START OF THE REAL GUIDE NOW:
Before I start advising there are some basic questions you need to answer:
What’s your Goal? Order them the way that matters
Rock in regular quests (Story Build)
Rock in Alliance Quests (AQ Build)
Rock in Arena (Arena Build)
What’s your budget in units (which translates to money potentially)?
Baller (I don’t care what it costs)
Semi-Baller (Trying to keep it under 5,000 units)
Student (Trying to keep it under 1,000 units)
What level are you?
50+
40-23
Under 23
Who is this guide for? This guide is for any Goal, preferably Semi-Baller and above, and preferably level 40 and above. Anyone can find value in it though. I just want to be clear to the audience I’m speaking to.
A few key definitions:
PI: Power Index - It’s the number in front of your characters that generally represents how powerful your character is relative to others. More PI in Arena means more points per fight. Here’s a great thread on PI:
community.kabam.com/forums/showthread.php?562852-Concrete-stats-on-increasing-PI-through-MasteriesCritical Hit: I hope you know what these are… It’s the hits that display much larger yellow numbers and more damage. We want more damage more often… ALWAYS
L1,L2,L3: Short hand for special attacks at their current level. L1 = Level 1 special attack.
Tree: When I refer to tree, I mean the way masteries are laid out connected to each other. Some masteries require others to unlock and have squiggly lines going from left to right. I refer to this as a tree. You must get the mastery to the left prior and it can form branches to access new masteries.This is due to my geeky background.
Debuff: This is shorthand for a detrimental effect like armor break, poison, bleed, etc that is one of those red circles on you or your opponent.
Step 1: The masteries I believe EVERYONE should have regardless of goal
There are 18 points that I believe everyone should spend on for the basis of ANY mastery build. I call this the Core set of Masteries.
The executive summary of the core is Strength (1/9), Greater Strength (1/9), Pierce (1/3), Lesser Precision (1/5), Precision (5/5), Lesser Cruelty (1/5), Cruelty (5/5), Limber (1/5), Parry (1/3), and Dexterity (1/3). Below I go into detail on the why for the more novice users
Core Offense (15 mastery points):
CoreAttack.jpg
Even poor people should strive for these 15, and coincidentally these 15 enable you to meet the requirements for Baller Offensive masteries. Anybody who doesn’t have these 15 I personally believe is not serious about their masteries…
Strength (1/9): Do rank 1 of 9 only. Don’t waste your precious mastery points on any more. This is just to unlock deeper in the tree.
Greater Strength (1/9): If you can’t afford more expensive masteries later after building the rest of the core, it’s ok, but honestly it only improves your attack fractionally from 1.6% to a maximum of 8%. That’s expensive for 8 additional precious mastery points. Use this to unlock the tree further.
Pierce (1/3): Your first expenditure of units! It costs 6 units. No biggie. It makes your champs ignore 5% of armour when you do critical hits. Not bad… But it’s to get to the better stuff. General rule of thumb… Stuff farther in a tree is better.
Lesser Precision (1/5): Gives you a 0.5% increase to your critical hit rate. That’s not a lot
but we use it to get too….
Precision (5/5): The first thing we max out. Maxed it increases the critical rate of all champions by 10%. That’s huge. Last time I checked it costed 100 units to max this out, plus maybe an unlock cost (5 stoney cores? 675 units) . Cool thing about unlocking costs is once you pay them it’s unlocked even if you rebuild.
Lesser Cruelty (1/5): Increases your critical damage by 2%. That’s not a lot
but we use it to get too….
Cruelty (5/5): MAX THIS. Maxed it increases the critical damage of all champions by a whopping 50%. That’s huge. Last time I checked it costed 100 units to max this and a 1 time unlock cost of 675 units! It’s worth it!!! Trust me. Your battles will last a lot longer without. So don’t get those 7 Premium Hero Crystals (PHC) with their junky 2 star champions and make all your champions more powerful.
