I forget when it came up – maybe when Burden of Might was first added, maybe under a discussion of Spite or Mystic Dispersion – either way, I remember seeing a Kabam team member assert that “dexterity is an optional mastery,” implying that any destabilizing interactions between its pesky little precision buff and the rest of the game is just a choice we’ve made as players, and therefore have to accept without further comment. I have some serious problems with that assertion, and I hope this clarifies things.



First, an acknowledgement that there was indeed a time when dexterity wasn’t necessary to play this game at a high level. Perhaps even a year ago, and definitely when masteries were added, it was possible to take very small amounts of block damage from projectiles, so choosing not to evade them sometimes made sense. Similarly, at one point almost all champions had one of about a half dozen movesets, which were all simple enough that you had a decent chance to dash back early enough to evade a charging medium attack even without any masteries. It was difficult, and not at all guaranteed, but it was usually possible.



But let’s fast forward to the present. Dormammu is the Alliance Quest boss. We just had Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Medusa, and Stark-Enhanced Spiderman added to the game, all with brand new movesets (which we appreciate – thank you to the design team for that effort). As anyone who’s tried to fight Dormammu without triggering dexterity can attest, avoiding some of these new movesets without that mastery is extremely difficult, and often just plain impossible. And I promise, however it may have been intended, dexterity does not just help you against projectiles. It lets you evade any attack if you time the dodge right. Sometimes this is difficult to prove, although I’m fairly certain that whether Juggernaut’s L1 attack throws a rock up out of the ground at the end depends on whether it would’ve hit you or not had you stayed still. I recently discovered the perfect piece of evidence, however.



The design team went the extra mile on Yondu, and his yaka arrows have a sparking animation when they strike objects, a nice touch for metal projectiles on armor. As I was playing through this last release of story quest material, I noticed that this sparking animation didn’t ever occur when I was safely out of range at the beginning of his L1. However, if I was close enough that my dodging back triggered dexterity, the arrow sparked in mid-air, where I would’ve been had I not moved. To me, this proves definitively that the game first calculates hits or misses, and THEN figures out whether dexterity allows you to evade. This may seem obvious, but it means that anyone who plays this game at a high level, with a judicious mix of evasion, parrying, interception, and baiting, would be getting hit CONSTANTLY without dexterity. In fact, I proved this on my own with an unintentional experiment during my Labyrinth of Legends run last spring. Masteries were free to switch at the time, and in the process of adjusting them for my fight against Magik, I accidentally turned off dexterity. All of the sudden, I couldn’t for the life of me avoid her dashing medium attacks. I could parry and use up precious stun time, or I could block and deal with how hard end-game enemies hit now that 12.0 has permanently lowered block proficiency for almost all champs. Either way, I would have to accept playing the game at a lower skill level and a higher item cost, which is just unacceptable to anyone who puts real time into this game. Without dexterity, fighting bosses in AQ, most fights in AW, and in the majority of Act V, to say nothing of LoL, would become nearly impossible. I haven’t even started yet on all the enhanced special nodes we’ve come to know and love throughout AQ and AW and in a few choice story quests. How exactly is one supposed to deal with a Doctor Octopus with an unblockable L2 without dexterity? Use Classic Daredevil for every fight? Take a gamble with the new Stark Spiderman? We all remember the language surrounding 12.0 about how the game isn’t supposed to NEED any one champion for all of its content, and yet without dexterity, alliances would need a minimum of three classic Daredevils per AW group, regardless of skill level. That’s silly. I know these situations may come up less often in the kinds of demo fights we see videos of at conventions, but for the players who have put the most into this game, they’re most of what we face every day.



Now, why does this matter? After all, if dexterity is so crucial, perhaps even more crucial than parry, then just unlock it, right? Problem solved. The single most common piece of advice for beginners is to save units for those two masteries, after all. I think we all know why it matters. Alliance Wars may be a little destabilized at the moment, but we know that eventually, they’ll have to be adjusted so that there’s some incentive to place strong defenders. The minute that happens, the most decisive factor in wars will once again be which team has the most mystic defenders with maxed out mystic dispersion. That mastery is a solid investment regardless – plenty of us see the offensive value of it – but why on earth does it constantly feed off an essential game function like evasion? It makes zero sense. Since I feel I have explained why dexterity is indeed an essential mastery, can we admit that its interaction with MD is absurd? It’s great that buffs like Wolverine’s regeneration or Star Lord’s furies can have consequences, but choosing to dodge over taking massive block damage? That shouldn’t be punished the way it is currently.



So fix it. Countless proposals have been aired in the last year. You only need to pick one. I think my personal favorite would be to remove the precision buff entirely from the first rank of dexterity, improve the one you get from rank two, and leave rank three alone. That leaves intact the progression from not having the mastery at all to maxing it out, and makes the most problematic aspect of it optional, which in a way is exactly the solution your team has already proposed. After all, if the buff is truly optional, there’s no problem. To me, this is a no-brainer. You guys made clear you’d like champs other than the top 4 mystics, Hyperion, and NC to be viable as defenders by adding this new diversity system. Great!! If you’re actually committed to that cause, the single best thing you can do is fix dexterity so that MD isn’t the most important mastery in the late game.



Thanks for reading.

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