Marvel Heroes 2.0

The Marvel Heroes folks sent me an email a while back announcing the launch of their "Biggest Update Ever." It had been several months since I played the game, so this seemed like a good time to see what had changed.

It turns out that what changed is darn near everything about how you build out each character. The action-RPG gameplay is more or less the same, and you still have pretty much the same story content and challenge modes. The level of difficulty has been reset in that content, though, so that higher difficulty modes are more of a challenge than they used to be.

Under the old system, a large part of character planning involved trying to get as many levels as possible in your key powers. The new system eliminates power levels entirely, and adds the concept of talents that can change how powers work depending on which talents you select. If that sounds familiar, that's probably because it's pretty much the same change we saw from Diablo II to Diablo III. In general I like it, especially since it means you see all of a character's powers (except the ultimate) by level 30.

The change to eliminate power levels had a big impact on items as well, since adding power levels was a big part of gearing character in the old system. Almost every item got a revamp, and for the most part you can do pretty well just by getting the unique items specific to your character plus a few artifacts. When I logged in some of my old characters, I was mostly able to jump right in without worrying too much about changing out their old gear, even though the stats on that gear had changed. I'm sure there's new ways to min-max stats, but the old stuff is mostly still usable.

Another major change is the simplification of the end-game character improvement system. The old OMEGA point system was extremely complex, so a key feature of the new Infinity system is simplicity. There are only 6 groups of 5 options for Infinity point placement, much fewer than the number of OMEGA nodes. I found it to be fairly easy to understand, and it certainly seems to have plenty of room to grow in the future if the developers decide to go that route.

I was less enthusiastic about the ramping up of difficulty. The "green" lowest level is still pretty much the same, but "red" and "cosmic" levels seem significantly harder than I remember. I suspect that the designers realized that power creep was becoming a problem - high-end characters with the best gear were just too powerful - so decided on an across-the-board difficulty increase during this major update. I'd rather that they'd paid more attention to the power creep to begin with. Still, at least this addresses the situation to some extent, and hopefully they've learned a lesson and won't make the same mistake going forward.

After spending a few days going back to some of my old characters, I felt fairly comfortable with the changes. It's a credit to the design and development teams that they were able to make these big changes in such a way that it was pretty easy for players to make the transition.

Marvel Heroes: Ant Man and Vision

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.

Marvel Heroes' Civil War Event

Marvel Heroes has promotions and events of various kinds running almost constantly. So it's no surprise that they did not miss the chance to put something together specially for the release of Captain America: Civil War.

There was no time wasted by the marketing department: I got an email even before the event actually started. Presumably the idea was to catch the eye of fans who were going to the midnight showing of the movie, since it came in at 11:15 PM. Here's the event details, as listed on the game's website.

This promotion should appeal especially to new players, since it includes a free unlock of either Captain America or Iron Man. It's still useful for existing players who already have both, too, since you get a hero token to improve their Ultimate power. I picked Iron Man. There's also new costumes for many of the characters in the movie, for purchase in the store.

The event itself has two parts. This week, a short new zone where you can chase down the villain Crossbones (similar to the movie's opening action scene) has been introduced. Crossbones also shows up in the various patrol zones. Next week, there will be events to gain influence with either the Iron Man or Captain America side of the civil war. Through the whole thing, characters that appeared in the movie will get bonus experience.

I went through the new zone a couple of times, first with a level 60 character and then a level 40. At level 60, it was very easy, so I'm glad there's also a cosmic version of the zone to provide a bit more challenge. At level 40 there was a bit more difficulty, but still not too bad. All but the least experienced players should have no trouble, and it won't take even brand-new players very long to get to the point where they can make it through.

Clearly the idea with this promotion is to attract new players, with all the movie-related giveaways and content. A free hero unlock is always good for new players, and the bonus experience is nice to give them a quick start. I think the developers did a good job with the new zone as well, making the movie-related content easy to access for new players attracted by the movie tie-in.

I haven't been playing Marvel Heroes on a regular basis for a while, but I still log in occasionally and I'm glad to see the game continuing to grow. Hopefully some of the excitement from the movie will transfer over to some new players in the game.

Marvel Heroes: Theme Building

Like most ARPGs, character builds in Marvel Heroes come down to laying waste to as many enemies as possible, as quickly as possible. With so many different characters to play, though, I find that it gets boring trying to maximize damage output for each one. Building a few characters according to a theme is an entertaining alternative.

This post doesn't have anything to do with Storm. I just like the picture.

Pretty much every playable character has two or three choices for how to focus their build. Take Psylocke, for instance. She can be played with ranged psionics, a melee mix of physical (sword) and psionic damage, or all-psionic melee damage. If you're looking for maximum damage, the hybrid melee build is probably going to win out. My Psylocke is currently an all-ranged psionic build, though, focused on the telekinetic theme rather than the up-close-and-personal assassin aspect of the character.

Colossus is another character that I like playing with a theme build. Most people play him as a tough melee character, doing damage largely with his fists. He has a set of powers that focus on his friends, though. He can do the "Fastball Special" Wolverine throw that is a staple of X-Men comics, and Wolverine will stick around to fight for a while. Colossus can also summon his sister Illyana (aka Magik) to fight alongside him. With the right gear and build, Colossus can have both helpers out and fighting all the time, turning him into more of a three-person team than a single character. It's not the most optimal damage-dealing setup, but I think he's more fun to play that way.

