Let's talk about PVE scaling

simonsez

Eddiemon wrote:

Yet in your earleir post you said that you grind PvE 'pretty hard'. That's where your scaling is coming from. Your performance and history has more bearing than your roster.

But clearly I don't grind harder than people like Phantron and Sc0ville, who place first in pretty much every PvE. Like I've been saying every time I've brought this up, guys like them consistently outperform me significantly in every PvE. So do you want to offer another hypothesis?

simonsez

Eddiemon wrote:

X Force, Iron Fist and Laken are my go to guys in the bomb drop missions. X Force, Iron Fist and Spidey for Ultron Prime.

Ultron Prime and the bomb drop mission aren't the issue. The side battles is where the largest scaling difference seem to be. And why you'd want board shake on the bomb drop missions is a mystery to me, but I'm glad it's working out for you.

simonsez

Phantron wrote:

It seems to me the enjoyment of this event is entirely dependent on how much scaling likes you. I can manage at those numbers, but if they go up to 200-220 it'd be pretty painful.

Scaling update: turns out lv251s aren't fun either...

Vohnkar

simonsez wrote:

Eddiemon wrote:

X Force, Iron Fist and Laken are my go to guys in the bomb drop missions. X Force, Iron Fist and Spidey for Ultron Prime.

Ultron Prime and the bomb drop mission aren't the issue. The side battles is where the largest scaling difference seem to be. And why you'd want board shake on the bomb drop missions is a mystery to me, but I'm glad it's working out for you.

Agreed, I like the Ultron concept. The part that we fight against him and if we die we did X dmg but died in the process. The part I dislike a lot is the sentrys, like everyother goon fight is just a pain to play against. they are ok at lower lvls, low life makes them relatively fast to kill, but when they start being 120+ thye have too much life, they heal, put crit tiles, do insane cascades and they just plainly suck, as always in every PvE event.

My alliance is on round 5, we are quite casual and only 7-8 members are playing a lot on this event. I was trying really hard to push, but after 3 sentry battles to hit ultron I'm just bored and out of heals, I can destroy Ultron, but his minions destroy me? I could managed to get hit really hard by a "boss", but his minions is just too much for me, so everytime I fight them I end up closing the game and thinking how can the devs think is fun to get smashed so hard by those minions.

Don't get me wrrong, I have an extensive roster, not many maxed 3* but enough on the 120-130+ to make them useful on those battles, I can do and beat most of those nodes, but I can't find them fun. They usually get too many cascades or crit tiles. To prevent that I have to match a non-optimal 3 match and delay my attacks while they keep hitting and doing even more cascades. Maybe I've been unlucky, but its been 2 days of doing the same and sucks. Althaugh I prefer this kind of event to the usual ones. At least this event is less grindy, you have a progression reward to work with your alliance instead of bashing your head against optimal clears to beat other players who are doing the same, pushing scaling even further.

With minor tweaks the event would be a lot more fun to do it, but at least they tried new things and look better than the other PvEs.

SnowcaTT

Phantron wrote:

ArkPrime wrote:

GT/XF at 250, 10x166s, 15x100-140s
Round 7.

From top, clockwise

1- QS 185-189
2- QS 129-182
3- BW 188-189
4- Hulk 181-182
5- Thor 181-189


I'm actually surprised to know there's any variety, I thought they were all the same level.

My Ultron Prime finale is 248. First round is 132. These have also been basically the same so far (actually the last one at 186 was the easiest, but good boards will do that)

Your levels are exactly the same as mine (though I'm on round 5). I don't even think the levels on the Ultron Sentries ever go up as a function of round number because I think they've been at those levels since round 1. Sucks to be the guy with higher than those numbers, because it's already pretty brutal at these numbers.

It seems to me the enjoyment of this event is entirely dependent on how much scaling likes you. I can manage at those numbers, but if they go up to 200-220 it'd be pretty painful. I'm sure I can still beat it, but I'd no longer be looking forward to playing any of those nodes. Seems like there are maybe 4 different distinct settings for this event? It sure isn't like a normal event where you'd have a hard time finding two guys with the same enemy level on any particular node.

