Direct Objects

Feel like everyone around you has a leg up in tactics? Experience may be the best teacher, but we want to help you shape up your strategy. Heroclix has a lot of rules, which also means a lot of loopholes, synergies, and restrictions. Knowing what those are and more tactically practical ways to exploit them can help you see the game in new ways and come up with your own variations. It’s not quite meta, but it’s still Practically Tactical!

So a while back, I got a request to do an article about special objects. Today, I finally get around to actually doing that.

What's So Special About These Objects?

So what are "Special Objects?" Well, Objects are game elements that you place on the board at the start of the game for your characters to interact with, typically by hiding behind or smashing over someone's head. Special Objects are the same thing, but typically have additional uses such as bestowing powers to their wielder. More specifically:


Now, that doesn't mean that all special objects grant powers. Some have other uses, such as generating effects for nearby characters, but we'll get on that in a moment.

Lost Relics From Ages Past


One of the big distinctions about Special Objects is that they include Relics, but go further. A Relic is any special object that that specifies that it's a Relic, and generally there's something called a "Relic Roll" to get them. The idea is that you move on top of the Relic, give the character a power action, and roll a dice to see if your character correctly figures out how to use the Relic.

Relic rolls, for a long time, were One Per Character Per Game. This could be a huge kick in the pants if you paid the points to include a Relic on your team, used an action to move out, used another action to pick up the Relic, made the roll, and then didn't succeed, because it meant either giving up and tossing those points to the wind, or investing more actions to have your second or third choice characters try to pick it up. After a while, they dropped the "once per game" part of Relic rolls, though Relics do still bear the stigma of having a chance that they simply don't work after you try, and wasting multiple actions per attempt is a large thing if you don't know it's guaranteed. Luckily, WK has mostly moved away from using Relics in recent years, and even included a few aids to get that Roll you needed.


But Wait There's More!


Even as Relics fade out, there's still plenty of other Special Objects to choose from. Equipment has become very popular, and has been coming in to supplant Relics as the new way to give a character a little extra. Equipment is requires no roll, and can even be performed by characters holding the object instead of needing to specifically be in the square the object resides. This makes it really easy to augment your characters based on what you need to accomplish. Want to give a Mystic Invulnerability? The Hulkbuster Torso has got you covered. Want to be able to give your melee character Giant Reach? Harley's Hammer is there for you. Even better, since they're not Relics, you can use as many of them as you want as long as they fit in to your Object selection (1 Light, 1 Heavy, and 1 of Your Choice). Now, Equipment does have the drawback of not being able to be stacked. You can't give yourself both the Hulkbuster Torso AND Harley's Hammer, or more accurately when you equip the second one, the first one simply ceases to exist. Because of the changes to Possessors over the last year or so, this also includes them, so you can't take Helmet of Fate AND Brainiac, because having a god-like magician whispering in one ear, and Kryptonian-turned-Communist robot in the other is probably just a headache waiting to happen.

Even without Equipment, however, there are plenty of objects that just do things without needing to be directly attached to someone. For example, the Gamma Bomb slowly goes off after several rounds, blowing up everything within 8 squares, which effectively means that it can affect almost 2/3 of the map, and set the pace of the battle. The Batsignal can be used to grab friendly characters, and pull them back to a specific rallying point. The Black Lantern can heal your characters for KOing opposing characters. There's a lot of special objects that can affect the flow of battle without needing to be picked up or attached.

ROC-Solid Objects

A really nice thing about non-Relic Special Objects is that ROCs allow their use even in Limited format. Normally with ROCs many of the early tournaments use Limited format to foster a shenanigan-free environment for players. Resources, Colossals, or even Possessors could really change things up, and so ROCs partitioned part of their events to address that. The thing is, Special Objects are still allowed in Limited ROCs, so they're something to consider or at least pay attention to year round. Just keep in mind when looking over the rules that there's a difference between Relics, Resources, and Special Objects.


Treasure Hunt


While most objects no longer require a roll to use effectively, they do still often require an action to pick up. This can be troublesome since you have to place them fairly far away from your starting area, and depending on the map, you might be leaving your characters exposed to an alpha strike. Without proper coordination, grabbing an object can completely throw off your early game flow since your character needs to move out, grab the object, and most likely clear. That means it could be Turn 4 before that character is really in the fight, and that's quite the deficit to make up if their team is under fire.

One solution is to keep your team out of a fire-fight while this is going on. This mostly benefits turtle teams, but as your character(s) are getting special objects, try and keep everyone near the back. Your opponent is less likely to press on to attack you if they have to hurry across the map to do so, and if they do, it can leave them open on your next turn.

Even better though, with a little coordination, you can minimize the impact of their chance to attack. For example, someone at my venue once showed me how to use a Yo-Yo to TK a character out, pick up the object, and then TK them back. In most cases, this is 3 actions instead of 2, but it's over three characters, and at the end your team is still in their starting zone, which means your opponent will have to hustle to cross the map, and your team will be able to defend themselves as early as Turn 2, and clear by Turn 3. You could even use a character such as



She can free action TK someone out, have them pick up an object, and then bring them right back. By the time your opponent closes in on you, you're fully rested, and now sporting a shiny new Special Object!

