Why no buff for Banner or Ock?

bluewolf

A perennial request/complaint on the forums, especially among vets and 5* players, is why the devs don't buff the two worst 5*s to playable status.  There is even a suggestion that Banner could be a Gambit counter over on the nerf Gambit thread.

People hate Banner.  Hate hate hate him.  Ock is a fun design for a different game, so sits mostly unused.

They look at buffs for Surfer and 5 Cap and say, what's up? Come on, fix these characters.

Money.  Right?  It's easy.

Buffing or rebalancing a character takes time and effort (AKA money) for the developers.  Why do it? 
1.  It's nice for players to find new uses for characters that they have in roster that have been marginalized by power creep, or that were poorly designed in the first place.  So it's a thing that devs do that is nice for players.
2.  The devs, I assume, hope that paying players decide to pursue newly buffed characters that they may have previously skipped or otherwise not bothered to develop.  In other words, they are looking for an ROI.

So, Surfer - the first 5* - was very well covered and collected by anyone that was at the endgame.  Cap was too, to a large degree, simply because the 5* pool wasn't very big.  Buffing them meets criteria #1 because a lot of players had existing characters on their roster that they could newly enjoy, and perhaps use iso to level up or CP to finish, meeting criteria #2.

Doc Ock we know people skipped like crazy and hoarded past, based on all the complaining when he became an essential.  So if they did buff him, how many people have a high level Ock rostered that they would work on?  

Banner?  I am not sure about how people chased him, but he was seen as bad very early, so I am guessing a lot of players did not chase him and don't have him at a high level.  But even if he is actually very well covered and meets both criteria #1 and #2, he is a different beast because he is actually 2 characters in one slot (when he transforms, everything changes).  So balancing might be difficult in general (in terms of what you want to accomplish) and technically, as seen when the boosted Banner changed into an unboosted Hulk recently.  It probably will required a lot of programming work to rework this turkey of a character.

Not to be ignored is the simple fact that dilution is burying all the Classic 5's further and further into a hole where pursuing them becomes very difficult to do thanks to RNG.  The slow-rolling feeder system will help, but every month or so, the odds of pulling the cover you want gets worse.

Lastly, while I assume the devs intend to make characters better and more appealing, we can see from recent 4* reworks that it sometimes doesn't really do anything.  Kingpin is seen as worse, for example.  A lot of reworks are lateral moves (Fury, for example).  I also think that the devs have a commitment to come at the characters (and are obligated to do so by Marvel) in a way that stays true to the character and power set.  This sometimes results in characters that are not so great for playing the game, but they are boxed in by working with the Marvel character requirements.  So maybe the Ock design is not really up for changing no matter what the devs want to do.

Ultimately the questions are:  Could they make these characters good enough that people would feel like they needed them?  CAN they do it (will Marvel let them(?  And if they did somehow make them better, would it be worthwhile for the devs when the real money comes from keeping people chasing the Latest 5's?  I think the answers to most of these questions are mostly no.

DAZ0273

Banner, I don't know however I think they wanted Ock to kind'a be goofy. His green power celebrates the epitomy of stupid supervillain schemes and is clearly the dev's being super indulgent.

Dogface

I wouldn't be surprised if Doc Ock had some business dealings with the Acme Corporation.

Jarvind

I actually don't mind Ock so much. His blue could use help - the tentacles need to be fortified, at the very least - but black is actually pretty good, and green is extremely high risk for extremely high reward, which is fine. Not every character needs to be a meta-breaker, and I think it's good to have an impractical-but-fun character here and there.

Banner is a train wreck, though. When your transforming characer is best used without transforming...yeah, that's just horrendobad design.

Orion

Isn't Archangel just as bad as Banner and Doc Ock?  You have a 5*, and all he does is deny AP?  And poorly at that.  I don't know how he even made it out the door being that bad.  Must have been a course correction from the 2 powerhouses before him.

I don't have Banner or Doc even remotely covered so I don't play them ever, but yeah, they're horrible and need an upgrade badly.

GrimSkald

Jarvind said:

I actually don't mind Ock so much. His blue could use help - the tentacles need to be fortified, at the very least - but black is actually pretty good, and green is extremely high risk for extremely high reward, which is fine. Not every character needs to be a meta-breaker, and I think it's good to have an impractical-but-fun character here and there.

Banner is a train wreck, though. When your transforming characer is best used without transforming...yeah, that's just horrendobad design.

Agreed on Ock.  If they buffed his blue I'd tolerate his green just for sheer amusement factor.  As you said, not every character needs to dominate the game.  Trouble is, he's a one power character right now...

Regarding Banner - his blue does almost nothing (7 green is a horrible threshold,) his black has a drawback, and you are indifferent to having him transform, particularly when he's boosted.  That's a real problem.  He literally has no good power.

ThaRoadWarrior

DOck could use a self-stun, maybe some AP acceleration to really maximize what he is about, but I really love his goofy art and interesting powers personally. 

