Agreed. Actually, half the forums seem to feel he needs a damage buff. He’s good, and pretty strong early compared to some, but not remotely OP, especially since neither his signature or ultimate are terribly strong damage-wise. So much fun, though.
For the final weekend of the anniversary month there is an epic tweleve event from Friday to Monday. All the Big 10 event boosts, plus hero tokens making a reappearance for the weekend and some other random boosts on top of everything. All the details here.
I know where I’ll be this weekend then, and I’ll be spending more money too in all likelihood.
Just dropped in to post that. Now I have to decide if I want to play Skyrim or Marvel Heroes.
My particular favorite is that Doomsaw is at least hinting that they’ll be doing things like randomly tuning up the unique drop rate to be 25x more common like he accidentally did back when the live tuning system first came out.
No clue whether or not I’ll get lucky and be on at that time (probably not), but the sense of whimsy is enough to amuse me.
Squee
1824
I have no idea what any of that means, but I guess I’ll finally take a look at this. Part of the reason I avoided trying PoE for so long was because I assumed it would be garbage/pay to win/pay to not be crippled since it was free to play, which wasn’t the case at all. Should give this a whirl now too. Any pro-tips for complete newbies, either regarding gameplay or unlocking heroes quickly or… Uh… Whatever would be useful?
Play a lot this weekend, make sure to at least log in every day to get the freebies.
Also don’t sell anything until you’ve levelled up your Crafter. Money is only really useful for crafting stuff, so any gear you have that you won’t need or have outgrown should be donated for XP to the crafter (Hank Pym/AntMan in avengers tower, to donate for XP hold control and right click an item instead of right clicking alone. Note that once it’s donated for XP it’s gone, unlike selling which has a buy back tab.)
The best way to unlock heroes quickly is to buy them. If you end up deciding you want to buy heroes, this weekend is buy one, get one free. So if you want a number of heros, buy the cheapest one first.
If you don’t want to spend money on heroes, and assuming you don’t get lucky with hero token drops (if their drop rate is the same as it was in the original game, you likely won’t), the best way to get heroes is to save up your eternity splinters and buy a random hero box. In the random box (175 ES) all heros are the exact same probability: 1/N where N is the total number of heroes in the game. This DOES mean that you can get the one hero you already own as your random hero, but the odds are in your favor for quite a while, and nothing feels better than spending 175 eternity splinters to get a hero that would cost you 600 to buy directly. (There are three hero tiers, 200, 400, and 600. A few high profile heroes are 600, the vast majority are 400, and like 6 are 200.)
Past that, remember that you can make a new account for free so if you get started and really don’t like your starter freebie hero, ditch it and make a new account to try a different one. (Or make a few new accounts to start with and pick the 2-3 heroes you’re most interested in and try them all out for 10 levels or so.)
As long as you don’t put any real-money purchases on the account you’re only losing out on time (and I suppose potential super-lucky drops) by ditching one of the other accounts. Well, and maybe your preferred character name I guess, depending on how attached to such things you get.
Um. Not really. There are nuances to high level gameplay, and ways to optimize levelling and such, but for a newbie you don’t really need to do anything except pick a character you want to play as your starter, and play story mode at least once through the end of chapter 8 (which gets you enough one time bonus splinters to buy a random hero). After that they just drop every 8-ish minutes whatever you’re doing as long as it’s vaguely level appropriate, so there’s not really much speeding it up.
Edit: oh yeah. Donating everything to your crafter and then enchanter is important and nonintuitive. But that’s mostly it.
Squee
1827
Thanks for the heads up, the crafter thing sounds especially tricky since I doubt I would’ve had any idea about that.
Oh good grief, as if I don’t play enough already. Weekend…gone. Luckily there are World Cup matches to force me to take breaks.
The MH forums just died, so I can’t verify, but if you have any interest in this game, be absolutely certain you get to level 30 this weekend, then go to Avengers Tower and talk to Agent Stan Lee by the teleporter. You will kick yourself later if you don’t. Among other things, you will get a free stash page.
Squee
1830
After playing a couple hours I think I’ll end up skipping it. It’s definitely not shabby but I wasn’t really getting into it compared to D3 or PoE. Does seem up there in terms of quality free to play games though.
