PSA: How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: PvE Scaling

NorthernPolarity

So throughout this forum, the fear of leveling 3*s past level 94 permeates the air because people are scared to death that doing so will increase their scaling. However, the developers have told us that PvE scaling (besides the Gauntlet) is only affected by your performance and how much damage you take in each match, as we've seen from people like Beee who has ridiculous scaling because he doesn't stomp with 4*s and takes a lot of damage.
So the problem becomes, how can we level our 3*s past 94 while taking the same amount of damage as we are taking now? If we use our 3*s, then they have more HP, and we have to force ourselves to take more damage to maintain the same level of scaling. I can't believe I didn't see this earlier, but there is a much much simpler solution than trying to take more damage:

Do NOT use your leveled 3*s in PvE.

It's such a simple solution that I can't believe I didn't think about this earlier. If you ONLY use your leveled 3*s for PvP and the 2*s / underleveled 3*s that you've been using before for PvE, then you'll take the exact same amount of damage as you were before, thus keeping scaling low. And so, you can have your cake and eat it too. Level up your guys to 166 without fear of scaling (except for Gauntlet), since those sweet top 100/25 PvP rewards are more than worth it to have higher scaling in the gauntlet.

I'm going to start to recommend this from now on: there is no reason why you shouldn't level your characters as a transition player.

Unknown

When Bugpop used to be around he was testing a theory that the game's matchup for both PvP/PvE is dependent on only characters you recently won with and I think that makes a lot more sense than damage taken. I still don't buy the 'damage taken' theory because it is very easy for me to arrange games where I take a ton of damage and it has never reduced scaling in any meaningful capacity. Yes it used to work and that was when you can take Ares and use Sunder twice in a row on the last 2 guys to end a match and see the levels drop even after winning, but that simply no longer works. Back when enemies do not have reduced match damage for ultra high levels you don't even need to arrange anything to take a ton of damage after a certain point, but the scaling sure doesn't go down just because you're taking unavoidable 1K match 4s.

From what I recall, what you need to do is take some weaker characters and boost them and then beat the hardest nodes several times, and after a few games your levels/matchup will suddenly drop (this works for PvP too, though if your MMR is greatly reduced you may no longer see guys worth much points either). Note that you cannot bring your high level characters to bail you out, as the game will quickly recognize this and adjust accordingly, and that you must win with your lower level characters. The game doesn't care how many times you lost in terms of scaling, since otherwise it's pretty trivial to send a bunch of level 1 characters to lose over and over.

Arondite

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Do NOT use your leveled 3*s in PvE.

I said the same thing a month or so ago and was met with a mixture of incredulity, ostracism and ridicule.

It works though, I've been doing it since before I posited the idea to the forum and the results have been exactly as you might imagine - my story events look exactly as they did before I broke the 3 Star wall.

NorthernPolarity

Arondite wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Do NOT use your leveled 3*s in PvE.

I said the same thing a month or so ago and was met with a mixture of incredulity, ostracism and ridicule.

It works though, I've been doing it since before I posited the idea to the forum and the results have been exactly as you might imagine - my story events look exactly as they did before I broke the 3 Star wall.

My condolences for the hardships that you've faced a month ago. People were not ready for your ideas, which were far ahead of their time.

Phantron wrote:

When Bugpop used to be around he was testing a theory that the game's matchup for both PvP/PvE is dependent on only characters you recently won with and I think that makes a lot more sense than damage taken. I still don't buy the 'damage taken' theory because it is very easy for me to arrange games where I take a ton of damage and it has never reduced scaling in any meaningful capacity. Yes it used to work and that was when you can take Ares and use Sunder twice in a row on the last 2 guys to end a match and see the levels drop even after winning, but that simply no longer works. Back when enemies do not have reduced match damage for ultra high levels you don't even need to arrange anything to take a ton of damage after a certain point, but the scaling sure doesn't go down just because you're taking unavoidable 1K match 4s.

From what I recall, what you need to do is take some weaker characters and boost them and then beat the hardest nodes several times, and after a few games your levels/matchup will suddenly drop (this works for PvP too, though if your MMR is greatly reduced you may no longer see guys worth much points either). Note that you cannot bring your high level characters to bail you out, as the game will quickly recognize this and adjust accordingly, and that you must win with your lower level characters. The game doesn't care how many times you lost in terms of scaling, since otherwise it's pretty trivial to send a bunch of level 1 characters to lose over and over.

