Marvel Heroes

Currently back in the “play grindy games and listen to podcasts” mood, so not only have I played a lot of Guild Wars 2, no, also did more than log in for Login bonuses in Marvel Heroes!

So, what changed? There’s 5 new 60s I guess. Nick Fury was in the Advance Pack and I levelled him a while ago already (probably in April). This week I spent most of my >2000 Eternity Splinters and bought 5 heroes for 400 each. Ant-Man, Warmachine, Loki, Rocket Raccoon and Moon Knight. All besides Moon Knight were already rushed through parts of story mode and are Level 60 with an absolute minimum of gear. Meh, completionism only for now. Still sitting on a massive amount of G from a ridiculous sale a while ago, will probably be spent on Team-Ups. I also worked on a few achievements, but not really worth mentioning I guess.
To my big disappointment the Fantastic Four were taken out of the game, so unless you got/bought them before, you can’t get them. This sucks quite a bit, as I only have two of them, and could’ve easily grabbed Invisible Woman and Mister Fantastic if I had heard about the change in time 🙁

So yeah, I did it (and totally forgot to post on Sunday). After the latest big update levelling is quite quick, then add a few XP boosts you have flying around – and you’re up to 50 Level 60 Heroes. If you have too many Eternal Splinters as well, and just buy once your last one reached 60.
Beast and Black Bolt I got from the Advance Pack, Iron Fist was never interesting before (but that changed thanks to the Netflix series) and had +50% XP this week, Kitty was high on my list since she came out (but I was a bit underwhelmed with how she plays so far) and then for Psylocke… well I had 2 costumes, so I chose her.
From how they actually felt:

• Kitty – ok
• Psylocke – good
• Iron Fist – good
• Black Bolt – good
• Beast – a bit meh
• Angela – ok
• Luke Cage – ok
• Ultron – ok
• Doom – good
• Juggernaut – good, but I’m inexperienced with Movement Heroes
• She-Hulk – quite good
• Elektra – quite good
• Cyclops – meh
• Green Goblin – ok
• Thor – ok
• Jean Grey – quite good
• Blade – ok
• Daredevil – surprisingly good

Not missing many heroes until they launch some more:

• Ant-Man (interesting)
• Colossus (meh)
• Emma Frost (meh)
• Iceman (mhm)
• Invisible Woman (meh)
• Loki (half meh)
• Moon Knight (half meh)
• Mr. Fantastic (meh)
• Rocket Racoon (kind of interesting)
• Vision (meh)
• War Machine (all builds use his Synergy, so would be the “smart” choice)

Oh, quite some time has passed since I last wrote about Marvel Heroes. I did log in for the rewards most days before firing up some other game but wasn’t really motivated. That has changed a bit since “THE BIGGEST UPDATE EVER” has launched.
So far I’m a bit underwhelmed by the changes. Most annoying is not only coming back after half a year, but also having to respec and reread about (now) 45 characters. I also don’t see a big benefit of the Infinity System – before you had Cookie Cutter builds and now you have them.
I do like that you can just take your skills and use them. I find it a bit weird that you can level 1-60 in like 1h (or was that my XP boosts?) or 3h with only Chapter 1-3 of story mode. Midtown Monday is still nice to level or prestige, ICP only heroic means I’m out while levelling, it worked ok at 60.
That all means I’m not against most changes I guess, but I’m also not thrilled. I’m happy I still like the game (~20h since I started playing again like a week ago, that’s not bad) but it’s definitely a -different game- now. Let’s see when marvelheroes.info will have all the builds for all the heroes I care for and if I can still manage some Cosmic Trials. (I hate figuring out builds on my own these days. I guess I last did this in WoW’s TBC expansion…)
Summary of changes in the roster:

• Doom to 60 and prestiged to Green
• Ultron to 60
• Luke Cage to 60
• Black Cat to 60
• Venom to 60
• Angela to 60
• Iron Man prestiged to Blue (2x)
• 2 new Team-Ups to 60 (Captain America, Ms Marvel) or halfway there (Winter Soldier, Spider-Man) and one at 1 (Miles Morales)
• 4884 Achievement Points

Tentative to do list for the next weeks:

• clean out all those Artifacts
• I have 982 Eternity Splinters, that could be 2 new heroes…
• Cosmic Midtown
• do a few Danger Room runs
• wrap up a few achievements, like 50 Taskmaster kills on Taskmaster
• try to figure out a few “mains”
• do some of my “would be nice” prestiges, or at least advance towards:
  • Iron Man to Red
  • Spider-Man to Blue
  • Gambit to Purple
  • Rogue to Green
  • Green Goblin to Green
  • Cyclops to Blue

PS: I still love their business model of giving you so much nice loot that digital hoarders like me have to buy bank space for money.

So I gave in and bought the Deluxe Advance Pack 3 in Marvel Heroes. I already had Green Goblin, but at least got a new (prettier) Costume. Also got Elektra already and now waiting for the other Heroes and Team-Ups (Heroes: Nick Fury, Ultron, Angela, Black Bolt, TBD and Team-Ups: Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), Spider-Man (Miles Morales), 2 TBD). I also stopped getting random splinter boxes and instead bought She-Hulk for 400 splinters.
Also there was again some visible progress:

• Cyclops to 60
• Elektra to 60
• She-Hulk to 60
• Nightcrawler prestiged to Purple (3x)
• Jean Grey prestiged to Green (1x)
• She-Hulk prestiged to Green (1x)

So that’s now 38 Heroes and currently 19 missing.
 

