Worthless is a strong word.
In Raids, In Rare Quests & During Events:
With board luck on the poor end, you’ll definitely have a better chance of winning with 5* heroes simiply because of the fact that they’ll be harder to kill.
When hitting Titans:
When comparing heroes with similar special skills, you’ll do more damage with a teir four legendary hero since they usually have higher tile damage than teir four epic heroes. Multiplied by 5 heroes, or even just 4 heroes, the difference can be very very high.
You definitely can still get A+ and A titan scores with a full team of teir 4 epic heroes with strategic firing of special skills, good boards and just some 2* battle items if you’re fighting 5-to-8 star titans (maybe higher if you’re really good). Once your alliance gets higher than that or when you’re hitting certain rare titans, I bet it would be a lot harder to consistently do better than a B.
Raid/War Defense:
Epic hero teams are most definitely easier to beat than full maxed Legendary hero teams and most Legendary + Epic Hero teams— especially if a 5* tank is used in the latter.
However…
I do agree that trying to get a maxed legendary team or isnt as remotely as important for people in their first half a year (-ish) of playing as some people seem to think. And to some extent focusing on 5* instead of 4* heroes can be worthless if you want to advance in the game.
@SWEG already did a great job of explaining why working on 4* heroes are initially far more important than working on 5* heroes.
As SWEG stated you can finish 4* heroes far faster than you can finish a 5*. Around twice as fast.
— You can do much better with color stacking in attack teams, customizing titan teams, and even farming higher levels with two maxed 4* heroes of each color than with one 5* hero of each color. I’ve found this is especially true if your 4* heroes of the dont play play the same role (ex. Hit multiple enemies special skill, hit one enemy special skill, healing ss, buffing team ss, debuffing enemy ss, high survabilty stats vs high damage stats etc)
I’d also like to point out no matter how much you spend on summons trying to get 5* heroes, ascension material drop rate doesnt increase. So even if you bite the bullet and spend too early, you could get your new 5* hero stuck at 2/60 or 3/70 where as a 3/60 or 4/70 4* would of been more useful.
Even if you get lucky with Ascension materials, (or buy them), there’s still the problem of not having buildings upgraded high enough and not winning enough raid attacks to have a high enough food production, trainee(feeder) hero inflow, and recruit availability to level 5* heroes timely as possible because you’ll have major stalls in leveling.
So yes in that sense, 5* heroes can be worthless but I doubt this applies to anyone who’s been playing for closer to a full year.
To deviate from the thread topic a tiny bit
A new player joined the (invite only) alliance im in just a few days ago. Certainly, he was accepted because he just meets the minimum trophies and his defense team looks pretty good or atleast decent for the alliance —and it will only get better with leveling. It has two TC20 5* (neither are one of the amazing ones but meh, a 5* is a 5*) and three TC 4*. He also has 4* troops for all his heroes. I expected him to of been playing a lot longer than he said he has (a little over a month i think it was). Because he’s such a newbie player, he barley has any other heroes leveled up enough that he can use them. His titan scores are really low so far (probably because he cant color stack, can’t always omit the heroes of the weak color, and/or because his team dies before he can do significant damage) Also in our alliance, if you don’t opt out of war but don’t use all 6 war flags more than once you’ll get kicked— so he cant be an asset here either.
Just bringing this up to make the point not to bite off more than you can chew early on. Not only are 4* hereos important, 3* heroes are important early on aswell. 3* heroes can get maxed quickly and cheaply when compared to 4* heroes and all the needed materials are easily found in surplus in the provinces. I wish people would ignore the higher arenas, competitve alliances, missions and event loot in their first couple months and focus atleast a couple 3* heroes of each color. This is especially helpful during war. Even if you have 30 4* heroes at viable levels it may be desirable to actually bring a 3* to a couple battles since the ability to color stack may make it worth it.