Can We Please Have More Respect For The Characters?

Dccrulez

I love this game and the way characters are represented most of the times, but I feel the Developers aren't giving the characters as much love as they used to. There are characters like Psylocke whose abilities could desperately use an update and characters like 2* Hawkeye who could use updates to their champion rewards. But above all, we have characters being star ranked in honestly unreasonable ways. I know some probably don't care, but does it seem fair to say that Doctor Octopus could fight Phoenix 1v1? Lately the new characters have been places in 3,4 or 5 star slots for seemingly no reason. I know this is a minor gripe to some but I really feel that each character should be appropriately ranked to their genuine power scale. When 5* was added it gave the idea of "These are the top, these are the x class mutants, the reality benders, the cosmic beings." and yet we have characters on their like Doc Ock, Hawkeye, and Black widow, none of whom have any actual powers, none of whom reasonably should be rated among characters like Thanos with the infinity gauntlet, the silver surfer, and phoenix. Furthermore, some new characters have powers that just feel lacking. Star lord and Sandman both have at least one good power, but their set doesn't feel that unique or interesting beyond working up to one grand slam. Even worse, the trend of 3&5* release for new characters creates uninteresting duplicates. I know it can be hard to think of great powers for some of these new characters, but please make your focus quality over relevance or quantity, your game is beautiful and I'd love for it to stay that way.

Skrofa

Star rankings have always been about rarity and not power.
Sure, 1* characters are weaker and 5* more powerful but that's how things are. There are exception though. I can think of many 4* who pack a greater punch than some 5* (or at least, they ate more useful). Same can be applied to 3* vs 4*.

As for your sandman/starlord point. That, is done on purpose. I have said it before but some of the game's mechanics and strategies remind me of mtg. Within each set, if there are 12 mythic cards and 30 rare, the absolutely good ones amount to 2 mythic and maybe 6 rares. 

Not sure why but they feel like having junk cards/characters seems to work for the game. Maybe it makes the rest feel better/ more useful

Jaedenkaal

Well I'm sure the developers don't make "bad" characters on purpose, and I'm sure we can all agree that it would be basically impossible for all characters at a given rarity to be exactly the same "power level", whatever that means. I mean, they could, I guess, if they all had identical abilities. But what would be the point of that?

So some characters are simply going to be "better" at some/all things than other characters, and wherever characters are ranked by this effectiveness, one of them is going to end up at the bottom.

Should new characters always be "better" than any other character released before them? That would 'solve' the issue of new characters being bad, but would cause a power creep issue that I'm sure Demiurge does not want to deal with more than they already are. New characters are already better than old ones courtesy of new mechanics that they have access to that older characters did not (fortified tiles as only one example).

Star-Lord and Sandman aren't even that bad (if you ask me, in my opinion, of course), they're simply not interesting, which I think is the worst thing that a new character can be (boring). 

Dccrulez

I feel you misunderstood me on many points. First off I don't believe they mad any characters bad nor did they do so on purpose. I feel that they simply made bad choices in developing characters. The main of which is sacrificing quality over relevancy, creating covers like 5 and 3 * star lord because guardians two was coming out, but not being invested enough in that covers development to give it a well thought out move set. Instead of releasing characters they were actually inspired to release, they often push out characters out of necessity, which in turn causes their abilities to be less interesting as less love and thought was put into them. Furthermore this push for relevancy has caused some older characters to be all but forgotten. Some two stars have never had their champion rewards updated to reward their three star variants, and we haven't seen a new character below 3* in a very long time. Then there are characters like psylocke whose abilities were fine when she was first introduced but has become lackluster as more mechanics have been added to the game that she could benefit from, such as passives.

As for characters being 'better' I was not referring at all to power rankings in the game. Every character has a specific playstyle and learning how to best use that is what makes them more powerful. What I was referring to the power rankings in the marvel canon. the 5* rank is supposed to represent the strongest characters in the marvel canon, so why is Doc Ock there? from the beginning we were given a sense that the ranking meant something, but that has seemed to fade. It has always made sense to me that each variation represents a different level of power, of course the older models of Iron man's armor are weaker and of course the hulk buster is the strongest. Surely the black suit Natasha is weaker, she isn't equipped with the same weapons as grey suit or primed for espionage like classic.  Clint is weaker in one star because he's a younger more inexperienced clint still in his big purple get up. There was always an explanation.

Stick

The star ranking was never related to in-comic power level. I mean, a lot of the five star characters are important characters from Marvel, and thus very powerful, but there is nothing anywhere that implies that all 5 stars have to be the most powerful characters from the comics. Sure, Phoenix would wipe the floor with Doc Ock like, instantly, but in the comics, specifically Spider-Man comics, Doc Ock is one of Spidey's most important villains. (See: Superior Spider-Man, my favourite run of Spider-Man, tbh)

Jaedenkaal

Dccrulez said:

What I was referring to the power rankings in the marvel canon. the 5* rank is supposed to represent the strongest characters in the marvel canon, so why is Doc Ock there? from the beginning we were given a sense that the ranking meant something, but that has seemed to fade. It has always made sense to me that each variation represents a different level of power, of course the older models of Iron man's armor are weaker and of course the hulk buster is the strongest. Surely the black suit Natasha is weaker, she isn't equipped with the same weapons as grey suit or primed for espionage like classic.  Clint is weaker in one star because he's a younger more inexperienced clint still in his big purple get up. There was always an explanation.

Yeah I can't agree with this. Star level has only ever represented rarity in-game, and power level in-game. This has been true since the beginning of the game. Compare 2* Ares to 3* Punisher, as only one example. Or 3* Sentry with 4* Nick Fury. Or Elektra.

Character rarity is about game-play and advancement, nothing more.

If you're trying to use the game to tell a narrative, then sure, I can see the power disparity between some characters being jarring to some. Although even in the comics themselves (which are surely as canon as it gets) unlikely victories happen all the time, if only because it makes for a more exciting story than 32 more pages of "slaughter in their wake"