Diamonds

Intro

Diamonds are the new progression system that will be introduced to the MSF soon and is meant to be the extension of the Yellow and Red Stars systems, providing a percentage-based upgrade to the character’s base stats. Diamonds can be equipped only after you maxed out all the Yellow and Red Stars, which makes Diamonds in essence, a Limit-Break or Ascension type of system.

There’s currently no date announced for the arrival of Diamonds.

Overview

Every player will be able to equip Diamonds once they reach Commander Level 42. To equip them on the selected character they need to have 7 Yellow and 7 Red Stars. 

Initially, there will be 3 levels of Diamonds available, each providing a small boost to your characters’ stats.

Currently, from Red Stars, the maximum Boost you can get to your stats is 75%. Each Diamond level will further increase the stats:

• Diamond Level 1: Boost stats by +10% (from +75% to +85%)
• Diamond Level 2: Boost stats by +10% (from +85% to +95%)
• Diamond Level 3: Boost stats by +15% (from +95% to +110%)

This Boost will be applied to the character’s base Health, Damage, Focus, Armor, and Resistance.

Similar to Red Stars, you will need to acquire Diamonds for each character individually

Earning Diamonds

There will be two main ways of earning Diamonds: Special Orbs and an in-game Store. 

Special Orbs can provide you with Diamond Levels for your characters directly but on a random basis. Each Orb will drop a Diamond for a specific character in the center pillar, and the sides will be dropping Diamond Credits and in some cases, Elite 7 Credits and Gold Promotion Credits. 

The drop rates haven’t been made available yet, but it is reasonable to assume that getting a level 3 Diamond drop will be very rare.

There will be 2 types of Orbs – Diamond Orb and Diamond Dawn Orb.

Diamond Orb will be the unique orb, that can be acquired only by buying offers. 

This orb will have a guaranteed drop of 20 Silver Diamond Credits.

Diamond Dawn Orb will be the main, free-2-play accessible Orb. Fragments for this Orb will be distributed by the S.W.O.R.D. Satellite and Cosmic Crucible game modes, a smaller amount of fragments will be made available from the Free Claims on the MSF Website. Any Main Events may also provide some Diamond Dawn Orb Fragments as Milestone or Leaderboard rewards. 

This Orb is gonna have a guaranteed Drop of 8 Silver Diamond Credits. 

You can also get Silver Diamond Credits by exchanging your Elite 7 Credits. 2500 Elite 7 Credits will get you 5 Silver Diamond Credits.

Minion Characters are going to be excluded from both Orbs and can only be bought in the in-game store for Silver Diamond Credits.

Diamond Store will be the place where you can spend Diamond Promotion Credits to acquire Diamond levels for your characters. There will be 2 types of Credits – Silver Diamond Credits and Dark Diamond Credits. 

There are no maximum caps for Silver&Dark Diamond Credits.

The cost to upgrade characters with Silver Diamond Credits is:

• Diamond 1: 50
• Diamond 2: 110
• Diamond 3: 280

Duplicate Diamond drops will be converted to Silver Diamond Credits:

• Diamond 1: 10
• Diamond 2: 30
• Diamond 3: 80

Most of the MSF characters can be upgraded by using Silver Diamond Credits, but there are some notable exceptions: all characters that are released by means of Dark Dimension, Scourge or Trials, and some other unique characters like Quicksilver or Iron Man (Zombie) will require Dark Diamond Credits. 

Simply said – any character who requires Dark Promotion Credits for Red Star upgrades will be requiring Dark Diamond Credits for Diamond upgrades. The price for these characters will be different, likely on a case-by-case basis.

Characters that use Dark Diamond Credits will be excluded from the Diamond Orbs, and Dark Diamond Credits won’t be available at launch. 

List of all characters that will be using Dark Diamond Credits:

• Super Skrull
• Apocalypse
• Dormammu
• Doctor Doom
• Ultimus
• Ultron
• Morgan Le Fay
• Rogue
• Red Hulk
• Archangel
• Nova
• Black Cat
• Green Goblin (Classic)
• Iron Man (Zombie)
• Juggernaut (Zombie)
• Quicksilver
• Spider-Man (Big Time)

Breakdown

To make sure that all active players will be able to steadily increase the Diamonds on their characters, MSF developers are going to implement some substantial improvements to the game. 

Firstly, they established a more consistent cadence for characters to become farmable. After 4 Months of the character’s initial release date, shards for them will become easily available. Every active player will be able to upgrade those new characters to 7 Yellow Stars by the end of 6 months after the initial release. 

This will greatly improve the state of the game in itself since knowing when you will be able to get more shards for your character will help all players plan ahead. On top of that, MSF also will ensure that new characters are relevant to the meta for at least a year, which means that after the six-month mark when you get those characters to 7 Yellow Stars, you will still have another half a year to use them without them being outdated. 

Not only will the characters become more farmable quickly, but it will also be easier to farm them since some stores will have increased shard stacks (20 shards instead of 5, etc) without increasing the price too much. Some stores will have more character slots, so finding the one you need will become easier. The amount of shards that drop from the Campaign nodes is doubled. There will also be an increase in the store currencies that we receive.. all of the above will make farming much more pleasant.

Secondly, getting Red Stars for characters also became much easier. Lately, the Main Events have increased payouts of Elite Credits and Silver&Dark Promotion Credits. This will help get your characters to 7 Red Stars much faster than before.

Equally important was the introduction of the Incursion campaign, which allows you to directly get Red Stars for some characters. The drop rate isn’t very high, but it’s enough to be able to get at least a few upgrades every week. Other than Red Stars, the nodes can also drop Red Star Orb fragments and Promotion Credits. 

The only downside to the Incursion Campaign is the limited character pool but as long as new chapters of the campaign are regularly added that won’t be an issue. 

All of those improvements pave the road for Diamonds. 

Without being able to more easily max out the Yellow and Red Stars on your characters the introduction of Diamonds would have been a disaster since to equip a Diamond level your character needs to have their Yellow and Red Stars maxed out. Surely long-time players have some characters that would meet those requirements but how useful would those characters be now? When new features like Diamond come out you have to prioritize using them on Meta characters if you want to stay competitive and, thanks to all of those improvements, most of the players should be able to do exactly that. 

There will still be a gap between free-to-play players and spenders that max out new characters immediately. But at least now there’s a definite endpoint since after 6 months there’s a strong possibility that your characters will have parity. Whereas before, you could wait close to a year or even more in some cases for that to occur (looking at you Ikaris, and Agatha)

Even if you don’t care about Diamonds yet, their release will already be beneficial because of the improvements that will accompany it. 

There are still some details we don’t have about Diamonds, like the character drop rates from the orbs, or the amount of orb fragments we will be getting from the S.W.O.R.D. Satellite mode and Cosmic Crucible afterward. Those would help us estimate the impact on the player base a little more. 

Dark Promotion characters having their Diamods not available at launch can also be a good thing since it will help balance out the scale. But it also depends on how developers will approach releasing them and how hard will it be to earn Dark Diamond Credits. 

Conclusion

Overall Diamonds are not a fundamentally new mechanic since they act more as an extension of the current Red Star system and the similarities between both of them are pretty plentiful. You can think of Diamonds as just bonus Red Stars, that have their own currency and store.

The max upgrade that Diamonds can provide to the stats is +35% which can be a lot, but it also won’t be insurmountable, and defeating those opponents, while very hard, would still be possible even without any Diamonds. 

If the rollout of this feature is good enough and the amount of Diamond Orbs and Credits we get is not egregious it should be a smooth experience for everyone. Even so, the accompanying changes will already make the game better.