Regarding the diversity thing, It is entirely possible that this truly is a goal of the “True Healing” change, but it’s saddled onto the cash-grabby, flawed Health Pack system. Frankly, I think the relative payoff in terms of diversity is going to be low from this change - that is to say, it will fail to have a MAJOR effect in the stated desired area (I will grant it may have some minor effect, but I would be surprised if it ends up being significant). Below are some thoughts about what changes would encourage me as a player to want to use a broader array of my characters. Some of these have been mentioned by me before in other threads, or are inspired by other forum members’ posts. This is more of a compilation of ideas with some new ones mixed in.
1) Ease the covers bottleneck - There are more *** characters than * and ** combined… what?? *** means rare, right? And getting any *** character to a competitive level takes a ton of time to get enough covers to raise the soft level cap and make the abilities decent (or it takes a ton of $/HP, for the wealthy or hackers). Players in **-land are stuck with a minimally diverse playable roster and a slog of a time to get into ***-land. So what can we do about this?
<strong>-1a) Make it easier to hunt down covers for specific ***/****'s</strong> - As the pool of *** characters has grown and grown, we're mostly still stuck with tokens that pull from the entire pool (plus the **'s... good lord, so many duplicate **'s!!!). Event specific tokens give like a 1% boost to the odds of featured character(s). Maybe they want to encourage spending HP directly buying covers, but even then you must randomly pull or tournament-win the color you need. I would love to play with Lazy Daken, but I only have his Blue and Black powers - he runs on Purple, and I can't buy a Purple Daken even if I want to pay 1250 HP (as a rule, I do not). So how can we help get needed covers, encouraging actually playing with characters?
**--1a1) Spend Standard/Heroic tokens to change the odds** - Much like in the Minish Cap Zelda game for GBA, instead of 1 token per pull, spend multiple tokens at once to raise odds. Maybe even make it character-specific (1 token = +1% or +5% chance to character of your choice).
**--1a2) Have multiple "Heroic" class token "slots" that pull from different pools** - Maybe 5-10 possible ***'s per pool, so you can spend your tokens aiming for specific covers you need. Spend your Heroic token in the Avengers slot or the X-Men slot or the Villains slot, etc. etc. Divvy them up however.
**--1a3) Danger Room mode** - Complete challenges with a single character to gain covers for them. The more covers you already have for that character, the harder the challenges become. These could be like the item crafting puzzles from the original Puzzle Quest - Challenge of the Warlords.
<strong>-1b) Increase the pool of * and **'s in a way that doesn't create a needless ISO-sink</strong> - The biggest argument I've heard against adding more * and **'s is that the last thing we need is one more place to spend valuable ISO on characters that we won't eventually use anymore. Great point. Since the game loves having multiple versions of characters at different rarity levels, let's embrace that but change the implementation. Have multiple versions of characters who share a (best possible) level and level cap. So if I'm just starting out, let's say I get MBW to level 30 and then get my first covers for OBW. OBW's level cap is now 30, even with just one cover - and she is at level 30. If I spend ISO to level one of them to 31, it levels both of them to 31. Past MBW's hard cap, only OBW will keep gaining the levels. Once I have GSBW, it levels all three (or both) of them, as high as each version's max level will go - past 85, only GSBW still gets to grow. Transitioning is now easier, and Lazy characters don't feel so tacked on - they become the natural progression. This has the bonus of opening up wide rosters for **-land players as *** characters get * and ** versions. Also eases the ISO bottleneck. Speaking of...
2) Ease the ISO bottleneck - I would love to switch up my game with more characters, but I can’t. With the level of opponents I face, I can’t reasonably bring a partially-covered level 54 character to the fight and expect to win consistently. The growth rate, especially as characters hit higher levels, makes bringing a wide array of characters up to speed take forever. So how can we get more ISO to make more characters useful and desirable to use?
**-2a) Add traditional RPG-style battle experience** - Let the characters who fight get a benefit for doing so. As it stands now, the best way to level someone is to take your best characters and have them go win for a while, then spend the ISO on someone with potential. Wouldn't it make more sense to grow build up weaker characters by actually playing with them? That way the player also gets to get used to them, how they work, who they team well with, etc. Keep the post-battle ISO drop as a bonus that can be spent on whatever character, but let the characters who fight get an ISO infusion as part of the spoils of victory. And tie this to to the relative power of the enemy team vs the player team. If I can drop a PvE team of level 300's, with my 141's, give me a nice reward. If I do it with 85's, give me a nicer one. If I bully a level 30 team of HAMMER soldiers with my 141's, minimize that reward. Give me an incentive to use the weaker characters!
3) Balance the existing characters better - Currently, Loki and Lazy Thor are supposedly of an equal tier. Patch and Nerf-Spider-Man are too. Sentry is just ***'s, same as Ragnarok. There’s always going to be some variance, but seriously, people gravitate towards a few characters because they are flatly better characters to use. Who will gain you more wins, OBW or Bullseye? Ares or Bag-Man? CMags or Daredevil? So let’s…
**-3a) Let 2-power characters level up to the 3-power max level for their star rating** - Level caps are tied to # of covers. A 2-power character COULD hang with 3-power characters if the powers were great and they were allowed to level up to their star-level's actual 13/13 level cap. If we want to keep some 2-power guys, fine, but don't artificially keep their raw stats underpowered too. I think a lot of people would occasionally run Doom if he could just be level 141 without any other changes, for example. Or...
**-3b) Give a third power to 2-power characters** - Some characters really need to do something more. Loki, for example, needs a way to matter more outside of being a nice roadie for Patch. Plus, it's fun to get a new trick for our old dogs!
**-3c) Rebalance existing 3-power characters** - We all hate nerfs to characters we like, but I think most of us can tolerate small nerfs. Spider-Man went from nearly auto-include to a Loki/Daredevil tier ***. That's not diversity, that's removal from the metagame. A quality nerf would drop someone who's so outside the power distribution curve to within the distribution curve, so they would remain a solid option, but others would be just as viable. I fear what's in store for CMags... just make a small tweak at first and then observe. Tweak again as needed to keep him a highly powered but not overpowered character. But you know what's better than nerfs? Buff some of our weaker characters! These boards are full of great ideas on how to power up weak characters and gently power down overpowered characters.
4) PvP Defenses - Part of the reason it’s tough to take a chance on some characters is that they will leave a player wide open for defensive losses in PvP. Now, maybe it’s OK to have some characters whose specialty is scaring off attackers and you take the hit to offense to buff your defense. OK, that’s strategy. But the penalty is too severe as it stands. Point loss is brutal in PvP, I’ve lost over 200 points just over the course of a single match during frenzied times at least once or twice. 200! In the amount of time I can win a max of 50 points in a real outlier situation. Limit the losses and don’t make people sweat about defenses they can’t really control anyway. If you have to raise the tiers of progression rewards because it’s easier to climb higher, OK. People would rather have to climb higher than get constantly pulled down (or at least I would).
Well, that was an enormous text dump of thoughts. If you bore with me through the whole thing, thanks for reading. I think these are the types of changes that will ACTUALLY increase character diversity far more than “True Healing”. Open to critiques, other ideas, etc.!
