My 2c on 5* Captain Marvel

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Character Discussion
1

So a little background first. I’ve been mostly hoarding whilst ensuring that I fully cover each Latest 5* before they leave and immediately getting at least one cover of each for PVE.

I already have Okoye/Thor/Kitty champed at 45x and whilst I had accumulated 3000cp or so I didn’t pull from their special vault as I personally see no value in potentially getting them each to level 46x. I didn’t originally intend to pull from Carol’s release store, however got very bored and decided to take the opportunity to full cover my Starlord who was one of my few incomplete Classic 5*s. I ran at around 14% through circa 130 pulls and with a decent distribution managed to finish off SL and get 9 covers for Carol. I then all but emptied my stock of Latest tokens once Carol entered packs, ran an awful (but for me standard) 9/94 but this was enough to champ Kingpin (hooray!!) and Carol.

So onto Carol - like almost everyone I looked at her numbers and powers and concluded, to be generous, that she wasn’t the best. But I’ve tried to give her a try anyway. My thoughts:

Red

Fun and ok power - IF you can get the repeater tile to fire. Maybe a little underpowered on both damage and strike strength. Passive unnoticed.

Green

Passive - very slow, even if you can get the repeater to zero.
Active - ok at 5 covers but still not as good as other green users. Decent if somehow you’ve managed to flood the board with specials

Yellow

The damage is decent for only 8ap. However as a downside you have to take one of your characters out of the battle for 2 turns, which given you sometimes try to build a team is less than ideal.

Conclusions

Carol is bad/weak/slow enough that I cannot see me using her in PvP even during her 2 week boost period. Aside from her yellow, everything she does relies on repeaters which aren’t fortified - unless you run her with either Goblin or Cable (and even with them they may be unprotected for a turn). The downside of the yellow can be very problematic unless its a standard PvP where the 3* essential can often be sitting there doing nothing anyway. Maybe some ok synergies with likes of Carnage, Storm and Vulture.

Suggested buff’s

A complete rework would honestly be best, but assuming we’re keeping her powers mostly as they are:

  1. The red should get immediate damage/strikes with the repeater to follow;
  2. Green passive reduced to 2 turns;
  3. Green active I am undecided on. It’s serviceable, but there are much better uses for it;
  4. All repeaters should initially be fortified. This is the most important by far;
  5. The yellow should send an enemy airborne instead of (or as well as) a teammate.

Even with all of the above she would still only be mid-tier if that and make no impact on the meta. However she may become fun/borderline useable. At present, there is little more unfun than collecting enough red/green ap to fire a power and then have the repeater matched before it has done a thing.

2

Thanks for your thoughts. I personally feel all active abilities with repeater tiles that have a cd greater than 1 should fire first then place the CD. This would significantly improve repeater tiles especially in the 5* tier. With Carol, KP, Loki all suffering from long cd on their repeater tiles they “feel” unplayable and weak. I highlight the word feel because it takes a while to build up the AP to fire a power, and then to have to see an expensive power get matched away is frustrating.

i would also add for her green passive to be deployed at the start of the match the way Gambit’s is placed. Gambit gets the 2 turn repeater before he players first move because the devs realized having the 2 turn repeater tile appear on the player move was too slow. So now why does Carol get a 3 turn repeater on the players 2nd move?

3

UNFUN. The very word that best defines much of what seems to be happening with most new characters, both 4* and 5* (though the effect on the 5* game is vastly greater given the scarcity of covers and their low total population). It is UNFUN to collect assets to acquire a character with great art and history, characters many of us grew up with and love dearly, then go through the RNG wringer, only to end up with an entirely lackluster character that will have no real impact on the game. It’s like mom promising a candy treat and she brings home a carob bar…

And, god knows, there is nothing more UNFUN than repeaters. They SUCK.

Rant over, please carry on.

4

It is noteworthy how many threads are popping up that are focused on people quitting or questioning playing, along with threads about how disappointing the 5*s are, especially Carol.

The connection is obvious.

Good ideas! Many times we have proposed revisions to mediocre or bad 5’s. All ignored, of course.

