Announcing new 6-star characters!!!

super_gyro

Announcing new 6-star characters!!!

This is the inevitable announcement that many of us never want to see. 5-star characters are hard enough to find as it is. However, D3 appears to be on a path of releasing ever more 4 and 5-star characters with no end in sight. At some point (if not already) there will be too many 4's and 5's to release any more. And then what happens? Do we get 6-star characters?

No, because I have an idea.

My suggestion would be to create a new class of characters that can be upgraded across tiers. The idea would be similar to the champion system, except that once a character is fully covered and leveled you would have the option to transition that character from a 2-star to a 3-star, and later to a 4-star, probably at a cost of HP/CP. It would be the same character with mostly the same powers, just a higher tier. The example would be if you could directly upgrade to the old Gold-star characters like Daken, Torch, or Cap.

The benefits would be that a) D3 could continue to release new characters that would function within the existing tiered character system and b) users would be able to make a long term investment in these new characters with the promise that they would have a direct path to becoming powerful later on. I think it would be extremely fun to take a 1-star character all the way up to be a 5-star.

Obviously there would be some challenges to doing this. Jumping tiers would temporarily set the character back a bit. You would not get to keep 13 covers when you do so, but maybe you could keep 3. But more importantly, how would you earn these characters? The devs would have to come up with a way to make covers available for these new characters without diluting the pull rates too horribly for existing 2,3, or 4-star characters...and I have another idea to help solve this. My second suggestion would be to create a new color-coded cover placeholder that once pulled could be applied to any of these new characters, provided that the color matches. The idea is that while these covers might be suitably rare, the tradeoff would be that you could apply them to ANY one of your new tier-hopping characters, depending on which ones you want to advance next.

All of the new characters certainly add a lot of fun to the game. But there is a limit to how many the current system can support without making the pull rates impossible. My hope is that D3 can come up with a way to continue the fun addition of new characters while giving players a reasonable chance to draw them and some hope that we can eventually make them strong enough to be useful.

Pogo

I think it would be extremely fun to take a 1-star character all the way up to be a 5-star.

So what happens to all the 1-star characters who only have 2 powers (and, by extension, a lower level cap)? Would they break through their ceilings and still only have 2 powers? Or would the devs be expected to add a third power without making the character unbalanced?

In many cases, the star rating means more than just level range. Many of the higher-star characters are more complicated and nuanced compared to low characters. The powers of 1-star characters are very straightforward and tend to have more favorable effectiveness/AP cost ratios, because it's a given that you will need to outgrow them in order to advance. Looking at 1-star Widow, Hawkeye, Juggernaut - scaling them up to 4/5-star levels is brutal because their powers are so blunt and inexpensive. Look at the "Balance of Power" event.

1-star characters are training wheels, and they're great at what they do. I think a lot of us are dreading what may happen once the 4/5-star lineup fills out more, but we know the bus can't go below 50 mph and there's gonna be at least 2 characters per month for the foreseeable future. It's a lot easier to mitigate character imbalance when you can set level caps to limit the number of viable team groupings.

I think the duplicate-version Storm, Johnny, Steve, Thor, Daken were missteps, and I'd love for them to change the powers so that the lower and higher star versions are distinct, but I'm sure they won't any time soon because of the outrage.

Personally, I'd like to see the addition of more 1 and 2 star characters, and more events that limit you to those low-end picks.

wirius

As long as the game exists, there will be increasing tiers of stars. Its not going to happen for at least a year though, maybe longer. Don't worry about it.

Unknown

I like the idea of the break thru characters but you are talking about a whole new game their buddy. But interesting idea for marvel PQ2.
But the only thing I would change is that every character start at 1* with 2 powers and to rank up to next tier you would have to have 5 covers of that characters skill you want just to fill spot 3 with and 10 outfit covers for the next tier. The same for 3rd and so on how ever this presents a interesting development and new dynamic.

I'll use black widow for a example OK to start she has her widows sting and her recon skills and I collect the requested material to advance her. Now I get to add a skill I can pick which of these 3 to collect ag device aggressive recon or her passive skill espionage. I choose ag device. Now comes time for tier 3 and iyts time to pick ok well aggressive recon and widows sting work well for me so far so let's drop the original recon skill and I can pick any of her 3* skills so now you have a custom black widow at this point. Try some may have the same thoughts of skill lay out but not all have the same level of skill. How do they not have the same level of skill you ask simple the command points are still used for something new called limit break.

You can limit break a skill several times over at first the change happens only after the second break let's say it lowered the ap price by 1 then after 2 more it adds a extra turn to stun moves lowers a timer by one ads 20 damage and so on but each time you break a skill it adds 2 levels to the skill increase requirement. For example ok I just increased widows sting now it takes 4 limit breaks to get another bonus and it starts back at zero breaks. Not everyone will take their time on the exact same characters skills as some one who loves a certain character to death. So now theirs less work for the devs on wondering how not to break the game mechanics with a new character but allows them to put out a basic character with rudimentary skills and develop a well planned possible skill tree that fits right in as the game progresses. Which also helps with the occasional o **** their to over powered but fixing it will upset players who are exploiting the mess up before it was discovered.