Marvel Heroes

Hah! I was just as stymied as you were. I knew the concept you were looking for, but I sure as hell didn’t come up with a word for it either. :)

In general, I agree. I guess what I’m going for is that the fancy stuff I get in D3 seems, well, fancier. Part of that is the sheer number of stats gear in MH has. I have a hard time telling one cosmic piece apart from another, and the “sell for” price is not terribly helpful there either. I do really like all the relics, insignia, and Uru-forged stuff, as well as the weird currencies. And as a caveat, I’ve only gotten two characters to sixty, and have not done any pure end game stuff, so I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of cooler loot.

I will say that being able to play without a crash every twenty minutes sure helps.

What Diablo 3 does that Marvel Heroes does not do is have gear that defines builds. I don’t think anything in MH has such a dramatic effect as to make some particular setup suddenly viable and fun to try out (aside from possibly certain items making it possible for some characters to regenerate spirit so quickly as to make heavy spirit spending viable). It’s much more a matter of slotting things that are good for the build you’ve already put together. But then, the variety of builds available to any Diablo 3 class is much greater. It’s just that D3 has…what, six or seven classes? Whereas MH has 48, with another one coming every month. And I hardly ever get legendaries that are worth building around.

Yeah, well said. After getting two ranged characters to 60 I think I might explore a melee approach now. I have Thing and She-Hulk from random boxes and while neither really floats my boat right off the bat, I think they might be an interesting change of pace.

I was having regular freezing/logout issues for a while. I decided to run the 64 bit .exe from the steam folder as admin. And it appears to have worked. Fingers crossed.

Edit: I find the Hulk to be fun in small doses. I’m usually all about ranged or hybrid builds. My first 60 was Deadpool mainly ranged, some swordplay. And they said it couldn’t be done. :-)

She-Hulk is a different character from the Hulk, and although I haven’t tried her yet, probably plays differently. For one thing, She-Hulk is always green and strong (if not as strong), but she’s also a lot smarter than Hulk (perhaps not smarter than Banner). And a lawyer.

And while melee Deadpool used to pretty much be the only serious build available to him, they made some tweaks over the last few months that make ranged pretty viable. That minigun he can whip out wasn’t in there when I was playing him, for example.

I like ranged classes in all games, as melee usually takes more skill than I can muster (in most MMOs and ARPGs). But most ranged classes play fairly close to one another, mainly differing in whether they are AoE or single target focused it seems. I have yet to explore really how to use the different builds and hotbars; I guess, for example, it’d be good to have one build for Winter Soldier that is ranged, and another using his bionic arm melee stuff. That’s on my agenda to fiddle around with, as is exploring how to edit the .ini file so that I can have a key trigger an ability that is on a different (not visible) hot bar.

Lately I’ve been leveling Human Torch. He is an AOE monster, so much so that I wonder if I annoy other players when I show up in MM or ICP and start to cover the whole area in flames.

A legendary once every five or six hours is awfully low. In D3 at level 70 I get about 3 or 4 per hour, but even while leveling I don’t think they’re that rare. And are MH low level uniques worth upgrading to level 60? I’ve never bothered since you can find a fresh set soon enough.

I dunno, I’m kinda finding the MH loot uninteresting. On SW, it’s get your class uniques, go endlessly farm for the boss drop artifacts you need, and then go do raids for the couple of uniques that your class uniques aren’t BIS for. And when you get more class uniques try to figure out which slate of stats is better (which is the same problem any ARPG has, but I’ve invested the time into figuring out the D3 system and I can only vaguely guess which MH unique is better [crit, brutal strike, and +skills are good is about as far as I’ve gotten]). And while you’re doing that farm Odin Marks. And pray for rune drops. Unlike D3, none of the loot is going to change my life - some stats are going to go up and I’ll get marginally more powerful.

I wonder the same thing when I walk around with Scalet Witch’s screen-covering AOE movement power going. Do other players get that same effect?

Either they’ve patched the drop rate way up since I last played, you’re a hell of a lot luckier than I am, or you have a few jillion paragon levels in magic find (I have a few dozen paragon levels, tops), because I certainly wasn’t finding legendaries anywhere near that often. Every five or six hours might be an exaggeration, I can’t remember for sure, but certainly no more than once every hour or two. And usually nothing that exciting.

