Coming soon: Blade, Danger Room, and the Defensive review

Blade is going up on public test center soon, which means live release is imminent. I believe they want to release him next week. I'm pretty hyped, I liked playing Blade in Marvel Ultimate Alliance and have been wondering how he will play in Marvel Heroes. The Danger Room finally getting to the public testing phase is also great, since that should mean a release not too far off.

https://forums.marvelheroes.com/discussion/241980/schedule-update-10-19/p1

Test Center will be coming down today and stay down for a few days while we work on Danger Room and prepare Blade!

Blade is planned to hit Test Center around Wednesday, depending on various approvals/changes. He is currently in internal testing now.

Danger Room will return with Blade for more testing and feedback, thanks for all of your feedback over the last day, we're very excited about it!

As of right now, no patch is planned for this week. We're focusing on all of the goodness in Test Center instead.

Danger Room FAQ:  https://forums.marvelheroes.com/discussion/235306/faq-danger-room-game-mode

RocaW assembled a pretty nice post and videos about the Danger Room on the official forums if you'd like to see how it looked during the initial testing: http://forums.marvelheroes.com/discussion/241879/danger-room-hd-video-new-hub-reward-scenarios-walkthrough

Danger Room was on Test Center over the weekend and they are already working on some of the feedback about loot:

Lot of good feedback here. We're going to make it so bosses drop their loot (including their boss specific items) when defeated, and we're looking at changing the design some so that mobs can drop loot took (including the mini-bosses). Unfortunately the difficulty was out of whack due to an engineering bug, so later this week you'll get a look at a version of DR much closer to what we envisioned, difficulty-wise.

Some amount of the gameplay loop we envision for Danger Room is waiting on the Item Enhancement system (placeholder name), but that doesn't mean the merit system can't be a fun and rewarding system for Danger Room.

As for X-Defense and Holo-Sim, those two modes need a review ASAP, agree.

Another thing that is coming is the Defensive Review. Here is the gist of it:

The simplest way to describe the new defense system is "One layer to rule them all". In practice, what this means is that each form of mitigation that a player can itemize for will still exist, but rather than be independent sources of multiplicative mitigation, each of these layers will add to one single stat that represents your total damage mitigation from all sources.

There are three layers to this new stat, which internally we are calling Armor. This name may change before we launch the feature, but for purposes of this post, I'll continue to describe it as Armor.

Layer 1) Defense Rating - This is the familiar staple of mitigation that isn't changing mechanically in the new world. The only difference is that the result of the defense rating calculation now folds into Armor. For example, if 3000 Defense Rating gave you a 20% resistance to incoming damage, 3000 Defense Rating would now give you 20% Armor. Defense Rating will no longer be found on the 'white stats' of Slot 2-5 items, thus Defense Rating on heroes will become much more valuable.

Layer 2) Deflection Rating - Projectile Deflect Chance has been one of those 'feast or famine' affixes I described earlier - heroes who do not have it have a noticeably harder time dealing with ranged enemies, and as a stat that is very difficult to itemize for, those heroes find their options very limited if they want to itemize to solve the issue they are facing. In the new system, Projectile Deflect is now known as Deflection Rating, and acts similarly to other Ratings found in the game. This property will give a chance to absorb 50% of incoming damage from any attack, not just projectiles, while also increasing your Armor, to a lesser degree than Defense Rating does. An example of this might be that 3000 Deflection Rating gives you a 25% chance to absorb half of the incoming damage from an attack, and 12% Armor. In essence, Deflection Rating is replacing what currently is known as Dodge Rating

Layer 3) Dodge Rating - With these changes, we have the opportunity to revert Dodge to its former value, as we can tune and balance it while resolving the problems it once had. Veteran players may remember an age where a Dodge-based hero could evade a large number of attacks, but without it granting any form of mitigation, Dodge-based heroes would often be rolling the dice to determine whether or not they are defeated by attacks. This is not a world we want to return to. In the new system, Dodge Rating will provide a chance to absorb ALL damage from an incoming attack, while also giving some Armor, though at the smallest conversion rate compared to the other two layers. 3000 Dodge Rating might grant a 10% chance to completely evade an attack, while also granting 6% Armor.

Each of these three layers is intended to grant the same amount of total mitigation - Defense provides the most stable mitigation, Dodge provides some stable mitigation but some spiky mitigation, and Deflection lies somewhere in between the two.

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Passives and buffs will be undergoing a full pass to convert all relevant stats to the new system. To ensure that no hero needs to heavily itemize for missing layers, each hero will be given one of three possible pairs of defensive stats. For example, as a very agile hero, Spider-Man would be a dodge/deflection hero, whereas Colossus would be defense/deflection.

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When this change does go in, a global reduction in enemy damage will accompany it.

The defensive review will go live late October or early November.