Walkthrough and forum survival guide.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Tips and Guides
1

Marvel Puzzle Quest Walkthrough
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There are plenty of character guides and setup and levelling guides around in the forum, and guides on different events and formats. This tries to bring a lot of it together as a simple set of instructions and guidelines. I’m more concerned with optimal teams than with individual character comparisons. If you find success with characters not recommended here, that’s great. The purpose of the game is not to get fully kitted out 5 stars, it is to have fun.

When you see a number in brackets like this [1] it means there is more information available in the following post referring to that number. This convention allows me to maintain a readable narrative without digressing in the main post while providing context and useful information in the footnotes.

Starting out
You’ve started the game and you’ve played through whatever tutorial currently exists. The tutorial has changed a number of times so I’m not going to cover it. You should have entered the world with a shiny 1* Iron Man[2]. He should be 1/0/0[4].

To start with we’re going to go to the prologue missions. You should only have the initial set of missions available to you, as you need to complete all the missions in one set before you unlock the next.

Clicking on an individual mission will show the available rewards. Once you have selected a particular mission your opponents are displayed and the available rewards will be shown cycling, including the awards that have been acquired[5]. We’re particularly interested in rewards that either award covers specifically or recruit tokens.[6] But to get to those we’re going to have to get through some missions that don’t have the rewards we are after.

The first mission has three level 1 Goons.[7]. Their abilities create countdown tiles of green or purple[9], so if possible you should look to match red, yellow or blue tiles. You’re going to get better damage out of them because they are your Iron Man’s dominant colours, and you are also going to have more opportunity to match away any green or purple countdown tiles that do appear.

As you progress through the missions you will win Hero Points as some of the rewards. Hero Points, or HP as they are generally referred to, can be used to buy token packs, Health Packs or roster slots. For now the only thing worth buying is roster slots.

You start with four free roster slots, which should let you collect the characters mentioned later. Your first roster slot will cost you 25 HP, the next 50HP and so on. Roster slot costs max out at 1000HP each. While you start with enough roster slots for this pat of teh game, you’re going to want 4 or 5 more to collect the characters that will allow you to advance.

You’re also going to be accumulating ISO-8 for levelling your heroes. That’s the best use for it, and eventually it will become the bane of your existence as you can never seem to scrape together enough. But starting out you may actually lack covers and your character max levels will be so low that you can’t spend your ISO. Personally I recommend buying standard tokens when you hit that wall, as one or two extra covers and the associated levels will help you push through the prologue.

The team

At this tier the characters you want to collect are Iron Man, Black Widow, Storm and Juggernaught. You will get Hawkeye covers from the prologue, and his abilities can be handy for dealing with goons, but that roster slot will quickly go to another character. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use Hawkeye, just don’t get attached to him unless you are buying slots with real money.

  • Iron Man is well balanced with three damage colour abilities.

  • Black Widow brings a high quality stun which is particularly useful when going up against a single powerful enemy. Some of the later prologue missions will have you taking on a single opponent who level may be higher than yours. That 5 turn stun is a gamechanger. It will also come in handy when you head into PvP with one boosted enemy accompanied by cannon fodder. Her purple is good, but if you put max covers into it it become too slow and expensive to ever use.

  • Juggernaught’s red hurts him, which is bad from a health pack point of view, but if your opponent has enough resources, or a countdown about to expire that would do more damage, then let fly. His green is a very cheap board shake.[/color][11] He’s also particularly useful in one of the DDQ missions, which are discussed more in The Tier 3 section.[/*]

  • Storm is the first character after Iron Man that the game will reward you with a significant number of covers for. She compliments Iron Man well as their only overlapping colour is yellow. This means you will get better match damage on more colours, but also that you have abilities that make use of any green or black AP you collect.
    Her yellow and green abilities shake the board, so when fighting goons you should wait until there are countdown tiles you cannot deal with before using those abilities. By significantly rearranging the board they can destroy the tile that was bothering you, or line it up so you can match it yourself.
    [/list]

    Beyond those you should also be looking to collect any covers you find for OBW, Wolverine, Storm, Thor, Daken and Magneto in the 2 star tier.

