I don't want to speak too soon...

Unknown

I played the Thor PvP in the last 2 hours last night, as I am wont to do with a PvP wherein I don't need the progression rewards. It was gruelling; I was switching from partner to partner to preserve health packs, making use of 2nd and 3rd string climbing combinations I would otherwise not have used outside of PvE. That final two hours of Thor (which I couldn't play for the whole time) shredded my roster like a highly scaled PvE grind.

I think the developers have reached a new era of character diversity...and I am excited to see how it plays out.

However: PvP scoring is not made to accommodate long matches and second- or third-best team combinations. If this brave new world of high health, long matches, and varied teams is going to succeed, the PvP event structure needs to be fundamentally re-evaluated.

Edited to correct autocorrect. Thanks, Obama.

Unknown

If I knew that they were going to change the structure of PVP I would be a lot happier about the changes, I like Puzzle Quest and I like long tactical matches. But being lined up by half a PVP table while attempting to hop with every cover being a tank will ultimately end in frustration to a lot of players.

dkffiv

The overscaling made most other characters irrelevant, at least with LThor being featured. I found the best strategy was to try to fuel his abilities as quickly as possible rather than trying to bring a balanced team simply because their damage to AP ratio was so much lower. PvE node rotation seems to be taking 10-33% longer too, I don't care at all about this event but future grind downs are going to be a nightmare.

babinro

I need more time with the system to develop my thoughts on it...but I agree that the time investment to reward ratio feels VERY wrong with all these changes.

Longer matches, more challenge, lower win rates for the same rewards.
The end result is more interesting gameplay but a less fun game given our conditioning to reward structure.

For example: Take a game like Diablo 2, give the mosters more damage and just cut the drop rates of all gear in half. Suddently the core gameplay won't be quite as satisfying even if there are more tactics involved.

The devs need to consider some major changes (and may have already done so with the ISO leveling changes coming soon).
Without knowing the specifics and impact of those changes I'd say the following would compliment the new pacing wonderfully:

1) Double all ISO and HP rewards to make up for the fact that matches are easily twice as long or longer on average.

2) Auto-Heal all characters after battle but keep the health pack system in place for any downed characters. A lesser alternative would be to SUBSTANTIALLY modify passive heal rates.

Extreme changes to be sure, but ones that could be necessary to regain our previous sense of time investment vs reward.

Unknown

Some featured characters mess up a lot with team composition, specially very old ones that even people running 2* teams have it decently covered and in your side end up tanking more than they should. LThor is one, Hulk is another.

Its not going to happen too often but can give some wrong ideas about the new MMR when even on early climb you take to take 10k HP minimum off the featured character every fight.

Wonko33

Ilike using different teams too, problem is defense, u used all those teams then will get retaliated off of weak defensive teams -

snlf25

I shouldn't have too much of a problem getting my 4K Heroic 10 pack for season 13, I'm almost there. But now as a transitioner I'm struggling to make 400 points an event. This was before the health changes. I only have 5 useable characters: LCap 166, GSBW 166, CMarvel 166, Patch 153, LThor 140. The changes specifically makes thing so much slower for my roster and it seems like the devs are telling me that they don't need me anymore unless I'm willing to drop serious cash on health packs.

jobob

I noticed that the 4* character is at 1000 points. I thought it had been moved to 900? Maybe I'm just thinking about the old 3* reward which was at 900.

Also, what happened to having multiple characters boosted for a PVP? That seemed to help save health packs some, at least for me.

MarvelDestiny

Moon 17 wrote:

I think the developers have reached a new era of character diversity...and I am excited to see how it plays out.

However: PvP scoring is not made to accommodate long matches and second- or third-best team combinations. If this brave new world of high health, long matches, and varied teams is going to succeed, the PvP event structure needs to be fundamentally re-evaluated.

Yes! Elegant solution. And here I was focusing on the negative -- longer matches and being hit more. I too enjoy the new diversity (tried out a few odd teams here and there) and like where this leads.

Unknown

The defense team doesn't matter as much as it used to because unless you left someone horrible on defense your opponent is getting grinded down by the same thing that makes your climb difficult. Your A-team's offensive capability declines exponentially as a function of damage taken. To see this, just imagine your A team starts with half the health and good luck defeating even a B-tier team with those guys. Sure, you can still do it sometimes, but you'd be crazy to do this on a regular basis. If you're not a point where you want to shield to preserve your score (in that case the rest of your roster doesn't matter) then it is still more important to win a game now and maybe have some increase in expected retaliations, than risking taking another loss with your crippled A team because they're down to 50% health. Of course if you no longer plan on playing you'd still just end the game with whoever you think is best at defending and throw up a shield if it makes sense.

