Tanks and Cannons

Unknown

We are playing a game where there are some tanky characters, Hulk, Thor, Colossus, R&G, etc. And some squishy characters Mystique, Loki, Storm, Black Widow, Human Torch.

On offense the player can instinctively target the weakest character and take them down first. That is basic RPG strategy 101.

However there is no way for the player to protect their weaker team members while attacking. Matched green? Storm rushes out to the front line to take the next attack, Thor, and Hulk hang back because reasons...

There are deadpool and Colossus that seem like a nod to this conundrum and can take hits for others but I want to propose a more elegant reorganization. Sort everyone by health class, I think we have 7 ranging from:
11475
10200
8500
7650
6800
5950
5100

Once we have everyone sorted here is the simple change that could let tanks tank, and glass cannons stand off to the side where they are most effective.

Lower each character's match damage by one per health class.

That means on a green match Hulk(79) would always be out front, Gamora(77) would be behind him, followed by Patch(75), and Storm(73) all the way in the back. Storm's green is still higher than any character whose second power is green so it won't shake things up too too badly. With some testing I would almost want a further decrease so the lowest HP Characters could hide behind secondary color tanks on their primary color.

Where it will make a larger difference is on the low end, the 11/12/13 damage tiles. Lowering them by even a few points would let the squishier characters hide behind nearly anyone else and give them that much more survivability and sustainability on offense.

Players currently do some of this by intentionally underleveling characters so they hide better but a low health character is supposed to be dangerous to counteract their weak hitpoints, if you are forced to keep them low to keep them alive then you are lowering their hitpoints even further and taking away from their strengths by not maxing out their levels. D3 has said before they want there to be no reason for a player to not want to max out a character and there are many threads asking for a de-level option in some form.

Torch is one of the best examples of this conundrum. I love his power set, he is fun to play and can deal some damage. Using him on offense requires constantly feeding him healthpacks because he takes a lot of hits and doesn't have the hitpoints to shrug off trivial damage and keep going. So, I don't use him, his cost to play is too high and he gets benched. If I could rotate a series of tanky characters in front of him to take the majority of the hits then having a deep roster is a good thing, and I can play with the fun glass cannons more often. Yes they will always be squishy on defense, but if they take the hits on offense and defense then they will quickly ignored and rarely used.

Unknown

Interesting proposition.

However I think it is relatively fair that some risk is required when putting out characters with lower hp. What I normally do to alleviate that situation some is to place a second character with higher health in the same team. e.g Torch and Cyclops, letting Cyc tank red for Torch by placement at the team setup screen.

That said, I think the way things are now are fine, and takes more strategy on how to move the board while trying to avoid putting a lower-health character in the light makes it more exciting for me!

If the lower health characters are always gonna hide behind higher health ones then it'd make the game less challenging.

Arondite

You could always just put hulk to storms left so he tanks for her on ties lol