Upcoming Character Changes - Falcon and Storm (Modern)

IceIX
IceIX ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 4,308 Site Admin
We've got more coming after this, but I wanted to get one upcoming batch in front of you so that there was more time to plan for any affected Agents:

Falcon: Inspiration
Old ability:
    Inspiration - Yellow Passive
    Falcon spreads his wings, motivating his teammates as he swoops into the fight. When the team makes a yellow match, Falcon improves the strength of 3 friendly Protect, Strike, or Attack tiles by 10 percent.
    Level Upgrades
      Level 2: Improves friendly tiles by 15 percent. Level 3: Improves friendly tiles by 20 percent. Level 4: Improves friendly tiles by 25 percent. Level 5: Improves friendly tiles by 30 percent.


    New ability:
      Inspiration - Yellow Passive
      Falcon spreads his wings, motivating his teammates as he swoops into the fight. When the team makes a yellow match, Falcon improves the strength of 2 friendly Protect, Strike, or Attack tiles by 7.
      Level Upgrades
        Level 2: Improves friendly tiles by 8. Level 3: Improves friendly tiles by 10. Level 4: Improves friendly tiles by 13. Level 5: Improves 3 friendly tiles by 13.
      Max Level: Improves 3 friendly tiles by 79.

      As announced earlier, this ability needs to go to a static increase instead of a percentage. The percentage works great for scaling but works horribly for the character himself since it means that keeping Falcon at lower levels so that he doesn't tank any of the tiles is advantageous. Percentages also have the disadvantage of being great for high powered Strike/Protect/Attack tiles but fairly useless on low powered ones such as Storm (Modern)'s Hailstorm. Making the increase static instead of a percentage fixes these issues by allowing the value to scale by Falcons level. This means that it's important to level Falcon up to get more advantage from this skill. It also creates a strong reason for players to use Falcon with other characters that use lower powered tile placements as opposed to having him be at his strongest when dealing only with characters like Doom or Magneto.

      And a minor tweak to Storm (Modern)'s Level 5 Lightning Strike:
      Old Ability:
        Lightning Strike - Green 10 AP
        Storm calls a blinding bolt of electricity from the heavens, shattering 8 tiles, doing damage and earning AP for each.
        Level Upgrades
          Level 2: Shatters 9 tiles. Level 3: Shatters 10 tiles. Level 4: Shatters 12 tiles. Level 5: Shatters 16 tiles.


        New Ability:
          Lightning Strike - Green 10 AP
          Storm calls a blinding bolt of electricity from the heavens, shattering 8 tiles, doing damage and earning AP for each.
          Level Upgrades
            Level 2: Shatters 9 tiles. Level 3: Shatters 10 tiles. Level 4: Shatters 12 tiles. Level 5: Shatters
          14 tiles.

          This little tweak came about as a result of her usage as AI in Simulators and her increasing usage in lower level Versus battles. While it still remains wholly effective, the loss of 2 AP per Lightning Strike (and associated fraction of a chance of a cascade as a result) keeps her from creating quite so much board destruction and repetitive turn over turn ability usage all at once.

          The plans are for these changes to roll out by the end of this week.