight. Kitty with these nodes will just punish you even harder for playing her wrong. But if you play her correctly, the nodes aren't hard to navigate around. The margin for error, however, is lower here than I think it is for any other side quest fight.
If you're trying to make a hard fight, this is one way to go. Take a champion that on its own is a tricky defender, and then wrap it around nodes that punish inaccuracy. I would also say that *if* you are trying to make a challenging fight, take note of the fact that the mental load for this fight is high, but it doesn't require keeping track of a lot of timers and states on screen constantly. You do have to deal with Counterstrike, but that doesn't require constant attention. You can watch the defender and concentrate on the fight for the most part. The fight is hard, but not unreasonably hard. But it does focus more on player skill than roster counters, and on aggressive but precise play. I think this fight lives at the upper limits of what this content was probably intended for, but in my opinion still within the lines.
However, if there's one flaw in the design from my perspective, it is that it doesn't seem to have psychologically rewarding avenues to cut through the difficulty. Basically, it lacks some cheese. Some way to out-think or out-roster the difficulty a bit. You can have a ton of cheese or you can have a touch of cheese, but in my opinion if you're shooting for the top of the difficulty range, at least a tiny bit of cheese is necessary to make it not overly punishing. That's just my opinion though.
Fight Complexity: 7
Skill Requirements: 9
Mental Load: 10
Roster Requirements: 6
Overall Grade: AMF
There are six fights designed by players and two fights designed by Kabam employees that are not specifically content designers (Kabam Boo and Kabam Sted). For simplicity sake I'm going to refer to these eight fights as the "player designed fights" even though two were not designed by players. These fights are, in the order they were unlocked: America Chavez, Hela, Kitty Pryde, Angela, Medusa, Gwenpool, Quake, and Peni Parker. Each fight is at the end of a separate path, and are "pseudo bosses" for the side quest. They are like minibosses in terms of strength, but Sigil Scarlet Witch is actually the final boss of the side quest map. I'm going to be reviewing the Legendary versions of these fights here.
America Chavez - Designed by Kabam Sted
America Chavez has four noteworthy nodes: Comeback, Long Distance Relationship, Make a Stand, and Right Back At It. Comeback basically boosts AC's attack and energy resistance bonuses from Dimensional energy when she reaches low health. Long Distance Relationship stacks weakness on the player when standing close to AC. Make a Stand is a 90% protection buff unless AC is knocked down, and Right Back At It makes AC debuff immune after being knocked down. The basic design idea seems fairly straight forward: make her super tanky unless you knock her down, but make her stun immune (and dot debuff immune) for a short period of time if you do knock her down. If you try to parry-heavy her and stay close, you'll get a lot of weakness. She'll get a little more dangerous towards the end of the fight.
Curiously, for a relatively easy fight, America Chavez is one of only two of the player designed fights that does not include any of the path buffs from the path she resides upon (Peni Parker is the other designed fight with this property). That seemed odd to me: it suggests that the Kabam oversight for the content felt this fight would be substantially harder than it turned out to be, or I'm vastly underestimating how tough this fight actually is.
In either case, I don't believe this is a difficult fight. If you are unfamiliar with AC's specials it can be a bit tricky, but by in large the nodes are not as dangerous as they might appear on paper. You just need to play reasonably safely and in control with any reasonably good attacker. Attackers that have strong damage over time passives (that won't get cleared by Right Back At It) are helpful, but completely unnecessary. What I think this fight lacks is some form of "gotcha." To make a fight challenging, either the defender or the nodes or some combination of the two has to have a "gotcha" - a circumstance where, if the player doesn't respond correctly or fails to act accordingly they will get into trouble. AC lacks this kind of gotcha, and the nodes don't add one. This makes the fight a somewhat conventional fight. Hit her, don't get hit, and try to knock her down a lot. The fight is very forgiving, and has no pitfalls. If you're looking for a simple fight this is it, but from a design perspective I find this to be a bit of a design flaw.
I'm using a different set of metrics for 2022. Fight complexity is basically how hard I think the fight is to understand. Skill requirements refer to literal twitch skills. Mental load refers to how much stuff a player has to keep track of to manage the fight, which is something I'm finding to be increasingly important in MCOC. Roster requirements is a general measure of how much benefit a player gets from having a more diverse roster for that fight. I don't think any of the fights impose real roster checks on the player: none of the fights *requires* specific champion counters in my opinion.
