The influx of goons in revamped missions is insulting

Unknown

I think this is the first time I felt insulted by the game after wiping yet another time to say, Yelena + 2 Pyros because even after you downed Yelena you can't do anything about the Flamethrowers, and no you can't just bring a CD specialist because that'd leave you pretty crippled dealing with coming up with enough damage to down Yelena on time before you get eventually overwhelmed by Flamethrowers and since Yelena can move the board, the match damage done by having the Pyros themselves prevents you from playing a defensive strategy when you take 500 a pop from each match 3. Even the Gauntlet wasn't so bad to insult the player's intelligence by throwing villian + goon combo nodes at the very end. I hope everyone have realized by now that goons are massively overpowered compared to virtually any playable character in the game. At high scaling their match damage alone is crippling. I do not consider myself a roleplayer, but if all I have to do look forward to while improving my roster is so that I'm slightly more effective fighting Bagman + 2 overpowered goons then I've no intention to play this game. This goes even beyond scaling, though no doubt scaling just magnifies everything more. If you want to kill players you can put a level 395 Ultron with 2 other guys on every node. At least I understand that Ultron is supposed to be a boss and is supposed to have utterly unfair abilities. Keep on losing to guys like 'Analyst' or 'Kishu' or 'Criterion' makes me feel like all I have been doing is a complete waste of time. And since I see no reason why this would be changed anytime soon, I've already uninstalled the game even though I was sitting at #6 in the Iso 8 Brotherhood event so I'm obviously still doing much better than the average.

By the way, I would normally be sitting at #2 if I was able to play optimally, but the new time zone changes makes it impossible for me to not miss at least 4 hours from the optimal cycle unless I want to get a lot less sleep, and now that I think about it, it's pretty crazy that I even considered this as a factor before ultimate deciding that dropping a few places was still the right choice over sleeping a lot less. From what I can tell the devs don't want people to play the game too much, and yet they still aren't doing anything about how even a small advantage in timezone can lead to an insurmountable lead. In the previous time system I can get my normal amount of sleep and be at most 2 hours off pace. Now that it's move 1 hour ahead, it impacts my schedule twice which leads to 4 hours off the pace and that is enough to make #1 unlikely when playing against players of equal dedication. That is simply nuts.

grunth13

If phantron is leaving, the state of this game is very limited. He actually stood up for you, d3. Learn from your mistakes, make the game fun again, because otherwise it will start losing money.

Unknown

The last Iso-8 brotherhood event, I was able to do very well, top 50. I didn't even have all the essentials. I had a bunch of 3* around 114, scaling was reasonable, was able to grind every node. Since then I have leveled a core group of 6 guys up at once, up to lv 135 now.

All of a sudden I'm getting wiped multiple times in the first sub, in the nodes with goons, Yelena and Moonstone. One photon blast one-shots everyone I bring to the table because she's 100 levels higher than my guys. I have no one capable of taking down 12k in short order like that. Nevermind if I focus on her, unstable blasts wreck the team anyways. If this is the first "trivial" sub, there's no way I'm going to make any headway in this event, especially since I don't have any essentials other than Fury.

Time to take a week off I guess.

Unknown

Let me reiterate this isn't just about scaling, though scaling most definitely makes everything worse. I actually tried several times on the Ultron + She-Hulk + Loki node before giving up and using Whales, and if health packs aren't at such a premium I'd have liked to tried that node just to prove that it was beatable without Whales. I know that Ultron is meant to be a way overpowered boss character and that node is supposed to melt player's faces, so even though I lose to it many times I can live with that.

