Prodigal Sun Scaling

SnowcaTT

chaos01 wrote:

After reading I used this against a 249 goon node. I made two moves to charge polarity shift and then looped their powers with surgical and x-force occasionally making a match five for no other reason then change the monotony of using powers.

X-force really is the way to go infinite with this. I've run it a good 20 times at full health now, never boosting, it never seems to fail.

If purple fails, you can start with blue. If both fail, you can go green and board shake. If you can't do either, you can go black and get rid of all the yellow goon tiles vs a Thug or Don, or get more green for more board shake against Grenade guys.

I had a couple of tiles go off - just made sure to get X-force in front, then put out a yellow tile: plenty of time to re-heal X-force. The black tile wipe (along with steal) and the yellow heal make it really tough to wipe on these.

Unknown

R&G, base level Elektra, and OBW is pretty fun against any node with a Muscle. I'm trying to figure out how to get to double dipping 4K match 3s but haven't had much luck. I think I can let them get Threaten twice and hope I steal the right ones twice but that'd probably be overkill.

simonsez

orbitalint wrote:

Did a quick scan of my top ten, 7 had the combo viable (5 blue stique and a mags). If they aren't using it, how did they keep up with my grind down (assuming no health pack buys)

I've got the covers, I'm 2nd in my bracket, and I'm not using it, and didn't buy any health packs. So your logic that they must be using it is full of holes. And thanks to Trisul's poll, I don't have to debate this any further.

Trisul

simonsez wrote:

I've got the covers, I'm 2nd in my bracket, and I'm not using it, and didn't buy any health packs. So your logic that they must be using it is full of holes. And thanks to Trisul's poll, I don't have to debate this any further.

Yup, it appears to not nearly be as widespread as I assumed. I'm still against infinite combos by principle, but it seems pretty clear to me that there's really no urgency to fix winfinite since it doesn't appear to be affecting community scaling nearly as much as I thought.

Unknown

If you have X Force you're not really supposed to ever lose to a goon only node and I'm not even sure if it's any faster to do this because for goons only node you can just load up on pure offense for the whole team instead. It's more of a problem in that this also works against the standard 3 villian setup, though Daken and Ares tend to be the bane of this strategy due to Magneto's lack of HP so it usually balances out. Of course any mix of goon + villian will also suck since goons have elevated match damage and of course any accelerated AP consuming moves have a good chance of knocking out Magneto or Mystique, and one of them has to be tanking blue, red, and purple if X Force is your third person. Note that if you don't use X Force because you want someone who can tank for Magneto/Mystique then this strategy is about as fast as watching paint dry.

That said, this game's sloppiness on all the easily enabled infinite combos is just really amateurish. When Iron Fist comes in you'll be able to infinite on half of the DAs with Surgical Strike on purple followed by IF's purple, and while I'm tired enough of DAs that I'm willing to say it's not a bad thing for the community to be able to trivially curbstomp them, it's still just really bad design.

Unknown

Trisul wrote:

The chain reaction is pretty simple:

1. Players with combo can beat every node, more nodes than before.
2. Scaling rises faster because a higher percentage of players can beat the node than otherwise expected.
3. Players without combo can't keep up with the high scaling.

End result: players with the combo get a disproportionately large advantage. <-- This is what I'm against in principle.

What I don't get is why the game needs community scaling. It would solve many problems is the scaling was only personal, raising levels as you progress. I took a break for 8 months from the game and I return to see that the same issues still plague the players even after 8 months. The feeling I always got from this game is that it wants to punish the players who play a lot or those who have a strong roster.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

If you have X Force you're not really supposed to ever lose to a goon only node and I'm not even sure if it's any faster to do this because for goons only node you can just load up on pure offense for the whole team instead. It's more of a problem in that this also works against the standard 3 villian setup, though Daken and Ares tend to be the bane of this strategy due to Magneto's lack of HP so it usually balances out. Of course any mix of goon + villian will also suck since goons have elevated match damage and of course any accelerated AP consuming moves have a good chance of knocking out Magneto or Mystique, and one of them has to be tanking blue, red, and purple if X Force is your third person. Note that if you don't use X Force because you want someone who can tank for Magneto/Mystique then this strategy is about as fast as watching paint dry.

That said, this game's sloppiness on all the easily enabled infinite combos is just really amateurish. When Iron Fist comes in you'll be able to infinite on half of the DAs with Surgical Strike on purple followed by IF's purple, and while I'm tired enough of DAs that I'm willing to say it's not a bad thing for the community to be able to trivially curbstomp them, it's still just really bad design.