    Beyond the Prologue

    Outside of the prologue you have two other tabs, Story and Versus. These are most commonly referred to as PvE and PvP, which are abbreviations for Player vs Environment and Player vs Player respectively. The difference is that in PvE you are matched up against challenges specifically planned out by the developers    [12]whereas in PvP you are matched up against other players characters. The intricacies of PvP will be covered in a later Tier post.

    For now what you need to know about PvP is this: Most events have a feature character. If you do not have the feature character one will be provided for you for the duration of the match, with 1/1/1 covers. This feature character will also be boosted, which means they will be level 70 for most PvP events. The point is they completely outclass your meagre assortment of characters. And your opponent will be given a similar character on their team.

    You’re not going to be able to make it very far with your current crew, but you should be able to win one or two battles. Target their weaker 1* characters first, so that they lose access to abilities quickly, then focus on taking down their loaner. Even through they can’t hand out significant damage, Black Widow’s stun and AP steal abilities and Storm’s abilities that generate AP can seriously help your behemoth and hinder your opponent’s.

    The aim here is only to win one or two battles. You should get one basic recruitment token as progression when you win your first match and one for placing close to last when the event ends. You also may win covers or ISO for individual battles you win. If you can get to 200 points you can win the featured 2* cover that you can see by looking at the event rewards. But that may be a bit ambitious until you have added some covers and levels to your roster.

    On the PvE side the events will normally have trivial goon nodes that you can take out. There are often one or two missions that you need to complete before the full board of missions is offered to you. I’ll cover this in more detail later. For now you just need to be aware that there may be 2 or 3 semi challenging missions before you get to easier ones. Even a minimum level 1/1/1 2* that has been scaled down can be too powerful until we get some proper cover numbers on our team.

    You may be offered loaner characters for one or two missions in PvE though, and it’s a fun opportunity to see what you can someday acquire. Even if you cannot win a battle the event should still award you some recruitment tokens for participating when it finishes.

    Alliances

    You should join an Alliance at random. There is no point in shopping around because you have nothing to offer besides a warm body behind a keyboard, but that has some semblance of value. Every day you play as a member of an Alliance you receive free ISO for every otehr member of the Alliance who played on the previous day. Further all those PvE and PvP events give rewards when they finish to Alliances that participated, which means a bit of extra free ISO and recruitment tokens.

    Along with that daily ISO boost you will get a reward for each day you play, which is called resupply. Most of the rewards are random but some are fixed, and you can see the fixed ones on the resupply timeline. The longer you play the better the fixed rewards become, eventually giving you 5* covers I believe if you play for over 2 years. You will also get HP, ISO, Health Packs, recruitment tokens and CP from resupply. Do not spend your CP on anything, it’s more valuable than HP and I’ll go into it in more detail in Tier 4.

    You can also ask your alliance mates for team ups. Team ups are the abilities you can choose to take into a battle when committing to a fight. If you have some high level players in your alliance they may be able to give you well levelled 3 or 4* abilities that will instantly win PvP matchups at your level. The team up you receive is randomly selected from the activated abilities present on the character your alliance mate has submitted to your team up request. If you get a bad team up it’s more likely that the character offered had better abilities, but the random selection picked the bad one.

    Progression

    The plan is to continue like this, making progress in the prologue and scrounging together recruitment tokens and their associated covers until we have manage to acquire 4 or 5 covers for a couple of our 2* targets. There are 2* cover rewards in the prologue as well in the later chapters, which will bring us to this point more quickly. Once that has been achieved we move onto Tier 2 in the posts below.

2
  1. This was the footnote example text.
  1. There are many different versions of the same character in the game. For example there currently exist 3 different versions of Iron Man and 4 of Wolverine. Demiurge have differentiated between them by giving them different names and also by placing them on different rarity tiers.[3] So if you want to be clear on which character you are referring to you can use their unique name or refer to their rarity tier. The board will also use abbreviations of full names to refer to characters, so MBW, OBW and GSBW for example are used to refer to the three different tiers of black widow - Modern, Original and Grey Suit.

There is a handy reference guide here which is a good start.

  1. The star ratings define the rarity of characters, and they come in tiers from 1* to 5*. Different tiers of characters are obtained in different ways. It is important to grasp that the * rating only refers to rarity of the covers for the character in this game, and isn’t any kind of wider judgement about their power or anything in the Marvel Universe. It’s a regular newbie complaint that character X doesn’t deserve a certain star rating. Please don’t be the person who starts the next thread on that.

