The Simulator - Nov 11th-18th

Unknown

Having Hulk boosted allows you to use The Hood without fear of utterly being owned by match damage and this round is fairly standard in terms of matchups. You even get quite a few matchups very in favor of The Hulk against Blade/Daken/Falcon since you want your enemy to pump out large attack/strike tiles when you got The Hulk. Yes it'll probably cost you a health pack on Hulk but beating a node that's level 250 with only one health pack should be considered a win. It's not like you can easily come up with another team that'd take even less damage especially against Blade/Daken/Falcon that pump out a ton of match damage in a hurry.

orbitalint

Thanks for the insights on the colossus essential node. Gave me the confidence to give it a try. Good board and cmags/hood made it slow but completely manageable.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

Having Hulk boosted allows you to use The Hood without fear of utterly being owned by match damage and this round is fairly standard in terms of matchups. You even get quite a few matchups very in favor of The Hulk against Blade/Daken/Falcon since you want your enemy to pump out large attack/strike tiles when you got The Hulk. Yes it'll probably cost you a health pack on Hulk but beating a node that's level 250 with only one health pack should be considered a win. It's not like you can easily come up with another team that'd take even less damage especially against Blade/Daken/Falcon that pump out a ton of match damage in a hurry.

I don't see it. the only color he'd take from hood is black

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Having Hulk boosted allows you to use The Hood without fear of utterly being owned by match damage and this round is fairly standard in terms of matchups. You even get quite a few matchups very in favor of The Hulk against Blade/Daken/Falcon since you want your enemy to pump out large attack/strike tiles when you got The Hulk. Yes it'll probably cost you a health pack on Hulk but beating a node that's level 250 with only one health pack should be considered a win. It's not like you can easily come up with another team that'd take even less damage especially against Blade/Daken/Falcon that pump out a ton of match damage in a hurry.

I don't see it. the only color he'd take from hood is black

The Hood normally gets all the mutual weak colors for being level 196 in this event, like purple, and Hulk also gets TU. That's 2 instead of 4 colors (Hood will have blue and yellow for sure).

Infrared

I just noticed that in hard mode, Simulation 05 has the exact same team as Simulation 07. What's up with that? And was it like that in the previous normal mode too?

And the current normal mode Simulation 06. I brought Doc Ock's along looking to maybe score a few bonus attack tiles when I clear enemy Blade's strike tiles. AI gets a cascade and suddenly here comes Summon Demons + Bird Strike. Luckily Doc Ock's blue was flashing proudly as if it had prepared all its life just for this moment

AXP_isme

Worst. Timing. Ever.
Joined a bracket in, literally, 1000th place. Leader has 126k head start. *mutter, mutter, mutter... real life... shakes fist*

Unknown

Simulation 9 in Hard is kicking my **** this morning. That RotP TU is just one too many colour to deny, and it's not helped by the fact that RNGesus has been giving the AI crazy cascades of red every time I try. Ow, my health packs.

On the plus side, my sub brackets have me in 1st and 5th at the moment, so I should get a nice chunk of HP later on. I currently have exactly 40000 points in the normal sub, which is immensely satisfying to see, but I'm going to have to earn a bit more to keep my place.

Unknown

AXP_isme wrote:

Worst. Timing. Ever.
Joined a bracket in, literally, 1000th place. Leader has 126k head start. *mutter, mutter, mutter... real life... shakes fist*

Next time check the thread " PVE Event name - Current bracket is at _______ players " before you join mid event so you have a better chance of getting into a fresh bracket.

Unknown

I kept track of the points for 3rd round and it's +50% which means if you ended round 2 with 114K points you'd be on pace to hit 160K. Looking at the top alliances on the PvE boards I see less than half of the people are on pace to do that from those alliances, so either grind really hard or it's already over. Hard R3 is quite nasty since you can't use X Force on two of the essential nodes and you can't use Sentry on one of the essential node, and The Hood isn't exactly the guy you want to be boosted while you don't have X Force or Sentry (and in one case, both). Avenger's Assemble interacts favorably with a boosted The Hood since he gets 4.5X crit modifier and will most likely be matching crit due to his boosted status and you can do 3K crits easy, though of course getting the AP to use any of Nick Fury's move takes a long time even with The Hood.

Bowgentle

Phantron wrote:

I kept track of the points for 3rd round and it's +50% which means if you ended round 2 with 114K points you'd be on pace to hit 160K.

I got a combined 60K points from Round 2 by joining the subs with 11 hours to go, so there's no way you need to be at 114K now to hit 160K.

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I kept track of the points for 3rd round and it's +50% which means if you ended round 2 with 114K points you'd be on pace to hit 160K.

I got a combined 60K points from Round 2 by joining the subs with 11 hours to go, so there's no way you need to be at 114K now to hit 160K.

