PvE scaling question

Wonko33

So enemies scale according to the level of you characters

Do they calculate just once at beginning of event or at the beginning of every sub


Basically if I level a character after I've started playing, will the enemies scale or not ?

Unknown

They definitely won't change mid-sub. I do not know if they would change for the next sub.

Arondite

Wonko33 wrote:

So enemies scale according to the level of you characters

Do they calculate just once at beginning of event or at the beginning of every sub


Basically if I level a character after I've started playing, will the enemies scale or not ?

Hotly debated as to whether character level directly affects scaling at all. According to the only input devs have given us, it doesn't. Now that needs clarification, according to a lot of interpretations, but there is nothing 100% concrete saying that there is any scaling to occur with character levels.

Unknown

Scaling is usually reset on every sub so I think if you raised your character's levels, you'll see that reflected on your next sub but not the current sub.

JVReal

I don't know anything personally about scaling, but based on different posts I've read with information from demiurge posted on this forum, it's not directly based on your characters levels. It's various things, one of which is % of damage taken during certain encounters, so if you have higher level characters with higher hit points, you may take the same amount of damage as if you played with your 2* roster, but % will be less so you will be scaled higher. I don't know when the scaling happens, how quickly it goes up or down, but I have experienced nodes where the opponent level drops a couple levels after I've been wiped when I immediately try to have a go at it again. I don't know if they take the damage % and average against your highest hit point characters in your roster or not.

Some have taken harder nodes and lost with tanks to take a big hit and try to lower the level of the node the next time around, and after a couple of times have seen the level decrease, though when I tried it, I saw no effect personally. I didn't use my tanks, since I don't have enough high level characters to waste on taking a dive. Throwing under covered 3*'s at the Hard node and losing did not change the difficulty level of the node at all.

Again this is just what I gathered from what I've read on here. I do not claim to know the actual answers.

simonsez

Arondite, in the other thread, we've already discussed the confusion around what is meant by "scaling". Can we not perpetuate the confusion here?

As per fmftint,

"This is what confuses most players when scaling is discusses, there are 3 types of scaling:
1 Baseline - This is where you start and is determined by your roster when events begin
2 Personal - This is based on your performance
3 Community - This is based on everyone playing an event (unknown if isolated to your slice)"

When I say "scaling is broken", what I'm really saying is that the baselines aren't being set in a balanced way, and the subsequent scaling isn't compensating for that.

I really don't think there's a whole lot of confusion about the general process. Baselines are set according to your roster, and scaling is applied (regardless of roster strength) according to the success you and the community have had on that node. What we don't know is the specific math, ie how the baselines are set, what the magnitude of scaling is, and how exactly it's triggered.

Arondite

simonsez wrote:

Arondite, in the other thread, we've already discussed the confusion around what is meant by "scaling". Can we not perpetuate the confusion here?

As per fmftint,

"This is what confuses most players when scaling is discusses, there are 3 types of scaling:
1 Baseline - This is where you start and is determined by your roster when events begin
2 Personal - This is based on your performance
3 Community - This is based on everyone playing an event (unknown if isolated to your slice)"

When I say "scaling is broken", what I'm really saying is that the baselines aren't being set in a balanced way, and the subsequent scaling isn't compensating for that.

I really don't think there's a whole lot of confusion about the general process. Baselines are set according to your roster, and scaling is applied (regardless of roster strength) according to the success you and the community have had on that node. What we don't know is the specific math, ie how the baselines are set, what the magnitude of scaling is, and how exactly it's triggered.

Is fmtint a developer or is he guessing?

The fact is, I'm using what the developers have said and nothing more to form my argument. My personal experience happens to fall in line with what the developers said.

The other side of the argument is using strictly personal experience, and, until a developer elaborates, amends or clarifies these original statements these personal experiences require either unknown information or directly contradict developer statements.

Being that I should have been able to observe these changes you refer to due to the recent and tumultuous changes to my roster but haven't and that the developers statements don't support what you claim, I think it's arrogant and actually hurtful to spread the information you are spreading until it's supported by the devs. I'm not saying you are intentionally lying, but you could just be flat out mistaken.

Why tell someone
"If you level your characters, Pve gets harder"
When we don't know that for sure, instead of telling them

"We know, thanks to developers, that the more efficiently you clear a node, the higher nodes will subsequently scale. It's also suspect that leveling your characters might also make nodes more difficult, but the devs haven't directly confirmed or denied this, so it is speculation".

Sure, that takes more time to type out, but at least the user has all the necessary information then, rather than accepting the word of a vet as the writings of The Lord. As a veteran player who is distributing information, I would think you'd have a moral obligation to note that any unproven information is, in fact, speculation.

dkffiv

For the most part I feel as though scaling doesn't really matter. The only thing that really pisses me off is when 1* & 2* players have an incredibly easy time in Heroics due to #1 their opponents do not have 5 covers in every color (which makes Hood trivial, daken killable and jugg slow) and #2 their **** 1 cover featured hero gets over a 200% level boost due to additive rather than multiplicative boosting.

