Character rankings 6/14 edition: vote now!

mischiefmaker

atomzed wrote:

Cool! Will you be getting opinions about people's rationale for voting?

It will be cool to have a compilation of different people's opinions. Maybe invite certain 'celebrity' forummites to give their inputs? Or certain people who has unique choices?

I would love to have other people's opinions! I meant to include a place on the survey where people could write about their rankings, but forgot, so if anyone has opinions they'd like to share, please feel free to PM me and I will try to get them into the writeup.

That being said, last time I invited a bunch of well-known forumites to contribute; only half of them took the survey at all and only one contributed to the writeup (<3 Celerity).

Unknown

I put Magneto as #1, LThor as #2. I put Sentry at 7th - having played with him in the simulator, I agree that he's strong but hate the feel of his abilities. I think I ranked Invisible Woman somewhere in the high teens, based on a paragraph Walkyourpath wrote in the character forums that she's extremely strong defensively.

Darmock13

locked wrote:

Pjoe0211 wrote:

and i think that invisible women has to be the hardest to rank, those of us with 2 star rosters have never even seen her in action at all

I am fully transitioned and I still never see her in action: no one runs her and even if someone does, she doesn't do anything... On offense maybe?

It's not that she's bad. She's actually has some power, once you get her leveled up... but as WalkYourPath pointed out in the IW discussion thread a while back, her quirky abilities just really slow down the fight.

Generally speaking, that's the last thing you want in PvP: you're either trying to go swiftly in your initial push, or you're shield hopping and trying to go REALLY swiftly.

So, you probably would have only seen her in a Versus fight as part of a tanking team.

atomzed

mischiefmaker wrote:

atomzed wrote:

Cool! Will you be getting opinions about people's rationale for voting?

It will be cool to have a compilation of different people's opinions. Maybe invite certain 'celebrity' forummites to give their inputs? Or certain people who has unique choices?

I would love to have other people's opinions! I meant to include a place on the survey where people could write about their rankings, but forgot, so if anyone has opinions they'd like to share, please feel free to PM me and I will try to get them into the writeup.

That being said, last time I invited a bunch of well-known forumites to contribute; only half of them took the survey at all and only one contributed to the writeup (<3 Celerity).

50% return rate is the standard 'good' response rate for surveys I think you should be happy with 50%

Alternatively, you can scour the individual character thread to get the pointers.

I love the previous rating thread because it gave clear, concise strength and weaknesses for all the characters. That was really good.

Unknown

I found that the very low levels of the rankings, say 30 and lower were based off of who I thought wasn't worth the effort. Even if they could be okay in battle, if they cost tons of ISO to level up, then it's not really worth it and your ISO could be spent in far better places.

Unknown

I tried to use a bit of perspective when making my choices.

I didn't want to just consider "who does most damage fastest", instead I put a lot of value into usefulness. LazyThor didn't place very high for me because he's very self-sufficient but easy to handle.

I actually placed OBW at #1. Sure she'll never beat another team if she's on her own, but she's too damn dangerous in any team and most of the time she's the biggest threat. The fact that people who've made the 3* transition still use her speaks volumes. Sure, the healing is a huge factor but aggressive recon is a game changer and espionage is devastating together with strike tiles.

Also, I didn't intend for this placement but hulk finished #2 for me. The fact that attacking him has immediate consequences and sometimes game-ending consequences is huge in my opinion.

M.Storm was just outside top 10. Another one of those characters that can't be ignored in a fight. Maybe devs have changed AI behavior since, but AI used to be able to spam her abilities near indefinitely if the AP was available.

In retrospect I might have ranked HT a bit low (around 14-17).

Unknown

I'll explain one choice. I probably placed Lazy Daken lower than about anyone else - I think #37 - because I hate that he character exists, which isn't something I can say about anyone else in the game. Daken - one of only three C-listers in the game - gets a second character before many A-listers have gotten a first. He was a waste of a character release. I'm pretty much refusing to use him unless I absolutely have to (essential node, etc.)

over_clocked

Who are other C-listers, Yelena and Falcon?

Edit: it's okay to hate on characters, most people don't care about that anyway and only care for power/utility/ROI, so general rankings should be more or less uniform.

Edit: by a happy coincidence I fangirl Magneto in everything (EXCEPT THIS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkc_Myyye20) and also ranked him #1 now.
Still a bit bummed about Spidey moving down several tiers, but there's hope - he's the heart of Marvel, after all.

Unknown

locked wrote:

Who are other C-listers, Yelena and Falcon?

Yelena and Ragnarok. Falcon's a solid B-lister, especially now that he's been in a movie.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

locked wrote:

Who are other C-listers, Yelena and Falcon?

Yelena and Ragnarok. Falcon's a solid B-lister, especially now that he's been in a movie.

Falcon is a solid B-teamer for me now. Finally picked up his last few covers from some tokens, and had the ISO so I maxed him out. His health is a big problem, but his strike tile synergy is tremendous. He is Daken's bestest buddy - those two absolutely destroy Lightning Rounds up to 250 (fastest combo I've found yet).

The reason I love Daken/Falcon so much? The ability to give OBW the middle finger always because that combo has 0 reliance on AP. Go ahead and steal it! I don't need it! I regularly get over 1K match damage with that combo, and without the drawbacks of Patch's green. Falcon would play great with a 3/5/5 Patch as well, since it wouldn't take long to get rid of enemy strike tiles with Falc's blue, and you can quickly buff the 3 that get placed to solid levels.

Also solid with Punisher and Psylocke.

