Best way to be on top of pve?

Deviator1

Okay fine nonce this is on topic lol

Is it only by grinding every 2.5 hours? Or is the rubberbanding high enough to wait till the last minute?

Katai

It varies so much between PvE tournaments, I don't even know anymore.

The last one rubber banded pretty harshly, so everyone was fighting really hard for the top spots.

The one before that didn't rubber band at all, so people who grinded were like 40,000 points ahead of everyone else.

Unknown

Deviator1 wrote:

Okay fine nonce this is on topic lol

Is it only by grinding every 2.5 hours? Or is the rubberbanding high enough to wait till the last minute?

Last minute might get you fairly high, but it probably won't get you a win. It's wildly unpredictable, because you never know exactly where you'll end up.

The people winning tend to be grinding a lot. The people at #10 might not be.

Unknown

From an empirical observation, less than 1% of the people are capable of grinding in a consistent manner plus doing 3 passes of the most valuable missions in the last refresh. Doing only one of the two always loses to someone who can do both, but since less than 1% of the people can do this it may or may not matter (the top tier prize tends to be placed at exactly the top 1% percentile).

Assuming common rubberbanding exists at all (most missions do not rubberband on Prodigal Sun so this strategy will fail for Prodigal Sun type events) you can generally eliminate any previous advantage built by a grinder with 2X1 passes at the >5H mark. This assumes the grinder is not able to match your performance on the final refresh (otherwise he'd still win by the virtue of starting ahead of you and still doing exactly the same thing you're doing). So if you can only do one thing you should do the last hour plus up to about 2 passes starting at some time >5H to go so you don't have too much of a hole.

Of course with true healing changes you can hardly count on being able to do all the hardest mission 3 passes in the last hour so there's always that to worry about.

Deviator1

I have no issue getting the last ones done, I actually was ranked 2 in the juggernaut pve but it was very boring to just set timers every 2.5 hours and when I have to work I hit the essentials twice to make them refresh about when I'm off work. I did well then but it gets old

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Deviator1 wrote:

I have no issue getting the last ones done, I actually was ranked 2 in the juggernaut pve but it was very boring to just set timers every 2.5 hours and when I have to work I hit the essentials twice to make them refresh about when I'm off work. I did well then but it gets old

If you take Heroic Jugg a reasonable clear might be upper right 3 passes and bottom right 2 passes in the last 2h or so, but since this is a fairly intuitive clear you should expect your opponents to be able to do the same too. If you and your opponent both do exactly 3 passes of upper right and 2 passes of bottom right then almost certainly the winner will be the guy who started out ahead, which is why keeping pace with grinding matters.

Now what if you make 3 passes of bottom right instead of 2? That might be enough to make up for a significant deficit to someone who only do 2 passes of bottom right, but you also don't know if you'll be able to do a third pass of those missions which will hit their peak scaling at that point. If you're prepared to say buy health packs if necessary to get your 3rd pass done then you can definitely afford to do less work ahead of time, but that seems pretty backwards of resource allocation.

The placement you're at before doing your 2H 24M essentials is a good way to see how competitive your bracket is. If you're sitting at say #15 overall prior to doing that, then you can be pretty sure that you'll hold top 20 easily barring a catastrophic collapse or schedule problems.

Deviator1

I've been keeping pace at #1 pretty easily, before work I had a 2k lead in sub and 800 lead in main but like I said it gets old and this one is lasting for a week. If only I didn't need sentry lol

Unknown

Deviator1 wrote:

I've been keeping pace at #1 pretty easily, before work I had a 2k lead in sub and 800 lead in main but like I said it gets old and this one is lasting for a week. If only I didn't need sentry lol

Well, the burden of #1 is that you can't exactly cut back what's gotten you to #1, but I'm sure most people would rather have that problem than not.

Deviator1

Well thank you Phantron, the explanation was informative. So far I've been doing the right 3 from highest to lowest then the two nodes in the middle with the highest points. Then I set a timer for 2.5 hours and do it again. So far health has not been any kind of issue since I only need maybe 1 or 2 every run. Shulk is pretty useless though with a pun and OBW

Unknown

How does the system decide what lvl the enemies are at? My chars are nearing 150. Is it because I'm grinding the nodes too much? I am grinding every 2.5 hours but before I sleep, I grind them until I run out of health packs.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Deviator1 wrote:

I've been keeping pace at #1 pretty easily, before work I had a 2k lead in sub and 800 lead in main but like I said it gets old and this one is lasting for a week. If only I didn't need sentry lol

Well, the burden of #1 is that you can't exactly cut back what's gotten you to #1, but I'm sure most people would rather have that problem than not.

Exactly.

Rubberbanding will allow a player to become even with the leader given enough time and pin attempts in an event. However, once a player reaches the top, that player must exceed the overall performance of the current leader to surpass them on a time/effort basis. Once that occurs, the player becomes the new leader and stands as the performance benchmark for everyone else in the bracket to be measured against.