Fight Complexity: 4
Skill Requirements: 3
Mental Load: 5
Roster Requirements: 3
Overall Grade: C
Hela - Designed by Kabam Boo
Hela has Queen of Hel (regen 20% health before KO), Transducer, Languor, Stung Once Twice Shy, Mystic Ward and the two path buffs Recharge and Invade. This one is a little more interesting. Transducer, Recharge, and Languor basically work together. Transducer causes you to constantly leak power. It would also normally cause you to gain power faster, but Recharge reduces your combat power rate to zero. I believe the net result of the two is your offensive power gain is very small. However, SOTS and Invade both are gotchas. SOTS causes you to gain power sting when you reach a bar of power. This means if you want to use specials you can't just hold block to gain power and then use a special immediately, because you'll take power sting damage. But if you hold the power too long Transducer will leak that power away. And you can't just hold block until you reach SP3 and then hold it long enough for the power sting to expire, because using SP3 will also cause you to take a lot of damage (Languor). So managing power to use specials becomes tricky. Meanwhile, holding block to gain power is dangerous because Invade will cause you to take a ton of damage if you're struck while blocking.
The basic design concept appears to be "juggle the power bar without getting hit." This isn't a super hard fight, you just have to deal with your power bar carefully. The best and safest strategy I've found is to treat your power bar like a timer. Hold block to gain enough of a buffer of power so that when you're attacking transducer doesn't bring you to zero too quickly and have Languor blast your health. Don't use specials and spend that power unless you're certain you won't then drop to zero. A lot of champs work here. However, if you're not accustomed to fighting Invade, this can be a tricky fight to get past, especially as you also have to get past three other fights with Invade. I would say this is a well-designed fight. The nodes all work together very well to construct a reasonable threat that isn't very roster-restrictive. This is more of a skill fight, specifically dealing with Invade. From a design perspective, I like the fact that Invade works with Recharge, Recharge Transducer, Recharge, and Languor work with each other, SOTS works adds additional power control gotchas, and Mystic Ward works with Hela to prevent players from just nullifying her Indestructible too easily.
If the player actually had to keep track of their power bar constantly to deal with Languor and SOTS, I'd probably say this fight approaches mental overload. But it doesn't have Power Shield, you don't have to use specials, and thus some players can try to navigate the power effects to use specials and some players can simplify the fight by forgoing specials and just trying to keep a reasonable power bar buffer. I think this is an important escape hatch for the fight.
Fight Complexity: 7
Skill Requirements: 7
Mental Load: 7
Roster Requirements: 3
Overall Grade: A-
Angela - Designed by Royal
Angela has Aspect of Evolution, Buff Duration, Fight or Flight, Recovery, Transducer, Vigorous Assault, and Mystic Ward. Although it has a boat load of nodes, personally, I think this fight comes down to Fight or Flight and Vigorous Assault. Fight or Flight either gives Angela unstoppable if you're close or gives you unstoppable if you're far away. If you can manage that well and either deal with unstoppable or just keep track and get it yourself, all is well. And if you can fight Angela while unblockable, which she's going to be a lot while she is healing, then all is well. Keeping track of both is not easy. There is some cheesy options here: while Angela has a lot of protection against nullify, she doesn't have protection against buff immunity or buff ability accuracy reduction, so champs like Claire and Tigra can prevent Angela from getting heal buffs. No heal buffs, no unblockable.
The concept is the pretty straight forward unstoppable/unblockable we've seen in other fights, wrapped around a champion that is herself not too difficult to fight. Unblockable plus unstoppable plus regeneration sounds rough, but Angela herself is not a particularly dangerous defender nor does she have any attacks difficult to dodge. So I think this is a reasonable fight. Just enough gotcha to be interesting, a couple of lanes of cheesy options for wide rosters, and otherwise fairly straight forward. I found this one easy cheesy, and still manageable when going dairy free. The biggest challenge might be for players to read through at least six node descriptions and reach Vigorous Assault. If you go in blind without knowing this fight has that node, it'll probably be a bit more challenging.
Fight Complexity: 6
Skill Requirements: 7
Mental Load: 4
Roster Requirements: 4
Overall Grade: B+
Kitty Pryde - Designed by Dragon
Kitty has Counterstrike, Footloose, Buffet, Spite, and Turtling. Now we're talking. In 2021 I jokingly said that Dragon loves Jubilee and really hates you. In 2022, this is no joke: I'm pretty sure Dragon hates us all. If Kitty gains prowess and dashes forward she phases. If you dex, Kitty goes unblockable. If she uses a special attack she goes unstoppable and starts evading you. If you gain buffs she regenerates or gains power, whichever one will mess you up more.