In summary to build this the first time is about 1,556 units in total and to rebuild it around 206. This is why I said this guide is for Semi-ballers and above. To get the most accurate costs and PI increases check out:
bit.ly/MCOC-Masteries-PI-Increases-OffenseCore Defense (0 mastery points):
I don’t believe there is a core defense. You technically can live without defense in the game totally. Wait... what about willpower or stand your ground? This is all Baller stuff, and not necessary. The core is about getting the basic masteries that will be in EVERY build in my opinion. To get the most accurate costs and PI increases for defense check out:
bit.ly/MCOC-Masteries-PI-Increases-DefenseCore Utility (3 mastery points):
2015-10-25 22.30.59.png
There’s only 3 you need. And I use the word need. There is debate like, I’m not a blocker so I don’t need Parry OR I don’t really dodge so I don’t need Dexterity. That’s BS in my opinion because… At some point you do do both, and they trigger many times even when you don’t mean them too, and it’s game changing. I call it Dexparity. I’ve swiped to dodge back and just the precise timing has triggered a parry stun. I’ve parried special attacks. I’ve evaded ranged attacks often intentionally and sometimes unintentional. It’s HUGE to evade thor and storms L1 and L2. In case it wasn’t clear above:
Parry (1/3), allows you to stun on a perfectly timed block. Increasing it increases the stun time. I personally don’t think you need to max it anymore and if you want to spend extra mastery points it’s better to spend 3 points on Stupefy to get a half a second added to all stuns vs just a half a second more only on parry. 3 stoney cores for a total of 405 units to unlock and 15 units to rank up.
Dexterity (1/3), allows you to dodge back to avoid any attack. It also increases the critical hit chance of your next connected/non-blocked attack to your enemy. I don’t think it’s worth increasing this at all. Dexterity to me is all about the added evasion. It costs 2 stoney cores for a total of 270 units to unlock and 15 units to rank up.
Limber (1/5): Oh this is necessary to unlock the 2 above. It reduces the time of the duration of a stun on one of your champions. This actually isn’t a bad idea to max for AQ builds, because champs like Thor and Storm can kill you with their lengthy stuns. Maxing it will effectively reduce stun times by 48% which is effectively half. Maxing it has also caused many parries in Arenas to fail to allow the enemy to capitalize and hit me. It’s a strong one worth considering. 10 units to rank up.
Note: There has been some debate amongst some strong players and friends of mine about the utility “core”. This is my personal opinion above. However, if you are a rare person who only dodges you can leave parry out. A good friend of mine has an effective build that only uses dexterity and instead of using any block related defense on the bottom part of the defense tree, he maximizes Greater vitality. We discussed it, and I advised him that was the best choice to reach 15 to still get willpower. He has since been killing it on Alliance Quest map 4. However I still strongly suggest both. There have been numerous instances where I have parried even when attempting to dodge back and it’s made a difference.
This is 715 units in total and 40 to rebuild. To get the most up to date impact of Utilities for costs to unlock and PI increases please see:
bit.ly/MCOC-Masteries-PI-Increases-UtilitiesIn summary to build the CORE the first time is about 2,271 units in total, which in raw dollar costs is about $60, assuming you can buy and odin for $99 and get 3100 units, and this spends about 60% of those units. You can also have the core built by level 23, since it’s only 18 mastery points and you start accumulating those at level 5.
Here we come to a fork in the road… You need to decide now:
A) I'm a Baller: I can afford multiple Carbonium Cores (minimum of 7) at 550 each, realizing Nupe has bought over 20 for over 10,000 units testing this crap.
B) I'm a Semi-Baller (Balling on a budget): I can afford maybe another 2000 units putting me in at an Odin and a half….
C) I'm a Student now (wifey, GF, or family members side eyeing you for spending): I can't afford much in terms of units but I have earned a few more Stoney Cores and I'm looking to maximize things
D) I'm broke dude… No more units…
Below I address all 4 of these scenarios in the advanced mastery section that starts with Step 2
Step 2: Mount your defense
If you are not level 41 yet, read ahead to get an idea what you are in store for and then go ahead and level up some more. You’ll need at least 18 more mastery points to continue balling after the core.
So I’m going to break it down to you… Defense is the key to most of the Baller Strategies. If you are a baller or even semi-baller you should try to get the mastery Willpower. It’s the basis of the most advanced builds. Here’s the kicker… To maximize willpower it will take 4 Carbonium Cores at 550 units x 4 = 2,200 units, plus 90 more units for each level. OUCH. It will also take 15 mastery points prior to unlock the Advanced Defense Mastery tree and another 3 to Maximize Willpower.
So what the heck is Willpower and why is it so great?
At 3/3 Willpower grants the following - Your Champions regenerate 1.5% health and gain 3% armor for each detrimental effect (debuff) they suffer. In a nutshell, when one of your characters get hit with poison, bleed, stun, etc they take reduced damage from hits AND they start regenerating health.
So I know many don’t like to do math… Here’s a few quick examples based on my characters:
My 3* Superior Iron man (4/40) gets an Armor Break fighting Iron Fist 4* (3/30) awakened 20. Since his health is 5857 he would heal up at a rate of 88 health per second for each armor break while they are active, furthermore with 3% more armor it would reduce that 11.8% armor reduction to 8.8% counteracting a lot of the effect. Still unfortunately doesn’t help with those improved critical rates of Iron Fist, especially if they have the Core Masteries.
