I am just a video game player who enjoys ARPGs. I recently played this game and here's my take on it.
Marvel heroes is a pay to win game with nothing to win
The game has one of the worst/corrupt cash shops I've ever seen. The entire gaming experience as a free to play player is atrocious. You're constantly pressured to make a purchase because you're drastically limited in all aspects of traits that make an action RPG fun. Have you ever walked into a store and then have gotten swarmed by salesmen? That's what it feels like playing MH. You're constantly put into situations where the game is attempting to sell you something.
Right off the bat your bag/warehouse space is practically nothing but the game requires so many reagents and crafting materials. By the time you'll level to 60 with the default bag space you'll be forced to delete most items and never save any crafting materials. Your entire bag will be filled with runes, relics, a few decent artifacts and a couple of uniques if you're lucky. You can only upgrade your warehouse with real money.
If I can't save items for the other characters I want to play then I'm going to be less motivated to play those characters. The funny thing to me is that MH is designed to unlock many characters due to all of the synergies and experience boosts you get by having multiple level 60s. It's obvious their intentions are to persuade you into playing many different characters.
It's also obvious they added a huge constraint on your bag space to make you want to buy more space so you can gear up those alt characters.
They also sell experience/drop rate boosting potions, costumes, pets and a bunch of various other stuff which is a typical in most F2P games. It seems a bit stupid to me that they sell so many boosts because the game has very little content.
You're essentially paying to win against AI because PvP is close to non-existent and the PvE content is trivial. Hence, you have nothing to win.
You'll be grinding your life away
The game has 33 heroes and if you want to play any of them except for your starter hero then you will need to find items called splinters or buy them with real money. Splinters are an in game item that drops on a set timer set by the game developers. So far after tracking over 1,000 hours of drops which was done by the community the average drop rate seems to be 6 per hour. The problem is many heroes cost 400 splinters, a bunch of them cost 600 and quite a few cost 200.
So to give you a little chart, here's the number of hours you would need to be in the game world killing monsters to buy a hero:
200 splinters: 33 hours of grinding
400 splinters: 66 hours of grinding
600 splinters: 100 hours of grinding
You also have an option to purchase a random hero for 175 splinters but the issue with that is there are 33 heroes at the time of writing this and you can get duplicates of heroes you already own. The duplicates can then be used to upgrade your ultimate skill which has 20 ranks.
Your ultimate skill is a very strong skill that is usually on a long cooldown but it varies depending on the hero you play. However if you were to buy the ultimate skill upgrade for a specific hero it costs 200 splinters. You get it at level 1 by default so that means you would need to upgrade it 19 times which means it would cost 3,800 splinters to upgrade your ultimate skill to its max level. That comes out to 633 hours of grinding.
If you want to play a specific hero then buying a random hero is a horrible move because you only have a 3% chance to get the hero you want. The math is completely broken for random heroes relative to the cost. It's not a good idea to random a hero unless you're ok with playing a wide array of heroes and you only have a few.
The splinter grind doesn't stop with heroes
They also have team ups that you can hire, similar to Diablo 2's mercs. The only problem is they cost 400-600 splinters each and they provide very little benefit. They instantly die end game but you can put them in passive mode. When they are in passive mode they are nothing more than a DPS boost. They are basically an item slot that you can pay real money for, or grind 100 hours for which also means those 100 hours you grinded away cannot be used to buy a hero that you can play because you spent it on a passive stat boost instead.
I actually did the math and created a spreadsheet to show just how little value they add end game. You can find that here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5AtB0vYiwfIzl1GI-q5WsLmpMi0hAofxkguZO-Ux6U/edit
I encourage you to look at it because the premise is that it will take on the order of years for a team up to pay for itself. Insanity!
ARPGs are about the items, but MH has little to offer
The items in this game are completely uninteresting. They decided to take the same approach as Diablo 3 in regards to unique/legendary items except there's very little uniques total. They can drop at any level and the only difference between a level 20 Cool Sword of Coolness and a level 60 Cool Sword of Coolness is the level 60 variant has a few more stats.
It also suffers the same fate as D3 when it comes to itemization except it's much worse for MH. Every hero has pretty much the same build. You will want to get 3-5 uniques because there's only 5 main item slots. Then you will want to get cosmic items for the other non-unique slots. Cosmic items are just 1 notch under uniques and are the same as rare items in D3.
What this means is you're hunting for 1 specific item for each slot and those items are guaranteed to be best in slot and nothing else comes close. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at it the hunt for these uniques don't take very long. On my 2nd level 60 I was able to find 4x level 60 uniques for the slots I wanted in about 8 hours of game play, that included a duplicate too which I vendored and the 5th unique did drop however it wasn't optimal for my build so it was no interest to me.
