Thick as Thieves

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Comments

  • I am worried this is a thought out pve ISO building nerf. The idea of lvling up enemies is interesting but poorly implemented here. Especially because there is no bonus for fighting them At a high lvl vs a low lvl. Instead you generally are getting WORSE rewards the higher they get which is the opposite of how it should be.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    If you count each mission win as increasing the enemys strength by 1 unit, it seems like around 5 retreats will reduce the enemys strength by 1 unit, so you would have to retreat 60 times in order to get enemy levels down to their base each time you grind a cycle. I remember the harder missions hitting 230 really early on (so they increase extremely rapidly). I've managed to reduce the first mission down to 70 from 230, so I guess I'll do this intermittently so that I can actually farm iso during this event by not paying for boosts, although I wonder if this is more efficient than just grinding the punisher pvp event... it is significantly easier than fighting 3 level 80 enemies though.


    It's so sad that we have had to resort to even having this conversation.

    Yeah, the developers should spent more time about thinking what is the optimal way to play the game, and design accordingly... I feel like all of these issues could have been fixed by simply playing the event and seeing how their current design results in all of these dumb ways to get an advantage in the event. I wouldn't even be doing this if I didn't really want the iso to transition into a 3* roster, sigh.
  • Daedelus wrote:
    Don't retreat, let your guys die. I think the enemy strength downgrade is tied directly to your character loss not match loss. I've seen several times where I won but someone died and the levels went down, furthermore I did the fifth level and let everyone die and saw dramatic level reduction across the board. In 5 matches I had the first mission go from 180 to 90. Using level 5 gives you a borrowed patch meaning you only have to kill off your low level characters and no health pack used

    This would probably explain the posts where people say they've seen a good drop off after retreating 30 times.
  • Too much work to grind the enemies down from 230 only to have them go back up quickly so I will miss out on this event. I was not going to place well in the main event anyway - my group was too competitive. Daredevil looked fun with all those trap tiles but I can wait for him to be a featured character like Punisher is now.

    Good luck to those of you who are continuing with the event!
  • Too much work to grind the enemies down from 230 only to have them go back up quickly so I will miss out on this event. I was not going to place well in the main event anyway - my group was too competitive. Daredevil looked fun with all those trap tiles but I can wait for him to be a featured character like Punisher is now.

    Good luck to those of you who are continuing with the event!

    It's not nearly as hard as what was initially thought, takes about 10 minutes to get the missions down to a reasonable level.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Daedelus wrote:
    If you count each mission win as increasing the enemys strength by 1 unit, it seems like around 5 retreats will reduce the enemys strength by 1 unit, so you would have to retreat 60 times in order to get enemy levels down to their base each time you grind a cycle. I remember the harder missions hitting 230 really early on (so they increase extremely rapidly). I've managed to reduce the first mission down to 70 from 230, so I guess I'll do this intermittently so that I can actually farm iso during this event by not paying for boosts, although I wonder if this is more efficient than just grinding the punisher pvp event... it is significantly easier than fighting 3 level 80 enemies though.

    Don't retreat, let your guys die. I think the enemy strength downgrade is tied directly to your character loss not match loss. I've seen several times where I won but someone died and the levels went down, furthermore I did the fifth level and let everyone die and saw dramatic level reduction across the board. In 5 matches I had the first mission go from 180 to 90. Using level 5 gives you a borrowed patch meaning you only have to kill off your low level characters and no health pack used

    I don't think it's character loss: I retreated which made my low characters die, and didn't see a reduction in strength. I'm also at the point where the level 5 characters are level 70, so this would take too long I think. It might be tied to an actual match loss causes from all your characters dying, but I'm not too sure. I guess I'll try having my guys die next rotation when the level goes back up to 230.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Too much work to grind the enemies down from 230 only to have them go back up quickly so I will miss out on this event. I was not going to place well in the main event anyway - my group was too competitive. Daredevil looked fun with all those trap tiles but I can wait for him to be a featured character like Punisher is now.

    Good luck to those of you who are continuing with the event!

    Meh, even if you can't place well in the main event, grinding down the enemies would let you get through the missions without boosts, which means iso galore.
  • I've seen levels went down from no one dying on a retreat, and the reverse where levels didn't go down but 2 of my guys are downed. It seems like having guys downed is more likely to lead to a level decrease, but it's definitely not certain. You can see my posted numbers to see that they don't all drop down in a consistent way.

    I guess if short on time you can just let all your guys die. Shouldn't be very hard against a level 230 guys.
  • Daedelus wrote:

    It's not nearly as hard as what was initially thought, takes about 10 minutes to get the missions down to a reasonable level.

    I will try letting my heroes die like you suggested - I would like to participate in the event.


    Meh, even if you can't place well in the main event, grinding down the enemies would let you get through the missions without boosts, which means iso galore.

    You are right. And I do need that iso... Desperately... Okay, I am off to kill my heroes. Thanks guys!
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Phantron wrote:
    I've seen levels went down from no one dying on a retreat, and the reverse where levels didn't go down but 2 of my guys are downed. It seems like having guys downed is more likely to lead to a level decrease, but it's definitely not certain. You can see my posted numbers to see that they don't all drop down in a consistent way.