Falcon's purple at 4 is a major annoyance, and combined with yellow can really slow down an opponent. So, he's not going to deter any attacks (in fact, he invites more), but for climbing he's now one of my go-to guys. Once I hit the 700-900 zone, I'll swap him out for someone a little bit beefier on D, but I love playing with him.

over_clocked

Oh... completely forgot about Ragnarok, him being a clone and all.
I am so politically incorrect.

wyp, 'C-lister' was referring to the Marvel canon, I am pretty sure I never heard of Falcon before CA: TWS.
MPQ Falcon is solid, no argument about that... He must be one of the most annoying characters on defense.

Unknown

locked wrote:

wyp, 'C-lister' was referring to the Marvel canon, I am pretty sure I never heard of Falcon before CA: TWS.
MPQ Falcon is solid, no argument about that... He must be one of the most annoying characters on defense.

Falcon's been around since the 70s (and maybe late 60s); Captain America was credited as Captain America and the Falcon for years. He faded a bit after the 80s; but he was a big deal when I was growing up (one of the first black superheroes, and maybe not the first to have "black" in their name, if I recall correctly). His stuff in the movie is likely to bring him back into a more prominent position.

over_clocked

Yeah, I read about Falcon being more prominent before. Captain lore doesn't interest me much though.

Unknown

My bad - that's what I get for not reading the whole thread.

Unknown

I'm with some people on this about the whole tier list instead of ranking them individually. It gets too tedious ranking all of the characters one by one and you will most likely not the get the results you wanted. Putting them in their own tier first and then ranking them while they are in there tier will be so much easier. I hope we can see the suggestions everyone has made into the next Character Rankings topic, where it will be extremely easier and more accurate as to what everyone truly ranks the characters.

Unknown

I remember someone did a ranking which is based on how many levels added or subtracted would you feel this character is needed to be fair. For example, let's say Psylocke is fixed at the +-0 position, and say you're only allowed increments of 10, then you might be rank it something like:

Magneto -!!! (the number of levels he'd lose is a shocking number to be balanced with Psylocke)
Daken -20
Punisher -10
IM40 +20
Bagman +!!!

and from that I think you can get a pretty good feel for tiers.

mischiefmaker

The problem with putting characters in tiers is twofold. One, it isn't very interesting, because most of us have a pretty good idea of what the tiers look like, so such a ranking doesn't provide us with any new information. Two, if you put characters in tiers and then rank them, that's exactly as much work as just ranking them, unless I put them in tiers for you. And if I do that, then we don't get interesting results like the guy who ranked a 1* character #1.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

The problem with putting characters in tiers is twofold. One, it isn't very interesting, because most of us have a pretty good idea of what the tiers look like, so such a ranking doesn't provide us with any new information. Two, if you put characters in tiers and then rank them, that's exactly as much work as just ranking them, unless I put them in tiers for you. And if I do that, then we don't get interesting results like the guy who ranked a 1* character #1.

Well for me it's hard to say rank two characters who are very close like say, Captain America versus Black Panther. Which character being better also depends on what you're doing at the time. Due to PvP's unique concern about being attacked, there are a lot of characters that are otherwise very good that aren't so good due to fear of being attacked, and I'm not sure if you're supposed to think about that when ranking a character. Falcon is a very good character, for example, but he's probably not someone you want to use very often on PvP due to his lack of HPs.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

The problem with putting characters in tiers is twofold. One, it isn't very interesting, because most of us have a pretty good idea of what the tiers look like, so such a ranking doesn't provide us with any new information. Two, if you put characters in tiers and then rank them, that's exactly as much work as just ranking them, unless I put them in tiers for you. And if I do that, then we don't get interesting results like the guy who ranked a 1* character #1.

It would cut down on the amount of time wasted selecting which character should be at what specific number. With doing tiers first, it'll narrow down the broad number of characters and let you instead focus on ranking only 5 or so characters at a time instead of all at once, which also gives you an idea of where the line is when it comes to character strength and not just thinking that #9 is a lot better than #14, even though they are both B-tier.

mischiefmaker

Phantron wrote:

Well for me it's hard to say rank two characters who are very close like say, Captain America versus Black Panther. Which character being better also depends on what you're doing at the time. Due to PvP's unique concern about being attacked, there are a lot of characters that are otherwise very good that aren't so good due to fear of being attacked, and I'm not sure if you're supposed to think about that when ranking a character. Falcon is a very good character, for example, but he's probably not someone you want to use very often on PvP due to his lack of HPs.

I agree, there's definitely a lot to take into account when ranking a character, especially as some are particularly useful for some aspects of the game but borderline useless in others. I find that what helps me differentiate between the tough cases is just to ask myself, if I could only have one of these characters, which one would it be? Conversely, if I had to pick one of these characters such that everyone else gets to keep theirs and I have to lose mine, which one would I pick?

This helps roll all the various factors (including things like "how often is he buffed/featured" and "how hard is it to get her covers") into one question.

GT-47LM wrote:

It would cut down on the amount of time wasted selecting which character should be at what specific number. With doing tiers first, it'll narrow down the broad number of characters and let you instead focus on ranking only 5 or so characters at a time instead of all at once, which also gives you an idea of where the line is when it comes to character strength and not just thinking that #9 is a lot better than #14, even though they are both B-tier.

Ah, that's fair. Unfortunately SurveyMonkey doesn't support such a thing, at least not in the free version. But you can already do this -- just use the old spreadsheet as a scratch area, put the characters into tiers, rank them within the tiers, then input them into the survey. That's basically what I did and found it pretty easy.