Character rankings 12/14 edition: the results!

mischiefmaker
mischiefmaker Posts: 932
Happy holidays everybody!

Welcome to the fifth round of character rankings! We got yet another huge response this time, tallying 226 total votes. Thanks to everyone who contributed -- it certainly is getting harder to rank all the characters so we do appreciate the thought and time that people take out of their busy PvE schedules to fill out a ballot.

As is our custom, we'll first review all the changes that have happened since the last round of rankings, to get a better idea of how the landscape has shifted and why some characters might have moved up or down.

New characters
This round of rankings saw the biggest increase in new characters ever, with a whopping nine total: Colossus, Doctor Octopus, Devil Dinosaur, 2* Ms. Marvel, Blade, Mystique, Rocket and Groot, 4* Thor: Goddess of Thunder, and Gamora (we left out Elektra, since she hadn't been released at the time that the survey started). As a whole this group was middle-of-the-road: there were a couple of duds, a couple of strong characters, a few abilities that lend themselves to powerful combos, and of course one extremely strong character that shook up the metagame.

We're talking about the Lady of Many Nicknames, of course: 4or, T4or, Thorina, Thoress, TGT, GT, LadyThor -- no matter what you call her, she has one of the most powerful sets of abilities in the game, and is one of the dominant fixtures in high-end play. She's so strong that there are a few previously unused characters that now form a playable combo with her; it's still early but we're likely to discover more as more people acquire her covers and begin to experiment.

Changes to existing characters
While TGT's overwhelming strength certainly affected the metagame, changes to existing characters had just as much if not more of an effect on teams at the high end. The most important of these was the massive change to Sentry, of course, who went from being present in virtually every single high-end team to barely used at all. Where you once might have seen but a single non-Sentry team after crossing 900, these days you might see only one team with him, and usually those teams don't present the least possibility of a loss.

Changes to Hood, Loki, and Daredevil made a big impact on their relative worths, but haven't made too much of a difference in how other teams are put together or how often you'll see them being used. We'll talk more about each of these characters in their individual sections.

Lightning rounds now rotate buffs
Once upon a time, lightning rounds were an excellent way to accelerate the transition from 2* into 3* -- fight for top placement in a Doom or Loki round, then use your buffed villain to win covers in the other rounds. If that were still the case, rotating the characters who are buffed would be at least somewhat impactful, worsening the characters who were previously useful only as LR stepping-stones to good characters. However, these days the lightning rounds have such a low chance of delivering something useful that the rotating buffs aren't much of a factor in character rankings at all.

Time shards
Not much impact here either. Some shards are higher-scoring than others, some shards are easier to place than others, but the strategy involved in getting to a relatively high score and placing highly hasn't changed. The one difference this has made is that it's now nearly impossible to guarantee getting a fresh bracket, because they fill up so much more slowly, which takes a little bit away from characters whose niche is to defeat low-level teams quickly.

Rubber banding and PvE
This edition of the rankings saw the release of several new characters over the course of long, grueling PvEs where the reward bands were much tighter and the rubber banding was turned way down. Gone are the days where you could play 2-3 clears at the end of a sub at catch up enough to get three covers; these days you need to be hitting every refresh and either waking up in the middle of the night or playing multiple clears before sleep.

This has had a few effects. One, high-power characters increase in value, because when you hit every refresh, your scaling goes up in a hurry, and if you're playing every 2.5-3 hours, you can't afford to lose very much health -- you need to be playing characters that can consistently deliver big hits quickly to get you out of nodes before you take too much damage. Second, true healing is important, since you can't use more than 6 health packs per clear unless you want to be paying for them. And finally, having characters that can clear nodes quickly is useful -- if you can cut a minute off each fight by playing a faster team, that might cut 10 minutes off your clear speed, which is a big advantage down the stretch and helps you not feel like you're spending your entire day playing MPQ.

You might say, well duh, all we've said there is that characters that are really strong, really fast, and have true healing are good. And while that's obviously true, you really only need one or two of those characteristics to have a character that's worth playing -- the important thing is that the character be really good at whatever it is you're playing them for.
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Comments

  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited January 2015
    As usual we encourage everyone to read through old versions of rankings; we may not duplicate all the information from previous versions, and it's also fun to see how characters have changed from round to round.

    12/2013 - the beginning
    3/2014 - standard deviation edition
    6/2014 - meme edition
    10/2014 - theme song edition

    As we discussed shortly after the last round of rankings in this thread, there are now way too many characters to try and write something new about them each time. So we've done writeups just for those that have changed significantly or are new; in some cases we've added a sentence or two with additional thoughts to clarify or amend previous writeups.

    We've kept the ratings for active powers and for speed, sustainability, and power, and we hope you find these useful as you think about what characteristics you'd like to optimize for as you build your teams.

    Here's the heat map for this round of rankings:

    7jOA6D6.png

    A couple of observations:
    - There were several notable outliers -- look at all the orange dots scattered around the map -- more so than last time, and with higher values, even though we got slightly fewer votes.
    - More people than ever noted how hard it was to rank all the characters. I think this is actually a good thing, since it means there's better balance across more characters and more gameplay depth as there are different roles filled to different degrees of effectiveness by each character.
    - There's so many characters! By next round we might not be able to get a single screencap with all of them, and trying to post the image inline, with the 700 pixel width limitation, is getting to the point where the text is too small to read. We'll try and figure out something better for next round.

    Tiers and final rankings to be updated as results are posted. Here we go!

    53-57: Oh so bad
    47-52: Roster spot questionable
    46-39: Well, if that's what you've got...
    38-33: Playable, but needs help
    32-27: Useful for specific niches
    19-26: Good solid characters, part 1
    12-18: Good solid characters, part 2
    5-11: The best of the rest
    1-4: The Best There Is

