I downloaded this to check it out. It’s pretty damn cool. I leveled four starting heroes to 10–The Punisher, Scarlet Witch, Winter Soldier, and Storm–and liked each one. The action is familiar enough that I can figure out what is going on and what to do, and pretty viscerally satisfying as well. It’s fairly gloriously over the top stuff. I’m still confused with some things–I’ve a quest to make some serum, that I have no idea how to do, as it doesn’t show up as a crafting recipe, and I have no idea how the sidekick/partner heroes thingy works. But I’m intrigued enough to keep at it for a bit before I decide which character to uncap.
Any tips for first timers?
EDIT: I figured out the crafting; had to (duh) scroll down.
So I unlocked Scarlet Witch, and got She-Hulk for the random hero I bought with shards. Haven’t played She-Hulk, but I am digging the red witch.
Venom and Silver Surfer are both quite rad. I hear Juggernaut’s pretty good too. Really mostly a matter of personal taste, though.
And there’s a ton of stuff you can do at 60 that you couldn’t before but it’s really up to you whether you’d rather work on beefing up SW or level another character. You get big permanent experience buffs for your first four 60s (and then another 5% per hero thereafter), so between that and synergies getting some breadth is helpful for either delving deep into a 60 or continuing to level other characters, but this is not a game where optimal is more important than fun.
I’m leaning towards Venom for my free hero, or possibly The Hulk.
It’s really nice of Gaz to do this for the players. Up until now I’ve just played whatever I got from the random boxes. While I’ve been pretty lucky in that regard, I’m looking forward to having a choice.
I guess I’ll try a few guys out a bit and see how I like them first. Conceptually Hulk seems a lot like Thing, so leaning towards Venom.
I’m kinda Scarlet Witched out at the moment, so unless there’s something quick I can do to help out a second character I’m probably going to play Thing for a while.
Scarlet Witch is the best way to complete cosmic Terminals at top speed. So if you want to bash out your Terminal shared daily, she’s your girl. Similarly if you want to start repeating a specific terminal for some boss loot, like the Gem of the Kursed. It doesn’t take long at all for me to do 5 to 10 runs of Cosmic Kurse each evening.
I’ve played a lot more Hulk at 60 than Venom but I’d say Hulk’s a more enjoyable melee character than Venom (who you can build non-melee).
I keep sampling the heroes to see which ones I want to unlock (or get for free with the freebie they are giving away). So far, I like the Moon Knight, who’s kind of goofy but neat, Silver Surfer, who’s sort of weird but awesome, and Gambit, who is hilarious (and hits people with a stick). Felt kind of meh about Hawkeye, Cyclops is ok, liked the Punisher and Storm. Still haven’t tried She-Hulk, which I got from the random hero box. Oh, and Ghost Rider has a freakin’ flaming head. Can’t beat that.
It’s often hard to tell which piece of gear I want; there are so many in the inventory after a short run and they all differ in so many tiny ways even at the same gear level. And some of the power choices leave me paralyzed (though I guess you can respec at will?).
I would not worry about gear optimization until level 60. Before then, about the only decision that gives me pause is whether a fresh cosmic is better than an aging unique. And yeah, as of last Thursday you can respect anytime you want outside of combat.
Is there a way to assign more than one skill point at a time when you respec? Re-assigning 150 points one by one, and then doing it again because you didn’t quite plan it out as well as you should have, is the way to madness.
And is the daily bonus for legendary quests per character? It looked like it is, but I’m not 100% sure.
Ok, this game can be pretty epic silly fun. Taking Ghost Rider around and pulling demonic burning wheelies on top of bad guys is pretty slick. Though I can’t figure out for the life of me (in the Industry City or whatever it is patrol zone) why all these master crooks, cultists, mad scientists, and assorted thugs are obsessed with knocking over hot dog carts. Don’t they, you know, have bigger crimes to mastermind?
Teleportation is the key to quick runs. Note that any character can do this by using a ziggurat artifact. It’s still nice to use a character with a natural teleportation power like SW, and it also helps that she’s freakin’ powerful now.
I’ve played a lot more Hulk at 60 than Venom but I’d say Hulk’s a more enjoyable melee character than Venom (who you can build non-melee).
I took a quick look at the power sets for both characters. Hulk looks to have the more straightforward playstyle of the two, and I’ve heard that he’s a lot of fun post-review.
I didn’t really grok the way Venom works. I keep hearing great things about him though, so I want to do a little more research before I decide.
Basically, he’s split between powers that consume his health (and typically restore Ichor), and powers that consume Ichor (and often restore health). He’s also got a short cooldown (25 seconds on mine, though that might be partly his uniques, I forget) Signature that’s flipping incredible and directly enhanced by three pairs of mutually exclusive passives that also give him a bunch of awesome passive bonuses including an auto-self-rez. And then there’s Parasitic Tendrils, which is a channeled PBAoE that does autotargetted damage to enemies around him and restores huge whacks of both health and Ichor every tick you channel it, plus has a mere 10 second cooldown. So there’s a bunch of ways you can take him but pretty much any of them make heavy use of Symbiote Spikes (the Sig) and Parasitic Tendrils, because they are both awesome. I’m doing 1.3-2.5 million damage hits with Symbiote Spikes, routinely. Personally I’m running a mostly Ichor-based build centered around Deadly Maw and Hungry Maw (with a soupcon of Come to Venom for another big hit and a cool 200 Ichor restore) that I’d have to look up.
My lack of melee Venom appreciation may partly come from getting him to 60 at the same time as a bunch of other heroes recently, all whilst spending a lot of time playing Scarlet Witch, Hulk and to a lesser extent Cap.
After a while you tend to level quickly enough that you stop caring about gear that isn’t purple or better up until level 30 or so, and then after that just cosmic or unique (unless a slot gets really far behind the curve). I tend to level with everything under purple set to auto-vaporise, which I crank up to everything under cosmic sometime between 30 and 50.
Er, set to vaporize? Is that, um, an actual setting or something? But yeah, even at the low levels if it isn’t purple or Cosmic I generally don’t keep it.
Wombat, if you check out the Gameplay tab under the options menu. About halfway down is the Autoloot settings. You can choose the vaporize level for all five slots of gear.
Handy, but I still need the credits/pet buff, so I either vacuum it up or loot and sell most things.
Cool, thanks! Didn’t see it the first time. I set it to vaporize the white stuff as I still need to donate the rest to the crafter and vendor. Autoloot for medkits and credits is a no-brainer though.
There certainly is a lot of, um, stuff in this game. Very cool for a F2P so far.
If you’re willing to just go with the flow, it’s far better to just keep buying the random hero boxes for a while. Best value for time played in the game, I’d say. (Assuming they’re still 175 shards… been quite a while since I played regularly, but I have like 7 or 8 guys sitting there begging me to level and I’m getting interested again, so…)
The free hero unlock is out this week, so people should keep that in mind. If there’s an expensive hero (pre-Doom) you’re keen to play, using the freebie on that is a good idea. I’m only missing less than 10 heroes, so I shall be adding Ghost Rider to the pile with mine, I reckon.
On a related note - levelling is so much nicer now that you can just re-allocate points (for free) on the fly! Normally I’d pick a build from the forum and follow that (or do a variation of it for levelling in build 1, then the final one in build 2). Now I can just do whatever I want, whenever I want. Especially handy for playing around with variations on Doom during his levelling process.
I am stuck between trying out Scarlet Witch and Captain America, I have SW and CA is only 450g I have 650 available. As suggested I might take an expensive character as my free one.
