In a state of general interest, specific boredom a few days ago and having read Green Armadillo’s posts on the topic I started with Marvel Heroes under the premise that it seems to be close to Diablo in game play and I always liked Diablo-style games.
So first of all, you play as a Marvel hero you might or might not know, there’s no partial character look customization (only paid full costume options afaik) and it’s Free 2 Play with IAPs.
When starting you nowadays get 11 Heroes you can play to level 10, then are allowed to uncap one of those, i.e. be allowed to play them to Level 60, the current level cap.
Right now these starting heroes are: Hawkeye, Black Widow, Storm, Cyclops, Rocket Raccoon, Human Torch, Punisher, Colossus, Black Panther, Luke Cage and Captain America
There’s also a daily login bonus and on your 2nd day you get enough in game currency to buy 1 (or 2, if everything is 50% off for the holidays) additional Heroes. I decided to invest 10$ to get 3 more Heroes, so here’s my lineup now:
- Human Torch, uncapped for free (currently level 14)
- Storm, from a random hero item for 175 Splinters (currently level 7ish)
- Ghost Rider, my second random for 175 Splinters (yay)
- Gambit, bought for 450G (= 4.5$)
- Hawkeye, bought for 225G (currently level 11)
- Scarlet Witch, bought for 225G
Heroes I’d like to have but wasn’t willing to pay money now (and really, 6 characters makes this roughly as many classes as Diablo 3 had, so should be about the same replayability factor, if only for alting/classes): Captain America, Colossus, Deadpool, Iron Man, Nightcrawler, Punisher, Rogue
The other 30 (43 – 6 – 7) didn’t look hugely interesting to me right now, but we’ll see how long I’ll play and if there are more sales offers.
A major drawback seems to be the bank space, which of course can be bought for real money, but as countless MMOs have taught me, stuff you get in the first half of the game is hardly worth keeping around, so I don’t see any problems for now. And unlike the 50% off of Heroes for this holiday sale I’m not pressed to buy that now, I’ll play more than 10h first.
That said, I had a lot of fun in those 10h and it seems to be one of those “play for a quick 30min” games more than a “omg, I spent 5h now” for me, so I’d say I’m happy I gave them a few bucks and think got a good worth in return. I’m usually not that easily pulled in by sales, I only own those Humble Bundles with games I really wanted (although I looked at nearly all of them on time) and I’m not even sure I got any game on Steam this time (besides Hammerwatch, which also plays like Diablo, and is also totally awesome, but it might have been a week before the holiday sale).
Oh, and Marvel Heroes Items Base seems to be very good.
O.o I guess they said that the new 400ES grant was a reworking of the old first-playthrough bonuses, I just hadn’t quite realized it was in addition to a freebie from the starting line-up. Pretty nice that you can be rolling with three fully unlocked guys right away.
Nice that one of the random boxes turned into a 600ES/1350G tier character. The math is strongly in your favor at this stage (until 15 or so, especially since many of your characters are in the 200ES/450G tier (i.e. you disproportionately own cheap guys and don’t own expensive guys), but even with 1-2 dudes owned you can still technically draw a dupe.
You may have seen that the login reward system will give you 10 ES every 10 days. What you won’t have seen since the current in-game event has no daily bonus login reward is that it’s pretty common (at least once a month) to get a daily gift that’s good for 5-10 ES per day. Point being, there are many days when I log in for just long enough to collect the rewards, and the things add up to a new hero’s worth of ES pretty quickly.
RE Storage and leveling, my experience was that there was very little need for storage for the first character or two. Long-term, I consider one crafting tab (300 G’s – note, stash went on sale for July 4th 2013 and may not ever go on sale again) nearly mandatory due to the Rune/Enchanting system. Beyond that most of the stress on storage comes from stuff you want to save for future characters (Insignia, rings, any-hero Unique gear, good artifacts). The only thing I save after I have out-leveled it are character specific unique items, since you can theoretically upgrade these later (though on a good “Midtown Monday” you can just replace the things at max level pretty quickly as well).
A final tidbit since you do have a number of dudes now – there are permanent account level bonuses for certain milestones, which include:
Level 25: Stat bonus, see the “hero synergy” tab of you power window, can use 10 of these
Level 30: 1% exp account-wide
Level 50: 3% exp account-wide (replaces the 1%), Second stat bonus (in addition to the first)
Level 60: 5% exp account-wide (replaces the 3%). ADDITIONAL bonus for your first four level 60’s of 25%, 15%, 10%, and 5% for a grand total of 75% on an account with four level 60’s.
Point being, it’s fun to try out many characters, but there are also bonuses for “finishing” a few.
Thanks for the hints, I’m nearly there for the first synergy bonus 🙂