Character Tiers: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|Po Yi sat down to play Talisman with his generals. He said: ''At this moment, each of us has an equal chance of winning. When we choose our character cards, then we will no longer have equal chances.''|[http://www.chimeramag.com/features/tenpoints.html General Tso: The Ten Points]}}

Sometimes the tiers get shaken up due to [[Metagame]] shifts, and characters that were once below-average can become more useful. However, the chances of this phenomenon occurring diminish if no new content is added to the game.

 

 

 

{{examples}}

== Fighting Games ==

* ''Capcom vs. SNK'' actually codified its tiers in-game, and based the number of characters one could select for their team on what tier each character was; this didn't go over very well with gamers, and was dropped for the sequel. (In the sequel, the player splits 4 "Ratio" amongst up to three characters, giving the player some input as to the character's tier.)

** The Tenkaichi and Raging Blast series are notorious for their tiers (which is somewhat expected with over 100 characters).

** 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.

** The ''Smash'' community maintains a tier list decided upon by top level players on Smash Boards. There's a sticky thread where you can read the current lists, and it undergoes yearly revision to compensate for changes in the metagame. One example was when Armada ''blazed'' to the #2 spot in [[Tournament Play|Genesis I]] with Peach, at the time agreed to be aggressively middle-tier.

* ''[[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

* David Sirlin (who did balancing for [[Street Fighter]] and [[Puzzle Fighter]] HD Remix) accepts that perfect balance is impossible, as characters with differing abilities will always have advantages and disadvantages over each other, but believes that the God Tier and Garbage Tier should be empty, and that no specific character-versus-character matchup should give more than a 6-4 advantage (meaning that if equally-skilled players play ten matches, the character with the advantage should at most win six and lose four). His own games (Kongai, and especially the tabletop games Puzzle Strike, Flash Duel and Yomi) go through ''years'' of playtesting and tweaking in search of this.

** And, despite those years of testing, still fail, with Puzzle Strike being a particularly bad offender pre-errata thanks to one character being clearly better than all the rest thanks to their ability to take an extra turn AND get rid of a character chip at the same time, extremely early in the game, leading to a game-long advantage.

* [[Guilty Gear]] XX had a very unusual tier setup -- partially because the game is so well-balanced that tiers rarely affect a match significantly, but unusual in that the top tier consisted of only ONE character -- Eddie. Mainly because of his ability to destroy you on wake-up due to unblockables. Eddie was crippled somewhat in ''Slash'', but he recovered in ''Accent Core'' (with a triple unblockable sequence) and now shares his spot with Testament. The catch? All of the characters have a ''steep'' learning curve, and it can take several months (or even ''years'') of practice to use them effectively in [[Tournament Play]].

* ''[[Blaz Blue]]'' has 3 characters in the Top Tier spot: Rachel, Nu, and Arakune. In that order. Rachel is extremely good, but VERY hard to use effectively unless you know how to control her wind. Nu has magical flying swords which enable ridiculously long and damaging combos, but she has very low health and defense. Arakune has '''[[Bee-Bee Gun|BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES]]'''.

** 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.

** Mario Kart 7 basically mirrors what Mario Kart Wii did. Not only are people only using Metal Mario for his extra top speed, but kart parts used online and in time trials seem to be only the B Dasher and Mushroom Wheels (or Gold Tires), because this combo gives the best top speed possible without sacrificing too much in acceleration or steering.

 

 

== Competitive Pokémon Battling ==

** First off is the Uber tier. This tier can be seen as a ban list, as Pokemon in it are only in there so that the rest of the metagame doesn't suffer. Pokemon in it are either too powerful (Mewtwo), too versatile (Mew), or too broken (Wobbuffet). Pokemon in this tier can not be used in any competitive battle unless the rules specifically allow it, or the players agree to use them. This tier is a metagame in itself, since the overpowered nature of all the Pokémon used creates balance.

** The second "real" tier is the [[Needs More Love|Under Used]] (UU) tier. This tier is composed of Pokemon that are occasionally used. The Pokemon in this tier usually have a problem or two that prevents them from being used easily, or have Pokemon in the upper tiers that fulfill the same purpose, but do it better <ref> Though it is not unheard of for a UU Pokemon, such as Quagsire, to find a niche in Ubers, as different metagames call for different capabilities.</ref>. In UU tier battles, only Pokemon from the UU tier and below are allowed.

