Poll on Single Map PvE as requested by Hi-Fi

mohio

adamLmpq wrote:

I think what is particularly frustrating about the heroic Juggernaut event is how disproportionately he scales and how quick and easy he can cost you 1 or more health packs. Take the Combined Arms and Balance of Power events as an example. Juggs dominates in those because he scales so much higher than other characters. It's really annoying to have to go up against him multiple times every two hours.

This is certainly true, but it isn't just juggs. It's really any scaled to oblivion 1or 2* that the game encourages us to beat over and over every 2.5 hours. Super scaled daken or bullseye (or both!) is just an exercise in hoping for a good starting board or else you're beating your head against a wall and losing several health packs. Any time you have a single set of nodes there for over 2 days it's just way too much as scaling goes through the roof and you are encouraged to beat daken and bullseye and juggs and venom with purple feeding goons for the 10th time for 20 iso.

I think this is why you see people claiming deadpool vs MPQ is their favorite. The match ups are (mostly) unique, just like simulator, which was the previous favorite for that reason. Even prodigal sun was a refreshing change cause you fought different teams that didn't usually show up in pve before.

Phumade

arktos1971 wrote:

20 Iso per node cleared is not enough.

I tend to agree with sentiment. At the level of scaling that I face, I need to run 6 boosts to be able to finish a match with a reasonable amount of health. The net result result is that while I can still make my 3 cover objective, I'm spending close to 6000/7000 iso to do it.

Ultimately, Its not that big of an issue to me, because I would bet most players will gladly spend 10K in iso for 3 3* covers, vs 4500 in HP to purchase 3 covers. But you do have to budget ISO for a heroic. I.e. I had 20k in iso stored that I wanted to use to level a character, but I knew the heroic was coming and I decided to save the iso and spend it on boosts to win the covers.

mohio

I wonder if people voting rubberband are saying that the rubberband is too weak now? To me it seems like some of these issues could be cleared up if the rubberband were a little stronger and we didn't have to grind every 2.5 hours from when we join or else we'll get left in the dust and unable to catch up cause the rubberband sucks. Maybe they'll be able to increase the rubberband back some once they add the new end time feature since that removes the major complaint for the strong rubberband in the first place.

Unknown

1. What Phantron said, Daken is a whole different beast now that he has chemical reaction.
2. I'm tired of Daken/Ares/Jugg/Venom/Yelena/Bullseye/Moonstone/Rags, but there isn't really any good options since we are so short on Villians (we need more villians).
3. The goons feeding Juggs and Rags and Venom's stun is really what makes me dislike these events. (Thick as Thieves and ISO-8 Brotherhood are my favorites)

I mentioned in another thread that I think the powers being feed by goons, should have their cost increased by that same amount. Also forcing goons to use goon generated AP is a fix, either way we stop having Unstoppable Crash/Venom Stun/Gravity Warp/Godlike Power, etc every other turn (this would be too easy I think). Juggs and Rags can still have green feeders and Moonstone/Venom can have purple feeders, but their skills need to cost more. 6-7AP when getting fed 4/turn is too cheap, 10-11AP means we can plan for it and actually play. These events aren't fun because we stare at our screens while Venom stuns us into oblivion or Juggs cascades us into headbutt after headbutt. When we are staring at our phone/tab/computer, we get bored. When we get bored, you lose players.

Rotating subs would also help (like the hunt), locking in people's gains in previous subs and rewarding them. That would get rid of the last hour uncertainty and make people more okay with grinding for a new character. Though to be honest, I would rather new characters only get released in Deadpool vs. MPQ and Simulator. If you want roster diversity, reward us for being creative in the all Storm or all Wolverine matchups with a certain essential character.

I like the limited rosters in Heroics (even if they lack synergy), because it forces us to be creative...even if that means running a team lacking 2 colors, but they should only reward older characters, not new ones.

