The Simulator - Dec 30 - Jan 7

atomzed

Does the scaling reset with the new sub? It is scary to see the deadly difficulty on most of the nodes....

I haven't grind sims pve for a while so I forgot how it is like...

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

Does the scaling reset with the new sub? It is scary to see the deadly difficulty on most of the nodes....

I haven't grind sims pve for a while so I forgot how it is like...

Yes. I'm told by alliance mates that it's not uncommon for people to have trouble with sim 1 hard, then sim 3 hard again. 2 is apparently the easiest.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

Btw I'll say what I say in every pve thread: mnmags+cstorm+patch will beat any node if you can get those two purple matches early.

ok but how do you do this? plz explain exactly...how much ap? what to do? etc...

Unknown

Anybody having issues getting into game tonight. I keep getting check internet connection even when it is fine.

squirrel1120

raisinbman wrote:

squirrel1120 wrote:

I had a lot of apprehension about doing any of the hard sub nodes tonight. They all seemed harsh. Then I remembered someone posting in events past how nice a combo patch was with stormneto, and with Mags boosted, storm would be hidden. Gave it a try. It was so effective that I ended up smashing most of the hard nodes with the combo.

With patch tanking 4 colors it's easy to get him out front of big hits, and a BR or two before double wind storms... fun.

How do you do this...?

Best if your patch is high enough to tank green and yellow over storm. Boost +3purple/ blue ap. Keep patch out front taking red then green, only sneak Mags out to take purple and blue when he's not going to be smashed with a power. Work someone down, usually a low hp to get it down to 3 vs 2, using windstorm to keep the most dangerous target locked down. Take some easier fights to get a feel for how hard everything hits when powered up. The best there is followed by zerker rage makes windstorm hit near 2500 with a un boosted patch @ 153's strike tiles. Tbti does like 7-8 k I think, and zerker rage about 3k. Once you get a feel for how much you can drop them , it's pretty powerful. If you are lucky with good blue supply you can lock down 2 targets pretty well.

I'm really just starting to play with it as patch has been fairly weak until I picked his yellow up from 3-5 with rewards, but that's the crux.

Edit: for what it's worth I have a handful of toons at 153 ish and my nodes are all hard to deadly at 230 to 285 on the upper end.

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

Does the scaling reset with the new sub? It is scary to see the deadly difficulty on most of the nodes....

I haven't grind sims pve for a while so I forgot how it is like...

They do.

Unknown

If you can actually win games with Storm then your scaling is not as high as you think it is.

Here are my hard essentials:

Sim 9
Hulk level 395, 26889 HP
R&G level 395, 23901 HP
Ragnarok level 395, 23901 HP

Sim 10
Falcon level 395, 13942 HP
Elektra level 395, 15931 HP
She-Hulk level 395, 23901 HP

Sim 08
GSBW level 356, 12587 HP
Thor level 356, 21570 HP
Daken level 357, 14430 HP

Only Falcon and GSBW would even be somewhat vulnerable to a 10K hit (Daken would easily regen that over time despite his lowish HP totals).

Unknown

squirrel1120 wrote:

raisinbman wrote:

squirrel1120 wrote:

I had a lot of apprehension about doing any of the hard sub nodes tonight. They all seemed harsh. Then I remembered someone posting in events past how nice a combo patch was with stormneto, and with Mags boosted, storm would be hidden. Gave it a try. It was so effective that I ended up smashing most of the hard nodes with the combo.

With patch tanking 4 colors it's easy to get him out front of big hits, and a BR or two before double wind storms... fun.

How do you do this...?

Best if your patch is high enough to tank green and yellow over storm. Boost +3purple/ blue ap. Keep patch out front taking red then green, only sneak Mags out to take purple and blue when he's not going to be smashed with a power. Work someone down, usually a low hp to get it down to 3 vs 2, using windstorm to keep the most dangerous target locked down. Take some easier fights to get a feel for how hard everything hits when powered up. The best there is followed by zerker rage makes windstorm hit near 2500 with a un boosted patch @ 153's strike tiles. Tbti does like 7-8 k I think, and zerker rage about 3k. Once you get a feel for how much you can drop them , it's pretty powerful. If you are lucky with good blue supply you can lock down 2 targets pretty well.

I'm really just starting to play with it as patch has been fairly weak until I picked his yellow up from 3-5 with rewards, but that's the crux.

Edit: for what it's worth I have a handful of toons at 153 ish and my nodes are all hard to deadly at 230 to 285 on the upper end.

The start is accurate - keep the team behind patch. But the important thing is: you need to get enough ap to fire off berserker rage(use it on anyone with under 7k health) and follow it with mnmags purple (usually I use it on anyone with over 10k health). You're going to use cstorm blue on the most dangerous character if you can't take it down - remember that that windstorm is going to AoE for something around 4k damage with boosted patch at 166 with 5 green covers. After the dust settles you should be left with one dead opponent (lowest health one), one pretty wounded one, and the biggest, ugliest one stunned for 4 turns. There's a solid change the following match 3 will trigger storm's yellow (on account of the purple tiles lying around). You want to tank that with patch, so keep it in mind. The yellow should hit for another 3k and kill the non stunned guy. Now you have a few turns to play around. If you can, and need to, match purple and try to combo again. If things start going really wrong, try to get everyone to 50% health - boosted critical yellow does something like 6-7k damage on everyone. This scenario is usually what does it for opponents scaled at 395, and it's not very sustainable. But it does do the job.

It's how I beat the final levels of the gauntlets.

Common complaints: "Supports can't tank damage and die before you do anything" - if this is true, then your characters are being chunked down for over 5k damage, which means even a maxed out Dino won't last much.

