Frontline Interviews: StarFighter – Boss Rush (Claire Voyant)

Summoners!

Thanks to Starfighter from the Podcast of Champions for sharing her thoughts on participating in the International Women’s Day Boss Rush and designing the final fight, Claire Voyant.

How did you feel when you learned that Kabam was planning an International Women’s Day Boss Rush and wanted you to participate?

It’s kind of a rush and a shock all at once haha. I had a lot of fun doing it the first time, so it’s something that’s very hard to say no to the second time. I was honored to have been thought of for this type of thing again, and doing it in conjunction with IWD is something I felt like I had seen people ask for in the past.

Why did you choose Claire Voyant as your champion? Did you have thoughts of choosing anyone else or what is always going to be Claire?

Claire is one of those champions that I personally want in my roster – I don’t have her as a 5*. Picking her was partly also me seeing if I could entice her to slide into my crystal results, similar to Law of Attraction. Ever since she came out she’s been one that I’ve always been excited about seeing. Changing immunities is just really fun to mess around with, not to mention the other areas of her kit.

As a group we did decide that we should all decide to pick female champs, and I had ones I knew I wouldn’t pick and I wasn’t always set on Claire – I think I had a list of her and maybe 5 others that I was considering. I want to say those were Nebula, Spider Gwen, Elsa Bloodstone, She Hulk & Storm. I also had those in mind before we saw the list of curated nodes that we had to come up with something from, so some of that changed it. So as I started toying with the combination of nodes, I did start to think of combining Rage, Mighty Charge and Matador. Soon after that the more I messed around with the idea the more it became more and more tailored to Claire.

You were able to design a fight for last Boss Rush with your Podcast of Champions co-host Kam. How did that fight and the feedback you received influence this fight’s design?

Yeah, that fight was a lot of fun to design. Getting to do it with Kam was also a great thing for it, I think we hashed out the fight over an hour long call. – the idea we started to run with was the idea of a fight similar to the feel of Brian’s flare shield rocket of getting amped up damage, before dialing in on icarus and the fact that we both thought Taskmaster would be fun with empowered immunity. For then we wanted to have a fight that could be done by pretty much every champ that time also.

I think most of people’s feedback we heard was either that it was a really fun fight at the end of the quest or that it was too easy. We were both happy with how it turned out don’t get me wrong, but I think for me, I did end up wishing we had made it a little more challenging for people then it was.

So I did want to make this fight a lot more designed to manufacture a way of fighting it, without taking too much of the player’s choices away. The design grew from the first ideas I had to become what it is – I don’t think I set out to design it exactly this way other than me seeing both Mighty Charge & Matador in the list and laughing at combining them. I did want this fight to feel more substantial as a challenging but doable one. It’s kind of made to not have direct clear cut counters, like sometimes turnout, but naturally people want to counter safeguard and not have to take all 100 hits – so I did leave room for the passive damage dealers and some of the other avenues there.

You designed a fight that’s a bit longer than the others in the Boss Rush and one where damage over time champs excel. Is that the kind of fight you enjoy the most in MCOC?

I haven’t always been a fan of them, like I enjoy watching champ’s health bars melt as much as everyone else. I do like fights where it gets easier when you have a direct counter, but maintains a baseline for everyone that’s about the same level of effort being put in at a certain rank/level of champ. That and that kind of makes it easier to replayable the fight, where it’s not one sole answer to it but many. That’s what makes some fights more fun, especially when you know you are going to want to play the quest numerous times.

The way it turned out is one of the ways I do enjoy fights – being able to push opponents to higher power bars & then bait out the specials have always been enjoyable to me – and it’s a good way to learn how to play around Mighty Charge if you care to take the time for it. And I’ve always had fun with seeing how much power you can give an opponent in a single hit or parry – more on that in a bit here I think.

Besides your Claire Voyant, which fight in the Boss Rush did you enjoy the most?

That’s hard – I’m partial to most of them. I think I have to go with Dragon’s just due to the fact that it’s a call back to the Captain Marvel clash event and the way it’s designed does leave room to fight it in a traditional way, or to fight it by using invade to your own strength. Cat’s is probably the runner up, not that I’m biased from her being my alliance leader at this time… The way it turned out works really well for being able to play around medusa’s autoblock.

Who did you use to beat your boss, and what other champions would you recommend?

I almost exclusively used Captain America Infinity Way for her. There’s something that’s really satisfying when you bring him in with his signature ability classes on the team, making you able to parry Claire on a Mighty Charge and see her power shoot up to a full bar. Him and just rinsing parry, bait, punish was most of how I played the fight. I did also enjoy going in with a Nebula with Prox on the team and just trying to time a parry to see if I could see a single parry take her from 0 to 100 in .25 seconds. I didn’t end up getting that in full, but I definitely had one of 2 bars of power that I cackled at a fair amount.

The more efficient counters I’ve seen have been Omega Red and trapping her to a corner, Human Torch with his passive flames, Quake, Longshot. All have passive damage that get around safeguard and don’t get thrown off when she Mighty Charges. If you do want to play with the immunities more – bringing in champs like Cap who can apply debuffs on block can lead to some fun with power. I don’t think that you can really go wrong in choosing.

-Dano375