Unknown

malfunkshen wrote:

How does the system decide what lvl the enemies are at? My chars are nearing 150. Is it because I'm grinding the nodes too much? I am grinding every 2.5 hours but before I sleep, I grind them until I run out of health packs.

Most recent events have been heavily dominated by community scaling, and level 150 isn't exactly very high when Punisher can be up to level 171. The enemies will be at their highest level at the last refresh due to community scaling, so if you get to do one less pass thorugh the hard missions because of an early lead it's well worth it. Of course you can't know that ahead of time but that's why there's a risk to everything.

Unknown

Lyrian wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Deviator1 wrote:

I've been keeping pace at #1 pretty easily, before work I had a 2k lead in sub and 800 lead in main but like I said it gets old and this one is lasting for a week. If only I didn't need sentry lol

Well, the burden of #1 is that you can't exactly cut back what's gotten you to #1, but I'm sure most people would rather have that problem than not.

Exactly.

Rubberbanding will allow a player to become even with the leader given enough time and pin attempts in an event. However, once a player reaches the top, that player must exceed the overall performance of the current leader to surpass them on a time/effort basis. Once that occurs, the player becomes the new leader and stands as the performance benchmark for everyone else in the bracket to be measured against.

Keep in mind that there's a gap between when rubberbanding stops to the current leader's score. Let's say that gap is 1000 points, then that means if you're the overall leader, anyone who still has rubberbanding needs basically 1000 base points worth of mission to even be within striking range, so that's obviously an incredibly advantageous position to be working from. It's a lot of work to get that position and keep it, but it does pay off if you have it.

Unknown

Play early, play often.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

Play early, play often.

And then play late, and relentlessly.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

malfunkshen wrote:

How does the system decide what lvl the enemies are at? My chars are nearing 150. Is it because I'm grinding the nodes too much? I am grinding every 2.5 hours but before I sleep, I grind them until I run out of health packs.

Most recent events have been heavily dominated by community scaling, and level 150 isn't exactly very high when Punisher can be up to level 171. The enemies will be at their highest level at the last refresh due to community scaling, so if you get to do one less pass thorugh the hard missions because of an early lead it's well worth it. Of course you can't know that ahead of time but that's why there's a risk to everything.

Thanks. So it doesn't matter how many times I play a node, it's all based on scaling? I try not to go nuts because I don't want to be faced with lvl 395 enemies.

Unknown

Maximum Points: Start early, do a pass every 2.5 hours, grind the nodes to 1 point after last refresh. This will guarantee you a top placing if you can pull it off.
Realistic: Just be there in the final hour and grind like crazy, while this will not do much for your alliance score, you are usually guaranteed a top 20 placing.

Unknown

malfunkshen wrote:

Thanks. So it doesn't matter how many times I play a node, it's all based on scaling? I try not to go nuts because I don't want to be faced with lvl 395 enemies.

The personal scaling is still there, but I believe the game always take the higher of your personal scaling or community scaling. If you ever walk away from a node and came back a few hours later and found that it's higher level than when you left it, that usually means community scaling is dominating the levels so as long as you didn't do anything super crazy like grinding node down to 1 and repeat it 10 more times for fun, you don't have to worry about your personal scaling, and community scaling is not something you have any control over.

Unknown

The most reliable way is hard grinding over the course of the entire tournament, but over the months that just makes you want to quit. It can back fire but I say start a little over half way through. Use your alliance to enter half way through a sub and hope for the right bracket. Normally if you enter early you are placed with grinders, and maybe more dedicated ones than yourself. When you enter on day 4 of seven you probably aren't playing people that care that much but you have enough time to make it not a sprint. I'm not completely die hard and this is my stratagu to get top 10. I'm day 234 and I have found that the easiest way to win is actively not play, and strategically plan your entrance into tournaments

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

malfunkshen wrote:

Thanks. So it doesn't matter how many times I play a node, it's all based on scaling? I try not to go nuts because I don't want to be faced with lvl 395 enemies.

The personal scaling is still there, but I believe the game always take the higher of your personal scaling or community scaling. If you ever walk away from a node and came back a few hours later and found that it's higher level than when you left it, that usually means community scaling is dominating the levels so as long as you didn't do anything super crazy like grinding node down to 1 and repeat it 10 more times for fun, you don't have to worry about your personal scaling, and community scaling is not something you have any control over.

I've made tests about rubberbanding. Playing not so much and see what happens.

1) Getting points is good when you don't play so often.
BUT
2) Scaling still is horrible after some time, and with the current characters available on the PvE, you need boosts and Health Packs if you want to rank high.

So I'm trying to experiment new strategies so as to get prepared for the next PvE in which a new character will be introduced.