Rebirth

mischiefmaker

Summary
Allow players to reset a character to level 1, with 1 of each cover, in return for a significant improvement in ability. First proposed here.

Details
Inspired by games like Castlevania, the idea is to have a New Game Plus-like mechanic, except on a per-character basis. When you rebirth, the character is reset to minimum level, with one of each cover. Additionally, you get to choose one permanent upgrade, which you keep through future rebirths. You may rebirth as many times as you like but there are only 3 upgrades. Your character portrait also gets a special border or some other treatment to indicate it's been rebirthed.

A fully rebirthed character should be competitive with characters of the next higher rarity. For instance, Iron Man (Model 35) might have the following upgrades:

- 50% increase in health at all levels
- Ultra-Freon Beam costs 12.
- Repulsor Blast damages all members of the opposing team.

This would probably be a ton of dev and design work (although limiting the upgrades to enhancements to existing abilities might help reduce the load on design), but I believe the benefits are immense.

Benefits
1. Greatly extends the endgame. Maxing out a character now takes four times as long as it did previously. This means high level players continue to have a reason to play and progress.

2. Huge ISO/hero point sink. Also a 4x increase in ISO/hero point sink, and keeps players interested in tournaments — if you have a maxed 3*, maybe you want to win 3 more covers so you can get a head start on a rebirth build.

3. Allows casual players to be reasonably competitive. Right now it's really hard to make progress if you can only play in short sessions throughout the day. This would make it so that such a player could grind the Prologue over and over and eventually come away with a fully rebirthed Thor or Wolverine that would be able to compete with non-rebirth'd 3* characters.

4. Helps alleviate the "rich get richer" problem. Right now, when you get 3*s to a high level, you start to dominate tournaments. This makes it so that at any given time, some of the high level 3*s will be rebirthed and working their way back up.

5. Potential source of constant PvE content. If you tie rebirth to the Prologue, or to a special quest, now players have a really good reason to constantly replay those PvE missions. This is similar to the suggestion about resetting the Prologue, but the reward is significantly better.

6. Increase in character diversity and strategy. Instead of everyone going 1* -> 2* -> 3*, now you might see folks choosing to play rebirthed 2*'s. There would be strategy in how you rebirth — what ability should you take first? Character builds would also change as characters get rebirthed and their abilities are improved.

Open questions
There is one open question, which is how to unlock rebirth. Here are some potential mechanisms:

Unlocked when character reaches max covers. Too easy to rebirth; doesn't provide ISO/HP sink.

Unlocked when character reaches max level. Annoying for characters like IM40 where you might not want max covers, but easy to implement and good iso sink. No PvE tie-in, though, so rebirth is just a big long ISO grind.

By completing the Prologue. Constant PvE, although perhaps missions are too easy. Maybe scale mission difficulty per rebirth, or to roster level. UI to rebirth a character on completion is potentially clunky; what if I want to finish the Prologue but am not ready to rebirth someone yet?

If I could just wave a magic wand and make this happen, I would have a special set of missions just for rebirth that unlocks when you finish the Prologue. You would be required to pick a max level character to start the missions; this character is required for all the missions in the set. Mission difficulty scales depending on whether the character is 1*, 2*, or 3*. When you finish this set of missions, you unlock rebirth for that character. When you rebirth the character, you reset all the missions and can start with a new character.

Unknown

Problem with that is that I'd never do it because ISO is scarce enough already.