** In between OU and UU is the Borderline (BL) tier, composed of Pokemon that are too strong for UU but not actually used enough to be OU. BL, like Ubers, is a ban tier (but for UU instead of OU). Since OU tier is based on actual use and ''not'' on actual stats, it also frequently chnges. BL battles are not common, but most Pokemon in the tier are good enough to see use on OU teams.

== Role Playing Games ==

* A big thing in the ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' fandom, where the participants don't stop simply at unit performance. They also take into account joining time, joining requirements, joining level, starting stats, stat growths, weapon options, support options, elemental affinity, promotion requirements, and other, additional abilities in their quest to accurately rank the characters. Due to [[Cap|the way]] [[Random Number God|the system works]] in ''[[Fire Emblem]]'', the vast majority of characters are at least usable if you really want to play them, and so the tier lists are mostly arranged by merit of which characters are most helpful for Ranked or low-turn playthroughs. The ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' community's mantra in these debates is "personal experience means nothing"; just because a character worked out for you does not make that character good; you may have simply gotten lucky with the [[Random Number God|Random Number Goddess]]. The community judges a character's stats based on averages for their level progression.

** The game actually gets slammed by those who play only the early sections of the game for this, as many of the early characters are outright useless except as decoys. One very early character, a [[Farm Boy]] cleric, even outright says he has no skills at all (his only attack is very slow and unwieldy), but he's still better than some characters, which have no attacks at all, and their only support ability is to remove [[Standard Status Effects|status ailments]]. The win-the-fight-single-handedly good characters, however, are almost invariably the [[Authority Equals Asskicking|leaders of certain sub-factions]], and require you to collect every one of their subordinates before they can be added into your group. This means you have to do things like drag that annoying, useless brat mage around until he gains 10 levels to recruit his father just so you can recruit that father's boss. Oh, and if we're speaking power levels, the humans have much better character choices than the non-human faction does.

* After the arena system was introduced in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', players and developers alike have been compiling statistics about which character classes are over- or underrepresented in high-rated teams. Naturally, these statistics are then (ab)used regularly in flamewars about [[PVP-Balanced|class balance]].

** The devs seem to be aware of this practice, at least as far as [[Purposefully Overpowered]] final bosses go: Caulder/Stolos can't be selected for wifi matches in ''Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict''.

* ''[http://www.urban-rivals.com/ Urban Rivals]'' (which sometimes advertises on the sidebar to your left) has their marketing strategy built around this. Each virtual card represents a character that appears in comic book features, has a backstory, a set of stats and abilities, and their description pages contain reviews on the cards appearance, strategic applications, and effectiveness. Many forum threads are about which cards or dream teams a given player advocates. The auction market for these cards can be manipulated into high fluctuation based on current popularity, collector status, or how much cleavage or implied nudity is on the card.

** 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.

** And Goro and Xiao just get ridiculously outclassed due to their slow attack speeds rendering them vulnerable to attack and their weapons can be hideously inaccurate. Goro especially, since he can only attack enemies in front of him and even then, he can still miss because a lot of enemies don't hold still.

* [[Final Fantasy VI]] is a complicated case, best illustrated through example. Cyan is normally low-tier, since his most powerful attack takes an inconveniently long time to charge. Teach him the (quite hard-to-learn) Quick spell, and the charge time will cease to be relevant, but Quick is tied for highest MP cost, so he'll primarily be a boss-killer. Give him an Economizer (an artifact that [[Randomly Drops]] from one of the most dangerous monsters in the game), and he'll be able to cast Quick for 1 MP, allowing him to reliably do 16k damage per turn in a game where the normal cap is 9999. Or you could ignore all that, and just abuse an exploit that allows him to attack endlessly until every foe onscreen is dead. Depending on how many exploits you're willing to use, and how much time you're willing to put in, this could make him low-tier, high-tier, or god-tier--and every character except [[The Berserker|Umaro]] and ''maybe'' [[Master of None|Gogo]] has at least one trick or exploit like this.

* The ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' games, in which both mecha and individual pilots are ranked.

** The Mazingers in Alpha Gaiden is a unique case.

*** First, Mazinger Z, a decent unit in and of itself. It's extremely cheap in term of energy consumption, doesn't need morale (in contrast to other super robots), accompanied by relatively strong weapon with good range coverage that gets a slight power up later in the game, and Mazinpower to increase attack power by 20%. It's fairly sturdy to boot.

