Dynamic Combat Scaling
Many zones and game modes now support Dynamic Combat Scaling - a system that makes it easier for Heroes of different levels to play together!
Previously in Marvel Heroes, each area of the game had a fixed level, and all enemies in that area were locked to the level of that area. This meant that, even if you and a friend both wanted to play in a mode like X-Defense, if you weren’t near the same level you couldn’t play together. It also meant that if you were significantly over the level of an area - such as going back to lower level Story Mode chapters - you really didn’t have any reason to visit those areas since you would not receive loot or XP for your hero level.
With Dynamic Combat Scaling, these barriers are being broken down! Enemies throughout the game will be able to match your personal hero level and give appropriate rewards, allowing you to play with friends of different levels without having to split up to experience a more appropriate challenge, XP and loot rewards for your hero.
Story Mode will be affected by Dynamic Combat Scaling in the following ways:
- Enemies will still have a minimum level based on the progression of chapters as you encounter them, but will continue to scale up to match your hero’s level.
- XP rewards from Story Mode have been adjusted to ensure that progression through the chapters is smooth for new players. XP rewards from missions has been reduced slightly, while XP rewards from enemy defeats and orb pickups has been significantly increased. XP rewards from mission completion will now also scale to your hero level rather than being a fixed amount of XP based on the level of the mission. Overall, the amount of XP earned from Story Mode while playing through each chapter normally will be increased compared to before, but reduced when immediately skipping directly to a much higher level mission objective while bypassing enemies.
- Chapter 10 no longer requires reaching level 60 to unlock immediately, you’ll now unlock Chapter 10 as soon as you complete Chapter 9’s main mission progression. For now, unlocking Hightown Patrol during the Chapter 10 storyline will still require reaching level 60, and Hightown Patrol will remain broken into level bands, but this will be changing to match other Patrol zones in an upcoming patch.
Challenge Modes will be affected by Dynamic Combat Scaling in the following ways:
- Some modes that were previously accessible before level 60 are no longer separated into level bands, and all players will be joining a single zone that allows all players above the mode’s minimum level to join the same area. This includes:
Midtown Patrol (now level 1-60)
S.H.I.E.L.D. Holo-Sim (now 1-60)
X-Defense (now 1-60)
- The Cosmic Trial will no longer be entered through the portal within Midtown Patrol itself. The Cosmic Trial now has its own Waypoint entry in the Challenges tab that will unlock for each hero at level 60 so that players can unlock access to Cosmic Midtown Patrol, Cosmic Industry City Patrol, and Cosmic Hightown Patrol for that hero.
- Midtown Patrol reward boxes will now drop at the level of the hero you are currently playing.
- Modes that previously required level 60 to enter have not changed. These modes still require level 60 to enter, and their difficulty will remain as it did prior to this patch for level 60 players.
- Going forward, we’ll be continuing to roll out Dynamic Combat Scaling to fully apply to other content in the game through upcoming updates:
- Green and Red Terminals as well as One-Shots will be converted similarly to zones such as Midtown Patrol and will encompass the entire 20-60 level range once they are unlocked for that hero.
- Industry City Patrol will be converted similarly to Midtown Patrol and will encompass the entire level 10-60 level range once it is unlocked for that hero.
- Hightown Patrol’s level 60 requirement will be lifted, and this Patrol will operate similarly to Midtown Patrol encompassing the entire 1-60 level range. Note that access to this zone will still require at least one hero unlocking Hightown Patrol through Chapter 10 Story Mode main mission progression.
Blessings Revamp
With this patch, we are removing all sources of passive bonuses that grant benefits which ignore diminishing returns. The main outlier in the game in this regard was the Blessing of Hela, which granted an enormous amount of Brutal Strike chance that allowed players to reach incredibly high Brutal Strike chances. Due to these bonuses ignoring diminishing returns, these bonuses simply have become too powerful, and are being converted into rating bonuses so they can be tuned against more consistently.
Because this change affected the Blessing system to a much larger extent than anything else in Marvel Heroes, we have taken the opportunity to redesign Blessings as a whole to make some of the other Blessing choices more appealing, and encouraging some heroes to take different Blessing setups compared to always using Blessing of Hela.
Blessings are now broken up into three major categories: Offensive, Defensive, and Utility.
