I found the response to a better-worded question on Discord. Hopefully no-one minds me posting it here:
Wobble963 Today at 7:19 PM So if retro rewards happen for a 4* but you ascended the 4* before the rr, that mean you will miss out on those rewards? Sorry if my question is worded poorly IceIX Today at 7:22 PM At current, yes. That's what Pinky and I were discussing. We're still having conversations about it internally, because there is a good argument for both keeping it as it is (power vs possible reward dividend) or doing the work to update the retro reward system to support it (eliminates cost/benefit, but also essentially injects more stuff into the economy because you get the "older" now updated rewards and the ones you're running through)
Wobble963 Today at 7:19 PM So if retro rewards happen for a 4* but you ascended the 4* before the rr, that mean you will miss out on those rewards? Sorry if my question is worded poorly
IceIX Today at 7:22 PM At current, yes. That's what Pinky and I were discussing. We're still having conversations about it internally, because there is a good argument for both keeping it as it is (power vs possible reward dividend) or doing the work to update the retro reward system to support it (eliminates cost/benefit, but also essentially injects more stuff into the economy because you get the "older" now updated rewards and the ones you're running through)
So there's some debate about it, I see. I really hope they go with the retro rewards, though I do think that in my three options, the first one is going to be out of the question.
Another new system to stave off any need to make a 6* tier?
Will 1* - 4* characters retain their current curves for health, power strength and match damage?
As I recall, lower tier characrers actually scale better than 5* level for level; they just hit a leveling wall far sooner. So I would expect that a 4* or 3* character will become the new best-in-game option for health and power damage efficiency, but I think 5*s have always had about 2-3x as much match damage as any other tier, even on a pro rata basis. I wonder if that will limit the utility of these new ascended characters.
@Vhailorx said: Another new system to stave off any need to make a 6* tier? Will 1* - 4* characters retain their current curves for health, power strength and match damage? As I recall, lower tier characrers actually scale better than 5* level for level; they just hit a leveling wall far sooner. So I would expect that a 4* or 3* character will become the new best-in-game option for health and power damage efficiency, but I think 5*s have always had about 2-3x as much match damage as any other tier, even on a pro rata basis. I wonder if that will limit the utility of these new ascended characters.
@Vhailorx said: Another new system to stave off any need to make a 6* tier?
Honestly, I don't blame them from staving off the 6* tier - to me it looks like a nightmare. How do you make them hard enough to get but still make them achievable? It seems like you'd have to make a tier unlike any other - one where even a handful of covers would be useful. I think that's kind of what they intended with the 5 star tier, but they quickly discarded the idea.
@Vhailorx they addressed your question about scaling, and no, they will not scale the same way. It's explained in here somewhere by a red name.
@Kusik73 said: So my serious question with the 2.0 system is why bother releasing anything new other than 1 stars since all toons can be raised to 550?
It takes a total of 1,660 covers for a 1-star character to transition to 5-stars, and another 400 covers after that to max them out. While every 1 star character could be raised to 5 stars, the number of players who will actually do that -- and would want to for each new character coming out -- is virtually none.
Y'know, I finally started champing 5* to escape the Polaris meta. I do not appreciate having Polaris ascend up with me! grrr. Go away, shoo!
Other than that, I don't really have strong opinions about it right now. There's characters I'd be excited to see move up (the batteries, certain synergy partners, plus a couple personal favourites). Most of those are 3* , with a couple of 4* .
Most of the current 1/2* will suck when they ascend (with some exceptions, like 1* Spidey.). Because the vast majority of them are just wayyy too slow to do anything in a reasonable amount of time and have no passives. Look at the AP numbers on IM35 on that posted image, they're atrocious. 10, 8, 19 with no self-feeding is just straight up unuseable without a feeder in 4/5* . There's also much less synergy in their kits.
IMO, the game became significantly more fun once I transitioned from 2-3* in large parts because that's when character' kits start to become fun and why (pre-Polaris) 4* tier was such an awesome playground. More synergetic kits as well as more synergy between characters, less absurdly expensive powers, less unwieldiness.