If you think that’s wrong, please bear in mind the fact that there are four versions of Wolverine on four different rarity tiers. Same goes for Peter Parker’s Spiderman. The rarity of an instance of a character does determine their health and relative power levels within his game, so 5 star wolverine is dramatically more powerful than 2 star Wolverine.

It appears that the 1,2 and 3 star tiers are ‘complete’, in that no characters have been added to those tiers in a long time. 4 stars are prevalently being released now with 5 stars slowly being added to the mix. You can generally expect 2 character releases a month and complaints about characters being released ‘too often’.

  1. Each character is represented by a particular cover of a comic that featured them. As a result character rewards are referred to as ‘covers’. Most characters have 3 different colours associated with their covers, apart from a few 1* exceptions. A character who is described as 4/4 would have four covers in their first colour and 4 in their second. 3/2/1 would have 3 in the first colour, 2 in the second and 1 in the third.

The first cover you get in a colour gives you access to a new ability and increases your character’s max level by a minor amount. Subsequent covers improve that ability and substantially increase your character’s maximum level. The fourth and fifth cover in an abillity normally drastically improve that ability. Characters are limited to 13 covers, so you have to make decisions on which ability colours are going to get the more powerful fourth and fifth covers. (Except the 2 cover people, they can go 5/5, but their level maximum is reduced due to not getting as many max level increases from covers.)

  1. This tip used to read “The first time you complete any mission you are guaranteed to receive one of the available rewards, randomly selected. When you repeat the mission you have a chance of receiving one of the other awards, or instead receiving 20 ISO. Over time this will tax your very sanity as you try desperately to achieve the one reward you actually wanted and realise you have expended 20 minutes of your life, all of your health pack and that one reward has still eluded you.”

Since it was written the game has been changed, so now you can only win one of the selected prizes, and will win one every time you complete the mission. For prologue nodes they lock you out once you have garnered all the rewards, while event missions will still let you complete them for even points, but nothing extra will be awarded, not even 20 iso-8.

I have kept the old explanation here because I assume references to 20 ISO-8 will continue for a while to come, so this give you context.

  1. Tokens are converted into a random cover. Basic tokens can convert into any 1,2 or 3 star covers with one stars being prevalent and three stars being rare. This is the one token type where the odds aren’t disclosed. For all other token types the screen that lets you expend a token should also have a ? icon that shows the odds of pulling anything.

Some tokens use a ‘vault’ system. With these tokens you can see all the prizes you could potentially draw with the token. The token will randomly allocate you a prize from the vault and remove that prize from those available in the vault. This means that if you have enough tokens you are guaranteed to eventually get every prize that was generated in the vault. These vaults are randomly generated based on feature characters for the event, so everyone’s vault will be different.

  1. A Goon is an opponent who doesn’t move tiles as part of their turn but instead places countdown tiles that have fixed effects[8]. Most of these countdown tiles cost AP to perform so you generally have a few rounds before countdowns start appearing. To fund these abilities each goon generates AP in associated colours at the start of each round. When you kill off a goon the opposing team no longer gets the AP they were generating. This sometimes dictates a strategy of killing squishier goons first to reduce the more powerful goon’s capacity to use their powers.

These countdown tiles values decrement by one at the start of your opponents turn and when the countdown reaches zero the tile is destroyed and the effect happens. Tiles are processed in rows from left to right, top to bottom of the grid. The order of processing is important because some tiles will destroy areas of the board around them, or cause matches when they vanish. This may affect how you prioritise dealing with tiles that expire in the same round.

By clicking on your opponents in battle you can rotate through them as targets. As a new opponent rotates to the front their countdown tiles will be briefly highlighted. This allows you to identify which opponent you need to focus on to prevent a specific countdown from going off.

