The Longer Term Character Reclassification

Formerly known as "The Post Dark Reign Reclassification" and "The Everyone at the Same Level Reclassification".

Stage 1 – The Move to 100

All characters are moved to the same max. level – 100 (it’s a nice round number which gives the impression of completeness). This first stage theoretically allows for every fully levelled character to be used in a far broader way at all times (think Balance of Power PvP) – the start of truer roster diversity. ISO usage should be rejigged, so overall expenditure remains largely neutral or close to. Players with existing characters simply have them migrated automatically over to the new system. Gameplay should remain largely similar to now, with players only facing rosters similarly levelled to their own.

At this time, there will be a selection of essentially duplicated characters and devs should develop a plan to retire 1 Captain America, 1 Daken, 1 Human Torch, 1 Storm (excluding Classic) and 1 Thor and implement any minor balances required to account for the removal of the partner. A generous refund of ISO and HP should be offered and maybe the remaining one appears in a lot of cover giveaways at the time, so that people can get them more easily. Characters that have more than one variation - Black Widow, Hawkeye, Iron Man, Magneto, Storm and Wolverine – will not change for the time being.

Characters will clearly need balancing (as per the norm) and if modest changes to glaring issues can be made at this time, that should be done. Characters retain their associated stars.


Stage 2 (Part 1) – The Rebalance Start

This is the foundation for balancing characters and forms the basis of a complete character overhaul. The end goal of this is that players will have a roster full of all very usable characters and should want to level up each one up and the biggest issue will be deciding who first. There should be one iteration of each character.

I am not sure how all of the behind the scenes technical stuff works, so devs would need to ascertain the order and timeline. You might do certain elements, whole parts, individual characters or other. For example, once the new “final” character is formed and in the open, their now former version/s get retired (including the more than one iteration of Black Widow, Hawkeye, Iron Man, Magneto, Storm and Wolverine) with a generous refund of ISO and HP.

The overall character is first based upon the below background elements and for this, we have turned to the official Marvel Power Ratings - which ranks character abilities out of 7 (the higher the tier, the more able). These are the abilities that have a broad (though admittedly a little low) range across the characters.

Strength

The ability to lift weight. In MPQ, this translates to tile damage.

There are 7 (only 6 in current use) tiers of numbers. Let’s say level 7 characters have max tile damage average of 70. The 6 characters have max tile damage average is 60. Max tile damage average is 50 for the level 5 characters, 40 for the 4 characters, 3 characters get max average tile damage of 30 and the sole 2 out of 7 character has max tile damage of 20. The exact numbers here are off and I imagine the leaps between levels will be smaller, they serve the illustrative purpose.

* Hulk, Juggernaut, Sentry, She-Hulk and Thor come out on the highest level of 7 and have the highest amount of damage for each single tile swap.
* Colossus, Iron Man and Ragnarok also cause much pain on 6.
* Ares, Captain Marvel, Doctor Octopus, Loki and Ms. Marvel next on 5 out of 7, hurt a lot.
* Beast, Deadpool, Doctor Doom, Moonstone, Spider-Man, Venom and Wolverine get a 4 and hit pretty hard.
* Remainder get a 2 or 3, so get the lowest two tiers of damage per turn.


Durability

Given we now have a tangle of healing options in the game (True Healing™, not True Healing™ (aka. boost of health), post-game healing and sporadic use of health abilities in game), it’s time to look at something more consistent and justifiable.

So, let’s talk about durability. In Marvel, it’s described as “the ability to resist or recover from bodily injury” and in MPQ, this translates to character healing.

Here are the characters:

* 7 – Hulk and Juggernaut at the top level are considered “virtually indestructible” and should heal quickly.
* 6 – The “superhuman” healing Ares, Captain Marvel, Colossus, Doctor Doom, Iron Man, Invisible Woman, Loki, Ms. Marvel, Ragnarok, Sentry, She-Hulk, Thor and Venom should also have a fast healing level.
* 4 – The “regenerative” Beast, Daken, Deadpool and Wolverine, should have a moderately fast heal.
* 3 – Black Panther, Black Widow, Bullseye, Captain America, Moonstone, Psylocke and Spider-Man have “enhanced” levels.
* 2 – Daredevil, Doctor Octopus, Falcon, Hawkeye, Hood, Human Torch, Magneto, Nick Fury, Punisher, Storm and Yelena Belova have “normal” levels.