** You've also got Ideon up there on the God tier or beyond, at least in Alpha 3 where you don't have to worry about that pesky universe ending IDE gauge. Banpreios in Alpha 3 also is God tier. On the low ends, you have mook Gundam pilots and most supporting characters like Katz, Fa, Musashi in Getter 1, any MS that isn't piloted by Char or Amuro that's not a Gundam, and any Astevailis that isn't piloted by Akito or Gai. The Valzacard in W is God tier as well.

*** The resident [[Joke Character]] Boss and Boss Borot is an anomally in the tier list. In older SRW, boss is Mid tier at best, having decent Seishin set, and Boss is one of the better Ressuply unit. Its extremely cheap repair cost lets you to use it for suicide bombing purpose just in case. However, some newer SRW gave Boss his subpilots, having awesome Seishin but get hit by [[Magikarp Power]] to fully achieve its biggest potential. Then come J, L and W. in J, and W its a [[Swiss Army Knife]] able to repair, ressuply, and have strong and economic weapon and its really cheap to upgrade. In L, boss has an awesome Squad bonus, and a lot of its attack deals massive damage AND lower morale. Both game also has 3 Pilot Seishin for Boss. In these SRW, Boss is a contender for Top tier.

** There really are no truly best or worst characters when playing a full 5v5 game. Under other conditions this may not be true. 1v1 matchups favor dps characters, early-game harassers, and single-target stuns. Only-middle-lane games favor [[Area of Effect]] spells and pushers. Even "pubstomper" characters aren't necessarily overpowered in pub games - if the opposing team is poor, those character can most quickly become unstoppable, but if its own team is poor then those characters can also most quickly become useless.

* ''[[Disgaea]]'' has some degree of tiers; other then the in-game tiers (unlocked by levelling up their "lower tier" units), some classes have definite advantages over other; until you realise that [[Game Breaker|Divine Majins]] beat ''everything'' except ''maybe'' Flonne in a ''single'' stat. They are very time-consuming, though.

* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]''

** 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.

** Tiers themselves are based on "As Written" comparisons based on how effectively the class can deal with different situations. The original author pointed out that optimized fighters can still be a low tier but capable of taking down the [[Physical God|Tarrasque]] in a single turn. In the hands of the right munchkin many classes can be equal to higher tiers<ref>except for the Complete Warrior Samurai</ref>. The Truenamer breaks the tier system by dint of its mechanics not being properly thought out, getting worse by every level, until level 19 when it will just spam Gate Celestial Angels.

** The 4th edition of D&D sought to remove this by making all the classes follow the same progression, so ''everyone'' is [[Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards|linear]]. Predictably, this nevertheless didn't result in a uniform power level, and discussions about which classes are higher-tier than which others are common. For example, "iconic" classes like the fighter and wizard have ''many'' more spells, feats, and abilities printed than "what on earth is that" classes like the Battlemind or the Seeker..

** D&D Minis had informal tiers based on the perceived usefulness of a particular miniature. Unlike the RPG, spellcasters were rarely in the top tier due to [[Squishy Wizard]] Syndrome, among other things. Also, very few of the most powerful monsters from the RPG were top tier as minis, due to poor playtesting by the Devs.

* While it is generally agreed that tabletop wargames ''[[Warhammer]]'' and ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'' have army tiers, getting anyone to agree which armies are in which tier is nearly impossible. Except for the Daemons of Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy - everybody agrees that they're God Tier. This isn't at all assisted by the fact that the more popular armies get updated much more often than the less popular ones.

** You can still bitch about Necrons, though. It is a fact universally acknowledged that Necrons suck.

** Generally speaking, armies are all about the same power level, it's the ease with which you can use the army that really divides the board.

** This is complicated by Wizards releasing cards that [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=88817 seem useless], only to either 1) release another card later that makes it useful, 2) have a player suddenly realize how it was meant to be used in the first place, or 3) to have a player use it in a way that they didn't intend but that [[Game Breaker|completely breaks the game]]; the last tends to be the largest problem. Ironically, One With Nothing itself was meant to be a completely useless card, but due to a deck that wizards never even thought was viable, let alone good, coming to exist - a deck that won by forcing its opponent to fill up their hand with cards all the time - One With Nothing briefly became a tournament staple, though the popularity of the deck in question (Owling Mine) declined dramatically after everyone started playing aggressive decks that simply didn't care because they were throwing lightning bolts at people's heads, and drawing more cards just meant more lightning bolts and Kird Apes.