  1. By this definition Galactus is technically a Goon. I just want to make it clear that any entity that devours worlds should not be referred to as a goon. In case they hold a grudge.
  1. Or Pink. D3 claim it’s purple but everyone has their own opinion. Anywhere inside the game that tile colours are mentioned these tiles are referred to as purple. But if you are bored and want to start an argument on here refer to them repeatedly as ‘pink’. Or ‘violet’ or ‘magenta’ just to confuse everyone.
  1. Some people argue that the only thing worth purchasing with HP ever is roster slots. It really depends on if you ever plan on spending any of your own money on the game. If you are then soon is the best time to do it, as 3 or 4 extra roster slots now will be invaluable as you acquire single covers for more powerful heroes you’d rather not bin.

Health Packs should only be purchased when they are necessary to hit an event target. Which won’t be an issue for a roster this low. If you want to treat yourself to tokens then at this point heroic tokens are the best. They are the cheapest to buy and at this point you need, well, everyone. The other thing you can spend on, shields, will be an issue for later.

If you plan on never funding the game then you’re going to need every HP you can scrape up for roster slots. There’s no treating yourself to anything else for a long time.

  1. A board shake is an ability that drastically alters the board. Most board shakes destroy a number of tiles form random locations, though there are some abilities that swap tile locations without destroying any. There are also abilities that change the colour of multiple tiles, which can cause matches and yet again significantly alter the board.

Storm, the other character you will have covers for is one of the best board shakers in the game, with both her yellow and green abilities significantly altering the field of play.

  1. Some might contend that PvE events are poorly planned. About the only event everyone seems to enjoy is The Gauntlet. And whenever there is a bug or failure in an event people scream out for ‘compensation’. I’ve never worked out what they are being compensated for but it is critically important that they be compensated.

Heroic events which limit your roster choices are generally unpopular. They come up a lot in the rotation.

3

Second Tier
At this stage you should have at least a couple of 2* characters with 4 covers. This is the easiest Tier transition, as the power gap between a 1 star and a 2 star is relatively large[1]. This means you should make the jump as soon as you have remotely usable 2 star to avoid wasting ISO levelling characters you will only need for niche content and will probably end up selling off to preserve roster slots.

While stats are of interest, the big difference between your 1 star roster and your 2 stars is teamwork. Your 1 stars had mostly standalone abilities, whereas your 2 stars can enhance each other. Wolverine can generate strike tiles that Original Black Widow gets double benefit from with her Espionage ability. Magneto can generate blue to power Classic Storm’s Windstorm ability[2].

Many players really struggle with this Tier, not because it is difficult to work with, but because they start getting lucky 3*, 4* and even 5* covers and try to accommodate them in limited roster slots which ends up with a mess of a roster. I personally don’t find a character with a single cover in a single ability as much fun to play as a fully covered character with a range of abilities. The diverse abilities isn’t the only good thing, a 2* with 5 covers in an ability will generally do more damage than a 3 or even 4 star with one cover in that ability.

If you luck into a cover for one of these 3 stars - Cyclops, Iron Fist, Patch, Falcon, Hood or Spiderman or for Hulkbuster, Iceman, Jean Grey, Red Hulk or Professor X from the 4* team you should try to keep them. Everyone else gets thrown on the ISO bonfire unless you are spending money to buy roster slots. You just don’t have the space. And under no circumstances open a Legendary Token, the reward won’t help you right now and could considerably hinder you.

Scaling
The game scales your opponents based on both your roster strength and your performance history. The people you are competing against for placement will be in some part determined by your roster quality[5]. Your actual opponents in matches will be scaled to match you in PvE, or selected from other players of similar standing in PvP.

Performance history includes a number of factors - performance in previous events, battles won in this event and even how well you won a battle. Winning battles while taking little to no damage will increase your scaling faster than winning[6]. In theory losing battles reduces your scaling, but it takes a lot of losing to see any notable effect.

As a newer player scaling runs in your favour. You don’t really have a playing history for events, and your roster is very weak, so your opponents don’t scale appreciably. Opponents in PvE events can scale up to level 395, which is a serious step up from what you currently face or are liable to face for an appreciable time to come. And when you face say a level 200 opponent instead of a level 40 opponent, it isn’t just a matter of their damage and health increasing, the fights on average take much longer, so you need to put more time into the game. If you only have half an hour to play you will amass more points at a lower level than you will at a higher level[7].

