Combined Arms

Unknown

Was #12 at the end and did a last-minute jump to #9. Since the alliance got me my red, I didn't need top 5 - I'm down to needing covers for 5 3*s now, which is nice.

Have we gotten any word on whether Season 5 starts Friday, like last time, or will they wait until Monday?

CrookedKnight

Wow, I got attacked once in that whole tourney. I mean, I only jumped in last night, but still, usually I get barraged with attacks in the last few hours no matter how little I participate. Instead I managed to sneak in at 95 on the strength of a (literally) last-second win and now I'll be able to play those Torch nodes, so this is a good, good day.

Unknown

This was a blast. Early on I played around with a couple teams but ultimately settled on Daken/OBW/MStorm since while maybe not the most blatantly powerful, it was a whole lot of fun to play. I got to actually use a team-up most rounds, and had relatively few times where I'd wipe.

Made it up to 700, smacked back to 580 or so. I'd keep playing back up whenever I was able and just enjoyed playing. This morning I switched over to Sentry + randoms (Thor!/IM35 was really good actually) and made it up to 910, shielded. That held. Two people in my bracket finished unshielded, one in top 5, one in top 10. Really low scoring and quite amusing. Liked this more than Balance of Power.

Amazeballs

Tagstar87 wrote:

Amazeballs wrote:

I thought I would get attacked out the wazoo, but mStorm, OBW, 153 LCap has deterred a lot. I've gotten more defensive wins than normal, netting over 100 points (even counting the losses).

Same here. I had this team up overnight while I slept and was only attacked twice (had broken 500 before bed). One retaliation was worth 7 points and the other 45!

I jumped in on the first day running the same team and got attacked 6 times, 4 of which turned into defensive wins and the other two were maxed LThor and BP with the same build of 1/2*. I noticed more and more people running our trio as the tourney went on and no one attacked over the last 12 hours. I could've probably been okay not shielding, but better safe than sorry! (One person tried to start a retaliation war last night, running same team but with a lower Cap. They had more points than me so they alone gave me 70+ points lol.)

locked wrote:

Events like this make me wish for an option to see my own defensive teams pretty hard (for wins, losses, everything). I'm stranded on slow wi-fi atm, so can't play MPQ (not downloaded yet), so I don't even know how my whatever team is faring on defense. Probably not stellarly though as any team can be beaten.

A review option would be so awesome. When I see defensive wins, it's such a "WOOHOO!" moment. On the flip side, sometimes it's like **** after a loss happens when it seems illogical. (Also had the thought that this would weed out the 1 hit cheaters. Now thinking it would double the app size to download haha.)

Unknown

Top4 without shielding seems fair to me

Unknown

2nd place at 930 points and alliance got 5th place at 14,395 points.

Now if they would just fix how the AI uses HT green ability.

mischiefmaker

I know this probably makes me history's biggest monster, but I have to say that I did not enjoy this event very much at all. Sure, there was a lot of diversity in the teams I faced, and I got to play some different teams than what I normally would, which was great, but overall the little bit of enjoyment I got out of increased variety was completely swamped by:

- there were very few teams that didn't require a health pack every 2-3 games
- every team I faced had the ability to wipe my team on a single cascade or even a stale board with the wrong colors
- so it was quite hard to make progress except in small chunks, but that meant either constant shielding or risking losing a large part of that progress with just a loss or two

I swore at my phone more times during this tournament than any I can remember in recent history. I tried to put myself in a mindset that the point of the tournament was to explore my roster and rotate through a bunch of combinations, but even so most of my sessions were infuriating.

(And this is even though I didn't need the prizes and my alliance got the cover. I can only imagine how much I would have hated it if I'd actually needed Torch covers.)

It feels like this mechanic would be much better suited to PvE, where I'm irrevocably rewarded for every win (so even if I lose a character or two, I'm still making progress), don't have to worry about defense, and optimal play leans toward short sessions with 2 hour breaks (enough for health packs to regenerate).

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

I know this probably makes me history's biggest monster, but I have to say that I did not enjoy this event very much at all. Sure, there was a lot of diversity in the teams I faced, and I got to play some different teams than what I normally would, which was great, but overall the little bit of enjoyment I got out of increased variety was completely swamped by:

- there were very few teams that didn't require a health pack every 2-3 games
- every team I faced had the ability to wipe my team on a single cascade or even a stale board with the wrong colors
- so it was quite hard to make progress except in small chunks, but that meant either constant shielding or risking losing a large part of that progress with just a loss or two

I swore at my phone more times during this tournament than any I can remember in recent history. I tried to put myself in a mindset that the point of the tournament was to explore my roster and rotate through a bunch of combinations, but even so most of my sessions were infuriating.

(And this is even though I didn't need the prizes and my alliance got the cover. I can only imagine how much I would have hated it if I'd actually needed Torch covers.)

It feels like this mechanic would be much better suited to PvE, where I'm irrevocably rewarded for every win (so even if I lose a character or two, I'm still making progress), don't have to worry about defense, and optimal play leans toward short sessions with 2 hour breaks (enough for health packs to regenerate).

This event is closer to winning 50% of the time on average for PvP instead of somewhere around 99%, but the game's PvP system is not designed to work well when you only win close to 50% of the time on average. For one it gives way too much advantage to shields (because having full health now matters a lot on whether you'll win at all and shields give you time to replenish health packs) and of course boosts. If PvE wasn't bugged with enemies doing base level ability damage, I wouldn't be able to have enough health packs to make any meaningful progress in this event while still doing Iso8 Brotherhood.

scottee

Ha, that's precisely why I liked this event. It magnified the skill difference in match making because everyone had similarly powered teams.

And I took first.