    Final rankings:
    1. 4* Wolverine (X-Force)
    2. 4* Thor
    3. 3* Thor
    4. 4* Nick Fury
    5. 3* Daken
    6. 3* Black Panther
    7. 3* Captain America
    8. 3* The Hood
    9. 3* Magneto (classic)
    10. 3* Blade
    11. 3* Wolverine (Patch)
    12. 3* Deadpool
    13. 3* Hulk
    14. 4* Devil Dinosaur
    15. 3* Captain Marvel
    16. 3* Human Torch
    17. 3* Sentry
    18. 3* Punisher
    19. 3* Falcon
    20. 3* Mystique
    21. 3* Black Widow (grey suit)
    22. 3* Rocket and Groot
    23. 3* Loki
    24. 3* Colossus
    25. 3* Psylocke
    26. 3* Daredevil
    27. 3* Gamora
    28. 3* Doctor Doom
    29. 2* Black Widow (original)
    30. 3* Iron Man (Model 40)
    31. 3* Spider-Man
    32. 3* Storm (Mohawk)
    33. 2* Ares
    34. 3* She-Hulk
    35. 3* Ragnarok
    36. 4* Invisible Woman
    37. 3* Doctor Octopus
    38. 2* Storm (classic)
    39. 2* Thor
    40. 3* Beast
    41. 2* Daken
    42. 2* Magneto (Marvel Now)
    43. 2* Wolverine (Astonishing)
    44. 2* Hawkeye (modern)
    45. 2* Human Torch
    46. 2* Captain Marvel
    47. 2* Captain America
    48. 1* Juggernaut
    49. 2* Bullseye
    50. 2* Moonstone
    51. 1* Black Widow (Modern)
    52. 1* Storm (modern)
    53. 1* Iron Man (Model 35)
    54. 2* Bag Man
    55. 1* Hawkeye (classic)
    56. 1* Venom
    57. 1* Yelena Belova
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    57. 1* Yelena Belova, even

    56. 1* Venom, -1

    55. 1* Hawkeye (classic), -1

    54. 2* Bag Man, +2
    First-ever finish outside the bottom 2 for The Bag! Don't know what he did to deserve it, though, as he got more than 100 votes in second-to-last. Guess it was those 16 votes at #38 that helped keep him out of penultimate place.

    For those that have suggested in the past that we order the characters in some default way, I should point out that Bag Man's starting position was, you guessed it, #38.

    53. 1* Iron Man (Model 35), even
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    52. 1* Storm (modern), -1

    51. 1* Black Widow (Modern), +1

    50. 2* Moonstone, even

    49. 2* Bullseye, even

    48. 1* Juggernaut, even
    Still incredibly underrated. Guys, Balance of Power is officially a Thing now. It counts for season points and everything.

    47. 2* Captain America, even
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    46. 2* Captain Marvel, new to the list

    Finally, our first new character! Ms. Marvel cracks the list at fairly disappointing #46; it's not that she's bad, per se, just that with an ever-growing list of 3*s, and 2*s falling from PvP opponents like candy from a busted pinata, there's not that many rosters that can both afford to keep her and will actually play her.

    Which is a bit of a shame, really. Her red power is pretty bad, sure -- it doesn't do much damage even relative to other 2*s, and it doesn't even have the niche use that her 3* version has, where you might want to bring her against a team that specializes in generating protect tiles, like Falcon/Spider-Man, since she can only destroy 3 of them. But her black is solid for a 2*; it's reasonably priced, in a color that's rare for 2*s, and does pretty good damage off the bat plus the potential to deliver a second punch that adds up pretty nicely.

    Finally, there's yellow, which doesn't look like much, but it's cheap and it's incredibly good at generating cascades. As we discussed last time in CMags' writeup, you usually want to avoid gathering teamup tiles, in favor of powering your character abilities, and the same is true for the AI. Therefore there will usually be a high number of team-up tiles on the board (or the AI has been taking them, which is good for you), making cascades from Marvel's yellow very likely. Her yellow also plays well with CMags -- use it to start cascades, and follow up with his red to do big damage and generate yet more casacades.

    Again, though, the problem is that there's just no roster space for her. If you're a 2* transition player, chances are good you're hoarding hero points for roster slots and the occasional shield to net an extra 3* cover, and you've already got plenty of go-to 2* characters fully covered and maxed. If you have plenty of hero points, you probably don't need another 2* character. Which is probably why I haven't seen a single Ms. Marvel PvP opponent, ever.

    Red: fair
    Black: good
    Yellow: good

    Speed: medium
    Sustainability: medium
    Power: medium

    Recommended build: I can't see an argument for anything other than 3/5/5.

    45. 2* Human Torch, -1

    44. 2* Hawkeye (modern), +1

    43. 2* Wolverine (Astonishing), even
    Actually still a little bit useful after fully transitioning to 3*, since his green is one of the fastest powers in the game when dealing with low-level (2k health and below) opponents.

    42. 2* Magneto (Marvel Now), even
    Incredibly underrated, with all the powerful blue abilities that have been released in the past three months. In fact, with the exception of Doctor Octopus, every blue power on a new character has been top-tier: Rocket and Groot, Mystique, and of course Thor all are packing serious heat on blue, and MMN fuels blue better than anyone. Might be the best 2* transition character in the game, depending on who you have covered in 3* territory.

    41. 2* Daken, -2

    40. 3* Beast, -6
    Finally gets his due as the worst 3* in the game, except that he's probably only the second-worst now.

    39. 2* Thor, -4
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    38. 2* Storm (classic), -1
    A bit underrated; more than one top player has been surprised to find themselves the unhappy recipient of a 50 point loss thanks to a cheeky Storm-MMN-loaner team.

    37. 3* Doctor Octopus, new to the list

    Question: why do they call him Dr. Octopus? He only has six arms, and octopi have eight! Sure, he has two legs, but technically he should be Dr. Sexapus...oh, ok, yeah, now I see why. Never mind.

    Whatever you call him, this is one of the worst 3*s in the game. Start with his blue: Loki's Illusions is nobody's idea of a game-changing power, but Manipulation costs more than twice as much, in a more contested color, and swaps only half -- HALF! -- as many tiles. Sure, it destroys special tiles and does damage for them, but even in a game against multiple goons or a Daken/Blade passive-tile-generating extravaganza, you're only swapping a quarter of the board. Even if you manage to hit 5 special tiles, that's still less than half of what Magneto's blue does (and oh by the way, is cheaper)...and a 5/16 hit rate would imply TWENTY special tiles on board. I don't know about you, but if my opponent has twenty special tiles on the board, I'm pretty sure destroying five of them for 2.5k damage ain't gonna cut it.

    Green is pretty bad too -- the devs describe it as a grab-bag of awesome powerful stuff, but it's actually kind of a weird grab-bag of ****. Why you would want to put **** in a bag and then grab it is kind of beyond me, but that's how I feel about his green -- at 12 AP, it's competing with stuff like XForce and Call the Storm, but the area damage is closer to Punisher's black (nearly half as expensive, in a way less powerful color). Sure, there's some other stuff going on here, but destroying a random enemy countdown is nearly worthless; reducing enemy AP is ok, but doesn't help you win the fight any faster; and a 3-turn stun is good but putting it on a random enemy is pretty mediocre since you generally want to use stun on a character with a dangerous power charged up.

