Endgame Content Creation Philosophy in the Context of Revives
I think there are two ways to go about creating endgame content. Roadblocks and Sponges.
The original 6.2.6 Champion boss is an example of a potential Roadblock fight, because he had mechanics to zero out your damage and to regenerate himself throughout the fight. If you weren’t ready for him, you couldn’t spend your way past him. No amount of units would make you better at dexing his specials, for example. If you look back at RoL, Wolverine is a Roadblock fight because if you don’t have an answer to his regen, you can’t win that fight.
With the exception of Warlock, the EOP fights are Sponges. If you’re willing to throw enough revives at a fight, you could do it with a 1*. I mention RoL Wolverine as a Roadblock fight, the rest of RoL are Sponges. The challenge is a giant healthpool and juggling the mechanics long enough to get meaningful damage on the board. You can look at a Sponge fight and think “okay, I got 20% off that run, that was solid. Time to revive, heal up, and lop off another 20%,” and that’s a legitimate strategy.
Obviously both Roadblock and Sponge fights range in complexity, as you can see from the examples above. The bottom line is Sponges can be brute forced, Roadblocks can’t. So now it becomes a question of design perspective. Do you want content that cannot be beaten without specific roster and skill checks, or do you want content that you can incrementally chip away at? There’s no right or wrong answer here from an individual gameplay standpoint, but I think from a developer standpoint you want your fights to be able to be overcome if a player wants it badly enough. Otherwise you risk losing that player completely.
With that in mind, a change to the way players acquire and maintain revives is absolutely understandable. I could easily pick up 8-10 revives just autoplaying while at work because I have a constantly huge stash of energy refills. I like to think I’m pretty good at the game, and none of my EOP runs were overwhelmingly revive-spammy. But if Kabam plans to use Sponge design going forward, then an abundance of revives in the game just completely removes any aspect of challenge.
Now with ALL of that being said, I still think the proposed changes are the wrong way to go. But my complaint isn’t with the total number of revives that we’ll be able to hold at a given moment, it’s with the rate at which we acquire them. One a day with a 5% chance for a second one is painfully slow. Under the proposed changes, I’d have still been able to do EOP the same way I did, it just would’ve taken waaaaay longer. This doesn’t solve the problem, it just slows it down and makes me wait to play the new, fun, exciting content.
My proposed solution would be to change the way revives work in the inventory. Instead of the current system where you can hold 15 (19 w/ sigil) and the rest go into your stash until they expire, perhaps we triple the inventory size and do away with stash revives entirely. That way there is a hard cap on the number of revives a player can have on hand at any given moment. Players can still farm up to a healthy cap point, but because you can’t be actively playing two quests at a time, there will be a limit. Additionally, devs will know exactly how many revives players can have access to when designing content. Yes, people willing to spend units on revives will be able to bypass that cap, but that was and will always be the case. This at least solves the issue of taking a whole month to get a healthy stockpile of revives.
This was a slog of a post, but I hope y’all will give it a read and let me know what you think.
