The Simulator - Dec 30 - Jan 7

simonsez

Fievel wrote:

Wow, so I accidentally chose slice 4 instead of 3. It wasn't so bad until I went to bed. I was around 300 when I closed my computer, and #1 was about 5,000 up. I woke up having dropped only a respectable 20 places, incredibly happy because I still had a chance. Then I looked at the leaderboard and now #10 is about 100,000 points up on me. What the bloody hell happened while I was sleeping!?

You realized that there's no way rank 300 could have been only 5k behind rank 1.

fmftint

9 hours remaining on slice one and all nodes in Sim Hard have become deadly

Unknown

It was pretty early on, but maybe my eyesight is worse than I thought and it was 52,000 that I was back. Even so, how is it possible that they got 50k more in an 8 hour span?

Unknown

fmftint wrote:

9 hours remaining on slice one and all nodes in Sim Hard have become deadly

Which made very little difference for me. It's been "Either combo out/get nice cascades or wipe" for a while now.

Unknown

I think this may be the first PvE since I started playing where I am not likely to get the top progression reward, I'm only 1/2 way and there are just a few days left. So unless the last two days double the points, I don't think I'm going to get that Patch cover I need. Anyone else having a similar issue?

Unknown

I assume since ive barely played this and am still in the hunt it is as popular as ebola given the mediocre character prize, the mediocre prizes generally, and general uselessness of these new half baked characters.

Vohnkar

ark123 wrote:

fmftint wrote:

9 hours remaining on slice one and all nodes in Sim Hard have become deadly

Which made very little difference for me. It's been "Either combo out/get nice cascades or wipe" for a while now.

Same here, I'm only doing the essential nodes now and then, but I'm being owned on every fight no matter what I do. I manage to clear some of them if I'm lucky with cascades, if not I get destroyed, specialy by she-hulk.

Unknown

The essentials in round 2 are extremely hard because two of them have Loki which pretty much stops all your combos before they get going until you take him out, but you don't have enough time to take him against such high levels out without your combos. You pretty much need all the right kind of match 3s (match 4/5 won't work because of Mischief) and that's a lot harder than it sounds.

dkffiv

I've got a pretty solid strategy for the second round hards but I do end up getting boned if my match 3 cascades into match 4s from the top before I'm ready to burst Loki down. I'm actually enjoying these nodes save for 395 Jugg and Daken nodes but I'd prefer a 4-5 hour refresh timer. Damn rotation is taking 1.5 hrs (I think about an hour of it is from the hard nodes), chewing through 12k+ hp x3 is tiring.

Unknown

dkffiv wrote:

I've got a pretty solid strategy for the second round hards but I do end up getting boned if my match 3 cascades into match 4s from the top before I'm ready to burst Loki down. I'm actually enjoying these nodes save for 395 Jugg and Daken nodes but I'd prefer a 4-5 hour refresh timer. Damn rotation is taking 1.5 hrs (I think about an hour of it is from the hard nodes), chewing through 12k+ hp x3 is tiring.

I think you're pretty much screwed on Loki if the board starts with 2 match 4s, and even some instances of single match 4s are hard to break up because you either cascade into a match 4 or you hand them a match 4 and that's hard to recover from at this level. If you have a fairly boring board that doesn't have much purple, it's usually a pretty smooth game. I haven't bothered with the non essentials though they don't look particularly intimidating outside of Juggernaut and Daken. I think playing an hour is fine if the refresh time is 4-5 hours, but yeah it's pretty nuts when you finished playing and the first mission you played is about an hour from refreshing.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Infiltration doesn't really work well because to even get the average expected value you'd need the board sitting at a decent number of black and purple and since black is probably not something you can afford to let it sit idle for too long. Using Polarity Shift to power Infiltration would naturally decrease the number of purple tiles on the board making it harder to get good cascades. Infiltration followed by Illusions usually works pretty well. Using Infiltration twice will usually get you very good cascades but there are a lot of things you can do with 18 blue AP that doesn't depend on luck.

Well, it was nice to dream about. Next you're gonna tell me I'm gonna get kicked out of top 150 during the Sentry-Essentials and Luke Cage isn't gonna be a good character...

Moon Roach

I like Normal Simulator 8, the OBW + Deadpool + Psylocke node. And that's only because it's an insight into the AI of the game.

When OBW is about to die and has 9 or more blue, rather than fire up Anti-Gravity Device the AI will save them up instead for Psylocke's Bewilder.

Take from that what you will.

mohio

dkffiv wrote:

I've got a pretty solid strategy for the second round hards but I do end up getting boned if my match 3 cascades into match 4s from the top before I'm ready to burst Loki down. I'm actually enjoying these nodes save for 395 Jugg and Daken nodes but I'd prefer a 4-5 hour refresh timer. Damn rotation is taking 1.5 hrs (I think about an hour of it is from the hard nodes), chewing through 12k+ hp x3 is tiring.