    Finally, there's his black, which is actually pretty good. 2 strength 129 attack tiles is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're fighting a team that produces enough special tiles to make matching them very common and if you have strike tiles to boost them up.

    Due to his black, he can be a reasonable character for PvE, but you know who else is a reasonable character for PvE? Basically everyone! He's pretty much a warm body that you can use if you're messing around or are out of health packs -- even when he's buffed he can't stand up to high-level opponents, and he's a villain so he's unlikely to get buffed any time soon. And if your niche is "PvE, but only against low level opponents"...well, that's really not much of a niche at all.

    Blue: poor
    Green: poor

    Speed: low
    Sustainability: low
    Power: low

    Recommended build: 5 in black, and then it doesn't really matter -- I guess if I had to max one I would probably go with blue since I'd only ever play him in pve where I want the ability to destroy countdown tiles, but both of those abilities are just really, really bad.

    36. 4* Invisible Woman, +1
    Two-time winner of the Spider Man Memorial Wat award! Received votes at 48 of a possible 57 different positions.

    35. 3* Ragnarok, even

    34. 3* She-Hulk, -2

    33. 2* Ares, -5
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    32. 3* Storm (Mohawk), -2
    MoStorm's low rating has always been due to her low health and the fact that her best power, green, has been far and away the best color in the game. She still has low health, but the presence of 4* Thor, with her best abilities on red/blue, makes Storm's green even better as an AP generator when you take into account charged tiles. Add in the increased frequency and importance of PvEs, where Storm shines due to her ability to cascade and not having to worry about defense, and she's fairly underrated at #32.

    Our previous 5/3/5 recommendation is still quite viable, and a solid build if Storm is one of the few 3*s in your roster. However, for pairing with TGT, we're now recommending 5/5/3 as a better build -- you get better damage and more cascades from yellow, and generally you don't want to use the black since you want to convert as many tiles as possible to charged tiles.

    31. 3* Spider-Man, even
    Would bump up a lot higher if there were some kind of infinite survival mode (e.g. if the Black Hole bug, where the node would reset and waves would keep coming until your characters all died, were an actual game mode) -- free protect tiles and a decent team heal are a great fit for that niche.

    30. 3* Iron Man (Model 40), -1
    Like Storm, deserves a mention as a 5/5/2 now pairs excellently with 4* Thor, bringing increased speed and consistency along with decent health. Won't be played well by the AI, but a very viable team for offense.

    29. 2* Black Widow (original), -3

    28. 3* Doctor Doom, -1

    27. 3* Gamora, new to the list


    When Gamora's full stats were first revealed, a lot of us were left shaking our heads in confusion. Her green costs 12, which is the same neighborhood as Call the Storm, Rage of the Panther, and Whales, yet does a paltry 1148 team damage. Stunning two enemies for two turns is pretty good, but it doesn't guarantee you get the dangerous enemy you want, and anyway a stun that expensive isn't going to be available fast enough or frequently enough to be a big part of your game plan.

    Red looks similarly underpowered; sure, it's cheap at 5, but it does only 1719 damage, whereas something like Human Torch's red, costing a net 6, does nearly twice as much. Sure, Gamora has a pretty significant health edge on Torch, but how could this be balanced?

    The answer lies in her black, though it's not particularly obvious. With green/red/black tile damage priorities, it's easy for Gamora to end up tanking just one or two colors, for which black is overpriced and ineffective. But if you can construct a team where she tanks three or more colors, suddenly you're looking at something like 900 damage in strike tiles, which compares favorably to the other premier strike tile generators in the game.

    Once those strike tiles land, her other powers look at lot more robust -- red's now doing 2.5k damage for just 5 AP, which, while not world-beating, is pretty palatable, and green's hitting for roughly 2k team damage, which is pretty good with the stun.

    That being said, constructing a team where she gets to take three colors isn't trivial, especially in the usual 2 + featured format, where the buff on featured makes it unlikely she'll get more than one color. She still has some use, since anyone with cheap direct damage powers can be used to speed up pve clears, but that isn't exactly a great reason to invest in her given how many other character fill the same niche while also doing other things better (Punisher, Daken, Blade, Psylocke, Falcon, etc.)

    Speed: medium
    Power: medium
    Sustainability: medium

    Green: fair
    Red: fair
    Black: excellent if Gamora tanks 4+ colors, good at 3+, fair at 2+, poor otherwise

    Recommended build: 3/5/5; as discussed the green's damage is way too low even at level 5, and the stun is nice but not game-changing. Meanwhile, you really want to max out the black since it's her only shot at being a playable character, and you're likely to use her red the most.
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    26. 3* Daredevil, +13

    A huge jump up for previously unplayable Daredevil, who got a major rework this time around. His red was always very strong, but with unusably high variance -- in the games where you could get it to go off, it'd down a character almost for sure, but in the vast majority of cases it'd just sit there doing nothing the whole game, or you'd have to match it yourself for negligible damage.

    The new version solves one of these problems: matching the tile yourself is an excellent outcome, since you get 3k damage plus the potential to do it again, and it retains its cheap cost. However, the variance is still pretty high; it's common to find your Ambush trap tile falling into a corner or just landing somewhere that you can't match it for several turns. There's also the problem of having the trap get overwritten, especially since Daken remains a popular character at the high end.

    Blue fared quite a bit better in the revamp, and is now probably his best ability; where previously you'd get a very long stun, but at a random time, on a character you'd already been targeting so not at full health, now you can target the most dangerous opponent and get the stun immediately, albeit not for nearly as long. There are some interesting interactions here now too -- Intimidation gives you the ability to lock down an opponent for 4 turns; matching your own tile usually will let you cast it again, essentially short-cutting the timer; and having two Billy Clubs on board is pretty fun as they fly around the board, keeping a single character stun-locked.

    Lastly, there's purple -- much like red, the old version was massively powerful when triggered, but often sat there doing nothing. New purple is fairly underpowered; it's useful for getting rid of troublesome special tiles, but it's too expensive to rely on against enemies that are capable of spamming specials, like Daken and Blade, and the damage is way too low for something this expensive. Compare to Blade's purple, for example, which can do almost as much damage per turn, or Fury's purple, which does 60% more damage plus a bunch of side effects.

    A natural pairing for Daredevil is Patch, since you can use Daredevil either to remove most of the strikes you give your opponent, or stun your opponent to keep him from being able to use the strikes. This combo isn't bad, but consider that for just one more AP, you can use Trickery from Loki, who comes with a better set of supporting abilities.

