I wrapped up the first playthrough on Normal difficulty yesterday, defeating Dr. Doom and then Loki with Hawkeye. I was Level 28 or 29, now I’m in Lowtown again and nearly Level 31.
I really like playing Hawkeye, although he’s not feeling like easymode like Human Torch (up until Level 14, so my experience is limited).
Loki was a real pain, though. I think I died 6 or 7 times, a first. The jump from Normal to Heroic is not really noticeable I think, less than in Diablo 3 for sure.
I got weak and bought a little more ingame currency for 5$ and now have a crafting tab. I could buy a Hero tab as well but so far it’s beenĀ bearable. I am feeding all the items I get to the crafter to reach level 20 there, but so far it’s only Level 8.
The winter/holiday event ended yesterday evening with a long downtime and today there’s a new event with 42% XP bonus. I was happy until I noticed that the holiday event had 100% XP bonus, it just wasn’t easily recognizable if you started during it. Ah, whatever, 29 levels wasn’t too bad.
I played a lot less WildStar, but my Medic is 38 now and halfway through Wilderrun already.
Story Mode Loki (and to a lesser extent Doom) can be hit or miss, especially if he rolls irritating affixes on Heroic/Superheroic. If I DON’T have any trouble burning him down then I can tell that some combination of my hero and gear must be good, but it’s equally common for me to corpse zerg him repeatedly. Also, they’ve added a lot of game systems that make players more powerful (enchanting, team-ups, cybernetics, omega system, synergies, etc) since these bosses were introduced, so they will only get easier as you play more.
Crafting tab is a good call, IMO the one mandatory purchase in the game due to how the enchanting rune system works. (I actually own two paid crafting tabs, compared to two general tabs – one free for starting the game and one that players got as a gift for the game’s first birthday. The second is a luxury that I use to store one stack of all 40 common crafting elements so I have them handy for recipes.)
Hero tabs can also be nice because they will eat a number of unbound things – rings, insignia for teams that hero can equip, and any hero uniques. Due to the insignias, it can be better to own tabs for characters who are flagged for multiple teams. Also, if you intend to prestige that character a hero tab becomes close to mandatory because all of their level 60 gear needs to be stored somewhere. (I have yet to do this.)
“Bonus” exp in this game is a bit screwed up because they’re constantly doing events and it’s actually very rare for the exp to go all the way down to 0% – people immediately start complaining because it’s so uncommon. The 100% was supposed to run through the “end of the year” so we might have been at 0% for a week. (It’s hard for me to tell anymore since I’ve got the max 200% synergy bonus and usually a 50% boost potion from chapter 7 quest rewards, and I also didn’t play much that week.) The bonus is “usually” between 40-70%. In general, you’ll find that 1-30 go reasonably quickly (especially with any bonuses), 30-50 is a bit slower, and 50-60 are the slower levels.
Also note that this week’s “cosmic worldstone” currency (which drops everywhere, not just endgame) can be used to buy a minipet, some crafting recipes, and also a legendary item that is best in slot for some heroes. So this event is generally a good time to be playing (regardless of what level) and using any special item find boosts you have handy.
One final tidbit that I regret having failed to mention to you during the sale – at some point you will want to procure a team-up character. There’s a pretty big payoff to getting your first team-up because you can use them on all of your characters and they’re basically a large chunk of damage and/or stats. (They are specialized in different ways but you’re talking about a relatively small difference between team-ups and really I’d recommend picking your favorite character if you’re planning to own just one.) You can purchase (most) Team-ups with ES, but they cost nearly twice as many ES/G as heroes do (i.e. 600 ES buys a team-up who costs 750G or a hero who costs 1350G) so it can be much more attractive to wait for a G-store sale.
Hehe, thanks for the pointers again.
I read about the team-ups but so far they weren’t necessary and I actively preferred to have a hero more or two for my money than that. But I’m saving splinters and might buy a team-up first before another hero, still unsure. In general I would have preferred half the on-char inventory if it would have been per-char, but so far it worked out ok with just the one crafting tab.
Anyway, a pretty fun game, I’m playing Human Torch in a duo as well but I am not sure I can do these (quick napkin math) 100 complete runs as you did, even with enough time… š