To clarify and simplify how healing is handled across the game, as a baseline, each character should automatically receive their associated level of healing both in game (as yellow bar temporary resistance) and post-game healing (recovery) – perhaps as a percentage value of the original and the higher the tier, the faster the rate.

More specifically, there 5 tiers in current use and each should be suitably set, for example:

* 7 – 5% of health each turn in game and the fastest rate of post game healing.
* 6 – 4% of health each turn in game and the 2nd fastest rate of post game healing.
* 4 – 2% of health each turn in game and the 4th fastest rate of post game healing.
* 3 – 1% of health each turn in game and the 5th fastest rate of post game healing.
* 2 – 0% of health each turn in game and the 6th fastest rate of post game healing.

These are illustrative numbers meant to represent a tiered approach only - I do not know the exact figures (they are likely to be a little lower). Character health levels may also need moderate adjustments to ensure no one became too powerful.

The values would be shown on the character screen via the roster, in the area where the colour damage is displayed (eg. a shield for in game resistance and a small red cross for post-game healing).

As an example, at the end of each turn in game Hulk earns the highest rate of yellow bar healing automatically (no player intervention – the numbers just increase like a "boost of health" ability being used) and also heals the fastest post-game. In a similar fashion, Daken regenerates automatically in game at the 4th highest rate and similar post game.

This would replace all characters healing abilities in the game.


Energy Projection

The ability to discharge energy. This relates to the level of the crit tile multiplier.

* Doctor Doom, Iron Man, Magneto and Thor and are the top group with 6 points and as they can “discharge multiple forms of energy”, get the highest level of bonus tile damage.
* Captain Marvel, Human Torch, Invisible Woman, Loki, Ms. Marvel, Psylocke, Ragnarok, Sentry and Storm get a 5 and get a high level of damage too.
* Daredevil, Hood and Moonstone come in with a 4, so get a decent boost with their bonus tiles.
* Black Panther, Black Widow and Yelena Belova get a 3 and get a modest boost.
* Remainder of characters are on 1 and only have a small bonus damage amount.


There are currently no levels of character health. None of the ratings have a good enough cross section (most overall levels were too low, one was exactly half high and half low and the only one that was almost of use, was too unrealistic) and I simply can’t fit it neatly in anywhere. I would actually consider have a single health amount for all characters (so all these surrounding factors really make a difference) or link it to their combined star rating (eg. level x 200 or 250, gives a consistent and similar range to now and these figures are below).


Stage 2 (Part 2) – The Rebalance Abilities

Once you have the outline of the character, they are then individually formed with their abilities, examples of which can be seen in an earlier classification. Characters should also lose their subtitle.

There is a summary of gameplay elements here and here and devs should work out which ones they want to keep in the game going forward, which they want to ditch and any new ones. The forum community should be involved as much as possible.

I have removed the use of passive abilities, so only active abilities remain and everything is now just abilities, all of which cost AP. It should be noted negative/ passive elements of the character will more noticeably appear in the use of abilities.

Continuing on with the Marvel Power Ratings, come both the general way the overall abilities are handled, and also two categories where quite a number of characters had very little to no impact, so they became incorporated into the more general ability area.

Fighting Ability

The final element from the is the proficiency in hand-to-hand combat. In MPQ, this translates to the variety of ways that the character cause damage to a single enemy. Abilities should generally be related to damage, offense and defence (you know, the simple direct ones).