    At the end of the day, he's definitely a lot more playable than he used to be, but considering how bad he was, that's not really saying much. He's a decent pairing with Patch, but otherwise he's probably a tad overrated, since he's not that great for PvP and has no special utility for PvE.

    Purple: poor (fair if either you or your opponents generate strong special tiles)
    Blue: good
    Red: fair

    Speed: low
    Sustainability: medium
    Power: medium

    Recommended build: I like 3/5/5, which gives you maximum oomph on red and a big upgrade on blue over L4 -- getting that extra turn of stun and the extra AP are both very worthwhile. That being said, if you plan on playing him with Patch a lot, 4/4/5 or 5/3/5 are worth considering as well.

    25. 3* Psylocke, -4
    My irrational love of Psylocke is well-documented, but while I concede that the meta has passed her by, and her damage output is just too low for her to carry a team, I still maintain that there are few faster characters in the game, making her great for lightning rounds, easy PvE nodes, and any time you have easy opponents you just want to dispatch quickly and move on. It turns out that's a surprisingly large niche. Is it worth investing in? Probably not right away, but I have only mild regret for having leveled mine almost to max.

    24. 3* Colossus, new to the list

    Colossus looks pretty good on paper -- top-tier 3* health, with a red that does significant team damage, a yellow that helps protect the rest of your team, and a spicy black that does damage and protects a team member from getting hurt AND lets you cast an ability for free!

    In practice, though, the whole is significantly less than the sum of the parts, because the parts don't play very nicely with others. Yellow helps protect the rest of your team, sure, but Colossus doesn't have a healing ability, so you're still taking damage, and anyway it's way more efficient to avoid damage by using that ability to finish the game before the opponent can get off abilities of their own, not to mention that the 50% modifier only applies to base damage -- strike tiles can still put a whuppin' on ya.

    Red is very good when Colossus is in front, and pretty bad when he's not. Luckily, it's easy to get him in front: either match a tile and cast Colossal Punch on your next turn, or cast an ability this turn before you cast Colossal Punch. Unfortunately, this puts a pretty hefty limitation on your flexibility -- if you get red early, for example, you often want to sit on the ability for a bit, and you can't cast someone else's ability before you cast red, unless you also happen to have 8 yellow and nothing better to do with it. All these limitations means that while it's quite powerful on offense, you can't always get full benefit from it, and it's not scary at all on defense unless Colossus is last man standing.

    Speaking of last man standing, that black that looks so strong is literally unusable if he's the only one left, and it might win the prize for the Best-In-Theory-But-Worst-In-Practice power in the game. Start with the expense: at 13 black, it's got to compete with Surgical Strike, and Rage of the Panther, both top-tier abilities, and it has to be good enough to be a color you're prioritizing, otherwise you'll never have enough AP. And consider who you might throw -- you don't want to bring anyone who has a strong red ability, since Colossus' red is his his best ability, and you don't want to bring someone who has any **** abilities, because then you might get that ability.

    Who of the current top characters fits those criteria?
    - XForce: Surgical is more reliable; only 66% chance to get an awesome power since Recovery is pretty meh
    - 3* Thor: 66% chance to get something awesome since red is weak
    - 4* Thor: same as 3* but yellow is the weak color, and probably has the best red in the game
    - BP: Rage is better, Defense Grid is a horrible result for Fastball
    - Patch: TBTI will be weak since Colossus tanks yellow

    About the only guy I can think of that works with Colossus is Nick Fury: no conflict on red or black, three good-to-great powers. But the problem then is that every single one of your powers costs 10 or more, which makes your team interminably slow and vulnerable to AP steal!

    Yellow: fair
    Red: good
    Black: fair

    Speed: low
    Sustainability: medium
    Power: medium

    Recommended build: 5/5/3. 5 red is the only thing I'd be really adamant on; the upgrades on the others are pretty marginal so I wouldn't worry too much about a 4/5/4 or a 3/5/5. In fact, if you don't have a character with a strong black power, 3/5/5 might actually be ideal for you.

    23. 3* Loki, +14

    What a difference a third power makes, huh? At first a lot of folks were underwhelmed -- how often do you make match-4s, anyway? But then we got a taste of brand-new Loki in the Simulator and in his featured PvP, and it turns out, yeah, Mischief is the new hotness.

    Personal aside: it's very confusing for me to read Loki threads. I think everyone is talking about me.

    Why is the passive so good? Let's consider a matchup where you don't have Loki, and your opponent does. Let's say there's a match-4 on the board. What do you do? If you take the match-4, you get 8 AP and potentially a cascade (though the cascade may trigger Mischief again), but Loki gets 8 AP back in another turn (technically they're 2-turn tiles, but since it triggers on your turn, it's functionally the same as a 1-turn tile cast on his turn), and it could be AP that you need more than the AP you're getting. If you don't take the match-4, you're giving 8 AP to your opponent, plus cascades.

    You might say, well, what if you just destroy the countdown tiles? 4 2-turn tiles is a lot to stop -- it's tough to get more than 1, and often you won't be able to get any. Plus, having to match the tiles means having to deviate from your normal AP-gathering plans, which means you'll usually be slowed down even without considering the AP steal.

    Match-5s and 6s are even worse -- you don't get any more AP (in fact you often get less, since T- and L-way matches typically only get you 5-7 AP), and of course if you pass up that match to avoid triggering Mischief, your opponent gets first crack at a critical tile and the bonus damage it brings.

    Also, Mischief is a strong counter to teams that are based on chaining AP abilities, since often these teams have multiple board shakeups and/or can place tiles to generate criticals. Loki doesn't have a ton of health, but he's got enough to stand up to a few cascades, and after that it can easily get out of hand:

    WmDfs88.png

    And don't forget that even if you're being careful about not taking any match-4s until you can down Loki (which slows you down a lot and exposes you to increased damage, since now your opponent is more likely to take those match-4s and 5s), you can still accidentally trigger Mischief if the board just happens to drop a match-4 in off the top. Hey, if it happens for the AI, it can happen to you, too.

    His other two powers are essentially the same as before; Trickery only changed for levels below 5 and Illusions is still the cheapest board shakeup in the game, good enough to be a solid fourth or fifth option or an early kickstarter into more powerful abilities. All in all, a solid upgrade for the God of Lies, enough to net him this edition's biggest climb at +14, into solidly playable territory.

    The only thing about Loki is that he doesn't have any powerful damage abilities of his own, and his AP steal isn't quite as reliable as OBW or Hood, so outside of a Patch pairing or against a protect-tile generator like Magneto/Falcon, he really needs to be a third character where the other two are providing strong abilities on 3-4 non-purple colors. This can happen in PvEs and some PvPs where the featured character is good, but it does limit his usefulness somewhat.

