Crystal worth it or skip ?

HoundofShadow

It really depends on the context. 

In PvEs, if you're using BRB/Polaris to clear CN or hard nodes, you know they are really slow but they are mostly effective. With KK, she's going to speed up the match dramatically for this team. I foresee a 30-40% reduction in clearing time for this team. For Crystal, you use her mainly for the healing. She's not much of an aggressive character.

In PvPs, Crystal gets the win for being annoying. When 450 Crystal gets boosted, 450, she's going to heal her team for ~8290, and herself 11, 000. As for KK, I haven't thought of a good pick-2, but Carbage (thanks to BlackBoltRocks)  looks good with her. Crystal will be annoying regardless of who she gets boosted with. As for KK, who gets boosted will make or break her.

Bad

Comparing Kamala vs crystal is not fair because Kamala will be a meta queen.
Kamala is way better third than kitty as she can fortify, enhance by 50%, selected board destroy, generate AP, and something few players will appreciate until playing it, to change special tiles to her colors. That's great on a Polaris team although she can do great in any other team. On 5* tier she will be great but nothing compared to 4* tier. They designed her in that way as it's expected her show will be the best on MCU (and MK is already great imo).
Crystal is a great character who can sinergyze with her, is a defensive character with great supporting skills. Her healing will activate the twice if the player fires the powers fast. And actually all the variations of her green are useful depending on the team and the board, being the default red a reliable way to kill faster though character such as colossus and enhanced protects by BRB and kitty.
Also her red is pretty good as she damages and creates strong special tiles, plus gaining the added match damage.
My advice would be to pull for her if your CP and LL token rate is solid enough to champ Kamala, as when MK exits it's expected to be a great LL store with gargantos Kamala and the next one.

Vhailorx

Bad said:

Comparing Kamala vs crystal is not fair because Kamala will be a meta queen.
Kamala is way better third than kitty as she can fortify, enhance by 50%, selected board destroy, generate AP, and something few players will appreciate until playing it, to change special tiles to her colors. That's great on a Polaris team although she can do great in any other team. On 5* tier she will be great but nothing compared to 4* tier. They designed her in that way as it's expected her show will be the best on MCU (and MK is already great imo).
Crystal is a great character who can sinergyze with her, is a defensive character with great supporting skills. Her healing will activate the twice if the player fires the powers fast. And actually all the variations of her green are useful depending on the team and the board, being the default red a reliable way to kill faster though character such as colossus and enhanced protects by BRB and kitty.
Also her red is pretty good as she damages and creates strong special tiles, plus gaining the added match damage.
My advice would be to pull for her if your CP and LL token rate is solid enough to champ Kamala, as when MK exits it's expected to be a great LL store with gargantos Kamala and the next one.

I can't say that I see 5KK as a meta queen (except against goons in PVE, but those are not exactly challenging nodes to begin with).  She can do all the things you list, but that doesn't mean that chasing the ap to do them is a good idea.  Fortifying tiles and boosting special tiles seem like fine benefits to me, but not something that one can easily build a strategy around (I have underrated boosting powers in the past, fwiw. I even thought that 5/3/5 was the best build for C4rol before I had experience playing with her.). 

To me, the way to play 5KK is to partner her with someone like polaris or carbage to flood the board with friend specials passively and a damage booster like apoc to go wild on all the damage procs that will come destroying those tiles with her green.  That means that yellow will likely be reserved for the damage booster and you will be chasing green for the board shake and maybe a little blue to keep a study tile out at all times.  and since the bulk of the damage is from creating>destroying as many specials as possible, it's not a good idea to worry about boosting any particular tile very high (especially if they are starting at a relatively low value and would need several 50% boosts to become strong like polaris tiles).

I think the offensive ceiling of a team like that is pretty high, but I'm not sure about the speed relative to the current meta teams.  Hard to see how you can reliably get lots of specials out, plus 6 blue for a study tile + 7 yellow for the damage boost in 5 turns or less.  And by that time a team built around SC will generally be casting its first purple with 3-5 combo for 50-80k damage.

Bad

On a grolaris team the damage will double up. That only Kamala will make it possible. It will double up the speed.
And it's still needed to try her green out, but on middle battle that would mean an explosion of damage and special tiles generation thanks to Polaris, even if it's a random shot.
My foresight, meta queen without a doubt.

HoundofShadow

It's kind of pointless to compare characters with SC. He has a total damage multiplier of
Crit * Combo Point * Charged tiles =
 4.5 * 5.72 * 3 = 77.22x or 7722% damage increment, which is the second highest in the game, but the highest in 5* land. And he's the only one in the game who can deal more than 1 million damage in a single move.

Even if I reduce Shang-Chi's damage by 80%, it's still around 200k damage. In order for characters to deal that much damage and make it worth using them over SC, we are looking at 25k damage per ap, assuming 8aps. Currently, I don't think any other 5* character, except Ghostpool, can deal 25k damage per ap. 

TheEyeDoctorsWife

HoundofShadow said:

It's kind of pointless to compare characters with SC. He has a total damage multiplier of
Crit * Combo Point * Charged tiles =
 4.5 * 5.72 * 3 = 77.22x or 7722% damage increment, which is the second highest in the game, but the highest in 5* land. And he's the only one in the game who can deal more than 1 million damage in a single move.

Even if I reduce Shang-Chi's damage by 80%, it's still around 200k damage. In order for characters to deal that much damage and make it worth using them over SC, we are looking at 25k damage per ap, assuming 8aps. Currently, I don't think any other 5* character, except Ghostpool, can deal 25k damage per ap. 