Unknown

Using a bigger rubberband to undo the tedium of 2.5H clears is just trading one problem for another. At any rate even if rubberband was super strong like way back you'd still have heavy grinding toward the end because let's say rubberband is so strong that whoever plays last always wins, the person who started out #1 before the final 2.5H is the person most likely to play last compared to anyone else, and the person most likely to be #1 at the start of the last 2.5H is the person who was #1 at the start of the last 5H, and so on. In fact in events like TaT it is quite possible to fall behind by (event's base points) X 30 which cannot be made up no matter what the rubberband mechanism is, and the guy who is ahead by this margin sure didn't get there by being idle. I think the current rubberband is adequate if the cycle time is on something more reasonable like 5-6H.

If you look at the DA lineup, we can roughly classify them as:

Exceptional when having a significant level advantage - Daken, Sentry, Juggernaut, Ares, Ragnarok.

Exceptional despite having a significant level disadvantage - Daken, Juggernaut, The Hood, Venom, Ragnarok.

Moonstone, Bullseye, and Yelena are the only characters on the enemy list that do not have a significant strength while over or underleveled, and you can make an argument that Bullseye is exceptional with a significant level advantage (mostly due to his 4.5X crit modifier pumping out crazy match damage). Not only does the DA beat you up when they have a level advantage on you, they're also pretty darn good even when they're operating at a level deficit.

For the goon issue I think goons should not generate AP as long as their side can move the board. There are just way too many degenerate fights when you can spam moves that cannot even be denied. Even Yelena + 2 purple AP pump have a good chance to lock down a human player forever with Lethal Recon.

over_clocked

1. Introduce subs in ALL events including Heroic Juggernaut and Venom and Unstable Iso-8. I love what was done to Oscorp Heroic and Thick As Thieves. (No rubberbanding off a single map for everyone.)
I don't even care about the rewards that much although not having more event tokens, HP and ISO sucks; it's about not having the entire playerbase rubberband off the global leaders making all early effort meaningless unless you're a machine that never skips refreshes, and then you are not going to lose anything anyway with better event structures. Maybe the long-awaited arrival of timezone bracketing will solve some of the rubberbanding/scaling problems, I can't even imagine all the consequences yet but until we have a working model, subs are a must.

1a. If not possible to introduce subs in those events, make them no longer than 24-36 hours, flash events so to speak. Seriously. Anything more than that with those 2,5h refreshes is killing joy faster than you can say 'tinykitty'. The joy was killed 24 hours before the actual start of Heroic Juggernaut. It already went negative infinity 48 hours before the event's end for people that have been here long enough to know what's wrong with Heroic Juggernaut and Venom.
I understand some PvE always needs to be run but why not run Gauntlet or Simulator with older, perfectly mediocre rewards? Simulator can even be broken up into short subs, no need to run it in its entirety for 6-7 days, it has no story to relay. Ditto Gauntlet.
People that whine about bad rewards will whine even when the rewards are actually something good like lazy Captain America or Punisher because they need some other top covers ("gimme Sentry and Hood NAO!!!" "gimme Patch and I don't care he's been rotated out!", etc) or something, while most players can still use those covers and every single player can use ISO/HP/event tokens, while vets can appreciate a break from PvE for older covers.

2. Rosters should always include active rainbow skills, at least one good skill in every colour (remember when Bag-Man was the only purple/yellow user or some such? That was a horrible, horrible time). That's the least that should be done. Ideally there should be some synergy between the characters (e.g. Black Panther wants oBW or someone with attack tiles/cheap attacks to utilize his strike tiles; Falcon NEEDS someone with special tiles to be useful at all; MMN needs an outlet for all that blue, even Spider-Man or 2* Captain America would suffice if no cStorm; GSBW needs someone to tank for her, she is almost completely unviable as the core featured character due to her non-existent hitpoints; etc, etc.).
I sure as heck ain't recruiting the weaksauce IM 35 back to dump blue that MMN generates in the current Heroic; that's not synergy at all and it won't help me one single bit against lvl 200 Daken. Oh and Black Panther blue is not a decent blue in any universe, not against Daken for sure since it's too slow and Daken's too fast.
GSBW, BP and Colossus are all slower characters and need AP help badly (if not from oBW/mBW/Storm, at least Blade, Psylocke and mHawkeye then which is still horribly slow of course). Or stuns.

