With a high level roster, you really are punished to play

Deadsider

... in pve. I'm starting to feel as if this is an attempt to get people to quit. No, really, hear me out a second.

If the most vocal opposition is vets, you want them to leave or benefit by them being quiet. If that is true, overscaling is an elegant solution to erode them out while helping new players. In theory, vets have the least stuff they still yet want as you have a roster to play from. There may be metrics that correlate fewer buys to people who have more (speculation I admit) but it follows logical reasoning. So why play if your thick roster gets blocked on multiple 240 character nodes, now featuring combos that are actually scary with ultron goons for giggles?

Food for thought. I know I have been playing less.

Unknown

Define "high level".

OnesOwnGrief

Define "punished".

Heartburn

maybe they are trying to farm whales

Unknown

I would not consider myself a vet really (at day 281 ish). But i only have 1 lvl 4 maxed (devil dinosaur) just got my second up to 200 (wolverine). Past that none of my other characters have reached 166. Now the first match in the event i have to use 3 health packs because i limp out of it and the second node says it is easy and with all 185ish characters (hulkbuster, cyclopse,ironfist) They take out the dinosaur in one round around turn 3 because of some really bad cascades. They take out the rest in less than 7 turns after that. Seriously, i enjoyed myself more when i did not get my guys up past 100. At least then i could play for a bit.

MarvelMan

Define play.








Is forum time included?

Unknown

Define "define."

DBC

Various38

I've found through my play that the rating they give the node does not correlate into how it will actually play out. Just this morning I went to pay the "trivial" X-Force essential and ended up using 2 health packs, and losing 4 characters. The characters were all boosted to levels way past what I was up against by the way. The combination of bad starting boards, slow powers, and a few well placed PC cascades led to the demise of my rosters top slots. If I remember correctly the ratings are based on the health levels and not the actual synergy or power levels. The last node in the simulator went up to deadly after two plays and the rest are at hard so this is going to be a rough run.

sinnerjfl

"Operation Vet Purge" is still going strong apparently. It's succeeding, keep it up devs!

Unknown

Veterans have an advantage on the hardest nodes. Weaker rosters have an advantage in the essentials. However the roster strength/skill/time needed to overtake a weak roster is too much for most players to achieve. You have to first come close to grinding essentials down to 1 (no longer trivial), and after that, you still have to beat your 300-395s. It turns out that your 300-395 stuff, even scaled down, is indeed stopping the weaker rosters fine, but if you can't beat those guys in the grind on essentials, it wouldn't even matter because essentials are worth more points.

Unknown

Still waiting to get in on some of that "advantage" weaker rosters have... if I'm at an advantage, I sincerely apologize for what things must look like for higher level players.

It's pretty awesome to have my boosted 2* Thor downed before I've even noticeably damaged the enemy team. Awesome as in not really all that awesome.

1 for 3 in my essentials tonight, and boy, were those fails spectacular. For that matter, the lone success sent all of my heroes to the 5+ hour "healing zone." There's not going to be any grinding from this guy.

tl;dr: When it comes to scaling, there's plenty of punishment to go around.

DBC

scottee

In the first Simulator sub, I didn't grind anything down to zero, but was top 2. I think everyone else is looking at big nodes and just quitting. But my "high level roster" is having no problem. Maybe the buffs made people forget how good Hood is. Or the nerfs made people forget how good XForce/4Thor are.

But shhh, don't tell anyone in my bracket. Top 10 looks like it'll be easy.

Unknown

Yeah, they basically completely changed things in March so that all the transition players like me who were looking forward to having a decent enough roster to win at PvE could no longer do this.

D3 saw that many, many players were not buying health packs and made gameplay so destructive to health that people would buy health packs. That's pretty much all it was about.