In this new world I think you'd need a much longer timeframe, like say 1 week for scores to actually settle if we're limited to gameplay mechanisms (shields can still generate points out of thin air and would separate players pretty quickly at a significant cost). Of course this would mean a drastic decrease in rewards which would be bad, and even if they somehow got around that, I suspect people will still just attempt to play in the last day anyway. In short, the PvP system is indeed inadequate for this kind of gameplay, but I think it's in the right direction. Of course the reward structure needs to be revamped but it was long overdue anyway. Putting incentive for people to play relatively continously would be good too.

For PvE, I can already see the 2*/transition rosters are cleaning up my sub far more than before. And no this isn't because 'veterans don't need Mystique'. Try to do some of these nodes yourself at the scaling a veteran would have and you'll quickly understand why 2*/transition are cleaning this up when a relatively tame Doom + Mystique + one goon at level 180 easily downed 2 guys on a good day (bad way would just be a complete wipeout). I had a lot of Doom one shotting guys with Diabolical Plot since he's fed purple and that's hardly the cheesiest PvE node you can face. It is quite clear now that X Force was the only thing that kept scaling in check, as he was broken enough to cancel out scaling which was broken in the opposite direction so we end up with a balanced game. Now the go-to guy for the top roster has been made ordinary, scaling is going to easily dominate unless another X Force emerges and that sure doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. I think what they need to do is have nodes with static level and static level increases each time it's beaten, with maybe an introductory extra low level setting for the first time for story considerations (otherwise weak roster would never be able to beat say the red Sentry cover node if it's at a static level intended to be challenging for strong rosters).

Unknown

I didn't mention PvE yesterday because I haven't been playing it much, but those health buffs really hurt. All of the Mystique+goon nodes are surprisingly difficult now that she can't be shredded as easily. And I would love to stop being OHKOed by diabolical plots...

I don't know if the developers were looking at this as a 20+% increase in difficulty more or less across the board, but that's what it feels like. As good an excuse to finally un-scale this game as any.

Polares

So now we have that PvP is way more difficult for veterans and we need a week to get to 1000 without using a ton of shields, and PvE is much much difficult now that XForce (or 4hor) can't help you against super scaled nodes. Great, the only thing I can play now is DDQ.

This game has forgotten about us veterans, the only thing important right now is new players.

Ps: It is suuuuuper fun playing against Doom or Mystique at level 250+ with goons feeding them black.

SnowcaTT

Wonko33 wrote:

Ilike using different teams too, problem is defense, u used all those teams then will get retaliated off of weak defensive teams -

This.

You have to run the -best- team you have, every single time, or you'll lose points not only on anyone else who is searching at the time and finds your weak team, but also in a retaliation.

I agree with OP, PVP is a terrible, incredible PVE-esque grind now. And I already had given up on PVE....

simonsez

Phantron wrote:

Now the go-to guy for the top roster has been made ordinary, scaling is going to easily dominate unless another X Force emerges and that sure doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon.

Totally agree with your PvE comments. Looking ahead to the Sim PvE, in the past I've always grinded for a 4* cover I needed, but I don't see it happening this time. They've finally broken me. It's too hard to compete with **** rosters when your scaling has been set by weapons you no longer have.

Unknown

babinro wrote:

...

2) Auto-Heal all characters after battle but keep the health pack system in place for any downed characters. A lesser alternative would be to SUBSTANTIALLY modify passive heal rates.

...

I must confess to being a bit confused that this hasn't been changed before now. Using a health pack to revive a downed character seems fair, but having a surviving character revert to full health at match completion has been pretty standard for what, like 20+ years of gaming?

DBC

Unknown

Do people here have never heard of the energy system that's in like almost every similar mobile game out there? Yes your characters usually get healed to full because you can only play X games over a period of time so it doesn't matter if they auto revive every fight. If characters heal to full after every fight there's got to be something to prevent this game from turning into one where whoever played more wins and you'll just get the energy system, e.g. you have 50 energy and they regen over a period of 5 hours and each fight uses 5, so after 10 fight you're done, or you can insert another 250 HP to continue. Of course that's also going to lead to even less roster diversity which directly corresponds with less money made, so it's a lose-lose situation.

Arondite

Phantron wrote:

The defense team doesn't matter as much as it used to because unless you left someone horrible on defense your opponent is getting grinded down by the same thing that makes your climb difficult. Your A-team's offensive capability declines exponentially as a function of damage taken. To see this, just imagine your A team starts with half the health and good luck defeating even a B-tier team with those guys. Sure, you can still do it sometimes, but you'd be crazy to do this on a regular basis. If you're not a point where you want to shield to preserve your score (in that case the rest of your roster doesn't matter) then it is still more important to win a game now and maybe have some increase in expected retaliations, than risking taking another loss with your crippled A team because they're down to 50% health. Of course if you no longer plan on playing you'd still just end the game with whoever you think is best at defending and throw up a shield if it makes sense.