The design concept of this fight is layered complication. Kitty's phasing throws a complication at the player that is unusual. Overuse of dexterity to avoid phase causes Counterstrike to throw a separate complication. Footloose adds an additional complication. Spite, buffet, and turtling make it difficult to play conservatively to deal with the complications. You have to play aggressively and overcome them on demand.
I originally fought this fight with Kitty, just to be funny. As it turns out, Kitty is actually a pretty good option for this fight. Dragon Kitty is just constantly flipping in and out of some state of being un-punchable, but DNA Kitty was similarly playing not-it throughout the entire fight, so I got out of it relatively easy. In preparing this review, I went back into the fight and tried more conventional options. Other options work: G2099 works (she doesn't crit) and Claire works (immune to incinerate and she can nullify) but you have to fight Kitty well, in particular you have to not reflexively dash into her at the wrong time.
I think this fight is not as hard as some people think it is, but its most important challenging element is that it fights against muscle memory. Kitty alone is a fight you have to unlearn how to fight. Kitty with these nodes will just punish you even harder for playing her wrong. But if you play her correctly, the nodes aren't hard to navigate around. The margin for error, however, is lower here than I think it is for any other side quest fight.
If you're trying to make a hard fight, this is one way to go. Take a champion that on its own is a tricky defender, and then wrap it around nodes that punish inaccuracy. I would also say that *if* you are trying to make a challenging fight, take note of the fact that the mental load for this fight is high, but it doesn't require keeping track of a lot of timers and states on screen constantly. You do have to deal with Counterstrike, but that doesn't require constant attention. You can watch the defender and concentrate on the fight for the most part. The fight is hard, but not unreasonably hard. But it does focus more on player skill than roster counters, and on aggressive but precise play. I think this fight lives at the upper limits of what this content was probably intended for, but in my opinion still within the lines.
However, if there's one flaw in the design from my perspective, it is that it doesn't seem to have psychologically rewarding avenues to cut through the difficulty. Basically, it lacks some cheese. Some way to out-think or out-roster the difficulty a bit. You can have a ton of cheese or you can have a touch of cheese, but in my opinion if you're shooting for the top of the difficulty range, at least a tiny bit of cheese is necessary to make it not overly punishing. That's just my opinion though.
Fight Complexity: 7
Skill Requirements: 9
Mental Load: 10
Roster Requirements: 6
Overall Grade: AMF
21
Comments
Medusa has Power Focus 2, Steady Perseverance, Polka Dot Power, Offensive Specialty, Stampede, Unblockable (specials), Mystic Ward, Parry, and maybe some other stuff because even I stopped reading at that point. In 2021 Cat gave us Unblockable Tigra. This time the concept is Block-happy Medusa. Mystic Ward is there to allow Medusa to reach auto-block levels of fury. When Medusa blocks she stuns with Parry, and gains Overrun charges. Power Focus 2 gets her to SP2 quicker, and for most people SP2 is somewhat harder to evade than SP1.
Given the overall difficulty and rewards for the side quest, I believe that Murdock Medusa is probably right in the middle of the difficulty band - just about what I would expect from content of this type. Not too hard, not too easy. As with Angela, Medusa can be cheesed with buff suppression champs like Claire or Tigra. But she can be beat with any champ really, if you play patiently. Just don't mess with Medusa when she has three furies, and you'll be fine.
Although it has a boat load of nodes, I found the actual mental load of the fight to be not bad at all. Design complexity and fight complexity aren't synonymous, and I think this is an example of a fight that incorporates a lot on paper but it all combines into an interesting but not overwhelmingly complex fight. if Hela is an example of a fight where all the nodes work together well as a design, Medusa is an example of a fight where the gameplay of the fight is not just the sum of its parts.
I almost wanted to take points off for having so many nodes that collectively didn't seem to do much, but in fact that's not a bad thing at all, when the nodes coalesce into something that seems to be simpler than the pieces individually are, so I decided to give that higher marks. *IF* this was supposed to be difficult content, I might have graded the other way. But here, I think that design should be rewarded.
Fight Complexity: 6
Skill Requirements: 6
Mental Load: 3
Roster Requirements: 3
Overall Grade: A-
Gwenpool - Designed by Starfighter0717
Gwenpool has Combo Party, Combo Up, Combo Shield, Power Shield, Power Reserve, Fighting Dirty, and Counter Tactics. In 201i9 I thought Starfighter's (and Omega's) Taskmaster was probably the easiest Boss Rush fight. In 2021, I thought her Elsa fight was the easiest 2021 fight. This time, I don't think she made the easiest fight. I think Kabam Sted's AC fight is probably the easiest. But this fight is still on the easier side. Where's the Energize? Where's the Destructive Feedback? I would have stuck debuff immune in there and then laughed maniacally. Come on Starfighter, let's see your mean face!
