Update to Supports (7/3/18)

Brigby

Hi Everyone,

With the release of the newest Support, Wasp Gauntlets, the team wanted to take a moment to speak about the overall Supports feature, and share some of their thoughts:

Hey all,

Since we launched Supports, we've been paying close attention to the community's reception of them, and listening to your feedback. One piece we heard repeatedly is that Supports just weren't strong enough to bother playing with. We're thinking about how to respond to all all of your feedback, but this was the piece that we felt we could address the quickest.

So, with the next several Supports, starting with Wasp Gauntlets, we're trying something new to make them more powerful and exciting. We're increasing Supports overall power level, making high rank Perks stronger sooner, and reducing the number of Perks a Support's power is spread between from 5 to 3.

Instead of a Perk unlocking at all Ranks, Perks are now unlocked at Rank 1, 3 and 5. Fewer Perks mean that the individual Perks are stronger - the power we would have given to the Rank 2 and 4 Perks have been redistributed to the other three. Ranks 2 and 4 will still raise the Level cap of a Support, allowing you to make your Supports stronger, they just don't add extra Perks.

On top of that we've raised the overall power level of Perks. Perks that deal damage or create Special tiles of a certain strength will now be about twice as strong at Level 250 than they are now, and get much stronger on their way to Level 250 than they do now.

Finally, we want high rank Perks to feel awesome as soon as you unlock them, so you'll see many Rank 3 and 5 Perks that start off stronger than they used to.

Please tell us what you think about this new kind of Support! We're listening!

Casey Malone
Lead Designer, Marvel Puzzle Quest

You can check out these changes in the newest Support, Wasp Gauntlets, which you can find details about HERE

Cormackie

Seems like an alright change. And if you say you're thinking about all the other feedback too, it makes me hopeful that all the other concerns will be addressed down the line. Hopefully this is the beginning of supports actually being a thing ha.

irwando

The problem with Supports is getting them.  Without a consistent, reliable way to get them / make progress on them, they'll be like 5*'s - interesting to those willing to play the meta game / spend tons to get them, uninteresting to the rest of us who won't.

As a long-time high-level but still casual player this change means nothing to me given the very limited opportunities to get supports.

Make them part of progression and I'll be more interested.

BearVenger

Where's HERE?

Ah. Here's HERE. 

SnowcaTT

Make them available, they are just soooo rare and hard to level.

Vet player with 15 5*'s champed all the 4*'s champed.

I have one 5* support

I have one 3* support
.....
That's it. Everything else is 2* or lower.
"Everything else" being 13/33. Can't find them.
Not that it would matter - my 5* support is "up to" level 119, I barely would have maxed any 2* support at this time.

Supports and Riso need to be MUCH more common to make me pay any attention to them.

Daiches

Skims announcement. Sees no way to actually ACQUIRE supports. Goes back to not caring.

bowla33

What are supports?

Warbringa

Thank you for the update Brigby.  I am not sure if the issue is that supports are really under powered, but more about the availability of getting supports and limited resource availability of red iso.  Perhaps the feedback from players who had maxed out supports were they were too weak but I think on the forums, and probably from the majority of the player base, it is the availability of getting supports and red iso that is the big problem.

The limited availability also makes supports appear weak because people get very few of them and have few opportunities to level them up, hence the weak feeling.  Making supports significantly stronger may actually make them more difficult to meld some day into PvP as well.  

The rockett

At least they saw an issue and making some changes, but still a few remain. 

How to get them?
RISO to level them. 
Missing a lot of them. 
Limiting them, see Infinity Stones. 

nycjonny

The two largest issues with supports are they are very hard (and expensive) to get and the red iso levels given are very low. Thank you for hearing some feedback. 

broll

I'd still just rather they go away completely.  

fmftint

There's still the issues that
Support tokens are extremely rare and rank 5 support tokens may as well not exist

Punter1

I'd also chime in and say the user interface for supports is still un-intuitive, clunky and prevents me from caring more.  It's not easy to see what supports are assigned to who, it's not easy to see what supports do, it's not easy to move and assign specific supports and so on.  Everything with supports takes about 5 taps more than it should.

Improve the interface, make supports more accessible, make RISO more available and maybe I'll look into them more.

I'm currently at 77k RISO - leveled 1 support to 16, but not spent any otherwise.  I've not bought anything.  I play PVE to 7 clears and PVP to 1500ish.  That's a paltry amount of RISO for all that play.  I could level 1 support to 93...

babinro

I really hope this change comes with the intention of either revamping or buffing all 30ish existing supports.

Buffing the Support concept is a good idea but if you're buffing only new releases then you've effectively left players with a pool of diluted 30 supports that are terrible...and a few good ones.   Given how rare it is to pull a support this will feel TERRIBLE.

I can appreciate that reworking 30 existing supports would probably be too much work...but it should not be challenging to simply adjust the numbers on existing supports to bring them up in power level. 

Those highly underwhelming perks that boost health by something like 2000 only could easily be converted to +50% or whatever you would deem is appropriate for the feature.

Bowgentle

Really.

Yes I think some people might have said that supports weren't strong enough to bother with... right after _everyone_ said that there needs to be a way to actually _acquire_ and _level_ supports.

How about putting support tokens into the PVE and PVP progression tables, _then_ worry about them not being strong enough.

PolarPopBear

Power level is far less important than the difficultly of obtaining supports compounded with the fact that red iso gain is vastly outpaced by the release rate of supports and the dilution of the packs.  Packs which incendently we can almost never obtain.

At least with the huge iso debt from characters you can mathematically earn covers and iso faster than new characters are released.  With supports its an unreasonable proposition to even keep up with the releases so you get left further and further behind.

bowla33

I've not spent any red iso yet - 193k since intro. I can take my 1 5* support to level 143. 

That is a ridiculous cost to level ratio.

Shintok17

There's no point of making the Supports stronger if we can't get enough of them or Red Iso to enjoy these new stronger perks. Devs got it backwards. 

monsieurmojo

Just out of curiosity, @Brigby, does this mean players with Rank 4 supports are about to lose some of their already extremely limited utility? Those R4 Web Shooters are only remotely useful because they up PP's critical multiplier; it would be extremely obnoxious to lose the one useful support I have.

Jaedenkaal

bowla33 said:

I've not spent any red iso yet - 193k since intro. I can take my 1 5* support to level 143. 

That is a ridiculous cost to level ratio.

Surely no more ridiculous than 'finishing' the new feature mere months after it was released.

irwando said:

The problem with Supports is getting them.  Without a consistent, reliable way to get them / make progress on them, they'll be like 5*'s - interesting to those willing to play the meta game / spend tons to get them, uninteresting to the rest of us who won't.

As a long-time high-level but still casual player this change means nothing to me given the very limited opportunities to get supports.

Make them part of progression and I'll be more interested.

At least making them more impactful takes away some of the pressure of acquiring a ton of them. You can only really use 3 at one time anyways, maybe 6 depending on how you do your PVE. 

Dartmaster01

What about all the supports that have come out already? Are they doomed to forever be worthless, low damage items? While heading in this direction is needed, it will instantly invalidate all but 2-3 previously released supports.

You must buff the old with the new if you want this to work.