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.