Marvel Heroes

I didn’t play too much Marvel Heroes this week because I was busy with Shadowrun: Dragonfall and also GW2, but still:

As you can see, Winter Soldier is 60 and Wolverine made it to 52 (pic is a few hours old) – for WS I tried something new (not using the cookie cutter build with the most upvotes on marvelheroes.info) but instead opted for this build, which highly favors stealth. Wolverine plays quite similar to X-23, but I liked her a bit better. Levelling those 2 up I got a decent amount of Eternity Splinters and of course I had to gamble again. This time with very good results: Star-Lord and Nova, especially the latter is a hero I am really interested in trying out 🙂
The achievement system has one of those “meh” achievements. While I only had to continue playing Hawkeye for 2h to get to the magic 100h mark (he was my first hero after all, which always takes a lot longer, then for a while my only 60, and now even at purple prestige) the “500h /played on one character” is really harsh and I’ve taken to always log Hawkeye when I let MH run when going for dinner or something. Maybe those 10-20 min increments over a year will help for this achievement…

Not as much got done, but I’m still happy with the result:

The tally now is: 17 Heroes, 14 at 60, 5 prestige runs done (so really 19), 2 Team-Ups.
There was a giveaway at MMOGames.com which their servers didn’t really handle that well, but I still managed to snatch a free character box, which yielded me Black Panther. Other than that I prestiged Captain for the second time and Hawkeye for the first time (wanted to play him with the review changes anyway), the +50% XP bonus for the Avengers helped a lot. After that I levelled Nightcrawler to 50. He feels awfully squishy, but he’s very fun to play. Apparently he gets better at max level, with all the powers available – we’ll see.
Again I spent a few millions on Costume Affix rerolling, but I got nearly everything to > 80% of the max roll now, and even ~45% of them to > 90%, fwiw. Everyday I’m spreadsheatin’. Other than that I started a massive cleanup of my bank slots and exchanged a load of Any Hero Uniques for Runes and Relics, and also a ton of duplicate hero-specific ones. Then again a few heroes now already have a “levelling set” of Uniques, mostly the ones I prestiged already, but a few others that I plan to prestige also have a few.
Scarlet Witch is supposed to be really awesome after the 52 review now, but I haven’t tried her again. Still pondering if I should just prestige her at the next event, maybe next Monday…
For now I saved up my Eternity Splinters, I think for the second time ever I have more than 200. Still unsure if I should continue gambling until 20 or buy Domino as a Team-Up, because she’s supposed to be a little better than Clea. Then again it probably makes more sense to wait for a half-off sale again for those few percent of bonuses and just keep ~150-200 splinters ready for this.
I’m still sitting on 1050G and haven’t spent any money lately, I think. That is, because I failed to mention another 20$ purchase in the April 27th post.

Yes, again I’ve been playing even more Marvel Heroes than anything else.

First of all, there’s been a few additions to the roster. I bought Iron Man at the 50% Tax Return (US stuff, but who cares?) sale after getting Deadpool from a random box and on Sunday I also got Nightcrawler from there.
Since the last post I first levelled Cable to 60, then Deadpool and then started with Iron Man last week (hooray, vacation).
This weekend I prestiged Captain America because of the Avengers 50% XP buff and maybe I’ll do it a second time. Or prestige Hulk, Hawkeye or Scarlet Witch – but for her I might wait the two weeks when here review is supposed to go live. Speaking of reviews, I haven’t read good things about Hawkeye’s review. He was my first Hero to 60 and he was pretty fun to play – but after playing some other heroes he’s been put on the backburner a bit and I had hoped for the review to bring him up to speed so he’d be as fun to play as my current favorites. Ah well, we’ll see.
On the other hand I dug into theorycrafting now and looking to get some characters raid ready (or at least write down what’s necessary) – so there’s a lot of spreadsheets involved, which “Any Hero” unique should go to whom, which of them are useless enough so I can exchange even the 60 ones for Runes and Relics, and so on and so on.
Especially nasty are the Costume Suffixes. Most builds just go with a default of “+Critical Damage Rating” on all 4 Grades, so that’s what I used for most of my heroes – but this is highly random, so you can either have a lot of rating or not much at all.
Apparently the max rolls without a Costume Core for Grades 1-4 are 70/140/216/302 and with a 60 Costume Core they are 382/765/1177/1668 – so now everytime I am at the 3m credit cap and also have some spare Pures, I’ll start rerolling until I have everything to at least 90% (or 80% if unlucky) of the max roll. I think today I spent like 500k to get like 8 grades to over 90, but with so many characters 😛

Oh wow, it’s been nearly a month since I wrote down my progress in Marvel Heroes – guess I’ve been too busy playing the game  – so this means it’s still absolutely fun 🙂

So apparently since the last post I managed to prestige Human Torch a second time, get Hulk, Ghost Rider and Taskmaster to 60 and, which was the best part, get Punisher from a Random Hero Box and also level him to 60, yay. I also got enough OMEGA currency to buy my second team-up, Agent Coulson. So right now only 2 unlevelled characters out of 13.
Punisher is fun to level and play (probably because he had his review recently) despite his Ammo mechanic being very, very different than the Spirit for most heroes. Ghost Rider was kind of fun, but doesn’t seem to be strong (with my gear and/or spec), same for Taskmaster. Hulk was a bit unexciting, but I think because of levelling only in Midtown and ICP (no story mode at all) I neglected my gear, so I read he should be strong but didn’t feel like that – I probably have to redo some things and practice.
I also spent many hours better equipping some of the characters, with most of them now at least having only 60s epics (not min-maxing really, but I should write down a few slot/hero combos where to save up the cosmics).
I played a lot of Captain America at 60 on last Monday’s Midtown Madness  (a holiday) and earned around 100 OMEGA points, so now I’m just shy of 800. Not too bad for 100 days of login rewards (awesome concept btw) for which  I got the Mini-Ultron pet yesterday. I should tally them up at some point, I think…
So the last todo list looked like this:

