3 easy ways to make 4* progression more of a thing

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
1

Progressing to 3* land has been made far far easier with the change to PvP reward structure and the inclusion of DDQ. I can’t stress enough how much better these changes have made the game; last year at this time the 3* progression was a terrible, discouraging slog…now it really is just a matter of time.

The 4* progression, however, doesn’t exist; you have to hit 1000 in PvP on a consistent and regular basis and/or wait for the daily resupplies that you’re looking for. The first is difficult at best (depending on your roster) and the second is a little ridiculous (500 days to TGT, new-comers!); if 4* play is going to become a standard part of the game, there just has to be a better and faster way.

Here are 3 such ways.

  1. Change PvE rewards. There’s a huge discussion about this in General right now, so I’ll just make one quick suggestion. Take 4* covers entirely out of the rewards at the end of PvE events and make them high value progression targets instead. Make it so that dedicated, hard-working players can earn a single 4* cover in any given PvE event (similar to the way they can do it in PvP right now, but without the harsh competition obstacles of PvP). The effect of this would be fairly large; few people win 4* covers in PvE, but a lot of people probably could hit progression targets (if they were set properly…I’m looking at you, first run of Heroic Oscorp).

  2. Change Season rewards. Giving out 4* covers to top -scoring alliances makes for a lot of ugly mercenary work and player trading, as well as a lot of hurt feelings. Why not take that away? Give us alliance progression rewards per season, and put the new 4* cover at the end of those instead of at the end of the competition. Everybody on your team works together and everyone eventually (and hopefully) gets something cool out of it. The effect of this would be moderate; the small pool of top 100 alliances each season would be broadened to include other dedicated performers who might just not be in the top couple of percent. Of course, the obtainability of those progs (as always) would determine the reach of this change.

  3. After each full load of 3* covers in DDQ, do a one week mini-run that featured 4* characters. Obviously, taco tokens would have to be revised so that it didn’t rain 4* covers, but it would certainly be cool to have another way to get guaranteed 4* characters. This would have the largest effect of all of the proposals I’ve made, and honestly might be too much. But if we’re all expected to eventually start moving in 4* land, we have to get a bunch of those covers somehow.

2

agree except #3 no need to adjust taco token rates, i have gotten more 3* from standards in the same time frame, plus it will only be like 2 token per person

3

I think we need to revisit whether or not there even needs to be such a thing as a 4* progression. Let’s just call it an XForce progression. Until they nerf him. Then we can just forget about it altogether.

4

Yeah, the original post was written before TGT’s nerfs were announced. If she is how strong all the 4* characters can be, moving to 4* land is a waste of time.

5

I think all of these are great ideas! They’d speed up the 4* transition (more like create a 4* transition) but keep it at a manageable pace. Personally, even if not all of the 4*s are as powerful as XForce, I’d still like to be able to play with them for fun- kinda hard to do that when I have so few covers for them though.

6

First and foremost, there needs to be more 4* covers first. There are over about 35 different 3* characters right now, which is why DDQ is really more of a consolation than an improvement, given the 13 required covers to max a character with potentially 2 more to spec it properly. (that’s over 450 covers to max out every 3*)

With Xavier, we’re up to a whopping eight 4s. Multiplied by 13. that’s 104 covers total for the entire 4 roster. Add in to that, everyone just flocks to XForce/Thor (duplicates included) and makes three million complaints about the other six like the spoiled brats they are, and we end up with THE blandest endgame that could exist right now. Until we have more 4s capable of standing on their own, instead of team leaders for 3s like Star Lord and Xavier, or at least get more cooperative 4* team sets like already exists in the 3* bracket (Daken/Patch, Luke/Fist, Spider-Man and almost any Red/Green/Black like Hulk, Punisher, Human Torch, Gamora) to compete with XForce/4Thor, the point of creating a 4* progression system will be too empty right now, given that people care about exactly TWO of them.

I’m all for adding a 4* as a progression reward to PvE events, but until we get some tangible balance and variety to the 4* tier so people aren’t whining incessantly about how X isn’t as good as you-know-who, not many people are going to applaud the move, and in the end, it turns the 4* tier into more of a destination to be reached instead of progressed to. (meaning it’ll be more about the maxing of 4* characters instead of steady process of building them to that level.)

7

Why is someone a “spoiled brat” for correctly pointing out that the other 4s are pretty useless? Especially since…

… you agree with them

8

Bwahahhahahahahahhaha…I’m amazed he wrote all that and didn’t see the contradiction.

9

Neither of those is a reflection of my personal opinion. Most people only care about XThor, but I’m allowed to have a dissenting opinion. It doesn’t mean my lone opinion is going to make a dent in the way the current meta is. I don’t believe any character in game is absolutely useless, especially not any of the 4s. However, only XForce and Thor get special treatment because they involve some of the safest and simplest offensive movesets in the 4 tier. Xforce is damage, healing, and breaking tiles, while Thorina is damage, stun, delete enemy specials and Charged Tile generation for more damage. All this while sharing only one color in common, that also happens to be XForce’s situational heal. The computer itself shows why this duo is a child’s play pair up, as they lose very little potency on defense. Before Xavier, there were no other pairs as efficient as these two combined, but even the proposed Xavier/Devil Dinosaur combo is having its naysayers, and that disappoints me. Immensely. Even before release, the first thing on every endgamer’s mind was “not as good as you-know-who”.

Maybe “spoiled brat” was the wrong term to use, but I can’t think of a positive term to use for someone who overloads their roster with duplicate XThors while simultaneously dismissing any character with a strategy more complicated than “Use actives when available” as immediately ‘useless’.