I really wish Banner was better. He seems like his focus was intended to be to race to get him transformed, then hilarity would ensue, but that just isn't the case in practice. It seems like he is some value tweaks away from being rad (fix his green threshold, allow his auto-matches to gain AP, do mega damage in hulk form...something). 

sinnerjfl

Orion said:

Isn't Archangel just as bad as Banner and Doc Ock?  You have a 5*, and all he does is deny AP?  And poorly at that.  I don't know how he even made it out the door being that bad.  Must have been a course correction from the 2 powerhouses before him.

I don't have Banner or Doc even remotely covered so I don't play them ever, but yeah, they're horrible and need an upgrade badly.

Archangel is worse than Doc Ock, not even kidding.

Blue has pathetic damage for 11 AP, green doesnt even go up in damage at 3,4 or 5 covers (only more random AP destroyed, yay?), AP denial is the only good power but who cares, just use another color for 5 turns.

Ock's black is really good at not wasting a stun, good strike tiles at the end which helps out blue a little (the tentacles do need to be fortified and the cost reduced by 1 probably), green costs way too much for what it does but it's fun, just needs to be more immediatly useful.

Dormammu

The reason the developers don't do anything is that someone has to be the worst. If they buffed Banner and Ock, then we'd all be complaining about some other 5-star who moved into the 'worst' slot. If the developers kept beefing and beefing and beefing everytime we the players complain, power creep would be 10x worse.

There's going to be some duds in our rosters. It just sucks that every single Banner Hulk seems to be one of those duds - he's such a popular and beloved character.

ThaRoadWarrior

I mean, is he though? Has there ever been a good Hulk movie either? I feel like he has huge name recognition, but can't really carry his own thing

Blindman13

I thought the Ed Norton Hulk was pretty good. Certainly better than the Eric Banna version. While not the best MCU movie, it is definitely not worst (looking at you, Dark World). Since then, while he has not had a stand alone movie, the MCU Hulk has had some of the best moments in the movies he appears in. 

I love the scene of him swinging Loki like a rag-doll in Avengers, and the call-back to it in Ragnarok was great.

Unfortunately, as the OP indicated, we have multiple versions of the Hulk in the game, but none are top tier.

Dormammu

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I mean, is he though? Has there ever been a good Hulk movie either? I feel like he has huge name recognition, but can't really carry his own thing

The Hulk is one of Marvel's most recognizable characters across the world and has had his own comic(s) in continuous publication since 1962. Throughout that history his popularity among fans has ebbed and flowed, but he was the 1st Marvel character to carry his/her own prime time network television show and he's had two movies (of which the 2nd one with Ed Norton was pretty good). He was also the absolute highlight of both Avengers movies.

Among comic geeks like myself, the Hulk is one of those benchmark characters:

Who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?
He's almost as strong as the Hulk!
He stood toe-to-toe with the Hulk!

When you say "HULK SMASH" or "PUNY GOD" people smile and know what you're talking about.One year my dad, who has never read a comic in his life, dressed as the Hulk for Halloween.

So yeah, I'd say the Hulk is pretty beloved.

Jarvind

GrimSkald said:

Jarvind said:

I actually don't mind Ock so much. His blue could use help - the tentacles need to be fortified, at the very least - but black is actually pretty good, and green is extremely high risk for extremely high reward, which is fine. Not every character needs to be a meta-breaker, and I think it's good to have an impractical-but-fun character here and there.

Banner is a train wreck, though. When your transforming characer is best used without transforming...yeah, that's just horrendobad design.

Agreed on Ock.  If they buffed his blue I'd tolerate his green just for sheer amusement factor.  As you said, not every character needs to dominate the game.  Trouble is, he's a one power character right now...

Regarding Banner - his blue does almost nothing (7 green is a horrible threshold,) his black has a drawback, and you are indifferent to having him transform, particularly when he's boosted.  That's a real problem.  He literally has no good power.

Bannerform black actually works nicely with either Daredevil or Gambit - being able to overwrite the enemy attack tiles makes it fairly beastly. 

Obviously still not viable for PVP, but fun to mess around with now and then, esp. for wave nodes.

ThaRoadWarrior

It's always been my experience that Hulk works best when treated like Godzilla: basically a force of nature that other things react to. So in a sense, having Bannerform be the more interesting character is pretty on-brand, and then we have a largely underwhelming semi-autonomous Hulkform that the rest of your team kind of has to just deal with when he shows up...actually maybe 5* Banner is the most thematically appropriate character in the game the more i think of it lol

JohnnyBlood

Another suggestion on why neither of them has been buffed, is that if they do, the devs would have to increase the sell back rate for them after the re-work, and people would probably leap at the chance of those "No More Guns" tokens.

LifeofAgony

5* don’t typically get guarantee tokens for re-works.  When 5cap was re-worked, he just had increased iso/hp.  Only OML and Gambit were offered tokens because of being weakened (even tho gambit wasn’t really).

Bottom line, buffing either won’t come with the offer or guaranteed 5* tokens.