5 
Moving to character discussion.
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This is an infuriating and arbitrarily enforced practice. Players are the whole point of this forum – not mods, not devs, not nobody but the people who support and play the game, thereby paying salaries around here.

If you don’t like what what we have to say or where we choose to place our comments, then just cut off comments and turn this into a blog with information moving in one direction.

It is not a coincidence that (almost) everything that gets moved this way is critical. It is paternalism and censorship.

Paternalism: the policy or practice on the part of people in positions of authority of restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to them in the subordinates' supposed best interest.

Censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
7

@Yepyep take all my likes.

To be fair though, I see that particular mod has moved this thread to Character Discussion, which is where I’d expect this thread to belong to.

8

So paternalism and censorship is bad? Someone gives you the use of something but asks you to follow a few rules, which you actually agree to before using the item. In a case like that the user that does not follow the rules but complains about them sounds in the wrong to me.

Go make your own forums and moderate them under your own terms if you are so put off by someone else’s rules.

On topic carol does seem a bit clunky and slow. If repeaters did something on activation they might be weaker powers in general. Since you pay for one use and if can protect the repeater get more use out of it.

9

I can comment on her green power with great experience, as I’ve been playing a singleton Event Horizon/Photonic Rush Carol as the QB of a level 170 T4A team.

It’s… really satisfying when I managed to destroy 4 rows with it. But that’s only happened once, and I had to use a Hailstorm TU to accomplish it.

Meet Rocket & Groot is an easy enough PvE, with a majority of slow goon nodes, to run on CL7. But I’m boosting RY every node and steadily burning health packs. The spider-man one with all the symbiotes was that bad on CL6.

For comparison before I picked up CM5 (which was the goal of this side project alt account), thanks to some fantastic pull luck I got to run singletons of all three LLs, as well as Kitty and OML (Actually two OMLS) from the anniversary Fan Favorites vault. Storm’s Gathering Storm was perhaps the weakest of the bunch, but still more reliable than Photonic Rush, plus it has great synergy with Worthy Cap. ProfX blue is awesome, Kitty was kitty (yellow), as long as she has tile support life’s a breeze; OML, so useful. And Iceman’s green, hilariously reliable damage and, as an LL, powered up pretty often lately. My closest comparison to Carol’s green and outshadows it a loooot, it almost seems like Carol was just designed to be a battery and tank for other actually good powers.

So onto that green: I actually like how weak and low-stakes the AP repeater is. You don’t mind matching it away to make 3 green; it’ll come back. And it’s not supposed to be her gimmick like it is for Gambit, so it doesn’t lock out other characters using green. Does his even do that anymore? I sold him after the nerf and never looked back. He (and Carnage) are the only 2 fives I don’t have… I suppose I stopped pulling classics around the same time and wow did my QoL improve.

Anyways, I’m rambling.
I like Carol’s kit. I just don’t like spending 30 AP for no effect, even if 12 of it was ‘free’, which happens in long missions. I don’t like having to match away my tile because there’s no other matches on the board, or having to make bad matches to protect it from the AI, only to have some ridiculous cascade take it out anyway. I know there’s a bit of quantity bias, but wow, does that CD rarely resolve. And when it does resolve, it’s probably just a single row.
Maybe in CL 9 with a lot of high power supporting characters and special tiles it’d blow more stuff up, but in CL9 battles don’t last long enough for an unprotected, 3-turn CD.

Anyway if a character isn’t going to be viable in the 450 meta, they should be designed with the 200, or 270, or 360 meta instead. Carol’s kit seems built for the heavy SAP, wild destruction of CL9 at CL5 speed. Which is like, roster level 170, i.e. her match damage will often win the fight before she even gets to use her powers.

Wow, I’m rambling tonight; TL.DR I really hope they give her some self-support. Fortify Red, have her green repeater make a bunch of weak strikes whenever it triggers or you match it away. And/or have Photonic Rush create strikes when fired so if it gets matched away you got some benefit, and if it doesn’t, it’s more likely to trigger multiple-row destruction. Yellow, I dunno. I think it’s better used on herself than an ally, and makes more sense anyway.