Marvel’s Avengers has been commonly compared to Destiny, and it’s a pretty apt comparison as far as progression is concerned. A fair bit of how you progress in the game and grow stronger is through the acquisition of higher-tier loot. But that’s not the only way that Marvel’s Avengers tracks your progress–it’s one of four tracks that you’ll need to stay on top of to curate your perfect Avenger.
We’ve played the beta extensively and have a detailed breakdown of how progression works in Marvel’s Avengers. We’re specifically looking at character progression, as story progression is far easier to understand. Early on in Marvel’s Avengers, JARVIS will inform you that all missions on your War Table that are marked as part of the Reassemble storyline will contribute to your progression through the main campaign. Just keep beating those single-player missions and you’ll complete the story.
In our Marvel’s Avengers beta impressions, editor Phil Hornshaw wrote about how combat and teamwork-focused gameplay in the beta is somewhat fun, while pointing out that there are flaws in both the environmental design and grind for new gear.
Character Level
As you complete missions, the character that you are specifically using will earn experience. With enough experience, you’ll level up–this number has little bearing on how strong a character is. Your level simply marks how many skill points you have.
You invest these skill points into a character’s skill tree. At the outset, all characters have a light attack, heavy attack, long-range attack, special ability, dodge, and three unique hero abilities. All of these moves can be evolved via a character’s respective skill tree.
For example, unlocking Whirling Tempest for Iron Man transforms his heavy attack while lasers are equipped, adding a fast offensive move to his arsenal that allows him to more easily stun enemies. This attack will only grow stronger if you increase Iron Man’s power level though.
Power Level
This is the number that has a much more significant impact on a character’s strength. It is dependent on which gear that a character has equipped–a character with power level 15 gear is going to be stronger than one with power level 10. The number isn’t everything, however.
Similar to other loot-based games, different gear can have unique effects, such as making your character more resistant to cold, with the power of the effect tied to the rarity of the piece of gear. Gear comes in six levels: from least to most rare, it’s common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, and exotic. So a power level 10 rare piece of gear might have a more desirable effect than a level 15 uncommon piece of gear.
That said, the early levels of Marvel’s Avengers are at least designed to encourage you to just keep chasing higher power levels. At some point in the campaign (likely towards the endgame), you’ll probably have to start investing in-game resources towards boosting low power level gear that has desirable effects. But early on, it’s definitely all about just increasing that overall power level; special effects be damned.
Challenge Cards
Do you like battle passes? We really hope so, because Marvel’s Avengers has one for each character–they’re called challenge cards. All of the challenge card tracks in the beta are marked as “free,” in that you unlock their rewards by earning enough points without having to pay real world cash. This seems to imply that there is a track that will not be free, but if that’s the case, it’s not in the beta.
If you’ve played a game with a battle pass before, you know what to expect with challenge cards. By completing daily and weekly challenges, you earn points towards unlocking tiers in the challenge card. With each tier, you earn a new reward–stuff like hero costumes, emotes, and in-game currency.
Each hero has their own set of daily and weekly challenges, so if you want to earn the rewards for multiple characters, you’ll have to switch between who you’re playing as between missions. You can’t play as Black Widow and complete a challenge to defeat a certain number of enemies for Ms. Marvel, for instance. Our advice? Pick the one character you like the most and focus on them in order to avoid burning yourself out on completing tasks for multiple character challenge cards.
In-Game Currency
And finally there’s in-game currency, of which there are two: Units and Credits. Both are used to purchase cosmetics, but while Units are exclusively used for in-game marketplaces, Credits are tied to Marvel’s Avengers’ online marketplace.
Basically, you use Units for something like buying a challenge card tier if you don’t want to unlock it via completing challenges (or maybe you just don’t have the time) while you would use Credits for something like a costume pack. As far as we can tell, Units are a lot easier to earn than Credits–you can only earn Credits through certain challenge card tiers, similarly to Apex Coins in Apex Legends (which makes us think that Credits are likely tied to microtransactions).
During the beta, we could not find a way to boost your character’s strength through the use of Units or Credits. So you don’t have to worry about the game trying to encourage you to buy your way to success (if either currency is tied to microtransactions). But you should still be working towards acquiring both currencies–at the very least, you’ll likely need to rely on earning Units to unlock the challenge cards of the heroes you don’t regularly play as.