GrumpySmurf1002

As long as we're giving reviews, the only notable difference between this and Balance of Power for me was having to use an underleveled LThor with OBW-Juggs, instead of a lvl 270 IM35. That also meant hitting somewhat of a wall when 266 teams started popping up. I probably could've knocked them out, but the health pack factor kept me skipping them.

This also had a bit more variety to it. BoP became mostly a 1* tourney except for a few random teams, this had decent variety across all 3 slots.

If nothing else, it was a good change of pace, and a nice relaxed bracket also helped. The Hulk event put a strain on how much I actually wanted to play this week.

Unknown

Fun tourney.

Used 3* Hulk, 2* Wolverine and 1* MBW/IM35 for most part, didn't get to play as many rounds as I wanted to with work but still hit 500 before the update changed from skip to force download which failed due to 'insufficient space', beh.

squirrel1120

Ugh, couldn't play at lunch break like I thought I would. 40th odd place turned to 140th odd place by event end. Long time since I couldn't grab at least one *** cover. Oh well.

Rusalka

Aaaaand... Australian end time smacks me in the face again. I pushed to 4th place last night before I just couldn't stay up anymore, so I shielded and hoped for the best. Woke up to find I missed top 5 by 2 points.

Oh well, I did enjoy the event quite a lot, and two HT covers still isn't shabby.

whitecat31

I really enjoyed this tournament as well, except after the update where my teams got the base level bug, and could not defend at all. After that I chose to shield hop. Every time I used my team B or Team C in between hops, I would get slaughtered.
I was thinking. How do these people know I am unshielded. Team A was Lazy Thor OBW and Storm.
Still at one time I did break 900 points and I did get a Top 5 finish and my alliance got a Top 100 finish. So good times.

Mawtful

whitecat31 wrote:

How do these people know I am unshielded.

You essentially get pushed to the forefront of the combat queues as soon as you enter a match, since you're now an "active" player. This is why shield hopping requires only 1 or 2 matches between shields.

Unknown

whitecat31 wrote:

I really enjoyed this tournament as well, except after the update where my teams got the base level bug, and could not defend at all. After that I chose to shield hop. Every time I used my team B or Team C in between hops, I would get slaughtered.
I was thinking. How do these people know I am unshielded. Team A was Lazy Thor OBW and Storm.
Still at one time I did break 900 points and I did get a Top 5 finish and my alliance got a Top 100 finish. So good times.

Buffed heroes are not affected by the bug, so Combined Arms went unscathed.

atomzed

mischiefmaker wrote:

I know this probably makes me history's biggest monster, but I have to say that I did not enjoy this event very much at all. Sure, there was a lot of diversity in the teams I faced, and I got to play some different teams than what I normally would, which was great, but overall the little bit of enjoyment I got out of increased variety was completely swamped by:

- there were very few teams that didn't require a health pack every 2-3 games
- every team I faced had the ability to wipe my team on a single cascade or even a stale board with the wrong colors
- so it was quite hard to make progress except in small chunks, but that meant either constant shielding or risking losing a large part of that progress with just a loss or two

I swore at my phone more times during this tournament than any I can remember in recent history. I tried to put myself in a mindset that the point of the tournament was to explore my roster and rotate through a bunch of combinations, but even so most of my sessions were infuriating.

(And this is even though I didn't need the prizes and my alliance got the cover. I can only imagine how much I would have hated it if I'd actually needed Torch covers.)

It feels like this mechanic would be much better suited to PvE, where I'm irrevocably rewarded for every win (so even if I lose a character or two, I'm still making progress), don't have to worry about defense, and optimal play leans toward short sessions with 2 hour breaks (enough for health packs to regenerate).

I also have a similar experience as most of my games end up my heroes being damaged in the games. I was "forced" to rotate my heroes but because I only have 2 usable 1*, my previous health packs were spend on the 1* instead.

I also realised that I was getting attack way more often than other pvp. It may bec I don't have a Jug and I was using Lcap (instead of Lthor or hulk). That caused me to lose a lot more points.

Last thing was the special circumstances of this pvp. I have full covers for HT so I was playing to earn HP. In the end, I managed to achieve that by getting top 25 (right at the last min) without using a single shield.

Seems like this and BOP will be a permanent fixture so undecided to open a new roster slot to build up a Jug. He has been my nemesis in this pvp and so I might as well use him too

Unknown

I agree with many of the comments here. This event was fun in that it forced creative team compositions but I had a similar experience in that one bad cascade could lead to a wipe. Shields seemed necessary to place in my bracket. Ended up at 41st place with a score of 622 for a HT green cover (which I needed).

My team for most of my pushes was C Mags (lvl 130, 553), Ares (lvl 94, 445), Jugs (level 1). I had deleted my 1*'s a few days before this event (lesson learned) which forced me to grab the first jugs cover I could get. C. Mags typically doesn't offer much in the way of defense, but I knew there is an annoyance factor: Mags long animations on top of the AI spamming mags powers, especially red, literally every turn added to Jugs general disruption. Also, I think this combo might be one to underestimate. The team worked quite well. Strangely, I ended up 4 or 5 wins to 1 loss on retaliations which pushed up my score about 40-50 points overall. It's about the best luck I've had on retaliations in any event.

Overall, I like this event and think they should definitely keep it in the rotation.

farlus

Ben Grimm wrote:

Was #12 at the end and did a last-minute jump to #9. Since the alliance got me my red, I didn't need top 5 - I'm down to needing covers for 5 3*s now, which is nice.

I was watching scores like a hawk at the end to make sure I didn't get knocked out of top 10, and saw your last minute hop. I was rooting you on. There was another guy that pushed to top 10 in the last 10 minutes, but sat unshielded for too long and got hit twice, leading they way for you to jump in. Congrats sir.