New ranking project - discussion stage - Initial Post Updated

Roland113

So i'm thinking of compiling a new set of ratings this fall and want a bit of input.  My thought is to rank the characters in up to ten categories.  Ultimately, I'd love to come up to capture how good Grocket and Gamora are together yet only decent on their own.

As an update, I'm going to separate the potential categories into two sections, finite values versus opinion / ranked items.  

So, what categories would you consider? 

Here's the compiled list so far for ranked items:

Match Damage - How do they rank in terms of damage from simple match 3's
Nuke - How much individual damage do their powers do (unboosted)
AoE - How much spread damage can they do to an enemy team
Tank - How much do they mitigate damage to themselves and to the team
Ap gen - Do they generate AP, how useful / practical is it?
Special tiles - Do they generate Strike, Attack or Protect tiles, (may have to break this into three categories)
Chaos (board shake) - How much random destruction do they cause causing the board to change
Niche - Do they have a weird specialty for instance, Kraven reduces the power of enemy specials
PvP Defense - Are they a good defensive character that the AI can use, does your team get skipped because of this character?
Sustainability - Ability to stay in the game (think combination of damage mitigation and healing)
Speed - How quickly can you do serious damage
Effeciency - Damage per AP
Stun - Also includes sending targets airborne
Special Creator - Creates special tiles
Special Stealer - Steals enemy special tiles
Special Destroyer - Destroys an enemy's special tile
Board Control - Can they modify the board to something good for the player?
Teamwork - Ability to work well with a wide variety of other characters.
Special Tiles - Creates for enemy
Tile Buffing - Do they improve / Fortify special tiles
Self-Synergy - Do they generate AP for themselves, do powers progress from one to the next.
Passives
Negative effects



And here are the more statistical bits of info:

Feeder - Do hero levels add to another character's advancement
Health - pure hit points


What are your thoughts? 

Roland113

Maybe board control also, a la 3Cap or Gwenpool

Daredevil217

Roland113 said:

So i'm thinking of compiling a new set of ratings this fall and want a bit of input.  My thought is to rank the characters in up to ten categories.  Ultimately, I'd love to come up to capture how good Grocket and Gamora are together yet only decent on their own.

So, what categories would you consider? 

Here's my short list so far:

Match Damage
Nuke
AoE
Defense
Ap gen
Special tiles
Chaos (board shake)
Niche

What are your thoughts? 

Health (as power creep continues, newer characters will have higher health pools)

Sustainability (whether that’s healing ala X-23 or reducing damage ala Rogue. 3* Wolverine would rate low in health but he’d rate as maybe the highest 3* in sustainability as you can ride him in that tier with minimal pack usage).

Speed (probably the most important thing to be good in to be a viable character in the game. This is what makes winfinites less useful, as they take forever to pull off. 

Efficiency (basically the damage you do per AP. Though this will likely be captured under special tiles, nuke, and AOE respectively, and doesn’t have to be its own thing. 

Stun (definitely deserves its own category and characters like Riri and Nova who send characters Airborne deserve points here too.

Roland113

Agreed totally on speed and stun.  I think health and sustainability kind of rolls into defense but I may be willing to break defense into those two separate ones. 

I agree with you on efficiency though it may be worth rolling some of the others into a larger eff we ciency category of we have to reduce later 

Pongie

Feeder. Not entirely sure how you would score each category but those yet to feed a 5* would obviously be 0. Depending on how desirable the 5* feeder is according to the meta, raise the score accordingly.

Persephone

In regards to special tiles, could that category be broken down into creator; stealer; or remover?  If that is too much to do, I understand.  

Roland113

Pongie. Good call, 

Persephone, also a good call. 

We're going to have a rough time keeping this at ten.

So here's a question,  how do we capture info for feeder, that is really a yes / no rather than something ranked.   How does that score get captured? 

Daredevil217

I think you just take all the ideas and then decide later what can be combined and what needs to be broken down.

I don’t think healing and damage reduction are part of defense. I think of defense as how many defensive wins you get, how well the AI plays your team and how many skips a character nets you.  A good example is 5* Okoye would be one of the highest ranked characters for “sustainability” due to the cheap healing whereas Thanos would get a low score due to costing packs (conversely he’d be tops in speed). Jessica Jones would be tops in defense however, as her traps make her one of the more annoying characters to face in the game and she is more likely to be skipped. 

Feeders don’t play any role in how good a character plays and thus I don’t think they should be part of something that ranks the best characters in game. Plus all 5* would get a zero as there are no 6* to feed. 

Roland113

Very good point on the Feeder.

For Defense, I was thinking synonymous to how good of a tank they were, but you bring up a good point at PvP Defense.  I like the idea of throwing all of the categories in one place and going from there.  I think I'll update the original post with that in mind.

