Featured Team: Brown-And-Tan Wolverine // X-23

Wolverine ISOs:  Steady (Attack/Accuracy/Health)
X-23 ISOs:  Steady (Attack/Accuracy/Health)
Agent ISOs:  Chaotic (All Stats)
Total CP cost:  270

Do you like bleeds?  OF COURSE YOU DO.  Do you like snikting bubs?  OF COURSE YOU DO!  Do you have trouble winning fights against Rescue?

Well I can't help you there, buddy!  This isn't the team for you.  But if you like solid teams that punish nearly every other kind of team that likes to take multiple actions, this one is for you.  It's particularly good against teams that run scrappers, particularly Quicksilver teams.   This team is also particularly good against teams that rely heavily on shields for their defense and healing, since bleeds circumvent many of the shields not provided by Omega Sentinel or Rescue.

Rescue is unfortunately a huge problem for this team, which is why the Agent is set up the way it is.  With the Scrapper Aegis Armor you can apply Targeted to Rescue or other tough defensive heroes, and with Monstrosity and Custom Bolt Action 4-Bore you can hit incredibly hard and entirely circumvent the debuff skipping your next turn.

This team has many viable other item choices, including avoiding that entirely in favor of setups including Neurotrope, Kuzuri, Scroll of Nomaj (in addition to Angolob) in an attempt to beat Rescue, or by using an Infiltrator Agent with something like Sinister Scepter to allow you to freely counterattack her if she attacks your agent.

Budget Agent Build:
Infiltrator Armor (preferably) or any 8 slot armor of your choice.
Custom Posessed Pistol
Magnetic Field Generator
"Snikt!" // Golden Feral Claws
Digital Decoy

The basic strategy for this team depends on the turn order.

If Wolverine acts first:  Use Adamantium Claws on an Infiltrator if possible, otherwise, use it on the most annoying non-Bruiser.  X-23 should follow up with her Blades of Rage, and your Agent should use Custom Bolt Action on the bleeding target to try to polish them off either right there, or on the next bleed tick.

If X-23 acts first:  Use Snikt on a suitable target, preferably a scrapper if present.  Wolverine should target a different target with Adamantium Claws.  The Agent in this case should focus fire on the target Wolverine has bled, to try to kill it off quickly.

If the Agent acts first:  This is the worst scenario.  Hopefully their team has done something you need to react to, otherwise, I would pick a target to focus fire.

If you lose someone early:  This is where this team shines.  Even if one member goes down, X-23 or Wolverine can both win fights entirely on their own, provided that you're a bit lucky with their proccing survival or with Berserker Rage.

If the target you want to attack with X-23 is not the Trigger Scent target, Blades of Rage is your best option.  Use her Assassin's Strike to finish off characters like Rescue who you might not be able to kill, but can get low.

This is a really fun and flavorful team, which I highly suggest you give a try.  It's also a decent team on defense, since it has several ways to get lucky and win even with poor AI.

Season 9 is here,plus some major changes!

Season 9 is here, and while it's still early to tell, odds are that it will be a Bruiser heavy season, since the last pvp armor given out was a Bruiser armor, and with Tacticians being so strong, Blasters are at an all time low.

But before we dive into trying to figure out what you want to do, let's look at a substantial positive change to how PVP works!

From the forum patch notes, we see a couple things that leap out at us.  First, that there's an incredibly grind-focused PVP item quest to get an Archangel's Staff, which looks great.  Don't miss a single day's PVP spin, and you should with some luck get the item without having to spend gold.

Second, there's a new PVP Hero, Angel!  He looks pretty sweet as another support option, in case you didn't manage to get Rescue.  It will definitely be nice to have a solid support available for CPs in case you don't get adamantium.  Thankfully, the next change makes it much easier to get to those coveted high tiers!

The requirements have changed for getting to Adamantium!  It should be much clearer if you are going to get the tier you want to reach or not with these new changes.

Getting started in PVP

There's a lot of people out there who are wanting to get started with PVP, but when the queue up they encounter well prepared murder teams that run them over like they weren't even there.  It can be discouraging to be progressing through the game feeling pretty much invincible, and in a blink of an eye you're down two team members wondering what happened.