    Black: fair
    Purple: fair (good with other board shakeup abilities)

    Speed: medium
    Sustainability: low
    Power: medium

    Recommended build: 5/3/5; the upgrade from 3 to 5 purple is basically negligible in terms of both chance to create cascades and expected number of cascades.

    22. 3* Rocket and Groot, new to the list

    I am Groot.

    (When we first got introduced to the cryptic tree and his interpretive wisecracking buddy, a lot of people focused on the blue: here's what Beast's blue should have been, right? And yes, blue is extremely strong -- a 2 turn countdown you get to place has a nearly 100% chance of resolving, and at max level it produces over 1k in strike tiles, which is one of the strongest strike tile producers in the game.)

    I am Groot.

    (But actually the blue probably isn't even their most powerful ability -- that honor goes to yellow, which is actually kind of like two powers in one. Used traditionally, it's a true heal that can bring him to full health, which is huge for sustainability and can combine with his blue to make for some awesome (or awful, depending on whose side you're on) comebacks. For the unconventional, you can enter games with R&G under 25% health, match yellow, and reap the cascades that follow -- this is especially powerful with other board shake abilities, since their effects are amplified by not having Team Up tiles on board, and can quickly catapult you into getting your ability engine rolling.)

    I am Groot.

    (Lastly, there's green. It's not bad, smashing 13 tiles and doing around 2.5k damage, but it's a bit on the expensive side at 12, and of course it has the age-old problem of competing with everything else in green.)

    I am Groot?

    (Speaking of R&G, if you're ever in San Francisco, there's a place called R&G Lounge where they serve a salt and pepper crab that will change your life. Seriously. No raccoons with guns, though.)

    Speed: low (high if under 25% health)
    Power: high
    Sustainability: high

    Green: fair
    Blue: good (borderline excellent, especially with a blue generator)

    Recommended build: Are you a traditionalist, and/or are R&G going to be one of your go-to guys? 5/3/5 lets you heal up to full and keep things rolling, while delivering all the power of blue and letting someone else use a better green power. On the other hand, if you like doing wacky fun stuff, or R&G are going to be splitting time with lots of other characters, you might be better off with 3/5/5 or 4/4/5 -- at L3, yellow will heal for an average of around 4k, and a single retreat knocks off 3400. Personally, I think 5 blue is the important bit and everything else is kind of tweaking around the edges.

    21. 3* Black Widow (grey suit), +1

    20. 3* Mystique, new to the list

    Quick, what's Mystique's best ability? The answer might tell you a lot about your gamer personality:

    a) purple; cheap stun plus AP steal helps prevent damage and accelerate your own team
    b) blue: cascades all day, kitties!
    c) black: 7k damage. 'Nuff said.
    d) Who cares, she only has 6k health

    If you answered c), you're probably a bit of a Timmy (if you like personality tests and are kind of a gamer-nerd, read the article, it's great!) -- you like abilities with big effects, and you're not terribly worried about efficiency, since Masterstroke requires both 8 purple to make a Shapeshift tile and another 11 black to actually cast the ability. This isn't as slow as getting 19 AP of a single color, but it's a fair bit slower than getting 11 black, which isn't that fast to begin with, and of course it's a lot worse on defense since the AI will happily cast Masterstroke without a Shapeshift tile, if it can even get 11 black AP in the first place.

    If you answered a) or b), but especially b), you've probably got a bit of Johnny in you (um, let's all agree not to take that line out of context) -- you like putting together cool combinations of abilities and exploring the synergy between characters. Infiltration has a ton of that going for it; if you haven't tried playing Mystique with MMN to play purple into blue into purple, it's a real treat. Shapeshift is a bit more traditional, but if you can construct a team that can protect the tile, it's quite strong as well; the only problem is that having Shapeshift on board makes using Infiltration risky since it might easily cascade your tile away.

    Finally, if you answered d), you're probably a Spike -- yeah, Mystique is fun, and she can do some real damage when paired with the right characters, but at the end of the day 6k health is just PvP roadkill. She doesn't kill fast enough to compensate for it on offense, or have cheap, easy abilities that the AI can use on defense, which really limits her ceiling. Fun for PvE, though.

    Purple: good
    Blue: good (excellent when paired with AP-generators in purple and black)
    Black: good

    Speed: medium
    Sustainability: medium
    Power: medium

    Recommended build: This is a tough one. There's a real dearth of purple skills, and stealing on every match is almost as good as Hood's passive (while the tile is out, of course, which is a big conditional), so you'd like to have at least 4 there. If you're planning on running Mystique in any kind of purple/black combination, like MMN or XF, you really want to max out blue. And at the same time, the jump from 4 black to 5 black is almost double the damage.

    So what to do? I guess it depends a bit on who you plan to run her with and your playstyle. If you like cascades and you have a well-developed roster, mostly what matters is 5 blue, and you should probably go 3/5/5 -- you likely won't be casting her purple or black that much, but when you do that will still give you solid return. I had a 1/5/2 that saw plenty of high-level playtime.

    If, on the other hand, you've got a Timmy-esque, HULK SMASH playstyle, or Mystique is one of the few well-covered characters on your roster, I'd probably recommend 5/3/5 or 4/4/5, so that black still packs a wallop, and you get maximum steal from purple.

    19. 3* Falcon, even
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited December 2014
    18. 3* Punisher, -4
    Like Psylocke, the meta is passing him by, but he's still one of the faster characters in the game, with enough power to carry a 2* team through the 3* transition.

    17. 3* Sentry, -11

    For three straight rankings now, the #1 character has always been nerfed. Sentry only ended up at #3 last time, but couldn't avoid the curse (although there's a pretty good case to be made that he should have been #1). His nerf is pretty severe -- changing World Rupture to 12 probably would have been sufficient, but adding a tick to the countdown tiles means that instead of 10-12 tiles activating, you're like to only get 7 or 8, and it means that the overall speed is further reduced. Paired with strike tiles, it still does significant damage (4-5k team), but it's incredibly slow now; even with boosts you're talking roughly 8 turns, and it doesn't even kill anyone anymore.

    The tweaks to red and yellow don't affect the power level much; yellow is still dangerous on defense and is a strong ability in general. Red is the same as it ever was -- to be avoided on defense, but rarely used on offense except in case of emergency, and like green, it does significant damage but won't kill anyone.

