'Official' Character Rankings Discussion 3/20

Unknown

Not great, but annoying enough to skip. Invisibility can play havoc on shield hops.

Arondite

Lerysh wrote:

Iron Fist is going to debut in the top 10. I place him above 3* Thor, but others may not.

You're absolutely correct - Iron Fist is now the best 3 Star character in the game, and that's actually by a noticable margin.

Cyclops is good, but with the devaluation of 4* Thor I dunno that he is THAT good. Decent outlet for black tho. I put him right behind Patch (who is way higher on my list) in usefulness and on teams.

Cyclops in my opinion will probably fall just shy of a top 10 list, being eke'd out by characters like Thor and Patch, and even Luke Cage imo.

Luke Cage is also good, kinda on par with Cyclops in overall usefulness, good outlet for Black, and free which is awesome. He probably comes in behind Magneto (Classic) in usefulness.

Agreed.

Squirrel Girl is... eh. For Marvel's favorite Mary Sue she's not very good here. The squirrel army is ok at turning Green AP into not Green AP but who the hell wants that? I think she joins the group of 3*s that's less useful than 2* OBW.

She's definitely a unique case. She actually packs a punch...but she's too slow to be good for Shield Hopping, and not sustainable for climbing, and unintimidating on defense (in fact, a hindrance), so she unfortunately falls short of every important metric.

Elektra is... special. She is really only good against people who use otherwise she loses a third of her power set. Of those one of them is Daken, who can overwrite her trap tile so that's not a good match up. Her costs too much to be really useful. The one nice thing she does is fill up all the purple tiles so Patch can go on a Berserk Rage rampage, which I guess makes her more useful than Invisible Woman, but probably less useful than Ares. Technically She Hulk is better at special tile handling so lets put her behind She Hulk I guess.

Yeah, elektra falls really flat in a lot of ways. The problem I find is that most/ a lot of Strike Generators generate them on Red, and that turns off her only pure offensive ability.

I have high hopes for Star Lord. He seems like he could be really really good especially paired up with Hood for CD manipulation. His damage per AP is actually quite good. The acceleration thing is a bonus. I've also tokened a ton of his covers somehow so I have a 4/3/4 right now. He goes in above Hulk for me, behind Deadpool, only because Deadpool has the option to super whales.

Professor X might be the next coming of Thor, which is to say he might be the next broken meta character. Invisibility is a pain in the **** to fight, so he may generate skips or defensive wins. His blue is crazy good, generate extra damage on your extra damage? Yes please. Free shield tiles don't hurt either, and easily buffing those shield tiles and attack tiles to 500+ with Blind Spot is pretty good. Because it's his debut, and because he's a 4* so not totally useable by a wide portion of the population, and because he can be tricky to figure out I'm going to guess he debuts in top 20, not top 10 or 5 where he belongs.

Yeah, IMO Professor X is going to be used primarily by players who are wanting to make an enlongated Shield Hop or not wanting to hop at all, since he's a more likely candidate to be skipped than most. Unfortunately, he's a bit slow on offense and that means you have to pair him with someone else defensively intimidating, as you won't be quickly hopping with him.

Predicted movement: 4* Thor drops out of the top 10 as a knee jerk to her change. Rankings after next she will slightly rise. Mystique drops the most places thanks to Winfinite being gone. Sentry continues to drop. Biggest overall 'Meh' will move Ragnarok +/- 2 spaces for his rework. Thanks to his featuring in this heroic and general balance of new powers Daredevil will see an uptick into the top 20. XF remains king at #1, which is apparently a death sentence round these parts so we will see how long he can hold out.

Yeah, unfortunatley D3 seems to be of the mindset that it's most effective to nerf whatever appears strongest, whether that character be ruining the balance ofthe game or not. If any at all, X Force really only needs slight tweaks on Surgical Strike's AP generation properties (and perhaps a damage buff to compensate).

konannfriends

my deadpool is 5,4,4 i didnt thing 5 purple would increase the damage much until i fought another deadpool. and that thing did 4000 ...... now i see why everyone places him so high. granted his health makes him perfectly balanced. shoot if he had 5100 id still use him

Unknown

konannfriends wrote:

my deadpool is 5,4,4 i didnt thing 5 purple would increase the damage much until i fought another deadpool. and that thing did 4000 ...... now i see why everyone places him so high. granted his health makes him perfectly balanced. shoot if he had 5100 id still use him

Deadpool's black is pretty lackluster so he's a definite 5/5/3. Whales doesn't technically need levels due to Whalebombing, but its his best option.

jimstarooney

I agree with arondite that unless u have the character you arent qualified to rate the character.when i 1st read about goddess change i thought it was actually making her better!i mean less charged tiles but more power per tile sounds better right?those charged tiles get matched a lot but an alliance member of mine pointed out its actually a nerf and seein as he has a working goddess and i dont hes more qualified to rate her than i am so ill take his word 4 it.but thanks for this,very interesting and while i dont agree with some things(i dont agree with some of mms write ups either)it keeps us going till we get mms version and its always good to see different opinions.cheers man:)

Unknown

The only big big change for me is Loki. There is no question in my mind that he belongs firmly in the top10. He's at least as good as hood in most cases, and definitely better with characters that need little AP to do broken things, or that run away with games if they fire a certain ability off early.

whitecat31

So anyway this is an unofficial discussion.
Instead of making a list like everybody else, I will just vote.