So I don't think most of the 1/2* will see much use in higher tiers. Their kits were not made for that.
Sure, it definitely will give 1* a use they didn't have beforehand, since currently you can only sell them, so that's good.
As for how PvP and PvE will shake out, I'm gonna wait and see. I'm fully expecting the plague that is Polaris to come back to haunt me, but otherwise I'm keeping an open mind. I definitely did not expect this development though; that's certainly a shake-up, let's see where this takes us.
@JediJones77 said: Why can't this process be simplified? How about all the extra covers for a character just get placed in an "ascension bank" on that character's screen. Then once you get enough covers, you can pay HP to "ascend" them to the next level. First step would be to max the character you have. Then, after that, each new cover goes in the "ascension bank." And when the bank reaches its threshold, you can pay HP to ascend the character. I'm not asking to get them upgraded for free. But rather than paying HP for new roster slots and juggling multiple versions of almost every character in the game on your roster screens (which is even more annoying on the screens where you select characters for fights), let us just keep one copy of the character and pay the equivalent amount in HP as an "ascension fee." It would make this whole process so much easier to learn, understand, explain and execute.
I agree one million percent. I’ve been a player since the beginning and I’m finding it very difficult to wrap my head around this. And the fact that you need FIVE active slots for 1 single character to be able to make this all work…. It’s just too overwhelming. I already have nearly 500 slots that I’ve spent a fortune on. And that’s just by having everyone duplicated ONCE!. Imagine if I have to have 5 slots per character. I’ll easily need over 2,000 slots. I agree that we could pay an “ascension fee” (which we would pay in slots anyway) and simplify the process tremendously and not have to roster every character 5 different times.
I saw above an Iron man 1* raised to 550 level and dealing 70k with the red power. Unboosted. Will 1* characters get god boost from now on? Is there no AP reduction to their crazy expensive powers at 5* tier? Finally, with this system all those old 5* who are underpowered will get standar health, match damage and power damage at last?
@Omegased said: Is THIS why Fury got nerfed?
And 4-Star Beast!
@IceIX Is your team also planning a "Descend"?
Players have previously asked for a way to lower/reduce their levels and it's been previously stated it was being looked into.
I did some math on the potential amount of roster slots needed. I could be wrong about this, so check my math please. There are currently 310 unique characters in the game. Ascension, once every character is staggered in, will create new "versions" of characters at different rarities. For example, the 1-star characters will now have 4 new versions of each one entered into the game. To roster ALL the new rarities or "versions" of every character currently in the game would require 333 new roster slots, for a total of 643 roster slots. So more than doubling the current amount required to hold one copy of each unique character. Even if you don't want to permanently keep all those versions, the process of ascension eventually requires you to concurrently hold a lot of duplicate roster slots for each character. To get a 1-star ascended to 5-star, you will at one point need to be holding 5 roster slots for that same character simultaneously.
Granted, as some people have stated, the road to get to 5-star versions of every character is a long one that few people will be on immediately for every character. I have a pretty advanced account, but I've never max covered a 4-star yet. I only recently started carrying some dupe slots for 3-stars. I have not been carrying dupes for 1s or 2s, just selling them off. To start carrying dupes for all 1, 2 and 3s, you need 80 roster slots. To get just the 1s and 2s into ascended 5-star land, you'd eventually need an additional 52 roster slots, BEYOND the duplicate slots you already created The 3s would need an additional 58 slots. And I think you basically need to be using most of these slots simultaneously, because, as we know, covers are collected evenly across all characters, except for the ones you've favorited.
