Current game state - one player's perspective

Shadow

I think that d3 is finally doing the right thing when it comes to the characters that they release. Previously, they keep balancing the existing characters instead of designing new ones to counter the strengths of characters already released. Thus many characters were hit too heavily with the nerf bat such that they are now nearly worthless. Wolverine (X-Force) even when buffed doesn't feel much like what a 4* should be. Sure, the buffs that some characters had were nice to have but I still rarely use those characters after their individual buffs. Now, it looks like they have finally decided to go down the direction of coming up with characters to counter those already out there. This is nice and should have been what they did from the get go. The following are examples of the counters: Jean Grey counters Professor X so if you attempt to do a match 5, you get stunned and the AP that masterplan was supposed to provide is drained instead. Deadpool (X-Force) counters Jean Grey's aoe with X Enforcer. Before Carnage even had a chance to become a good hopping choice, Antman was released and the blue is a good counter to Alien Instincts. And the upcoming character (Iceman?) is definitely looking like a HB IF counter provided the pink isn't too expensive.

However, there-in lies a newly created problem. There are now so many 4*s that having the same character come up again as a reward takes nearly 2 months. Even if one manages to get all the covers at launch, 4 + 1 + 1, there are still 7 covers to acquire before the character is complete. This now takes practically 14 months if one just goes for the 1k progression. Even if one goes for the 1300 progression, this would still take 8 months. And that's just getting the character fully covered. It does not make the character optimally covered which would take even longer. This is no longer practical and the situation only worsens as more and more 4*s are released. Soon it will take a year to fully cover a 4* if d3 doesn't address this issue. I really do hope that d3 has plans in store to prevent this issue from occurring. Otherwise, the game will only have the whales left and will the whales still continue to stay if the rest of the player base has gone?