    The end result is a character that's still quite powerful, but in the current meta, has no niche. Sure, he's got great health and hits very hard, and even has his yellow to give him a bit of speed, but using his powers virtually guarantees needing at least one health pack, and possibly more considering how slow the big powers are. If you need a health pack every other game, you've got to be shield-hopping, and he's just too slow for that these days.

    Speed: medium
    Power: high
    Sustainability: low

    Red: fair
    Green: fair
    Yellow: good

    (Note that red and yellow have both been bumped down from their previous ratings, even though they haven't changed that much; this is because their previous ratings assumed a shield-hopping context, where the self-damage is much less relevant.)

    Recommended build: If you were lucky enough to have participated in the golden age of Sentry-bombing, 3/5/5 is fine as there's not huge marginal improvement to increasing red (about 700 damage per level, which isn't nothing, but the self-damage makes it unlikely that you'll want to cast it much if at all). I'd also recommend this build if Sentry represents one of the only leveled 3*s on your roster; green's a whole lot slower but the power level of Sacrifice/World Rupture is still quite high, doing 4-5k area damage.

    If, on the other hand, you have better options for PvP, 5/3/5 is probably a bit better, as it gives you improved defense and an option for getting a quick win against non-max opponents (so, a middling PvE node), but it makes green totally unusable. Either way, for a well-rounded roster, he's likely to see very little play time. RIP, big fella.

    16. 3* Human Torch, even

    15. 3* Captain Marvel, +5
    Surprising gain for Marvel, who made the biggest jump of any non-modified character. I'm not sold -- her yellow is very powerful, but it's really tough to get it to trigger consistently enough to rely on it as a weapon.

    Having a baby L40 Marvel is a ton of fun for PvE, though.

    14. 4* Devil Dinosaur, new to the list

    When the details of Devil Dino's release -- available only during anniversary week and as day 364-366 rewards -- were first announced, many of us were concerned. He's a 4*; what if he's as good as XForce? Won't the people who missed anniversary week be forever screwed? What about the newbies? Won't someone please think of the newbies?

    Demiurge_Will assured us that everyone's favorite wacky Trex would not, in fact, be overpowered; see for yourself:
    (We're limiting the impact that has on players that miss him during the anniversary celebration by balancing him to be closer to a souvenir than a character you'd expect to see at the top of the leaderboards the other 51 weeks of the year. Depending on where you are in the game, he might be a great find for you, but he won't go toe-to-toe with X-Force.)

    Well, it's been nearly two months since then, and it seems that's pretty close to the mark. Dino's green and red are almost exactly the same ability -- same cheap cost, same relatively weak (but enough to leave a mark if you get hit a couple times with it) damage, and almost the same opportunity cost -- green has better skills in the game, but red has more good skills in a similar cost range. By comparison, Dino's skills are both useful but mediocre.

    Purple is much more interesting: most folks write it off immediately, especially if they only have a couple of covers; after all, it only costs 3, how good could it be? Well, thanks to Polarity's programming wizardry, we have a pretty good answer -- level 5 purple creates on average about 2.5 AP, which means it turns the least useful color in the game into any other color at almost a 1:1 ratio, plus a bit of damage. That's quite good, actually. The only downside is reliability, as purple has a pretty high whiff rate -- it's not fun to cast purple five times and get nothing.

    The best thing about Devil Dino, of course, is his massive health, easily tops in the game at almost 20k. On offense, since green and red are his strongest colors, you can use him as a meat shield for characters with stronger abilities in those colors, and on defense, super-high health means he has lots of time to get off purple after purple after purple, which eventually will lead to a cascade that will at least mean him taking a bite out of you if not something even more dangerous, not to mention the possibility of getting purple to repeat next turn. How frustrating is it to watch him do his little Snoopy dance every turn? Let's just say this happened after a particularly unlucky Devil Dino fight:

    aqGyo1R.jpg

    (Protip: if you're going to throw your phone, throw it screen side up, and not at a place where it might hit something hard.)

    Dino's best use is as a defensive deterrent -- his high health and ability to cascade makes him dangerous at any level, and the amount of time spent on animations while chopping away at that 19k should also make those shield hopping think twice about taking him on. That being said, Dino has perhaps the highest opportunity cost in the game: not only do you need to spend the extreme amount of ISO to get him leveled up, but if you missed out on anniversary week it's also a whopping 25k hero points to max him out, and that's after you pass your 1-year anniversary.

    Speed: medium
    Sustainability: high
    Power: medium

    Green: fair
    Red: fair
    Purple: fair

    Recommended build: The health is the most important thing. After that, it depends on who you're likely to play him with. I like 4/4/5 best -- 5 purple gives you the best chance to cascade, which is important on O and critical on D, and 4 in each of the other colors makes him flexible enough to play with either XForce or TGT. If you only have one of those, though, or if your covers happened to fall some other way during anniversary week, I wouldn't worry too much about it so long as you've got enough covers to get him to at least 15k health.

    13. 3* Hulk, -1
    Still massive health and a great green generator, but not nearly the scarecrow he used to be on defense, since the meta doesn't rely nearly as much on strike tiles any more, and 4* characters eat him for breakfast.

    Much like Marvel, if you have the roster space, a 5-black L40 Hulk is a blast for PvE.

    12. 3* Deadpool, +4
    Decent bump up -- super-Whales is a great fallback option for Gauntlet nodes, and a maxed Deadpool is a much bigger advantage in his featured PvP than most characters are in theirs.
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited January 2015
    11. 3* Wolverine (Patch), -2
    I was just starting to come around to 5/3/5 as a more versatile build when the Daredevil change and Elektra announcement landed. Now I'm not sure; I like 3/5/5 better for pairing with both of those, and find it more suitable to Patch's best use, which is as a sustainable climbing partner for Daken. 5/3/5 is definitely better if he's one of the few 3* on your roster, though, since it has a much higher power output and forms a dominant offensive pairing with Hulk.

    10. 3* Blade, new to the list
    Raise your hand if you were surprised to find out that Blade the vampire hunter was actually a Marvel property and not a just a 90's cult classic Wesley Snipes movie. Nobody? Uh...yeah, me neither.

    All three of Blade's powers are good to great: black is reasonably fast at 8 AP, and while it doesn't do a ton of damage, taking 3 AP from an enemy's strongest color is reasonably powerful, and especially so when facing those dreaded villain + 2 feeder goon nodes; now instead of him getting 4 AP every turn, you get 3 and he gets one, which is a much better deal.