3. Rosters should also always include at least one decent support character or someone to deal with the goon CD tiles; oBW, mBW, any Storm, Falcon, Spider-Man, Captain America both versions, cHawkeye, 3* Captain Marvel (at least she provides AP when being killed, and can stun), etc. If we could expand to villain characters that never appear in Prologue anyway, like Loki and cMagneto, for example, that would be great. Especially considering Magneto and Loki are not 100% villainous unlike Moonstone or Venom. I would add Octopus to the list but he's too sad of a character frankly to burden our limited Heroic options.

That's the gist for me. Voted for all 12 options because I could for some reason (lol Colognoisseur).

Oh and I sorely lament no stun or AP acceleration in the current piece of tinykitty also known as Juggernaut Heroic, against Daken and Juggernaut who are notoriously hard even with stuns and AP steal available, for covers of a character that both stuns and steals AP. Is this some gigantic joke we fail to get?
I mean sure you can make Heroic events as unenjoyable, as healthpack-heavy as you possibly can, even if you don't have intentions of doing so, by sheer accident. Well good thing we have been playing these for more than a year for you and can provide the information that metrics cannot.
Please, please, please, promote great covers we can actually earn (hint: BP blue is not a great cover for any and all rosters past the 1* > 2* transition, ditto GSBW red), not lvl 200 Juggernaut and 2* Daken's OPness, we all know already how strong these two are past their natural level, even newbies that only start the game can easily find Daken and Juggernaut nodes in Prologue harder than everything else.
By the way Muscle is the single most OP goon as well, too bad we can't have him on our roster, aww. I would trade my cover-maxed Beast or She-Hulk for a Muscle in a heartbeat

homeinvasion

Did my first clear through today, scratched my head at team continuity, or lack there of. I have max BP so 250 or something powered up, max wolvie and max 2 star mags, so I have powered up rainbow, seems good, after 2 nodes I need 3 health packs. Go into the third node on all full and lose with the enemy team on full health thanks to lieutenant spamming a heal EVERY turn and about 8 bullseye shields all stuck on the bottom with no possible way to get them out. Kind of upset, buy a health pack head back in, AI generates about 50 AP first turn and showers me with abilities till I die.

kind of upset by this stage, buy a 5 pack of health, figure I will need them to try to do the clear, get a magic cascade that gets me rage of the panther 3rd turn, phew, past the third node. Only because of mad luck.

4th node 2 of my peeps die and the last hobbles out, but get the win. onto 5th node, really getting somewhere.

5th node use last 2 HP and head back in with BP/ Mags/ GSBW

cascade 'o death with powers going off, don't even really get a turn.

Kinda sums up every one of these. I could win if I just spammed health packs all day but really it is not skill or ability, or clever team construction, or creative matching it is just buy health packs until you hit a good cascade and can get off rage of the panther.

p.s. oh yea on two of these games I got to 12 black and the AI just went 'denied' mad cascade kill BP

Unknown

2,5 hours of refresh time is not really ok. No offense to anyone but I can't play MPQ every 2,5 hours. I don't have that much free time to allot to MPQ. It should be 8 hours at least because playing every node 2 times a day is possible while more competitive players could do it 3 times a day.

Another thing is if you run an event without subs just make it short like this current Heroic. Probably 2,5 days for that kind of event is fine.

simonsez

I had high hopes for this poll, but now that I'm seeing that boredom-with-the-characters is getting the most votes, I'm really disappointed that THIS is perceived as the biggest problem. I mean seriously... would this PvE be any less awful if each node had an overscaled Wolverine spamming you with 1k Feral Claw attacks and dropping 100 strength strike tiles all over the board? And goons feeding blue to a lv 175 CStorm and black to a lv 175 Ms Marvel, leaving you perma-stunned and waiting to die?

I don't need to experience this to know that my reaction would NOT be, "I'm really enjoying getting my **** kicked and wasting health packs with this new novel mix of opponents!"

Oldboy

Just my thoughts as I still like playing the game as a whole but not the Venom/Juggernaut Heroics

The map itself isn't the problem for me. However the implementation of some of the features of it are horrible.