    I guess if short on time you can just let all your guys die. Shouldn't be very hard against a level 230 guys.

    My current strategy is to put up guys and retreat until they are almost, but not yet dead (thus saving time on them regenerating, since I don't lose any time from them being downed. Doing it this way let me consistently decrease enemy levels every 5 retreats for level 5. The other missions definitely don't decrease at the same rate (level 1 is at 61 for me right now), so you might have to selectively tank other missions, which might be hard since some have required characters. I tried retreating+downing my guys right after a fresh level decrease, but that didn't result in a level decrease, so I'm not exactly sure how that scenario works out in terms of how much it contributes to decreasing levels. My current rate is about 5 retreats per minute, so this adds an extra 12 minutes to each point cycle if you want to get levels down to near where they originally were.
    Edit - And now my level 9 is down to level 171, progress has been made!
  • Phantron wrote:
    I've seen levels went down from no one dying on a retreat, and the reverse where levels didn't go down but 2 of my guys are downed. It seems like having guys downed is more likely to lead to a level decrease, but it's definitely not certain. You can see my posted numbers to see that they don't all drop down in a consistent way.

    I guess if short on time you can just let all your guys die. Shouldn't be very hard against a level 230 guys.

    My current strategy is to put up guys and retreat until they are almost, but not yet dead (thus saving time on them regenerating, since I don't lose any time from them being downed. Doing it this way let me consistently decrease enemy levels every 5 retreats for level 5. The other missions definitely don't decrease at the same rate (level 1 is at 61 for me right now), so you might have to selectively tank other missions, which might be hard since some have required characters. I tried retreating+downing my guys right after a fresh level decrease, but that didn't result in a level decrease, so I'm not exactly sure how that scenario works out in terms of how much it contributes to decreasing levels. My current rate is about 5 retreats per minute, so this adds an extra 12 minutes to each point cycle if you want to get levels down to near where they originally were.
    Edit - And now my level 9 is down to level 171, progress has been made!

    The last missions are just extremely resilient to this tactic. I'd just be prepared to assume the last 3 missions are always 230 and work on getting the earlier missions down to a manageable level so that you're not forced to boost every single time. I'm not even sure if it's necessarily faster to just keep on retreat compared to just say do Army of One for more iso 8s and then spend them on boosts instead, though it's certainly an easy alternative when you don't feel like actually putting any effort into your games.
  • Done! From level 230 to level 54. 15 heroes down. I was able to reuse several heroes as they revived themselves quickly enough for me to kill them again.

    So how do i keep the enemies at their low levels so I do not need to do this again? Or is it impossible to avoid?
  • Done! From level 230 to level 54. 15 heroes down. I was able to reuse several heroes as they revived themselves quickly enough for me to kill them again.

    So how do i keep the enemies at their low levels so I do not need to do this again? Or is it impossible to avoid?

    Impossible to avoid, so have fun...
  • Spoit
    Spoit Posts: 3,441 Chairperson of the Boards
    Hmm...Are you sure this works? I've downed 6 characters (+3 more since I was using the mission with the guest patch), and the easiest level is still stuck on 230 after force reseting
  • Spoit wrote:
    Hmm...Are you sure this works? I've downed 6 characters (+3 more since I was using the mission with the guest patch), and the easiest level is still stuck on 230 after force reseting

    I think the enemies can have difficulty stacks that go beyond 230 so it might take a while to get it down, and the difficulty level do not go down in a consistent way either. But it definitely goes down eventually.
  • Spoit
    Spoit Posts: 3,441 Chairperson of the Boards
    I guess I have way too many stacks somehow then, because despite missing the last refresh in day one, I'm at 14+7 deaths and it still hasn't budged from 230 on the easiest level
  • I got the hardest mission down to about 150 now and most of my missions are at level 50.

    This is rather silly after I realized I have about 100 retreats now and still counting. What should have happened is that enemy levels can only increase but the range for the missions should be smaller. Like say the first mission should be 30-50. The fifth mission could be 125-150. The final one can still be a flat 230. If they don't want people to grind too easily, make it so that the third time you do a mission it's always 230 but have that number reset when the mission refreshes.
  • Spoit wrote:
    I guess I have way too many stacks somehow then, because despite missing the last refresh in day one, I'm at 14+7 deaths and it still hasn't budged from 230 on the easiest level

    I used the main event page to check on my progress rather than the submissions. Maybe it helps to back out of the subevent page, go to the main event page then go back to the subevent page between every hero death? Not sure if it will help you or not but that is what I did and my enemies scaled down.
  • Mawtful
    Mawtful Posts: 1,646 Chairperson of the Boards
    Not sure if this has been mentioned previously, but it looks like they've pushed up the Global Intel Gathering requirement. Yesterday and this morning it was sitting at 450M, its now at 700M. Even with all these nerfs to story progression, are we still pushing further ahead than expected?
  • Well this is just silly. Tried the tactic and it does work but mass suicide does not seem right somehow and is certainly not fun. So tired of guess the rules events. Will try to win the sub event (in 2nd by 2pts right now) but will try (I am not good at quitting though I did manage to take almost 36hrs off after the Rags nerf icon_e_wink.gif ) to refrain from further foolishness until they do something to fix it.