I think those are my round 7 numbers as well. Not looking forward to the 8th round (nearly there), when the scaling makes it pretty much game over. Hopefully I can hit 2nd QS progression before then.

Unknown

I've been keeping Professor X at base level (70) since Master Plan already does enough damage and I usually need the AP more than the damage, and I don't have enough yellow/purple covers to make use of his passives so if scaling is based on recent characters used like I theorized I can see why I have lower than expected. Of course, that just goes to show how stupid the game is when you'd purposely keep characters underleveled. It's not like I can't afford to take him to level 188 (based on my covers) but I'm pretty sure I'd be in a strictly worse position had I done that! I also have a level 153 Iron Fist that I originally didn't max out due to a lack of cover, but now that I got his final cover I'm not even sure if I want to take him to 166 because Iron Fist gets used all the time and I suspect that slightly lack of levels is keeping scaling somewhat sane.

Stax the Foyer

Concrete example of why this scaling is a bad idea:

With increased health, the regen band of the Flyers increases, where you have to burn them down in a single fight or risk them healing (since the drop-ins at the top are random). Simon and other people with insane scaling don't have any special tools to deal with this. They just have to save up an extra nuke to deal with it.

The idea of personal scaling is a stupid idea to begin with, since it punishes people for playing the game without giving a corresponding increase in awards. (You can game the system, but you have to do so via hidden and nonsensical mechanics, and once you're scaled up it's very difficult to put that genie back in the bottle).

The combination of scaling with health-based mechanics with persistent personal scaling is just bad idea hot fudge on top of a bad idea sundae, especially after the Let's-Make-Every-Fight-A-Slog-Now rebalancing.

Unknown

Flyers aren't even that bad because they at least don't do much offensively so you can wait. A level 180 Gunner (the Swarm type, might be Fighter they all sound the same to me) creates a ~71 attack tile. Let's say you've something like 3 Gunners (which is really an easy type), so you got to keep 5 attack tiles on the board for 350 damage. That's already a lot of attrition damage in an ideal board, and there's nothing stopping them from having more than 5 attack tiles on the board. Note that getting below 5 attack tiles means all kinds of crazy happen with 3 Swarms. So you run say Patch who heals 435 a turn and that looks enough, but what if those guys are 20% higher? Now they'd do more damage than what you can regen even in an ideal case, and you're giving up a pretty decent amount of offense to have Patch in there. And what if there's a Fighter in there? It's not unusual to see half of your health gone in a single Core Meltdown. If they've 20% higher level that'd just be about 60% of your health (Ultron Sentries seem to scale linearly on match damage with levels). In fact in a typical Fighter/Gunner configuration you usually have a lot of Swarms going on since Core Meltdown hits way too hard to risk it, and even with a strong regen the extra cascades caused by Swarm when combined with strike tiles will quickly eat away your health. So you bring Luke Cage who seems to have this event tailored for him, but again it's the same issue here as if the enemy's strike strength even slightly overpowers his protect tile you're looking at the difference between taking a lot of hits for 1 (trivial) or a lot of hits for 50-100 (which adds up very quickly) but the only thing that's responsible for which of those two outcomes you get is your scaling.

Lee T

1) average of top 4 characters in roster.

97 ( 2 100lvl 3* and 2 94 2*)

2) round number

Round 5, Ultron 250.

3) level of unboosted essential and associated wave node.

QS1 67-101
QS2 100-104
Iron Man 80-89
Hulk 96-97
Captain America 63-68

4) levels of nodes for Ultron Prime sub.
100-101-100

GrumpySmurf1002

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

Top 4 characters: XForce (221), Cap, Thor, Grocket, Hood (166)

Prime:

1) 112/113/113
2) 128/129/128
3) 123/124/124
4) 132/133/132
5) 159/159/159
6) 159/159/159
7) 177/178/178
8) 181/182/181

QS (lvl 40) 155, 155-159
Hawkeye (lvl 1) 139-155
Iron Man (lvl 102) 139-140
Black Widow (lvl 94, OBW is higher than GSBW) 105-137

So I'm about to finish Ultron prime now, and my level 8 is now 212/212/212. So it went up 30 levels from when I first posted.

Unknown

Well, I see nothing is changed in MPQ really. The main reason I left it for good is the very PVE scaling ****.