Marvel Puzzle Quest: Character Rebalances Insights

S0kun

We’ve been closely following all the feedback since we announced our plans to roll out batched nerfs and buffs across a wide range of MPQ characters. Unsurprisingly, the most heated reactions are around changes to long-standing meta characters that have made some of the most significant contributions to your rosters over the years.

We’ve said before that the game needed a shake-up because things were starting to feel stagnant. Over the past year, we’ve put a lot of thought into how to approach that in a meaningful way, and the answer came in the form of these larger rebalanced batches. Those plans assumed the game would be on a more stable foundation, but with all the turbulence from Unity’s launch and the follow-up work, the timing hasn’t lined up the way we hoped.

With that in mind, we’re going to hold off on Batch 3 of our rebalances until sometime next year, when things are in a more solid place. The previously announced characters will be reevaluated then, and we’ll also be looking not just at individual characters, but also at game-breaking synergies that clearly weren’t intended to exist (for example, Kangveil).

Before we wrap up, we want to talk a bit about the reasoning behind these changes. In simple terms, characters like Polaris and Mighty Thor have defined the meta so completely that most new designs just cannot compete with them. Their kits and their place in the ecosystem are so dominant that they crowd out other options, and that can’t be fixed just by adding more powerful characters on top. For a game with over 300 characters, the usage stats make it clear that a small handful are sitting in the double-digit percentage range across play, and from a balance standpoint that becomes unsustainable. To give more characters a chance to shine and to open up team-building creativity again, we made the difficult decision to tone down some of these top meta picks.

What about future regular rebalances like in the past?
That’s absolutely something we want to return to. Those smaller, more regular tuning passes were part of MPQ’s normal cadence, and we’ve missed being able to do them properly. The reality is that Unity-related development issues have made it hard to dedicate the time and focus needed to get back into that rhythm. Our hope is that once things stabilize, we can bring that style of ongoing rebalance back next year.