It’s been awhile since somebody has posted about supports here, so I am going to give my personal views and suggestions for improvements. Most have been “borrowed” from elsewhere.
In my view, supports are a fantastic idea that have been limited by a limited roll-out and several issues with they way they operate. The supports themselves are interesting; they could made more powerful, but that won’t really matter until the whole system is usable by players, which is my focus here.
First, the UIs for supports need significant improvement. I can’t list all of the issues here, but a few:
- I should be able to tell which character has a support equipped from the support screen. At the moment, it’s not even clear which supports are equipped at all from this screen which is directly linked from the main screen. This needs to change; ideally, there would be something like a character icon placed on the support card in the main support screen, but there are other ways to do this.
- I should be able to un-equip a support from a character, without having to just equip it on a different character.
- I should be able to tell which support is equipped by a character without having to select the character, and move to the support tab of the character. Like above, just putting a little icon on the character would do it; for example if Dr. Strange has equipped Wong, a little Wong icon in the character roster would make it clear. The little “+” icon that was added is a start, but a same size icon with a picture would be much better.
- While in a battle, I should be able to tell which supports are equipped by which characters. This will be that much more important when they’re introduced for PVP.
That’s enough of the UI complaints for the moment, but essentially the entire presentation should be re-thought. The pictures for the support are awesome, but the interface is lacking.
Second, please, please, please do something about RISO accumulation. Other than a small amount of spend after the initial launch, I’ve spent no RISO since. I play a lot (7x clear PVE, T25 or 50 PVP season, etc.); not as much as some on the forums, but still hours per day plus VIP and some other spending (not close to whale levels). I currently have 156K RISO, which is enough to get ONE support to level 130. That’s over months of play. I understand that one of the design goals is to make them difficult to level, but in the same amount of time I’ve champed 4 5* characters, and have enough ISO (or max-champed 3* that I can sell) to champ 3 more. This is crazy. Either RISO rewards should be significantly increased, or availability needs to be increased so that more duplicates are drawn.
Third, please, please, please do something about acquiring supports. It is not clear to me how to get them at this point; the ways to get them are almost laughably bad. Beginner supports in PVE vaults? OK, I guess as a start. Release vaults where I have a higher change of getting a 2* than even a beginner support? That’s a bad deal for my HP. 250 CP for a 4* that I don’t need and one pull that is most likely to get a 3* support that I probably already have? Please; that’s 10 Latest Legend pulls. T25 season? That’s the top 1/2 of 1 percent for one pull. And adding stones and making them only available to a season winner was an insult; “Hey, look at these really cool things! Too bad that you’re never, never, never going to get them”. At the very least they should be in all vaults including Deadpool, high awards at high PVE SCLs should reward higher level tokens than beginner, and they should be added to re-supply and champion level rewards. Would it kill anybody to add an advanced support token to VIP?
Like I said when I started this missive, supports have several positives. The art is cool. They still have the possibility of changing the way the game is played in a way that isn’t completely game-breaking. I WANT them to work; they just need a refinement to achieve the goal the developers had in mind when they put in the work on the feature.
Thanks; I hope the devs are already working on their ideas for improvements; who knows, since they were released with Infinity War, the plan may be to drop these kinds of improvements for the DVD release together with activating them for PVP. But, please do not release these for PVP until the more fundamental issues have been addressed.