I mentioned the leader characters, like how Star Lord is meant to be hooked up with Rocket&Groot and Gamora or how Xavier’s double passives and invisibility means he needs attackers at his side. There are 3*+4* combinations that would be brutal if a 3* character had a 4* equivalent. Even more deadly than 4Thor. And then we get 4* combinations that feel SO plausibly efficient, but end up cut down by XThor’s smash, slash, and trash simplicity, like Elektra/Invisible Woman. Perfect color complements, includes defensive options in Invisibility + Shadowstep, damage over time walls with Force Bubbles + Ballet of Death, and heavy Strike building with Double Double Cross. But no, as feasible as it as a 2-woman mix up, XThor just trashes the board with X-Force slashes and Surgical Strikes, Striking Distances erase protects and strikes, and all of their attacks are single hit damage beasts that might as well treat protect tiles like paper, without even counting the health disadvantage. So right there already is shining proof of how overpowered Xthor is in the limited 4* roster when two other characters in the exact same tier with their own manageable strategy are shut down like nothing.

But are they useless? No. That strategy could still be a powerful shutdown for lots of PvE nodes and 3* matchups in PvP, but none of the ‘elite’ would bother finding that out for themselves because it’s just easier to Xthor everything that stands in their way instead, deleting other 4*s to make room for more XThors, then complain when a PvE/PvP features a character ‘nobody uses’.

And that’s where I get off saying that that a 4* ‘progression’ system would be ‘empty’. Not pointless. “Empty”. It could be helpful for new players to build maybe ONE 4* to give them fighting chance in Mid-High tier PvP, if only by level advantage alone, but with XThor still being the current overpowered one-trick pony, all I can see is a lot more duplicates of it making the endgame a frustrating nightmare. All unless you were to either nerf XThor further, buff the existing 4* underdogs, or remove XThor as a PvE progression prize altogether. None of these will make any XThor reliants happy, so maybe that’s why I used the term “spoiled brat”, and perhaps that was uncalled for. And I apologize for that.

In the end, I don’t doubt that a better 4* progression system will be put in place eventually, but at the very least, we’d need more working combinations besides the one dominant strategy before a person’s method of playing MPQ from start to ‘finish’ is just ‘More XThor’

10

If any part of what you just said implies that Invisible Woman has even a niche place on someone’s squad, I have to respectfully disagree. I have her fully covered and leveled to (I don’t know) about 90…and she is easily the least effective member of any team she joins. The under-leveled and under-covered 3* characters I have who are lower-leveled than she consistently bring more to the fight, and her incredibly low HP and incredibly high ability costs make her as much of a liability as an asset. So I don’t mind admitting that the hate toward non X-Force/Goddess 4*s is probably a bit overblown, but it extends with complete and utter justification toward Invisible Woman.

She’s just awful.

11

The skill disparity is interesting. When I first started playing character caps were different. Revisions were made during the ‘releveling’
** | old cap | change | new cap
1* | level 50 | +0 | 50
2* | level 85 | +9 | 94
3* | level 141 | +16 | 166
4* | level 240 | +30 | 270

The rationale for this change was simple: too many players were able to use 2* rosters and compete against 3* teams - so progression wasn’t a thing. People were just making dupes of 2* teams to have backups doing just fine. After the releveling a 1* roster had a much harder time taking down a 2* team, and 2* teams had a much harder time taking down 3* teams.
It broke down in 3-4* land, because there weren’t really enough 4* characters, and your options were bag-lady and a pre-buff (terrible) x-force.

The logic there seemed sound. There should be an obvious benefit (and therefore: incentive) to trying to progress to the next level. Fury might not be in the current XForce/Goddess tier, but he is a decent 4*. Buffed XForce and Goddess seemed to indicate that there should be a desire to achieve 4* status.

But then it all fell apart. Recent 4* characters are big bags of hit points, but aren’t necessarily better/stronger than a 3* team. Nerfing Goddess so surge/smite has roughly the same damage/AP of a decent 3* seems to continue the argument. It feels like they are trying to bring 4* characters back down to a 3+ tier instead of a true 4* class.

12

I realized a metaphor for the progression problem and prize structure of the game, hopefully it makes sense.

On a crazy holiday night (New Years 1999 in SF) I was trying to take the subway home after midnight. The platform where you wait for the train is down a very long escalator. Security had to keep shutting down the escalator because the platform at the bottom was full; there was no room on the platform for more people until trains came through to clear some away.

In this metaphor: the prize tiers where you can win a 4* is the train platform; and its full. In order for a new player to win a 4* cover they have to outperform players who already have 4* rosters. That’s not an easy thing to do, but the platform is already full. Would it work if they just “made the platform bigger”?

Existing 4* players often win the 4* cover in PVP and trade it in for 1000 ISO. They didn’t need the cover, but they won it anyway. What if the existing prize tiers all moved down 2-3 levels. (With some reshuffling..)

instead of
#26-100 - 1x 3* covers
#6-25 - 2x 3* covers
#2-5 - 3x 3* covers
#1 - 4* cover + previous prizes

You pushed those ranks down a little.
151-250 - 1x 3* covers
101-150 - 2x 3* covers
51-100 - 3x 3* covers
26-50 - 4* cover + previous prizes
– from here down prize tiers just add big wads of ISO - which is almost all a 4* player really want any more. (maybe HP)
11-25 - 3000 ISO + previous prizes
2-10 - 2000 ISO + all previous prizes (including ISO)
1 - 2000 ISO + all previous prizes (including ISO)

There will be obvious problems with this, and prize tiers will get toned down, but just putting out an idea.

(The only alternative is to wait for 4* players to get bored and quit to make room for new blood.)