All Blessings in the
Offensive category will have Brutal Rating as a primary affix, as well as a secondary offensive affix:
Blessing of Frigga
- +15% Summoned Ally Damage
- +200 Brutal Strike Rating
Blessing of Hela
- +400 Brutal Strike Rating
- +400 Brutal Damage Rating
Blessing of Hogun
- +200 Brutal Strike Rating
- +300 Melee Damage Rating
Blessing of Loki
- +200 Brutal Strike Rating
- +300 Ranged Damage Rating
All Blessings in the
Defensive category will have 1% Damage Negation as a primary affix, as well as a secondary defensive affix:
Blessing of Fandral
- +1% Damage Negation
- +1,000 Dodge Rating
Blessing of Heimdall
- +1% Damage Negation
- +1,000 Deflect Rating
Blessing of Volstagg
- +1% Damage Negation
- +1,000 Defense Rating
All Blessings in the
Utility category will have both Health and Damage Rating as primary affixes, as well as a third utility affix:
Blessing of Balder
- +200 Health
- +200 Damage Rating
- +50 Spirit
Blessing of Sif
- +200 Health
- +200 Damage Rating
- -4% Spirit Cost
There will be a single uncategorized Blessing - Odin, the All-Father - that grants bonus damage versus bosses, and additionally grants +1 to all Attributes if your hero equips one Blessing from each of the three categories:
Blessing of Odin
- +3% Damage to Bosses
- If you have an Offensive Blessing, Defensive Blessing and Utility Blessing equipped, gain +1 to all Attributes for 10 seconds when you use any power
With all Blessings being converted to rating bonuses which have different levels of scaling relative to your personal hero level, Blessings will now scale their benefits based on the item level of the Artifact they are being applied to. The listed stats above are the maximum each Blessing will scale to, which is reached with Artfiacts that require level 39 to equip (item level 42) or higher.
In addition, to help players make the transition to the new Blessings on their existing heroes, the Enchanter will now have exchange recipes for each of the individual Blessings. Inserting any Artifact that already has an existing Blessing applied to it will allow you to switch to any other Blessing at no cost using these exchange recipes. This will allow players to change their Blessings around to adjust for the updated Blessing stats without spending additional Odin Marks.
Global Tuning Changes
In line with the change to the Hela Blessing, most other sources of bonuses that ignore diminishing returns are being altered:
- Cable Hero Synergy has been updated to +2% Critical Rating at level 25 and 50.
- Star-Lord Hero Synergy has been updated to +3% Critical Rating to Energy powers at level 25 and 50.
- Ghost Rider Hero Synergy has been updated to +3% Critical Rating to Mental powers at level 25 and 50.
- Moon Knight Hero Synergy has been updated to +3% Critical Rating to Physical powers at level 25 and 50.
- Wolverine Hero Synergy has been updated to +5% Brutal Rating at level 25.
- Midtown Patrol Vest slot 2 Unique item affix has been updated to grant a large amount of Brutal Strike Rating when hitting a Midtown boss.
Two hero powers have also been changed that conferred passive overcap benefits:
- Rogue’s Destroyer’s Vengeance passive updated to grant +4% Brutal Strike Rating
- Rogue’s Precise Aim passive updated to grant +4% Critical Hit Rating
Other hero powers that affect Critical Hit or Brutal Strike chance outside of diminishing returns do so either temporarily or only for individual powers, and are not being changed.
New Avenger’s Tower
Tony Stark has ordered a remodeling of one of the upper floors of the Avenger’s Tower to serve as the new base of operations, which is now complete!
The new Avenger’s Tower hub area is more spacious and contains all the amenities you’d expect from a billionaire’s superhero headquarters. The previous terminal section of the old hub - after undergoing constant maintenance and repairs to no avail - has been retired, now that the Waypoint technology has been upgraded to the point that they were no longer necessary.
Feel free to get comfortable and take in the sights of the new Avenger’s Tower hub!
Danger Room Tournament - Doop Scenario
A new Danger Room Tournament will begin this week starting
Friday, August 5th at 12PM PDT - the Doop Scenario!
Fight off waves of dangerous Doops in Doop Space Nine until you can take down the devious Doop Generals, and finally defeat the dastardly Doop Overlord!