The delay in making all characters eligible for ascension creates another issue with roster slots. Let's say it takes a long time for the final 1-star to be eligible for ascension. You still want to stop selling your 1-star covers now. So to "prepare" for an ascension that you can't do right now, you actually need to hold 16 roster slots for the same 1-star character, to prepare for its future ascension eligibility. These are the "ingredients" needed to ascend a 1-star to 5-star. And you can see that the starting ingredients are 16 maxed 1-stars:
2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 2s ascend to a 3 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 2s ascend to a 3 2 maxed 3s ascend to a 4 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 2s ascend to a 3 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 1s ascend to a 2 2 maxed 2s ascend to a 3 2 maxed 3s ascend to a 4 2 maxed 4s ascend to a 5
To be honest, one way they could improve this issue is to let us ascend ALL 1-stars to 2-stars right now, but just delay their ascension to higher rarities. Then we could usefully use 1-star covers to max the 2-star versions, rather than selling them or creating 1-star duplicates that might not be able to be used for a long time.
@Druiz23 said: @JediJones77 said: Why can't this process be simplified? How about all the extra covers for a character just get placed in an "ascension bank" on that character's screen. Then once you get enough covers, you can pay HP to "ascend" them to the next level. First step would be to max the character you have. Then, after that, each new cover goes in the "ascension bank." And when the bank reaches its threshold, you can pay HP to ascend the character. I'm not asking to get them upgraded for free. But rather than paying HP for new roster slots and juggling multiple versions of almost every character in the game on your roster screens (which is even more annoying on the screens where you select characters for fights), let us just keep one copy of the character and pay the equivalent amount in HP as an "ascension fee." It would make this whole process so much easier to learn, understand, explain and execute. I agree one million percent. I’ve been a player since the beginning and I’m finding it very difficult to wrap my head around this. And the fact that you need FIVE active slots for 1 single character to be able to make this all work…. It’s just too overwhelming. I already have nearly 500 slots that I’ve spent a fortune on. And that’s just by having everyone duplicated ONCE!. Imagine if I have to have 5 slots per character. I’ll easily need over 2,000 slots. I agree that we could pay an “ascension fee” (which we would pay in slots anyway) and simplify the process tremendously and not have to roster every character 5 different times.
@Druiz23 said:
They added Roster-Slot rewards in the recent Heroic Boss. Maybe they can make that an award in a Vault or some other limited way to win/earn them besides HP purchases
They could reduce the cost of roster slots further.
Or they could, you know, make roster slots gasp free! There's no other game that penalises players for adding to their rosters like MPQ. I don't get penalised for catching as many Pokemon as I can in Arceus or Violet.
@BlackBoltRocks said: They could reduce the cost of roster slots further. Or they could, you know, make roster slots gasp free! There's no other game that penalises players for adding to their rosters like MPQ. I don't get penalised for catching as many Pokemon as I can in Arceus or Violet.
@BlackBoltRocks said: They could reduce the cost of roster slots further.
They'd have to find some other way to make money. They could probably do this if they didn't have to pay Marvel for the license, but I don't think the game would be as popular without these characters.
@JediJones77 said: I like the idea of being able to upgrade every character in the game to the same tier. I also play Contest of Champions, and that's basically how that game works. All the same characters exist at each star level, for the most part. It's not done by upgrading from one level to another, but that's beside the point. The main point is, if you like the basic Wolverine character, the same character can be played as a 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star or 5-star. The problem with the plan outlined here is the very awkward and confusing mechanics to get this "ascension" done. If this is tough for an end game player to process and absorb, imagine how confusing it is for a newbie joining the game today. The biggest confusion comes in what it will take to ascend a low rarity character, like a 1 or 2-star, up to 5-star. It's like a Russian nesting doll scenario to figure out the steps to taking a 2-star to 5-star. By my math, you'll have to be holding 4 separate roster slots for that character at one point to eventually get it there. That's awkward, complicated and just ugly to look at when you're browsing through your roster. Why can't this process be simplified? How about all the extra covers for a character just get placed in an "ascension bank" on that character's screen. Then once you get enough covers, you can pay HP to "ascend" them to the next level. First step would be to max the character you have. Then, after that, each new cover goes in the "ascension bank." And when the bank reaches its threshold, you can pay HP to ascend the character. I'm not asking to get them upgraded for free. But rather than paying HP for new roster slots and juggling multiple versions of almost every character in the game on your roster screens (which is even more annoying on the screens where you select characters for fights), let us just keep one copy of the character and pay the equivalent amount in HP as an "ascension fee." It would make this whole process so much easier to learn, understand, explain and execute.
