PvP Help

Unknown

Hi Guys

I know this may have already been covered in another post so if it has i'll just go there but just wondering if I can get some advice for PvP's.

I'm in the 2-3 star transition and getting along nicely, a few 3* characters over level 100 now and just patiently waiting for the covers to come along (about 1 out of every 20every gold recruit token at the moment)

Anyway I'm having a problem with trying to figure out the best time to enter PvP's. If I start too early I end up getting whaled on by all the 166's and if I start too late I don't have enough time to get up to the top 100. Take the current Predator vs Prey event. I started yesterday morning with level 153 GSBW, 114 BP and 104 Doctor D (levels roughly accurate) and ever since then I have just come along and been hit constantly by 166's. I figured it was because everyone has started early so is just pushing through but as of last night I was around the 300 point mark and when I woke up I had been hit for a further 150.

Anyway long story short, is there a best time to enter to avoid getting smacked around constantly everytime I load the game up?

Wobby

Solorized wrote:

Hi Guys

I know this may have already been covered in another post so if it has i'll just go there but just wondering if I can get some advice for PvP's.

I'm in the 2-3 star transition and getting along nicely, a few 3* characters over level 100 now and just patiently waiting for the covers to come along (about 1 out of every 20every gold recruit token at the moment)

Anyway I'm having a problem with trying to figure out the best time to enter PvP's. If I start too early I end up getting whaled on by all the 166's and if I start too late I don't have enough time to get up to the top 100. Take the current Predator vs Prey event. I started yesterday morning with level 153 GSBW, 114 BP and 104 Doctor D (levels roughly accurate) and ever since then I have just come along and been hit constantly by 166's. I figured it was because everyone has started early so is just pushing through but as of last night I was around the 300 point mark and when I woke up I had been hit for a further 150.

Anyway long story short, is there a best time to enter to avoid getting smacked around constantly everytime I load the game up?

How far up were you when you started getting nailed? If your team isn't strong enough (yours isn't) then it is not going to deter anyone who has 166s - you'll draw far more than your fair share of fire.
Your team is exactly the kind of team that the higher-level 3* folks will start seeing once over 400 points -- and they won't hesitate to hit you... as such, starting too early means that you're going to take a lot of hits.

Your roster is also not strong enough to make a solid push at the end of the event -- unless you truly start at the very, very end and just hope/pray that you get a fresh bracket.
Give it a shot (maybe not with Sentry, since that is going to be a trainwreck) -- maybe your MMR won't be too bad for that.

Your best bet may be to climb early -- then get hit a lot by those 3* folks, and hoard the retaliations. If you give it a day or so, those folks may have climbed up past you so far to the point that hitting you back on your retaliation won't be worth it at all...

Just keep in mind that the score it shows when someone is in your queue is not necessarily the same score that they have now. If you're hit by someone while at 250 points, it may be just a 20-25 point showing... but if they've climbed up over 800+ then the actual score you'll get for beating them is more like 40-50 points. Check their alliance tag when they're queued and proceed with confidence if you see a top-tier team.

GrimSkald

Wobby wrote:

How far up were you when you started getting nailed? If your team isn't strong enough (yours isn't) then it is not going to deter anyone who has 166s - you'll draw far more than your fair share of fire.
Your team is exactly the kind of team that the higher-level 3* folks will start seeing once over 400 points -- and they won't hesitate to hit you... as such, starting too early means that you're going to take a lot of hits.

Your roster is also not strong enough to make a solid push at the end of the event -- unless you truly start at the very, very end and just hope/pray that you get a fresh bracket.
Give it a shot (maybe not with Sentry, since that is going to be a trainwreck) -- maybe your MMR won't be too bad for that.

Your best bet may be to climb early -- then get hit a lot by those 3* folks, and hoard the retaliations. If you give it a day or so, those folks may have climbed up past you so far to the point that hitting you back on your retaliation won't be worth it at all...

Just keep in mind that the score it shows when someone is in your queue is not necessarily the same score that they have now. If you're hit by someone while at 250 points, it may be just a 20-25 point showing... but if they've climbed up over 800+ then the actual score you'll get for beating them is more like 40-50 points. Check their alliance tag when they're queued and proceed with confidence if you see a top-tier team.

Wait... when you retaliate you get points based on their actual rank, not what they were at when they hit you? I think that explains a few things for me. I'll have to check that in the future.

Anyway, what he said - this particular PVP is going to be a hot mess - BP is now a much higher end character and everybody wants the Sentry. For the future, you may want to try some tanking to drop more out of the high end's sight, so to speak, and to cultivate a better defensive team to end on. Doctor D is not all that scary, GSBW is extremely squishy and "Deceptive Tactics" just plain sucks on defense, but BP isn't bad.