Now imagine if a node is level 300 Bagman + 2 Pyros. This is a lot harder than it looks because Bagman can still move the board, so a pure CD defense team like Blade + Falcon wouldn't work because he'll eventually defuse your Nightstalkers. You're still getting a Flamethrower for about 4K on everyone every 2.5 turns. The fact that Bagman can move the board generally makes it much harder to get rid of Flamethrowers since the only case this would help you is if the AI miracle cascade and destroyed their own Flamethrower, and yet even on a team with no offensive abilities on the guy who can move the board, getting a miracle cascade against this level would result you taking probably 4K worth of match damage. If you do beat the node, it's pretty much the easiest configuration I can think of that involves this combo. If you lose, well, you just lost to Bagman. Now level 300 Bagman + 2 Pyros is probably a much stronger team than anything the players can field, but that doesn't justify its difficulty when such teams are used ubiqitiously after the revamp. It's insult on injury as not only are those nodes incredibly difficult, if you lose them you're still saying, "Whoa, I just got spanked by Yelena + 2 goons". Back when Ragnarok had his 2 AP Thunderclap, he was incredibly cheesy but it actually felt quite satisfying to beat him, and perhaps due to sheer accident he wasn't used very often either, so it felt like you were taking down a boss. Sure I had my share of utter wipeouts against him, but you can tell yourself that Ragnarok has a 2 AP Thunderclap which is obviously totally broken so there's no shame losing to an obviously boss level character. Even Ares/Juggernaut falls under of the same 'way too strong for PvE' category so you can at least say you tried. Now the proliferation of goons is making even Yelena very tough so you can feel like you're totally not getting anywhere in this game. I thought about burning my remaining HP for this event to max out IMHB, and then I realized that'd be so that I can defeat Yelena more effectively and I said forget it, I'm not spending HP or money to get better at defeating Yelena.

Unknown

I didn't mean to make my addition primarily about scaling, whoops. I should've emphasized that even with my LCap boosted to 183, he dies at the hands of goon powered nodes. The Yelena/pyro node is the worst. Even with a character tailor made to handle goon cds, I get hosed. Maybe if I get a 11 red ap cascade to start I'll have a chance.

Vhailorx

1 enemy + feeder goons is one of the devs only tricks for defeating the stupidity of their ai (this strategy removes almost all choice from the ai, giving a limited set of powers and an unlimited supply of ap to fuel those powers. The only the ai can do wrong is use the goons' powers instead. Which it does from time to time).

It seems clear that the recent pve revamp was intended to nudge the difficulty level up a little bit, so it would make sense for the same changes to also increase the number of feeder goons in deadly nodes.

It's very annoying from a player perspective, but fwiw, it seems to fit into the devs' larger strategy for the game.

Unknown

Vhailorx wrote:

1 enemy + feeder goons is one of the devs only tricks for defeating the stupidity of their ai (this strategy removes almost all choice from the ai, giving a limited set of powers and an unlimited supply of ap to fuel those powers. The only the ai can do wrong is use the goons' powers instead. Which it does from time to time).

It seems clear that the recent pve revamp was intended to nudge the difficulty level up a little bit, so it would make sense for the same changes to also increase the number of feeder goons in deadly nodes.

It's very annoying from a player perspective, but fwiw, it seems to fit into the devs' larger strategy for the game.

That's not entirely true because if you want something hard you can just have Juggernaut in every node, or for that matter have Iron Fist on every node. It'd be just as hard if not harder, but at least you're not losing to random faceless guys.

It was a common compliant for Heroic Jugg that Juggernaut was all over the place and he's definitely very hard. So when they revamped it they put in a lot of new nodes, except they put in pretty much exclusively 1 enemy + feeder type. By the way, even if the feeder is the wrong type, it's still plenty hard. Yelena + 2 Pyro has no possible synergy and I wiped on that just from unable to get rid of Flamethrowers even after Yelena is downed. Yelena's mere presence prevents you from using a strictly anti-CD team as her goon pumped match damage would defeat anti-CD specialists like Falcon rather easily and yet anything that can get rid of Yelena is probably not going to be too great at getting rid of Flamethrowers.

