This is a direct offshoot from Helix72’s thread, worst 5* character in the game. I was limited to 9 poll options (plus an other), so I’ve tried to include the nine worst (I excluded limited characters, like Devil Dino or Howard). If I missed your most hated 4*, please select other and list him or her in the comments.
Everyone else has some use, even if it is limited.
I don’t think Namor and Lockjaw deserve to be on the list. They aren’t great, but I don’t think they are trash tier.
Black widow is only useful for recharging the health of her teammates. But when you reach 5* matches health bonuses don’t really help much
BW, talos, Emma, kraven are the traditional weaklings.
Some other characters like jubilee, wiccan, namor, and nebula seem pretty weak to my, but I would need to play them more to be sure.
I think Emma and talos are the worst two. Even when you build to leverage all their abilities, they just don’t do very well.
Some other former trashcans are now just useful enough to escape this list (Brock, fantastic, etc).
Prowler doesn’t deserve to be on that poll. Paired with the right partners, he is a beast not to be trifled with. Medusa, Prowler and Carnage is a fun team to play against any non Gritty’s you encounter.
Talos though? That dumpster fire of a character is the 5 star Wasp of the 4 star tier. No synergy. No offensive powers, period. His teammates die, he may as well just die with them, because you’re not winning that match with him.
For me it comes down to Talos or Emma Frost. IMO, they share the spot. Talos does absolutely nothing, though at least he has a stun. And whatever Emma tries to do is irrelevant since she takes 3 centuries to get there with her active powers + multi-turn repeaters. You can’t speed her up with feeders, since you still have to wait for the repeaters, and they have the survivability of wet tissue paper. And even if you can get through all that, what she does is so very underwhelming that you’re questioning why you’ve bothered to build a team around her in the first place. At least Talos has a stun?
Flaptain also takes ages, but at least when he gets around to it he has a nuke. BW plays well as a support character to characters with a cheap stun like Iceman, Kingpin could at least feed someone else’s yellow (pity there are so few good active yellow users in the 4* tier), Jubilee has amazing synergy with Lady Thor, Namor is just meh rather than terrible and you can at least do something with Prowler or Lockjaw on Carnage teams.
While she’s not great, she offers more than that. Lowering power costs is nothing to sniff at. And her ability to remove special tiles comes in handy. In the current Valkyrie PVP tournament, I’ve used her to force a few Professor X’s out of hiding.
I picked Emma, due to the crushing disappointment of her uselessness. She had been requested for so long, unlike Talos, who was obviously just a movie tie in. It makes sense to have tie ins, but I don’t remember seeing anybody actually campaign for him to be in the game.
Emma though, comes under the bracket of “Most requested characters since the start of the game”
Talos is a real mess, granted, but I think Emma is worse. At least Talos has utility with his stun. Outside of the scenario where Emma covers all the missing colours in a team i’m struggling to think of a time when I would pick her above Talos and I would never pick Talos.
Her powers are slow and there are much better alternatives, though this is also true for Talos. I’d rather use a 3*.
She can be great with 5*s, mostly for cost reduction and stun (that drains enemy AP). Fake healing not so much, though when boosted it’s not that bad either.
I’ve voted Emma, because it’s one of the biggest disappointments in the game for me. Great opportunity to have some unique mechanics, but she ended up with repeaters and then done very poorly.
I’m not so sure what Talos even does, though. So he might be as bad or worse.
Also, Flaptain is still a contender for this particular title, after all this time. He at least has some uses with speeding up CD’s for instance, plus an expensive nuke that’s often an overkill, but still. A nuke is a nuke.
Talos.
Most of that group I wouldn’t put on the list to pick from to begin with. Jubilee, Namor, Lockjaw, Prowler, all niche, none horrible; Black Widow can reduce power costs, which makes her a powerful support character with the right teams. Kingpin is great with countdowns (throw in Carol, Coulson, Goblin, just a shame KP’s black isn’t as good as it used to be).
Emma’s problem is that she’s slow. She would benefit from getting to use the effect of the repeater and then placing a repeater that does it again, so you don’t have to wait for that first use. And she could use some sort of toggle on her black power. Like have it break a fortified tile each turn, so she eventually turns back on her own. She’s a pretty solid third with Panther/Shuri (it’s a shame that engine-oriented teams like that don’t have hard/long nodes to really shine against). I think the only reason people hate her so much is because she was highly requested, so they had a stronger reaction to her lackluster kit.
Sam Wilson… now he’s not great. He makes a lot of protects for firing a power, which is not an exciting use of AP. When it is, it’s because of other things going on (4* Panther makes fortified protects, and gets bonus damage when you match protects, and pairs well with Shuri who gets bonus damage for matching fortified tiles; and 3* Falcon’s protects come with an AoE, and 3* Magneto’s protects can overlap enemy specials and appear on a variety of colors). His red is a fantastic nuke, but it’s hard to set up (23 AP for him alone), and it’s not exciting to set up either (because protects). His blue isn’t awful, but the buff isn’t as good as his 3* version, and the countdown speedup isn’t super exciting (especially since his release more countdowns have come out that you want to protect, and repeaters were added to cover some of those effects, etc). If he could speed up repeaters he might be nice.