You need to pickup almost all loot because you can donate it to an NPC to level them up which is just another time sink. Expect to spend hundreds of hours of grinding and donating items to level up just 1 of those NPCs to 20. They unlock things like being able to enchant items for a small bonus or apply certain modifications to your costume.
At least you can trade items right?
Nope, uniques are account bound and almost everything is bind on equip. Oh yeah, the game doesn't even have a trading system at all. You have to drop your items on the floor and hope you don't get ripped off.
I think an auction house in an APRG is a bad move. I was against it from day 1 in D3 but eliminating trading or making trading painful is just idiotic in a game of this genre.
I think PoE does a great job at trading and it has a lot more to do with how the game is setup to begin with. Trading is very seamless in PoE because of little things like being able to go to a zone in any difficulty without leaving your game. It takes seconds to invite someone, meet up and trade your items safely through a trade window. Then you can immediately go back to playing. It's a great user experience.
The game runs like garbage
I'll admit my computer isn't the best but I'll tell you this. Diablo 3, Torchlight II and Path of Exile all run well enough on my machine that I can't complain too much. I get a constant 40-50 FPS in those games with small dips to 30ish on occasion but it's always playable. PoE had some crashing issues in the past but they've long fixed that and they constantly go back and tweak old content to make it more efficient. The game runs great now.
On the flip side MH is just unbelievably bad. I had to turn everything off, set the game to the lowest resolution possible, run it in a window, change memory allocation settings in my operating system and spend over an hour going through 5 different config files Googling dozens of variables to tweak every last ounce of performance out of the game.
Even with all of that done the game routinely ran at 10-20 FPS even playing solo in a lot of areas and certain areas like MM were unplayable. The game would completely freeze for 5 full seconds and then unfreeze for 500 milliseconds and keep repeating for an entire minute until things eventually loaded and then it was a total slideshow at about 2 frames per second. It doesn't help that you get sent to MM very often for quests too.
A lot of people with much better computers than myself have serious performance issues too. Feel free to go to their tech support forums to see what I mean.
How's the content?
There's a story mode with 3 difficulty settings similar to Diablo 2. The story can be finished in about 4 hours un-twinked from start to finish while doing all of the quests and getting the way points. You can basically level to 60 which is the max level in about 15 hours of game play. That's 12 hours to repeat the story 3 times and then 3 hours of grinding to reach the cap.
There's also a map called MM that's just 1 big zone with a bunch of monsters spawning and bosses spawn on a timer. It's a huge lag fest and pretty inefficient to ever go to unless you have a legendary quest to complete.
Legendary quests are like bounties in Diablo 3. You get sent to kill stuff and you get exp at the end along with an in game currency that is used to enhance your character by providing enchantments to your gear or giving you a legendary item that requires you to grind out a massive amount of EXP to level up to obtain passive bonuses for that 1 character.
There are other zones like xdef and holo-sim which are just little maps that you can go to and get swarmed by enemies while trying to complete simple goals like kill 100 enemies or kill a few bosses. It's very repetitive and boring. You can play them alone or in a public party because you have to queue up to play them.
Lastly there are terminals which rehash the existing game content and just put them into instances. There's nothing special about them at all and they have multiple difficulties. The last difficulty has a higher chance to drop cosmic items including cosmic rings. It also gives you the same objective every time where if you kill a certain amount of enemies you get a chest at the end which drops typical loot you'd find anywhere else in that cosmic instance. The content isn't even challenging. You can get through a cosmic terminal on a fresh level 60 without any buffs or luxury items like enchants or legendary items.
That's about it. If you were to ignore story mode you could level from 1-20 in xdef in about 30 minutes and then hit 60 in a few hours of doing legendary quests. As you level up more heroes to 60 you gain an account wide experience boost. Combine this with cash shop experience boosts can you can hit 60 in about 2 hours no problem. I wouldn't bother though because all of the above content can be done pre-60 except the cosmic terminals which other than being harder is the same stuff you've been doing pre-60.
There's PvP too but it's an unfinished joke. I'd rather get molested by a porcupine with aids than PvP in this game.
There's a stigma around the company behind the game
A lot of people get banned for no reason and they routinely remove posts from the forum that aren't positive feedback. A lot of players (myself included) look at forums before playing a game.
If a game is 10 gigs it takes a bit to download and browsing the forums is a good way to learn about the game while waiting for it to download. I feel like by censoring your forums you are lying to potential customers.
They try to make the game appear more well received than it really is because at the end of the day a free to play player is a potential customer so they do everything in their power to increase that.
Luckily you can always look up public stats. If you were to view the popularity of MH on Steam which is measured by concurrent players you would see it's doing quite poorly relative to their competition, especially compared to games like PoE which have close to 4x the number of concurrent players at the time of writing this article.
Final thoughts
Go play any other ARPG out there if you're looking to scratch your loot lottery itch, it'll be better than this game. It is a total disappointment.
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