Arondite

Wonko33 wrote:

So enemies scale according to the level of you characters

Do they calculate just once at beginning of event or at the beginning of every sub


Basically if I level a character after I've started playing, will the enemies scale or not ?

Look, judge for yourself.

www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5451

We know that enemy levels will not scale with your own upon completions because that much is explicitly stated.

It is also suspected that starting levels won't scale much / at all by the implication from him saying that you won't hurt yourself by leveling. It is not expressly stated, but I see no reason why he wouldn't mention base levels at all in response to that prompt yet take extra time out to say that leveling won't hurt you.

Unknown

Character levels do not directly affect your scaling. They do directly affect your PVP performance.

Unknown

Your roster obviously has an impact on your starting point. Do people really think once upon a time all the max level guys are facing level 125 enemies and it never occurred to any of those guys that you can just bring your weaker guys to match the playing behavior of someone with a weaker roster? That's exactly what people did back when how you play the game influenced scaling and you get some absurd cases where the guys with the strongest rosters have generally the lowest scaling because they've an endless supply of maxed 2/3*s to send to die while barely winning. Once it was clear that the game expects you to take at least 1K or so damage back in the old days, it was trivial to just put the breaks on Magneto's infinite combo to make sure you definitely took at least 1K damage before winning. We don't know how each member of your roster contributes to your initial scaling or whether there's something more on top of that, but your roster most definitely establishes the baseline levels, and future scaling is also multplied on this. Again, if scaling is simply additive, you'd see the strong rosters eventually dominate toward the end of the event, because adding 100 levels to an enemy that started at 250 simply isn't as much of an impact compared to one that started at level 150. But there's no way the observed behavior of who dominates PvE match this.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Your roster obviously has an impact on your starting point. Do people really think once upon a time all the max level guys are facing level 125 enemies and it never occurred to any of those guys that you can just bring your weaker guys to match the playing behavior of someone with a weaker roster? That's exactly what people did back when how you play the game influenced scaling and you get some absurd cases where the guys with the strongest rosters have generally the lowest scaling because they've an endless supply of maxed 2/3*s to send to die while barely winning.

Um, yes, I do think exactly this? The reason almost nobody with a high level roster keeps their scaling low is because even if they start out using 2*s they almost always bring out their higher level characters when community scaling rises or they need to win fast in order to be sure to keep their placement, and then that performance affects the initial values in the next PvE. In a heroic a bit ago I ended up using two 2*s and a very underleveled 3* and the initial values for the next PvE were way lower than they usually are. And again, we've observed and discussed over and over and over again people seeing initial levels much lower than alliance mates with weaker rosters after taking it easy for 2 or 3 PvEs

Unknown

Arondite wrote:

Wonko33 wrote:

So enemies scale according to the level of you characters

Do they calculate just once at beginning of event or at the beginning of every sub


Basically if I level a character after I've started playing, will the enemies scale or not ?

Look, judge for yourself.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5451

We know that enemy levels will not scale with your own upon completions because that much is explicitly stated.

It is also suspected that starting levels won't scale much / at all by the implication from him saying that you won't hurt yourself by leveling. It is not expressly stated, but I see no reason why he wouldn't mention base levels at all in response to that prompt yet take extra time out to say that leveling won't hurt you.

A few issues with your argument.

1. Post is from 11 months ago, many things have changed in that time. Many comments from 11 days ago from D3 are dated, much less 11 months ago.
2. Scaling is defined by some people as the community+personal scaling that takes you from the beginning of the node to the end of the node. For others, it also includes the starting value of the node. It is unclear which camp IceIX falls into. When he says scaling is not affected by leveling up characters, he could be referring to only 2 of the 3 aspects of PvE scaling and be 100% in agreement with everything we are communicating.
3. To use real world (or MPQ) experience, there have been numerous times that we have, as a community, compared node levels at the beginning of the subevent. The beginning of the subevent, by definition, will not have any personal or community scaling, because the subevent has just begun. If your theory that character leveling plays no impact on the starting difficulty, then all players would start a node with the same level of difficulty. But what was found in every comparison is that each node was a relatively constant percentage of your highest leveled character. On one node, people might have a starting difficulty between 70 and 85% of their highest leveled character. While highest leveled character is not the only factor in determining the starting strength of the enemy node, it is a very important factor.

Not to mention the commonsense fact that we know a node has a different starting value for a player with a 270 XForce compared to a player rocking the IM35

Unknown

I don't see how anyone can come to the conclusion that roster plays no value in initial scaling. That'd mean I should expect my hardest node to start at level 40 or so because that's the limit of how hard it can be for a newcomer to have any chance of winning. The only time this has happened was during the time slices where scaling mysteriously went away that was well-known. Scaling cannot be solely a function of how you play, because a strong roster can emulate the playing style of any roster weaker than it but the reverse is not true. It doesn't matter how clever you think you are using a 2* roster, because I have exactly the same guys so if you doing something can fool the game into giving you easier matchups, then I can run exactly the same guys. Since I don't even need those guys to begin with, I can one up that and simply let the 2*s get downed on purpose whereas a genuine 2* player probably wants to keep his characters around for other events.

