YMMV / Disney Heroes: Battle Mode

• Broken Base: Are there now too many characters? Some don't mind there being so many characters in the game (especially since the characters span all eras of Disney rather than only the Revival Era or only characters from Cash Cow Franchises, plus you aren't necessarily required to level up all of them) and genuinely look forward to who will be added to the game next. Others find the large amount of characters to be a problem from a gameplay perspective since (especially if you're on an older server and/or a low-spending/free-to-play player) it makes divvying up resources between nearly/more than a hundred characters a hassle and invites a massive amount of Power Creep (especially for older characters since newer characters are often extremely powerful), something not helped by how there seems to be no end for the character additions in sight.
• The Chris Carter Effect: After a certain point, the main campaign's story devolves into a stock formula of "characters visit X world, characters fight creeps and find another clue pointing to Y world left by the Inventor, characters find character from Y world to take them there, repeat". The story gets so repetitive (especially since it's likely an endgame for the story will only come in the event that the game ceases development) that it becomes less intriguing and interesting and more like pointless window-dressing.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:^note No, not that Syndrome.
  • Expect whoever is considered to be the latest top-tier character(s) to fill out many a PvP team. Early on, Quorra, Olaf, and Sulley were considered a must for anyone's team, and Randall was an especially infamous case of this right after his debut in the game.
  • In Heist Mode, you get bonus Heist coins for every 50 clues toward finding the Hideout you make (up to ten times until the Hideout's location is pinpointed), so players will often try to fill out the clue bar as much as they can before the Heist's end to get these bonus coins, even if the Hideout has already been found.
  • Characters who specialize in dealing basic damage are a considered a must for Invasion, with most players including whoever is currently considered to be the strongest basic-damage character on the highlighted team in fights. Gizmoduck, Animal and Pleakley in particular are frequently recommended for Invasion.
• Crack Pairing: Some of the Friend Campaigns happen between characters you really wouldn't expect to get along, let alone interact (e.g. Clawhauser and Li Shang, or Milo Thatch and Winifred Sanderson).
• Crosses the Line Twice: The Bunsen and Beaker moveset involves Bunsen cloning Beaker and sending the clones at enemies, where they eventually explode. In other words, the moveset revolves around suicide bombing; and yet because they're Muppets who do this kind of Black Comedy slapstick all the time, it's ridiculous and funny instead of disturbing.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Blob enemies, which can tear apart even the most formidable teams in seconds by repeatedly bombing your squishy Damage, Support and Control heroes with their basic attack, which deals splash damage. Worse yet, they can completely ignore your Tank heroes, as their attacks always target your backline. You'd best pray your Yax or Violet can charge up their actives fast enough to save your team if you see two or more of these in the first round.
  • The Brutes, aptly named because they're immune to normal damage. They're common in the first several chapters of the main campaign and in friend campaigns, and can be particularly formidable if there are multiple Brutes in the front lines with healing Mages behind them. Better have a character or two with fantastic-type attack skills or have leveled them with enough power in order to defeat the Brutes in time.
    • They're doubly annoying in some of the Friendship Campaigns, which greatly limit your team selection to two friends and a select few others, and the extras can't all be used at once until the final episode. In some cases (looking at you, Merida/Elastigirl campaign), you'll have an episode where you only have one fantastic damage dealer, and no choice but to spend a ton of resources to strengthen them enough to survive.
    • Brutes and Skeletons, the latter being immune to fantastic damage, gain an extra level of annoyance in Heist; if you run into these, and you're unlucky enough to have no heroes in your pool of five that can deal the proper type of damage, you might as well just surrender and save yourself the time and pain, even though doing so will leave every hero you summoned for the fight knocked out for a couple of minutes.
  • Thieves can become a problem when they show up in Friend Campaigns, as they can stun heroes and have regenerating health. They're designed to be a decently-challenging boss in Heist Mode where multiple players can pool their strongest characters, but end up being overkill when you only have two or three heroes that are likely not among your best fighters.
