I would rather fight Carnage than field Carnage

Jwallyr

So I get that Carnage is supposed to be a "high attrition" aggressive character that dishes out fast damage (by his passive creation of Attack tiles and cheap/splash abilities) but also causes his team to take damage (passive creation of enemy attack tiles, friendly fire damage on his Red if you don't save up excess Red AP). As a result of the wide variety of counters to special-tile spammers (probably aimed more at Grocket than Carnage, but probably not as effective against Grocket) however, the end result is that if you have some of those appropriate characters, it's actually more effective to have an enemy Carnage than it is to waste one of the 3 character slots on your own Carnage.

1) Carnage will only create up to 10 attack tiles for his side; however, an enemy carnage will make an unlimited amount of friendly attack tiles if you are consistently matching or otherwise clearing them. In conjunction with specials buffers like Nico, you can build up an arbitrary amount of damage from their Carnage's spammed tiles

2) One of the best-known counters/partners for Carnage is Medusa. If running Medusa with/against Carnage, you are likely to have a sizable cushion of burst heals to weather the enemy's attack tiles. Specifically if running Medusa against Carnage, you are likely to be able to eat a couple of his red or green abilities if he saves up the AP. End result: his activated abilities are not super threatening.

3) If you are running against enemy Carnage, then instead of running Medusa/Carnage and having one slot left over for the essential and/or someone that synergizes with Carnage's spammed specials, you can instead run Medusa and two characters that work nicely with/against Carnage (because it's largely the same set of characters that work with/against Carnage). Depending on who you have at a usable level, you have a TON of options (in order of my highest-to-lowest characters):

Kraven- neutralize their specials while doing passive damage (other abilities are **** but whatever)
Lockjaw- tanks when they match friendly specials and does a smack in the face, blue can be randomly helpful, green is meh
Dazzler- AWESOME counter. Passive gives a huge stun that's reliably procced by built-up strike tiles, dump red to focus on her green, which does bonus damage from the friendly attacks provided by enemy Carnage
Nico- aggressively matching away his attack tiles makes it likely that you will have more attack tiles, which will begin to accumulate a TON of damage
Captain Marvel- retaliation on her passive, if Medusa's CDs expire she buffs stuff

MrF- rework makes him an INCREDIBLE Carnage counter, and a meh everywhere else. Free abilities/heals on matching enemy specials, his blue does damage buffed by the free attack tiles from enemy Carnage

The 3star options are obviously less good, but there are tons of them, and many of them work well with Medusa + one of the other 4s above.

So... am I alone in thinking that I'd rather see an enemy Carnage than actually use one myself? Particularly in PvP.

hopper1979

With the update to Mr Fantastic I am not sure I agree with this anymore.  He has his counters like any character but you play Carnage, Medusa and Mr Fantastic, some of your good observations are not as relevant.  Not many people are going to take Dazzler or Kraven into a pvp match, they might now to help but that yellow pass of Mr Fantastic is going to mean getting hammered every 1-3 turns by a power cast by the passive.  This is going to be one of the new meta teams at the 4-star level. 

Jwallyr

I played Medusa/MrF/Dazzler against every Carnage team I could find in the MrF PvP, and other than being sure to stun the enemy mrF with Dazzler's passive, I found them to be easy matches, which basically substantiates my point: Dazzler + Mr F + Medusa was better than running MrF + Medusa + carnage. Carnage's actual damage was mostly irrelevant, while *my* team was getting free stuns from Dazzler to neutralize enemy MrF and Medusa.

Jwallyr

Against other teams I ran other combos, obviously, but I'm not sure that I would have *wanted* to run Medusa/Carnage even if I could have. Carnage and Medusa make many banners to slow down matches when you're trying to climb, and Carnage himself doesn't end up contributing the damage I would want. His green can easily end up destroying YOUR attack  tiles moreso than theirs, red damage wasn't great because Carnage wasn't boosted, etc.

Kolence

Fighting Carnage with Kitty really is like having an extra 4th team member.

And yet, I've seen Kitty/Carnage team a few times this week he was boosted. Guess it's still good on offense, playing for wins?

Dormammu

To me, Carnage is a well-designed character.

There are teammates/strategies to use him and be successful, as well as opponents/strategies against him that are successful. That's the way it should be.