Today, we're going to talk about getting started in this game with PVP.  Unlike my usual posts like featured teams and the like, this is meant more as a primer on where to spend your Gold, what heroes to buy early, and what kinds of things to focus on to get out of the early roadblocks.  Let's get to it!

Q:  I want a new hero/quick levels, should I spend Gold to get them now?

A:  If you want to PVP, absolutely not.  The only things you should spend your hard earned (or bought for that matter) gold on are PVP armory pages, Armory items, or good 64 gold items (such as Scrolls if they're available, passive buff Protect items for your agent, or other similarly good things with high pvp bonuses for when they're not useful anymore).

Q:  Should I spend the gold to level up my items?

A:  Only when you're ready to stop leveling, or at the level cap.  Otherwise, it's not worth it.

Q:  When should I start doing PVP?

A:  There's a few optimal levels, and they correspond with the levels where you can research and unlock new Armory pages.  Level 25, and level 60 are both good breakpoints, so let's talk about them.  It's worth noting that you should definitely PVP any time a tournament is up, even if you can't do super well it's not particularly hard to get to Gold tier and the extra gold is pretty helpful.

Benefits of starting at 26:

• You unlock the first bonus armory through research.
• Many teams are not ready to face people who have more armory pages than the default.
• There's no new ISO tier so you have some time with a level playing field.
• You can buy Curative Reach with research.
• It's really fast and easy to get to 26.

Drawbacks

• It costs 20 more gold to start with a full armory.
• You'll face a ton of Torch/Strange teams which is really frustrating and dull at times.
• Lots of the top tier teams are all extremely optimized sandbagging alts.

Benefits of starting at 60:

• There's yet another armory page through research, so the total cost of getting the remaining pages is low.
• Many teams are no longer using Strange/Torch exclusively so it's not as repetitive.

Drawbacks

• There's a new tier of ISO, so you need to do a lot of research before you can play on a level playing field.
• It'll take longer to get here.

I started seriously doing PVP at 60, because I didn't have the gold when I started out to get my armory pages, which is unfortunately quite important.  You can get by without them, but it's much harder.

Q: What are good heroes to buy early for pvp?

A:  There's a few really good pvp bargains at low levels, a couple of which have been mentioned earlier.  Dr Strange and the Human Torch are both very effective, and to make a good (aka PVP costume) team with them will cost a bargain 54CP for Tactician Strange, and either 75 (Blaster) or 89 CP (Bruiser) for Torch, although I actually suggest sticking with Blaster torch at low levels because so many other teams will be the same as yours, and you want to maximize winning the mirror match.

The other PVP bargains are Tactician Grey Suit Black Widow, who is still in my opinion one of the best PVP characters at 45cp. and Wolverine, who costs 90 but his alternate costumes are only a slight improvement over his default costume.  Other good PVP characters include Storm (93 Tactician, 80 Blaster), who has the additional benefit of being needed to unlock mission 4-4's epic boss for CP farming, and when available, the Iron Patriot costumes (either mode) and Tactician Mk 42 Iron Man.

I personally prefer using Tactician Widow and either Wolverine or Storm, but you can get good results from almost any combination of the above heroes early on.  The additional benefit of going those routes is that you need Wolverine and Storm to get access to some of the best low level agent gear.

Q:  Why does nobody use Bruisers?  My blasters never get to critical hit!

A:  Because your Blasters get to critical hit them, and at low levels blasters are everywhere.  You start to see Bruisers again once you hit the mid 70s-80s and the teams become more diverse.

Q:  What are good items starting out, and where/how can I get them?

A:  While the best PVP items typically are the 64 gold items, when starting out you won't have access to the best kinds of gear like that.  This list is designed to help you build a cohesive Agent without those items.

