Thick as Thieves, bracketing and rubberbanding rules?

13

Comments

  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Just want to comment that the scaling enemy difficulty is a pretty cool system. It strikes a good balance between grinding and rewarding strong teams/good play. It also probably means that people without high-level covers can mostly see the story if that interests them, whereas in prior PvE events you needed to be able to beat the 200/230 villain teams to see the conclusion of most sub-events.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    It should reset each sub event though. I finished about 9th in the first sub event (Indian takeaway came 30 mins before the end so I had to leave some missions uncompleted) and my first fight in 2nd sub event is vs 201, 202 & 202 level enemies icon_e_sad.gif I struggle with enemies above about 170 so doubt I'll get far in the sub event.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Do you guys have an estimated time on when a bracket is full? I want to start the Anderson so bad but I dont want to get put in a hard bracket. And when are they going to release other misions in the meeting?
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    How should we know?
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Unity, there's 200 per bracket. It's almost impossible to predict the time, let alone which one you can get in.

    If you are not confident of grinding it, recommended that you wait for the last 2 hours. 1 hour is cutting it too close. 2 hours should do. Or 1.5 if you're good.
  • Nemek
    Nemek Posts: 1,511
    200 brackets usually fill reallllly quickly. Like...5 minutes or less.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    jozier wrote:
    How should we know?

    Because you know everything else.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Phantron wrote:
    It's slightly different because that 1 mission in the main bracket is worth 10 points, which you have in your main bracket but not sub bracket.
    D'oh. Thanks.
    bughunt wrote:
    It should reset each sub event though. I finished about 9th in the first sub event (Indian takeaway came 30 mins before the end so I had to leave some missions uncompleted) and my first fight in 2nd sub event is vs 201, 202 & 202 level enemies icon_e_sad.gif I struggle with enemies above about 170 so doubt I'll get far in the sub event.
    It does carry over to the next? Oh, flip. I'm going to regret trying to squeeze missed 500 ISOs out of one-pointers at the end. Also looks at a glance like they're not rotating the colors as they did Ares, so you might always need first to get greens.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    I just checked the main topic.

    Apparently, enemy levels will drop if you retreat.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    mechgouki wrote:
    I just checked the main topic.

    Apparently, enemy levels will drop if you retreat.

    I tried it and they didn't. Are we going to need to start tanking whole events now? I like the idea, but the implementation is brutal.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    I retreated 30 times to get a mid level mission (think it was #5) from 230 down to 100.

    The top mission is still 230 and unaffected. The 6-9 stuff went to like 150 I think. They also went back up very quickly.

    Retreating is more like a technique to get a breather when you got tired of staring at all the level 230 encounters. It's only slightly more efficient than simply not playing (level of enemy go down over time from inactivity).

    As far as I can tell it looks like each mission have a target range and if you go above it, then it does drop relatively fast (if 30 retreats can be considered fast) by retreating. I wouldn't even bother trying this on the final mission, though. You're likely just wasting your time, as that one seems to be awfully resilient to this technique.

    Realistically, all retreating 30 times did was let me beat the Thor required mission twice. I didn't feel like taking a chance when the guys are at 230X3 since you can't have Spiderman with you if you bring Wolv/OBW, and if you don't have one of those two it's going to take much longer to win. Also I ended up boosting for the 6-9 missions anyway, since even at level 150 they're not something you can comfortably do without boosts, and mission 9 was always 230X3. It also made the 1-4 missions easier, but I was pretty comfortable doing those without boosts
  • mouser
    mouser Posts: 529 Critical Contributor
    Out of curiosity I intentionally lost a match in the first sub, last battle IX when the bosses were 230. They then dropped to 199 and 200. Losing a 2nd match didn't bring them down any further though.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    mouser wrote:
    Out of curiosity I intentionally lost a match in the first sub, last battle IX when the bosses were 230. They then dropped to 199 and 200. Losing a 2nd match didn't bring them down any further though.

    I don't know if it's random or you need a set number of losses to lower them, but it definitely doesn't work every time.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    So a more general question about the big PvE events. If you do really well in the first sub event, doesn't that put you at a severe disadvantage for the second sub-event since you'll get something like 1/5 the points per mission/stack/reset as someone who totally stunk up the first sub event?
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    ApolloAndy wrote:
    So a more general question about the big PvE events. If you do really well in the first sub event, doesn't that put you at a severe disadvantage for the second sub-event since you'll get something like 1/5 the points per mission/stack/reset as someone who totally stunk up the first sub event?

    It used to be that way, but the last couple events have been much better about the rubberbanding in subs. In Ares, I was able to stay #1 in my main and still win some subs towards the end. In this event, I guess it's yet to be determined, but I haven't noticed any drastic dropoff in points yet. It's possible that the sub brackets are now seeded by how well you're doing in the main bracket so that rubberbanding is minimized.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
    Each time you complete a mission, your enemies gain a level stack. This stack increases their level by a given amount depending on which mission it is. Even though levels cap out at 230, the enemies still get level stacks. You decrease this stack count by 1 everytime you retreat 5 times (not sure how downing works), but since some of your 230 missions have excess stacks, you wont see their levels decrease until you do it enough times.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Celerity wrote:
    ApolloAndy wrote:
    It's possible that the sub brackets are now seeded by how well you're doing in the main bracket so that rubberbanding is minimized.
    If this is the case, it still doesn't address the issue. i.e. If I know I can't win a good prize in the current sub-event, my best bet is to do really poorly and get into a terrible bracket for the next sub (assuming I don't care that much about the main).
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    confirmed, tank all your missions down, clean up easily. back to top of bracket.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    In this event I see no particular disadvantage for doing well in the previou event, other than the enemy likely start out with a ton of level stacks if you did well earlier, but that can be dealt with by retreating. It's true both of the sub bracket I've been in seems to have extremely tough competition, but I have no reason to believe this isn't just some kind of fluke. The sub bracket sure looked quite ordinary until 2 guys charged out from nowhere with an hour left to go.
  • Kelbris
    Kelbris Posts: 1,051
    Phantron wrote:
    In this event I see no particular disadvantage for doing well in the previou event, other than the enemy likely start out with a ton of level stacks if you did well earlier, but that can be dealt with by retreating. It's true both of the sub bracket I've been in seems to have extremely tough competition, but I have no reason to believe this isn't just some kind of fluke. The sub bracket sure looked quite ordinary until 2 guys charged out from nowhere with an hour left to go.

    Why are you retreating? Let them kill your one stars. Much more efficient.

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