What I would like to talk about is eliminating "Troll voting" In the last poll there was over a dozen top 6 votes for Bag Lady. She still finished behind almost every three star hero but beast and doc octopus. I still would like a normalization algorithm of some type that would eliminate final votes that are clearly 5 to 6 standard deviations away from the norm.
I think the only reason why MPQ has not shelved bag lady (invisible woman) is because they think by these polls, that somebody actually likes her.
Why else would Xavier have an invisible power that cost 7 ap and is like ten times better than Invisible Woman's invisibility power at about half the cost?

Unknown

whitecat31 wrote:

So anyway this is an unofficial discussion.
Instead of making a list like everybody else, I will just vote.

What I would like to talk about is eliminating "Troll voting" In the last poll there was over a dozen top 6 votes for Bag Lady. She still finished behind almost every three star hero but beast and doc octopus. I still would like a normalization algorithm of some type that would eliminate final votes that are clearly 5 to 6 standard deviations away from the norm.
I think the only reason why MPQ has not shelved bag lady (invisible woman) is because they think by these polls, that somebody actually likes her.
Why else would Xavier have an invisible power that cost 7 ap and is like ten times better than Invisible Woman's invisibility power at about half the cost?

Those 'troll' votes are a limitation of the software used. If you submit your answers without moving a single character, they stay at default position (even if you told the software to randomize the positions, which they weren't for the last one.) So it might have been a result of some people submitting without actually ranking or it might be some people only voting for the top few characters, or the ones they have, and not moving the rest. The votes where they were everyone was ranked exactly as listed should have been removed, but I'm not sure if they were.

While IF is good, I still have a hard time ranking him higher than 3* Thor. Thor just pulls his weight alone, whereas you really need a good black power for IF to be more useful than Thor. The tank hp puts him above IF in my opinion.

As a suggestion for removing troll votes, you could compare the votes to the average, eg: if you have in excel
X-Force, Goddess, Fury, IW with votes
1, 2, 3, 4
4, 3, 2, 1 (the troll)
1, 3, 2, 4
2, 1, 3, 4
AVG: (2, 2.25, 2.5, 3.25)
Then you could put in a difference column with Ctrl-Shift-Enter, =SUM(ABS(B1:E1-B$5:E$5))

This gives differences of (2.5, 5.5, 3, 2.5)
So the 5.5 is identified as a troll vote. So now you calculate a new average removing the troll votes (here I've put 5 as the threshold)
=AVERAGEIF($E1:$E4,"<5",A1:A4) => giving you (1.3, 2, 2.7, 4)

Unknown

daibar wrote:

whitecat31 wrote:

So anyway this is an unofficial discussion.
Instead of making a list like everybody else, I will just vote.

What I would like to talk about is eliminating "Troll voting" In the last poll there was over a dozen top 6 votes for Bag Lady. She still finished behind almost every three star hero but beast and doc octopus. I still would like a normalization algorithm of some type that would eliminate final votes that are clearly 5 to 6 standard deviations away from the norm.
I think the only reason why MPQ has not shelved bag lady (invisible woman) is because they think by these polls, that somebody actually likes her.
Why else would Xavier have an invisible power that cost 7 ap and is like ten times better than Invisible Woman's invisibility power at about half the cost?

Those 'troll' votes are a limitation of the software used. If you submit your answers without moving a single character, they stay at default position (even if you told the software to randomize the positions, which they weren't for the last one.) So it might have been a result of some people submitting without actually ranking or it might be some people only voting for the top few characters, or the ones they have, and not moving the rest. The votes where they were everyone was ranked exactly as listed should have been removed, but I'm not sure if they were.

While IF is good, I still have a hard time ranking him higher than 3* Thor. Thor just pulls his weight alone, whereas you really need a good black power for IF to be more useful than Thor. The tank hp puts him above IF in my opinion.

As a suggestion for removing troll votes, you could compare the votes to the average, eg: if you have in excel
X-Force, Goddess, Fury, IW with votes
1, 2, 3, 4
4, 3, 2, 1 (the troll)
1, 3, 2, 4
2, 1, 3, 4
AVG: (2, 2.25, 2.5, 3.25)
Then you could put in a difference column with Ctrl-Shift-Enter, =SUM(ABS(B1:E1-B$5:E$5))

This gives differences of (2.5, 5.5, 3, 2.5)
So the 5.5 is identified as a troll vote. So now you calculate a new average removing the troll votes (here I've put 5 as the threshold)
=AVERAGEIF($E1:$E4,"<5",A1:A4) => giving you (1.3, 2, 2.7, 4)

There's also the fact Iron Fist is actually scary on defense. Not alot of characters can say that anymore.

peteer01

Man, these April Fools names make reading tough.