My 4* Awakened Juggernaut (4/40) is bleeding at a rate of 66 hp per half a second from Hawkeye’s arrow. Since his health is 12,570 he would be healing at a rate of 188 per second! BUT since I have the Recovery mastery (3/3) and Salve (3/3) I’m getting a 15% bonus to all heals AND 5 extra HP per half a second ( I’ll explain these later) I’m receiving 227 HP per second… FYI it’s IMPORTANT to note that you see healing rates twice per second. So this would actually be displayed as +114. So I’m healing more than I’m bleeding. WOW
SUMMARY: YOU HEAL UP OFTEN MORE THAN YOU HURT when you get hit by DEBUFFS
I can’t afford Willpower, what should I do?
If you can’t afford willpower you have 3 options… I list them in the order I feel is best.
Go the way of the Adaptable Student and focus on Code’s mastery build (http://imgur.com/XykQ7z5) that requires 39 mastery points and a lot less units (Under 1,000 after the core setup), This use to be the best mastery build prior to the introduction of the Carbonium Core. It gives a really nice PI bonus, and you can always reclaim the Utility tree later for around 40 units, and return to step 2 here, since some of the defense tree will be setup, and rebuilding the 3 utilities you need for only 40 units. I used to have Code’s build prior to the new advanced masteries.
Go the way of the Patient One. Suck it up and save for willpower. Start building the defense you need above for the 15 units, and save up any other mastery points you get, and be relentless.
Go the way of the Broke Dude. You’re out of units, and you are pleased with the core. Pump mastery points and rank up via gold in greater Strength and greater Vitality. You’ll spend 16 points and get an 8% increase in attack and health. You can always rebuild another day right? This is ain’t bad for the average player to be honest, and it’s useful in all contexts.
I’m planning to get Willpower - So what should I choose in the basic defense tree to get 15 points?
If you are a Baller: This is a matter of personal preference, but I recommend the following
Recovery (3/3): At max this gives 15% bonus to all heals. It’s expensive at 6 Stoney Cores to unlock and 15% seems paltry, but it’s too all sources including Alliance potion heals. That 15% is huge for some hacking heal builds like the one I’m currently running. You need Salve at least 1/3 to unlock. With recovery Salve at 1/3 heals you at a rate of 2 HP per half a second for the first 60 seconds of a fight, and at max it heals you at a rate of 5 hp per second for the first 60 seconds of a fight. I waver on whether to max salve out or keep at it 1… Currently mine is maxed out because I don’t find much value in the rest of the tree. Mind you it’s a total of 8! Stoney Cores to get this extra healing because you have to unlock Salve too AND rank up, so that’s a baller’s budget of 1,220 units.
Stand Your Ground at at least 2/5. At this rank you maximize the PI gained, and get the chance to reduce damage from a heavy attack to a normal block, and continue blocking vs taking massage damage. Stand Your Ground at maximum increases this chance to 50% which is nice, but still random. An experienced player should be able to anticipate most heavy attacks and evade properly by dashing back. This costs a Stoney Core 135 units to unlock and 6 units to reach rank 2.
If you are Balling on a Budget: you can get your 15 points by not spending units at all. I would recommend Vitality (1/9), Greater Vitality (9/9) which gives your more base HP to get higher Willpower heals, Block Proficiency (4/4), and Perfect Block (1/4) for the 15.
Additionally a nice HP Booster Heal build that gives you 15 points is Vitality (1/9), Greater Vitality (9/9), Salve (2/3), and Recovery (3/3). That extra 8% health can be effective in AQ. This is good if you aren’t much of a blocker and prefer to evade.
I personally am not a fan of the following:
Energy Resistance: It goes up to 4% maximum for 4 points. That means on a very rare chance you will take no damage from an energy attack. The % is too low for me to bemeaningful. It may save your ass once in awhile, but there are better masteries that are more consistent.
Physical Resistance: It goes up to 4% maximum for 4 points. This has the same comments as energy resistance but for any physical attack like a punch. Yes punches, kicks, etc are more common, but really taking on average no damage for every 4 out of 100 physical attacks doesn’t warrant this as a wise spend to me. I’d rather have 50% of my heavy blocks resisted vs 4% of every physical attack.
