Do we have to play every 2.5 hours?

Katai

Seriously? I've been trying to get anywhere in the PvE, but I'm tens of thousands of points away from where I want to be. I basically grind out all the nodes every night, and I'm nowhere close to the 90 or 100 thousand point mark. The rubber banding seems to keep me to the rank I was the night before, but never ahead.

Are people really playing all the nodes every couple of hours to get ahead? Is this how the game is going to work now?

NorthernPolarity

My guess is that you joined extremely early and got stuck in a bracket full of grinders. Try joining later next time: I joined after the first sub ended, and am in a bracket where I'm 10k points above 10th place with pretty minimal grinding (last sub for instance, I just did a single clear of the essentials 3 times and then grinded the last 30 mins of the sub). You need to do some metagaming around when you join in order to get a bracket where you don't have to grind. Even joining ~12 hours before the end of the first sub is probably good enough too.

Unknown

Depends on what your goals are.

I've played less than 2 hours total of this PvE and I'm sitting 35th in my bracket. There's no hope of me getting up to the top 10 but I'd rather buy sentry covers than spend an equivalent amount on boosts and Health to obtain them with 10 hours of play.

If you want to be #1 in your main bracket you may need to. But getting top 20 shouldn't require every 2.5 hours IMO. It's a little late to think about strategy now but it certainly wasn't necessary to grind every 2.5 hours if you weren't too concerned about your ending placement.

ADD: I'm 35th with 55k in my main bracket and I did join early (For better or worse)

Unknown

With nodes in the recent relatively weak rubberband structure I'd say it's about 20% of what you do prior to the final refresh and 80% on what you do on the final refresh.

However with true healing changes it's difficult to be certain you can clear what you're expecting to on the final refresh so that 20% matters a lot because you can always get a nasty wipeout on a node like Venom/Juggernaut/Analyst. Playing prior to the final refresh is really about building a lead so that you can get away with not touching the hardest nodes at the end. If you have no problem doing those nodes, you don't need to do very much work prior to the last refresh. Of course, people in the top 10 do both, so if that's what you're going for you got no choice. I had to do the famed Venom/Juggernaut/Analyst twice for my #1, and I'd really hate to have to do it three times which is why I grinded a lot. At lower level of placement it might be the difference between doing it once versus twice, or none versus once.

You should identify what nodes, if any, are particularly high points and difficult, and ask yourself can you comfortably beat it. If you can do it then there's not much point to grind early unless you're shooting for a very high placement. If not, you need to either grind or make sure you have boosts ready for the problematic nodes, because those are going to be the tiebreaker between two people who put in similar overall effort.

Katai

But I'm not. The top player barely made it to 100,000 (from what I can tell, 100,000 is the common goal for the she-hulk cover).

I've been playing for two hours every night (and about 20 minutes in the morning to catch some of the morning refresh), but I'm BARELY top 50 at this point (not even convinced I can keep it).

It's not even a matter of roster. It's just the time it takes to grind out the nodes is enormous. 2 hours of tablet gaming every night is already ridiculous. THe points are just not there. I would get a node with 1000, and it would drop to 600 after beating it once.

Unknown

Katai wrote:

But I'm not. The top player barely made it to 100,000 (from what I can tell, 100,000 is the common goal for the she-hulk cover).

I've been playing for two hours every night (and about 20 minutes in the morning to catch some of the morning refresh), but I'm BARELY top 50 at this point (not even convinced I can keep it).

It's not even a matter of roster. It's just the time it takes to grind out the nodes is enormous. 2 hours of tablet gaming every night is already ridiculous. THe points are just not there. I would get a node with 1000, and it would drop to 600 after beating it once.

If you can be 100% certain that you can clear every single node down to 1 in 2 hours (which certainly works out okay time-wise) that's about all the time you need to play per sub, plus maybe at most an extra single pass at around the 5H to go mark which takes about 20 minutes.

The extra playing time comes from the fact that nobody can be that certain of their ability to beat the nodes and must trade additional time for more reliable progress. Obviously, most people don't mind trading time for more stability, so if you're not able to plow every node down to 1 in the last 2 hours you'd expect to lose to the guys who also can't do it but invested more time to make up for that.

mohio

With rubberbanding like the subs had, you could add a ton of points by adding one additional clear at some point earlier than the end. I usually started 6-10 hours until the end and did 3-4 clears and finished right near the top of main each time. You could even do less and just do the highest 4 or 5 missions and that will take you 10-15 minutes. If you can do that, it would probably put you in good shape for top 10-20. Also, joining a main bracket towards the end of the first sub is usually a good way to ensure a slightly more slack bracket than joining early as was mentioned above.

Unknown

How much will these nodes be worth in 10 hours? Im 9k ahead of 11th and want to sleep lol. Is a 9k lead enough? Almost at the end..just a little bit more lol. Feels like work lol.

Unknown

Vexed wrote:

How much will these nodes be worth in 10 hours? Im 9k ahead of 11th and want to sleep lol. Is a 9k lead enough? Almost at the end..just a little bit more lol. Feels like work lol.

Nodes on my main and alt have the same value. My alt is 93,000 points behind the bracket leader.

