Get rid of denial type battles in PvE

Unknown

I was playing some nodes in heroic and I hit the Yelena + Lieutenant + Soldier, and I noticed that every time I try to get something going she always managed to have 19 purple AP to get a Lethal Recon, and I think I went through the whole game without using a move that required 3 matches because I never had the AP (and lost). I didn't have purple covered but it's not like it matters when she's getting free purple AP each turn. By denial I don't necessarily mean AP steal. It can be Venom + 2 purple feeder, or Ragnarok + 2 green feeder, or The Hood with yellow pump. You're not going to get anything that resembles a plan when you've a Godlike Power every turn to reset the board or a Twin Pistols every other turn. I don't know if I can speak for everyone, but I hate denial fights even more than almost all instances of the straight up power/overscaling. That is, if you got a level 395 Ares with green pump you sure won't last very long but at least you can still make your matches since Ares cannot disrupt the board, and if you've some luck on enemy ability usage (pretty much any green pump goon has a higher costing green so they could skip Onslaught) you might be able to do something, or at least die trying. In most of the heroic fights you're basically just watching the computer spam their moves every turn and easily destroying whatever board position you're trying to setup with their board clearing moves. I don't know what's the point to have one of those ultra cheap nodes at level 70 where you know you're still going to lose 80% of the time and feel like you totally suck at the game for wiping on a node rated as trivial. Maybe it wasn't the original intention, but a lot of those nodes feels like trolling, like fighting 3 The Hoods at level 100 without Daken. Sure, it'd be awfully hard to lose to 3 The Hoods but I can't imagine anyone want to fight them and you're going to spend most of the fight looking at 0/0/0/0/0/0 APs.

homeinvasion

AP steal or gain is easily the strongest mechanic in the game. It is flat unfair that they have +ap goons with characters. I wish a mathematician looked at all the mechanics, cause there is no way that say hoods passive is = to Beast active. or even just hoods passive versus ALL of beast. AP steal is 'I'm droppin bombs and you're not'. Think about this, look at she hulks heal, or any fake heal. Strictly speaking damage is always better than heal. There is rarely a situation where a big bomb is worse than a big heal. in most games heal numbers are way bigger than damage numbers, cause heal is not as good. Call the Storm does way bigger numbers than She hulks heal, for a similar cost, but heal is just worse than damage. If She hulks heal was the same cost and healed your entire team to full would peeps start playing her? Even then she would be pretty weak compared to a straight damage toon.

The game is unbalanced, there is only one strategy to win. It is easy to release a new toon every week with no balance or mechanic or balance at all put into it. They really need to get the top 50 players in a room, nut out what mechanic (ap steal, heal, strike tiles etc) is worth and come up with a core mechanic for the game, this shoot off the hip gets too unwieldy.

IamTheDanger

Maybe, just maybe, Mystique's abilities that steal green, red, and yellow might make some of them beatable again, if she's one of the 8 usable characters. OBW can steal purple, blue, and black, (plus all others with her recon), but it really doesn't seem to be enough. Especially when she's not in the line up for the available characters. It was my understanding that one of the reasons those nodes were made like that is because of OP characters like pre-nerf Spidey, Rags, and C Mags. But with those guys all gone now, shouldn't it be time to re-think the whole level 395 thing?

Spoit

I agree that AP feeding is a tiny kitty, but i don't really see what that has to do with denial, since you can't deny it that way

_RiO_

Spoit wrote:

I agree that AP feeding is a tiny kitty, but i don't really see what that has to do with denial, since you can't deny it that way

OP means denial as in opponent combinations specifically geared towards systematic denial of your AP.

Unknown

I don't really see the issue. Yeah those fights are harder, but everybody's got to do them and rewards are based on how efficiently you play vs. everybody else.

nimvin

soursenseless wrote:

I don't really see the issue. Yeah those fights are harder, but everybody's got to do them and rewards are based on how efficiently you play vs. everybody else.

This is only true after you have earned all the progression/node rewards. Somepeople only pve for those then any rank reward they get is just icing, the progression is the cake.

fmftint

you've got to use +damage boosts on those nodes.

Unknown

The characters you have available don't really matter because for one I don't think Mystique counts as a good guy so you won't get her in heroics, but even if you do the DA lineup is likely better than yours in denial tactics when they've their compliment of AP boosting goons. Goons + Villians are overpowered in general, but there's a difference between being able to play the game or not. If it's just pure accelerated damage (like Thor + green) you at least have a vague strategy. Doesn't mean it'll come close to working most of the time but you can plot out something. When the AI just gets to stun/AP steal/board control for nothing you have no strategy.