There was a point where your scaling was indeed influenced by how close your fight is and it was easy for the strongest player to fake every battle into a close call and keep their scaling artificially low. People didn't suddenly stop doing this because facerolling level 150 enemies when you got pre nerf Magneto was boring. It simply stopped working at some point when D3 realized the strongest rosters were easily faking battles as a weaker player. Ares using Sunder on a guy with 100 HP left was a very reliable scaling killer, and nobody with a strong roster needed Ares for anything else.

Unknown

There are ways you can play that cause pretty big disparities in enemy levels with similar rosters.

For example: in the starlord PvE final sub, at the point where my highest level node hit 395 I was complaining in LINE chat and someone with a very similar roster to mine, who specific plays in PvE to minimise his scaling, had the exact same node at 225 (IIRC, something like that anyway).

Scaling seems to be an overly complicated mess. Personally I can't help thinking a system where baseline scaling is purely based on roster and scaling is fairly uniformally added on top would be better, but that's 100% not the case at the moment.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

There are ways you can play that cause pretty big disparities in enemy levels with similar rosters.

This is by far the biggest issue to me.

Similar rosters should be facing the same nodes. Forget 94 vs 166 vs 270, why is it possible for 2 nearly identical rosters to see level differences as much as 100?

Unknown

The initial scaling and the consequence increase is fairly linear even if the exact weight is somewhat of a mystery. I can't recall a case where someone has a strictly stronger roster (by rarity/level breakdown) end up with lower level enemies in a Gauntlet type event where you have no further factors to screw things up. Now I know the weight the game places on the 4*s and 3*s is somewhat of a mystery so it's possible that you have a case where say a guy has a 270 + a few 166s versus a guy with a 2 180 4* + lots of 166s and either of them can have higher scaling depends on how the game decides to weight those guys. And obviously any non Gauntlet event it is indeed possible your personal scaling somehow makes things even more messy. But there's no question that higher level characters gets you a higher starting point even if we don't know how much.

At any rate, trying to decide an initial scaling based on level is just crazy talk. I'll just bring the example I have above. Person A has a 270 4* + 3 166s, while person B has 2X180 4* + 10 level 166s. Who has a stronger roster? Note that I left out who those guys are, which is what the game does because I seriously doubt they factor in how strong X Force is compared to IW even if both are at the same level. How can you even decide who is stronger in this case? And if you can't decide, that means any scaling based on that roster is just a wild guess at best.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

There are ways you can play that cause pretty big disparities in enemy levels with similar rosters.

For example: in the starlord PvE final sub, at the point where my highest level node hit 395 I was complaining in LINE chat and someone with a very similar roster to mine, who specific plays in PvE to minimise his scaling, had the exact same node at 225 (IIRC, something like that anyway).

Scaling seems to be an overly complicated mess. Personally I can't help thinking a system where baseline scaling is purely based on roster and scaling is fairly uniformally added on top would be better, but that's 100% not the case at the moment.

If the levels added are not multplicative, then the strongest guys will always win because adding 100 levels to an level 295 enemy is comparatively less impact than adding 100 levels to a level 100 enemy. Now I don't have any problem with that, but if you're going to award the best rosters in PvE, then you might as well have no scaling to begin with because you're still introducing the random unfairness based on how you weighted those rosters, so if the strongest roster is supposed to win you can just skip the random unfairness at the beginning. I always thought PvE should be broken down like Simulator Basic into easy/hard brackets where the base scaling is fixed (and they might as well be fixed for Hard given its insanely high for everyone). Strong rosters usually don't do well in the easy bracket, and that's not because X Force somehow has a problem mopping up guys who are rarely above level 100. It's simply because it is so easy that even if you're running X Force/Thor/whatever you're probably not outgrinding another 2* anyway, and I have no problem with that. I'm quite willing to concede an easy bracket with slightly less rewards to weaker players, and if necessary I'm willing to do a completely equal prize pool even if that makes very little sense.

Raffoon

It would be nice to have some more info about this from the devs. I'm currently sitting at 220 on my Xforce, 250 on Fury and I haven't leveled them up any further for months for fear that it will increase PVE levels. Being incentivized to NOT level up characters seems pretty weird.

My concern specifically is that the system may not be taking actual changes in power level into account, only numerical level. The difference in leveling an Xforce from 200-270 is worlds apart from leveling a 3 star from 96-166 or a 2 star from 24-94. Does the system say "oh, one of your characters has 70 more levels, let's bump the difficulty up!" or does it distinguish between 70 levels on a 4 star vs 70 on a 2 star?

Raffoon

I know the devs have been pretty active lately

So.... if I level up my 4 stars to 270, is it going to make PVE nodes harder?

Unknown

Raffoon wrote:

I know the devs have been pretty active lately

So.... if I level up my 4 stars to 270, is it going to make PVE nodes harder?

The game does acknowledge that adding level and characters do not have a linear effect on your scaling. That is, having a level 270 character doesn't mean your node is twice as hard as someone with a 135 character. Likewise the game is aware that having 4 level 270s doesn't mean you're twice as strong as someone with 2X270. Your node will absolutely get harder when you level someone to 270, but how much is something no one has ever figured out, but we do know it will be higher than what it is right now.