To everyone: sorry for the wall of text (or AM I?)

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@Szude
Fine, I'll start over, calmly, and leave out the insults. I assumed (and, it seems, made an ### out of myself in doing so) that you had understood and kept coming back to a single point as if it were a trump. Since there's a serious lack of comprehension, here's an attempt to address it...and since you seem to think me incapable of making cogent points, consider both the extent to which I'm going to NOT insult you (considering how predisposed you believe me to do so) and that I am REPEATING not one but many points here which stand equally well on their own but especially well together. First: My repeated references to Colossals are based on your assertion that they are overpowered and therefore not a good metric, and my point is that the things that drive this assertion by you aren't unique to Colossals...so I don't even need to reference, say, Galactus to bring up the things that make Colossals so powerful and therefore affect balance considerations. The flip side of my continuation in bringing them up because you don't consider them for balance considerations because of said power, yet you returned to action efficiency AND damage potential of a single figure...but somehow I'm off in wacky-land for considering their existence and treating them as a balance consideration like every other figure in the game. That actually bears repeating: you stress action efficiency of one figure and then say the figures that must be considered in such an argument for multiple reasons are NOT worth considering. They're a part of the game, ignoring them is an argumentative flaw and attempting to dismiss them as clearly unbalanced is a WORSE one. That's it. That highly stressed sentence would be my ENTIRE point about Colossals, except you stressed the 500 point veteran dial. Name a non-Team-Dial figure that ISN'T Colossal in that point range. I'm serious. As I said before, arguing about action efficiency without considering that the figure itself costs more than any regular single base figure made, to the point of nearly double. There might be even more there, except that the other things they CAN do, but don't even consistently have anymore, are no longer unique to them and haven't been for some time. Multi-Attack, Power Cosmic, continuing to take actions with two tokens (or not), immunity to Incapacitate (or not), various forms of immunity to penetrating damage and support powers, extremely high combat values of all varieties; all of these, the constituent parts that are causing you to say they are overpowered to the point of not being a good benchmark, are still game-balance considerations ANYWAY.


For clarity: let's introduce a hypothetical. For this hypothetical, none of what I'm going to say below applies to team dials, and a truly obscene but still legal Colossal figure is the ONLY way to reliably beat them outside of a mirror match. It doesn't even have to be a Colossal: let's just say there's only one non-Team-Dial force configuration that could do it. IF this were true, or worse, if it were unbeatable except in a mirror match, then yes, Team Dials would be overpowered, because they would have changed the game to a stagnant point. Want to win? Here's your only way, and everyone else plays it to! A healthy play environment and balanced game require variety of strategies and options. Since all the things I'm going to say DO apply to Team Dials, the argument I'm making is that this is NOT the case.


In the same vein, my point about Icons Superman was to define overpowered and gamebreaking, which was clearly lost. I brought him up to analyze WHY he broke the game at the time, and the entire point of that was to stress that the ability to put out high damage is not itself game-breaking. That's not tangential, that's case study critical to understanding why repeating "but it CAN do XYZ damage!" is NOT a winning argument when discussing if a figure is overpowered. A single figure that eats up basically your entire force dealing only five damage every two turns, not penetrating damage, and only able to augment damage with objects when you've already crippled your opponent? Hardly sounds competitive. It was the figure's ability to do this damage without reliable counters and from a continued position of safety that broke the game. What it boils down to is that high attack, high printed damage, long range, movement power, movement speed, ignoring hindering, and defensive power were not what broke the game individually. Any ONE of these things could be annoying to face against when unprepared, but it was the COMBINATION that broke the game. I failed to be as clear before as I should have been on this, so I'm not counting this as a repeat.


This is the kind of understanding you need when arguing about ANY figure's POTENTIAL damage output. When talking about the any team, but especially the Titans, their maximum efficiency requires splitting off figures and losing powerful defensive benefits while putting some of their power at risk. When talking about VFH specifically, their damage potential punishes a team that relies on a true tentpole but is largely lost against diversified teams. In either case, ALL of this potential is lost by a simple Incapacitate (as I've said before), and there are multiple ways to do so that don't even require you to hit a Team Base's NOT so stellar defense values (as I've also said before)...all of which can be done to actually first-strike a Team Base, instead of relying on having them come to you. I really have to name-drop Mr. Freeze as an example of extreme long-range Incap here, Icicle as a no-attack Incap, and mention TK again for you to consider this an actual point? The Titans get a 19 at the extreme top dial of their 500 point version...otherwise, both the Titans and VFH fluctate at the realistic defense values of 16-18 and limited defensive powers at a time, each with its own rock-paper-scissors value and all Outwittable.


Consider also how much these figures cost and that Impervious is apparently going to be a rarity, not a norm, and how relatively scarce Invulnerability is on their dials. On top of that, they don't ignore any kind of penetrating damage (Titans specifically get to ignore PPB when all are attached to the dial, but no other form and in no other way). Another important consideration is how hard it is to actually defend a team base from other forms of attack. Stealth is not reliable because of their size (as if we somehow didn't already have figures that ignore it in various ways for targeting), and generally forces a different angle of ranged attacks and support powers...but does not prevent them.


An EXTREMELY important consideration is the no vehicles/resources clause, which gives many figures access to powerful abilities a Team Dial and its assigned members will never use. You know, the same sorts of power-cheese that are quite capable of spinning a Team Dial's collective heads and can provide enough mobility to force a Team Dial to waste attacks on terrain...hey, speaking of terrain, I should bring up Barrier (again). VFH can ignore terrain for attacks...while Cinder is attached AND her asset is showing, which is unreliable because of the random nature of the Asset dial and the forced spins caused by the symbol appearing on a third of VFH's asset dial. The Titans don't get this particular trick, and I'm guessing (though I could be wrong) that like Impervious and 19 or higher Defense it will be a rarity for team dials.


As others have pointed out, the actual cost-per-click on a Team Base is high, and STAYS expensive when your play a team at a higher value. ~25-30 points per click for VFH, slightly higher for the New Titans. As highlighted above, you get pretty lackluster defenses for something so pricey. Even their offensive ability is somewhat limited for such a figure: 12 appears twice naturally on VFH's dial (the last click, and top click of 500 value) and not at all on the Titans, and even that reliable eleven doesn't reliably appear. The tradeoff the Titans get for this is the ability to split off more members. Even further, the ability to ignore defensive powers comes from Outwit (and PC for rerolls, if applicable), NOT from repeated penetrating damage. Combined with the same-type action limitations, this prevents the most important aspect of an overpowered figure from coming to pass: safety from retaliation. Maximum escape potential would actually rely on having Running Shot, Phasing (not simply the ability to ignore terrain while moving, the actual Power-Action-required power) or Hypersonic showing on the dial or via asset, another extremely unreliable thing for the dials. Their swing is a one-way ticket into a firefight, their actual range isn't high enough to prevent retaliation, their actual defenses are realistic instead of nigh impossibly hard to get past, and they are prone to most of the issues such an expensive figure has unless it can act every turn (they can't), is immune to being locked down (they aren't), and keep its defenses against most comers (still nope)...oh right, and some of the cheesiest thing to come down the pipe actually CAN'T make a Team Dial cheesier.


Also worth mentioning (again) is that the same Perplex abuse you seem concerned about making them overpowered can be used against them even more effectively because for the same points a Perplexing team can get more uses of the power to take a team dial from Hero to Zero while still reliably reaching the figure. Finally, none of the strategies that would be considered counter strategies are actually unique to fighting a team dial: they're the same strategies that are already effective in ANY point level game, and if anything a team dial generally faces more issues against the stacking of such strategies than conventional teams.