In no particular order...

1) Goons feeding AP to Villains with cheap AP abilities (Daken, Juggernaut, Venom, Ares)

By having goons feeding AP to the villains every round, that is equivalent to providing them a match 3 every round of that colour. Juggernaut + Analysts accelerates his Headbutt. Jug + soldiers accelerates Crash. Purple feeding goons + Venom accelerates his Symbiote Snare. Ares + Lieutenant/Soldiers accelerates Sunder/Onslaught.

Players start the match at a disadvantage unless we use boosts but then this works against us as it drives up personal scaling which then makes the next matches harder and it becomes a vicious cycle.


2) Over-levelled 1* characters
Juggernaut and Venom over-levelled way past their limit of 40 (e.g. 90 and above) distorts the damage dealt to players. It's true our heroes are also buffed but we have to wait for healing and/or spend health packs. The AI doesn't need to. Juggernaut can Headbutt until he goes down and the AI doesn't care because he'll be at 100% the next match.
(I haven't checked match damage so I can't comment but the AI getting cascades almost everytime because of Juggernaut's Crash? That's pure horribleness because of the villains cheap abilities)

With respect to points 1 and 2, I really don't mind a challenge but in a context of the Gauntlet would be a lot better. Then it becomes an actual challenge to overcome and not something to dread and repeat for the next 3.5 days.

3) Limited heroes with no/little synergy
I have no problems with being provided a limited roster but sometimes the characters leave me scratching my head. The only synergy I see this round in Jug Heroics is with MnMags Purple accelerating IM35 Blue ability. I run BP, Wolv, and GSBW for a rainbow team in Essentials but their abilities take about 3x as long to charge up (without cascades) compared to Juggernauts Headbutt and Crash (which usually generates cascades resulting in more Crash and Headbutts). BP Rage of Panther does AOE damage but by giving Juggernaut +5 Green AP (strongest colour) almost usually means a Crash the next round followed by cascades and probably a Headbutt. Colossus is fairly new and most people wouldn't have him with many covers (>7) which makes him difficult to use against Juggernaut essentials or the more difficult nodes. GSBW is only greatly useful if she has maxed covers in Green and 3-5 covers in Purple. None of their abilities complement each other with the exception of strike tiles which usually get destroyed anyway with Jug's Crash.

Others have mentioned in better detail about this. From my personal experience, if I had the right heroes with synergy this event wouldn't be that bad of a grind and I think that's where a lot of frustration comes about as well. The nodes are already challenging (because of 1 and 2), getting a poorly balanced team makes it that much harder. Even though the rest of the playerbase have the same limitations, the individual player becomes frustrated when they keep losing to enemies with lower levels than them. People don't get frustrated as much in The Gauntlet because we only need to clear them once and we get that those enemies are high levelled and there is 'bragging rights' about how we did it.

Even Unstable Iso-8 allowed us to use our full roster and I would rank it better than Jug/Venom Heroics. (Not that I like it that much mainly due to the scaling over the long duration of the event)

4) Variety in enemies
6 of the nodes in the current Jugs Heroics has... well.. Jugs. It gets dreadful even before we can complete the first run-through of the map. (see 1,2 and 3 above)

Simulator and Gauntlet and the other events provide variety and allows us to mix and match the characters we have spent time and resources building up. There is a sense of accomplishment being able to use the 3* (or 4*) that we took so long to build up.

5) Refresh times
I have no issues with it but I can see how it would be difficult for many others who don't want to be on their phones every 2.5 hours just to place well. Perhaps this can be extended to 4 hours so that those who want to grind can do so while those who don't want can do less grinding.

6) Rubberbanding
I seriously have no idea how this works (even after reading the explanations) which is why I grind the nodes.

7) Rewards
With just one map for 3.5 days, it becomes an unrewarding grind after the 1st day. Add in the fact that most of us have to boost just to clear the *Easy*/*Normal* nodes in this current Heroic and it becomes a very unrewarding exercise.

