Feedback Wanted: Character Balance

Rework the duds

Some characters have essentially been dead on arrival, which kind of sucks for a game where the design pushes you towards rostering everyone.  They don't all need to be meta defining, but there should be at least one set of opponents where each character would be a good choice to bring on your team.

Especially at the 5* tier where covers are rare and you've got a fixed window for good odds to cover a set of three, it is disappointing to receive covers for someone like Wasp.

Normalise 5* match damage and health

The constant creep in match damage and health for the 5* tier is getting ridiculous.  The most recent characters have about a 50% advantage over the original 5* characters now, and there's no sign of this changing.  If this is intended as some kind of planned obsolescence system for the most valuable characters in the game, then that's a pretty underhanded strategy.

It also feels like some characters were given unusually high (at the time) match damage as compensation for mediocre powers (e.g. Star Lord and Captain Marvel).  The constant match damage creep essentially means that those advantages disappear and they're just left with mediocre powers.

I'm not necessarily advocating for giving every character equal match damage.  The originally communicated plan of having three levels corresponding to different styles of character (normal, tank, and support) could work too.

It might also be worth significantly reducing the match damage of the tier to avoid problems with Bishop and Worthy Cap.  Both characters have interesting mechanics, but having their powers trigger off simple 5* match damage makes them unreasonably effective.  So we either need to increase the damage threshold of their powers, or let the 5* tier do less match damage.

Increasing the damage threshold would severely neuter both characters when played at their own tier, which seems undesirable.  On the other hand, reducing 5* match damage could help make powers more important in the tier.

Change powers that cut off interesting development in the game

I use Kitty every day in the game, yet I also recognise that her purple power is a hard counter to a large portion of the game's roster.  It's clear that she's affected the power design of characters that have come after, with more reliance on repeater tiles, or attempts to out-race her special tile removal.

While I love how much she speeds up matches, maybe she does more harm than good in constraining the design of new characters.

[I wouldn't say no to changes that moved the meta away from speed, and/or reduced the repetitiveness of events too]