In this new world I think you'd need a much longer timeframe, like say 1 week for scores to actually settle if we're limited to gameplay mechanisms (shields can still generate points out of thin air and would separate players pretty quickly at a significant cost). Of course this would mean a drastic decrease in rewards which would be bad, and even if they somehow got around that, I suspect people will still just attempt to play in the last day anyway. In short, the PvP system is indeed inadequate for this kind of gameplay, but I think it's in the right direction. Of course the reward structure needs to be revamped but it was long overdue anyway. Putting incentive for people to play relatively continously would be good too.

For PvE, I can already see the 2*/transition rosters are cleaning up my sub far more than before. And no this isn't because 'veterans don't need Mystique'. Try to do some of these nodes yourself at the scaling a veteran would have and you'll quickly understand why 2*/transition are cleaning this up when a relatively tame Doom + Mystique + one goon at level 180 easily downed 2 guys on a good day (bad way would just be a complete wipeout). I had a lot of Doom one shotting guys with Diabolical Plot since he's fed purple and that's hardly the cheesiest PvE node you can face. It is quite clear now that X Force was the only thing that kept scaling in check, as he was broken enough to cancel out scaling which was broken in the opposite direction so we end up with a balanced game. Now the go-to guy for the top roster has been made ordinary, scaling is going to easily dominate unless another X Force emerges and that sure doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon. I think what they need to do is have nodes with static level and static level increases each time it's beaten, with maybe an introductory extra low level setting for the first time for story considerations (otherwise weak roster would never be able to beat say the red Sentry cover node if it's at a static level intended to be challenging for strong rosters).

Am I the weirdo/crazy guy? I usually still attack if I have 33%+ on at least 2 Guys. lol. I thought that was normal.

Unknown

Arondite wrote:

Am I the weirdo/crazy guy? I usually still attack if I have 33%+ on at least 2 Guys. lol. I thought that was normal.

Because you asked, if I'm facing a relatively doable match (specific characters/levels), I will most often go for it with a squad above 40-ish%... and I tend to win a bunch of those.

DBC

Unknown

What kind of hopelessly outmatched guys can you be playing to go into a fight with 40% on a regular basis? The only guys I can attack with that kind of health and win reliably would be Hulk, Thor (4*), and Devil Dino, and those guys are usually selected not for their ability to defend well (at least not as well as people think). Take Lethal Intent, 40% of a 8.5K guy is 3400 HP. That's likely within one shot range for a high level Gamora's Razor's Edge, and we're talking about just Gamora here.

Arondite

Phantron wrote:

What kind of hopelessly outmatched guys can you be playing to go into a fight with 40% on a regular basis? The only guys I can attack with that kind of health and win reliably would be Hulk, Thor (4*), and Devil Dino, and those guys are usually selected not for their ability to defend well (at least not as well as people think). Take Lethal Intent, 40% of a 8.5K guy is 3400 HP. That's likely within one shot range for a high level Gamora's Razor's Edge, and we're talking about just Gamora here.

Most games I play the enemy team usually on fires 1 Skill, maybe 2. When I'm playing from behind (50% or under) I let my healthiest guy tank their match damage as much as possible, then when / if they have a skill ready, I let the featured/loaner (depending on whether mine is healthier or the loaner would've been) eat the skill if it is possible.

Idk, I just don't get hit with enemy skills much. I also tend to match their colors more often than my own (unless I'm shield hopping), if that plays any part in the issue.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

What kind of hopelessly outmatched guys can you be playing to go into a fight with 40% on a regular basis? The only guys I can attack with that kind of health and win reliably would be Hulk, Thor (4*), and Devil Dino, and those guys are usually selected not for their ability to defend well (at least not as well as people think). Take Lethal Intent, 40% of a 8.5K guy is 3400 HP. That's likely within one shot range for a high level Gamora's Razor's Edge, and we're talking about just Gamora here.

Bear in mind three conditions have to converge:

1.) Levels close to mine (2* land)
2.) Specific character traits will influence my decision (quick healing, stealing, or protection possibilities)
3.) Finally, and most importantly, I'm desperate, the clock is running, and it's the difference between 1-2 points over a goal vs. 1-2 points under...

There is absolutely no guarantee, and I lose plenty, but we were talking whether anyone actually tries it at all...

DBC