Need quick help for my *** team

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Hulk was the second character that I leveled up to 141, and I'm sad to say that I never use him anymore. While he was the best tank at the time, now that BP/LazyThor have been released, he's become completely obsolete in the metagame.

While I wouldn't say that he's obsolete, I've had a similar experience to NorthernPolarity. I have him maxed, but I hardly ever use him. His main use is to throw onto your team on the last PvP fight before you're going to be away from the game for a while. Players without a good Spider Man will pretty much automatically skip over you and not retaliate. My main team is usually Punisher with either Classic Magneto or Spider-Man or original Black Widow. I will sometimes use Hulk as my third when able, but he doesn't do much besides making me very annoying to retaliate against.

The problem with Hulk is that his only real role on offense is to get angry. This can be insanely good, or it can be an absolute non-factor, depending on several things. Here are some of the considerations.

(1) He needs a lot of black covers to be really useful. Since you aren't using strike tiles, the 5th black isn't as important but you really want 4 black covers for him to be better than what you're already using (Thor).

(2) As you level him, it becomes harder and harder to activate Anger from pure match damage. At a high level, it'll only happen against guys like Patch and Daken and Punisher.

(3) So if you plan to run a high-level Hulk, you need to send him to the front when the enemy is about to hit you with one of their powers. There are many potential problems here:
-You're waiting around a lot, rather than finishing quickly. Faster would be better.
-Timing when to put Hulk out front requires micromanagement, and can sometimes fail due to the way the AI now handles using its AP when it has more than one potential use for them.
-Sometimes the right colors won't be there when you need Hulk to make a match. Although in your case, a red or a black match should almost always be there since you are prioritizing purple, green, and blue. When using Hulk with Punisher, though, I run into this sometimes.
-He's only powerful when getting beat up. Which is fine for "Plan B" but you'll probably try beating the other guy up as your "Plan A."

The best way to use Hulk (on offense) is as an emergency measure. If things aren't going well, you can put him out front and he'll win the match for you through a combination of protecting the other characters, generating a ton of green, a ton of damage if running 5 black + strike tiles, and a lot of cascading and critical tiles.

Unknown

Perdidodf,

Thanks for posting your 3* characters. Honestly, you best plan is to just keep using 2*Thor until you have better covers for one of these characters we've been discussing. Your only 3* with sufficient covers to be better than 2*Thor right now is Iron Man 40, and I don't know that he's a good enough fit for your team to be worth the ISO investment.

Otherwise, you should probably just wait and see whether you're able to get near-max covers for one of these guys:

LazyThor, Black Panther, Hulk, Ragnarok, Classic Magneto (not a perfect fit for you but awesome overall). Hulk needs 3 more black, Rags needs 3 more red, Magneto needs several more, and you have basically nothing for the other two.

If you're willing to spend Hero Points to buy covers at 1250 a shot, then yeah, you could go ahead with either Hulk or Rags for about 3750 Hero points. Otherwise, you need to wait to get colors you don't have for the other guys.

Unknown

One more minor point about Black Panther.

I'm almost 100% sure you won't be able to use the positioning trick that NorthernPolarity mentioned to get Black Panther to tank green over Spidey. That only works when characters are exactly tied, even down to the hidden decimal value. Black Panther and GSBW are a true tie in green but your Spidey at level 130 is already higher in green than Black Panther can ever get. Spidey at 130 is a "high" 10 in green and Black Panther even at 141 is a "low" 10.

But wait!

If you keep Black Panther one level higher than Spidey, BP will tank yellow, which is a true tie for these characters. Black Panther can also tank red if he's a level higher than both Spidey and GSBW (it's the 4th best color for all three and so a true tie), and can tank both blue and black if he's higher than GSBW. If you choose to do the same level for all three, that will work with proper positioning except when Spidey or GSBW is a non-boosted "required" character that's forced into the center position.

So the bottom line is that a max level Black Panther would tank four of the six colors for you (red, yellow, blue, black), protecting your more essential characters. This is enough to convince me that he's a better fit for your team than any of the guys we've discussed other than LazyThor.

So yeah, I'm coming around on Black Panther. The weird number of ties in tile damage among these characters creates a surprising potential for using him as a tank. But for this to work, you'll need at least 12 BP covers to get him a high enough level. At a lower level than the other two, he actually tanks *none* of those four colors, making him a very poor fit for your team until he equals or surpasses the other two.

So my current answer:
Long term, try for LazyThor or Black Panther.
Short term, stick to regular Thor.
Intermediate term, you'll have to decide whether it's worth investing in Rags or Hulk. The answer probably depends on how quickly you think you can get at least 12 covers in LazyThor or Black Panther.

Unknown

I love that after all the back and forth, you guys came up to the same conclusion, lol.

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanations, i learned a lot, not only about the two chars, but about stuff like tanking/ties, damage per ap, etc. You could´ve just said: ¨Take Hulk. Hulk smash¨. But you provided insightful explanations and all. That was awesome of you, both NorthernPolarity and codhimself.

Like I said in the beginning, my team does alright, both on pvp, and pve. so it´s not like i have to change my team right now. I´ll keep an eye on BP and Hulk covers, as well as lazy thor, and i´ll start saving up ISO too.

Again, thanks for all the help. And if I see you in game, i´ll murder both of you.