PVE Issues I believe should be addressed

AaronTheLuigi

To preface this, I enjoy playing Marvel Puzzle Quest. I'm almost six months in and have been hooked. I play during most of my free time, and am kicking myself for not joining it sooner when my brother began playing. Also, Deadpool's Daily Quest is a blessing from the gods and is more than generous enough to keep me intrigued with the game for quite some time I imagine. However, as I have experienced much, I can safely say PvE, while my only non-DDQ reliable source of resources (us 2 rosters have it rough in the PvP wilderness,) has a few things that are downright mind-boggling and feel like a big middle adamantium claw to the player.

1: Mid-Event Scaling
In the current run of Iso-8 Brotherhood, I just unlocked the California Sub. Beat the first two nodes then ran into 133 Ragnarok/Bullseye/Lieutenant. I bring in my 94 Magneto/Storm/Daken, a B-Team if you will, just to ease my way through. Miracle cascades kill Storm on their second turn (about six Match-5s on their first turn from the Random Number Gods). I'll admit I'm peeved, but let's call it an isolated incident even though all damage I did was negated by Bullseye's Protect tiles + Lieutenant healing. I wipe horribly, everyone on the enemy team finishes at max health. No biggie, I got some health packs to spare. Heal them up again, same level opponents take me down again. Arguably a more competitive match, I had killed the Lieutenant & Bullseye before Ragnarok builds up Godlike Power and cleans up Mags/Daken. (Storm befell an early death to a team-up Masterstroke right before I could cast Wind Storm.) Okay, this is a tough one. I reluctantly bring my A-team (Buff 134Thor/Buff134OBW/94Ms. Marvel) Much to my surprise, the enemy levels...are the exact same ones I feel to earlier. This time I beat it with about 40% damage on everyone in my team. Next I unlock Lv. 147 Ares/Empiricist/Control. Ugh, well, this is a one time node. I'll wait for Stormneto to heal up and give it a shot then. I hit the Blade essentials and do those while Thor/OBW (who haven't healed) take an extra 25% life loss. I peek at the Ares node...and find it jumped to 167.

Really. 20-Level jump because I beat two essential nodes. Bravo.

Well, tomorrow I'll see if I can't boost my way through that kittystorm, but as for tonight, no way. Then I remember hearing that mid-event scaling is based on player performance, and if this ongoing thread has validity to many of the posts (Truth about PvE Scaling & Roster Levels, http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=26077), then taking damage lowers levels, and winning w/out taking much damage increases levels.
[EDIT: A good wait while typing this and I squeezed through with OBW/Stormneto, in spite of taking exactly one 6AP Onslaught doing 60% of OBW's health.

I beg and grovel to differ on the claim that damage taken has anything to do whatsoever with scaling. Wiping twice to the same node without a budge either tells me damage taken isn't in the scaling formula, or everyone else is beating that node the same time I'm falling to it. Yet beating an isolated node somewhere else in the sub all of a sudden means a 20 level bump for every node in said sub? And I didn't flawless any of those! In Past PvE events I've ended up falling twice and if I was lucky, it dropped 2 levels, then beating it while taking a good deal of damage sent the sucker 12 levels higher. Heck, in the last run of Enemy of the State I fell to Gorgon/Kishnu/Wolvie and the node went UP ten levels AFTER I lost. Not to mention if I hit the same node in the easy sub five times it actually goes DOWN 10-15 levels, which is perplexing as all Hades.

As far as I see it, the scaling serves to remove any middle ground the player has and make nodes mindlessly easy or a living, breathing nightmare. And community scaling is either really weird considering everyone beats the hard subs and falls to the easy one by the looks of my shifting levels or is not working as intended.

2: Starting Scaling
I see no need to give me a Level 150+ node to start with when I begin an event. We're talking near-maxed agains 94's here. And if starting scaling takes into account boosted levels (I don't know for sure), then I urge you to stop because it feels less like a reward for having a diverse roster and more like restricting the number of viable characters I can use. Heck, in the last run of Deadpool vs MPQ my last node on the Hero sub started at 180 and rose to 225 by the events' end. (Using my 94/134's to beat and lose to it didn't make it go down at all.) That's ridiculous, and I'm not the worst victim by what I've seen. I sincerely feel sorry to all the guys who have the audacity to use 3/4 guys and commonly end up with nodes 100 levels over their rosters.

I keep hearing the max level jump of opponents from 270 to 395 was a measure to counteract the Mags/Spidey combo long before I joined. Now that they and several other potential infinite combos have been split up...why do we still have this? Not to mention anyone who wasn't using these combos to begin with got double-whammied because they had no available combo yet still took the brunt of the super-scaling. I get it, it's supposed to be a challenge and not every hard sub should be repeatable, but this ridiculous bar of leveling for enemies makes PvE less appealing as your roster progresses.

3: Everything's a Competiton
Fighting through an additional story mode against enemy teams set up by the developers to unfold a neat little story arc? Fun!
Realizing you not hitting all the nodes/hitting them as quickly as someone else on the planet and thus, receiving less rewards? Frustrating!