    Purple is a bit more expensive, but significantly more powerful; with 6 strike tiles on board it pumps out two tiles doing a massive 1012 damage each (plus the 6 strikes), so close to 2.5k damage per turn. That'll end a game in a hurry. Our contention from last time, that purple is often uncovered by your opponent so you're better off ignoring it and contesting the colors that can actually hurt you, still stands, but in this case purple is so strong, and reasonably priced, that prioritizing it is a viable option.

    Where to get those six strike tiles, though? Enter green, Blade's best ability. Having 10 red tiles on the board isn't guaranteed -- it can be a tough ask sometimes, and on bad boards you can go a whole game without The Thirst triggering more than once or twice -- but when you can get 10, the AI doesn't know to match red and it tends to avoid matching special tiles, so on offense, when The Thirst triggers, it often triggers turn after turn after turn. Even on defense, it can be fairly disruptive for an opponent to have to choose between chasing down red tiles, effectively denying him AP of other colors, or taking several hundred points worth of strike tile damage every turn. For team composition purposes, you should think of his green passive as though it were an excellent active red power, as it is very strong but precludes you from relying on anyone else who has an active red, as you want to avoid matching red as much as you can.

    You can think of Blade as a pretty good stand-in for Daken -- both are middling health, can generate a ton of strike tiles quickly, can be denied strike tiles by bad boards, and pair well with Falcon. Blade brings a little more to the table in the long game with his AP steal and purple attack tiles, but Daken is more consistent, faster, and of course has the trump card of true healing.

    That being said, they actually play pretty well together, since Daken can tank damage on purple and black, you have strong actives on three colors and a reason to match a fourth, and of course it's a lot of fun to pump out four strike tiles a turn when the conditions are just so. Blade also plays extremely well with 3* Thor -- good to great actives on four colors, and Thor has a decent active red but not one you'd normally prioritize, which is perfect for Blade.

    Black: fair (good against goons)
    Purple: good (excellent if you have another source of strike tiles, or the board is right)
    Green: excellent

    Speed: medium
    Power: medium (potentially high, see comment for purple above)
    Sustainability: medium

    Recommended build: Depends on what you want to use him for and how developed the rest of your roster is. If you have most other characters in the game maxed, and want to use him primarily for his speed, which is very fast in the right teams, 5/3/5 is probably the best build by a hair -- in that configuration black is useful as a finishing move since you'll rarely have time to get much use out of purple, if the game even goes that long.

    If, on the other hand, Blade is one of the tentpoles of your 3* roster, or you intend to play him against harder PvE opponents, 3/5/5 has a much higher ceiling, and you'll need that increased power to deal with other 3* rosters.

    9. 3* Magneto (classic), +4
    Ah, irony -- sadly underrated last time due to his incredible synergy with X-Force, and now that he's cracked the top ten, 4* Thor has now replaced him as X-Force's best running mate. Still a very viable combo for high-level play, though.

    8. 3* The Hood, +1
    Technically Hood got a nerf; ending the turn is generally a really severe drawback, especially on an ability that might set up cascades and exposes the lowest-health character in the top tier to whatever nastiness the opponent might have to offer. Not generating AP is sad too, since it's now a whole lot harder to use Twin Pistols to keep a multiple-ability chain going. But looking at the big picture, his change would be like if you had a sniper rifle with a laser sight and someone swapped out the laser sight for regular sights -- sure, the old configuration was a bit better, but the reason you have a sniper rifle in the first place isn't changed at all.

    Tortured analogy aside, Hood's most dominant power, Dormammu's Aid, is still the same, so he's still one of the very best characters in the game due to how he can singlehandedly shut down an opponent's ability to use active powers while charging up your own. And in some situations, getting to do damage on Twin Pistols is actually an improvement, even if it does end the turn -- it does enough damage to work great as a finisher, since if you can use it to knock out an opponent with a charged power, you usually won't care too much if Hood takes a match-3 or two on the next turn.

    Yellow: good
    Black: fair

    Speed: medium
    Sustainability: low
    Power: high

    Recommended build: The Sentry change means that there's now very rarely a reason to have more than 3 countdown tiles on the board (Captain America/IM40/Hood is about the only team composition I can think of), so 5/5/3 should be overwhelmingly the build of choice, since the damage for L4 and L5 yellow is a huge upgrade. That being said, 5 blue is still easily the most important thing, and you should find a 4/5/4 or 3/5/5 Hood to be plenty useful.

    7. 3* Captain America, +3
    Pretty big jump up for Cap, perhaps owing to the fact that TGT's strongest color is red, mitigating Cap's slow speed and capitalizing on the fact that he's got perhaps the best non-Thor red in the game.

    6. 3* Black Panther, +1

    5. 3* Daken, +1
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    edited January 2015
    4. 4* Nick Fury, +1
    Deemed overrated in the last go-round, he's now more deserving of his lofty position thanks to the raw damage output of Demolition. If you don't have a playable TGT, you need to have some way to neutralize her or do a massive amount of damage fairly quickly; Demolition on its own delivers 10k or more, and Surgical Strike into Demolition often creates 4-way matches that increase the chance that multiple traps get triggered.

    With the introduction of 4* Thor and the nerfing of Sentry, we now recommend 5/5/3 over 3/5/5 for Fury. The upgrade from 3 to 5 purple is just so marginal that you'll rarely ever wish you had those two extra levels, and while it's true that yellow is still slow and takes some babysitting, getting a stun on blue or extra area damage is actually a significant upgrade. Having a level 5 yellow, though, does merit a bit of a change in playstyle -- instead of firing abilities as early and often as possible to chip away or down one character early, you're usually better off holding everything until you can fire off a full-power Avengers Assemble, then follow up with all the other stuff you've been holding in reserve. Usually that'll just end the game, depending on what other powers you have.

    Now that I think about it, playing things close to the vest and unloading when you can ensure victory kind of sounds thematically like Nick Fury, doesn't it?

    3. 3* Thor, even
    Seems a bit overrated to me, since he doesn't synergize well with X-Force and can't be played with TGT at all, plus I'm having a hard time making a case for him over Fury.

    2. 4* Thor, new to the list
    So, ah, what's up with 4* Thor's costume? I mean, I get it, midriffs are hot and all, but isn't the whole point of protective body plating to actually protect things? You might as well put a little sign that says "insert pointy thing here" at that gap.

    Looks aside, Thor easily deserves her place at the top of the rankings. Start with her health -- at 14k, there isn't a 3* in the game that can dispatch her with fewer than two powers, and most of them take at least 3. That's a *lot* of AP, which means a lot of time spent gathering AP, which means a lot of time for her and her teammates to bring the noise.