I forgot who said this before but there's a rather bizarre policy where the devs feel they're handcuffed by the available characters in the story, never mind that the story rarely makes sense or that Marvel has a wealth of characters. For example, Juggernaut is generally way too strong as an opponent, but Dr. Ocotopus is pretty weak as an opponent. If you look at the DA lineup, if you go with say Bullseye, Moonstone, and Dr. Octopus that might be too weak of a team, but sub any of them out for Ares and it's too hard. Or, in this case, the devs sub one of those guys out for Muscle. What they should do is sub out Bullseye for Captain America, but Captain America is not a DA. But who cares? Or call him Captain Canada, and I'm sure some Marvel buff can give us a bad guy that'd be roughly affiliated with DAs that is similar to Captian America.

dkffiv

Pyros themselves are unfair, they should be 6 turn CDs like Rockets. Thugs are pretty unfair too at 3 turn but I suppose their damage is low in comparison - the problem is they generate too much yellow AP and fire one off every turn.

I had to insta retreat one Yelena attempt because a from the top cascade generated 2 match 5's, dealing 5k damage a piece with the crit multiplier, instantly downing my full life nearly 10k HP Gamora. The level 395 node was dealing 1400 damage a match 4 due to the goon's attack damage. Same thing with the Ultron node, his match damage was so high it was impossible to bring anyone with less than 10k hp. The "goons never generate matches so they deserve high match damage" argument is tiny kitty poop. Either give them the standard 3 color progression or let them have rainbow damage equal to either team up damage or third color priority match damage. It would still give champ + 2 goons an unfair advantage in that they have no bad match damage colors but at least the incoming damage would be reduced by like 50%.

Also f the 2* essential nodes. I appreciate that at least I'm only fighting goons, the problem is the goons in these subs all have AoE attacks and if one goes off it instantly kills my fully covered but mostly **** 2* because a level 80 can't eat a level 210 rocket. Luckily I wasn't forced to use a kit on a 2* during my grind down but I've started banking 2* essential covers in the event I need fodder to get access to the node.

Also f the buffing of 2*'s when almost no one uses them anyway. The Moonstone health bump makes her significantly harder to down (and she was already deadly if she reached 11 red or 8 purple) and her black has been screwing me over a lot. In the main node loaner battle she stole my Avenger's Assemble defense tiles and the match basically took forever because I couldn't get rid of them. Last event I wiped due to a Bullseye green cascade out of nowhere, the only thing we can be thankful of is they haven't doubled Yelena's HP and given her a third too.

Unknown

I don't know why people assume you have to play optimally. Get a couple less covers and sleep, duh.

Vhailorx

moonstone really has gotten a lot more annoying since her recent changes. I guess that's payback for the fact that rags got noticeably weaker when he was revised.

Also, as I understand it, when over-leveled match damage was toned down during the winter, didn't the devs say that goon match damage would stay high because they don't make matches as often, so they needed the extra punch to keep pace? Doesn't placing 395 goons with tile-moves kinda undercut that argument?

Unknown

Use Falcon, boost +2 B/P If you have to, end of problem. If you don't have Falcon at a decent level, use OBW. If it's a really hard level, use both plus Fathor.

dkffiv

shade_tree wrote:

Use Falcon, boost +2 B/P If you have to, end of problem. If you don't have Falcon at a decent level, use OBW. If it's a really hard level, use both plus Fathor.

Even with a 5 red Cage obw was dying to match damage because of the goon tile strength. Phantrons complaint is that it's hard to bring falcon because yelena has something like 12k hp and falcon lacks offensive potential. I think her black does something like 3k damage even if there are no crit tiles and you eventually get overrun by CD tiles if you can't down things quickly

Unknown

To ArkPrime:

I don't mind getting less covers for playing less. I knew after the timezone change that 1 hour was likely to put me out of top 1 and it would've made top 5 pretty hard. I stopped playing because playing a dumb encounter less often doesn't make the encounter less dumb. I'm just reflecting that it's pretty stupid to even have to contemplate such things in the first place. There were quite a few threads about how the new time slices which was only 1 hour difference from before negatively impacted some people, and while people are always whiny, they're not particularly wrong in this case. An hour difference off the optimal cycle can easily cause you to drop down a tier in PvE and this is something that never should've happened.

To Shade_tree:

If you bring Falcon for Yelena + 2 Pyros you wouldn't even be able to enough damage to defeat Yelena on time before the fight goes on long enough for Flamethrowers to easily overwhelm you. After the recent balance changes they did a pretty good job ensuring guys who are good at dealing with special tiles aren't very good at anything else, which is a fair tradeoff until you're fighting guys who are good at everything.

