Marvel Heroes

AggroChat #70 – Calibrating “Main Gun”

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massEffectGarrus

This week we are joined by Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen, with Kodra having to deal with some family stuff.  I was not certain how much we would have to talk about, but like always we managed to fill a show full of all sorts of games that we had been playing.  Thalen starts it off talking about his further adventures into the Magic Duels free to play game.  Similarly with the launch of Fallout Shelter for android he has started playing that as well.  Finally he talks about the recent Fantastic Four event in Marvel Heroes and how The Thing is the tankiest of tanks.  Tam spent the day at an Infinity Tournament and talks about just how awesome the Seattle minature gaming scene has been.

Grace talks about her recent swap to spending most of her time in Wildstar and the excitement surrounding the impending free to play drop that is now on the public test server.  Additionally she talks about her recent foray into the PVP system, and how generally cool the community seems to be surrounding it.  While board games are normally the territory of Kodra, Grace mentions the Exploding Kittens card game and how much fun she has had with it since receiving it.  Ashgar has followed in Tam’s footsteps and talks about his experiences playing Sword Art Online Hollow Fragment.  Ash has also started on a brand new playthrough of Mass Effect with the intent of carrying one save game from one all the way through three.  This of course spawns a conversation where we talk about our experiences with the Mass Effect series.  

Finally I talk about my recent return to Rift, and my obsessions with Hellgate London.  Additionally we talk about next weeks show, where we plan on talking about the storyline of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward expansion.  We have purposefully kept discussion of plot points to a minimum, but we feel it is generally safe enough to start talking about where we think the game is going.  We are announcing this ahead of time for the purpose of letting our listeners and readers join in the fun.  Do you have any interesting theories or are there parts of the story that you didn’t quite grasp?  We are taking in questions via email for this coming show, and we will go over them on the air.  I should be a lot of fun and it is our first real attempt to do something like this.

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#Blaugust Day 14: Of Vaults and Cards and Other Things

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Kinda late with the blog post today. Normally I try to write them the night before and schedule to post the next morning, but a combination of gaming later than I really should have and lack of any clear notion of what to write about meant I had nothing written when I went to bed. Just means I'm writing at lunch.

Fallout Shelter finally came out for Android yesterday, so I downloaded it to see what people were going on about a month ago. It's pretty enjoyable so far, though I'm obviously still in the very early game which is often the best part in these sorts of things. We'll see if it holds up further in once leveling and finding new things slows down. I did get lucky and pull a unique dweller and a legendary weapon from my first and second lunchboxes, so I've had him out exploring the wasteland and bringing back more stuff. So far raider attacks haven't been much trouble to deal with thanks to the early infusion of armor and weapons. I did have a scare for a little where my water production fell off and my overall happiness started to tank; I managed to reassign some people and make it through though and then prioritized expanding water production once I had the caps.

#Blaugust Day 14: Of Vaults and Cards and Other Things
My litle Vault, ticking along
Over in Marvel Heroes, I finished leveling Magneto to 60 last week and started running Thing up through the story to take advantage of an xp bonus for the Fantastic Four that was in over the weekend. I've been enjoying the Thing's gameplay more than I expected. I tend to prefer dodgy ranged characters and he's very much an in-the-thick of the action brick. His secondary resource builds when he deals or receives damage so you want to leap into the middle of a bunch of guys and start whaling away. I finished up Chapter 4 yesterday with him and have reached level 34, so again, no problem leveling in the story.

#Blaugust Day 14: Of Vaults and Cards and Other Things
Dear Gazillion, I will pay cash money for this costume
Finally, I played a fair amount of Magic Duels last night trying to clear out a couple of quests. You can have up to 3 simultaneously and it seems you get one new one each day. I had a full load, so I wanted to get at least one completed so as not to wasted today's. One quest was to put 20 counters on creatures over the course of any number of games, and the other two were both Archetype quests, which ask you to win 4 duels with particular deck types. It's important to note that you have to make a deck using the Deck Builder for it count for those quests. I know Kodra, who's up on the current cards and meta, hates the deck builder but for me it's helpful to give me an idea of what sorts of decks are viable these days.

I ended up putting together a red/black deck built around creature sacrifices, ideally creatures stolen from my opponent, that was a lot of fun when it worked. I feel like it needs some fine tuning, as it could be brutal when things went my way, but I had a couple terrible defeats as well when the cards weren't with me. For another quest I made a blue/white air superiority deck that worked remarkably well in the duels I used it in. There the point was to overwhelm my opponent with flying creatures while handling his creatures via special abilities to tap or destroy them and a few hefty blockers.

Tomorrow I should have the first of what I hope will be many book reviews going up, and I also have an idea for another ongoing series that I plan to start up Sunday. I just have to actually get the posts written. Come back tomorrow and see if I succeed!

Blaugust Day 3: Master of Magnetism!

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Marvel Heroes is another game whose developers seem to be very good at learning from their mistakes. Most recently they did away with multiple story mode difficulties. Where previously you had to run through the entire story 3 times to get all the available rewards on a particular character (most importantly power points) a single run through the story now takes you from level 1 to 60. Previously you would expect to be around level 25 the first time you fight Doctor Doom. Now you'll be nearly at the level cap when you reach Doom.

I decided to test this out by pulling out one of the characters I have unlocked but a level 1 and seeing how the leveling felt in this new system. I considered a couple of options, but ultimately decided on Magneto.

Those are some impressive guns for a 90 year old.

I played through the first 4 chapters of 9, and had hit level 33 by the time I defeated the Kingpin. Based on a little time spent in Midtown Manhattan, that seems to still be a quicker way to level, but Story mode is definitely a more viable leveling option than before.

I did notice that villains in events had a lot less health than before, resulting in super-villains often being defeated almost instantly when they appeared. On one hand, it's nice that I can complete those events by myself without it being a multi-minute slog now. I think maybe they need to be adjusted back up a little though, as it's pretty much not worth trying to get to one unless you were near it when it spawned.

As far as Magneto's gameplay, I had a lot of fun floating around hurling metal shards at people and listening to Magneto's haughty comments whenever other heroes ran by. Magneto uses 'debris' as a secondary resource for his attacks which recovers slowly over time or faster through wrecking up the place. I tend to destroy anything around in any case just for fun, so that works out well for me. I also really like the white costume they chose as his default, though if his costume from his time as Headmaster of the Xavier School ever gets added to the game, I'll be picking that up immediately.

Blaugust Day 3: Master of Magnetism!