No directly visible progress in Marvel Heroes, but I’ve been doing a lot of achievement hunting and general catch-up in the last weeks.
The ‘Exploration’ category is done, I’ve pushed 33 heroes through Infernal Limbo by now and did most of the ‘Heroes’ achievements that involve running red/green dungeons and story mode. What’s mostly missing is Cosmic runs (many of them in Castle Doom) and a few One-Shot runs. I’ve hardly started on the “kill 1000-2000 enemies somewhere specific, with this or that hero or with some special item equipped”.
I also now own 9 of the 10 Unique Item upgrade recipes.

• 4479/13334 – 33% for achievement points.
• 36 Heroes, all of them at Level 60
• 8 Team-Ups, all of them at Level 60
• 14 Pets
• Prestiges: 1 Cosmic, 1 Red, 4 Blue, 2 Green
• 415 days of Login Rewards
• 26 Hero STASH tabs
• 10 general STASH tabs

Right now I’m unsure if I’m should continue to randomize characters – the chance is only (57-36)/57 (which rougly equals 36%) to get a new hero. I will probably save up until I have 400 and then decide. Or get to 575 and try it once…
 
 

Apparently Gazillion thought it would be a good idea to have a Daredevil event this weekend where you’d get +200% XP and another +50% for playing Daredevil or Punisher.
Apparently I thought that it might be a good idea to take advantage of that… So now I have a Red Prestige Daredevil (white -> green on Saturday, green -> blue -> purple -> orange -> red on Sunday) and then continued to nix my poor judgement of not doing story mode for a few chars and thus lacking power points. So Thing went to green and Captain Marvel to blue. My record time (with Daredevil and a ton of buffs – roughly +563% displayed + probably 150% server buff) for a full 1-60 run is 27 minutes, 32 seconds, but mostly it took around 30 minutes. Thing was slower with 40 minutes and with 200% less XP Captain Marvel needed around 50 minutes each for both runs. To end the day on a less grindy note I finally did Chapter 10 for the first time – on Hawkeye.

And then I also lucked out on Splinters again and thus have Cyclops. So that’s 36 characters, of which 35 are max level and 8 Level 60 Team-Ups, plus 20 non-Cosmic prestige runs and 1 Cosmic prestige run in 395 days since I started playing. Apparently that puts me into the top 10 “number of combined character levels” leaderboard already, although it’s only 3400 – whereas the current #1-#3 have 23520, which maybe means they have cosmic prestiged every single hero? I can’t seem to make up the math.
Maybe time for another most-wanted list:

• Juggernaut
• She-Hulk
• Kitty Pryde
• Ant-Man
• Venom

and the rest is not so interesting right now I guess.

Time to dig out Marvel Heroes again. Lucked out on getting Green Goblin via 175 Splinters and levelled him to 60. Was pretty fun as well. That makes 35 level 60 heroes now.

Second random was a dupe, so Black Panther got an Ultimate Rank, oh well.
Apparently the Team-Up window is bugged at the moment and you get a random level displayed. Not sure if it’s doing any harm or if it’s just a display bug. Glad I’m not doing hard content atm though 😛
I was thinking about getting the Advance Pack but when I wanted to make the final decision, it was pulled from the shop already. Ah well, 60 bucks saved I guess. But I bought 2450 G for 20$.
I really love the Crafting change, as there’s only one level for each of the four elements. Then again I’m not sure it’s pretty hard to get enough of them now if you’re rerolling costume affixes (+crit damage all the way).
 

Wasn’t in the mood for a lot more Mass Effect after Sunday lunchtime and today, so I decided to do some more prestiging.
Well, actually I had a few Heroes I had originally levelled in Midtown and not in story mode, so they only had 154 Power points (instead of 166 if you do all the important steps of story mode).

Result: Hulk is green (prestiged once) and Star-Lord is blue (prestiged twice). Yes, the colors absolutely do need to fit the characters.
This makes: 33x Level 60 + 12 prestige runs + 1x cosmic prestige.
Plans regarding this for the future: Captain Marvel and Thing still haven’t done story mode.
Plans regarding matching colors: (white -> green -> blue -> purple -> orange -> red -> yellow)

• Scarlet Witch: red – 5x – 🙁
• Gambit: purple – 3x – ok
• Captain Marvel: white (this costume) or blue (All-New All-Different costume) – ok
• Ghost Rider: orange – 4x – 🙁
• Taskmaster – white/blue – ok
• Deadpool – red – kind of ok
• Iron Man – yellow (cosmic, not gonna happen)/red – kind of ok
• Nightcrawler – blue/purple – kind of ok
• Wolverine – yellow (nope) – not sure what to do
• Rogue – green – ok
• Spider-Man – red – kind of ok
• Daredevil – red – 🙁
• Jean Grey – green – ok

The rest is fine in white. And no, I don’t think I’ll deliberately work towards this. But the green is horrendous, so only Hulk and Rogue may stay there, all others must directly go to blue. (Unless I get She-Hulk, Vision, Loki, and maybe Doctor Doom).