@JediJones77 said: I like the idea of being able to upgrade every character in the game to the same tier. I also play Contest of Champions, and that's basically how that game works. All the same characters exist at each star level, for the most part. It's not done by upgrading from one level to another, but that's beside the point. The main point is, if you like the basic Wolverine character, the same character can be played as a 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star or 5-star.
The problem with the plan outlined here is the very awkward and confusing mechanics to get this "ascension" done. If this is tough for an end game player to process and absorb, imagine how confusing it is for a newbie joining the game today. The biggest confusion comes in what it will take to ascend a low rarity character, like a 1 or 2-star, up to 5-star. It's like a Russian nesting doll scenario to figure out the steps to taking a 2-star to 5-star. By my math, you'll have to be holding 4 separate roster slots for that character at one point to eventually get it there. That's awkward, complicated and just ugly to look at when you're browsing through your roster.
Why can't this process be simplified? How about all the extra covers for a character just get placed in an "ascension bank" on that character's screen. Then once you get enough covers, you can pay HP to "ascend" them to the next level. First step would be to max the character you have. Then, after that, each new cover goes in the "ascension bank." And when the bank reaches its threshold, you can pay HP to ascend the character. I'm not asking to get them upgraded for free. But rather than paying HP for new roster slots and juggling multiple versions of almost every character in the game on your roster screens (which is even more annoying on the screens where you select characters for fights), let us just keep one copy of the character and pay the equivalent amount in HP as an "ascension fee." It would make this whole process so much easier to learn, understand, explain and execute.
Just think about all those players that wanted Auto-fire...
I’ve got a bad feeling about this……
So I've probably screwed up my maths somewhere, but I was trying to work out how many total covers (or shard equivalents) it would take in order to level up a character all the way to 550:
5★: 113 covers (straightforward: 13 covers to champ, 100 covers to max champ)
4★: 526 covers (13+113=126 4★ Binding, 1x4x100=400 5★ Ascension)
3★: 952 covers (2x13+2x113=252 3★ Bindings, 1x3x100=300 4★ Ascension, 1x4x100=400 5★ Ascension)
2★: 1,404 covers (4x13+4x63=304 2★ Bindings, 2x2x100=400 3★ Ascensions, 1x3x100=300 4★ Ascension, 1x4x100=400 5★ Ascension)
1★ (3 Powers): 1,508 covers (16x13=208 1★ Bindings, 4x1x50=200 2★ Ascensions, 2x2x100=400 3★ Ascensions, 1x3x100=300 4★ Ascension, 1x4x100=400 5★ Ascension)
1★ (2 Powers): 1,460 covers (16x10=160 1★ Bindings, 4x1x50=200 2★ Ascensions, 2x2x100=400 3★ Ascensions, 1x3x100=300 4★ Ascension, 1x4x100=400 5★ Ascension)
[Legend: "4x1x50=200 2★ Ascensions" means you have to upgrade (4) characters at an 'exchange rate' of (1) cover per level through (50) total levels, at a cost of (200) covers.]
It is odd that the 'exchange rate' at the 5★ tier is 4 covers per 1 level, regardless of whether you're talking about a 4★ character or a 2★ character. Given how much more common 2★ covers are than 4★ covers (and the fact that they're divided amongst many fewer 2★ characters), a 2★ character will fly from level 450 to level 550 in a tiny fraction of the time that it will take the 4★ character.
Anyway, feel free to let me know what I got wrong!
The day the first batch of characters eligible for ascension goes live, 58 new 5-star characters officially enter the game. I'm not saying it's time to panic, but...hold onto your butts.
Ok these numbers on 1* Iron Man look insane. This will break so much stuff, it'll be glorious.
I’m ready!!