While Power Creep has caused many starter heroes to be left in the dust at the lowest end of the spectrum as stronger and overall better characters are brought in, none have been as adversely affected as those listed below.
- Yax is near-universally considered to be the worst character in the game, mostly for being good for healing all allies at once and not much else. His attacking ability is mediocre at best, he absolutely cannot take a hit, and many other characters that you unlock later can do the things that Yax can do much, much better. All this makes for an utterly awful character who isn't good at anything and even his one niche cannot salvage him completely. Once you have a better support hero like Violet, Joy, Miguel, or Mickey Mouse, you'll likely have no need whatsoever to go back to using Yax.
- Felix seldom gets good results, either. Most of this is due to Power Creep, as many characters have been released that do what he can do a lot better, but as is, he is not all that durable for a Tank hero and can easily be damaged (and thus KO'd) faster than he can heal himself. While he can grant his allies a sizable Skill Power boost in a pinch, overall, Felix just Can't Catch Up in just about every other aspect. Updates eventually gave his stats and abilities significant boosts to bring him up to par with the later heroes - for instance, his active skill deals more damage and has a longer stun than it initially did — although he still finds himself outclassed by several other heroes.
- Power Creep has similarly not done Sulley and Boo any favors. While they were useful early on in the game's release, are great at inflicting the "Scare" status on enemies, and have a very useful Friendship Disc from Woody, as more Tank heroes have been released (including near-overpowered ones like Hercules and the aforementioned Ducky and Bunny), Sulley and Boo's flaws (such as subpar HP and most of their moves having a comparatively weaker damage output) soon overtook their advantages completely and they eventually came to be seen as an utter joke of a unit compared to even other lesser Tank heroes. Luckily, patch 1.12 made an effort to buff them to where they are once again just as useful as other Tank heroes, but it only improved them by a small margin, if at all.
- Genie is noticeably lacking in phenomenal cosmic power in this game. While not entirely without use (with sufficient upgrades, Genie can instantly give allies a ton of energy with his White Skill and stall an enemy with his green one), his main problems are that he is almost as squishy as Yax and, although he can heal three allies at once with his white skill, he has no way to heal himself, which makes for a very bad combination that will typically lead to Genie being KO'd in a jiffy. His ability to actually damage enemies is rather mediocre, as well, with only his Green Skill able to deal any direct damage to enemies outside of his basic attack. In short, just like Yax, Genie is another Master of None vastly outclassed by other support characters. That being said, Genie is an extremely common auxiliary character in Friendship Campaigns, so most players will tell you to give Genie enough resources so he can at least survive these, but as far as PvP goes, you're better off focusing on someone like Joy or Mickey. Genie was considered to be such a bad character that Patch 1.17 didn't so much as buff him as it did retool his moveset and skills completely in order to make him viable. While the buffs did finally give Genie something unique that he was actually good at (giving allies a speed boost if they are being healed over time while he is in the party, making him a great companion to the likes of Mickey Mouse and Timon and Pumbaa), it still didn't address his fatal flaw of having no way to heal himself, still making him a bit too situational in a lot of other circumstances to be 100% viable in comparison to someone like Kristoff (who debuted right before Genie's buffs and had already handily outclassed Genie in terms of his ability to support allies) or the aforementioned Joy and Mickey.
- Rex is yet another character ruined by Power Creep, and is now seen as another candidate for worst character in the game, let alone worst Tank class hero. Not only have other, far better characters essentially made him obsolete (with his only niche being dealing increased damage to shields), but as is, his ability to damage enemies has not been scaled to match that of more recent heroes and is thus absolutely pitiful compared to even other early characters. This was only highlighted more when other pre-Toy Story 4 characters like Woody and Jessie were buffed via Hero Refresh or being given their Red Skills. Eventually Rex did earn his Red Skill, turning him into a less ineffectual Critical Hit Class character, though it's still generally agreed that he needs an outright Hero Refresh in order to be truly useful again.
- Poor Basil had the misfortune of getting a short end of the stick right out of the gate for reasons that came down entirely onto his overall design as a character rather than his ability to stack up to the current meta. He is a character based around inflicting the "Study" status upon characters (i.e. making them more vulnerable to normal damage for a period of time), but whereas most characters with this capability inflict this status on all characters at once, Basil can only do this to a few characters at a time, making him much less useful than other Study-based characters. Most of his skills are rather poorly designed as well: his White Skill targets the enemy with the least HP and Studies them for three seconds. In theory it was likely meant to be sort of a finishing move, but in play it just feels like wasted move that could have easily racked up damage on the enemy with the most HP instead, on top of the absolutely pitiful length of the Study and being useless if the targeted character is immune to normal damage (i.e. Brutes) or invincible. His otherwise competent Blue Skill has a ridiculously long cooldown time (a whopping fifteen seconds when most characters' other skill cooldowns don't last any longer than ten), ensuring that it'll get used maybe twice per wave at best. The coupe de grace is his Purple skill, which grants him energy whenever an enemy is studied (including by himself) and ensures that he will be stuck using his White skill over and over again and be unable to use his other skills (especially his Blue skill). All of this is bad enough on its own, but the prevalence of Bunsen & Beaker a couple months later would doom him to bottom tier.note His Friendship Disks make him marginally better, but not enough for players to not regard Basil as a terribly designed character who is in desperate need of a design overhaul. Soon enough, Basil did get a Hero Refresh...which not only did nothing to fix his poorly designed skills but made it easier for him to gain energy (and thus exacerbating what was already generally agreed to be his biggest flaw). It was at this point that the Great Mouse Detective crossed over into full-on Memetic Loser territory in the eyes of the playerbase.
