Loot update

Hi there,

There were a couple of good posts lately about loot and even a few posts prompted by the fact that other popular RPGs are trying to improve their loot systems and make them as sexy as ours.

We've definitely seen some great ideas in all of the discussions and the loot game is something we keep close to our hearts (we get an email from Brevik almost every night with his loot experiences, among many other things).

The new designers we hired from the community last month, and the item design team had a great meeting today where we reviewed all the comments from posts, plus reviewed the next 10 months of plans we had for loot in 2015. We added more things to our to do list for this week, next week and the coming weeks to make sure every week we make changes and additions to the loot game. Weekly content is one of our major strengths. We don't have to wait for yearly expansion packs to iterate on loot, we can literally do stuff on a daily/weekly basis.

I've played most games on the market and believe Marvel Heroes has one of the best loot systems, but no designer should ever, ever believe their system is perfect. Every designer should read every scrap of feedback with a humble, open mind and make smart changes when appropriate.

With that in mind, we identified a bunch of changes and have already started work on some and completed work on others:

This Week

The first thing we're doing is upgrading the item hunting experience by:

Increasing the drop rate of unique items for level 30+ heroes in all zones and modes.

Changing the ratio of uniques to have a 90% chance to drop a unique usable by your current hero (up from 80%).

Independently increasing the drop rate of "Any Hero" and "Shared Hero" unique items very significantly. Now that we have so many more "Any Hero" uniques, the rate should reflect the quantity. @amthua is also working on an alogrithm to increase the rate of these automatically whenever a new "Any Hero" unique is added. This will be done separately so they don't reduce the chance of you getting a unique tailored to your hero.

Reducing the price of upgrading uniques to level 40 and 50 by 50%.

Doubling stack sizes for all boosts.

Replacing some of the incidence of cosmic gear slot 1-5 in cosmic chests with cosmic rings (less feast/famine)

Increasing drop rate of Gem of the Kursed on Kurse in Level 60 terminals

Increasing drop rate on the Hulk Medallion and other boss Medallions in Holo Sim

Increasing loot on solo and split-wave bosses in Holo-Sim and X-Defense

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With The Next Large Patch

Stopping the timer on buff potions while you are in hubs, training room and PVP. (This tech should be testable in about 2 weeks).

20 more inventory slots

30 more inventory slots associated with team ups (these can be used even if you don't have a team up)

Further review of item stack sizes

More "Any Hero" uniques to support certain builds that aren't being supported

A pass on all PVP rings to ensure they are useful for PVP situations

Unique rings that are geared towards PvE

A recipe that allows you to permanently buff your team up hero by giving them your extra unique items

Several recipes that allow you to turn duplicate uniques into other various other things (this won't be OP, but it will much better than vendoring them)

New artifacts to support mental & energy & ranged builds (MODOK now drops his Headband, but a few more are coming)

New artifacts to further support melee survivability and time-to-clear times (as you've noticed, we've been focusing on this recently and will continue to focus on it)

The Following Patch

Further iteration of loot tables to ensure you never have a terrible day

A very large pass on all items in the game to ensure every item has at least 1 build for which it is useful (this includes Legendary items)

More runewords to support various builds

Stark-Tech items which are being designed as a highly customizable "mini item game" within a game. We'll preview the new design in about 3 weeks.

New uniques and artifacts that can be farmed in a reasonable amount of time from each terminal boss

Many more terminals!

Another reward to celebrate our Mac launch that can be earned by all players that functions close to the Asgard reward chest

Several interesting new uses for crafting materials

Enchanting for various additional slots