I get that the devs can't be giving out free ISO and HP all the time cos they need players to make purchases, but not giving out anything after what most players take 1 day to clear the better rewards of an event (that has another 2.5 days) does de-motivate a lot of people from playing this event. Perhaps the rewards can be reset every 24 hours? Or introduce subs as what others have suggested. Or increase the ISO obtained like in the Anniversary week.

rixmith

My main issues with this Heroic:

Lack of variety: Since it is the same nodes for 4 days the nodes need more opponent variety.
Rewards: Having to do the same nodes for 4+ days and getting 20 ISO as a reward for brutally hard fights. And having a lack of subs means there are very few event tokens available.
Roster: I don't have a problem with a limited roster (I feel Heroics reward players that have invested in having a deep roster and that's okay). But I don't have any incentive to use anything other than Panther, Widow and Wolverine in this. They shred the easy nodes taking little damage, and nobody else can really do much against the bigger nodes. Maybe the 1* and 2* characters need bigger buffs to make them more viable to use?

Overall, I think the main issue is that without subs the event gets stale very quickly.

VonMatterhorn

I think the most frustratingly easy problem to fix is the issue of limited roster.

I get that they want to challenge us and force us to use unusual combinations. Fine. But when there are over 50 characters, are you really going to limit me to just 8 of them? Give us a few more options to play with that aren't hilariously as bad as some that have been thrown out recently. Hulk/Thor/Falcon? That only inspired me to figure out what else I could be doing other than playing this game.

It especially seems unfair when there's ridiculous synergy on the other side. Daken + Ares/Juggs teams get pretty difficult once scaling starts to kick in. God forbid there's a green feeding goon along with them too.

Unknown

The biggest problem I'm seeing with all these responses is that they don't take into account what happened with X-Force, and they really should.

With X-Force, we all complained because he was a weak, useless character, not realizing that if all the longest playing/biggest paying users all had a mostly-leveled X-Force on their roster, one big change would give a huge advantage to the players who least needed it. All these changes to the PVE won't help us, unless we're suggesting changes that will equalize the event for all players, and make winning an arbitrary choice that every loser will decry as unfair, especially the powerful ones, whose amazing rosters will have done them no good.

The real point is, every time you make this game easier, you make it doubly easier for those with more time and money than you. PVE will be won by the players with the right characters and the free time and motivation to play most often. The only working solution they've yet found to this is The Gauntlet, and we complain just as hard about that.

So the only real suggestion we can make is for them to make it more fun. To make the challenges realistic tests of skill and power, instead of arbitrary survival against characters 2-8 times their proper level cap, boosted by free AP from goons. To let us play against better characters than the dreck they created when the game was first developed.

I mean, here's a few things they could do to make the game a little bit more fun: Off the top of my head, I'd say stop level-boosting Daken when you could just have use fight his version. Sure, it doesn't fit that story but

NEITHER DOES YELENA BELOVA

Who the is she, anyways? I looked her up. She's not even a Dark Avenger. Also, Ragnarok was never a Dark Avenger during Dark Reign. Not till long after. And Juggernaut doesn't belong there, either. Just saying. Lack of orthodoxy. Give us Daken so at least he scales correctly up to 166.

The other thing they could do is create name-brand goons. They took the time to create a whole new set of "Brotherhood" mutant goons once upon a time. Why not create Avalanche, Pyro, Super Sabre, Destiny, Unuscione, Amelia Voght, Frenzy, Senyaka, Spoor, Fabian Cortez, Bonebreaker, Skullbreaker, Donald Pierce, Pretty Boy...

I could just keep listing every low-level goon I know of, any those are just from the X-Men comics.

My conclusion is that they should put a stop to AP-generating goons, and replace them with named characters who can make matches. And balance them so that, level 35 or 395, they still fight fair. Don't end the challenge. I'd hate to feel like the only way to win is to play every node without taking damage and then waiting two and a half hours. I like how the challenge stratifies players. I wish that only the ones who can win would be the ones who can win. I don't like losing to a player I know didn't have to face the same challenges as I did.

It would be great if they could figure out a way to make the game work better than it does now, but every solution so far has either made the game too hard or too easy.