Unknown

peteer01 wrote:

Man, these April Fools names make reading tough.

I'll add their symbols to the main posts when I get a chance.

peteer01

raisinbman wrote:

peteer01 wrote:

Man, these April Fools names make reading tough.

I'll add their symbols to the main posts when I get a chance.

Thanks!

Unknown

So, where does KK fit in the rankings? Above Patch? Below Patch? Next to IF?

El Satanno

Looks like I'm not the only person eagerly awaiting the voting this time around.

I'm not going to make predictions, but I do want to raise an objection to any sort of attempt to stymie troll voting. Given that we get enough legitimate votes, those troll votes won't make an impact. They'll be smoothed over by the rest. Surely someone else out there thinks that Daredevil is under-appreciated and deserves a much higher ranking? Or that Hulk really belongs much further down the list? Implementing the troll-prevention strategy Whitecat31 presented, as an example, would likely invalidate a whole lot of legit opinions. Sledgehammer to kill a fly. Just let the trolls troll and we can all get on with actually compiling our collective opinion.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

So, where does KK fit in the rankings? Above Patch? Below Patch? Next to IF?

I don't know yet. I don't have a 166 Marvel so I'll just be watching her thread to see what people have to say. That and playing her 'buffed' node.

She's fragile, but she has awesome abilities.

I definitely don't think she's bad - free heal, color conversion, team damage. Sure, you don't want her tanking anything, but if she can hide behind some high health/ability spammers she could make them more sustainable

peteer01

raisinbman wrote:

I definitely don't think she's bad - free heal, color conversion, team damage. Sure, you don't want her tanking anything, but if she can hide behind some high health/ability spammers she could make them more sustainable

She's the best justification I've seen for Colossus so far. I wonder how well that pairing would actually work with the right third character?

Hayek

XF/IF is heaven. How does that not pair well with prof? You just have to spec him .

As for SL, his at 5 makes IF's cost 3. Normally you would need 4 3-matches to get 2 casts. With this combo, 3 matches will give you 3 casts, 4 matches will give you 4. Depending on the board, you may get 12 on your second cast, which mean casts 3 and 4 are pure damage. Pair them with cage for the outlet (if benefited from SL , it would be insane) or even xf ( would cost 6, but possibly remove the cd).

And for Gamora, I think her kit was designed to work with the other GotGs. If she's paired with Groot and SL, she tanks all 3 of her colors. Both and give you a ton of strike tile damage in this set up. SL makes her cost 3. So the idea would be to get your strike tiles out and then use the empowered and encheapened . Her also benefits from strike tiles for being AoE. Having said all this, I've tested this out, and it doesn't feel very powerful. You have to do a lot of planning to make your team work around her and the payoff is underwhelming.

Unknown

Hayek wrote:

XF/IF is heaven. How does that not pair well with prof? You just have to spec him .

As for SL, his at 5 makes IF's cost 3. Normally you would need 4 3-matches to get 2 casts. With this combo, 3 matches will give you 3 casts, 4 matches will give you 4. Depending on the board, you may get 12 on your second cast, which mean casts 3 and 4 are pure damage. Pair them with cage for the outlet (if benefited from SL , it would be insane) or even xf ( would cost 6, but possibly remove the cd).

And for Gamora, I think her kit was designed to work with the other GotGs. If she's paired with Groot and SL, she tanks all 3 of her colors. Both and give you a ton of strike tile damage in this set up. SL makes her cost 3. So the idea would be to get your strike tiles out and then use the empowered and encheapened . Her also benefits from strike tiles for being AoE. Having said all this, I've tested this out, and it doesn't feel very powerful. You have to do a lot of planning to make your team work around her and the payoff is underwhelming.

I understand that the guardians were supposed to work together. It's just only one guardian is actually good and the rest are trash(until Starlord/Xavier becomes a thing). I think Gamora could be good if she could get 2 allies that could easily(read: not invisible woman) hide behind her and the whole board.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

So, where does KK fit in the rankings? Above Patch? Below Patch? Next to IF?

IF should be in the top 3* slot relatively easily. I'd say KK is better than Patch. After screwing around with her loaner I'm amazed at how much that yellow passive heals over the course of the match. Add to that the crit potential of purple and the giant green aoe nuke, I'd say she could be better than Lthor. Also I have no idea how Rogers always ends up that high. He's fun to play but he's nowhere close to being in the top10.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

Lerysh wrote:

So, where does KK fit in the rankings? Above Patch? Below Patch? Next to IF?

IF should be in the top 3* slot relatively easily. I'd say KK is better than Patch. After screwing around with her loaner I'm amazed at how much that yellow passive heals over the course of the match. Add to that the crit potential of purple and the giant green aoe nuke, I'd say she could be better than Lthor. Also I have no idea how Rogers always ends up that high. He's fun to play but he's nowhere close to being in the top10.

3* Cap's regenerating AP, repeatable stun, and strong protect tiles are often what gets me through level 350-395 PvE battles. He doesn't shine in PvP, but he's by far the single best PvE character, better than X-Force, better than Patch+Hulk