I’m not buying any heroes this weekend but I’m going to pony up for a couple of costumes, I think. Storm’s final 52 rework status looks really good based on the livestream I was half watching whilst playing yesterday, so I think I’ll grab her current comics costume. Otherwise… I’ve been reading a bunch of late 80s/early 90s X-Men related comics recently and I might buy the gloriously fucking stupid original comics Cable costume. It’s so bad, it’s good. We’ll see though.
I got Surfer to 52 last night, desperately trying to get him to 60 to take advantage of this weekend!
Servers still down as I post this, but here’s the patch notes. Of special interest (at least to me):
Storm review is out. Ambivalent about this. Boo, I liked the old Storm…but yay, new Storm to play with.
Another Omega point respec. I’m still putting my points into +XP nodes, because that increases speed toward more Omega points! And I can’t be arsed trying to figure out how to spend them differently on each hero.
“Shift + Right-Click now moves items to and from the S.T.A.S.H. when Crafting”…long overdue.
And a couple of upcoming points:
Achievements will launch at end of July and are in the internal testing rounds.
Login rewards will launch in one of the next two patches.
There’s more that I don’t care much about, but others might, like Beta Ray Bill being in this patch. All at the link.
Storm was boring as hell before. The only character more boring than Storm is Cyclops. Not sure this changes that, but one can hope.
DDB
1834
ineffablebob, don’t do that with Omega points. Because so much of your XP comes from Orbs/Legendary Quests and not actually defeating enemies, a little time and math reveals that you’re getting a bonus of about .5% if you go whole hog into the Omega System XP stuff. It’s an absolute waste.
It also makes the case that the Omega system is pretty stupid and badly designed, and full of bad choices and newbie traps. I would rather have 2 dozen useful nodes than the hundreds of crap garbage to sort through.
Boring for you, but not for me. I like throwing out snow storms and lightning storms, dodging to stay at range, getting bosses to stand in the storm AoE while still not killing me, and so on. One of the things I like about MH is that if you don’t like how one character plays, there’s another to try with a different style. I don’t think they’ll totally kill the style with the changes, but we’ll see how she plays now.
Isn’t all of the Omega system only tiny improvements to whatever you pick? Anyway, to each their own. If you want to spend the time to do the math, more power to ya. I’ll be somewhere killing stuff.
DDB
1837
No, actually, stuff like Goblin Formula, Melt Face, Tag Rounds (at lower levels), SPIN Tech, and other shit, is really good and can put real, noticeable improvements on to your characters. Your ignorance (and defensiveness about it) is funny to me.
Defensive wasn’t my intent, sorry. I just don’t feel like spending the time to explore the gigantic number of options, and I’m pretty happy that it’s possible to be ignorant about the system and still have improvements, even if they aren’t optimal. Good design, IMHO.
That sentiment applies to more than just the Omega system, by the way. The whole game seems to be fairly well designed to allow people to play without going “optimal” all the time. Unlike, say, Path of Exile, where you eventually run into a wall that prevents further advancement (in reasonable time) if you have a sub-optimal build. In MH, I can keep on playing the style I like as long as I want, and though I may not solo any cosmic terminals, I can still run reds or play in Midtown and keep on making progress.
Did my respec and played around with the new Storm a bit, and I’m pretty happy. I can still do my favorite Crashing Hail-then-spam-Lightning Storm AoE on groups, and Ball Lightning still seems fine for killing bosses. There’s a new channel power that has extra boss damage, but I skipped it since mobility is too important for me to do much channeling. The signature power is cool and I’m happy to use it every 30 seconds, and I like the extra 5-second damage boost from Obscuring Fog too. Her spirit seems to run out less often, which is probably the effect from the Spirited changes. And I switched tempest powers from the deflect projectiles one to the added lightning damage one; might change back later if she dies too much to ranged stuff.
RichVR
1840
Interesting. I had purchased 4 heroes last night not thinking of the weekend’s BOGO sale. Imagine my surprise when I logged in today and had 4 hero boxes in my inventory. A double of the Human Torch, Black Panther and two that I wouldn’t otherwise purchase: Storm and Rocket Racoon. Very cool.