1.  "Snikt" and Sabertooth's Claws, both are from mission 4-6 (and require Wolverine to unlock).
2. Electromagnetic Shield, which is a random drop from the epic boss Magneto in 4-4.  You will need Storm to complete the deploys (as well as a few other any hero or type specific deploys).
3. Curative Reach, which requires Medical Response to be researched, from the store.  (Medical Response requires Healing Factor I, and Rejuvenating Energy, and is available at level 26).
4. Digital Decoy, which is researchable through Stasis Fields at level 52.
5. Custom Posessed Pistol, which is available through mission 8.5's epic boss, is quite strong, but will not be available when you're starting out.  However as you level it's one of the best non-gold offensive items you can get.
6. Power of Four.  From the Chapter 5 Premium Mission (requires War Machine).  Don't leave this item on when you're defending, it can lead to some free wins for your opponents, but when on offense it's excellent.

Often enough, you'll be playing a supporting Agent, and I find that a bleed item for sustained damage, and those two powerful support items, are a good starting point for low level agents.  The additional bonus of Magneto in 4-4 being the best place to farm CP's until you're nearly level 100 (in mission 12-2) is an added bonus of going that route.

If you have any other questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below and I will try to address them in the coming weeks.

Featured Team - Spider-Man//Invisible Woman

Future Foundation Spider-Man -Infiltrator

ISO-8: 8x Steady (Health/Attack/Accuracy) OR 4x Deft, 4x Mercurial.
(I have moved to Steady as there are enough ways to make your unbuffed avoidance irrelevant.)

Future Foundation Invisible Woman -Infiltrator

ISO-8:  8x Steady (Health/Attack/Accuracy)

Agent - Bruiser

ISO-8: 8x Chaotic ISO-8

Armory:  This team wants you to have a very defensive armory, since the offense from this team comes over time.  Ideally, you'll have something like a 30/70 offense to defense.

Optimal Gear:

1. Warbringer's Axe
2. Scroll of Angolob
3. Scroll of Ocerebi Nomaj
4. Coulson's Revenge

Starting Player Gear

(This is intended for players who are new to the game, and do not have access to gold items, limited edition items, or the like.  Consider it the "budget" recommendations, although I will recommend many customized items from epic bosses, so expect to do a bit of farming.)

1. Curative Reach
2. Custom Bolt-Action 4 Bore
3. Norn Stone
4. Custom Only For Killing

This gear set is a bit finicky, so I wanted to go into detail about it, specifically Norn Stone.  This team is one whose game plan is to go very long, and if you can keep your Agent alive until The Future Is Now, with a couple Norn Stone buffs you can be unstoppable.  Custom Only for Killing is also something you want to use right away on their damage-dealing team members.

Team Strategy:

This is a very defensive team, that has a clearly outlined plan:  Use the Future Foundation synergy to generate "The Future is Now" after three rounds.  Surviving until then is the hardest part of your plan, once you do the opposing team tends to be dead quickly to your swarm of critical hits.

So how do you do that?  Your opening sequence is very important.  Spider-Man needs to Spider-Sense, and then web someone.  You will fall into a rhythm of Web Shot and Web-Slingshot, only using your Web Swing if you need to stun someone or lose.  I find it's more of a desparation attack than a reliable tactic.

Invisible Woman should always open with a shield unless she has already counterattacked a shield onto the team.  You will prioritize shielding your team and for the most part, unless Wolverine, Human Torch or another powerful debuff-applying Scrapper or Blaster is present.  If their scrapper cannot be easily beaten by your agent, you can use Force Cage to contain them.  You should also Force Cage War Machine out of the gate, as the AI will then use Charged Capacitors and have no attacks to make.  If you know the enemy Agent has Power of Four, the same thing applies.  There's a number of fights where Force Cage can cause the AI to act extremely poorly, potentially throwing away a number of turns, stamina and cooldowns extremely poorly.

Your Agent is your primary source of offense at first, and you'll want to use them to crush out the opposing team as you heal Spider-Man.  Spider-Man is an exceptional proc-based protector, and his Tingling Sensation buff makes it so that teams that attack you repeatedly like Quicksilver will soon be unable to touch you at all.

Summary

This team is one that used to perform much better than it does today.  It was one of the best teams in the past when Tingling Sensation didn't stop stacking and didn't remove itself over time, but it's still a powerful synergistic team with a lot of potential.  Since the game is very much about Tacticians right now, this is one of the few teams that can really punish players for using them.

