Best Of

I see where you're coming from, and for anyone who hasn't been playing the game for a very long time, this is an extraordinary issue. The barrier to entry is high, and the barrier to even understanding half of what things do in this game is ridiculous (especially for this generation. cough cough)

The easiest way to get around this, imo, is by grouping and association. A lot of champions at this point in the game either do exactly what another does or have very similar abilities to others and can be grouped into categories and you can make educated assumptions on what an ability will do when you see it pop up, even if you don't know exactly what is the slight difference in a certain scenario.
Another big one in this category is with animations. Kabam reuses and recycles so many animations, timings, etc, and just puts a new coat of paint on them, probably beyond what a lot of players expect without actually looking for it. This is to the point where you can look at a champion's special attack and go "Oh yeah, that's just Korg's sp1," and then never have to worry about dexing it again. Or "That's just x's or y's heavy attack, spacing, animations" and not even worry about what the animation is actually doing

Recent example: Casandra Nova: That's just Jean Grey and Professor X but a little to the left. You can kinda get the gist of what's going on without worying too much about it and anything you miss you'll collect as information as you fight

I see where you're coming from, and for anyone who hasn't been playing the game for a very long time, this is an extraordinary issue. The barrier to entry is high, and the barrier to even understanding half of what things do in this game is ridiculous (especially for this generation. cough cough)

The easiest way to get around this, imo, is by grouping and association. A lot of champions at this point in the game either do exactly what another does or have very similar abilities to others and can be grouped into categories and you can make educated assumptions on what an ability will do when you see it pop up, even if you don't know exactly what is the slight difference in a certain scenario.
Another big one in this category is with animations. Kabam reuses and recycles so many animations, timings, etc, and just puts a new coat of paint on them, probably beyond what a lot of players expect without actually looking for it. This is to the point where you can look at a champion's special attack and go "Oh yeah, that's just Korg's sp1," and then never have to worry about dexing it again. Or "That's just x's or y's heavy attack, spacing, animations" and not even worry about what the animation is actually doing

1. Dunbar's Number is a sociology concept about the ideal maximum community size of approximately 150, with that being the limit to how many relationships one can maintain.

While not an obvious connection to that concept, I feel like I've reached my limit of champions I can hold in my head.

Looking at Solvarch/Cassandra's abilities, my eyes glaze over and I can't remember in detail what they do even an hour later. This has probably been the case for most of the 2025 champions. However, I can still tell you that off the top of my head that Vox's SP3 can neutralize Inhuman champions (even though I've never used it) or that Kamala can nullify buffs (despite never actually using her). I just think that I can't stuff any more champion knowledge into my brain.

2. Champions are getting more complicated, and the number of champions is constantly growing as well. For normal game modes, this doesn't really matter since you have time to plan and resources (potions) to retry. However, even for game modes like Arena, this starts becoming an issue.

For competitive game modes (AW, BGs) this means that most casuals won't be able to keep up purely from a champion quantity/quality perspective. While one could argue that a player only needs to commit 30-50 champions to memory each month (based on meta relevancy), it still is a mental ask that not all players will be inclined to continue. Setting aside complaints about matchmaking, I wonder if there will be a natural attrition rate just from there being too many champions.

I don't think this is an actual problem, its intrinsic to the game (2 champions added each month) and just the natural progression of the game (champions have to be different from pre-existing champions). But I just think it highlights that this game will have a shelf-life for old farts like myself.