Both Epic and Cosmic versions of the Tournament Scenario will be available, with separate Leaderboards for each. At the end of the week, rewards will be granted to those that participated and have recorded at least one completion time on the Leaderboards, with better rewards for those that reach the top 50%, top 10%, and number 1 spots!
Hero Changes
Captain America
- Torqued Shield Throw has changed places with Indestructible Shield in Captain America’s power progression, to give Captain America some additional firepower to deal with Ultron in the Times Square tutorial, and improve the early game experience.
Hawkeye
- Hawkeye has received a new power: the Sky-Cycle! This power replaces his sprint as his dedicated travel power. Why walk when you can fly in style?
In-Game Store Gifting Changes
The in-game store gifting feature is being restored this week, with some changes being made with this update. Gifting items to another player will now have a few restrictions for new accounts:
- The account must have a verified e-mail address associated with the account
- The account must have at least one hero at level 20
- The account must be at least 1 week old and have logged into the game at least 5 times
Overall, these restrictions should not impact existing players, but will help prevent gifting abuse from those that were attempting to hide fraudulent transactions behind newly created accounts.
Minor Changes and Bug Fixes
Previously, a new account would have to have at least one hero reach level 30 before they could be affected by event-related server live-tuning bonuses (such as XP, SIF, RIF bonuses). This threshold has been increased to level 60, to allow us to better tune the entirety of Story Mode XP progression so new players have a consistent experience up to level cap the first time, without being overly affected by server-side XP halfway through level progression. Once an account has at least one level 60, they will receive event live-tuning bonuses.
The entrance to Midtown in the southeast corner of Avenger’s Tower will now only appear once a player has reached level 10 with at least one hero on their account.
Jean Grey's Telepathic Detection visual effect has been updated to better match her other powers.
Tippy Toe from Squirrel Girl's 'Tippy Toe's Itty Bitty Bow' unique now critically and brutally strikes when summoned. Don't let the bow fool you.
Storm’s Cape of the Stormcrafter unique now grants Spirit cost reduction to all Windrider powers, instead of cost reduction to only the Windy Flight travel power.
The login reward for day 730 will now grant players a 3-Year Anniversary Birthday Cake. This change is retroactive and all players who have at least 730 login days will receive one!
Login rewards have been added for days 751 to 800.
Fixed an issue that could cause the player’s hero to move towards the cursor location while the chat window was active and the player was attempting to type into the chat box.
Fixed an issue with Cyclops’ Marvel NOW costume that caused his eye beam when using Shotgun Beam to not be angled correctly.
Fixed some visual issues with Luke Cage's Chunk O' Concrete power.
Blob will now correctly drop his medallion when he is defeated.
Fixed an issue with modifier keys being pressed quickly and causing some powers to not activate correctly.
Some powers that result in a transformed state with a custom hotbar will no longer unintentionally be able to use their dedicated travel power via hotkey:
- Loki can no longer use his travel power while in Frost Giant form.
- Mr. Fantastic can no longer use his travel power while in Spectacular Spheroid form.
- Rocket Raccoon can no longer use his travel power while operating his Thanosbuster mech-suit.
Fixed a display issue with the refresh bar not displaying correctly on vendors that have the refresh option.
Fixed an issue in which the the tooltip for the Genosha Influence progress bar didn’t display correctly.
Fixed an issue in which dropped item names would not appear when using a controller.
Fixed a typo in Captain America's Shield Expertise power.
Fixed a typo in the Hero Synergy tutorial window.
Known Issues
The following issues are known and planned to be fixed in an upcoming update:
The Avenger’s Tower Waypoint may not be granted correctly on login. Until this is corrected, a simple workaround is to travel to Midtown Patrol via a different hub, then use the portal door to manually enter Avenger’s Tower and collect the new Waypoint.
The lowest health boss testing dummy in the S.H.I.E.L.D. Training Room does not have the correct amount of health, and instead has the same health as the high health Raid testing dummy.
Hawkeye’s Sky-Cycle will not be visible when used while wearing the Ronin costume.
Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop enhanced costume is showing a T-pose during her run animation.
Some Chapter 1 and 2 missions are showing a “Missing Translation” text string in the Mission Log where it should display the mission description.
02/08/2016, 18h39
)