Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

Cherry Bomb

Work, other matters and a weird fatgue's that's left me addlepated (as has been seen in some of my recent comments beneath posts) have kept me occupied, but I did nonetheless see the KC Flash they debuted Wednesday. This is one of the uniques which will be part of the next DC set, Legacy, due to go on sale sometime in March.

Concerns about how accurate to the version seen in the generally over-rated Kingdom Come aside -- which is a biiiig "aside" for the haredcore fans -- in a game rife with such compromise it seems they did a fairly good job of creating a piece that captures much of the character while scaling it to fit within the bounds of more teams.

Giving him Flight to free him from many of the movement constraints a grounded figure is saddled with was a solid way of ameliorating the 15 Speed they gave him. Of course, it helps that the character, by that point, is supposed to have flight. It's not something to be given to the other Flashes since, while in all other respects (in terms of movement and a built-in ability to carry someone) it would fit, there's no reasonable explanation for one of the others being able to Soar -- to rocket into the sky and hang there indefinitely.

In the design rules they're fairly up-front with part of the reason, that being that they feel they screwed up in part with Jay Garrick. (For the uninitiated, Jay Garrick, the first Flash, who debuted in the 1940s, was given a staggering 20 Speed as a unique piece in the first DC set.) A few things about the designer's paragraph for this new piece lead me to think that when DC does its "Universe" set - a new base set, whatever they'll call it - Jay will find himself on the fast track to retirement, leaving the KC Flash as the fastest piece (taking into account the HSS) in the game. Beyond that, the explanation is largely that they couldn't make him fully accurate to the comic without creating a piece who would be radically unbalancing to the game.

Hypersonic Speed down the dial (though we have little idea how deep that dial is) was a given for a character who exists as a red blur, and so it is in this clix form. (If you're curious about the various powers that come up here -- beyond the ones I link to an explanation of -- here's a pdf of the current range of powers and abilities in this game, albeit the team abilities you'll see there are the Marvel ones.)

A constant 2 Damage is reasonably representative; a little Perplex help from somewhere and he has a good shot at doing some damage. A starting Defense of 20 to start works, though his not having any Defensive powers aside from some late-dial Super Senses has struck many (including myself) as a blunder. By the time gets Super Senses his Defense will be down around 14 -- a value that is laughably easy to hit by a great many clix. The wording "he’s still vulnerable to pushing" strongly implies that they didn't give him any Willpower, which also strikes me as a blunder when attempting to depict a figure who seems to be everywhere at once, a super-speedster who is supposed to be at such a height in his powers that he's a god on Earth.

The starting Attack Value of 12 with what reads as a point-per-click drop -- though "drops steadily with each click" could just as easily mean it falls by 2 with each click -- should at worst still give him at least two really solid clicks and will probably mean he has 4 of them.

At 150 points he's by far the most team-friendly KC piece to date. The Bat Sentry is nearly pointless, and the 188 pt KC Batman is tantamount to handing one's opponent the points. I believe the 198 pt KC Wonder Woman would be the next up, and while she's a tremendous piece she's still problematic for use in games that are less than 400 pts. Magog (209 pts), Shazam (256 pts ) and Superman (265 pts) are all above and WELL above 200 pts each. Meanwhile, were one to pull a KC Flash out of a booster at a marqee event (where one buys three boosters and cobbles a team together from his random pull) he would probably be reasonably easily worked onto a team. I also suspect he'll be one of the pieces to work well with the 25 pt Fortitude card (also debuting in Legacy), so that he doesn't have to worry about having his Hypersonic Speed suddenly vanishing in the presence of someone with Outwit.

My other expectation is that when played competently people will soon see that the KC Flash is powerful enough; had they gotten something closer to what the fans claim they wanted - a monster with a Speed of 23 or higher - the piece would have been, in the parlance of the gamer, "broken."

Beyond all of the that... the latest preview adds to the expectation that Legacy will be a wonderful expansion set.

Addition: A note from Handsome ultimately reminded me that people are not only using different browsers but different screen resolutions, too. While I knew the page looked okay both through Explorer and Mozilla, I hadn't counted on those whose resolultions are set lower. Apparently H's resolution's set lower, resulting in much larger text and images, and the result was that the Fortitude card above left the adjacent text a squashed and fractured thing. I've addressed it somewhat, I hope, by defining the image size and making it smaller. I'm only remembering now that I probably should be coding it for proportions -- a % size rather than for pixels width and height -- but I'll keep that in mind for later.

He also brought up some interesting points concerning using the Bat Sentry and the KC Batman together, using the former to run interference for the latter. While I'm not convinced - they're both still so exposed to ranged attacks and Outwitting, and have fairly limited ranges - I did come to realize that at least part of the problem is that I (and apparently most of the players in the game, as KC Batman gets little love from the players) simply have a mental block against using a Batman who isn't inherently stealthy. So, apparently this version can be used to good effect. However, it seems that someone really has to want to use this specific version, since for the 188 pts spent on this one clix one can get as much or more in several, smaller, packages that don't have as large a bull's eye on them. Still, that can be said about many, worthy pieces in the game.