Bruce Banner Hulks and Totally Awesome Hulk are mutually exclusive

ThaRoadWarrior

Totally Awesome Hulk (ammadeus cho) and Hulk (Main Event) Bruce Banner can't both be on the same team for some reason. Is this a bug, or by design? They are two different characters.

ThaRoadWarrior

In fact, TA Hulk excludes all the Banner Hulks, even though he is a different character altogether. This makes sense for Venom (Eddie Brock) and Agent Venom (Flash Thompson) since they are sharing the symbiote, but Ammadeus Cho is his own dude with his own hulk situation, no different than She Hulk or Red Hulk.

Rick_OShay

There has been discussion that Cho (TA Hulk) drained the gamma effects (correct this) from Banner Hulk, therefore if Cho is Hulk, there can be no Banner-Hulk, thus cannot exist at the same time.

ThaRoadWarrior

And yet...
https://www.cbr.com/generations-banner-hulk-totally-awesome-hulk-review/

But regardless, it isn't like the Hulk is a mantle to be passed from host to host, as with Thor's mantle and Venom's symbiote. Otherwise we wouldn't have Red Hulk or She Hulk. Even within this game we have alternate universe replacements for existing characters that can be used along side the originals (spider-gwen and miles morales at least). 

Dayv

Yeah, this restriction made little sense when the character was released, and makes none at all now.

Crnch73

Other than in old man Logan, I was pretty sure that cho “removes” the hulk from Bruce Banner, and then also became a hulk. So therefore, if you are in a world where cho is the hulk, it SHOULD follow the logic that he already removed it from banner. IMO...You should be able to play as both cho and 5* banner, but banner would not be able to transform. That would amuse me. 

Also, why can’t hulk characters ever true, self-heal?! 

ThaRoadWarrior

You would think that, except again with the spider-man variations Miles Morales comes from the ultimate universe where peter parker is dead, but can be on a team with a parker spider-man, and spider-gwen comes from a universe where she was bitten by the spider instead of peter, and can be on a team with spider-man. You can also put together a Peggy Carter, Captain Falcon, Captain America team. It just isn't consistent, and if we assume that you want to default to "fun" in these situations, wouldn't it be fun to have an All Hulk Smash-a-thon? 

Dayv

Crnch73 said:

Also, why can’t hulk characters ever true, self-heal?! 

Amadeus Cho (Totally Awesome Hulk) does do true healing with his black.  It's a small amount of healing, but it's not boost health.  The healing amount needs to be small, for game balance reasons.  Most characters that can true-heal themselves have it balanced by a lower health pool (Daken, most Wolverines, Yondu).  It's unusual for a Hulk-sized health pool to have true healing as well, so it is kept under control in other ways.

Few Hulks have healing skills at all.  5* Hulk's entire Hulk form is effectively a huge lump of boost health with other effects as well, Main Event Hulk its the first Hulk with self-only boost healing, and She-Hulk stopped having weirdly mismatched team boost healing ages ago.  Board shake and reaction abilities are more central to Hulk designs.

edit to add: (But at this point we should probably already have moved over to Character Discussion.)

Tombstone

Hey everyone, I spoke with the team on this, and they have confirmed that the inability to use Totally Awesome Hulk and Hulk together was an intentional decision.

ThaRoadWarrior

Thanks for getting to the bottom of it! I was reasonably sure this was going to end up "working as designed," but I still feel it is fictionally inconsistent with the spider family and the Captain America variants. 

Dayv

Tombstone said:

Hey everyone, I spoke with the team on this, and they have confirmed that the inability to use Totally Awesome Hulk and Hulk together was an intentional decision.

Is there any possibility of getting this decision revisited?  It was stated as intentional at the time of his release, but Marvel may feel differently now, and this decision mainly serves to confuse players.

Marvel's "Legacy" storyline right now is supposed to bring back many of the original characters that have been superceded by newer versions such as the goddess Thor, Ironheart, Totally Awesome Thor, and others.  I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Amadeus Cho and a returned Bruce Banner fighting side by side in the next few months, and Banner's return has already been hinted at.

ThaRoadWarrior

I would be in favor of that; I don't see any obviously broken mechanical reason not to allow it, and it's hardly as if this game has any meaningful internal fiction that should preclude it.

CNash

On a similar note, 5-star Thor (Gladiator) can't be used with 4-star Thor (Goddess) despite the restriction in this case being Mjolnir, which Gladiator isn't using. Any chance of a revisit?