  • As far as enemy characters in the various modes go, seeing Jack Sparrow, Mr. Incredible, or Bo Peep on the other side can spell trouble if you aren't adequately prepared for them. If you don't KO him fast enough, Jack will unleash his extremely powerful active skill move which will almost certainly KO at least one of your characters. Mr. Incredible will typically have an obscene amount of HP, starts attacking faster and gains a Life Drain when his HP gets low enough, and can throw your team into disarray if allowed to use his own active skill. Bo, like Jack, has an absurdly powerful active skill which, unlike Jack, is able to last as long as her skill meter has any juice in it and can continuously damage your team while doing so unless you can stop her.
  • Shank alone can spell the end of an Invasion Breaker Quest run. At higher levels, even with all of the wards defeated and every possible power-up, you'll be lucky if you're able to scratch her. Bagheera, Dante, and Eda Clawthorne also tend to get people stuck on high levels.
  • Calhoun at Purple or higher rank in PvE modes, especially the Team Trials. Her purple skill grants her extra basic damage for the remainder of a wave every time one of her teammates is KO'd, and because she is a backline character, she is usually one of the last characters to get KO'd, unless you use heroes that specifically target the backline. That means that the further into a wave you go with an enemy Calhoun surviving, the more basic damage she gains, and the more dangerous she becomes, especially in waves with a high number of enemies. The real kicker is that, because her active skill is dependent on basic damage rather than skill power, Calhoun can wipe out your entire team with a single supercharged laser blast if you allow her to use it.
  • If allowed to use his active skill, Beast can become nigh-indestructible due to it making him attack faster and unable to go below one HP. If not stalled out with movement-impairing debuffs or sapping, he will almost certainly have gained enough energy to use it again immediately by the time it expires, ensuring that you will lose the battle by him either single-handedly wiping out your team or timing out the battle just by chaining uses of his active skill.
  • Mulan has gained a lot of ire from players less for her design as a playable character overall but more for her Dynamic Entry Green Skill that strikes (and stuns) characters before they can even apply many start-of-battle effects (most notably start-of-battle stacks of Hardy, an effect that blocks one debuff) and sometimes even interrupts the effects of other characters' Dynamic Entry-based skills, while at the same time being one of the most damaging attacks in the entire game, making it very possible for Mulan to wipe out an unprepared player's entire party before the battle has even started (making characters who can block critical hits like Timon and Pumbaa an absolute necessity when facing her).
  • In Friend Campaigns, Darkwing Duck is notoriously difficult to deal with during the early stages. Not only can he dodge attacks by turning invisible (becoming untargetable in the process), his basic attacks come out very quickly and deal a lot of damage to the point of potentially stunlocking one of your characters to death, and he gets faster the longer he's on the field to the point where he'll eventually take the entire team down before they can react.
  • Ian is a pain in the neck for three-starring levels, since he is likely to one-shot at least one of the heroes before being defeated, even at significantly lower power. Basically the only way to get around it is to only use tanks and other highly defensive heroes and hope they do enough damage not to lose.
• Difficulty Spike: The Ports and Trials are not all that difficult at first, even if your characters' levels and skills aren't completely maxed out, until you get to the difficulty where the enemy characters can now use their Red Skills. Suddenly, the enemies become much less of a pushover and your characters' levels and skills matter a lot more.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Some who play the game or have interest in the game are only in for the character interactions as opposed to the decent or tedious gameplay.
• Fandom Rivalry: A mild one with fellow Disney mobile game Disney Sorcerer's Arena. Some Arena players criticize Heroes for having simpler, less involved gameplay and less obscure character picks than Arena (while also criticizing Heroes for its infamously frequent level cap increases), while some Heroes players criticize Arena for lacking the story, character interactions, and variety of game modes and characters found in Heroes.
• Fridge Horror: The KO animations of the Wreck-It Ralph characters. Sure it's no big deal in this game, however- if this game were part of the WIR canon...
• Harsher in Hindsight: Elastigirl shows extreme concern over her family being controlled by the virus. Incredibles 2 has Elastigirl herself in the same fate (in a different way).
