Re: Marvel Strike Force Strongest Characters
Johna Delehanty
Even as I was downloading Marvel Strike Force, I ran through everything that was likely wrong with the game: a reliance on microtransactions, repetitive gameplay, disappointing roster of characters. When I finally got going and understood the various systems and currencies in place, I became utterly hooked by an almost overwhelming amount of modes. When combined with an addictive gameplay loop, Marvel Strike Force is a game I eagerly log into each day to play as much as I can.
To fully understand the sheer depth of modes, let me run down the current offerings: campaigns, challenges, arena, blitz, alliance raids, and events. While each mode centers on the same turn-based combat, they all yield different rewards. Challenges rotate daily, offering the best way to horde a wide range of resources and supplies in small bursts, while blitz gives you the ability to pursue new characters by facing off against A.I.-controlled teams from other players. However, if you want the best rewards, you likely want to join up with an active alliance to conquer raids. While each of those consume resources or have limits on how much you can play them at a time, I rarely feel pinched by it thanks to how many different things I can do while still feeling like I'm bettering my characters or my alliance. In addition, daily objectives drive you to each mode in order to earn additional bonuses, and a rotation of limited-time events keeps you coming back for more.
No matter how you choose to interact with Marvel Strike Force, every road leads to acquiring new heroes and improving your existing roster. Herein lies the big hook. Early on, I acquired favorite characters like Luke Cage, Spider-Man, and Punisher, but the longtime Pokmon fan in me wasn't satisfied with stopping there. Using the various avenues, I worked towards earning characters like Hulk, Drax, and Wolverine. During the Infinity War event, I grinded to add Thanos to my team. The moment you are prompted to recruit a favorite hero or villain to your team is supremely satisfying, and the instant improvement you see triggers that dopamine drip to get you hooked.
And you want to have a well-rounded roster of heroes. It's easy to focus on your strongest party of five characters, but situations often necessitate you reach into your reserves. The separate campaigns are the biggest example of this, as my team of Daredevil, Wolverine, Jessica Jones, Crossbones, and Spider-Man was disallowed in the campaign exclusively for cosmic characters. Similarly, my most powerful character, Thanos, isn't valid for the heroes campaign. This extends past this mode, however, as you must use items to heal characters between battles in raids, so sometimes it's best to just swap in your b-team to preserve resources.
This contributes to the constant drive you feel to not only add new characters to your roster, but supercharge them with every action. However, as you get stronger, upgrading your characters and equipping gear becomes more expensive and convoluted. Rather than simply equipping an item, higher levels often require you to craft something new from several different items you collect. It's unnecessarily complicated, and one of the things I wish was streamlined a bit. However, Strike Force smartly gives you roadmaps for each item you need to either recruit or upgrade a hero you want. No matter what you want to do, you need a different resource or supply; you can even auto-win previously beaten campaign missions or challenges as long as you completed it without any of your characters being defeated.
This means that if you manage your resources properly and intentionally choose where to use them, every action in Marvel Strike Force has meaning and contributes to the betterment of your team. Watching your team grow from a ragtag group of characters you just happened to unlock to a well-oiled machine of your favorite characters from across the Marvel universe is awesome, but steadily building them up through an intentional allocation of your time and resources to the point they can take on high-level raids is even better. Being able to bring your squad to an active alliance of likeminded players and contribute to the greater goals only adds to the excitement; I finally left my inactive alliance for one that raids every day and it made a night-and-day difference in both my enjoyment and progress.
While it suffers from some of the free-to-play pitfalls and some of the least enticing microtransactions I've ever seen ($50 to add Black Panther to my team... really?!), I'm all in with Marvel Strike Force. The loop of constantly working towards my next upgrade keeps me coming back multiple times a day, while the steady stream of activities and events ensures I'm never without something I can do. With more events and modes on the horizon, it's only going to become a better experience as the developers strike a better balance between effort and the rewards each mode divvies out. I'm already hooked, but I'm even more excited to see how the team at FoxNext keeps things fresh going forward.
Marvel Strike Force starts off easily enough. Manage a small team of heroes, work through a few missions... what tips could you possibly need, right? Well, my friend, you may not realize that you are not putting your best foot forward. As more modes unlock, and as you gain access to additional currencies, you may begin to realize that you have played your hand poorly.
However, it doesn't have to be that way! These tips will help you manage your priorities better, while also helping you save precious time while maximizing your Strike Force gains. These are all the things I desperately wish I had known earlier. Learn from my mistakes!
I can't stress enough how incredibly important this is. Not just for the sake of saving time. Some battles are times in the world of Marvel Strike Force. If you are stuck in a close match, where you are slowly chipping away at your opponent, you can absolutely time out and lose. Especially with how incredibly lengthy some of the attack animations are in this game.
Thankfully, if you increase the animation speed, that doesn't also make that clock count down any faster. For that reason alone, I recommend always having the speed set to 3X. It may be a bummer losing those animations, but you will also save hours of your life not having to watch Nightcrawler flip around the arena for fifteen seconds a shot.
Every day you'll be looking to cash in and quickly complete your daily objectives. You'll also likely want to clear those free orbs you are accumulating, and level up certain characters you are currently building. This can take a frightful amount of time if you do it inefficiently, so let me give you the streamlined order to approach these tasks that has worked well for me.
Once you have done all of this, you can circle back every five hours or so and complete a round of blitz battles, and spend your campaign currency in order to work at claiming the secondary Daily Objectives.
An easy mistake to make in the early game is to just assume that team positioning is, more or less, irrelevant. It isn't like being in the back row will reduce damage or anything, and there is no restriction on targeting characters in the back row, so what does the position of a character matter?
Well, keep in mind that attacks come in basically three forms: They can hit a single enemy, a cluster of enemies, or all enemies. For positioning, the cluster-type of attack is what I'm going to focus on. There are tank characters in Marvel Strike Force. One of the primary jobs of a character like Colossus is to taunt the enemy team, and take shots on the chin. Once a team has been taunted, they can only attack the tauntee. However, if they want to hit a character who is right next to the tank, they can use one of those attacks that hits a cluster of characters.
So, you will want to position your tank on one end of your team, and your more vulnerable characters on the other. By positioning your troops this way, you will be able to protect your extremely important, yet typically fragile, controller-type characters.
In the early goings, you are probably going to want to just build a team using your favorite heroes. And hey, that will definitely work... at first. In the early goings, power is all that really matters. However, as time passes, and you level your team up, you'll start finding that a team cobbled together from all across the Marvel universe is probably a little lacking when facing off against foes in the arena or in blitzes. That is because your team's composition is extremely important the further in you get.
This goes beyond having a tank, a healer, etc. You want to pair characters together that share traits. An X-Men team will work, but an all Astonishing X-Men team will have even better synergy. Building set teams will flat-out yield better results. So, when possible, that is what you should aim for.
The more teams you have to duke it out in the Blitz mode, the better. Every time you use a character in the blitz mode, you'll find that they are put on a cooldown timer, and it will cost the Blitz currency to use them again. However, you don't need your highest-level teams to succeed in the Blitz mode. Team synergy is WAY more important, as the teams you battle against scale to your level.
I've found that it works best to build teams up to level 30, as that is when they'll gain access to their ultimate attacks. While you are working toward that goal, feel free to take even lower-level teams in. If they lose, they lose. Every time you get five members that belong to the same group, save them as a team in the Blitz mode. That'll make it easier to cycle through them quickly.
You can also have teams where one member is at a higher level than the others, though that means your enemy's team will have a similar composition. If you do that, make sure the strongest character is pretty resilient, or they are one who has the ability to summon other characters.
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