There was a Yelena + 2 Spy (4 purple AP a turn) node in the original Heroic Oscorp, and although you have the pre nerf Spiderman for that fight, there are a lot of times where she'd get a turn 4-5 Lethal Recon and then you never have AP for the rest of the game. This is worse than dying on turn 4-5 most of the time because Lethal Recon obviously can't kill you so you shouldn't just quit, even though from this point on there's a very likely you'll never have more than 6 AP of any color for the rest of the game. There are many, many fights where I did a reasonably good job protecting red/green only to have Juggernaut pick up 4 green from his friends, do an Unstoppable Crash and then immediately get a red/green match 4 from the new board. This isn't an isolated incident of bad luck. If you played the essential nodes enough times you'll notice he's going to break out of any bad board state trivially with his friends around. You can't play with any strategy when there's a threat for a move like Unstoppable Crash/Symbiotic Snare or even Payback Mission being accelerated like they are in heroics.

Sometimes I think D3 thinks the AI is a paying customer too. The game was pretty imbalanced back when Magneto/Spiderman was around, but at least the AI isn't going to threaten to boycott this game just because they're repeatedly abused in every game. It feels like the heroics events are like 'remember you abused Magneto? Now it's payback!" But that's stupid because the AI can't threaten to quit the game so nobody should care about them. Yes you should strive for a more balanced game, but if someone has to suffer it should be the AI and not the player. Yes if we are all easily winning our games then scaling will kick in too, but at least people have expectation of 'higher level = tougher'. Look at your essential nodes in Heroic Jugg. They should all be lower level than your heroes, but do you really think that means you're favored to win against these crazy combination of villians? Wiping to a node marked as 'trivial' or 'easy' just makes you feel stupid, especially when there's nothing easy about a level 100 Jugg + The Hood + Muscle.

Unknown

Having been beaten by that Yelena feeder node several times, it's not immediately obvious where the problem is. She only steals 4 AP at a time, at a cost of 19AP to her. If you have a bad board, sure you can be screwed, but otherwise it really forces you to prioritize single colors at a time and then launch abilities quickly, despite them not being finishing moves.

I think that node's difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that you have the Lieutenant, a guy who drops a 2-turn countdowns for way too much healing. If you're targeting the countdown, then you get sucked in by Yelena's steal. If you try to launch to get AP to launch your abilities, the damage is healed too quickly by the lieutenant.

The battles where I've been successful on that node seem to be where I was able to deny yellow, and launch Battleplan twice OR chain MNMags Polarity Shift into cascades and critical generation.

nimvin

Most of the fights I have been using mmags, wolv, bp/col. Use polarity for the cascades and destroy enemy cd tiles and build my own ap as well. Col is a pretty effective meatshield thanks to his yellow. Wolverine casts as ap is available. Fastball is situationally useful to protect mmags while collecting more ap also. Have to be careful since I only have 1 cover does 630 dmg to thrown teammate also. Also try to hold off on polarity until I have a few strike tiles down as well.

Unknown

I got no problem with feeders. Every node should be a different challenge. I should add a caveat. I have no problem as long as everyone faces the same challenge.

Yelena especially. Without a feeder she'd never get any abilities off.

GrimSkald

I hate feeder fights - it strikes me as the height of unfair. We have to make matches to fuel our powers, while the AI does not. The Juggs/Analyst fights are the worst - headbutts forever with quite literally nothing you can do about it until you down the Analyst(s?)

Feeder fights that end up in denial are worse - it really eliminates any strategy you may have and turns the game into a grind fest. Sure, everyone has the same challenge. Sure, from the perspective of player base fairness there's no problem. The problem is it isn't fun. It's a terrible grind and it makes the players feel stupid.

Unknown

daibar wrote:

Having been beaten by that Yelena feeder node several times, it's not immediately obvious where the problem is. She only steals 4 AP at a time, at a cost of 19AP to her. If you have a bad board, sure you can be screwed, but otherwise it really forces you to prioritize single colors at a time and then launch abilities quickly, despite them not being finishing moves.

I think that node's difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that you have the Lieutenant, a guy who drops a 2-turn countdowns for way too much healing. If you're targeting the countdown, then you get sucked in by Yelena's steal. If you try to launch to get AP to launch your abilities, the damage is healed too quickly by the lieutenant.