Special Tiles
We’ve already seen countdown tiles, but apart from them most other special tiles are permanent additions to the board until they are destroyed. Special tiles controlled by your team have white symbols whilst your opponents have black symbols. The most common special tiles are:

  • Strike Tiles: These tiles have a dagger icon strike.png
    and add their damage to every damaging effect by the owning team - matching tiles, using abilities, countdown effects and strike tiles. Their damage is applied once per effect.

  • Attack Tiles: These tiles have a fist icon attack.png
    and apply their damage at the end of the owning team’s turn. The damage applied will be the total of all attack tiles plus all strike tiles controlled.

  • Protect tiles: These tiles have a shield icon protect.png
    and reduce incoming damage from all sources. They are generally the least useful special tiles, as in most battles characters will be killed by abilities rather than match damage, and protect tiles are an order of magnitude weaker than most abilities by default.

  • Web Tiles: Used specifically to fuel abilities of spider-family characters web.png
    . Their production and effects vary with the characters and their abilities.

  • Locked Tiles: Some characters have abilities that can lock tiles in place. These tiles are surrounded by a bubble effect locked_qs.png
    or forcefield.png
    . Their creation and effect depends on the character[/color][11].[/*]

  • Charged Tiles: Some characters can charge tiles charged.png
    . This makes the tiles produce more AP when matched and inflict increased damage. Some abilities scale depending on how many charged tiles are present on the board.

  • Trap tiles: Trap tiles are only visible to the team that controls them, and they do not have standard effects. Your trap tiles are visibly marked trap.png
    but your opponent’s traps are hidden. Generally a trap tile will either cause a negative effect when matched, normally damage, or have a positive repeated effect that forces the opponent to try to match the hidden tile or destroy it. Trap tiles can only occur on basic tiles, and strike, attack or protect tiles can overwrite an opponent’s trap tile, removing it.
    [/list]

    The Team
    At this tier we want to collect Wolverine, Thor, Original Black Widow, Magneto, Storm and Daken. Ares is very powerful for this tier, but he doesn’t synergise with others and isn’t often a required character. Captain America is situationally very useful. Hawkeye is disappointing but his purple can be deadly. The other characters are generally unimpressive. And then there is bagman    [12], who was a joke character and can only be won in PvP.

    • Wolverine is your first strike tile generating character. Even at a very low level, adding 2 or 3 strike tiles to the board can make your match damage exceed anything a Tier 1 character could achieve. He also has true healing[/color][13], which is important for sustaining combat without using up health packs. Use Adamantium slash only as a finisher, as your red AP reservoir is determining the number of strike tiles he creates.[/*]

    • Daken is similar to Wolverine, generating weaker strike tiles but having true healing from full health as opposed to 50% health. His strongest colours are the opposite of Wolverine, so between them you can have all incoming damage faced by a character who can heal.

    • Original Black Widow is the best character of this tier. You never want to put more than 3 into her purple ability as the increase in cost is not justified by the extra AP stolen. The damage dealt by her espionage ability[/color][14] will gain from strike tiles, so she is an exceptional pair with Wolverine as you get his strike tile effect once for the match damage and again for the espionage damage. Her blue makes fighting goons immeasurably easier.[/*]

    • Thor actually isn’t as good as many of the others, as his abilities are too ‘slow’ and he uses colours that could be better used by Wolverine. But he does have a good amount of health and you will be provided covers for him in the prologue, so he will probably be one of your early team members as you transition.

    • Magneto is particularly useful for his purple ability which allows you to place blue tiles and generates extra reds. This allows you to reliably generate blue AP and you can use it to create match 4 or 5 setups that will generate even more AP. He is particularly useful at feeding Storm whose blue is very powerful at this level. You can also use him to feed Modern Black Widow if you need someone locked down and Storm isn’t up to it.

    • Classic Storm has the ability to shake the board and generate AP just like Modern Storm did. She is mostly useful for her blue ability though, which damages the entire opposition team and stuns one of them.

    • Captain America, while not on my list of 6 required, does add a dimension to your team if you can afford the roster slot. At 5 covers, his red and blue abilities can both take out any special tile on the map, and both refund most of their AP when the countdown expires. This makes him useful against goons where you can smash countdown tiles in the corners, but also makes his abilities very AP efficient for both damage and stun effects, as long as your countdowns don’t get matched off the board.
      [/list]

        As you come to rely on this group exclusively, you may want to sell off your Iron Man and 1 star Storm to free up roster slots. Juggernaught alone is enough to win the DDQ event, and is useful in Balance of Power events. Modern Black Widow's stun is situationally useful for some fights, but at some point you may be better served selling her too if you are not using real money to buy roster slots.