This is my issue too. Don't have a great strategy necessarily but it's taking about 25 minutes for the normal nodes and a little over an hour for the 8 hard nodes I actually do. Feel like I've been playing non stop since I woke up

GrumpySmurf1002

Phantron wrote:

Infiltration doesn't really work well because to even get the average expected value you'd need the board sitting at a decent number of black and purple and since black is probably not something you can afford to let it sit idle for too long. Using Polarity Shift to power Infiltration would naturally decrease the number of purple tiles on the board making it harder to get good cascades. Infiltration followed by Illusions usually works pretty well. Using Infiltration twice will usually get you very good cascades but there are a lot of things you can do with 18 blue AP that doesn't depend on luck.

18 blue is essentially game over with Mystique-mMags. Only once so far have I launched double launched Infiltration and subsequently been stuck in a position where there isn't either enough purple cascaded to polarity again, and/or there isn't in a match-5 that will trigger the sea of blue/purple/black into cascades. That happened when there were too many TU tiles out there jamming up the works. Add in Panther to burn the never ending stream of black, and things die quickly.

The only node that's giving me fits with that combo (aside from where i obviously can't use mags) is Loki/She-Hulk/Marvel (level 270), who are too damaging too quickly to get the ball rolling.

I'm sure in 395 land it's suicidal to run him out there, but as long as Loki isn't screwing with things, that combo should work into quite high levels. My Juggernaut node is 316 and it still works except on disaster (no purple) boards

squirrel1120

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

18 blue is essentially game over with Mystique-mMags. Only once so far have I launched double launched Infiltration and subsequently been stuck in a position where there isn't either enough purple cascaded to polarity again, and/or there isn't in a match-5 that will trigger the sea of blue/purple/black into cascades. That happened when there were too many TU tiles out there jamming up the works. Add in Panther to burn the never ending stream of black, and things die quickly.

The only node that's giving me fits with that combo (aside from where i obviously can't use mags) is Loki/She-Hulk/Marvel (level 270), who are too damaging too quickly to get the ball rolling.

I'm sure in 395 land it's suicidal to run him out there, but as long as Loki isn't screwing with things, that combo should work into quite high levels. My Juggernaut node is 316 and it still works except on disaster (no purple) boards

So waiting for double infiltration is the trick? i've tried the combo a few times, and just not having any luck getting it to work. It doesn't help that, for instance, if Psylocke starts snagging the extra black, it just goes to hurt me more. I thought maybe trying it on a goon node would work better so the AI didn't mess up the board on me while trying to figure it out, but without a way to deal with CD's at all, it turned out very badly. I will try taking panther though. He'll at least tank yellow, and maybe even get his strikes out before the combo gets going.

Unbuffed Mystique is lvl 45 with 4 blue covers.

Unknown

Because Infiltration is random enough there's no guaranteed anything with it, but if you started with an average number of purple/black tiles and assuming you've some use for both of these colors, 2 level 5 Infilitration should usually put the game away. If you got your blues via Polarity Shift, you likely won't have the average number of purple tiles on the board because you need to match purple in the first place, so there's a slightly higher chance this won't be quite enough. Usually 1 Infilitration on an average board + Illusions will work too as Illusions tends to fix any situation where you got a lot of tiles that all happen to be in the wrong locations.

If you can afford to save up for 2 Infiltrations you should most definitely do that because being able to use it twice in a row greatly reduces the randomness aspect as that will usually create a board that's something like 1/4 black, 1/4 purple, 1/7 TU, and 1/7 blue and it's awfully hard to not have a crazy cascade in a board like that.

Unknown

Has the scaling been dialled right back? My hard essential nodes were the same this morning after a full clear last night.

Unknown

Poo onya shoe wrote:

Has the scaling been dialled right back? My hard essential nodes were the same this morning after a full clear last night.

What a coincidence. My hard essentials remained unchanged overnight as well. They are all still 395

over_clocked

Sorry, Polarity, the cat's out of the bag, lol.

Mystique with 5 blue and MMN allow me to laugh at this



or that



Most of the damage seen is from previous nodes.

Of course I do kick myself in the butt sometimes, like going for an extra blue match despite having 23 blue AP and promptly losing Mystique to crit cascades from level 395 Juggernaut, but it's rare enough that I'm holding top 10 effortlessly in main and top 2 in both subs.

So good I shrug off Grocket healing for 17k+ in the first sub. That was a touch annoying. Although I don't remember if I used Mq/MMN or XF/4or there.
I enjoy the high scaling a lot since I can afford not to grind every 2,5 hours and every hard node and even some Normal nodes are a mini-challenge especially when you don't boost (I do boost blurple against most Loki and Hood nodes, though).

GrumpySmurf1002

squirrel1120 wrote:

So waiting for double infiltration is the trick? i've tried the combo a few times, and just not having any luck getting it to work. It doesn't help that, for instance, if Psylocke starts snagging the extra black, it just goes to hurt me more. I thought maybe trying it on a goon node would work better so the AI didn't mess up the board on me while trying to figure it out, but without a way to deal with CD's at all, it turned out very badly. I will try taking panther though. He'll at least tank yellow, and maybe even get his strikes out before the combo gets going.

Unbuffed Mystique is lvl 45 with 4 blue covers.

5 blue really is needed to reduce risk. The double cast is what really triggers the effect. It can happen before that, but if it takes too long you risk resetting the board to more even colored.