• Les Yay: To the surprise of no one, Shego's friendship with Kim is OOZING with Kigo energy.
• Memetic Mutation: "A stronger Randall."^Explanation The default response that many players would give to other players asking how to beat Randall during the height of his notorious status as a High-Tier Scrappy.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Jack Sparrow in his debut wasn't necessarily a bad character; he is relatively good at attacking and has a special that hits all opponents multiple times. The problem was that he did not have the bulk to compensate for it, resulting in everyone's favorite pirate captain being a Glass Cannon, with an emphasis on the "glass" part, who would often be KO'd early on before he could even do anything. Luckily, patch 1.7.2 gave Jack a much needed buff to his stats along with good strategies that involve putting him on a team with fellow PotC character Barbossa, Rex, and Nick Wilde. While Jack's still not the best character in the game, he's at least not completely ineffectual and useless anymore; some even claim that he's now high-tier.
  • Donald Duck's standing in the meta used to be a bit unclear at his introduction. Some saw him as blatantly inferior to many of the characters he debuted around (not the least of which included infamous characters like Jafar and Randall) and that he was the most fragile character in the game since Zurg; being so squishy that it left him hardly any elbow room to use the few new things he could do (such as prevent debuffs from affecting his allies and instead turn them back against opponents or deal True damage with his Friendship Disk from Anger). Others claimed that Donald was not as absolutely ineffectual as he might have seemed; he still had a decent damage output, especially if you could keep him alive. ^note In fact, it's been noted that with enough HP mods, you could have him essentially function as a Tank hero instead of a Control one. A later update tweaked some of Donald's skills, however, and they ended up proving to the playerbase that Donald was useful after all, especially with enough HP boosts.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Fortify the Network contests are rather unpopular among competitive players. Because the scoring criteria are stamina and diamonds, they are heavily biased in favor of people who have the most real money to spend and they recur at a high rate, which prevents players from competing in more interesting contests based on strategies and/or character themes.
  • Messages about Arena and Coliseum merges and splits can be seen as just mailbox clutter that says the same things every time and requiring two separate presses to dismiss. At least in the lower ranks or with less active players, they show up very often if the player had recently selected either the Arena or Coliseum on the main screen. The Collect All button even failed when it was introduced if these messages are all a player had in the mailbox. Similarly, notifications about the Heist mode used to clutter the chat window.
  • The patch notes for the 1.6 update (Nov. 30, 2018) promised "occasional popups" for events. Turns out these "events" mostly involve in-app purchases, of all things. When these dialogs appear every few minutes on the main menu, it makes this game seem more like an Allegedly Free Game to non-paying players than it was at launch.
  • Should you choose to change servers, although allocated currencies, XP, VIP status, and the like will carry over with you to the new server, you will have to start from scratch from everything else, including Arena or Coliseum ranks, the main/elite campaign, and all of your heroes^* Although the last point is mitigated a little by the fact that all of your current hero chips carry over as well. Still have to spend all those coins leveling their skills back up, though., meaning you will have to work your way back up and spend your resources to level yourself and your heroes back up all over again. To make matters worse, occasionally servers will be merged together when they get too small, meaning that, if you're in one of the affected servers, there may be times you will be forced to start from scratch whether you like it or not.
  • One button-leveling (introduced in patch 1.14.2) is generally regarded to have made leveling up heroes far more of a hassle than it was before, due to debuting in a ridiculously broken manner that caused players to inadvertently add more levels than they intended to and waste tons of coins and diamonds they didn't want to use at the time in the process. Even after being brought to a more functional state, many players see the slider as trying to fix a problem that didn't exist in the first place, as few players truly saw anything wrong with the previous system (which additionally didn't run the risk of players adding more levels than they meant to due to mis-inputs or bugs.