1. Get enough Cosmic Worldstones to buy the Doop pet
2. Get enough OMEGA stuff to get Agent Coulson (Team-Up)
3. Get a Legendary on the Heroes that are lacking one: SW, HT, CAP, HULK
4. If possible, get the Hero a legendary before starting to level
5. Story mode is incomplete on: HT, STM, MM
6. Get Domino (Team-Up)
7. Decide what and if to prestige again, preferably before retroactively completing story mode

So yeah, 1), 2) and 7) are completely done. 6) would need more Splinters and for now I still love Random Hero Boxes (although I got a 2nd SW token yesterday as well)
For 3-5 I need to elaborate. From the St. Patrick’s Day event you could get a massive amount of “levelling” Legendaries, where step 1 gives you 10% XP, step 2 and 3 gives you 10% RIF and SIF and then some more. So all heroes that don’t have a proper Legendary now have at least one of those and the ones with a proper one also have one of those stashed away. I also have enough Cosmic Worldstones and Odin Marks to buy some Legendaries, which I will do once the non-proper ones are maxed-out. We’ll see.
Regarding story mode, it was worse than I thought. At some point I decided to not do full-on story mode for the heroes anymore, so only Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Gambit have 100% completion, for Human Torch, Captain America and Storm I stopped midway on Superheroic. So for those 3 I now at least did the minimal story mode for the rewards and on the newer heroes only this from start to end. So now only Hulk and Miss Marvel are sitting at 154 power points (zero story mode) and Storm needs 3 more, the rest is maxed at 166. Oof.
From a money perspective, I spent 20$ since last month and have 490G left, but I have the hero stash for every hero I own now.
The hero wish list obviously lost Punisher, but gained She-Hulk.
Random fact: I just had to add “Punisher” and “Hawkeye” to Chrome’s spellchecker. Bad Google.

As usual I played a lot of Marvel Heroes, after the letdown in my last post I got a lot luckier again, I drew Ms. Marvel and Cable from random boxes bought with splinters and got Taskmaster from a free code (thanks PCGamesN). Incidentally I was working from home today and got the news of this only 2h after they posted those 5000 keys, now 12h after the post they’re already gone. I’m not terribly keen on either Cable or Taskmaster, but I haven’t played them yet – and I’m sure as hell not complaining.
So yes, I did level Storm since my last post and also Ms. Marvel (a week of Midtown really helped here) – both to 60 and Hulk is also 33.

I’m pretty surprised that I’m still getting a tremendous amount of fun out of this game, I think I’ve logged in all the ~72 days since I started (for the login bonus) – but of course I didn’t play on all the days, but still quite a lot.
Immediate plans for the future include:

• Get enough Cosmic Worldstones to buy the Doop pet
• Get enough OMEGA stuff to get Agent Coulson (Team-Up)
• Get a Legendary on the Heroes that are lacking one: SW, HT, CAP, HULK
• If possible, get the Hero a legendary before starting to level
• Story mode is incomplete on: HT, STM, MM
• Get Domino (Team-Up)
• Decide what and if to prestige again, preferably before retroactively completing story mode

Short names grabbed from this site.
Maybe I should track my most sought after Heroes, those would be right now:

• Iron Man
• Punisher
• Rogue
• Deadpool
• Nightcrawler
• Juggernaut

And because I’ve never written it down, if memory serves me right, I now have:

• 3x normal stash
• 1x reagents stash
• hero stash for: HWK, SW, GMB, HT, STM, MM

Money I spent so far, if I remember correctly:

• 15$ for 1575G in the first week (1 Hero for 450G, 2 Heroes for 225G each?, 1 crafting stash) – 1200G
• 10$ for 1000G (3 hero stashes) – 1050G
• 10$ for 1000G (3 hero stashes) – 1050G
• 10$ for 1000G (2 normal stashes) – 1000G

That’s ~11$/10€ per month (still got some spare G) so far, compared to the ~14$/13€ for other MMOs.
That’s ~14$/13€ per month (still got some spare G) so far, exactly like in other MMOs.

So wow, a month has passed and I didn’t play anything besides Marvel Heroes.
I was just busy levelling Captain America when on Sunday morning I noticed that my bags were exploding with stuff (as usual) and I didn’t have a pet to feed all those delicious cosmic items to, so I set on getting a pet. Not having enough Cosmic Worldstones I first tried my luck with a few Fortune Cards – no luck of course. Then I saw that you can just buy pets for 1m credits but they have a prestige requirement. The cosmic event is going on right now which seems to be the thing to do prestige, so I didn’t hesitate (this would be the perfect moment for a pun that only works in German…) to start a prestige run on Human Torch, who seems to be my most AoE-heavy grindy hero at the moment. I managed to get to 56 until Sunday evening by basically doing Midtown Patrol for 20 levels, then Industrial City until around midnight. I used 3 2h +50% exp potions in the process. Then yesterday after work I finished the remaining 4 levels in Midtown (Monday!) and also brought Captain to from 47 to 60 there.
So this is how it looks. The “Random Hero Token” thing already bit me twice now, I got a 2nd Human Torch (translates to Ultimate token) and now a 2nd Storm. Meh. If I got my statistics math correct this should only be a 3%((8/44) * (8/44)) chance, so I don’t think they are really random – there was another unlikely 8% ((13/44) * (13/44))  case of getting 2 duplicate tokens in a row in the household.
But whatever, 30 more splinters and I can try again, I am not immensely pissed about dupes. Still unsure what to level next, probably Storm, maybe Ghost Rider.