** In ''Mirrodin's'' case, it was a whole mechanic that worked mostly as intended, but was more dominant than expected. Cards costing one-fourth what they should proved slightly too strong. The same thing happened in the Urza block. Due to the way the mechanic counted the resources spent, what was supposed to give back the resources (and ''maybe'' a bit more) winded up returning a lot more. In both cases, the ability to play your whole hand in a turn or two ''and'' do it sooner than you should be able to was [[Game Breaker|a bit too much]] for the metagame.

** The same debate goes on regarding different decks - generally there's the "best deck", several other top-tier decks, and a large number of second-tier decks. Then there are the "rogue" decks that aren't popular enough to have an obvious tier, and the decks that are pure [[Metagame]] choices. Being able to select the right decks is considered as much of a skill as playing well.

** One way to fix this advantage in chess and other games where turn order can be an unfair advantage given identical starting circumstances is with the "pie rule" - where one player makes the first move with white. The other player then has the option of either playing as black or switching to white for the game.

** The existence of the first-move advantage for white is heavily debated.

*** Note: in the third game, the scripted events disappear, monarchs are no longer pre-determined (which means that you are no longer certain if you start in the 1600's as France that Louis XIV is going to live as long as he did - and it brings up the possibility that he might be succeeded by a douché with a weak claim due to sudden heir deaths and after the succession, crisis after crisis) and non-European powers can "Westernize" and thus increase their tech rate - reducing the gap to the Europeans.

* ''[[Eve Online]]'' goes through this with every major patch. Each of the four races has had a turn at being the Flavor of the Month depending on who boasts the current [[Scrappy Mechanic]]; maybe it's the Caldari with ECM jammers being overpowered, Minmatar dominating because of unbalanced speed tanking, Gallente hurting because their close range ships suffered from the super-speed nerf or players calling for a boost to the Amarr all around. Fortunately, the EVE devs generally listen to the community....even if they swing the [[Nerf|Nerf Bat]] a little to hard at times.

* The [[Gundam vs. Series]] has its tiers built into the game; the Universal Century and Cosmic Era games use a five-star system (with half-stars), typically following technical progress (which means in the ''[[Gundam Seed Destiny]]''-based game, most of the returning ''SEED'' machines are downgraded). In ''Gundam Vs. Gundam'' the system is simplified to three levels (3000 for hero machines, 2000 for middle-of-the-roaders, and 1000 for [[Mooks]]); ''Gundam Extreme Vs.'' adds a 2500 tier consisting mostly of [[The Rival|Rival]] and [[The Lancer|Lancer]] machines.

* ''[[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.

** 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.

** Another notorious example is in Shining Soul 1, where the Dragonute is the only character with no redeeming qualities. Yes, he gets a breathe weapon counter, but... that's it. He's slow, has bad range, hits as much as nearly everyone else(as in rarely), and gets very few useful abilities save that particular one. In fact, the list in order would best be considering(from High to Low) Mage, Archer, Warrior, Dragonute.

* In the original ''[[Mass Effect]]'', Adepts were basically the top class - their powers kept enemies under permanent lockdown to the point where they could never fight back. Even the final boss was not immune. This made the hardest difficulty in the game (Insanity) pretty easy. Sentinels were considered the absolute worst class in the game, due to being a [[Spoony Bard]] class that was basically the [[Master of None]], having the worst weapon skills and weaker biotic and tech skills than any class bar the Soldier (who had no biotic or tech skills) without anything to really make up for it. In an attempt to tone down Adepts in the sequel, the game was changed so that biotic powers no longer work on shielded enemies. Pretty much every single enemy in Insanity difficulty is shielded, dropping Adepts from the best class to the worst. Sentinels also got a huge boost when they were given the same weapon skills as Engineers or Adepts (still technically the worst, but this could be remedied in a later mission that let them upgrade their weapon selection to include assault rifles) and the Tech Armor power, which made them the most durable class. They also got abilities to deal with pretty much every protection (Overload was especially useful considering how common shields were).

** NPCs in ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'' are ranked based on their powers. Miranda's powers are always useful, and she gives a damage bonus to the entire squad, making her the best overall. Mordin is feast or famine - against organics (even armored) he is insanely powerful, but against Synthetics he's pretty much useless.