  • The constant increases to the level and skill caps, occurring every four weeks like clockwork, are heavily criticized for forcing players to have to maintain their characters' levels and skills if they want to keep their teams viable without being left completely in the dust, which isn't helped by the cost for crafting badges and the amount of components required to craft them getting steeper the further you rank and level up. Every update that includes an increase to the cap will invariably be filled with players begging the developers to find a stopping point in the cap increases (or at the very least space the cap increases out much further) so they will not have to constantly be forced to spend precious resources in order for their teams to remain viable.
  • The Heist mode was introduced as a fun real-time multiplayer game, but several aspects of it cause many players to skip it entirely or only play on private mode. Competitive players don't like that, unlike Port and Trials, it hasn't had a difficulty upgrade since Shocking mode, making it trivially easy for anyone with red or yellow heroes. Even people who don't care about that and just want the resources tend to get annoyed with how long it takes to complete, especially on Medium mode (and higher before the introduction of accomplices). Then there are the people who join the Heist only to sit around and do nothing. The ability for the host to kick out others was added to help with this, but still doesn't help if the person doing this is the host, and its rollout led to another problem of occasional hosts kicking active people out for unexplained reasons, sometimes after they had helped them reach the narrowest white circle.
  • The City Watch mode came to be as unpopular as the Heist mode over time due to a broken team match-making system that would often generate teams that were either Nintendo Hard or outright impossible to beat even with a maxed-out team, even on the easiest difficulty, rendering some City Watch runs outright Unwinnable. Future patches would make strides to rebalance the team generation so most City Watch runs would still be beatable.
  • If you are running multiple friendship missions at once and end up missing a component for one or more of them if/when you go to start them over, the game will not let you restart any of the missions unless/until all components for all of the missions you are running are available. If you have no means to get the missing component at that moment, you will either have to spend gems or, more annoyingly, the game will cancel out of the restart mission dialog and you will have to manually restart all of your other friendship missions because of the one mission you couldn't restart. This would thankfully be much less of a problem after the Friendship system's overhaul in patch 2.3, due to badge bits no longer being required to run them.
  • The random drop boxes in fights. This can be especially frustrating if this is what the player is doing to gain hero chips without paying to receive them, as it turns turns every mission to try to unlock a character a Luck-Based Mission. If you're truly unlucky, you may get zero chips for the day in any of the areas that the certain character's chips are available and have to wait until the next to try again.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: The game's competitive scene has gotten significant enough to now include some of these. Most common are the players who look down upon others for leveling up characters who are not competitively viable in modes such as Arena and Coliseum. Despite many players regarding most if not all characters to have a niche where they can be useful, if a player talks about how they are working on leveling up a character who isn't currently considered to be a top-tier character or if they show off their roster and it includes early-run characters like Ralph or Yax at rank Red-0 or beyond, expect certain players to ream them out for wasting their resources on a competitively terrible character when they could have worked on someone like Randall or the Cheshire Cat.
• That One Boss:
  • Mr. Incredible, already enough of a headache in other PvE campaigns, becomes an outright migraine in many Friendship Campaigns due to his various speed, attack, and HP boosts that make taking him down an exercise in frustration, especially with certain character combinations^* (Bob alone plays a big factor into why the Joy/Olaf campaign is widely considered to be the most difficult Friendship Campaign in the game; Olaf can only deal large damage under specific circumstances and Joy can't even deal damage at all, which is bad news when it comes to a Damage-Sponge Boss like Mr. Incredible). It got even worse when he was buffed to gain the ability to heal himself via Life Drain, making it even harder for many characters (especially just two) to get past him.
  • After getting her moveset overhauled as part of a Hero Refresh, The Queen of Hearts went from being not too terribly difficult to deal with in Friendship Campaigns to a nuisance due to her reworked Blue Skill being all too capable of stun-locking the front-most character until either the clock runs out or she and any remaining enemies finish your character off if not all of the characters used in the campaign are powered up enough to KO her quickly. She can especially be a pest in the Friendship Campaigns involving Pooh due to her no selling the slowing effects of Pooh's honey and usually being paired off with a character capable of stuns and/or charms like Gaston who can stall out Pooh and his allies long enough for the Queen's Blue Skill to activate and stun-lock the poor bear to kingdom come.