While DDQ was wonderful in helping people improve rosters without the appalling ****-shoot of tokens, it has meant that cover buying reduced. They needed the $$$, so got it that way.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

In the first Simulator sub, I didn't grind anything down to zero, but was top 2. I think everyone else is looking at big nodes and just quitting. But my "high level roster" is having no problem. Maybe the buffs made people forget how good Hood is. Or the nerfs made people forget how good XForce/4Thor are.

But shhh, don't tell anyone in my bracket. Top 10 looks like it'll be easy.

There are actually more points in the hard track in Simulator compared to the essential track which is very unusual for a PvE event. The second highest node on hard is roughly the same value as the essential and the highest node is higher than any essentials. Usually the essentials have a monopoly on the highest value nodes. A weak roster has an overwhelming advantage on the essential nodes and when they're the top 3 value nodes like they are in most events, you can simply grind all the essentials down to 1 and hit the hard nodes very lightly and still comfortably come out ahead. When they're structured as Simulator, you usually want to whatever is worth the most points and a strong roster usually has an advantage on the 300+ stuff, so while you're disadvantaged on the essentials you can make that up on the other hard nodes. It also helps that Simulator's essentials are relatively weak compared to the overabundance of Daken/Juggernaut/Ares in a DA event where it's impossible to sustain grinding when at a scaling disadvantage against those guys. Yes the hard track on the DA themed stuff is pretty nuts too even for a low scaling guy, but it doesn't matter as much when you only have to do them once because all the points are concentrated on the essentials.

If they're not going to address the unreasonably low scaling on essentials, then the point distribution seen so far in Simulator is at least workable. Not sure why I am supposed to hit some level 395 stuff to make up a deficit elsewhere against a weak roster, but if that's what it takes, I can manage. But this wouldn't be possible in most DA themed events which makes up most of the PvE events. Nobody is going to make up a deficit by hitting some level 395 Ares/Daken/Juggernaut.

firethorne

scottee wrote:

In the first Simulator sub, I didn't grind anything down to zero, but was top 2. I think everyone else is looking at big nodes and just quitting. But my "high level roster" is having no problem. Maybe the buffs made people forget how good Hood is. Or the nerfs made people forget how good XForce/4Thor are.

But shhh, don't tell anyone in my bracket. Top 10 looks like it'll be easy.

Oh, I didn't just look and quit. I did try to pass that final "hard" node on the track. I agree, xforce is good, especially when paired with an Ultron murderbot and given 100 levels over my various team members.

wymtime

As far as PVE goes I would like to see more gradual scaling. Right now it stats out as normal difficulty and a couple go to hard or deadly. I would like to see them go easy, normal, then to Hard.

If I look at the reason why he Devs set things up as normal. Hard or deadly is more to create separation in scores. Some players see certain characters, or certain levels and say no thanks, or maybe I will do this node one or two times. Another group f players decide to keep playing that node, and that creates separation. I don't know if this type of player is a 2 * player, a huge roster player, or just someone willing to buy health packs if needed.

Remember part of this game is using resources to win. Some people feel paying for health packs to win PVE or PVP is cheaper than buying the covers, or helps them progress. Others ar completly opposed to buying health packs. Others spend 1000HP on shields in one PVP.

The difficulty is to create separation and the players willing to take on the challenge, and or pony up the HP have the advantage. I would like to see lower scaling to start mainly because I don't buy health packs, and I am comfortable only getting 2 covers in PVE. 3 covers is just not worth the grind to me.

Deadsider

It's just like crushing the carrot on a stick. You play so long making a roster and getting max levels and then do less and less with them thanks to how crushing pve is lately. I feel more challenged with my roster now than I was a half year ago and that is the opposite of progress. If there's no progress, why play?

Unknown

I don't do PVE (life is too short) but the problems with over scaling have been brought into PVP as well with the change in MMR. Every match straight of the bat is a tedious grind of max 4hor and Cage. I went to play earlier and when I seen the joyless grind matches I was offered, I just turned it off. Its not that I cant beat these teams, its just that I've lost the will to.