Nah, Doc Ock definitely sucks. I mean, he’s not bad to the point of being unusable, and he’s actually not terrible on pve, but then just about any character can be useful on pve.
His main problem is that he’s meant to be an anti-special-tile specialist, with a power set that heavily relies on that, but actually don’t even do them very well and other characters that aren’t even specialists can do them better.
His blue is way too expensive to react to board flooding situations, especially against passive special tile generators like Daken and Dark Avengers Bullseye (whom you’ll probably be fighting 80% of the time on pve). At 11AP, you have a very hard time reacting to cheap board flooding abilities like Coercive Field (9AP), Hailstorm (9AP), Berserker Rage (9AP), etc., etc. Collecting 11 blue AP isn’t trivial and you might end up in a bad enough board that you can’t even pull it off, unless you have a blue accelerator (which is very rare at the 3-star level).
The fact that his blue targets random tiles as well makes it even worse, since you could completely miss the tile(s) that you want to get rid of, especially high-value single tiles like Keep Your Enemy Closer’s attack or Sacrifice’s strike.
So instead of using Doc’s blue, you could just use Daredevil’s purple or She-Hulk’s blue or even Loki’s purple instead, which do very similar things much more AP-efficiently. They are also much better characters than Doc overall.
His black passive is probably his best power IMO, but still rather poor. It depends on the fact that you have to be able to match the enemy tiles in the first place, which isn’t always the case when they get spawned in an awkward position. To add insult to injury (hue), it actually clashes with his blue, as special tiles that are destroyed by blue do not trigger black. The passive also only triggers once per move, so even if you match 2 or more enemy special tiles in one move, it only activates once. If you like attack tiles, there are numerous other characters that can do attack tiles better.
His green is just bad. Far too expensive, tries to do too many things but does none of them well.
