The Hunt: March 10 - 16

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Jamie Madrox wrote:

12 hours left in my bracket and I only have a 25k lead. I don't know if I can keep my placement...

What's amazing is...I look at these other slice scores and I'm very lucky to have picked a slice without all the insane people in it. I probably wouldn't even be top 50 in the other slices.

Unknown

sc0ville wrote:

I really, really wanted to prove you wrong Phantron, but in the end your words were prescient. I woke up at 5:00am to start my final grind down and already saw that Phumade (Kung Phu Panda) had already started his. I knew I had no chance to catch up, as the aliens failed in their duty to abduct him for the hour or two that I needed. we bounced around for the next 4 hours duking it out valiantly. I did have a pretty impressive lead on him at one point:

While all you need is an hour, it's pretty unlikely to get that hour due to time slices and you really need some supernatural powers on your side. I already dropped another 1K on #1 and figure I'll just snooze my way to a #3 or #4 finish instead of #2 and lose by 10K instead of 1K and get 3 hours to do something else insetad. Now watch the aliens do kidnap the leader and #3 win it despite being behind by an even bigger margin than I was (1500 behind me, 2500 behind leader)!

500 points is a lot harder than it looks to overcome when it's the final sub because the person with that lead gets to dictate the pace of the game. Usually he'd just start as early as possible like your case because this forces all his opponent to immediately play or risk never catching up, but since you're playing this early it also eliminates any potential timing tricks so you still can't catch up.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Phantron wrote:

at that point it becomes a question of whether it's worth spending that much HP in the first place (30 HP per fight X number of fights can add up to a huge expense in a hurry)

8 hr refreshes working as intended. Now I'm just wondering if everyone who was in favor of the change didn't believe that it was going to make PvE more P2W, or if they're totally fine with it.

Well, before 8 hour rrefreshes, if I couldn't play every 12 hours, I'd never make top 150. Now I can basically be top 150.

Then again you're talking about absolute top of brackets, but that's just my .02

Unknown

I guess I should be thankful of the bracket and split I was in.
This event just ended at 3pm local time.

Unknown

Expecting to finish T50 in a little over 2 hours (5pm CST) with roughly 75,000 points. Will be the first time I get a 4* from individual placement rewards in PVE.

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over_clocked wrote:

XF/4or and either of Loki, MMN, GSBW, Iron Fist allow anyone to clear ALL normal, hard and deadly nodes in any given sub in The Hunt 5-6 times in a row, using a replenishing healthpack on 4or or GSBW here and there sparingly, with very slight ISO boosting and maximum speed. Heck, I was able to clear 3 subs (grinding down one to 10 pointers at that), all on 5 standard healthpacks, and even still had some healthpacks left after that to do PvP. And anyone can do that, if they got the characters! There's not much skill or strategy required, sadly. 4or is that good at trivializing PvE.
So I'm looking forward to character changes and hoping they could improve non-Heroic PvE with unlimited character rosters to become less of a grind.

I'm not complaining, it's been sorta fun, since I can enjoy (un)healthy competition as much as anyone and this marks my 4th new 4* event in a row with a top 1 rank (no life, nothing to see here, move along, please remember what I just said).
Shout out to Spider man 75 of The X-Men II for making me grind better points for my alliance and not giving up despite my lead since the very 1st sub. Hope to not see you again, though, lol. I always pick slice 4 for PvE but after the daylight saving adjustment slice 2 suited me better (1 AM/PM compared to 10 AM/PM).
Time for victory lap and a good rest after that.

(Please someone explain to me why the Hunt has to have repeating overlapping subs, this is madness, lol. We dubbed the event the Hurt in our chats for this.

There's also a variant name rated R.)

The overlapping time for The Hunt really sucked. For example on slice 5 you had subs began at noon, so after 2 cycles the next refresh time would be... 4am. I used green/black and blue/purple boosts on every node that wasn't on the easy path though the only time the health pack become an issue was at the end of Florida, as you've to do all Florida nodes 6 times and then still have enough in the tank to clear Savage Land when it opened. Given how stupid this event is I figure I didn't need to have to worry about the headache of potentially wiping out even when it looked like #1 was out of reach. As far as I can tell both puzzlequestm and I did virtually every node possible but he was able to make the 4am clears while I'm not and that added up to a 1K lead over the course of the event.

While HP boosts aren't a guaranteed win they sure make a lot more sense than spending 150 HP for 3 health packs. I'd like to see the 'P' part in PvE to be a bit higher actually so that it'd cost you more than 2500 HP to get 1st place by paying so that way either people don't do it or those who do end up paying for the bills. This is assuming that the game's problem is a lack of revenue, though rerunning The Hunt makes me wonder if that is truly the case. I guess if they can't put money into good use (clearly there isn't a lack of events to use other than The Hunt even if there is never going to be any new PvE event) the current system which doesn't generate much revenue is fine since if D3 doesn't put the money to good use then it might as well be something that's favorable to me.

