The
Marvel Heroes Civil War event has been going for a few weeks now. I've taken the opportunity to play some characters that are new to me.
Twice during the event, free hero tokens have been given out. The first one I got was Ant Man, who I hadn't yet unlocked. My second was a duplicate. I decided also to unlock Vision using the in-game currency. I have plenty of that, since I log in almost every day for the daily rewards, even when I'm not playing the game regularly.
With the extra bonus XP given to characters from the movie, plus all the other bonuses to experience gain that I have on my account, it took very little time to level Ant-Man and Vision to 60. So little, in fact, that I did it twice on each. That puts them both at green prestige level.
I also had a whole bunch of reward boxes that I'd collected from daily rewards. So once each character was at 60, I opened a bunch of those for gear. Nice to get a set of unique items with basically no effort. It's not optimal gearing, of course, but plenty for most anything short of high-end raiding.
Ant-Man has two major themes in his power sets: size change and ants. He has quite a few shrinking skills, which mostly do melee damage, and his signature power is to grow to giant size and stomp. The ant powers damage and debuff enemies with swarms of ants. I wasn't too impressed with most of the ant powers, but the size change stuff is pretty neat. The signature power in particular looks awfully cool. From a functional perspective, there are powers that fit all the key requirements (vulnerability debuff, area damage, single target damage) that are spaced out nicely as you level. Ant-Man feels a little less powerful than several of my other characters, but a bit more work to optimize the build and gear would probably fix that.
Vision's power themes are density shifting and solar powers. His Density Shift power toggles between low-density for phasing and ultra-dense for solidity. The other density shifting powers change based on the Density Shift setting, either phasing through things or hitting them hard. The solar powers do energy damage by using up solar energy, which is used up fast but also regenerates quickly. He can also take control a mechanical enemy and use it as a pet, though I didn't use that ability much. I liked a mixture of density and solar powers, mostly doing area damage with the solar powers and single-target damage with the density powers. I wish his vulnerability power unlocked earlier than level 47, but that's not a problem once you get to level 60. Vision seems to be about average power level, not noticeably better or worse than other characters that I'm used to playing.
The Marvel Heroes team has done a pretty good job with both these characters in terms of theme and style. It's a bit difficult to do size-change and phasing correctly, since the player needs to accept some limitations: you can't have Ant-Man just stomping on the biggest bosses, or Vision phasing through every wall. They're pretty good at implementing super-powers by now, though, after practicing on the other 50-ish characters in the game. In both cases, I felt like the gameplay captured the character's themes nicely.
