Character Tiers: Difference between revisions

** In general, throughout the series, transformed characters are far better than their untransformed counterparts.

** The Raging Blast God Tier features completely broken characters, including Kid Buu, Super Saiyan 2 Gohan, Super Gogeta, and Super Vegito. Each has ridiculous stats and can easily chain massive combos.

* ''[[Street Fighter]] III: Third Strike''. It was supposed to make the game more balanced, given the complete and obvious advantages certain characters had over others, and it did so for half the characters. The others simply moved around between tiers

** In most fighting game communities, the Chinese characters were top tier throughout all three games.

** Continuum Shift Extend is also considered to be very well balanced. Thanks to the damage nerf, characters that can produce high damage like Ragna, Valkenhayn and Hakumen tend to be high in tier list.

* Note that [[Tournament Play]] will shake tiers up. Sometimes a victor discovers an overlooked technique with a low-ranked character that the upper tier characters have no counter for. Also, some characters are fantastic counters against half the cast but get mopped by the other half, instead of being above or below-average consistently.

** You can select the old ''Super [[Street Fighter]] II'' versions of the characters by quickly inputting a code after selecting them. Old Sagat is considered top tier, and is "soft-banned" in some tournaments (meaning that there is a tacit agreement not to use him, but he can be used anyway), not because he is so overpowering (Balrog and Dhalsim are better characters overall), but because the players agree that the inclusion of Old Sagat makes the game less interesting as a whole.

* [http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/5529/dissidiatierlistbo9.jpg This] [[Dissidia Final Fantasy]] picture parodies the character tier system. In terms of tiers proper in Dissidia, it's [[Flame War|a subject of great debate]] (Yes, ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' fandom is arguing again. [[Broken Base|Shocking, we know]]). There is some consensus about who is generally better, but actual tier placements are far from universally accepted.

* [[Soul Calibur]] 4 tiers generally class Hilde as god tier due to her "Doom Combo" that can ring out from pretty much anywhere. Other generally good characters to use include Sophitia and Kilik, whereas Rock in particular is awful.

* Although the ''[[Gran Turismo]]'' games don't explicitly use Car Tiers, their cars can be pretty much divided into snail-slow subcompacts, slow sedans, medium sports cars, fast supercars, super-fast JGTC racing cars, lightning-fast Le Mans racers, and the [[Title Drop|Polyphony Formula Gran Turismo]].

** The arcade mode in the first two games had an explicit series of tiers. ''Gran Tusimo 2'', for example, has Class C compact sedans, Class B high-power sedans, Class A sports cars, and [[Rank Inflation|Class S]] supercars.

** The game divides its cars into three tiers. The first tier is made of cars such as the Mazdaspeed 3 or the Chrysler 300C, the second tier includes the Dodge Charger and the Lotus Europa, while the third tier includes ''the Dodge Viper and the Lamborghini Murciélago''

** The game also actively enforces the tiers by denying lower-tiered cars performance upgrades that would put them on par with higher-tiered cars, a sharp contrast from the ''Underground'' games and ''Most Wanted'' which allowed the likes of the Chevrolet Cobalt to, once upgraded, compete with (and even surpass) a Porsche Carerra GT.

* The ''Forza Motorsport'' series simultaneously adheres to this trope and subverts it: every car is designated a "performance index", complete with a corresponding tier denoted by a letter grade, but most low-tier cars can be upgraded enough to compete with higher tiers.

** ''Mario Kart: Wii'' gives each character has a subtle boost in certain stats like Speed and Drift. Players have already begun to make a tier list based on who has the biggest Speed bonus, etc. While the differences do not really make much of a difference in a VS race, some people will still use the top rated characters anyway.

** This tier system is much more apparent in ''[[Mario Kart]] DS'', because of the drift system. Characters like Yoshi got huge boosts off drifts and would be relentlessly used online by anyone who could snake well. Drifting in Mario Kart Wii was toned down because of general dislike of the system.

* ''[[Valkyrie Profile]]'' has a lot of characters but they are clearly examples of Character Tiers. Partly due to a few very powerful weapons that can last until the end of the main game can be obtained early and just make the two Lancers or the heavy swordsmen extremely powerful. Many characters of course cannot be perfectly balanced due to some attacks that have varying levels of power and usability. It's clearly established that almost all the Sorcerers are worthless (Due to several coming and only one is needed) or [[Overshadowed by Awesome]], The archers except for Janus and Valkyrie Suck, and the sword users just [[Can't Catch Up]].

** But this changes in the seraphic gate where swords just ridiculously overpower everything.

** Toan and Ruby are the most powerful characters due to Toan's quick attack-speed, high HP, and having a wide selection of weapons (Doesn't help that some powerful weapons can be obtained early) and Ruby being able to hit for a lot of damage despite being a ranged attacker who can't combo.