The battles where I've been successful on that node seem to be where I was able to deny yellow, and launch Battleplan twice OR chain MNMags Polarity Shift into cascades and critical generation.

The problem of that fight (and most hard fights in heroic) is not obvious because there's a very large amount of luck involved.

Liutenant + Soldier generates 3 purple AP a turn. Let's say the AI picks up 1 purple AP every 6 turns, then they'd have enough for a Lethal Recon every 6 turns. In 6 turns, if you average 4 AP a turn, you'd get 24 AP, which is the amount Lethal Recon can steal.

Now you'll say but I've beaten that node no problem. This is because the AI uses lesser abilities like Pistol/Suppressing Fire (though Suppressing Fire is quite nasty too). Unless you just started out with a nice string of yellow or black, your success on that node is largely dependent on how often the AI used a lesser ability instead of saving up for Lethal Recon. You can't win if they saved up for Lethal Recon because it is expected to steal more AP than you can possibly generate. You can't deny purple since they get 3 purple AP a turn for free (and when they do Lethal Recon they'll get 4 back). Now Yelena is weak enough that you can usually just hope the AI slows itself down enough while you try to get a Battleplan or Rage and win, but this is Yelena we're talking about too. Replace her with Venom and suddenly trying to outdamage the other team is no longer an option, and we'd be looking at a stun every other turn in this same configuration. You'd have a fight where the AI takes 3 turns for every 2 turns you get, and again those extra turns the AI get is likely to create some seriously bad position for you since taking 2 turns in a row lets you recover from a bad move (e.g. you hand the opponent a match 4, but if you got the next turn too that hardly matters). Again you can always get lucky. Maybe the AI makes two bad moves in a row and hand you a match 4, but you can't win with just luck. By the way, if the AI takes 50% more turns than you do, that's conservatively at least as good as every character on the AI's team doing 50% damage, and that's typical of how misleading the low level heroics are.

simonsez

stephen43084 wrote:

I got no problem with feeders. Every node should be a different challenge. I should add a caveat. I have no problem as long as everyone faces the same challenge.

I don't think we do. People with weaker rosters are less impacted by scaling, so they can wipe a node like this before Yelena has a chance to get her recon off.

FaustianDeal

simonsez wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

I got no problem with feeders. Every node should be a different challenge. I should add a caveat. I have no problem as long as everyone faces the same challenge.

I don't think we do. People with weaker rosters are less impacted by scaling, so they can wipe a node like this before Yelena has a chance to get her recon off.

The roster limitation is what really cranks it up a notch. You take away her squishiness by leveling her, that heal countdown scales up ridiculously, *and* am critically roster limited. My knock-out punch options all cost 12+ which is had to prioritize on any board. We have been refused any of the gadget players that would slow down their AP generation, extend or destroy the countdowns, or who have cheap enough powers for it to be a non-issue.

The same is true for the hood/jugg/thug node... when hood is small and squishy its easy to knock him over and go on with your day. Once he gets enough health to resist being quickly pushed over it gets harder to mount an offense - and we don't have any of the good passives that can help work around that.

When someone says "just use damage boosts instead" the question you have to answer is: are the players with substantially lower scaling required to boost through those fights? If the answer is 'no' then we haven't achieved parity or fairness - we have just found a way to squeeze money out of veterans.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Replace her with Venom and suddenly trying to outdamage the other team is no longer an option, and we'd be looking at a stun every other turn in this same configuration. You'd have a fight where the AI takes 3 turns for every 2 turns you get, and again those extra turns the AI get is likely to create some seriously bad position for you since taking 2 turns in a row lets you recover from a bad move (e.g. you hand the opponent a match 4, but if you got the next turn too that hardly matters). Again you can always get lucky. Maybe the AI makes two bad moves in a row and hand you a match 4, but you can't win with just luck. By the way, if the AI takes 50% more turns than you do, that's conservatively at least as good as every character on the AI's team doing 50% damage, and that's typical of how misleading the low level heroics are.

After killing Yelena first in the Venom/Lieutenant node, I experienced that Venom stunlock you're talking about. With Lieutenant pumping pink every turn, it really was a 50% turn battle. At one point the AI cascaded Pink and stunned me for 4 consecutive turns. Was just lucky enough to save enough AP for Rage and Adamantium Slash by moving less than every second turn.