I'm not sure how players whose MMR are already high can lower it, but for players who don't have jacked up MMR, this should still work perfectly, as Arondite has pointed out.

Trisul

Did IceIX clarify that base levels were not being set by leveled characters?

He said in his initial post that SCALING was definitely not affected by roster level. Not sure if the scaling he's talking about included starting levels or not.

Also, would love to have Will chime in. IceIX said a while back that there was streakbreakers in tile generation but Will clarified that there was no such thing.

Unknown

Trisul wrote:

Did IceIX clarify that base levels were not being set by leveled characters?

He said in his initial post that SCALING was definitely not affected by roster level. Not sure if the scaling he's talking about included starting levels or not.

Also, would love to have Will chime in. IceIX said a while back that there was streakbreakers in tile generation but Will clarified that there was no such thing.

This was EXACTLY what I asked in the previous thread about this, if the STARTING LEVEL of the PvE was affected by the highest levels you have (in most cases around 140/166), and THEN that wouldnt affect your scaling again, but the damage taken would.

Had no further replies.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I'm not sure how players whose MMR are already high can lower it, but for players who don't have jacked up MMR, this should still work perfectly, as Arondite has pointed out.

Well, it depends on whether your MMR and which bracket you're in is based on the same thing. If not, there's not much point to lower MMR because you would never be able to find people worth enough points to compete against the top PvP rosters. Certainly it's not going to work once you're already placed in a difficult PvP bracket.

Unknown

Now that Polarity brought up this old issue I'm thinking what may be happening is that your starting level is determined by the levels of the characters you won with in the last X games (where only D3 knows what X is). So to IceIX's point of view that is clearly not dependent on your roster, even though 99 out of 100 guys would use the highest level characters in their roster and thus to those guys, it indeed looks like scaling is set by your highest level characters.

Note that it is not exactly practical to do this without a huge roster because PvP still favors higher levels. I think Bugpop had multiple copies of several characters so he can afford to do this, but for a normal person your go to guys in PvP would naturally be level 166 at some point if you want to be competitive, and those guys are probably good at PvE too, but if you use those guys then you'd get the scaling of a level 166. You'd have to have a lower version of the same guy to use them in PvE, unless you never use any of your 3* aside from essentials, but even if you're that disciplined, there are a lot of nodes that are hard enough that you do need the 3* for the synergy. The 'everyone at exactly same level' approach works well for PvE since in that case you'd never have any particular character driving your average level up, but it's hard for me to see how you can possibly do well in PvP if no one is higher than level 100 or 110, unless you have say 2 Lokis and 2 The Hoods are 166/100 for different purposes, and that'd massive amount of resources to do and certainly not something a new player can do.

Tarheelmax

I read arondites theory on scaling a while ago and decided to follow his direction and take the plunge this season.

I'm taking a few 3*s I haven't been using in pve akd breaking past the 94 wall. I will only use them in PVP unless they are essential and then I will only use them for essential nodes.

I'll try and start a thread after this season and let everyone know what impact, if any there has been to my pve scaling (including starting level).

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Now that Polarity brought up this old issue I'm thinking what may be happening is that your starting level is determined by the levels of the characters you won with in the last X games (where only D3 knows what X is). So to IceIX's point of view that is clearly not dependent on your roster, even though 99 out of 100 guys would use the highest level characters in their roster and thus to those guys, it indeed looks like scaling is set by your highest level characters.

This is an interesting theory and seems the most useful. If so, then it might make sense to bring in duplicate Loki's at level 40 to attempt to lower your scaling. If doing the Magstique combo, it might be better to have them both under leveled and let X-Force do the heavy damage. Or, it might even make sense to have your 2-team plus a lvl 1 battle enemies in PVE.

So does using a larger roster in PVE keep your PVE scaling low? It's really hard to tell without creating multiple accounts.

Unknown

daibar wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Now that Polarity brought up this old issue I'm thinking what may be happening is that your starting level is determined by the levels of the characters you won with in the last X games (where only D3 knows what X is). So to IceIX's point of view that is clearly not dependent on your roster, even though 99 out of 100 guys would use the highest level characters in their roster and thus to those guys, it indeed looks like scaling is set by your highest level characters.