This is also a reasonably good defensive team:  It has a lot of protects and reasonable offense if they survive no matter what they do, which makes it a fine team to leave on defense.  It's a bit slow to use on offense, since it plans to go long and one of the most important things about attacks in PVP is being able to make them quickly.

At low levels this team is exceptional, where players aren't sure how to approach it.  At higher levels, it's a fine team that has some pretty glaring weaknesses, but it is still a fine team, and if you have Spider-Man you really should check it out.

Ranking:
On Attack:  C+

On Defense:  B

Counters  

Wolverine.  He's the best at what he does, and what he does is kill Spider-Man dead in short order.  There's a reason the Agent is set up to beat him around the ears, and that's because he will otherwise run over you.  You also have problems with teams based on Rescue, since she can strip away Tingling Sensation and your shields.

Featured Team: Black Widow // Wolverine

Grey Suit Black Widow -Tactician

ISO-8: 8x Steady (Health/Attack/Accuracy)

Brown-and-Tan Wolverine - Scrapper

ISO-8:  8x Steady (Health/Attack/Accuracy)

Agent - Scrapper

ISO-8: 8x Chaotic ISO-8

Armory:  This composition favors balanced, slanting towards attack, or all out attack.  Defensive setups on this team are likely not ideal.

Optimal Gear:

1. Kuzuri
2. Scroll of Ocerebi Nomaj
3. Neurotrope // Warbringer's Axe
4. Custom Magnetic Field Generator

Starting Player Gear

(This is intended for players who are new to the game, and do not have access to gold items, limited edition items, or the like.  Consider it the "budget" recommendations, although I will recommend many customized items from epic bosses, so expect to do a bit of farming.)

1. Sabertooth's Claws // "Snikt"
2. Curative Reach
3. Custom Magnetic Field Generator
4. Custom Only For Killing

It is also worth mentioning that the regular, non Brown-and-Tan Wolverine is nearly as good as the Brown-and-Tan, so if you are very short on CP's you can use him.  The same cannot be said for Black Widow, her Tactician Grey Suit is mandatory to make her useful in PVP.

Team Strategy:

This team is all about focus fire.  Widowmaker's ability to take someone out in one pass, particularly blasters if someone is fool enough to send one of those on defense, leads you to very strong openings.  Your openings are very much reliant on turn order, but they often fall into one of three categories.

1. Your opponent has a blaster.  This means that your Agent and Wolverine should focus on applying three stacks of bleeds with ravaged to someone other than the Blaster, and Widow will focus fire the blaster down with Widowmaker and her Flying Kick.
2. Your opponent has an Infiltrator.  This means that Widow and the Agent should focus fire someone, while Wolverine applies three stacks of bleeding and ravaged.
3. Your opponent went first and got their defenses set up // the above two scenarios don't apply.

The third scenario is the most complex, since you can fairly easily win the other two.  We'll talk about this one.  What if your opponent has a protect that you don't want to hit with your scrappers, like Hercules or a Bruiser Agent?  As it turns out, as long as they're not immune to bleeds you're probably OK just focusing everyone's efforts on the protector directly, and knocking them into next week.  If their protect is based on a buff, Widow can Flying Kick it off while Wolverine uses Feral Ambush on someone else, and your agent takes defensive actions like setting up Custom Magnetic Field Generator, or using Scroll of Nomaj to punt buffs if you have it.  Then, it's a matter of continuing to apply bleeds, and using Widowmaker to keep key members of their team on the back foot and stunned.

Rescue is particularly difficult, so I'll detail how to beat her with this team here.  What you really want to do is make sure that the first time she puts up her healing shield you can dispel it with Scroll, and the second thing you want to do is focus all your fire and efforts on whoever it is on their team can actually do damage.  Rescue's primary weakness is that she is very poor on offense, and if you can cut the legs out from under their offense before you're too weakened, Wolverine can usually do the rest on the back of his natural healing and your agent's ability to heal and shield him.