  </span>
4
  1. A 1/2/1 Captain America at level 25 has 1652 health, and matches for 16,13 and 14 damage in his primary colours. By level 45 Thor has 2940 health and matches for 27,24 and 21 damage.
    By compariaon a level 50 Iron Man 35 who has 2700 health and matches for 27,24 and 31 damage. A level 35 1* Storm has 1170 health and 22,20 and 17 match damage.
    So you can see the 2 stars are pretty robust in terms of basic stats even at lower levels, and their health scales much better than a 1*. And the point of transitioning as soon as possible is to avoid investing ISO-8 in the 1* characters that you will quickly move beyond.
  1. Winfinite is the concept of a combination of abilities that effectively mean you win the battle without needing to take more turns. Magneto’s ability to generate blue played a part in several winfinite combinations. Over time the developers generally move to break these combinations.
    Most current winfinite combinations are based around Professor X’s ability to generate AP on a 5 match combined with abilities that allow you to select tile colours. If you use those abilities to create more 5 matches then Professor X will generate the AP to fire those abilities again. You’re generating damage form the tile matches, the critical tiles and the Professor’s AP generating ability that also does significant damage. The combination of Professor X/Grey Suit Black Widow/Scarlet Witch that generates a winfinite combo is known as ‘Charlie’s Angels’.
    There is also a less reliable combination of Magneto/Mystique/Cyclops that uses each of their colour changing abilities to set up cascades[3], particularly with red tiles generate by Cyclops and Magneto. The cascades are relied upon to some extent to generate AP to allow the abilities to be used again.
  1. Cascades, also known as the AI cheating like a tinykitty tinykitty[4]. A cascade is where a match leads to another series of matches occurring. If the matches were on screen and could be seen it is generally considered a good move rather than a cascade. A cascade normally involves tiles dropping in from above that make matches. Avalanche quality cascades have resulted in the AI getting 80+ AP from tiles repeatedly falling in matching patterns generating more cascades.
    After a certain point in game progression, where you have complimentary character teams, you lose more matches to cascades than any other source.
    When multiple matches occur as the result of a single move, every move after the first has its damage reduced by a percentage for every match that preceded it. If there are strike tiles on the board they will apply their full damage effect for every match without reduction.
  1. The D3 forum profanity filter replaced a list of objectionable words with the term ‘tinykitty’. This now means that people just use tinykitty as an all profanity substitute. Just like the Smurfs did with the word ‘smurf’. Filthiest smurfing cartoon ever.
  1. Due to player capacity issues, players are broken out into server groups called ‘shards’. This is transparent to you as a player and you cannot select a shard. When you join an event your shard for that event is determined by the system load and availability. If multiple shards are available the system is biased to putting you into a shard with players of similar history/roster capability. This bias does not guarantee that new players will all be bundled into one shard and veterans in another, but it does make the mix more favourable for new players.
    Once you join a shard you will be placed into the next unfilled bracket. A ‘bracket’ is the group of players you are competing with for placement rewards. The size of a bracket varies by event, and if you want to seethe bracket size just look at the last placement reward listed for that event.
    While you are competing with the players within your bracket for placement based on acquired points, your opponents in individual matches are not limited to players within your shard or bracket, and can be pulled apparently from any participating system.
  1. Yes it’s terribly ‘unfair’ that the game ‘punishes’ you for being successful. Of course it is punishing everyone who is competing against each other, so it’s difficult to define where the unfairness happens. If you get lucky boards that you clear easier your challenges may be more difficult to compensate, while if you have a few unlucky cascade matches in a row your challenges may be made easier to compensate.

It’s one of the more common forum complaints.