This is an interesting theory and seems the most useful. If so, then it might make sense to bring in duplicate Loki's at level 40 to attempt to lower your scaling. If doing the Magstique combo, it might be better to have them both under leveled and let X-Force do the heavy damage. Or, it might even make sense to have your 2-team plus a lvl 1 battle enemies in PVE.

So does using a larger roster in PVE keep your PVE scaling low? It's really hard to tell without creating multiple accounts.

Keep in mind you still have to win in the first place. There is also obviously a minimum scaling factor that goes up to at least around level 100 since that was what I got at the end of Prodigal Sun in the version where everyone's scaling was reset (started out at like 15 but eventually climbed back to 100). A bigger roster doesn't help unless you have multiple copies of the same guy assuming you're always trying to keep characters as high as possible for PvP. So even if it's true, it's awfully hard for anyone to test without being super rich. The 'keep everyone at the same level' seems to be the closest you can do, and the fact such rosters are very strong in PvE seems to suggest this theory works, though a roster with everyone at level 110 sure isn't going to do super well in PvP either.

Unknown

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

GothicKratos

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

That would really depend on what metrics they're using to prove how "well" you're doing.

If a character dying is something that plummets your scaling, bringing a dead weight 1* could be a good idea.

If the game tallies up all damage over the course of the match, then True Healing users like Daken and Wolverine could be amazing.

If the game tallies missing health at the end of the match, bringing along some 2*s would probably be the best course of action.

That being said, Sentry Meta 2.0 confirmed?

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

Well, it wouldn't work for events where the brackets are separated by normal/hard, but let's just take the normal bracket in Simulator (nothing on Simulator hard is remotely doable with this method). The essentials for me are in the low 100s and I think it can get hairy even with say a max Punisher + 2 level 1. Likewise the right path on Simulator seems to be around 70 to low 100s with a surprisingly nasty mix of enemies. The left path would be pretty trivial to pull off but that's only 1/3 of the total nodes. Even if this works, I think you're already putting in a lot of effort to beat the essential/right path of Simulator so you could've just used that effort to beat the harder nodes in the first place. I mean, I guess you'd be running something like Patch/Daken/Iron Fist + 2 level 1 guys for the easy nodes, but I can certainly see things go wrong even against a level 50 goon only mix when you have no anti-CD support whatsoever, and it can certainly take a while if you're not getting the color you need with Patch/Daken, while Iron Fist does not have regen so although he will certainly win quite easily with a maxed black, it is also quite possible he takes significant damage.

IamTheDanger

Post from a while back.
Maybe it'll help a few players out. I know it works for me.
It's just like NP said. The method he suggested has helped me out.

JCTthe3rd81 wrote:

Don't feel bad, I've been playing for almost 11 months and I don't know what the miniscule infant feline is going on either .

Maybe this will help you out a bit, maybe not. It's just what I've noticed with my games. Might even all be my imagination . Anyway, I'm far too lazy to re type everything, so I'll just add the links. Hope it helps.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5451#p297127

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=23911&p=298998#p298998

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

That would really depend on what metrics they're using to prove how "well" you're doing.

If a character dying is something that plummets your scaling, bringing a dead weight 1* could be a good idea.

If the game tallies up all damage over the course of the match, then True Healing users like Daken and Wolverine could be amazing.

If the game tallies missing health at the end of the match, bringing along some 2*s would probably be the best course of action.

That being said, Sentry Meta 2.0 confirmed?

Missing health used to work, but it doesn't work anymore. When it used to work, Ares can keep your scaling low like a champ with the 'Sunder on a guy with 100 HP' clutch move. Besides, even with all the cheap things people are doing, it wasn't exactly hard to be missing a huge amount of health while fighting level 300+ guys. The health is obviously what you ended with, because otherwise anyone running X Force/Patch/Daken will have very low scaling too which can be easily verified as not to work. Also, the health lost seems to be measured against your strongest character. That is, bringing a level 1 guy and then lose 100% of his health has no measureable effect on lowering your scaling even when missing health did lower your scaling. That's why Ares was very good for this since his health is high enough to matter and he can pretty much lose health on demand.

Unless you have duplicate versions of the key characters at a lower level, I suspect after having your characters maxed out, winning with a low level team would be just as hard as using your standard team to fight your current scaling.