I haven't seen a ton of this team on defense, but my defends tended to be moderately poor.  You should likely only use a Scrapper agent on offense, and switch their suit to something more effective on defense, like Bruiser or Infiltrator.  This is a team that I really like on offense, and I used it to get Adamantium this season, but I often switched my defending teams around and just used this because it can quickly end fights.  This is a particularly important facet of this team for the last few days of PVP when your attacks are so critical to keeping up your rating.  You will face a lot of defensive fights, and a slow attrition-based attack team can't win enough fights quickly enough to keep up with the assault.

Summary

This team is great, as long as you're not leaving it back to defend at high tiers of play.  The team defends just fine for leagues below Vibranium, and features a number of neat abilities and the ability to largely ignore protects.  I use it, and that's the best recommendation I can make.  However, it's pretty bad on defense and since the last PVP reward armor was Bruiser, this team composition should probably use a different kind of Agent overalll, and possibly Infiltrator Wolverine on defense.

Ranking:

On Attack:  A

On Defense:  C+

Counters  

This team can be countered by heavy Bruisers, like Captain Britain, Juggernaut or Hercules.  Hercules is particularly good at beating this team down, as long as you have a way to remove bleeds from them.  Other things that can stop this team are teams like Rescue/Phoenix that can remove the bleeds quickly enough to blunt Wolverine's offense.  One of the keys for fighting this team is to make sure not to use AOE attacks:  Focus your fire on the Agent or Wolverine, first, and leave Black Widow for last.  Her AI isn't perfectly good, and the last thing you want to do is let her spam free attacks by attacking her before you can kill her quickly.

Featured Team: Rescue // Phoenix

Heroic Age Rescue -Tactician

ISO-8: 8x Deft (Health/Defense/Evasion)

White Crown Phoenix -Infiltrator

ISO-8:  5x Steady (Health/Attack/Accuracy), 3x Mercurial (Evasion/Attack/Accuracy)

Agent - Bruiser

ISO-8: 8x Chaotic ISO-8
Armory:  This comp will work with many type of armory balances, but I prefer ones that lean towards attack, since this team is naturally strong defensively and needs the extra punch.

Optimal Gear:

1. Warbringer's Axe
2. Scroll of Angolob // Scroll of Ocerebi Nomaj
3. Neurotrope
4. Blade of the Guardian // Kuzuri

Starting Player Gear

(This is intended for players who are new to the game, and do not have access to gold items, limited edition items, or the like.  Consider it the "budget" recommendations, although I will recommend many customized items from epic bosses, so expect to do a bit of farming.)

1. Curative Reach
2. Custom Magnetic Field Generator
3. Custom Bolt Action 4-Bore
4. Custom Only For Killing

Team Strategy:

Rescue has a lot of stamina and with luck you will have Neurotrope give her regenerating stamina, so your plan for her is to always use Flyby Attack (unless you have Exhaustion, this is very important) and then either her Protector Protocor or Reconstruction.  Use Status Reset whenever the opposing team has buffs that either allow them to pierce your defenses, or if you have bleeds/multiple DoTs that you need to get off of Rescue.  Your natural debuff removal should make it so you don't often have to use this defensively, but rather as an offensive tool to keep your opponent's team off balance.

Phoenix can be used to keep up the wall of protects, usually using Mind Link on herself if you have optimal gear, or the Agent if you are using the gear without Limited Edition items.  She also is your primary form of offense, so don't be afraid if you are not taking a lot of damage to just spam attacks like Telekinesis or Psiblast.  She has Psychic attacks so you can attack people through protects, and while this will not be your primary method of attack sometimes you can use this to finish off a weakened team member.

The Agent's job is much like Rescue's:  Spam buffs, protect and counter, and depending on which attack weapon you use, apply generalized or attack through protects.  If you are using the Blade of the Corruptor route, then both Phoenix and the Agent can ignore protects and hammer on specific targets.

The fun really begins when your first team member triggers Death and Rebirth.  Phoenix Fire refreshes, allowing you to severely wound the opposing team, and is yet another source of debuff and buff cleansing.  Often, Phoenix Fire combined with the solid healing from Rescue and the defensive nature of your team will allow you to get multiple uses of Phoenix Fire and make it frustratingly hard to defeat your team.