    The funk starts with blue, which is an absolute monster at level 5 -- one of the longest stuns in the game at 4 turns, plus generates a whopping 12 charged tiles and gives you first crack at matching them. Since they only land on her colors, it's pretty common to get either 5 or 7 AP from your first match, which is usually enough to Smite if you haven't already built up enough red, or recharge blue to stun a second character.

    Smite itself is no slouch, either; with no charged tiles on the board, it does a healthy 3.4k damage, but immediately after Power Surge it lands a patently ridiculous 12k damage, which is enough to down anyone who isn't Devil Dinosaur or Thor herself. Add that it tosses another 4 charged tiles of its own, and things quickly get out of hand -- on a blue/red friendly board it's not uncommon to go blue, match blue, blue, red for 20k damage, or blue, red, match either blue or red, now everyone is either downed or stunned.

    Yellow's kind of the red-headed stepchild of the bunch; 2k team damage for 12 AP is reasonable for a 3*, but it doesn't pack the same kind of holy-balls firepower that the blue-red combination do. It is the only power in the game that can currently give you charged tiles on colors other than red/blue/yellow, so that's something, and it does play very nicely with Patch, as it eliminates most or all of the enemy strike tiles and does area damage for extra boosting from the friendly strike tiles.

    Thor is so powerful that she makes a number of previously ignored characters quite playable; for instance, there's sad and neglected Model 40 sitting in a corner, whose L2 recharge can now be a game-ender, and there's also Mohawk Storm, who never gets invited to parties, but is a great fit with yellow providing cascade ability and green either snapping up charged tiles directly or getting cascades, plus a decent black outlet to provide color coverage. Of course, at the high end the go-to pairing is X-Force, who has minimal ability overlap and abilities that help charge up Thor's powers -- many of the highest scoring players rely on this combo, and you'll see many of them if you're looking to hit the highest pvp progression rewards.

    Speed: medium
    Power: unreasonable
    Sustainability: high

    Red: excellent
    Yellow: fair (good if enemies make a small number of powerful special tiles)
    Blue: excellent

    Recommended build: 5/3/5 is the easy choice here; with that configuration, blue into red is the premier damage-dealing combo in the game and you really don't need anything else. There's an argument to be made that for almost all opponents, L4 red, doing 10k damage immediately off blue or 9k damage after matching two charged tiles, is sufficient, so you might want to go 4/4/5 for improved PvE utility. Personally, I'd prefer to have maximum firepower on red to deal with opposing Thors in PvP or super-scaled PvE opponents, especially since there are plenty of other characters who are adept at dealing with countdown tiles, and for the occasional time when you might cascade away more charged tiles than you'd like.

    1. 4* Wolverine (X-Force), even
    Still the best there is.
  • Idea on ordering - put them in the order of the most recent ranking, with the newbies on the top or bottom (probably top, since they're less likely to be missed).
  • rixmith
    rixmith Posts: 707 Critical Contributor
    Wow, what a quick turnaround on the rankings this time. Great job mischiefmaker! And I think Ben Grimm has hit the nail on the head on the ordering...
  • Dreylin
    Dreylin Posts: 241
    Hawkeye's gone down 1 spot hasn't he, not 2?
  • Looking forward to the rest of this. These posts become a bible, along with the team compositions thread, as to which toons will get iso next based on what I have and the direction I'm looking to move toward.
  • Isay_Isay
    Isay_Isay Posts: 133 Tile Toppler
    48. 1* Juggernaut, even
    Still incredibly underrated. Guys, Balance of Power is officially a Thing now. It counts for season points and everything.

    For real, Juggs is more useful in Balance of Power and Combined Arms than many of the 3* in their own featured events.
  • Its hard to rank a 1* character much higher for the the 1-2 events he's usable in for higher level players. Certainly useful in combined arms, but I think we skipped this one the last season, and BOP is by far his best use. One run a calendar month at best. He's great then, but then just sits there for the rest of the 95% of the time taking up space. That being said... I don't want to delete the 40 5/5 juggy I have, but I do want another juggy at lvl 1 5/5, cause that regen time benefit...
  • Ben Grimm wrote:
    Idea on ordering - put them in the order of the most recent ranking, with the newbies on the top or bottom (probably top, since they're less likely to be missed).
    This has been suggested a few times before, but I'm resistant to doing so because it clearly influences the results. Bag-Man got 16 votes at #38, which was his default starting position, and another 6-7 votes around that area. You'll see more votes where default position clearly affected the outcome later, too.

    That being said, I'd like to have some balance between accuracy and convenience. The most accurate way to get results would be to randomize the starting order for all characters, but obviously that would be a huge pain to complete the survey. The most convenient way would be to put them in the order of the most recent ranking, but that's most likely to cause people to just vote however the last rankings were ordered. So I've compromised on sorting them by rarity and then alphabetical, although I'm considering going back to straight alphabetical since we got much better results last time.
    Dreylin wrote:
    Hawkeye's gone down 1 spot hasn't he, not 2?
    Good catch! Fixed.
  • RemoDestroyer
    RemoDestroyer Posts: 277 Mover and Shaker
    Is team up value being considered? A 0/5 Modern Black Widow I would say has arguably more value as a team up that can be given to alliance members at least once a day than Bullseye or Moonstone and maybe even Beast.
  • Its hard to rank a 1* character much higher for the the 1-2 events he's usable in for higher level players. Certainly useful in combined arms, but I think we skipped this one the last season, and BOP is by far his best use. One run a calendar month at best. He's great then, but then just sits there for the rest of the 95% of the time taking up space. That being said... I don't want to delete the 40 5/5 juggy I have, but I do want another juggy at lvl 1 5/5, cause that regen time benefit...

    When he's not in use Juggernaut is a great Team Up to send to your alliance mates. 4h return time, 100% guaranteed Unstoppable Crash, 6ap board shake up. Definitely worth the roster spot.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    Juggs is great as a team up evnwhen he isn't playable.

    Also, for a short time, I was running a 0/1/5 patch with 2* daken t0 save health packs. Whenever. Could choose a 3rd character, I used my lvl 26 juggs. He didn't tank anything, but had enough health to survive the odd aoe. And his 6AP green board shaker was awesome (cast chemical reaction to clear strike tiles, then shake the board, and likely regen at least one strike tile in the process). And if I got unlucky, and my mains wiped, then juggs could usually headutt his way to a pyrrhic victory.

    He definitely can't find his way into an A team, but he is definitely playable on the right B team. And he gives team ups, AND he is the best defensive character in the game in balance of power. I am not anywhere close to selling mine.