Online Battle/Strategy

Online Battle gameplay involves using your choice of a combination of cards and gear against AI-controlled player-created teams to achieve battle rankings. Newer players frequently encounter opponent gear and card combinations that are considered to be exceedingly difficult, especially against opponents with high gear scores.

Invincible Teams:
==== Some teams have utilized their passive abilities, special abilities, and gear combinations, such as the Fourth World Set and the LexCorp v2 Set, to develop a nigh-invincible setup that, at the very least, makes online battles annoying and last for nearly five minutes to win and at the very worst, leave a player dumbfounded towards how to penetrate their opponent's defenses. Players who opt for the survivability often forego damage output in their gear and character selections. ====

Shock and Awe Teams:
==== Some teams utilize powerful gear and character passive abilities to simply nuke their opponents before they saw it coming. Players often utilize Area Effect Damage gear combinations alongside hard-hitting abilities to near-instantaneously knock out the first character and reduce the rest of the team to minimal health. Crit Gear such as the Cloak of Destiny alongside Gear and Characters with Area Damage make these combinations simply lethal. Players focused towards this combination frequently utilize gear and augmentations that amplify their critical hit and critical damage characteristics. ====

Bleedout Teams:
==== Whereas Shock and Awe teams kill with one major hit, Bleedout teams prefer to wear down their opponents with a thousand minor lacerations. While not mandatory, a Batman Returns Catwoman can often boost the efficacy of this type of combination. This can be accomplished by bleeds, burns, or poison. It can be doubly effective if a player utilizes teammates that have passives which benefit from frequent tag outs. ====

Defending Battles:
It is important to note that when you battle other players online, you are not really battling the players themselves but more realistically you are battling their team's character layout and gear statistics that are controlled with AI strategies. Understanding this is crucial because there is no guarantee that the strategies that allow you to successfully overwhelm the AI opponent would also be successful against the players themselves.

The reverse is also true, you can verify this by watching the videos of your own victories and defeats when defending against an attacking opponent. While somewhat glitchy and often difficult identify whether basic attacks are of the light or heavy variety, you can very much determine what special abilities these players utilize to successfully and unsuccessfully circumvent your own AI defenses. This can be somewhat frustrating because the AI does not appear to understand why you've built and geared your characters the way you have nor is there any guarantee it will utilize anything similar to chain of attack combinations that the players themselves have successfully developed and battle tested to decimate the opposition consistently.

Some common themes tend to appear when combating AI opponents:

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AI opponents often develop a preference towards the utilization of S2 abilities over S1 abilities and Super moves. This can make KJ Joker and Shazam combination very powerful offensively for a player while still being relatively weak when defending as AI. It also causes characters with devastating S1 abilities like AO Deathstroke to use their S2 abilities even if your typical strategy is to chain multiple S1 abilities in succession. =====

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AI opponents online are relatively slow to react when a fight begins, while players who start with a bar or more of power like AO Batman will generally initiate his S2 or S1 abilities before you can finish a basic attack combination, if a player stands ready to initiate their own special as soon as the fight begins, they will beat the AI opponent executing the move the majority of the time. =====

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AI opponents do not appear to prioritize special move utilization to coincide with bonuses based on gear statistics. Generally if they see an opening to use a special ability, they will frequently use it, even if the player themselves would typically build more power to use their S2 or Super move to deal with the situation. =====

=== AI controlled opponent players are not pushovers by any means. Three max elite gold cards with good synergy, supported by 450 gear on each and all support card bonuses are a difficult nut for virtually any player to crack with just about any combination. However, players themselves can still outmaneuver these opponents if they have a basic comprehension about how their AI opponent is likely to utilize its abilities to attack. ===

Invincible Teams: Coming Soon!
==== Teams developed specifically around the design for toughness, self-heals, power drain abilities, and generally making themselves into a frustrating nuisance with passive bonuses are developed primarily to become extraordinarily frustrating for an attacker to defeat. Two Martian Manhunters (Blackest Night) geared with full 450 Fourth World gear sets going toe-to-toe with all other cards knocked out is a fight that will probably result in a frustrated force quit rather than a "Victory" for the player. Teams built heavily around survival specifically are usually best circumvents by combinations of Shock and Awe or Bleed Out builds. Area effect capabilities make these teams more effective, while tagged out characters can't be knocked out until they get tagged in, the chances of survival of another hit with less than 5% of their health remaining is relatively small, although the full Fourth World Set and Doomsday (Containment) have bonuses that can keep the opponent around longer than they would be otherwise. ==== Raven (Prime) specifically will make some counter strategies more dangerous than others, bleed damage abilities and multiple hit shock and awe abilities can frequently trigger her passive inadvertently and quickly turn the tide the other way. With bleedout focused teams this