If you care about saving packs he’s probably pretty good. He heals a ton but doesn’t do much else.
On defense I don’t think he’s a “threat,” in that he’s going to do something to kill you…he’s just a DPS check. If you can’t oneshot him from 200k+ he’s just going to sit there, healing to full every turn.
(Of course, literally everyone has the DPS to oneshot him from 200k+ right now, so I don’t disagree with your assessment. If that changes soon then maybe he’ll be something).
OK, Im sorry, but i just went back to play him some more, and even with a good charge tile person in the match, his healing is BAD.
Im afraid I’m going to need to see proof of this guy providing value or being annoying. As I’m seeing him, mediocre 4 stars can out pace his healing. It was something like 8 plus turns just to get his heals to like 20 percent health, then, he doesn’t have good health anyway!
I love the nerfing others logic, but unfortunately, they would have to nerf every character in the game for there to be enough turns for the sun to come out and shine on this turd. This is coming from someone you know likes the long game and playing slow, but even I dont have time for this silliness.
For a character to succeed at playing the long game, they need to provide something to get it to that point (defense, heaps of health, protect tiles etc.) but this guy does none of those things and he doesn’t justify bringing along with the others who do. He should start the match healing a shipton, then it gets weaker as the match goes on, then increase it with charge tiles or something, but this ultra long game, doesn’t exist, yet, and surely never will.
I came back to this thread generally curious, but I am leaving with more time invested in him and now thinking he’s worse than I thought when I came back. Proof, or I award you no points, and may god have mercy onyour soul.
Which mediocre 4
outpace his healing? Mine is like 480 and I haven’t ever had to use a pack on him. He heals back to full basically every turn. Maybe yours is defective?
I don’t think he’s good or anything, but I didn’t think OML was very good either, and everybody used him forever because of his healing.
You’re forgetting that oml’s strike tiles were twice as strong before the nerf
God damnit Bucket, you were supposed to just get on board. I dont want to go digging through all the 4 stars for us to continue the debate on each one! Plus, what are the rules? Can they have good supports, decent or 5c star teammates?
Someone do the math on how long it takes this guy to start healing 70% plus oh his health, because the Bucket I talk to, only plays matches that last a few seconds, and we’re looking at 10 plus turns for him to finally get healing. For a character who basically only heals, thats a rough look. Plus he’s already dead.
Once they nerf the broken meta, I will revisit him, just for you. LOOK, OVER THERE! A thread about actual successful healers! 
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I’ve been playing with him a little bit as well, and I can’t say the fights are over super quick, but Frank should start healing turn 2 as long as you have red set to 4 or 5 regardless of charged tiles. He has been the essential a few times, so the boost may be giving a false positive since he’s going to heal more per rage.
In the 5* nodes I never used a health pack & he started every node at full health in Honor Among Thieves. I did run him with Iron May to bump up the match & passive purple damage, so she could be adding to it as well. I was pretty consistently seeing him heal for 12-20K per turn, but since it was taking him back to max health I don’t know if it was more than that. His purple also triggers Sam Cap, so I was getting up to 35K in strikes by getting a few out then sending him airborne to boost them & let Frank tank blue & yellow without losing rage matching his strong colors.
I think we’ve found the nickname for this character!
Everyone has missed that he’s a counter to Frankie Nova. He eats charged counters and he fully heals while she’s airborne. It’s funny that the same people who say counter-characters are better than nerfing characters, are complaining about how bad he is.
I am not sure anyone has said the best approach is to make counter-characters.
I am not aware of any successful counter character. In every case I can recall they ended up nerfing the character. If you try to counter a meta character you need to have a true meta counter and they will probably need to be way too strong, aka you’re just making things worse.
I am not sure at all that Frankencastle would be any good in a match v Nova especially if she’s got May along, but otoh I am not planning to try to 550 him to use against all the 550 Novas I see. Maybe you are at a lower level and can report if he does ok vs equivalent level ones.
“Don’t nerf, give us counters!” is the single most common argument I have seen about MPQ character balance, over the 13 years the game has existed. It’s one of the most popular MPQ-related takes, period.
You are correct, there hasn’t been a decent counter character but non-nerfers are always advocating for them instead of fixing the core problem.
They should concentrate on counters.
Maybe the rebalances will address this, I maintain that there is a way to thematically change powers instead of just going “this characters stops a b or c”
Yeah it does mean you need to know some marvel lore but I think the majority of users would like that.
Counters have never worked in MPQ though. Is it because they’re bad at making counters or because this game doesn’t have the mechanics to make counters work? I don’t think it matters at this point, because 3 different sets of devs have tried making counters and they’ve all failed consistently (barring Scarlet Witch with Hulk/Okoye, and that was a unique set of circumstances).
Have to disagree
There are counters to polaris
There are counters to charged tile users
There are counters to airborne
There are counters to reviving characters
Now are all of these brilliantly effective? Nope
All im asking is they ratchet these counters up to 11
This should be a game of strategy not just keep pressing powers till you win
Which characters counter Polaris, charge tiles, revivers, and airborne characters, that are good enough to be used against the general meta? Lets use SIM as the base meta since all characters are Oman equal footing with no god buffs
Looks like there’s a disconnect here.
The popular statement is that no effective counters exist.
The counter argument (pun purely accidental) is that technically some characters are doing some countering, just not necessarily very well.
That’s my read anyway. The assertions are not mutually exclusive. Hopefully we can all put the knives away on that count.
I guess I don’t understand your argument then.
I didn’t say that they haven’t tried to do counters. 3 dev teams have tried super hard to make counter characters! But none of them have actually managed to accomplish anything.
Like, yes, there are airborne counters. They’re bad and they don’t do anything. Same with the Polaris counters, etc.
I don’t know why nobody can make a viable counter in this game, but they can’t. Why do we want them to keep trying and failing at it?
Yeah that would be the " not brilliantly effective " bit
Even when a counter is effective, the problems are:
The best defense remains a good offense, and powerful offense is the main meta of MPQ anyway. A guy who counters Polaris, like Maximus, isn’t useful in other situations and not scary to anyone who isn’t using Polaris so basically you just change over to Nova and kill him and move on.
A turn based game like this is hard to make counters work in because the player gets to go first etc. If the counter is strong enough to matter it has to trigger passively and powerfully, and it just makes an OP toon that no one wants to fight.
Counters are hard because the game design is “player wins most matches as long as they pick the right fights” and populating queues with uber shutdown toons would make a lot of players angry.
In games with play that happens concurrently it’s easier to do. Or in a game that held the metas to a lower level, but we passed that long ago.
Eb i love you but you could argue with your shadow.
Im not trying to argue anything im saying that they have characters than can actively buff to alleviate the only having 10 characters thats worth using.
Also there’s no counters to polaris? There are loads, mantis, morbius, 4 star beast, max the mad.
The point I was saying is there are characters that dont have lore relevant powers. Daredevil should be able to detect invisible, spidey should have spidey senses - he could counter airborne by webbing them and slamming them to the ground, iron man can get Friday to hack other technologists powers so they dont work. They could do so much and make it fit to the character but they havent.