  • Completing the trifecta of annoying Friendship Campaign bosses is Davy Jones, whose moveset makes it possible for your two characters to be constantly distracted by the Dead Man's Chest for half the fight (while Jones and other enemies continue to damage them) and be unable to inflict damage to Jones himself (who gains the hated Berserk status while the chest is on the field, and heals himself, steals energy, and turns invincible for several seconds if the chest isn't destroyed in time) for the other half. While he's less of a pain when you have more characters to deal with him, when you still only have two to work with, Jones ends up being a chore to fight against.
• That One Sidequest: Any Friendship Campaigns involving Miguel, Joy or Kermit are a lot harder to get started due to none of them dealing damage on their own. Consequently, whoever they're paired with has to do all of the heavy lifting to get through the first five levels where it's just the two of them. It eases up a bit in subsequent chapters where auxiliary heroes become available, but it's still an uphill struggle. Joy and Olaf's campaign, in particular, is widely considered to be one of the most frustrating friendship campaign of the game, as even with all of their stats maxed out and their best Friendship Disks they will still struggle to get past the first several stages due to Olaf only dealing immense amounts of damage under specific circumstances along with Joy's aforementioned inability to damage enemies on her own. It's especially frustrating as the disk you get from this campaign is generally regarded to be Joy's most useful one (due to it increasing the defense of all allies five times at the start of every battle when fully upgraded). So notably difficult was their Friendship campaign that when items meant to alleviate campaign difficulty were introduced in patch 2.4, they were demonstrated in the patch notes using Joy and Olaf's campaign.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While his moveset is still very true to his character, some players expressed disappointment that Carl's moveset did not involve him weaponizing his iconic floating house in some form or fashion.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Lilo's two friendship disks are with Russell and Angel, but, curiously, not her co-star and canonical best friend Stitch. Granted, the Angel campaign heavily involves Stitch anyway (it's centered around Angel and Stitch going on a date while Lilo makes sure they both stay out of trouble), but a number of players still found not making one of Lilo's friendships with Stitch himself in first place a puzzling creative decision regardless.
  • So you got Zeus and King Triton on the roster, who are both similar in that they're almighty fathers and Triton is technically Zeus's nephew and yet, they have no story campaign together.
  • Dante strangely has no Friendship Disk with Miguel (with them instead going to the rather odd choices of Baymax and Hercules) despite being Miguel's closest confidant and Spirit Guide both before and throughout Miguel's adventure all throughout their source material.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Character costumes. Despite being an interesting way to represent each character's history and having a unique collectable item (thread pieces) involved in unlocking them, the concept has been mostly abandoned since 2019 and Elsa, the one character to get a major design change since then, was merely updated to her Frozen II design with no means of actually using her original design.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Of all the Zootopia characters in the game besides Nick and Judy, Chief Bogo and Clawhauser are both major supporting characters and Finnick, while still very minor, is a huge fan-favorite and Nick's partner-in-crime. Yax on the other hand is a joke character from a joke scene, and even his one major contribution to the movie's plot is presented as a joke. He's also technically one of the most NSFW characters from a company notorious for making most of its products family-friendly, due to the fact that he's a straight-up nudist, though he does get some leeway because...y'know. What's more, while him getting in at all would still be a surprise, he was part of the launch roster, meaning he got in over all of the other, more popular characters that would be added in later on.
    • On that note, Mr. Big & Koslov were certainly an unexpected addition, considering Mr. Big a rather minor character in the movie, and Koslov didn't even have a name. And that's not even considering how unviable for combat they would seem to be.
  • While Hiro Hamada is in, he's not in his more marketable Big Hero 6 identity like Baymax is. Instead, he's in his civilian identity, and he uses his microbots to attack. While the microbots were his invention, they were stolen and further utilized by Yokai, the Big Bad of the movie. And while yes Disney Infinity also had him use the microbots to attack, he was in his Hero identity in that game, whereas again he's in his civilian identity here.