So get 11 black, SS on purple, fire off probably 2 IF purples, get another SS, fire it off to get virtually no purple because you just SS'd that colour... maybe fire off one more IF purple which is unlikely to get enough for an SS, so you can't claim that juicy 1-3 purple sitting on the board since you just cleared the colour again.... that's the shortest, shittiest infinite loop i've ever seen.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

So get 11 black, SS on purple, fire off probably 2 IF purples, get another SS, fire it off to get virtually no purple because you just SS'd that colour... maybe fire off one more IF purple which is unlikely to get enough for an SS, so you can't claim that juicy 1-3 purple sitting on the board since you just cleared the colour again.... that's the shortest, tinykitty infinite loop i've ever seen.

Are you sure about the bolded part? Yeah, you just fired a SS, but a double IF purple just added 18 black tiles to the board that are likely to cause some big shakeup...

Somebody should simulate this scenario.

simonsez

Narkon wrote:

What I don't get is why the game needs community scaling.

It's to balance rubberbanding. If you're going to reward players by letting them get more points for not playing, there needs to be some downside. But I'd be happier if they just got rid of both.

Unknown

I've decided not to struggle against the scaling anymore.

So, I'm ranking Top 50 now, instead of Top 10, and D3 loses 7-10K HP from me each event...

Favour the newcomers, and you will give vets a valid reason not to spend on your game D3.

The more you think the noobs are the spenders, the more you do things in favour of their spendings against the vets, the more you will be right to think the vets are not spending enough...

That's ANOTHER marketing strategy common mistake : favour one clientele over another one saying "the clientele we are not targetting is not spending". Of course, you no longer target it...

To make things easy to understand, I'll give an example (a one that existed) :

Deaf people were not using condoms so were infected by HIV more than the rest of the population (in percentage). Studies were made. And the result was : campaigns never targetted the deaf as a population, so they were thinking AIDS could not contaminate them (it was the same in the late 80s with straight people thinking AIDS was just a disease for the gay people and drug addicts). New campaigns were made, with deaf people in it : the number of deaf people infected dropped.

The less you invest in a category of population, the less this population will spend in your products.

hesjingixen

Just thought I'd chime in as well and say that Prodigal Sun scaling seems crazy. My highest level character is 177, but many of the nodes begin at over 200, and by the end of the mini-event are over 300. This is why (unchecked) roster scaling is stupid: sure, I do have several 166s, but I can only bring 3 to a fight. 166/166/177 vs. 300/300/300 is pretty stupid imho.

SnowcaTT

hesjingixen wrote:

Just thought I'd chime in as well and say that Prodigal Sun scaling seems crazy. My highest level character is 177, but many of the nodes begin at over 200, and by the end of the mini-event are over 300. This is why (unchecked) roster scaling is stupid: sure, I do have several 166s, but I can only bring 3 to a fight. 166/166/177 vs. 300/300/300 is pretty stupid imho.

My complaint about these also. I recently moved two up to 166, so I have three characters above 140. And I really have to use those three for almost every (non-winfinite goon) node.

Scaling has gotten ridiculous, global scaling (and rubberbanding) should be eliminated. Personal scaling needs to consider your average or top10+ average character level, not your top three - which is all most people rush towards, so they can compete in PVP.

orbitalint

arktos1971 wrote:

So, I'm ranking Top 50 now, instead of Top 10, and D3 loses 7-10K HP from me each event...

Ark, what in the world could you spend 7-10k worth of HP on in a PVE? Are we talking health packs? tokens?

Are people actually doing this? I'm a little confused at what anyone would be spending this on except playing roulette with trying to get IF.

Just curious

hesjingixen

Also, I've heard people indicate that scaling takes into account whether or not you have the featured heroes. Does that sound backwards to anyone else? Shouldn't you be REWARDED for having the featured heroes, rather than punished?

Vinmarc43

Get rid of scaling and rubberbanding, assign fix value at the beginning of the sub, they should at least try this....end this madness please.

Unknown

Kappei wrote:

bonfire01 wrote:

So get 11 black, SS on purple, fire off probably 2 IF purples, get another SS, fire it off to get virtually no purple because you just SS'd that colour... maybe fire off one more IF purple which is unlikely to get enough for an SS, so you can't claim that juicy 1-3 purple sitting on the board since you just cleared the colour again.... that's the shortest, tinykitty infinite loop i've ever seen.