* Ares, Daken and Wolverine on 7 are considered “masters of all forms of combat” and all have 3 influencing and different abilities. Their abilities should have powers that are either almost are too powerful or have enough negative to weigh them out.
* Black Widow, Captain America, Deadpool, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, Psylocke and Punisher are all on 6 (masters of several forms of combat), so have at least 2 strong differing abilities that more broadly affect gameplay.
* Black Panther, Bullseye, Daredevil and Yelena Belova on 5 out of 7 are “masters of a single form of combat” and have 3 decent abilities that focus broadly on the one theme.
* Every other character not specifically mentioned here is on 4 points (experienced fighter).
* Human Torch, Hood, Invisible Woman, Loki and Moonstone on 3 all have “some training”, so their unique abilities hurt not so much.
* And despite being crazily powerful in many ways, Sentry (on 2) sits alone with the most ordinary set of abilities.


Intelligence

The ability to think and process information.

* Doctor Doom and Iron Man are the highest on 6.
* Beast, Black Panther, Doctor Octopus, Loki, Magneto and Sentry come next on 5.
* Moonstone and Spider-Man come in at 4 out of 7.
* Others are at 2 and 3, so not a priority.

Speed

The ability to move over land by running or flight.

* Sentry and Thor share the top spot on 7 points.
* Captain Marvel, Doctor Doom, Human Torch, Iron Man, Magneto and Ms. Marvel come in at 5 out of 7.
* The remainder of the characters come in at 2 or 3.

These two categories have reserved for them, two particular broad types of abilities. They should impact the enemy team as a whole or benefit their team. Not sure which yet but likely to include more unique abilities such as AP generation and steal, repeating effects, board manipulation, differentiation of AP power costs.

Some early thoughts about colour use are here.

But before we go…


Stage 2 (Part 3) – Star Shuffle

Each new character is now able to reach a max level of 100 but how do they get distributed?

This stage’s aim is to move to a more accurate overall ranking system of the characters and fits somewhere alongside the implementation of “new” characters as described in the next stage.

While it would be nice to be able to remove the star ranking system all together (a better system being an integrated roster / training area where you allocate currency as you like to any character - see bottom for slight explanation), given the way the current game is set up, there has to be a way of seeing which covers can flood the game and which only come out once in a while. There should also be a simplified model of how covers are distributed.

For this, we turn to the official Marvel Power Ratings - which ranks character abilities out of 7 (the higher the tier, the more able) and we total points the characters have. Via the star ratings, we can now see an overall picture of the character’s position in relation to another and an indication of future character cover availability.

Iron Man (33), Sentry (32), Thor (32), Doctor Doom (31), Captain Marvel (28), Loki (28), Ms. Marvel (28), Ragnarok (26), Hulk (24), Magneto (24), She-Hulk (24), Ares (23), Juggernaut (23), Invisible Woman (22), Beast (21), Black Panther (21), Colossus (21), Moonstone (21), Psylocke (21), Black Widow (20), Daken (20), Doctor Octopus (20), Venom (20), Wolverine (20), Daredevil (19), Deadpool (19), Human Torch (19), Spider-Man (19), Captain America (18), Storm (18), Punisher (17), Yelena Belova (17), Hawkeye (16), Nick Fury (16), Bullseye (15), Hood (15), Falcon (14).

The Devs decide how many star rankings they want (eg. 1*- 3*, 1* - 4* or 1* - 5*) and then split them into broadly even groupings.

At the end of this, we have 40 something unique characters, all with the ability to max level to 100 with the above suggested levels of availability forecasted.

So, there you have it. A whole bunch of evenly levelled and varied characters, where you have to carefully build your team each time as each character has useful skills and abilities.

***
Overview of conceptual integrated roster / training system:

My belief is that eventually the game has to move to a system whereby you have the characters "open but greyed out" in a central roster / training system and then you then assign points / game currency, as you see fit.

Foundational single characters (perhaps pre-powered or their alias), with some sort of skill tree system (can be as simple as the current AP abilities initially) that can all be raised to the same level (eg. 100), which you then add costumes or whatever else. For example, you have "James Howlett" and adding ISO activates the basic hack / slash abilities and you can then have his Patch, Astonishing, X-Force variants (as costumes). Perhaps the covers can be reutilised some sort of currency model, so EVERY time you got a cover, it actually means something.

Once you have the base characters, whole sets of variants can easily be introduced. If people want to pay to get anything, great for the devs, otherwise people just earn stuff like they do now.