The basic concept of this fight is: Starfighter loves you, and doesn't want to hurt you, but Kabam is looking over her shoulder so she'll pretend to want to kill you and you pretend you almost died, and we both walk away winners. What makes this fight something other than just a push over is that awakened Gwenpool does have plot armor, so no easy kill with power shield. But anything with damage over time is probably going to end this fight relatively quickly. The one gotcha in this fight is unblockable after specials. I would expect most Cavalier-tier players to be able to deal with unblockable Gwenpool.
I wanted to give extra design points for having Combo Party, Combo Up, and Combo Shield in the same fight with Power Shield and Power Reserve. But it didn't have a Power Focus node, so I could not award the double hat trick.
Fight Complexity: 4
Skill Requirements: 5
Mental Load: 3
Roster Requirements: 2
Overall Grade: B-
Quake - Designed by Padme
Quake has Heavy Hitter, Immunity (debuffs), Stupefy, Destructive Feedback, and Foresight. Of all the fights, this one is in my opinion the one where most of the difficulty comes from the defender and not the nodes (although Peni is a close second). The concept of this fight seems to be: I hate fighting Quake, and now so will you. Quake is, if you don't kill her quickly enough, kind of a tricky fight for many players. Her attacks are not easy to evade completely, and she lands annoying stuff on you that can really mess you up in a fight that are difficult to completely avoid. Stupefy just makes her stuns last longer. Heavy Hitter takes away heavy countering, and Immunity (debuff) turns this into a stun immune fight (for the most part). The main extra gotcha is destructive feedback, which in the long run is something you have to keep track of but in the short term makes Quake impossible to burst down right at the start of the fight due to the feedback damage. Basically, this is Quake 2.0: Defender Edition.
I think this fight comes down to whether you can deal with Quake. If you can deal with Quake, this fight is doable. If Quake gives you problems, then Padme Quake will give you even more problems. Personally, I found that even with DF, the fight was less interesting than some of the others. Mostly, it was a Quake fight with some extras. Those extras didn't really change the "feel" of the fight, at least to me. That's not a fatal flaw, it just makes the fight less interesting to me from a design perspective.
If I'm being honest, I found Dave's Quake to be more interesting back in 2019, because I found the power mechanics of that fight to add an extra interesting gimmick. This fight is slightly more unilaterally punishing in design. However, its been three years: players are so much better at fighting Quake in general, that honestly I think that nasty Dave Quake from 2019 would be a pushover in 2022. So that's understandable. Still, I missed having that skill tunnel through the fight.
Fight Complexity: 4
Skill Requirements: 8
Mental Load: 7
Roster Requirements: 3
Overall Grade: B
Peni - Designed by Lizer
Peni Parker has Ebb and Flow KD, Heavy Assault, Enhanced SP2, True Strike, and Limber. In 2021 Lizer designed the Black Widow fight. I would characterize that fight as an easy defender with some tricks added via the nodes. This fight is kind of the opposite, it is a hard defender where the nodes don't add as many tricks. The concept of the fight seems to me to be fairly straight forward, and similar to my original thought process with Invisible Woman in 2019. Take a relatively new and unfamiliar champion that players may not have mastered defensively, and then add nodes to amplify those challenges.
Overall, I think this fight looks scarier than it is. Peni is a relatively new champion and there are many people who don't know how to fight her perfectly. But in practice Heavy Assault seems to be a great equalizer. The combination of Ebb and Flow KD granting fury on knockdown (and removing protection on knockdown) combined with the 500% damage increase on heavy attacks means the easiest way past this fight is to heavy, launch a combo, repeat. Bait SP1 if you can, because you really don't want to be eating that Enhanced SP2. I tried the fight a couple times and never got a solo, but by the time my first choice went down Peni was so low in health anything else could easily finish her off.
My suspicion is that this fight defeats more players who try to figure it out and think too much about strategy than those who just look for good openings and land as much damage as possible. On paper I thought this fight might give Kitty a run for her money, but in practice not so much. I'd say this is an above average difficulty fight (in the side quest) but not a super difficult fight in general.
Fight Complexity: 5
Skill Requirements: 7
Mental Load: 6
Roster Requirements: 4
Overall Grade: B
Final Thoughts.
