As part of Marvel Heroes’ Black Bolt patch last night, Gazillion made a number of major changes to the summoner characters. Previously, Gaz says, summoners were forced to choose between gear that improved their summons or gear that improved themselves, and folks who didn’t scour the forums might not even be aware of which one was which thanks to unclear tooltips in-game. “It [was] nigh impossible to tread the middle ground and remain ‘optimized,'” the team says.
But as of the patch, summons benefit from far more offensive stats and damage bonuses, and there’s a new summon damage rating that replaces the old affixes.
“With this change, every single hero summon power has had its damage, health, duration, and cooldown reviewed and modified. Players will probably notice the tooltip damage numbers have decreased slightly, but this is expected. Since pets can now deal vastly more damage when critically hitting and brutally striking, all while attacking faster, it makes sense that their base damage values might be slightly lower than before.”
Player response has been mixed so far, with players arguing that summoners are now forced into hybrid roles, depending on the nerfs and buffs to the rest of their loadout, as many can no longer be played as pure summoners. Others believe that pure summoners weren’t viable before either and that summoners are much better off now.
We still have an interview out to the team from last month.