Summary

Rescue and Phoenix are one of the better AI-controlled defense teams around.  They often sequence their attacks decently, and have an advantage against teams that do not have sustained burst, like other Rescue teams.  Similarly, this team beats many of the older popular teams like Torch/Strange, making it ideal for low level PVP if you happen to have unlocked Rescue.  It does suffer from being slow to use and hard to focus fire, which means that it is not an ideal aggressive team, but it is definitely one of the better AI teams and worth considering for your defensive lineup.

Ranking:

On Attack:  B

On Defense:  A-

Counters  

Want to beat this team?  The best ways of doing so involve strong Scrappers to assault Phoenix, and stealthy/psychic attacks to ignore Rescue's attempts to defend her.  This does present the problem that their agent is a Bruiser.  Other approaches involve characters that break shields or remove buffs, or exploit shields.  Try team compositions that include either Shatterstar, MK 42 Iron Man, Juggernaut, Thundra, Hercules, Union Jack, and similar.  They often have the tools or the durability to survive the relatively low offense of these teams and either buff themselves enough to break through, or remove Rescue's protects/shields and pound away.  Other approaches that I've used successfully include using Wolverine to keep constant pressure on Phoenix since he has a Stealthy attack with a follow up, along with Tactician Widow to make sure you're going to crit along with her ability to both stun Phoenix and ignore Protects.

Season 8 Recap

Hello there, fellow M:AA fans!

Today I want to talk about PVP, since it's fresh on my mind after a bunch of my friends got together and played the last few hours of M:AA's Season 8 tournament.

As you can see, things went pretty well for me:  I made Adamantium for the second consecutive season, although this time it was by the very skin of my teeth.  I ended up just barely squeaking in, which should have come as a surprise to me, were it not for a major development in this season's metagame compared to previous seasons.  Now, keep in mind that I was sandbagging for a while (we'll talk about this later), so I am talking from the perspective of level 90-100 range PVP, but I believe at that point the higher ELO fights are largely comparable to very high level PVP.

In case you didn't participate in PVP, or are new to the game:  Rescue is a thing, and a dominant one.  The reward for completing Special Op 9 - Extremis, Rescue is a powerful defensive hero with a variety of tools that have positioned her very well against the best of the previous season's metagame.  Her presence, combined with the changes to Tactican that slightly increased their power level, has resulted in a very blaster-unfriendly environment.

So, what is it about Rescue that makes her so dominant?  Her damage output appears at first glance to be minimal, and that's definitely true.  She has three almost entirely defensive abilities to go along with it, so the temptation is to use her to protect a very squishy high damage output hero, and that's definitely one way to go.

I saw a bunch of early Rescue teams that were based on heroes like Modern Costume Thor, or the nearly ubiquitous Human Torch.  These teams were unfortunately extremely vulnerable to this blog's namesake, Tactician Black Widow, as well as horrible in the mirror match against other Rescues, which led to the next batch of Rescue teams, the durable teams.

The rescue durable teams are generally based on a few guiding principles:  Every single member of the team including the Agent should have a protect, and ideally a heal of some kind.  That is a pretty short list, and the most prominent of these teams is the Rescue/Omega Sentinel team.  Featuring a long game nearly second to none, and a very powerful defensive early game, Rescue/Sentinel were all over and the real doorkeepers to Vibranium and Adamantium leagues.

So if that's the doorkeeper, what is the endboss of Rescue teams? From what I could see, it is Rescue and the infiltrator White Crown Phoenix.



They protect each other quite well, their AI on defense is very good, and they can with the right kind of Agent simply dominate the battlefield and win the attrition wars against other Rescue teams.  I'll feature this team composition in a separate article once I've had some time to sit down and practice with it so I understand it from the other side.

So what team composition did I run?

Wolverine and Tactician Widow.

What can I say?  I like Tactician Widow.

Dear Tact Widow,

What is this blog about?

--The Author

Dear The Author,

This blog is about strategy for Marvel Avenger's Alliance, with a bit of a focus on PVP. Don't always expect the same kind of format, I'll try to keep it mixed up!

Sincerely,
Tactician Grey Suit Black Widow