Compared to previous Boss Rush-type content, I found these fights to have the least roster-specific requirements or cheese factors. They were much more conventional fights, in the sense of being fights that required skills commonly required in a lot of other content. The range of difficulty was also somewhat narrower, with a few exceptions. I also noticed that the devs are allowing a much wider range of and larger quantity of nodes. In the past, I believe the devs were concerned that allowing too many nodes would make the fights too complex. However, I believe that while these fights required a bit more reading to understand them, the fights themselves are not overly complex. They don't require inordinate amounts of mental load during the fight, and don't require keeping track of too much fight complexity. The number of nodes doesn't correlate to fights becoming too complicated. What matters is the design incorporating the nodes, not the quantity of the nodes.
I found the actual design of the fights to be overshadowed a bit by the fact that they were diluted. In the Boss Rush style content, every fight mattered because you have one path and one team to take every fight down. Every fight doesn't just need to be tackled, it needs to be tackled in the best possible way to reserve strength for the rest of the fights. Here, each player-designed fight was "alone" at the end of a path where you had a lot more flexibility to throw more champs at that one fight, provided you could get through the earlier path fine and saved enough for Switch at the end. The need to learn and understand each fight carefully so you could do an entire sequence of them was thus partially lost. Furthermore, because you could expend more champions to bring the defenders down, their relative difficulty was much lower than previous player-designed content that was structured like a Boss Rush. Whether that was a good idea or not depends on your point of view. The content is much more accessible, and you could argue that IWD/WHM content should be widely accessible. On the other hand, more challenging content does tend to be a better way to feature player designs, at least in my opinion.
This makes deconstructing the fights less interesting overall, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that (from my experience) designing these fights is a lot of fun, and the players who get the opportunity to do so put a lot of thought and energy into trying to design something interesting for the players. We all come at that task from different perspectives, and with different objectives. But the overall goal is basically the same: to make fun content for the players that is both challenging and rewarding. This is not easy, and in fact in terms of trying to appeal to everyone this is impossible. For every fight in the side quest, there are players who find it their favorite. Because it targets their level of strength, because it uses a defender they find fun to fight, because it appeals to them on some gameplay level. There are no perfect fights, and fights I think are great other people might think are too hard or too easy or too complex or whatever. Take all of this as one person's opinion. It should not take away from anyone's enjoyment of the content, or more importantly it shouldn't impair any of the designers represented above taking pride in their work.
Incidentally, for those wondering my team for the entire thing (at least for first runs) was Angela, Claire, Kitty, BWDO, and Tigra. That's the team I used for every path, every fight, every week in the side quest. I had quite a bit of fun running that team through the content. Not everyone has the same wide roster I do, but for me that team was a wrecking ball smashing their way through paths and taking on bosses.
Nonetheless, I'm glad that you had fun, and thank you for doing these again, I loved it!
(Also, am I proud of that rating? Yes, yes I am.)
One thing that could have been fun would have been to have a proper boss rush at the end with all of these champions in a row. That way, you could have the best of two worlds, so to speak. The fights are already designed, after all.
Dr. Zola
I went in with Claire (5r5), CMM (6r3), Wasp (5r4), Fury (5r5) and Quake (5r5). Wasp and Claire doing most of the work, surprisingly I hardly used Cap at all, unlike my Cavalier runs where she does everything on her own.
Most difficult fight for me was Medusa, because it somehow never crossed my mind to simply wait out the furies. Guess I was just too busy malding at the Polka Dots. Besides that, Chavez, Peni, Quake, and Kitty all fell to the wrath of the Wasp, who ended up being borderline cheese for a great majority of this quest.
Concept-wise, Hela is easily my favorite of these fights. But again, health pools being so low resulted in the fight being over in a couple of combos into her block, so it ended up being a lot easier than it should've been.
I'll probably end up doing repeat runs with different picks, just because it's the end of the "month" and I'm bored.
I agree that completion at least should be made easy, since I don't think it'd be fair to force newer cavaliers to stick to the uncollected quest after having reached that milestone, but full exploration needs to pose a greater challenge. Nodes like Invade, Heavy Assault and Power Shield all provide easier fights (usually), and these can be used on said easier paths, but when every fight ends within 30 hits or less from 5*s, I can't call that challenging at all, and when side quests typically have greater rewards than the monthly quest, that's a bit backwards to me.
There isn't one specific "difficulty target" for side quests, it is more of a judgment call balancing difficulty, time expense, and energy costs. But also, content like this that has additional inputs, such as player-designed fights, have also been more flexible to accommodate the wider range of designer sources.