Roland113

One other note, if this project does move forward, I could use help in the 5 star tier.  I'm not qualifies in any way to comment on that tier.  I can also just skip the tier from a write up stand point but would love to have someone qualified to comment on the tier with write ups and such.

Persephone

I like the updated list.  I think the information provided would help me form teams to take into battle.  

Daredevil217

I would add “teamwork” to the list as well. Basically the ability to play well with others. Carol is a great example of a character that can fit on so many teams due to being self-sustaining and a support for others. Whereas IW Spidey and Nico are in the upper half of the 4* tier for sure, but need specific characters to shine. 

Roland113

Teamwork added.

ThaRoadWarrior

There are enough 4*s who can create enemy specials that it may be worth noting that. I’m not sure if that falls under “niche,” but since loads of characters act on enemy specials it is probably worth capturing.

Roland113

Special Tiles for Enemy added.  It may ultimately fall into the niche heading, but I figure for the first stage, I'll just throw all of the ideas out there and let us eliminate as we go forward.

Straycat

Not sure how this would look like. Would you give every character a score in each category that they are eligible. For example

Gamora  Nuke 6/10, Stun 9/10, Tile creating 7/10, Teamwork 8/10 etc...

Or would you go thru each category and rank the characters?

Nuke  1.Carol 2. Riri 3. Iron Fist etc...

I remember there being a ranking where the characters were given tier scores based on offense, defense, and ease of use. I like that each category applies to each character, but that is too broad. The 2nd example doesn't really reflect how the overall character is.

But I'll say some categories missing are passives, tile buffing, self synergy, and maybe negative effects

TPF Alexis

Straycat said:

Not sure how this would look like. Would you give every character a score in each category that they are eligible. For example

Gamora  Nuke 6/10, Stun 9/10, Tile creating 7/10, Teamwork 8/10 etc...

Or would you go thru each category and rank the characters?

Nuke  1.Carol 2. Riri 3. Iron Fist etc...

I remember there being a ranking where the characters were given tier scores based on offense, defense, and ease of use. I like that each category applies to each character, but that is too broad. The 2nd example doesn't really reflect how the overall character is.

But I'll say some categories missing are passives, tile buffing, self synergy, and maybe negative effects

Some things, especially those that only apply to a few characters, can probably just be a note next to whatever numerical rankings this ends up with. Something like "3* Thor: Durability 7/10 Nuke 7/10, Battery (y3/10-g7/10), AoE 8/10. Note- Good self synergy through each power generating AP for the next." Those numbers are absolutely just off the top of my head, but feel about right to me. I think I rate him a bit higher than others do, tho.

Hilk

I think this is great, and would love a link to the sheer when done - I often try to remember “who can I use to tan/etcs?”... while collecting the info, You may want things like the colors used, etc.

That said, trying to pick or compute a ranking from all these factors will be basically impossible... in the end I think you will come down to a few (PvE and PvP rankings).  
PvE will likely be based on speed and durability for different situations/ opponent types.
PvP is a little more interesting as they are starting to design the characters so they each have a weakness that someone else can use to beat them... 

Roland113

Straycat said:

Not sure how this would look like. Would you give every character a score in each category that they are eligible. For example

Gamora  Nuke 6/10, Stun 9/10, Tile creating 7/10, Teamwork 8/10 etc...

Or would you go thru each category and rank the characters?

Nuke  1.Carol 2. Riri 3. Iron Fist etc...

I remember there being a ranking where the characters were given tier scores based on offense, defense, and ease of use. I like that each category applies to each character, but that is too broad. The 2nd example doesn't really reflect how the overall character is.

But I'll say some categories missing are passives, tile buffing, self synergy, and maybe negative effects

My thought is that every character would get a score in each category as in your first example.

Roland113

Hilk said:

I think this is great, and would love a link to the sheer when done - I often try to remember “who can I use to tan/etcs?”... while collecting the info, You may want things like the colors used, etc.

That said, trying to pick or compute a ranking from all these factors will be basically impossible... in the end I think you will come down to a few (PvE and PvP rankings).  
PvE will likely be based on speed and durability for different situations/ opponent types.
PvP is a little more interesting as they are starting to design the characters so they each have a weakness that someone else can use to beat them... 

Oh, I'm going to eliminate this down to ten categories before I go to the next stage, ten is all I really have the energy to track.  Right now, I'm just including all of the suggestions in the master list before eliminating anything.  I'll probably go until the weekend then start working on eliminating / combining categories to get down to ten.

Roland113

As a thought, do you think that AoE is an important category or could that be rolled into the nuke category?  I find that with the speed game, I typically eliminate a few of the targets before I get enough AP for the AoE.  Granted, Dazzler may reinvent that meta before we know it.