I still don't get what's the obsession with the 36 hour subs which guaranteeds that some of the time the subs start/end will be unfavorable to you. You'd think every sub should either be 1D or 2D (or 12H if must be) and event would just start and end on the same time of the day by now.

Phumade

I really, really wanted to prove you wrong Phantron, but in the end your words were prescient. I woke up at 5:00am to start my final grind down and already saw that Phumade (Kung Phu Panda) had already started his. I knew I had no chance to catch up, as the aliens failed in their duty to abduct him for the hour or two that I needed. we bounced around for the next 4 hours duking it out valiantly. I did have a pretty impressive lead on him at one point:



but in the end, due to his hard work, I was unable to catch up. We finished up at 149642 and 148361 respectively. About half an hour from the end of the clear it became incredibly obvious that there just weren't enough points left in my nodes to catch up with him. It was an amazing run, and I doff my cap to the Panda, he fought an incredible fight and left me no room to squeeze past him. Well fought.

Great battle! With 1 hr left, I was really mentally frazzled. I thought you had given up when I started my final push, and was just cruising through nodes. Then I saw you take the sub lead and basically freaked out. The last hour was brutal, because I kept trying to avoid the deadly nodes and avoid wiping my team, but you made me suck it up and go for it! The last 40 min, I kept hoping for 100 pt nodes and only seeing 30pts. I kept thinking, he's gotta run out nodes eventually. I eventually moved to the main and focused on that one node, and then went back to the hard nodes as necessary.

Hats off to you as well and I look forward to our next battle! Hopefully not in another 4* release.

Kung Phu Panda

Unknown

As harrowing, time intensive and life-sucking as events like this are, I like reading everyones "gg wp" stories afterward. Shows the good side of the playerbase.

JamieMadrox

dearbluey wrote:

As harrowing, time intensive and life-sucking as events like this are, I like reading everyones "gg wp" stories afterward. Shows the good side of the playerbase.

I wouldn't call it that bad. I played for about 20-30 minutes every 4-8 hours depending on the overlap and clear schedule. Plus a 1-2 hour grind at sub closes, but those were mostly 90 minutes or less.

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Jamie Madrox wrote:

dearbluey wrote:

As harrowing, time intensive and life-sucking as events like this are, I like reading everyones "gg wp" stories afterward. Shows the good side of the playerbase.

I wouldn't call it that bad. I played for about 20-30 minutes every 4-8 hours depending on the overlap and clear schedule. Plus a 1-2 hour grind at sub closes, but those were mostly 90 minutes or less.

Whereas I had to spend upward of an hour and a quarter each refresh, desperately juggling both time and health packs and a couple of hours at least on the end of each sub to end up in 11th place.

I still need to learn more damage mitigation and get some additional 3*'s to 166, I think.

squirrel1120

The 4hor advantage really is pretty startling. I'd start an end grind 6hrs out and only have the easy nodes ground to 1, while the hardest stacks would be taken for highest points, assuming I could clear it at all. I'd slide up the charts into the T10 if I wasn't there already. As I'd approach 1st, the previous 1st would be 9-10th or even slide out, but then an hour or two before the event end you'd suddenly see them again... 10th, then 6th, then 4th, bip bip bip 1st. Then they'd just bury the score. Even 6hrs of constant play and health-pack management being pretty good, there were no subs this event I was able to do a full grind down on.

With as late as I started, I really can't believe I'm sitting in the T10 at all right now considering how scaled these have been, and how easy the xf/tgt pvp teams are able to slaughter nodes, but I'll just try to keep it up and cross my fingers I can hold onto it. If not, at least it helps ensure the alliance gets another cover, and worst case I still have at least one for the next event.

Speaking of which... 1 under-covered 4 star and 2 3 stars as the only usable characters? ugh. Maybe I don't need to add covers to Rag right now. heh. I hope they have others mixed in there again like they did last time...

squirrel1120

Sorry, only bad news phantron...

Unknown

Champius wrote:

I guess I should be thankful of the bracket and split I was in.
This event just ended at 3pm local time.

Wow, why couldn't I get this bracket. I'd be top 10 While I'm currently sitting at 32 in mine

SnagglePuss

Alchemist4 wrote:

Champius wrote:

I guess I should be thankful of the bracket and split I was in.
This event just ended at 3pm local time.

Wow, why couldn't I get this bracket. I'd be top 10 While I'm currently sitting at 32 in mine

Been cruising along outside of the top 50.... could have been cruising along inside the top 10..

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squirrel1120 wrote:

Sorry, only bad news phantron...

So I just sold out our world for nothing???