Oops, I used the wrong divisor (should be 4.5 not 3.5). After plugging the numbers in again I get 88.8K at the end R2 to be on pace for 160K. I see about 50-75% of the players in the top alliances having this score, so it's easier but still not cakewalk. You can probably pull a bit more in the last round for playing harder, but it's not going to be that much more.

GrumpySmurf1002

Phantron wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I kept track of the points for 3rd round and it's +50% which means if you ended round 2 with 114K points you'd be on pace to hit 160K.

I got a combined 60K points from Round 2 by joining the subs with 11 hours to go, so there's no way you need to be at 114K now to hit 160K.

Oops, I used the wrong divisor (should be 4.5 not 3.5). After plugging the numbers in again I get 88.8K at the end R2 to be on pace for 160K. I see about 50-75% of the players in the top alliances having this score, so it's easier but still not cakewalk. You can probably pull a bit more in the last round for playing harder, but it's not going to be that much more.

That's 72k, which is roughly what I got in the 2nd round. I joined the hard sim early on (32k), and the easy with 24 hrs to go (42k) So in theory the threshold should even be less than that, but the Hard sim this time around is an absolute beast, so it might actually be more again.

Unknown

I'm @ around 110K. Gonna join this last set of subs on Monday in the AM and just devote all my time to hitting that last progression. If i hit each refresh, i should be fine before LRs start on Tuesday.

I'm really digging Mystique, so putting in the grind for this cover hasn't felt so soulless. Best of luck to everyone.

marc

GrimSkald

Phantron wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I kept track of the points for 3rd round and it's +50% which means if you ended round 2 with 114K points you'd be on pace to hit 160K.

I got a combined 60K points from Round 2 by joining the subs with 11 hours to go, so there's no way you need to be at 114K now to hit 160K.

Oops, I used the wrong divisor (should be 4.5 not 3.5). After plugging the numbers in again I get 88.8K at the end R2 to be on pace for 160K. I see about 50-75% of the players in the top alliances having this score, so it's easier but still not cakewalk. You can probably pull a bit more in the last round for playing harder, but it's not going to be that much more.

Oh, good, I ended Round 2 with around 94k. I didn't think I had fallen that far off the mark. Damn, they've made the Hard one pretty damn difficult for the second and third round...

rbdragon

Did the points reduce from when it started? I might be mistaken, but I could have sworn my Sim 10 in the easy was over 1000 (due to how far I am behind the leaders I guess) when it first loaded, but now it says 601, and I haven't played it yet...

Am I missing something, or am I crazy?*

*Note that both could possibly be correct...

Unknown

rbdragon wrote:

Did the points reduce from when it started? I might be mistaken, but I could have sworn my Sim 10 in the easy was over 1000 (due to how far I am behind the leaders I guess) when it first loaded, but now it says 601, and I haven't played it yet...

Am I missing something, or am I crazy?*

*Note that both could possibly be correct...

Easy Sim 10 for me is currently 898 points. I haven't started either sub yet, and I'm at 111,945 points overall.

vudu3

Due to real life I played almost none of the second sub. I currently have 75K points. Is the Mystique cover at 160K completely untraceable for me? If so I'd like to know now so I don't have to even try.

GrumpySmurf1002

vudu3 wrote:

Due to real life I played almost none of the second sub. I currently have 75K points. Is the Mystique cover at 160K completely untraceable for me? If so I'd like to know now so I don't have to even try.

Tough to say for sure.

A good grind with some luck in the hard sub should be able to pull around 100k, so it shouldn't be unreachable in theory.

I'd ballpark you need about 25k from the hard sim to get there. (60k from the easy should be easily doable even just doing 24hrs). However, the hard sim here is a brute, and hasn't even really scaled yet. So you should check your node values and do an eval of what you think you can reliably clear there. If you can pull more than 25k there, you should have a shot.

Put more succinctly, start the hard sub, and see what you can do. If you can grind the hard to where you can get to 100-110k overall by midnight EST tonight, then you should be able to grind the easy one enough to get the rest of the way.

Unknown

Does anyone have a team idea for the essentials?

Hood really likes being in front, which means healthpacks, which means it is hard to do all six essentials regularly. Surely I am missing something.

Edit:

So far it seems Lazy Thor and modern Hawkeye get me through the Hard nodes and their 180s the best, using Patch and LDaken to take out the normal nodes. With those teams, at least I only need to heal Thor and Hood.

Vankysher

Essential Node 10 on Hard was too much for my Hulk/Hood/Thor.
Hood tanking was essentially one-shot by a Surgical Strike.
After downing Sentry, Thor was killed by a Technopathic Strke with a wonderful cascade.
One move later, another Surgical Strike and Hulk was down.

Anyone have relatively good success with particular combos?