Of the more recent 4* character releases, who is the best?

Roland113

Ok, So, I've got a few covers on 8 or so of the more recent 4 star characters and would like advice on who to favorite.  I really don't get much of a feel for any of these guys so please take a moment to comment on their strengths and weaknesses.  

Dormammu

Valkyrie

And it's not even close.

Rod5

Valkyrie

Yes, Valkyrie Thor is formidable

TPF Alexis

Valkyrie

Shuri, Black Panther, and Spidey can work well in the right teams, but Valkyrie is much better overall, and much more of an all-rounder. As far as I can tell, Black Widow, Jubilee, and Wiccan are all pretty bad. Wiccan somewhat less so than the other two, but still not good.

Roland113

Thanks for the input you three, it seems like Valkyrie is the obvious answer from the early results.   I'm still interested in anyone else's opinion.   Any good from the bottom three,  which teams week for the middle three?   

I think I kind of went on autopilot for a bit and didn't play much attention to these ones in general

TPF Alexis

Valkyrie

Shuri and Black Panther work well together. C4ge or Mr. F seem like  good thirds, because anyone who makes Protects or Fortified tiles will help.

Iron Spider wants other Web tile creators. Basically him, Miles, and Gwen.

ThaRoadWarrior

Shuri

Valkyrie seems pretty generally great, but mine isn't champed so it's not super easy for me to evaluate. With mostly passives, she seems like a Chavez-type all purpose team mate. I really want to run her with Thing and Nico, though i think the yellow tiles on the board would get crowded fast.

 From this list, I use Shuri all the time (the only one i have champed so far, though P4nther is waiting on iso with a 14th on the vine) so I went with her:

If you have other characters that modify AP costs, or that make fortified tiles, then Shuri goes well with them. I like running Shuri/Main Event Hulk/Mockingbird together because of the fortify spam and the AP cost reduction you get from Shuri. all that board shake from Hulk tends to give you a bunch of incidental bonus damage off of Shuri's blue when fortifieds cascade into matches or Grand Entrance does something useful. Or when you use Gamma Powerbomb, and the criticals spawn into fortified tiles and go off twice. Mockingbird will occasionally fire off something useful for free and will at least be gathering AP in the background, and Bombshell puts out a pair of fortified tiles and hit's real hard.

4* Lord/Shuri/Main Event also seems like a strong team, though my 4* Lord isn't great for testing: the AP cost reduction on Star Lord's countdowns will stack with Shuri's, so you can get Main Event down to a more manageable level. 

IM40/Shuri/Peggy is an awesome team. get yellow out early, make everything cheaper by firing off Shuri's red, then the other half of that is that the AP tax stacks with Peggy's, so enemy powers cost as much as 7 more AP while yours are 3AP cheaper. You have a multi-stun on blue and a fairly reliable single stun on green, and peggy hits like a ton of bricks.

I really liked the loaner Wiccan in Shield Training, but mine is only 1/1/2 so who knows how long it'll be before i can use him for anything. I thought Widow was just terrible, and Jubilee was sort of nearly good. She does the gambit thing of overwriting specials, but Light Show is just too random to be useful - it's kind of like trying to use Scarlet Witch's green to snipe a particular tile. Iron Spider had fun web spam, but since i don't have a good spider-family to back him up with, i'm not in a hurry to get too many more for my 0/2/1. 

Roland113

Thanks Road Warrior, that was a lot of good information, I really appreciate the input.

ssbledsoe

Valkyrie

I've recently champed Jubilee and Valkyrie.  I've had a lot of fun running them together.  I find Valkyrie to be slightly better w/ her red dealing a lot of damage that can take out multiple opponents.  Jubilee's green is great for tile over writing and using the AOE to trigger Valkyrie's black.  You can actually be swimming in AP paired w/ Vulture.  My Vulture is 5-1-5 @ LVL 213.  Get Vulture flying and you're very quickly swimming in AP between all of them.  Add in my Valkyrie is the highest rank of the 3 and I get all the red AP I need and I'm firing off AOE pretty regularly.  It's a pretty fun team, IMO.

