Tanking - Developers' view?

Unknown

btw, people are talking about healers and stunners as being the key to go against hard match-ups but board control is also a pretty key way to beat highly leveled opponents. Any character that allows you to place a tile gives you a huge advantage in terms of making free color matches or setting up 4/5 tile matches without giving the team a turn. Captain America and both mags have pretty good board control even at lower skill levels. It's especially great when CMags can place a blue tile on top of any minions countdown tile and completely nullify it. I hardly ever use shield tiles to defend, I always use them to create matches or nullify countdown tiles.

I don't have a OBW nor a spidey but I have a 85lvl cStorm who is a great stunner but I prefer to use 50lvl M Storm in conjunction with a nice damage dealer in order to speed the match up. M Storm has a spammable 5 ap destroy all env tiles which is absolutely deadly in the desert because you can go back and forth between red and green board control abilities without giving the other team a turn. When faced with really hard opponents, you have to check out the tools at your disposal and figure out a play style. a character that is worthless in PvP or the prologue (because you didn't have a strategy worked out) can be turned into a key player in PvE.

I still have to use health packs and sometimes I get creamed by a bad board or a combo 230 daken+bullseye+hulk but for the most part I can clear a sub fairly easily now that I'm poking my nose just outside of the middle tier.

Also, I know mid level kind of sucks but you probably need to work at placing in PvP before being able to place high in PvE. Work on getting a solid maxed 2* team and get a couple good 3* characters that enable you to take part in matches that have a required character.

it just takes a little time.