Are you sure about the bolded part? Yeah, you just fired a SS, but a double IF purple just added 18 black tiles to the board that are likely to cause some big shakeup...

Somebody should simulate this scenario.

You've added 18 black to a board where you've already REMOVED 11+ black. So 18 black onto a black poor board. Lets say you remove 18 tiles, which is, off the top of my head, an unlikely outcome of adding 18 of a colour to a depleted board (might simulate it later), that's 18/7 = 2 and a bit purple tiles dropping onto the board which started with 0 purple. Lets say you match away 35 tiles with the cascade (good luck). That is, on average 35/7 = 5 tiles dropping and it gets you one use of IF's purple to follow up. Since we've just cascaded away all those blacks to get space for purple's to drop your odds of cascades are pretty low AND your SS just did pretty pitiful damage only firing off 5 tiles.

Sometimes you'll get more purple than average, sometimes you'll get less. Sometimes adding black will cascade well, sometimes the game will find a way to drop those black tiles into completely useless places. It's an OK plan but not a spectacular one.

It is not really a sustainable loop. Mystique + Mags works because you actively, preferentially add all the colours you want to the board with infiltrate. IF on the other hand is giving you 1 colour you want and SS runs out of steam on multiple uses (as anyone using XF will have noticed at some point).

Unknown

Adding 18 black is basically going to get you a new board, which lets you Surgical strike again. The only way this loop can break is if you have more than 24 black AP too early but it's awfully hard to see a way to lose with X Force because you have too much black. If you have that many black you could just attempt to end the game by changing the color Surgical Strike is on since you can do it twice in a row. I guess it wouldn't really be much of an infinite loop because there is a good chance you have too much black AP after one cycle to sustain it but that's not a bad problem to have.

Unknown

Kappei wrote:

bonfire01 wrote:

So get 11 black, SS on purple, fire off probably 2 IF purples, get another SS, fire it off to get virtually no purple because you just SS'd that colour... maybe fire off one more IF purple which is unlikely to get enough for an SS, so you can't claim that juicy 1-3 purple sitting on the board since you just cleared the colour again.... that's the shortest, tinykitty infinite loop i've ever seen.

Are you sure about the bolded part? Yeah, you just fired a SS, but a double IF purple just added 18 black tiles to the board that are likely to cause some big shakeup...

Somebody should simulate this scenario.

It would only make sense to kill off the purple user with SS the first time. However, even with a single application of IFoKL after SS, you're averaging more than 6 Black AP. On the second application, you pick up about 12 more.

Using Turul's MPQ Simulator thread

You get about 17.29 Black back and 2.80 or so of everything else but purple. It's definitely not an infinite loop though. This also doesn't simulate taking crit possibilities when you see them.

Actual result values:

Note, used Thor's Lightning Strike to simulate.
Average AP earned
yellow: 2.77
red: 2.78
blue: 2.86
purple: 9.92
green: 17.29
black: 2.79
teamup: 2.86
critical: 0.96
total: 42.22

Distribution
yellow: 8.54
red: 8.78
blue: 8.74
purple: 4.23
green: 15.79
black: 8.68
teamup: 8.7
critical: 0.54

Unknown

If you destroyed 42 tiles on average that will generate 6 new purple tiles on average. Add the fact that you can almost always pick up some cascades from a Surgical Strike and that while using an ability that adds 9 black tiles twice you almost certainly could've flipped some of those tiles into a match 5, you'd almost certainly be able to get enough purple between another Surgical Strike and the cascades + any match 5s you made along the way. If you used Thunder Strike twice in a row in a real game you'll know that it almost always clears the whole board because you can trivially come up with many match 5s from 2 Thunder Strikes. The only way this combo can break is if you have too much black AP at some point so that you still have 12 black AP after using a Surgical Strike and you still have some purple AP around because putting the purple in two waves is not as effective as using it all at once, but if you have 23 black AP you probably should just try to end the game outright at that point. I'm not even sure how you're supposed to lose with X Force once you have 23 black AP.

Unknown

2 reasons the numbers might slightly differ are:
1. Created crits generate 1 less new tile (about 1.50 tiles).
2. Some of the purple that drop in will be overwritten by black. (42.22 - 1.50) / 7 - 4.23 = about 1.59

Still an average of 4.23 purple left means you're probably going to get to 5 more purple 40% (?) of the time, even with reckless play. At that point it might even be more useful to use the Purple for damage.