DAZ0273

Valkyrie

What I like about Valkyrie is that she is perfectly useable even without being champed.

Roland113

Thanks again everyone!

ThaRoadWarrior

Shuri

I've been using P4nther at 5/4/4 lvl 94 with Shuri and Flaptain (5/5/3 lvl 172), and let me tell you, that may sound dumb, but that team gets out of hand SO fast. Once you get Protector of Wakanda on the board, P4nther and shuri's nonsense gets rolling to the point that matching 3 fortified defense tiles will do outrageous damage on multiple damage pools (each one counts as a separate thing, so if you kill somebody with the damage from the first tile, the second ones move down the line just like Valkyrie's red), and Flaptain's nuke becomes 11 red ap instead of 14, so you might actually get to use it one time before you match them to death. Highly recommend, and can't wait to champ Flaptain and P4nther to see what this does at "real" levels of damage lol.

Roland113

Hmm, I'm intrigued by this set up.  My Flaptain is already champed so I'm curious to see how this works out.  I'll be trying this one in the near future.

ThaRoadWarrior

Shuri

get on the flaptain hype train, my dude. #MakeFlaptainGreatAgain lol

Dormammu

Valkyrie

Flaptain gets more flak than he deserves. But he suffers from his age and the fact that there are other characters now who do what he does... better. Since his re-work, 3Falcon is one of them.

monsieurmojo

Valkyrie

Black Panther and Shuri really are a lot of fun to play, especially together. Their passives start butchering teams once you get enough fortified protects (and other fortified special tiles) on the board, and it gets pretty nutty once you get off Panther's red nuke. But as a standalone character (especially one that works in 5* teams), Valkyrie is fantastic. Her red is very similar to Peter Parker's green nuke without the conditions, and her passives are both useful in many different teams.  It doesn't take long to have a ton of your strongest color AP, and for the board to be flooded with free yellow strike tiles.

ThaRoadWarrior

Shuri

Dormammu said:

Flaptain gets more flak than he deserves. But he suffers from his age and the fact that there are other characters now who do what he does... better. Since his re-work, 3Falcon is one of them.

I ran that same team with an under-covered/leveled C4ge, and it was WAY better lol

monsieurmojo

Valkyrie

Cage Wasp and Carol is my absolute favorite 4* team! Special tile buffing for days!

DAZ0273

Valkyrie

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I've been using P4nther at 5/4/4 lvl 94 with Shuri and Flaptain (5/5/3 lvl 172), and let me tell you, that may sound dumb, but that team gets out of hand SO fast. Once you get Protector of Wakanda on the board, P4nther and shuri's nonsense gets rolling to the point that matching 3 fortified defense tiles will do outrageous damage on multiple damage pools (each one counts as a separate thing, so if you kill somebody with the damage from the first tile, the second ones move down the line just like Valkyrie's red), and Flaptain's nuke becomes 11 red ap instead of 14, so you might actually get to use it one time before you match them to death. Highly recommend, and can't wait to champ Flaptain and P4nther to see what this does at "real" levels of damage lol.

I gained a renewed respect for P4nther during Civil War. I didn't really have any optimum teams for him as my Shuri is not levelled but even bringing along a 3* Spidey to spam shields every purple match and Panther was kicking out some damage! I'm definitely more interested in champing him now.

Roland113

monsieurmojo said:

Cage Wasp and Carol is my absolute favorite 4* team! Special tile buffing for days!

I love Cage and Wasp together.  I typically use whichever green / purple user is buffed that week rather than Carol.  If none are buffed, then I get Gwenpool as my third.

That being said, I had to use Black Panther a couple matches this weekend.  He worked pretty good with buffed Riri and Carol.

ssbledsoe

Valkyrie

I voted Valkyrie, but I have pretty much used P4nther exclusively in the Growth Industry wave nodes.

If you can get some repeater tiles out, he'll single handedly win the match.  I was regularly doing over 20k damage by the 4th or 5th wave of the node.  On most of those nodes I was also sitting on 5-10k in shields too.  It was a total cake walk.