Unknown

My biggest issue with heroics is and remains character selection. In this case, what characters are available? None of them have any synergy with each other, the 3*s are all pretty slow (a really big deal against Juggernaut and Hood), and one of the (3) featured 2*s couldn't possibly be maxed! The selection is just awful. I mean, last time the available 3*s sucked too, but at least you could cover the rainbow and had some synergy (Thor+GSBW was pretty solid). In this case, your options are horribly stunted.

Unknown

I'm willing to go as high as 2.5 days for length because that'd be the same as running a one round Simulator Basic and I don't think people will complain about a 1 round Simulator Basic even though it'd pretty much be just 2 single map PvE running concurrently, but anything more than that is too much.

The 2.5 hour recycle time is a universal problem in all PvE events and not limited to single map PvE. There are plenty of events with subs where the recycle time makes it impossible to play, like The Hunt when you got 2 subs concurrently with a lot of nodes that must all be played constantly.

I don't mind the limitation of a heroic roster but we need to stop fighting guys who are never meant to scale that high. I mean, just go back to the original version of Juggernaut/Venom (as in the prologue). I remember they were quite challenging even though a lot of those nodes would be just one Juggernaut or one Daken. The heroic version seems to be like 'if Venom by himself was normal then adding a purple AP pump makes it heroic'. How did the Juggernaut only node in essential become Juggernaut + Muscle + The Hood? Again go back to the prologue and you'll notice Muscles are used very sparingly because they're essentially like a boss character and probably a lot stronger than most of the villians by a lot. I believe they only show up as all goons or they're paired up with Yelena, who is easily the weakest DA in the game, and there's a reason for that!

CrookedKnight

File under "why can't there be subs": three days of Deadpool vs. MPQ gives me anywhere from six to twelve event tokens. Heroic Juggernaut gives me two. There's a huge difference between an event that gives me an average of one to two 3* pulls and one that gives an average of zero. With so many of these grindfests giving new characters as placement rewards, it means PvE is worthless for advancing in the 3* transition lately.

CNash

Oldboy wrote:

Juggernaut and Venom over-levelled way past their limit of 40 (e.g. 90 and above) distorts the damage dealt to players. It's true our heroes are also buffed but we have to wait for healing and/or spend health packs. The AI doesn't need to. Juggernaut can Headbutt until he goes down and the AI doesn't care because he'll be at 100% the next match.

You hit the nail right on the head. There should be some kind of penalty for the AI whenever Juggernaut KOs himself via Headbutt - for example, the next match you play in that event vs. Juggs, he starts at half health. Or a more general nerfing that would apply to everyone - how about, if Juggs KOs himself with Headbutt, the team loses all Green and Red AP?

Although I fear that the bigger task would be to program the AI to take this penalty into account when choosing actions...

Unknown

If your going to have a limited roster, could you guve us someone for CD nodes? OBW, Shulkie, Falcon, 2* or 3* cap, i.e. any one.

Also, and most importantly, please adjust the 2.5 hour refresh timers. My family and myself would prefer not planning our lives around the PVE node timers. 8 hours instead of 2.5 would be so awesome, I lack the words to capture it.

Wolarsen

I voted on rubberband, but as someone pointed out, it can mean anything.

I would like no rubberband at all, or at least diminishing till it dissappears midevent. I understand rubberband at the start of an event, so more people have the chance to go for it; but strong rubberband all the way till the end forces you to play during the last event hours if you want to go serious at competing; I would like to have more freedom to choose my gaming times.

For the same reason, I'd like longer refresh timers.

Nellyson

Everything....That's how bad it is. I found myself voting for every option there was except the dealing with countdown timers. That's not that big of an issue. I still think the character selection should be modified. The devs choose 4 people, we get to choose the last 4. That would help the player match who they think goes well together. Devs pick the super buffed 3 and the essential 3 , we pick our favorite 3 or who we like to match with the devs choices. Then we get to pick two 2 and two 1 . That would make heroics more enjoyable to have the options. After this, I really don't know any good fixes for scaling rewards or any of that. Although I'd love to see it be progression instead of ranking rewards. That annoys the **** outta me.