NOTE: Everything said here is exactly, exactly 100% the same for Dr.Doom one of the most beloved villain who is the worst character in the game, or Kang is. Basically its pick your poison they are both so underwhelming weak its get almost funny how badly designed it is (but ends up sad instead...). Literally miles weaker then any other characters. The base issue is that he takes up 2 slots of characters instead of 1. This means the player only get 2 characters instead of 2. A lot of other game does this as well and I will say before I go into details on this, that in Playdoms defense 2 slot characters are usually useless in most games so they have a tendency to never fit in.
IF there is one character design I hate in this game its Kang's.
With very simple math. And I mean simple I can prove why Kang is so fucking bad. And I say this with 100% serious professional view. One of my expertise in game development is game combat design and first and foremost game balance design, I have just this 2 last weeks worked on balance a card game for a company. And truly, if anyone at Playdom read this,,,Jesus Christ hire me as a consult and I can fix this mess in 3 weeks max!
Kang is just wow, your guys cant do the simplest 1+1 type of math. I am not gonna bother going into Kang's abilities etc as his ridiculous lack of stats makes his skill be useless regardless unless he had like, ultimate instantly win. .... ... Like they tried to do with Dr.Doom but give it a 10+ turn timer. yeah that will happen in pvp especially when you play with the weakest team in the game, good luck surviving to turn 10.
OK if each character has value, we can get a complicated value looking into the tier list and another list that I been working on just never published a team synergy point system. We can get a good indication on a characters strength, versatility, meta etc. But lets forget all about complicated shit. And just do a very simple logical reasoning.
If a character has 1 in power, we are a talking about an average character.
Then you have the Agent who is clearly far the best character in the game with numerous passives, he/she can have like 6-7 great character passive on the same time and awesome attacks and so on. And can be customized to any class or none class. So we logical we can say that Agent(A) is higher then 1.
A>1. Agent is higher then the average character. Very reasonable.
Then we have characters like Emma Frost(E) who are broken, and she is clearly also better then the average while not being on the level of Agent as Agent is number 1.
That gives us A>E>1. Its not really interesting how exactly strong Emma is right now but we can logically place her between agent power and average character power.
Having a normal 2 decent characters, would give the player 2 in power (1+1). We ignore the unknown power level of agent, A.
That means Kang should have at least, NOTE "at least" 2 in power level. As Kang takes 2 spot he should have the average base power value of 2. Thats the absolute bottom he can be at. Then having less characters makes you take less damage from aoe, but if Kang is for example debuffed its a much bigger deal.
Debuffing one character in a normal set up, and lets say its a 50% deal less damage. That means the team does 1/6 point of less damage that round. If that happens to Kang the team deals 1/3 less damage. For example if Kang hits for 1000 and Agent for 500. Thats 1500 normally, now its 1000 as he was 50% weaker dealing 500 instead of a 1000 damage. If its instead 3 characters and they deal 500 each, one will deal 250 damage and the total daamge ends at 1250.
Without going into overall complicated details its clear that a boss type of double character will need more to be compensated then just having twice the stats.
So Kang has to be higher then 2.
Reasonable Kang should be higher then Agent as Agent shouldn't be twice as good as a normal character and Kang takes up 2 spots so he should in all fairness be twice as good as Agent to really. Gives us K>2>A>1.
This is how the game should be, Agent is somewhere close to 2 being broken but its indented as thats the players avatar and were the player can spend money to make the agent go crazy strong etc. Kang is higher then 2 as he takes 2 spot he gets twice the stats of a 1 with some really good abilities and passives etc.
This is not rocket science so to speak. If a normal character is 1 and a special boss character takes up 2 spots of a normal he should be around 2. It takes some processes to say higher how much then 2, but clearly it has to be 2. Potentially it could be like 1.9 or something very close. One could guess that not knowing the game at all. Then knowing how easy it is to debuff etc. Its quickly clear it has to be nigher then 2. But just very basic its should be close to 2. That should be anyones first guess.
SO what we want is K>2.
Reality....
is like K ≈ 1.5 at best.
Like really WTF gives??? How come up with him being barely better then a normal character. Just his stats are so dam low.
We are not talking complicated stuff like I have emphasized several times but very basic power level based primarily on the stats of the character.
I rememberer last Christmas was Dr. Doom was released and playing with him. My normal character I was using had 22000 Health, which was high for my level(coming to this later). And Dr.Doom had 29000.
29000????? Thats higher then 22000 but its not even 50% higher!!!
So I quickly saw that Dr.Dooms stats arent even 50% higher then a normal guy (Kang is 100% the same). This means that 2 normal guys got 44000 health together while Dr.Doom has 29000.
29/22 = 1.3 so 30% better.... 44/29 = 1.5 so 50% better having 2 normal guys. Stat wise. And Dr.Doom don't even have good abilities....
How the hell did they land in this mess. Completely unplayable. I have for that matter never once seen anyone ever play with Kang. Not once, nor anyone I know uses him in either pve or pvp. Wonder why.
If they asked me what would I think a double character should have, not caring about it abilities knowing a base character has HP of 22000 I would say around 50000, knowing how Marvel Avengers Alliance works. At least 44000 and then some more.
Now they have given them 2 turns, so they can punch twice as hard in the regard of attack power then I guess. So like they can still only have 1 in attack but its 1 x 2 so its fine. Well if we ignore characters like Quicksilver who also have 2 turns and punches for like 0.7 or so and then do 1.4 damage so if you also have Omega Sentinel(same as QS) you get at least 2.8 in damage and so on and so on.
Their stats are atrociously low for taking up double the space.
So in the game is something like 1.5>K>1 which clearly don't put him above 2 other characters at best.
All that being said, if we introduce more elements into this and make it less simple. We have that the Agent, power value A. Is higher with a team. Agent got a lot of passive like coordination etc which are better with more team mates alive. This means that A actually is based on the number of alive N(normals). Especially stronger if both are alive. So a little more complicated value would be. Basically;
If Nalive == 2
A = A+X
X being unknown increase in value.
A is higher valued if its 2 team mates. This further makes Kang useless as he is always at best 1...
Then a lot of characters are better if synergies together. So for example Emma is great with Magneto or Phoenix etc. So Normally A>E>1. Is also then
IF Teammate == Magneto
E = E+Y.
Ok so we don't know the value of X or Y. But we do know that its better having them not having them, we can of course actually get the data and get a very good measurement of X/Y but this is just like earlier super simple logic so we do not need that.
What it gives us is that a normal teams value is N( using N instead of 1 s its not equal) is higher with more people and so its the agent so N is not worth 1 actually but something higher then 1.
So N>1 and agent is even further better with 2 N alive so, A>N>1. And Kang is still just shit.
Kang is something like A>N≈ K>1 in a team game.
Roughly estimated Kang is as good as a normal character. He as a little higher stats but as he lowers the value of A and he don't have an extra Y factor like a N has he is barely higher then N. Extreme examples like Magneto or Emma is much better then Kang actually in that case its easily.
A>E>M>K>1 That is of course a lot more complicated and not base logic to come to this conclusion.
But without going into Kang's abilities.the meta etc. A>N≈ K>1 this result shows how absolutely what a joke he is.
Ye Kang wont be Conqueroring anything any time soon.
Lastly, I just want to say story wise how absoutly little sense they made when they made him playable also..ok Kang somehow joins to stop the incursion or whatever I guess.
At least Kang has been recently interesting in the comics with the whole Apocalypse twins storyline.
