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.

Examples:

Raven/Prime, Killer Frost/Prime, and Killer Frost/Regime

Red Son Combinations

Doomsday/Prime

Doomsday/Containment

The Flash/Reverse Flash

Martian Manhunter/Blackest Night

Harley Quinn

Common Gear:

Fourth World Set

LexCorp Set

Gauntlets of Azrael

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.

Examples:

Batman/Arkham Knight

Batman/Arkham Origins

Deathstroke/Arkham Origins

Bane/Luchador

Batgirl/Cassandra Cain

Batgirl/Prime

The Arkham Knight

The Flash/Metahuman

Ares

The Joker/Killing Joke with Shazam

Wonder Woman/Justice League

Common Gear:

Cloak of Destiny

Fourth World Set

League of Assassins Set

LexCorp V2 Set

Bleedout Teams:
Whereas Shock and Awe teams kill with one major hit, or even a rapid sequence of them, 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 a player battles other players online, they are not really battling the players themselves but more realistically they are battling the 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 the player to successfully overwhelm the AI opponent would also be successful against the players themselves.

The reverse is also true, a player can verify this by watching the videos of their own victories and defeats when defending against an attacking opponent. While somewhat glitchy and often difficult to identify whether basic attacks are of the light or heavy variety, a player can very much determine what special abilities these players utilize to successfully and unsuccessfully circumvent their own AI defenses. This can be somewhat frustrating because the AI does not appear to understand why a player had built and geared their characters the way they 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:

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.

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.

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:
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 Manhunter/Blackest Knight characters 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 circumvented 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.

The LexCorp v2 set makes opponents in Invincible teams frustrating for several reasons, both sets of special attacks give that character substantial self-healing capabilities and the power drain reversal helps them gain the power necessary to use them frequently. This makes it crucial to utilize abilities that can wipe out an opponent very quickly if not in one shot. Ra's Al Ghul Scimitar wielders should temporarily stick solely to heavy attack combinations to avoid inadvertently fueling their self-preservation with the combo ender.

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 can be circumvented by area effect damage and swapping in low health characters with self-heal abilitpies before it is triggered to keep Raven at lower health. This passive paired with the resurrection feature of the Fourth World set make her truly nuisance to form a strategy around.

Shock and Awe Teams:
Whereas Invincible teams typically take advantage of all three pieces of set gear, signature gear with health, health restoration, damage deflect,and block, Shock and Awe Teams are a bit harder to identify at first glance because it requires a more thorough understanding of individual character abilities and passives and what can make them individually dangerous when paired with the statistic the gear provides. This often means that these setups will often only give the character a gear rating of 350 or 400 rather than a full 450, so it may not be quite as blatantly obvious that your opponent was configured for that purpose and a player may easily be surprised by it in actual combat, often fatally so.

The Cloak of Destiny is probably the only piece of gear which is clearly and primarily added to a character's gear set to allow that player to nuke their opponent. Even then it is only really very effective on characters that have innate stun capabilities in their arsenals and high single hit damage capabilities in their special moveset. It becomes more potent when coupled with gear that creates area effect damage on specials. It is also typical for the player to keep their nuke character tagged out until sufficient power becomes available to execute the specials, which behooves the player to be ready for it at any given moment. Both Batgirls and Bane/Luchador are notorious culprits because of their synergy with the Cloak, but it could also be applied to less obvious culprits.

Other Shock and Awe Teams take advantage of unblockable capabilities. This is what often makes Ares, Deathstroke/Arkham Origins, and the Arkham Knight particularly dangerous opponents especially when their skills get boosted by Area Effect capabilities provided by gear.

Due to the varied nature of the attacks that fall under this category, there is no single card which unfailingly stops Shock and Awe teams. Doomsday/Containment can be useful for single hit nukes, but often gets shreaded by Deathstroke/Arkham Origins using unblockable Point Blank. Raven/Prime is more susceptible to the single hit nukes, but can be an effective counter for multi-hit barrages due to her passive.

Counter strategies to combat these teams are diverse and depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, but one common advantage a player when faced with these teams has is that their opponent will usually have to sacrifice some survivabilty to get the level of overwhelming power that makes these teams so dangerous. Likewise, the characters themselves are often relatively fragile by comparison. So a player's options when facing these opponents are either to build characters designed to weather the barrage, or take them out first before they get off a shot. If paired directly against such an opponent, utilize power drain capabilities to prevent them from utilizing their more dangerous specials.

Bleedout Teams:
Bleedout Teams are fairly obvious as only certain characters are capable of rendering these types of effects and the only gear designed around it are The Ibistick and the League of Assassins Blade. While the 3 set bonus for the LexCorp v2 set does have a radiation effect to it, the effect is not so significant as to be much more than a nuisance to the opposing player. Likewise, characters designed for bleed out can have a much better level of survivabilty than Shock and Awe Teams typically would, but less survivabilty than Invincible teams as characters that take advantage of bleed effects typically have passives and special abilities that are more geared towards damage output than keeping health maxed.

What can make Bleedout Teams especially dangerous is when chaining multiple effects in sequence to take advantage of stacking bleeds. For instance, two Catwoman/Batman Returns S1 abilities followed by a Wonder Woman/600 S2 can quickly eviscerate Martian Manhunter/Blackest Night in a fully developed Fourth World set. Possibly even to the point of the final stab hitting after the resurrection.

Something to look out for when facing Bleedout Teams is the League of Assassins set. The most common defense against bleeds is a quick tagout to mitigate the future ticks of damage and conserve as much health as possible. This is generally a bad idea when subjected to the "Trapped" status effect the set generates, as swapping will at the very least give them your power to execute more bleeds on another character and at its worst cause high damage if the full set is present. Harley Quinn/Arkham Knight is especially dangerous when on these teams with that set, as her passive will also trigger the effect, temporarily stun that player, cause a lot of damage, and when she does tag in she can take advantage of both her team boosting S2 abilities as well as area affecting S1 abilities.

Raven/Prime and Reverse Flash have passives that can be effective counters to bleed effects. Power drains are extremely useful as well as most of the bleed sources come from special attacks. The key when facing Bleed Out Teams is to avoid allowing too many sources of those effects to cause too much damage, and utilize self-heal and team-heal effects to recover quickly. Bleedout Teams are at their most dangerous when they have all of their characters available to swap out and stack the effects. Bleed-capable characters by themselves are far less dangerous once their teammates get knocked out.