Perfect Block: I keep this only at level 1 to reach Stand Your Ground. Maximizing this to make only +4% of your blocks to give 0 damage is pretty lame to me… Daredevil off the bat gets perfect block of 30%, what’s 4% more doing…
So anyway below is the 15 I am currently running, since you probably are running. It cost me 1,391 units to get, NOT including Willpower.
Note: I personally like Block Proficiency maxed at (4/4) because it gives you an 8% bonus to block proficiency, which means when you block that damage is added to your armor and then further reduces the damage by your blocks. I’ve been able to hack some builds together with the proper synergies to reduce damage taken by blocks down to 0 for some champs rather consistently, which to me is better than focusing on a percentage with Perfect Block.
In summary if you are balling and now have a willpower maximized mounted defense you’ve probably now spent a total of 3,257 units in total, which in raw dollar costs is about $105. You can also have this built by level 38, since it’s only 33 mastery points and you start accumulating those at level 5.
Step 3: Revisit your Goals and decide how hard you’re going to go
So there are several powerful masteries that I’ll discuss the pros and cons of each before recommending builds.
Mastery
Pros
Cons
Liquid Courage: Does poison to you permanently at a rate of 1% of your health per second, but gives you +30% attack when maximized (AQ negative, Arena Positive)
+30% attack duh! It does not make sense not to maximize this if you get it, because the damage does not go up
With willpower and Recovery you can net heal a few HP
Some champs like Ultron are immune to poison
Grants MASSIVE PI benefits
Being poisoned causes ALL your regeneration / heals to be 30% less effective… Sucks for Wolvie, Strange, Iron Man’s Arc Overload and even reduces willpower’s effectiveness
Requires Recoil (1/3), which even though makes your specials more damage, deals 5% damage each time you use
you need to be thoughtful now...
Double Edge: Makes you bleed for 10 to 20 seconds based on strength and deals 10%-30% damage, but gives you 10-30% more attack (AQ neutral to positive, Arena Positive)
Up to +30% attack duh!
With Willpower and optionally Recovery you can net heal HP and actually regenerate more.
Some champs like Ultron are immune to bleed
Doesn’t last the whole fight which can be an advantage
Some awakened champs like Venom and Winter Soldier get advantages against bleeding targets
Doesn’t grant nearly as much PI as Liquid Courage
When paired with Liquid Courage and Willpower you potentially can lose more health than you gain
Coagulate: Reduces the damage of bleed by up to 30% based on level (AQ positive, Arena Positive)
Besides the obvious benefits of reduced bleed, when combined with willpower you can actually use enemy bleeds to your advantage
When combined with Double Edge and Willpower you can have a healing engine
It has saved my life numerous times against high bleed people like Deadpool and Winter Soldier’s L3
IMPORTANT: Due to a bug if you do not ADD Coagulate before you add Double Edge, it will not reduce double edges damage
It’s EXTREMELY expensive just to reduce bleed by 30%
Inequity: At 3/3 gives you 6% damage reduction per debuff on your opponent. Note: it’s worded AWFULLY (AQ positive, Arena neutral)
The damage reduction can add up insane with champs like Ant Man, and make them EXTREMELY effective in AQ
Works very well in conjunction with resonate
Works great in Arena if you face opponents with liquid courage and double edge, to take the edge off.
Not very useful if your heroes don’t add debuffs, but the double edge sword is heroes that do add debuffs suck against willpower
Resonate: Randomly causes all your champs to add weakness that last 7 seconds and reduced the damage you take when hit by 7-13% based on the level (AQ positive, Arena negative)
The damage reduction is very nice
This triggers inequity for champs that don’t already have debuffs. So at a basic inequity level of 1 and resonate of 1, you’ll be seeing a 9% damage reduction when weakened, and at a max you’ll see 19%!
It’s the most EXPENSIVE mastery to unlock at 2 Carbonium Cores PER Level for a total of 6 to Max. Seriously WTF!
This plain SUCKS ass against anyone with willpower and makes arena battles painful
It’s RANDOM. Sometimes when you want it it doesn’t come, and when you don’t want it, it does!
Suture: Reduces the time you bleed, thus the time you take damage by up to 20% (AQ positive, Arena Positive)
Taking less bleed damage from a time perspective can be nice.
I’m personally not a fan because with Willpower and Coagulate, I actually prefer to bleed longer because I’m net healing.
You can go all of these, some of these or none of these!
