Let’s talk about Thorne, Baby!
He sucks a lot, maybe!
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Lianna does reduce the attack of the target—dead foes don’t hit hard at all! 
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Looks like that. 
You are right. But I was thinking about those who survived after her first hit.
Don’t forget poor Quintus then!
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What about him? (20 characters)
He also hits without further special effects, he is slow and actually he is another hero that is rarely taken into serious consideration for investing tabards
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Oh! Yes, you are right. Even after upgrade Quintus is of a questionable value. But there is another thread about him. I’m a lucky owner of both Thorne and Quintus. 
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Quintus isn’t great, but he hits everybody at 270% of 747. That’s a lot of total HP taken. If your party is hovering near 50 to 60% of their HP in a raid when he goes off, it’s over. I think he gets a bad rap mostly because he is awful at 3/70. Gotta get him to 4/80 to respect him. Thorne? Still sucks at 4/80.
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Agreed. Slow AOE heroes are bad at the start but if you are unlucky to let them launch its usually a tide changer. But this is a different topic.
As for Thorne, I actually see him as a different version of Lianna but his attack stats has to be above 700 (his special would then really strike fear against his enemies). Then I would put a similarity of him as Gretel (Thorne) to Hansel (Lianna). Otherwise, for me he will never see the scopes.
I pulled Thorne too last month and he is my second 5*. He needs something other than damage , something like an attack debuff or def buff , but for a beginner he is ok. There are so many weaker heroes in this game , the question is do the devs even want this game to be balanced? Beceause it is part of the marketing strategy to release stronger ones so everyone is exited to buy more gems for pulls. Just compare Thorne to King Arthus , cmon give them some love.
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Not every hero can be as good as the next. Arthur is a special event hero, I would fully expect him to be better than the average hero that comes out of TC20. I’m just lobbying for Thorne to be made useful. To give me some reason to invest 6 scopes in him.
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What you are expecting has no value to the design of heroes nor balancing whatsoever. Why should any 5* be better than the other? If a hero is stronger then he has more stars , that is the only rule this game follows. There are some event heroes being weaker than the old ones so your statement is only partly correct. Balancing should mean bringing heroes of the same star level to equal strength otherwise it would be unhealthy to the game. Why are you even complaining about Thorne then? You mean a hero that is harder to get should be stronger than another? That is only your personal mindset as I said before some event heroes are even considered one of the worst , so where are we now? My opinion is that every 5* or 4* etc should be equal in strength no matter if they are harder to get.
Then no one would care about collecting 5*, which doesn’t make sense.
Small Giant want $$
People will throw their $$$$ just to get their favourite 5*
I didn’t mean that 4* should be equal to 5* just all 4* should be equal to each other…all 5* should be near same strength etc… I mean they are doing it with stats , why not with specials? Or they are trying but fail miserabely…who knows
If all the heroes of the same rank (number of stars) are equal, then there is no need for different characters, everybody would play with the same 5* (4*, 3*) hero. A diversity of heroes makes the game interesting and flexible. But the other side of a coin is that it is hard to balance heroes with such different abilities. It is a task to compare round with soft. 
And here in the thread we take our part in this exciting task.
Being equal doesn’t mean being the exact same. I have the impression that I’m speaking some alien language here. Everybody is using the same heroes anyway so what you are saying makes no sense and there would be more diversity if let’s say Thorne is equally useful than any other 5* just look into the leaderboards and you will see that everybody uses the same team how is this interesting or flexible???
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We have many heroes that do the same thing (we could use Tiburtus, Grimm and Gormek as an example)
- they are good heroes for the utility they bring.
- Then Wilbur has been added and his value far exceed their utilities.
- Sharing the same color with one of the cited heroes his niche have been replaced.
Now think if you have not only a Wilbur but even a BlueWilbur and a PurpleWilbur.
Then the heroes will start to become subpar due to the power creep.
In some cases (very rare cases) Gormek would be still better than Wilbur… but his “extinction level” sure went from Vulnerable to Endangered. Now, to return in topic…
Changing Thorne by making him viable and giving to players a reason to ascend him past 2.60 would make him change by Extinct to De-Extinct.
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I think one point everyone is missing here is that the game is not only developed for players that play for years, spend a lot of real money on it and that just try to reach their far end game formation as soon as possible. The vast majority of players are casual players that will buy maybe just a couple of VIP passes and stop playing after 3/4 months. If such a player gets Thorne as blue 5* hero and after a lot of struggle he finally collects 6 scopes, that player will be more than happy to ascend him. In return Thorne will help finishing rare quests, maybe a legendary event or win some raids and matches in a AW.
Another case in which Thorne is a good investment is for f2p players that get him very soon. If you don’t buy anything in the game you may get your second 5* blue after years, literally (I got my first yellow 5* when I could fully ascend 2.5 of them), so in this case having a 4-80 hero can help you progress faster and get more materials sooner, partly repaying what you spent on him, even if that hero is one of the worse 5* you could get.
I have him at 3-70 and playing him in combination with Grimm (they charge at the same time, so lowering defense with Grimm then attacking the same heroes with Thorne can be brutal) is more than viable to defeat or crack some 4000+ teams in AW. So in the economy of the game he has his spot, even if it is smaller than that of other peers.
Of course when you have advanced a lot in the game (or you plan to do soon spending a lot of money), you have a good set of 5* and a full bench for AW, you definitely don’t want to spend scopes on Thorne, nor warm capes, and all of the rest of the comments in this thread apply and make sense (even if I don’t agree that all heroes must be equally viable, but that’s another story and this post is already waaaay too long, so thanks all masochists for reading)
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I don’t really think anyone missed this point, it’s more we were caught up addressing some other issues…
Yes agree it’s like me having Quintus who isn’t the best but he will certainly help in any rare quests that require a purple stack. I’ll keep him at 3-70 though. Us FTPers cant be picky about our heroes as you say.
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I guess you are proposing a Starcraft style system, where Zerg, Terran and Protoss are all evenly balanced. I remember everyone singing the praises of that game because everything was beautifully balanced. Each of the three races had good and bad.
Zerg - fast mass production but easy to kill
Protoss - slow but quality
Terran - in between
The problem with E and P I guess is some 5* skills are simply better than others. Eg Resurrection is pretty imbalanced. It’s quite hard to balance things. No mana or mana reduction skills are useful but how does that compare with say Richards skill?
You’d probably need to assign a value to the usefulness of a certain super power and go from there, but that would probably require years of testing.
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