I’ve certainly gotten less excited about MH’s loot over time as I’ve raked in many inventories full, but what interests me in loot in any game is special effects and flavor, with a side of making my powers better or granting new powers. MH’s has a ton of that in a bunch of different categories. Most other ARPGs (and MMOs and even regular RPGs, really) I’ve tried have little or nothing outside of things like legendaries and uniques and unlike MH, they drop quite rarely. It’s why the loot chase that seems to drive so many through these games has never been why I play them. Not even MH, really - I’m mostly in it to play with all the different classes and modes - but it’s actually something I care about in MH, unlike those other games.

And in answer to your question about upgrading uniques: depends. It’s not something I’ve made a common practice out of - as you say, with a lot of heroes you’ll have multiples of everything in their kit - but while most heroes have one unique for most slots and maybe a second one for one or two, there are heroes with more than that and the level 13 version of the specific one you want for that slot may be the only one you’ve seen in many hours. And of course, the multi-hero uniques - there are dozens if not hundreds of those, and I personally have no idea which ones might be better for a given hero than their native uniques, but some of them are quite rare and might be worth an upgrade if they drop before 60.

I wonder the same thing when I walk around with Scalet Witch’s screen-covering AOE movement power going. Do other players get that same effect?

Up to a point. I believe the game prioritizes your own effects and you can only see so many at once. Plus there’s an option to turn other players’ effects off, IIRC.

Now that you can see the roll ranges when holding down Alt, you can make an easier judgement on whether to upgrade uniques. Generally it’s only worth doing if you’re impatient - I’ve done it a bunch of times because I’ve not seen that slot drop in hours & hours, or my level 50-something is better than all the 60s I get. I am impatient with uniques though. :)

I tried following the instructions on the forums about setting up your .ini file so that you can access abilities on the non-primary hotbar, but could not figure out how it actually worked, nor could I get it to do what I wanted to do. All I want to do is, for instance, stash a movement power, a debuff, and maybe one or two special-purpose powers on Hotbar 2, but be able to hit, say, R or Q and fire it off without switching hotbars. Right now I find most characters have about one and half hotbars worth of stuff I really want for any particular build. I NEVER have room for the movement power, for instance. I usually run LMB with default ranged or melee basic, RMB with the movement/combat power (a teleport or charge thing usually), and have medkits bound to Q. I rebound one of the main hotbar keys to W, and use that for a ranged AoE usually, and I use E for another of the special-purpose attacks (like Winter Soldier’s EMP arm blast). I just can’t figure out a good way to access more than the eight or so that are default for one bar.

I’ve never tried setting up a direct key-to-power bind, but I did set up the use of Alt to access the second hotbar by following this post (method 2). Just add two lines to the ini file they talk about in that post, and then you can hit Alt-<key> to access the full set of powers on the second bar.

Hey, thanks for that. I was in the same boat as TheWombat. This will help a lot.

This drives me absolutely nuts about this game. I’ve actually started playing it beyond level 10, and I just can’t believe in 2015 there isn’t a way to open multiple hotbars in the UI, or be able to configure the UI to your liking etc, it’s just such a /boggle. This would be design 101 before alpha for me.

If you’re going to make a horrible, basically unusable UI, it needs to have options to customize it. Really my single biggest complaint with the game, by a large margin.

Yeah, when I think of how customizable World of Warcraft is, it’s just sad.

This is absolutely the worst part of the game. My favorite hero is Dr Strange, but he’s fairly complex. You feel like you’re battling the UI more than the bad guys. The devs have been promising to address this for a very long time.

Yup. So far my solution has just been to gravitate towards characters and builds that don’t need more than eight powers at once, aside from maybe toggles (which I can mostly just leave on). But if they’re going to design characters more complicated than that, and they are definitely doing that, they need to fix the UI.

100% agree on the UI. Diablo beats this hands down with its superbly elegant UI. Now, that comes sort of at the price of less variety and fewer options, but in terms of overall gameplay impact, I think I prefer Blizzard’s approach. Gazillion needs to go to UI school for remedial lessons I think. I’ve steered away from characters like Strange because everyone says you need multiple hotbars, and instead, like malkav11, I just focus on characters where I can use a small subset of powers.

To clarify, if anyone knows–if I have toggled powers, which are on a secondary hotbar toggled on, they still apply, right?

I play Iron Man with toggles on a second bar. Hit the ones I want and forget about them. Just have to remember to toggle them in the first place.