I have taken the liberty to create a sheet that literally calculates possible combinations of willpower, liquid courage, and double edge because 1) It’s confusing on how they work mathematically and there are tons of posts in Kabam’s forums on how it works, 2) if you just max them you could end up hurting yourself and that’s stupid to do because they are EXPENSIVE to unlock and build, and 3) I was curious myself of the optimal combinations as I only tried a few subsets of them because I’m not going to rebuild my masteries for every permutation.
bit.ly/MCOC-Willpower-LiquidCourage-DoubleEdge-MatrixOK, I know you looked at the link and are like WTF, it’s too much to digest. So I’ll give you a summary:
If you are a BALLER and prefer maximizing Arena Run the following: Willpower (3/3), Liquid Courage (3/3), Double Edge (3/3), Recovery (3/3), Coagulate (3/3). It sucks if you get with a Heal Block in AQ, but other than that if you have a champ with 10,000 HP (which many ballers do have and above… I’m just using 10K because it’s a round number), you will heal 730 the first 20 seconds, and then 20 hp each second for the remainder of the fight.
If you are a BALLER that loves AQ and still plays arena often, and is worried about Heal Blocks I’d recommend: Willpower (3/3), Double Edge (3/3), Recovery (3/3), Coagulate (3/3). if you have a champ with 10,000 HP, you’ll heal up 1,350 at the beginning of every round which is nice! This is the build I’m currently using
If you are a BALLER that loves AQ, and doesn’t mind a challenge in the Arena, I’d recommend adding to build 1, Inequity (3/3) and Resonate (2/3). Reducing incoming damage by 19% is pretty money.
Finally I realize, I did not address the thought of ranking up Glass Cannon and Recoil further. My personal recommendation is not to trade 2.4% health for 2.4% attack more than once. Assume you have a 700 attack champ, with 10,000 health, by doing this swap your attack would go up to 717, but your health would go down to 9,760…. That doesn’t seem worth it to me. Also doing more damage and taking more damage from your specials doesn’t seem worth it to me either. This is just my opinion.
Step 4: Round it Out with a few of these
So here are a few masteries I personally like and why:
Courage. When you are below 50% HP it gives you +10%, +20% or +30% attack based on the level. At least do 1 level because the first level gives you a major PI boost
Limber. This can be huge for AQ against annoying characters that stun like Thor, Storm, or Captain America. Reducing the stun time further can be game changing. Plus maxed it almost decimates the effectiveness of parry.
Pierce. Increasing this makes your critical attacks ignore more armor. I found this very useful for the Realm of Legends to make hits stick harder vs Rhino and Juggernaut which were a bitch to fight. Plus increasing it beyond 1 gives a small PI boost.
Stupefy. For 3 mastery points you can extend all your stuns by half a second, which is very useful to allow you to react to a parry you didn’t expect, and help champs that use natural stuns too. Works great with Yellow Jacket.
Pure Skill. If you use mainly skill champs in AQ this can be a beast when maxed. It makes your skill champ ignore 65% of enemy armor. So basically it’s like hitting people naked when you critical.
Mystic Dispersion. I like this in theory but never have 11 points in Skill due to the tight constraints of the required mastery points to get baller synergies. Maxed it gives 12% power gain on your mystic champion every time a beneficial effect expires on your opponent. This is amazing with Scarlett Witch when she nullifies beneficial effects. It should also work with Dr. Strange and counterspell, but I think their may be a bug with that.
and stay away from these! Personal opinion on Masteries that suck or are not worth it:
Mutagenesis: Your mutants bleed 2.5 seconds less. It’s limited to 1 class, and personally I like bleeding counteracted with Willpower.
Collar Tech: Tech champions make enemy power gains 18% less. To expensive for 5 units to maximize. It’s only going to slow down the inevitable.
Extended Fury: God this sucks. At a maximum it extends fury by 0.8 seconds. At first I thought this was a typo, and it was missing a decimal place and should be 8 seconds, or 80% but something is CLEARLY wrong. I suggest we band together and have Kabam fix this one. Not even a second extension for 4 mastery points seems pointless. Extending a stun for a half a second can mean the difference of a whole series of attacks, but this makes absolute no sense for fury…
Enhanced Fury: Extend the effectiveness of fury by 8% at the max (requires 4 mastery points). I honestly don’t know what this means, but if it means 8% more damage that’s lame…
Scouter Lens, Detect Tech, Detect Mutant, Detect Skill, Detect Science, Detect Mystic, Detect Cosmic - I’m appalled Kabam want’s us to pay to detect on the map these enemies and they require 11 utility points to unlock!!! This means abandoning the great builds I will show you below… WTF. Worse is that without allowing us to easily switch mastery points / mastery profiles, these likely will NEVER get used...
but we use it to get too….