This is not designed at all to be another Player vs Player event. And I'm not getting into why 4-Thorce is fighting 395's, Falcon & Mr Rogers get 250's, OBW and her amazing friends get 150 while little Anthony and Ororo get Lv. 65 opponents. I get it, it scales to our roster strength. Understandable.
Why turn a story event into a competition where you have very little control over how you perform compared to someone else? My prime gripe here relates to placement rewards, but as I think about it the true culprit might be community scaling. "Oh, I see somebody used M35/Modern Storm/MBW to hit this node, or someone over there used Winfinite (R.I.P). Well, tough luck! Everyone gets an additional 10 levels for your success!" I'm less motivated hitting really difficult subs knowing I could be denying somebody else a shiny Kamala Khan cover thanks to community scaling.
[Admittiedly, this complaints' a stretch and shouldn't be taken as seriously as the other ones I list. Sorry if anyone takes offense to this.]

4: RyBack Syndrome (FEED ME MORE!)
I love a well-thought out PvE node, in terms of enemy team composition. Outside of some interesting Gauntlet nodes, one of my favorites comes from I believe the Hulk event. Rags+Juggs+Lieutenant. Sounds odd and masochistic, and I totally agree Juggernaut needs a rework, but hear me out:
Juggernaut has strong, cheap & skills. Ragnarok has a strong, cheap and his feeds into Juggs cheap and Rags' expensive . The Lieutenant? Support healing and tile destruction on two colors ( ) neither Juggs nor Ragnarok uses. Yes, scaled up Juggs is overpowered, but it is two tanks with somewhat complementing skills AND a power struggle on & ,while a third wheel completely avoids them. It's challenging as all hell, sure, but I feel really great when I beat it.

Ares and 2 Iso-8 Subjects? Hood + Maggia? Wolverine + The Hand? Doom + Doombots? Kitties. Tiny Kitties. Real cute and cuddly, teeny, weeny tiny kitties.
I've always seen part of the Puzzle in Marvel Puzzle Quest is denying your opponent their colors. Sure, it may not always be beneficial to you to go after that Purple when a match-4 yellow is staring you in the face, but Venom's almost got Symbiote Snare and you gotta weigh your options. Unless the enemy is handed their AP on a silver platter.
Nothing is fun about goon feeder nodes. It's challenging to beat a Hood who can fire of Twin Pistols every three-four turns in the same way that chopping a redwood tree with a spoon is challenging. (Mind you Twin Pistols is a powerful skill intentionally priced at 15 so even a character with built in AP stealing needs some time to fire it.) Tedious and so inexplicably geared towards your failure these missions are the rewards had better always be 500-2500 Iso-8 and/or 50 Hero Points if you guys are so adamant about including them. You notice why Hood, a player's best shot at free AP generation, has really low health, a mostly lousy Black skill AND a condition on when he can steal AP? Because Dormammu's Aid is an incredibly strong skill to begin with. Passive AP generation/stealing may be even better than controlled tile generation a la Polarity Shift and Deceptive Tactics. AP Generation is highly valued. If Iron Fist is anything to go by, (and our previews of Kamala Khan as well,) is that anyone who can generate AP for a top-tier character is amazing. Giving the enemy free reign to strike me with Adamantium Slash, Summon Demons, Onslaught, or to a lesser extent Lethal Recon does not a well-designed node make. What I wouldn't do to have an actual Maggia Don on my roster, just so my (eventuallyreturningfromthedepthsofthevaultI'vebeenwaitingsolongbabypleaseIneedyou) Black Panther could get Rage off every five turns...

5: 20
If you give us a time limit on how long we have to play the nodes, please give us a chance to pick up that 200 or standard token reward on our fourth completion. So many 1/4 Rewards collected...

6: Where have I seen these guys before?
Granted, the roster of villains in this game is small, so this may not be something easily repaired until a vast time period has passed. That being said, we've almost gone six months since the debut of our latest villian, Mystique. (I don't count Ragnarok/Doom/Loki's reworks). Show the baddies some love, and we will enjoy not fighting Bullseye/Daken/Moonstone for the umpteenth time!

7: Character Restricitons
This argument specifically applies to the Simulator and Gauntlet events. Why buff our Storm/Magneto if we can't use them because you're using the / version in a node? Especially considering the Simulator is, well, a simulator. I don't recall the S.H.I.E.L.D.simulator locking all wolverines out because the enemy team used Wolvie. What if our buffed characters (of which the scaling has focused on) goes away for a node deep in the challenging part of these events?

TL;DR: I love this game and believe it would be a tremendous benefit to PVE if scaling, node rewards, goon feeder nodes, repeated enemy teams, locking out our characters, and some of the competitive elements of PVE were re[worked/designed/moved] to improve the overall PVE experience.

Yes, this is somewhat of a rage post. I encourage discussion below. I'll try to keep up and respond to what I can.
No, I'm not mad at the Polarity Shift rework. It was justified. Now please fix Iron Hammer