  • Both Simba and Nala were added into the game, in correlation to The Lion King (2019) alongside Rafiki and Timon & Pumbaa. However, rather than being singular entities, they both work together as a team that counts as one unit (In relation Timon & Pumbaa do this as well, but that's less surprising since they're commonly associated with each other, even though Simba and Nala are the main couple). What's more, it's their cub-selves that are getting in over their adult-selves, who would be more than combat-capable.
  • While most of the Animated Canon characters are from either recent releases or beloved classics, there are some more obscure picks in there like Robin Hood (1973), The Sword in the Stone, The Emperor's New Groove, The Great Mouse Detective, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Bolt. In partucular, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and The Black Cauldron; while Cult Classics, are notorious flops that almost never get referenced by Disney. On the live-action side, The Rocketeer and Hocus Pocus are similar cases of having a cult fandom but not being part of a huge franchise the same way that Pirates of the Caribbean and TRON are. (And while A Bug's Life is likewise a less-known part of Pixar's library, that's more understandable since there aren't many more Pixar films left to include!^note Of Pixar's feature film lineup, only the Cars franchise has yet to see any playable characters)
  • It's highly unlikely anyone expected any of The Muppets to be in the game, due to the playable roster having up to then stuck almost exclusively to characters from Disney Animated Canon or Pixar movies (with a few characters from live-action Disney movies sprinkled in). Even more surprising is that Kermit the Frog wasn't even among the initially available characters. (A Dev Q&A stated that Kermit was in development before being cut due to issues with his walking animation; but he eventually made it in among a second wave of Muppet additions over a year later.)
  • In the same vein as the Muppets, Darkwing stuck out for being the only TV character in the game for some time until the DuckTales heroes came along. More than that, both sets of characters are explicitly The Disney Afternoon versions when you'd expect the game to draw on the current ones from DuckTales (2017) instead. Additionally, another character from Darkwing Duck was later added in as well, and it was Megavolt, one of the show's villains. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers later got representation via Gadget, and, eventually, Chip n' Dale themselves, who were unexpectedly portrayed as their Rescue Rangers selves rather than their Classic Disney Shorts depictions.
  • Powerline from A Goofy Movie was one of the most surprising additions to the game yet, due to being a very minor character from said movie with little to show for in the way of characterization outside of being a popular musician.
  • Winnie the Pooh characters count as this by default. While it has had some action-y moments, the franchise as a whole is ultimately very peaceful with little conflict, and even Kingdom Hearts, another Disney Crossover that typical has characters join in the action, usually depicts events with Pooh Bear and friends as whimsical and less-serious.
  • Most Disney crossovers tend to leave the TV shows out of having major representation, at most only acknowledging shows connected to the extended Mickey & Friends universe. So to see characters from original-IP shows like Gargoyles, Kim Possible, and Phineas and Ferb added to the game is always a pleasant surprise.
  • The addition of American Dragon: Jake Long in 2023 was not on most people's radar, given that the show, while fondly remembered by those who watched it, was nowhere near as popular as the aforementioned Kim Possible or Phineas and Ferb, not to mention shows yet to receive playable characters such as Gravity Falls, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, or Amphibia.
  • Bowler Hat Guy was a completely out-of-left-field addition as Meet the Robinsons is usually not brought up much in Disney's marketing.
  • Though not yet included in the game, the "Feedback On Future Heroes" announcement surprised fans when it said that characters from Miraculous Ladybug and Inspector Gadget could possibly be included. While both franchises are at least partially associated with Disney, neither are fully owned by the company, so the very notion of either being included in the game seemed laughably impossible.
  • While the show did garner a massive cult following, it was still rather unexpected to see Eda from The Owl House being added to the roster less than a year after the show ended, especially considering that the show's final season was hit hard by Executive Meddling. For that matter, many would consider it an odd choice for Eda to be the series' first rep instead of series protagonist Luz (who DID get added in later) or a fan favorite like Amity.

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