NorthernPolarity

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

Another issue is that once your scaling is up, it probably takes the course of tanking multiple PvE events to get your scaling down. Honestly for me, it's easier to just fight the bad scaling with xor, since, well, 4or is kinda OP. For the transitioners who don't have 4or though and are scared to death of leveling two of their guys to 166 because of PvE scaling, not using their 3* characters in PvE seems like the best way to proceed so they can start earning some PvP awards.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

Another issue is that once your scaling is up, it probably takes the course of tanking multiple PvE events to get your scaling down. Honestly for me, it's easier to just fight the bad scaling with xor, since, well, 4or is kinda OP. For the transitioners who don't have 4or though and are scared to death of leveling two of their guys to 166 because of PvE scaling, not using their 3* characters in PvE seems like the best way to proceed so they can start earning some PvP awards.

But that only works if your leveled 3* aren't someone you already need. For example say you've Loki at level 100, he's an all around PvP/PvE super star so you'd be using him in both, but he'd be better off at level 166 in PvP, so suppose you level him to 166 for PvP, do you still use him for PvE? But he'll lead to higher scaling there and yet without Loki your PvE team is a lot weaker too, unless you have another Loki to use. If you look at the typical 'nobody is higher than level 100' roster, they've a lot of 3*s at that level and I imagine they're used whenever appropriate.

Tarheelmax

Phantron wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

Another issue is that once your scaling is up, it probably takes the course of tanking multiple PvE events to get your scaling down. Honestly for me, it's easier to just fight the bad scaling with xor, since, well, 4or is kinda OP. For the transitioners who don't have 4or though and are scared to death of leveling two of their guys to 166 because of PvE scaling, not using their 3* characters in PvE seems like the best way to proceed so they can start earning some PvP awards.

But that only works if your leveled 3* aren't someone you already need. For example say you've Loki at level 100, he's an all around PvP/PvE super star so you'd be using him in both, but he'd be better off at level 166 in PvP, so suppose you level him to 166 for PvP, do you still use him for PvE? But he'll lead to higher scaling there and yet without Loki your PvE team is a lot weaker too, unless you have another Loki to use. If you look at the typical 'nobody is higher than level 100' roster, they've a lot of 3*s at that level and I imagine they're used whenever appropriate.

That's where I think you have to make some roster choices and balance of out. If you keep your scaling in pve low, you always have OBW for AP stealing. Then you just have to make a call on loki and hood. I decided to keep loki at 94 and move hood up to 117.

Hood will be my main support in PVP because his AP stealing is much less dependent on what the other team does. Loki is much more impressive against the AI when it's too dumb to take a match 3 instead of a match 4.

Overall, I think it mostly means you need to have a fairly diverse roster before you can go splitting it up into PVP and pve groupingd or you will severely hurt one of your two groups, as you said.

NorthernPolarity

Phantron wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

ark123 wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but if this is accurate you could just go into every trivial fight with a full covered 3* or even 2* and 2 lvl 1s and drag your scaling down tremendously. This seems like it would be relatively easy to prove.

Another issue is that once your scaling is up, it probably takes the course of tanking multiple PvE events to get your scaling down. Honestly for me, it's easier to just fight the bad scaling with xor, since, well, 4or is kinda OP. For the transitioners who don't have 4or though and are scared to death of leveling two of their guys to 166 because of PvE scaling, not using their 3* characters in PvE seems like the best way to proceed so they can start earning some PvP awards.

But that only works if your leveled 3* aren't someone you already need. For example say you've Loki at level 100, he's an all around PvP/PvE super star so you'd be using him in both, but he'd be better off at level 166 in PvP, so suppose you level him to 166 for PvP, do you still use him for PvE? But he'll lead to higher scaling there and yet without Loki your PvE team is a lot weaker too, unless you have another Loki to use. If you look at the typical 'nobody is higher than level 100' roster, they've a lot of 3*s at that level and I imagine they're used whenever appropriate.

This actually shouldn't matter at all. If Loki is a PvE all star, then that means that you're taking less damage with him on your team. If your taking less damage, then your scaling goes up. Removing Loki from your PvE team should have the net effect of both making your team weaker, AND lowering the opponents scaling, meaning that it would be a wash.

TLCstormz

Lord. This is all soooooo confusing!

I am too scared to even level up my Loki and my Grocket to level 94, all because I'm a very early transitioner, and the rest of my roster struggles A LOT at their current levels of 94.