Unknown

I want to throw out a counter-solution. I for one like these kinds of node in the simulator or gauntlet where you have access to your whole roster. It becomes a challenge where you pick odd combinations of characters to fight them and you can feel good about beating the node. Even in Sim, once you've gotten a solution that usually works, grinding that node isn't terrible.

There are several problems I feel you're really highlighting.

1. The prologue chapters were designed very early on, the last re-vamp they had was when Ares got added to the villains (to my knowledge). When Daken was changed, no one went through the prologue chapters to re-balance them. As such, when the heroics get created, you're stuck with the unintended consequences of node design + scaling. The prologue is still very beatable with Daken having a 3rd ability and with Yelena doing a recon every 6 (optimal) turns. However, with scaling, these nodes become nearly unbeatable.
2. The poor design choices that go into the heroic roster selection. This is one of the gripes from the "Cancel Heroic Juggs" thread and resulting poll that Hi-Fi asked for. We were given 3 reasonably solid but ridiculously slow 3* characters. If we'd been given faster characters, the denial is less of a problem b/c you can try to burn them out. Psylocke + 2* Wolverine makes those denial nodes on par with straight up aggro nodes b/c it only takes 2 black matches to lay an attack tile and 2 green to drop your first strike tile (which in turn makes Psy's red cheaper as well).

So I will disagree with your primary assertion of "get rid of denial type battles in PvE" and say "please give us well thought out limited rosters or re-vamp the prologue if you insist on re-using it so regularly."

Unknown

The only reason you can beat Yelena in prologue when she's paired up with purple generator was that she starts out with few enough HP to be killed by match damage alone. This is almost never possible in heroic, and if it was then the node would likely be way too easy.

Having better characters doesn't solve the problem. The first iteration of Heroic Oscorp has Yelena + Spy + Spy for 4 purple AP a turn, and you had pre nerf Spiderman for that. But if you didn't have a stun lock by turn 5 or so you were never going to have any AP for the rest of the game. Now pre nerf Spiderman can generally stun lock such a configuration by turn 5 so you can still beat it, but that's what it took to beat that node. Even pre nerf Magneto would have a pretty hard time knocking out Yelena in 5 turns. No current character can possibly have the firepower to beat this node, and this is just Yelena. Replace this with Venom + Spy + Spy and it's likely much, much worse.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

The only reason you can beat Yelena in prologue when she's paired up with purple generator was that she starts out with few enough HP to be killed by match damage alone. This is almost never possible in heroic, and if it was then the node would likely be way too easy.

Agreed. That's where I was going with my first bullet point. With scaling in heroics, the nodes often become unbeatable. That's not something I disagree with you on. In the prologue, you could win most of the fights without ever using a special ability.

Phantron wrote:

Having better characters doesn't solve the problem. The first iteration of Heroic Oscorp has Yelena + Spy + Spy for 4 purple AP a turn, and you had pre nerf Spiderman for that. But if you didn't have a stun lock by turn 5 or so you were never going to have any AP for the rest of the game. Now pre nerf Spiderman can generally stun lock such a configuration by turn 5 so you can still beat it, but that's what it took to beat that node. Even pre nerf Magneto would have a pretty hard time knocking out Yelena in 5 turns. No current character can possibly have the firepower to beat this node, and this is just Yelena. Replace this with Venom + Spy + Spy and it's likely much, much worse.

Here's where I disagree. This is where I was going with my second bullet. I see it as not being PvE as a whole that you're complaining about. There are any number of gimmicky nodes in gauntlet and Sim but people (generally) enjoyed the challenge. Mainly because you had your entire roster in your toolbox. It's the denial nodes specifically in heroics and even more specifically with bad rosters that I see as being your true complaint. Correct me if I'm wrong in this assertion.

If we'd have Psylocke instead of Colossus or BWGS, that Yelena node would have been nearly trivial, especially since you could boost into first turn Wolvie -> Psylocke. 1/3 of her health gone before you even make a match, plus persistent damage and it only takes 2 more black matches to get more persistent damage down, or 2 red matches for a straight up blast.

simonsez

Riggy wrote:

If we'd have Psylocke instead of Colossus or BWGS, that Yelena node would have been nearly trivial, especially since you could boost into first turn Wolvie -> Psylocke. 1/3 of her health gone before you even make a match

Given that in a 4.5 day event you'd be looking to beat each of the 12-15 nodes at least 40 times, is +6 boosts really the sort of long-term strategy that should be required/encouraged?