"If you can't find purple you're screwed" - this is correct. You are. So if they cascade for enough AP to kill someone next turn, retreat, heal patch on an easy node (or the introduction pve maps), use a health pack on mnmags (storm can go into the fight at almost no health as long as there are no quick AoE opponents), and go back. It's an all or nothing strategy, but it can beat ANY team in the game at any level. At a certain point you start looping mnmags purple into cstorm blue and you can take out targets of any size.

Variations: when storm is used you can put in spider, if he has 5 blue covers - after mnmags does his thing you just stun everyone and go hunting for more purple tiles (this combo does well against 395s too but you're incredibly dependent on finding more purple after the first combo, so try to make the mags purple shape 4-ofs to shake the board a lot). When wolverine is being used, anyone who can spit out quick strike tile does the job - lazy daken, blade, etc. Hell, I bet even 2* wolverine could do it(way more work though).

Spoit

IReallyHatePVP wrote:

raisinbman wrote:

Okay, so Sentry wasn't dead weight this time and I managed to do the Hard essentials.
...

*Judge SLAMS gavel down Hard*

This is incredible! Is the witness stating that the Essential nodes have rotated to Sentry?

*Crowd murmurs among themselves*
*Judge bangs gavel again*

Does anyone have any evidence to corroborate this testimony?

*Phoenix thoughtfully scratches his chin...*

Oh god. Kitty me, is sentry really a featured char again? And he's probably going to be the featured char for the last set of subs too? uuuuuuugh

Unknown

Okay so I need Patch Red levels to do it...gotcha

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Oh god. Kitty me, is sentry really a featured char again? And he's probably going to be the featured char for the last set of subs too? uuuuuuugh

Well, seems like it's Patch, Sentry and Mystique. They'll probably take one set of subs each. Or we could get really lucky and Patch could be required for all three - but that would just be crazy talk.....

Quebbster

dearbluey wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Oh god. Kitty me, is sentry really a featured char again? And he's probably going to be the featured char for the last set of subs too? uuuuuuugh

Well, seems like it's Patch, Sentry and Mystique. They'll probably take one set of subs each. Or we could get really lucky and Patch could be required for all three - but that would just be crazy talk.....

I don't think we have ever had a Simulator where the essential character did not rotate between subs.

fmftint

Essential just rotated to
scaling normal
this just got a bit more difficult

Quebbster

fmftint wrote:

Essential just rotated to
scaling normal
this just got a bit more difficult

So, Sentry will be Essential for the last clears. I believe they did that last time too...

simonsez

squirrel1120 wrote:

Work someone down, usually a low hp to get it down to 3 vs 2

When the "weak" one has 23k instead of 27k health, none of this works. Even with his regen, they're going to wear down your Patch long before you wear any of them down.

Yoxgix

I joined the shard 4 Sim last night and was 40k behind the leader already. Nothing like throwing in the towel for top10 before your first fight.

simonsez

ark123 wrote:

Common complaints

You forgot my complaint. This isn't a sustainable strategy. It's good for gauntlet, but not for grinding a PvE. With mnmag tanking pink and blue, by the time you get this going, he'll have taken enough damage that he'll probably need a health pack. At best, you'll get 2 battles out of him. When you consider that there are 3 nodes you'd want to be playing this way (not counting the goon node, which should be safe), and you're going to want to hit them at least 3 times each in a final grind, between healing him in a best case scenario, plus the times when you have to heal after retreat, plus the times you're going to have to heal Storm, plus the excellent chance that at some point you're going to have bad luck and wipe out, this is going to eat a lot of health packs.

There ought to be a way to get through these via roster diversity, not health packs.

Unknown

Let's say the Storm strategy works as long as the lowest HP character has at most 10K HP. Well, GSBW has 14K HP at level 395. So all you have to do is do 4K damage with match damage to get her to 10K to do your combo, while your opponent is doing at least double that in match damage and any of their special moves will totally blow anyone away. Normally Patch isn't even boosted so it's even less viable to do this. At 395 the opponent can easily drop Storm or Magneto in one round with Berserker Rage out with a decent cascade, and that's assuming you were able to even get a Berserker Rage out in the first place. Magneto has about 4K HP and Storm has about 3K HP, while your opponents can do 1000 damage on a match 4 and 2-3K cascades are not uncommon.

This strategy can only work if you had an extremely lucky board that lets you do 2 Wind Storms and probably 2 Polarity Shifts and even that isn't enough if they don't have someone with very low HPs like GSBW.

Unknown

Well back to the good old play the last 12 hours of the 2.5 day subs. Seems still to work reasonably well as just under 12K clear of 10th - where I want to be this event - but munching thought the HPs of those hard nodes sure takes a while without Goddess of Thunder. I just add I can see 5 green Loki getting hit with the nerf bat. Even at level 40 he got a lot of use.

Vankysher

Threw my phone in frustration.
Wiped on node 6 of normal.
Thinking my team of 2* Thor/Hulk/OBW was the wrong combo as 2* Thor was taken down first by cMags by turn 5.
Then the match dragged out to it's inevitable conclusion with all those protect tiles being spammed and inspired.

EDIT: 2nd team of 2* Thor/2* Ms Marvel/OBW did slightly better. cMags seems to be fast on firing off his powers. He alone took 2* Thor from full health down to 130 hp. OBW was sacrificed to cMags. had enough green & yellow AP to fire off Lightning Strike & COTS twice to clear the node. Still freaking frustrating to see one character nearly take out 2 toons by turn 5-6 and I have yet to do squat.