MarcusGraves

I love my Carnage and get a ton of use out of him, I always pull him and Medusa (5/3/5 when with him) out when I need annoying squishy characters dead (PvE Hood, Strange, etc.). I kinda wish I had a finished Prowler since he looks like he'd be fun in that team. 

The value of his red is actually really good compared to most other reds of near cost, even though it does team self damage at 7, you are paying 7 AP to do a total 8,519 damage. The fact that he's always putting out free damage beforehand does add little extra value to it.

Green isn't that great yeah, it really isn't to be used just for damage. You're better off sitting on it for either 1) finishing off a character on death's door before they fire a ready power, or 2) you have a bad board and wanna try for something better, then it's not so bad.

I think the real issue is that in 4* land the role he performs of constant in your face damage is muscled out by the simply ridiculous power of Grocket's out of the gate strike tile damage. Why wait multiple turns when you can start a match swinging with +924 (+1,932 if running a GoG)? If you get a starting board with pre set up 5 matchs/possible cascade then whoever is your first priority target is most likely going to be murdered within the next 2-3 turns.

Carnage isn't really mediocre or anything, he's just muscled out of what's he's supposed to be good at by someone that does it better and also counters him (free attack tiles to go with your strike tiles by your 2nd turn? yes please.).

Daredevil217

MarcusGraves said:

I love my Carnage and get a ton of use out of him, I always pull him and Medusa (5/3/5 when with him) out when I need annoying squishy characters dead (PvE Hood, Strange, etc.). I kinda wish I had a finished Prowler since he looks like he'd be fun in that team. 

The value of his red is actually really good compared to most other reds of near cost, even though it does team self damage at 7, you are paying 7 AP to do a total 8,519 damage. The fact that he's always putting out free damage beforehand does add little extra value to it.

Green isn't that great yeah, it really isn't to be used just for damage. You're better off sitting on it for either 1) finishing off a character on death's door before they fire a ready power, or 2) you have a bad board and wanna try for something better, then it's not so bad.

I think the real issue is that in 4* land the role he performs of constant in your face damage is muscled out by the simply ridiculous power of Grocket's out of the gate strike tile damage. Why wait multiple turns when you can start a match swinging with +924 (+1,932 if running a GoG)? If you get a starting board with pre set up 5 matchs/possible cascade then whoever is your first priority target is most likely going to be murdered within the next 2-3 turns.

Carnage isn't really mediocre or anything, he's just muscled out of what's he's supposed to be good at by someone that does it better and also counters him (free attack tiles to go with your strike tiles by your 2nd turn? yes please.).

I disagree.  His niche is creating enemy specials for the characters that proc off matching them like Medusa and Prowler.  Grocket doesn't do that.  The OP's point (which I agree with and thought was common sense) is when someone builds a team around Carnage, rather than bringing your own, you bring Medusa and two others who can use the AP.  Their Carnage will supply more than enough friendly and enemy specials for you to play with and you get another attacker to use all that AP.  A blue user and a better green perhaps? Iceman, Vulture, Peggy, etc. 

froggerjohn

I really enjoyed this post, and its analysis. I frequently struggled against Carnage teams (before learning proper counters), and rarely seemed to reap similar benefits of my own.

While I've improved in the latter somewhat to where I've used Carnage successfully a few times, I've improved drastically when playing against him, to the point where I almost always leave him until last as kind of a 4th ally.

TPF Alexis

froggerjohn said:

I really enjoyed this post, and its analysis. I frequently struggled against Carnage teams (before learning proper counters), and rarely seemed to reap similar benefits of my own.

While I've improved in the latter somewhat to where I've used Carnage successfully a few times, I've improved drastically when playing against him, to the point where I almost always leave him until last as kind of a 4th ally.

When I'm running Medusa against Carnage, I always think of him as a mobile health pack

walkerdog

I'm fine with the enemy having carnage, but he's part of my go-to trio with medusa/kitty, so I wouldn't quite RATHER see him, yknow?

Edit - I don't have grocket covered or I'd run him some too. Carnage is also generally going to help more against some heroes like Chavez - with medusa +carnage it's a lot easier not to get behind on AP, and it's nice to be okay with killing friendly tiles as heals against some opponents/situations. With grocket it feels like you'd occasionally lack enough specials due to bad luck or board shakes.