I’ve learned the past few weeks to play SHAng and it’s ridiculous. There isn’t a team he doesn’t beat easily in usually 3 rounds . Granted the play time is much longer than using passives because you have to think and calculate every move exactly . But that’s little to complain about consider you never use a health pack or take net damage. 

Vhailorx

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

HoundofShadow said:

It's kind of pointless to compare characters with SC. He has a total damage multiplier of
Crit * Combo Point * Charged tiles =
 4.5 * 5.72 * 3 = 77.22x or 7722% damage increment, which is the second highest in the game, but the highest in 5* land. And he's the only one in the game who can deal more than 1 million damage in a single move.

Even if I reduce Shang-Chi's damage by 80%, it's still around 200k damage. In order for characters to deal that much damage and make it worth using them over SC, we are looking at 25k damage per ap, assuming 8aps. Currently, I don't think any other 5* character, except Ghostpool, can deal 25k damage per ap. 

I’ve learned the past few weeks to play SHAng and it’s ridiculous. There isn’t a team he doesn’t beat easily in usually 3 rounds . Granted the play time is much longer than using passives because you have to think and calculate every move exactly . But that’s little to complain about consider you never use a health pack or take net damage. 

I think SC is only slow compared to passive-damage teams when playing trivial nodes. SC takes ~5 turns to get going most matches (fewer if you get some lucky cascades or a very good board, and more if you just can't keep the combo chain going).  That's plenty of time for Hulkoye or Okoye/warlock etc to burn through a team with <100k total health.  But once you start fighting cl10 challenge nodes or boosted PVP teams that can have >300k health plinking away with passive aoe damage is noticeably slower than the top-end active-damage teams like SC or even okoye + a damage tick provider like polaris or sabretooth, which can easily do 100k+ damage for 6ap or less once they get going.

TheEyeDoctorsWife

Vhailorx said:

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

HoundofShadow said:

It's kind of pointless to compare characters with SC. He has a total damage multiplier of
Crit * Combo Point * Charged tiles =
 4.5 * 5.72 * 3 = 77.22x or 7722% damage increment, which is the second highest in the game, but the highest in 5* land. And he's the only one in the game who can deal more than 1 million damage in a single move.

Even if I reduce Shang-Chi's damage by 80%, it's still around 200k damage. In order for characters to deal that much damage and make it worth using them over SC, we are looking at 25k damage per ap, assuming 8aps. Currently, I don't think any other 5* character, except Ghostpool, can deal 25k damage per ap. 

I’ve learned the past few weeks to play SHAng and it’s ridiculous. There isn’t a team he doesn’t beat easily in usually 3 rounds . Granted the play time is much longer than using passives because you have to think and calculate every move exactly . But that’s little to complain about consider you never use a health pack or take net damage. 

I think SC is only slow compared to passive-damage teams when playing trivial nodes. SC takes ~5 turns to get going most matches (fewer if you get some lucky cascades or a very good board, and more if you just can't keep the combo chain going).  That's plenty of time for Hulkoye or Okoye/warlock etc to burn through a team with <100k total health.  But once you start fighting cl10 challenge nodes or boosted PVP teams that can have >300k health plinking away with passive aoe damage is noticeably slower than the top-end active-damage teams like SC or even okoye + a damage tick provider like polaris or sabretooth, which can easily do 100k+ damage for 6ap or less once they get going.

I’m using Valkyrie to rain down red for SC I often hit 30 red and you can manipulate the board a lot with that . A fast stunner will usually negate that problem character for the entire battle or at least until your matches are doing 100K damage . I think I blew through 15 BRolaris teams without a scratch in the last PvP 

Vhailorx

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

Vhailorx said:

TheEyeDoctorsWife said:

HoundofShadow said:

It's kind of pointless to compare characters with SC. He has a total damage multiplier of
Crit * Combo Point * Charged tiles =
 4.5 * 5.72 * 3 = 77.22x or 7722% damage increment, which is the second highest in the game, but the highest in 5* land. And he's the only one in the game who can deal more than 1 million damage in a single move.

Even if I reduce Shang-Chi's damage by 80%, it's still around 200k damage. In order for characters to deal that much damage and make it worth using them over SC, we are looking at 25k damage per ap, assuming 8aps. Currently, I don't think any other 5* character, except Ghostpool, can deal 25k damage per ap. 

I’ve learned the past few weeks to play SHAng and it’s ridiculous. There isn’t a team he doesn’t beat easily in usually 3 rounds . Granted the play time is much longer than using passives because you have to think and calculate every move exactly . But that’s little to complain about consider you never use a health pack or take net damage. 

I think SC is only slow compared to passive-damage teams when playing trivial nodes. SC takes ~5 turns to get going most matches (fewer if you get some lucky cascades or a very good board, and more if you just can't keep the combo chain going).  That's plenty of time for Hulkoye or Okoye/warlock etc to burn through a team with <100k total health.  But once you start fighting cl10 challenge nodes or boosted PVP teams that can have >300k health plinking away with passive aoe damage is noticeably slower than the top-end active-damage teams like SC or even okoye + a damage tick provider like polaris or sabretooth, which can easily do 100k+ damage for 6ap or less once they get going.

I’m using Valkyrie to rain down red for SC I often hit 30 red and you can manipulate the board a lot with that . A fast stunner will usually negate that problem character for the entire battle or at least until your matches are doing 100K damage . I think I blew through 15 BRolaris teams without a scratch in the last PvP 

Yes, SC is very very very good (on offense). We agree on that point. Did my post suggest otherwise?  I only intended to say that SC is best against very strong opposing teams where his wildly high damage can really be felt, while other passive aoe teams like hulkoye or thanos are, I think, still the best option for speed clearing trash nodes.