The most customizable Marvel Heroes character, by far, is Rogue. She has a set of powers of her own, but nearly two thirds of her power choices are borrowed/stolen from other characters. There are dozens of possible choices; honestly, it can be a little overwhelming to decide what to focus on. Rather than focus on pure damage output, I created my Rogue builds around themes. My first build was focused on fire powers and gear. After a while I decided I wanted to try another option, so I created a build using all X-Men powers and gear. (A few X-Men enemies in there, too.)

I find that playing Marvel Heroes can get repetitive if all I do is focus on "optimal" character builds. (True of just about any ARPG.) Playing around with theme builds as an alternative helps me to see the game from a fresh perspective.

Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes is a massively multi-player online (MMO) action role-playing game (ARPG). Short translation: it's an MMORPG where the vast majority of what you do is combat. There is a story-line, but it's fairly shallow and not character-specific. The main attraction of the game (for me, at least) is that you can play as many different characters from the Marvel universe.

The game was first released back in 2013, and to be honest, it was pretty terrible. Lots of bugs, poorly designed characters, limited gameplay choices. I tried it briefly and gave up quickly. But to their credit, the developers have done an amazing job improving the game since then. In late 2014 the game was re-branded as Marvel Heroes 2015, and when I tried it again, it felt like a completely different experience. In January it was re-branded again as Marvel Heroes 2016 with a new round of improvements and expansion.

Unlike almost every other ARPG that I've ever played, characters in Marvel Heroes aren't based on a race or class. Instead, each of your playable characters is a personality from the Marvel universe (i.e. Iron Man, Spider Man, Captain America). There's a ton to choose from - 53 at the time of this post. You choose one when you first pick up the game, and can unlock others through various means: purchase, picking up in-game currency, occasional giveaways and rewards. You choose gear and decide which abilities to focus on for each character, so they're not always the same: your Jean Gray might be focused on her psionic abilities, while my Jean Gray uses her Phoenix powers. Both thematic for the character, but the player chooses how to customize their version.

Marvel Heroes uses a top-down isometic view, so you're always looking down at your character moving around the world. That's important, because there's always a ton of things going on as you fight your way through hordes of villains. A first-person viewpoint wouldn't have much of a chance of keeping up. Most combat is an explosion of lots of different superpower effects, to the point where it's difficult to see what all is going on. The interface provides some help, like pointing out where a boss is among all the chaos, but it can still be a challenge to keep track of everything that's going on. And that's part of the fun...the "action" part of ARPG is certainly front and center most of the time.

My experience with Marvel Heroes has gone through three major phases: discovery, expansion, and end-game. They overlap somewhat, but I think every player is likely to follow more or less the same path.

When a player first starts Marvel Heroes, everything is new, thus the Discovery phase. You've got just one character to play, and you take them through the story chapters. The story is pretty simple and feels very much like a comic book, especially since it is told largely through "motion comics" - basically slideshows using comic-book style art with voiceovers. You get to see all kinds of locations familiar to Marvel universe fans, from Hell's Kitchen to the Savage Land to Odinheim. You'll also be introduced to the concept of patrol zones (open areas with tons of enemies to beat on and periodic villain invasions) and terminals (repeatable areas with one major boss and his minions).

As you make your way through the story and have seen most of the various content areas, the experience becomes about Expansion. The most obvious form is unlocking new characters to play, which can be done quickly with purchases from the store or more slowly through collecting gameplay items. I've spent very little on character unlocks, myself, but I know people who have bought quite a few. My purchases have mostly been unlocking new storage space, and once a costume (90s X-Men Storm...my favorite character from that old cartoon). You can also improve your access to various items and abilities by leveling up the crafter and enchanter NPCs, obtaining influence with the Genosha Liberation Front, and collecting items for the various weekly event vendors. Then there are Team-Up characters, who are unlockable like playable characters. You can choose one Team-Up for each of your playable characters, granting various buffs and some combat assistance.

The expansion never really ends, but once you've gotten a few characters up to the maximum level of 60 and improved their gear/builds, you can shift focus to the End-Game. There are several raid zones meant for 10 players, and special "cosmic" versions of the patrol zones only accessible after your character completes a moderately-difficult trial zone. The game feels very different with a character at 60, as difficulty scales up and more zones are available to access.

The Marvel Heroes experience is almost entirely about the different playable characters, Once you've gone through that initial discovery phase, you won't find much new in terms of story or areas to explore. The game still comes down to repeating the same areas with the same enemies, but using different characters keeps it interesting. The game reinforces this by giving each character their own personality, with different one-liners during combat and occasional comments as you pass through different areas or near other characters. (For instance, my Storm likes to compliment every Psylocke she sees, while Emma Frost has a put-down for almost everyone she runs across.) If you get multiple characters up to level 60, each adds an experience boost to all your other characters, which smooths out the slow grind of getting a new character through lower-level content.

I don't play Marvel Heroes every day (though I'll usually log in once to claim daily rewards), but it's enough fun to keep me coming back on a semi-regular basis. Especially as the developers continue to add new playable characters, additional areas to explore, and special events.