  1. This really infuriates many players and leads to accusations of cheating. ‘How can a player with mostly 2 stars be top 10 in PvE?’. Because it is just so much easier and less time consuming. The longer battles higher levels face in terms of time and turns taken to complete just means an increased chance of an unlucky event happening such as a cascade of doom.
    Sure it also increases the chance of a cascade in your favour, but even if that ends the match early, the lower level player was already finished the match so you didn’t gain anything. As their roster grows in power and capability the scaling advantage goes away, but if you think of it as a kickstart for new players and encouragement rather than the universe taking a monumental dump on you it helps.
    Or you could start a thread complaining in the forums. You could also call out the player by name and post screenshots of their roster if you want to really annoy people[8].
  1. Accusing people of cheating by name in the forums is against the rules. The mods[9] will tell you off and give you a warning. It’s how they roll. You can report them to customer support and they will investigate.
    It’s fine to discuss what happened, because sometimes players will be able to offer an alternate explanation for something that seems broken or unfair (such as the 2* advantage in PvE[7]).
  1. Moderators come in two flavours, Green named mods and Red. Red named mods are developers or community support people and are direct employees of either D3 or Demiurge.
    Green moderators are volunteers and members of the player community. They don’t have any direct association with either company and do not represent, or purport to represent them. As members of the community an attempt is made to distinguish between when they are speaking as a player and acting in their capacity as a moderator. To achieve this moderator posts are presented in an alternate coloured text.
    Feel free to abuse the moderators[10], especially the red ones. If you hurt their feelings enough they are bound to completely change their decisions. Just like your parents always did raising you. Especially attractive are posts where you throw all the toys out of the pram, accuse them of lying and then say there wouldn’t be a problem if they communicated better. The irony feeds them.
    If you want extra leverage you can point out that even though you have been playing 14 months as a free to play player they have now lost any chance of you spending money on their game. They are gullible that way and easily panicked.
  1. Sorry guys, you know I love you. That’s why you keep PMing me final warnings right?
  1. Invisible Woman’s locked tiles will trigger Quicksilver’s locked tile ability, but Quicksilver’s tiles are not valid targets for Invisible Woman’s bubble destruction ability.
  1. Bag-man’s general uselessness has mad ‘bag’ a perjorative used in character names. So Invisible woman is referred to as bag lady. Bagnarok and Bagsilver are also really unappreciated characters. And if we could ever find a way to work ‘bag’ into Mr Fantastic or Totally Awesome Hulk’s names they would be there too.
  1. Healing comes in two flavours - true healing and burst healing. Normally they are differentiated in the ability description. True healing is permanent and stays with the character after the battle. Burst healing only lasts until the end of combat and then expires. You can see the difference in the character’s health bars - true healing extends the red line, whereas burst healing is added to the red bar as a green bar and is depleted before the red when damage is incurred.
    All healing used to be true healing, and players would take injured characters into east prologue battles with a healer to restore their health. A cynic might say that this was to increase the sales of health packs. On the positive side it made taking a healer into event battles a strategy to increase the number of missions you could complete without needing a health pack. Running out of health packs in a PvE event can be a limiting factor on people acquiring points, and set people’s scores apart, whereas in the old healing method everyone with a healer could generally clear all the nodes every time, at the expense of spending far more of their lives playing.
    It also created limits which might force people to talk to their family when out of Health packs. I don’t know if this is viewed positively or negatively.
  1. The character credited with a match is the character whose symbol is on a tile. This is determined by the character who has the highest damage for that colour. The damage shown on the character screen is rounded to a whole number, character damage actually increases fractionally each level, and when deciding which character ‘owns’ a colour the fractional component is taken into account.
    When two characters have identical values the decision is then made based on where they were selected in the team - center character takes priority over left character and right comes last. This is determined at the selection screen and can’t be changed once the battle starts.
    Black Widow’s espionage only works if her symbol is on the tile. For other abilities you need to look at whether they occur ‘when a tile is matched’ or ‘when the character matches a tile’ as that informs you as to whether the symbol matters.
  1. Talk about how goons feeding AP to active opponents is bad news.
  2. Talk about specialised goons, traps etc.
5

STage 3 Information

6

STage 3 Questions

7

STage 4 Information

8

Stage 4 Questions

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Thanks for the info, I’m a new player and started up with my basic gaming knowledge, my only mistakes so far was selling classic Storm early and maxing out Black Widows powers, everything else is pretty on point with what you suggested. Keep up the good work.