Still, like Emma, you can make teams that work with Sam. There are countdowns worth speeding up. You can run him with people that make powers cheaper to make it easier to afford his two-power nuke. You can also run him with someone else to generate protects. Generally you’re going to run other characters, but you CAN work with Sam (similar to Emma, really).
But Talos?
He’s like Kraven without a really useful gimmick (Kraven’s being that special tile nerf).
Talos can place traps to steal a strongest color when you match it. But matching it means there’s less for the opponent to match. Meaning there’s less to steal. So trying to steal more means there’s going to be less to steal. It’s a self-defeating ability against tile movers. Not too bad against goons who can auto-generate their AP and aren’t competing with you for that AP on the board. But… who needs a 4* that’s better at goons? You’d be better off running 3* Strange by a mile. His blue has potential as a stun, but it’s more expensive to give you a countdown to AP drain (meaning the steal isn’t guaranteed, lowering its value). But you’re destroying the enemy team’s strongest color. Which means there’s a 1/3 chance it overlaps with his purple power (you don’t want to destroy that AP if you’re trying to steal it from them). Higher if two or more characters have the same strongest color. It’s a bummer that you might not want to stun someone because stunning means removing AP you might steal with a different power. It’s more self-defeating stuff, he’s stepping all over his own feet. His black has potential to tie it all together. Bonus damage for having more AP in the enemy’s strongest color than they do. Combined with a stun that can delete enemy AP in that color, and a trap that (if you target an opponent who has the same strongest color as the team color, easy enough) lets you steal some AP when you match it, so you can destroy most of that color, match some of your own, and steal a little along the way (both lowering their total and upping your own), all on the road to making that gap between your total and theirs as high as possible.
Except I’ve never managed to use those powers to generate enough of a damage boost that it felt like it was “worth it.” And you’re still stepping on your own toes on the road to get there. And there aren’t really any clear partners to use him with to make him functional (the way you can at least attempt with Emma and Sam).
Nothing Talos does stands out as being worthy of starting a team, nor as being useful enough to support an existing team. I think he’s too caught up with strongest colors, so he’s not free to provide broader AP denial that would be more useful for virtually any team you’d put him on.
Talos has almost no redeeming qualities that I can think of.
Kingpin is terrible but pair him with XPool and you can get his Black servicable. His yellow is fine also, just slow
Flaptain - IF you ever get his red to work it is deadly but he is quite bad otherwise.
So that leaves Emma and really, I would take her in a team in a heartbeat over the galaxies most useless spy.
So yeah, Talos, even the devs skipped him in ST.
No, lowering power cost via an active power IS something to sniff at. It’s just too inefficient.
If you play her on team that cares about other colors, and you happen to collect yellow from Cascades, fine. It’s nice to have cheaper powers.
But you should never design a team to collect yellow AP so that you can use it to make other powers cheaper. That is a waste of time and effort. You are better off with a team that can use the yellow AP for some direct effect.
Also, much of the meta right now is a passive one. So reducing active costs is less valuable than it otherwise might me.
I might use her with Sabretooth once I have him up to speed, he gets some healing then and his cheap powers become even more spammable.
Funny people mentioning 3s they would take into battle over Talos, I would legitimately choose Juggernaut over him if it came down to it. He is just that bad. There isn’t a tier in the game where you can’t find a better alternative.
I’ve never seen the utility in Jubilee (i don’t have a functional Bolt or Gambit, so she is just there to help L4dy Thor and Lockjaw get going) or bl4ck Widow (there are just other, better support characters in the tier for how I play), but Talos seems extra useless to me. I actually kind of like Flaptain, particularly between P4nther/Shuri, I just wish his countdown passive were extended to include repeaters.
I think even if Devil Dinosaur was included (Howard, Taskmaster & even Spider-Ham all have more utility, IMO), it would still be a two-horse race between Emma and Talos. For me, Emma is a decent concept, but poorly executed. Meanwhile, I’m not sure what Talos is even supposed to add to a team. I’ve only used him once when he wasn’t required and that was just to shapeshift into Galactus alongside Mystique when I was screwing around. Other than that, I honestly can’t think of a situation I’d want to use him in, as even if I just wanted a shapeshifter Mystique is objectively better (and she’s not very good at all, without having an AI feeder by her side).
On a side note, I do wonder if Captain Falcon and Blonde Widow would be slightly better regarded if they both didn’t have troll-y Crash of the Titans battles against non-fictionally-appropriate opponents with hard-counters to their abilities.
Talos. It’s like they threw JJ, Chavez and OBW into a blender and nothing good came out since you just killed 3 people.
I’m not saying she’s top tier or anything: just that she has enough utility to not be on the bottom of the pile (what this topic is all about). There are other characters who simply don’t seem to behave the way the developers hoped.
I would definitely take 1* Spidey. He has a stun so that puts him on par with Talos straight away and he makes Crits which are a million times more useful than Talos. We al got Gypped with Talos - look at this:
He clearly has a gun arm!! That might have been alright, bang bang! Where is his gun arm D3/Demiurge?!?!??!?