I suspect they'll be worth the same in 10 hours as they are now.

Unknown

Ghast wrote:

Vexed wrote:

How much will these nodes be worth in 10 hours? Im 9k ahead of 11th and want to sleep lol. Is a 9k lead enough? Almost at the end..just a little bit more lol. Feels like work lol.

Nodes on my main and alt have the same value. My alt is 93,000 points behind the bracket leader.

I suspect they'll be worth the same in 10 hours as they are now.

Thats good news! Ty for checking.

Unknown

WorldRunner wrote:

ADD: I'm 35th with 55k in my main bracket and I did join early (For better or worse)

I'm 193rd for 55k in mine. I've been in the top 40 for every sub, but can't get anywhere in main.

Unknown

fidsah wrote:

WorldRunner wrote:

ADD: I'm 35th with 55k in my main bracket and I did join early (For better or worse)

I'm 193rd for 55k in mine. I've been in the top 40 for every sub, but can't get anywhere in main.

Wow.... That's quite a difference. Highest in my bracket is 98k, 10th is 85k. I guess I got lucky.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

<snip>
Playing prior to the final refresh is really about building a lead so that you can get away with not touching the hardest nodes at the end.
</snip>

This is how I play them, and why. my last push I hit sentry 1 time, juggernaut 0, and finished #4 in the instance. Before that I cleared every node in reverse order from highest to lowest value 1 time, waited a few hours, did it again.

Unknown

fidsah wrote:

WorldRunner wrote:

ADD: I'm 35th with 55k in my main bracket and I did join early (For better or worse)

I'm 193rd for 55k in mine. I've been in the top 40 for every sub, but can't get anywhere in main.

Um that's exactly as it should be. You are mathematically in the perfect spot for the effort you put in.

You finished 40/200 in each of the subs, so the 80th percentile. You are 193/1000 in your main, which is about the 80.7 percentile.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

fidsah wrote:

WorldRunner wrote:

ADD: I'm 35th with 55k in my main bracket and I did join early (For better or worse)

I'm 193rd for 55k in mine. I've been in the top 40 for every sub, but can't get anywhere in main.

Um that's exactly as it should be. You are mathematically in the perfect spot for the effort you put in.

You finished 40/200 in each of the subs, so the 80th percentile. You are 193/1000 in your main, which is about the 80.7 percentile.

Except it's not mathematically perfect. I'm sorry, I wasn't clear in my usage of top 40. I meant to say that I've finished between 20th place and 31st place, and I'm not sure on the average, but I know it's not lower than the range. I'd love to think there was some correlation between my performance in the subs and my performance in the main, but the competitors in my bracket are very fierce. That's why my point total can put someone in 35th place in their bracket but close to 200th in mine.

Which was the point. My bracket has some really fierce players.

Unknown

fidsah wrote:

Which was the point. My bracket has some really fierce players.

When did you join your main bracket?

Dragon_Nexus

NorthernPolarity wrote:

My guess is that you joined extremely early and got stuck in a bracket full of grinders. Try joining later next time: I joined after the first sub ended, and am in a bracket where I'm 10k points above 10th place with pretty minimal grinding (last sub for instance, I just did a single clear of the essentials 3 times and then grinded the last 30 mins of the sub). You need to do some metagaming around when you join in order to get a bracket where you don't have to grind. Even joining ~12 hours before the end of the first sub is probably good enough too.

I can vouch for this.
I came back from holiday the other week for the She-Hulk event, I believe it was. I joined after the event had been going on all week and within a few hours I was at the top spot in my bracket. And I was ahead by a good couple of thousand points
Meanwhile if I join a bracket on day one I will struggle to stay in the top 50 by the end.

Spoit

j12601 wrote:

fidsah wrote:

Which was the point. My bracket has some really fierce players.

When did you join your main bracket?

it's even harder to gauge PvE join time diffciulty, since the people you're worried about aren't (just) the top alliance members, but the people with a 1* roster and the required character.

Unknown

It has felt that way to me, but I definitely joined too early. I'm in the 120s in my main bracket with about 75k points (and all the top 10 in my bracket are over 100k). During the subs, I have generally been able to catch up to about 80-90th spot in the overall bracket during my usual play session but since the end of the last sub came overnight (when I get pushed out into the 120s or so) and there doesn't seem to be many points in the main to allow me to catch up again. If they'd just left the last sub open right to the end I feel I would have finished top 100 but since I couldn't play in that crucial last 2.5 hours of the last sub, I'm stuffed.

Does feel like PvE is very grindy now and the events which run more than 3 days or so are too much effort for the prize in the overall bracket- however the subevents tend to be an easy source of iso and tokens. I'm happy to leave the overall brackets to the grinders, get my tokens and iso and a reasonable amount of points for my Alliance, and just concentrate on PvP events.

Unknown

I've been screwed by this last event. I was a top 5 in all the previous events and was actually leading overall by about 1k when i went to bed. Woke up this morning to find myself 30ish and thousands behind the leaders. Ground out every single node to 1 and i can barely make top 15 now. Not even going to get to 100k for the She hulk cover and its just damn annoying to put it mildly.