Keep in mind that this all requires specific play styles, and if you just tossed on a Special Object for funsies as a last minute addition to your team, you might not want to devote a lot of time or energy to using it. Also keep in mind that your opponent can ALSO use the object, and leaving it more towards the center might encourage them to spend precious actions trying to get it while you fire at them.


Upcoming Changes


I wanted to talk about this a little bit just because we are getting some rules changes in a few months, and while there's been no explicit changes to Special Objects, there have been changes that still affect them. The largest change is that almost any character will be able to pick up a Light Object now, and that means a lot. Specifically, most Objects now allow you to Equip them if you're standing in the square OR holding them, and so more characters will have the object of walking out, grabbing some Mutagen, move to a safer spot, and then Equipping it later.

On a more cloudy note, changes to Outwit help rein in powers granted by Special Objects. Whereas before there was a difference between "can use" and "possess," soon Outwit won't make that differentiation, and your opponents can still get rid of specific powers or even preemptively prevent you from choosing them. This isn't game breaking, and it really addresses a shortcoming that made outside elements more important to the game than the character's natural powers, but it's certainly worth noting. There are other changes as well, and as the rules continue to change and update, we can expect Special Objects to be further changed as well.

At any rate, I'd originally wanted to talk more about specific objects, but the fact that we might overlook is that there's just so many. There's nearly 200 entries for Special Objects, and more being developed every year. And while they've often been glossed over for Resources or Possessors, they're seeing a rise once again as a useful addition to the game. Occasionally that simply amounts to adding an object when you don't know what else to do with the points, but in some cases, an object can be the crux of it's build. At any rate, I hope you learned something, or at least got to see something in a new way. We should have something special next time, so stay tuned and stay Tactical!

Farewell Ultra Heavies.....

Or better yet, if the object is not immobile, simply TK the object to you and pick it up. That only requires one use of TK.

It's interesting to note that the first Ultra Heavy was actually a 2 point Tank Turret from Chaos War, which was also a Special Object. It was quickly obsolete as they followed suit by making them free shortly thereafter. The thing is though, that an even earlier Special Object, the Soda Machine, was all the way back in Infinity Challenge, and while it wasn't designated an Ultra Heavy, it was a Heavy that increased damage dealt by +1 for 0 points, making it even more useful than Ultra Heavies at the same cost.

Oh..well that works too!

Yeah, it was so cool that I collected a bunch of them, figuring that lots of people would want them in the future when they were hard to get. That... didn't work out so well.

Well except in two ways:
(1) At the time of the Tank Turret, the Turret was Modern Age and the soda machine was not, so the Turret was playable in Modern Age games while the soda machine was not

and

(2) There's more to an ultra-heavy than extra damage. If you want a hard to destroy object for your stealth characters, you might choose an ultra-heavy. If you want a heavy object that your opponent can't use against you (with his TK or with his low point super strength characters), you might choose an ultra-heavy. There are reasons to prefer an ultra-heavy to the soda machine.

OTOH, if you are only playing low point super strength characters, then the soda machine may seem preferable to an ultra-heavy.

Oh, memories. I remember playing a few games and then seeing the Outdoor Adventure Kit at the store with the original special objects. Now, in hindsight, I'm surprised it took four years for us to get more in ANY capacity, but at the time the group I was with never felt the need for anything more on that front. But if you were a serious player you owned that pack, for the soda machine and the dumpster. Suuuuure, sometimes you'd use one of the others on a lark, but generally the tournament gambler gambled on an extra point of early damage or the ability to keep playing tandem tag with the Dumpster that never went away.

I had changed groups by the time Collateral Damage and Sinister came out, but definitely remember the original excitement around the new objects. Not just an object that let a brick effectively energy explode with a thrown attack, but a light object that gave someone a laser gun, and others that let you change the very map by putting in a teleport node or making walls indestructible! It's curious (once more, in hindsight) that special objects continue to thrive and have evolved to incorporate the function of feats.

With so many in existence, it's fun to surprise people with objects they may never have known existed in game...or at least not thought about in over five years! Structural Integrity Field is still my favorite to catch people off guard with because of its ability to make not just printed Blocking and Walls into a fortress, but to carefully use TK to keep repositioning it to make your own Barriers an impregnable fortress.

And then they had to errata the SIF so that it didn't work on the blocking terrain created by Barrier for that exact reason.

Knew I could get you to quit griping about rules changes and pipe in with a positive change at least once

Thanks for the article! I love using special objects. I almost always have some part of the hulkbuster suit on my team or Pym particles. Dreadpool is really fun to equip the pym particles too, make him tiny size and carry him around with that long range and free attacks. Merc with a mouth is helped out immensely with the HB torso. The terrigen crystal is another fun object. Greed from Trinity Wars is fun to play if you want to test out how different objects work.

It should be noted that this doesn't apply to Equipment. http://win.wizkids.com/bb/viewtopic....6192cf6#p17860 points out (under Equip):

[C]Game elements that can be equipped that are included on your force are considered friendly to your force.

But Relics and the older Special Objects are fair game to both sides.