I honestly don't know that entering at a different time will help that much. I'd say definitely don't enter in the first few hours, but after that I'm afraid it will probably be all luck of the draw.

Unknown

Some pointers. I don't have max chars yet, but I'm a bit further in the transition than you currently are,

a. try to join an alliance, a top 100 if possible. Despite what you may think your roster may be sufficient for this. In a top100 alliance, you'll get one extra cover per event, which accelerates your progress.

b. I agree that fighting in the PVP the second it starts probably isn't optimal. I tend to start about 18-24 hours after the start of the event. Other players start about 24-18 hours from the end of the PVP, but these players tend to have Wolverine (Patch) and/or Lazy Daken and can climb the first 400-500 points faster. (I don't have these chars fully covered so, like you, my slog uphill is going to be longer).

c. If possible, start your first fight on "off-hours", when it's 3-7am pacific standard time, for example. You'll get some interesting results. I sometimes get brackets with lots of Italian alliance names, or French. Sometimes Aussie. Of course there are strong players in every time zone, but the U.S. time zones are going to be the strongest. So start the PVP when the U.S. is sleeping.

d. When the PVP event first starts, be sure to immediately open the PVP and look at your nodes. If you join the PVP in the first minute or two, your nodes will be "seed team" nodes. This may require you to wake up at a strange hours in the night. It's up to you whether it's worth it. You don't have to start fighting these nodes yet (!). Just be sure to join when the event starts to queue up some easily kills. This will make your first 75-200 point climb easier. I say 75-200 points because sometimes (most times) you'll only get three seed team nodes while other times you may get a lucky break and get as many as 6 to 9 seed teams. Either way it reduces the slog up the hill.

Edit: If you switch devices or reload your MPQ program on your phone (or whatever device you're using) then only the top 3 nodes in your PVP queue stack will be remembered -- the other seed fights behind those top 3 nodes which would have otherwise been there will be lost. So, if you prevent your device from reloading MPQ, you're more likely to have additional seed teams beyond the first three. I used this to advantage during the anniversary week lightning rounds. I would queue up the seed teams the minute the PVP started, but then wait 80 mins until there was 6-8 minutes left in the lightning round to start fighting the seed fights and gain points quickly in an empty bracket for top5 placement. As long as I didn't reload MPQ during this 80 minutes, I would have more than 3 seed team fights queued up in my nodes which made it easy to get points beyond the third fight.

e. Pace yourself. Don't climb the ranks too fast. It's kind of like your a zebra in a herd with other zebras and there is a lion pacing around waiting for the opportunity to single out a weak zebra for the kill -- we've all seen these videos on you tube or documentaries, right? If you climb the ranks and increase your score too much above the pack, you become a juicy target and will get singled out. My pace is something like this: I tend to make an initial run for my first 150-300 points (get the token), then stop and take a break maybe coming back the next day. In a second session, I'll make another second climb to say 400-450. That is usually the first 24 hours. The next morning, I may climb to 500-550. Then within the last 8-16 hours I will make my final one or two climbs to 600-750, depending. As you get better you'll start getting some defensive wins which is nice.. anything to make reduce the slog. You can kind of get an idea what the pace is by just trying to stay within the top 50-100 of your bracket (if that's feasible). Check the scores in your bracket, both those around you and the top 10 to get a sense of the general pace.

f. If you're looking for some character combinations, both yogi and I posted combo lists we've compiled in this thread: http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=17105

g. I posted some comments in this thread about defense in pvp: http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17490

h. Shield. Depending on whether your F2P or not, shielding is really worth it and I recommend it and use shields often, especially for the covers you really want to secure. When I first started out, I'd often finish my climb to 600-700 with 24 hours left during US off hours and put up a 24 hour shield and call it a ball (this probably isn't feasible anymore given recent changes -- what I've seen referred to as "bucketing" where above certain scores you'll start to see "the wall" (of level 166 opponents). So you'll have to get a sense for what pace works for you under the current system. As I got stronger, I transitioned to 8 hour shielding 16 hours out, making one last run at about 8 hours left, then shielding for 8 hours until the end. I'm still somewhere around this point, which means I'm slightly net negatives on HP each event -- but I typically get 2-3 covers in return which is worth it for me. As I get even stronger, I'll probably transition to two 3 hour shields -- at this point it will either be break even on HP, or maybe a slight gain. Either way, the shields in nearly every case have been worth it.