** Ungaga and Osmond are clearly middle-tier characters. While they can both combo, they both wind up coming too late to match Toan and Ruby by the point they come. Osmond CAN move while he is attacking and hits for a lot, but Ungaga is also a little slow.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** In 3rd edition, versatility (how many problems a character can contribute to solving) is at least as important as power (how powerful the character's abilities are for problems) in tiering. The top tier is characters who, with the right spells prepared, can solve nearly anything the GM can come up with as a standard action. Lesser tiers either have [[Crippling Overspecialization|less versatility]] or [[Master of None|less power]]. In general, while a character of any tier can be a [[Game Breaker]] with the right factors, only a high-tier character can be a [[Story-Breaker Power|Story Breaker]] - imagine how ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' would have turned out if Gandalf could teleport any distance, read minds, identify any item instantly, and make anyone [[No Sell|immune]] to mental influence... and that was just a fraction of his abilities.

** More in-depth: [http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=5293 The generally agreed list] is six tiers. Tier 1 is for characters like wizards, clerics, and druids, who learn loads of powerful spells and abilities and learn even more with every new book. Tier 2 is for characters like sorcerers, psions, and favored souls, who learn powerful spells and abilities, albeit more restrictively (the creator compared it to the difference between a nation with a thousand nukes and one with ten). Tier 3 is for characters like bards, factotums, and duskblades, who can either do one thing pretty well and still be useful, or do everything appreciably. Tier 4 is for characters like rogues, barbarians, and rangers, who can do one thing pretty well and only that thing, or can do a lot of things without ever really shining. Tier 5 is for characters like fighters, monks, and paladins, who can do only one thing (and not all that well), or can only ever achieve [[Master of None]] level. Tier 6 is for [[Joke Character|Joke Characters]], plus [[Tier-Induced Scrappy|the samurai.]] And then there's [[Broke the Rating Scale|Truenamer]], which is like Tier 7 in uselessness, and Planar Shepard, a [[Prestige Class]] that's referred to as being "Tier 0".

* In [[Tom Clancy]]'s H.A.W.X., if you end up in a cannons-only, Assistance On-only match, pick the F-22 Raptor. Telling, isn't it?

** Tiers do exist, but many planes toward the top are close enough that it's not that clear cut and while the F-22 is near the top it's hardly alone. This also ignores that "guns only" still rather illogically allows unguided rockets which can be a significant edge and a reason to chose another plane. Guns only actually gets rid of one of the F-22 edges which is that it's hard to lock due to stealth, but also has high maneuverability unlike most of the other stealth planes. Without missile the extra lock time is a non-factor and a number of other planes are just as or very nearly as maneuverable.

** In the ''NCAA Football'' series, for instance, there are over 115 teams, but only show-offs and super-fans pick outside the Top 10.

* The campaign modes in ''[[Europa Universalis]]'' and its sequel, being based on and seeking to emulate late medieval to modern European history, do not pretend to create balanced factions in any way: various nations are more economically and militarily well-off from the very beginning, and scripted historical events affect gameplay in such a way that make it more difficult even for successful nations to continue dominating if history says that they cannot, effectively altering tiers based on the length of the game. Skilled players can take advantage of game mechanics to turn the tiers on their heads, but non-Christian, non-Western European nations have a much harder time at it.

* ''[[World Wrestling Entertainment|WWE]] Raw Deal,'' a [[Professional Wrestling]] collectible card game, took almost no time to sort itself into character tiers from Stone Cold and Chyna nearly unbeatable in earlier sets, to Andre the Giant and Largest Athlete in Sports Entertainment, the Big Show alternate, in later sets. Interestingly, the devs insisted that the game was perfectly balanced and that players just weren't finding the other characters' "killer archetypes." Said archetypes, if they ever existed, still haven't been found yet ten years later.

* [[Hearts of Iron]] 2, what tier a country belongs to depends almost entirely on its size and industrial capacity. The strongest countries are, in order: Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, and France. It's possible to conquer a continent or more with some of the smaller countries (especially Brazil and Argentina, which are far away from the main super-powers), but almost any country on the European continent will either be conquered by Germany or allied with Germany. Same with Japan and Asia.

* [[Shining Force]] 1 and its subsequent games had this is spades. It made somewhat sense, since there's always going to be those who excel, and those who don't. The problem was that many characters always had decent stat gains, if you're ''lucky'' every five levels. The most notorious bad character that wasn't even a [[Joke Character]](but might as well have been) is poor Hanz.

** Even worse is the only person's response to this is; "Use better characters". Yep, that's right. Now imagine if everybody did that. The game would get pretty stale pretty fast, then. That's why they give you 29 different characters to choose from, so you can try something new.