To dffiv:

If we hold scaling related problem as a separate issue, I don't think buffing characters like Moonstone is inherently bad. The problem is that the goons are far superior to virtually any player character and sometimes the entire team so any boosts to their accompanying villian pushes them over the top. I find a lot of node it'd be like say you got Pyro + Moonstone, you'd spend most of the game trying to make some match 3 wizardry to stop Flamethrowers from wiping you out. A lot of the time you won't even succeed, but even if you do, you're likely to hand the AI a lot of good match in your desperate attempt to stop Flamethrowers so you eventually get nailed by a Photon Blast or Gravity Warp and lose. It's insulting because you're pulling some miracle cascades you don't even know existed just to stop a Flamethrower or Tommy Gun or whatever overpowered CDs the goons are pumping out every 2 turns while taking a ridiculous amount of match damage, and then the game insults you with an overscaled Photon Blast instant kill. It's like sure I can totally focus on denying that 11 red when I have to dig out CDs that seem to always show up on the bottom left/right corners?

I find it hard to believe these revamped missions were ever tested at high scaling, even more so than Gauntlet. That is, I can see someone with a max buffed roster fight some 395s a few times and do relatively okay since the Gauntlet 395s don't have goons. The worst you can get is probably someone like Iron Fist, but if you're a lazy tester and just gave yourself max everything, a 395 Iron Fist won't look too intimidating to your 360 Prof X, 350 Star-Lord, and 260 Mystique. You might even win with that team just because you've some insane levels that can withstand Iron Fist's massive damage. But the recent two events? You can give yourself all the maxed out characters you want and I don't see how you wouldn't get frustrated on say just a level 300 Yelena + 2 Pyros, let alone anything that's optimized for the villian's strength. I think I started out winning that node comfortably, and then I started losing badly and then I realized that my earlier wins was because I was lucky enough for the AI to put all the Flamethrowers in easily matchable positions. As soon as the Flamethrower show up in the weird places it's just game over. The goon match damage also means, like you said, that you can't bring anyone under 10K HP. Of course even if you brought 3 240s a lot of time you just take 3 Flamethrowers and lose anyway, since the boosted heroes aren't necessarily any good at dealing with CDs either.

Unknown

dkffiv wrote:

shade_tree wrote:

Use Falcon, boost +2 B/P If you have to, end of problem. If you don't have Falcon at a decent level, use OBW. If it's a really hard level, use both plus Fathor.

Even with a 5 red Cage obw was dying to match damage because of the goon tile strength. Phantrons complaint is that it's hard to bring falcon because yelena has something like 12k hp and falcon lacks offensive potential. I think her black does something like 3k damage even if there are no crit tiles and you eventually get overrun by CD tiles if you can't down things quickly

Well, Falcon won't even be able to defuse 2 Pyros pumping out Flamethrowers reliably, so you'd probably need Blade. But if they matched your first Nightstalker then you pretty much already lost, and it's also very easy to lose Blade or Falcon or both to a single Flamethrower slipping through + match damage you accumulated. They're of course not unbeatable, but it's very luck dependent. While I said the same thing about the Gauntlet, I can at least understand if I need a lot of luck to beat a level 395 Ultron. Why on earth should I need to resort to luck to defeat Yelena? I'll even accept a 1* like Juggernaut is obviously godlike in PvE, but I didn't work on building my roster so that I can one day be slightly more successful at defeating Yelena.

Moon Roach

Phantron wrote:

Keep on losing to guys like 'Analyst' or 'Kishu' or 'Criterion' makes me feel like all I have been doing is a complete waste of time. And since I see no reason why this would be changed anytime soon, I've already uninstalled the game even though I was sitting at #6 in the Iso 8 Brotherhood event so I'm obviously still doing much better than the average.

Wait a minute. Phantron has uninstalled the game. No rage quit video, just a calm and reasoned viewpoint on goons with a throwaway line buried in the middle.

Phantron: someone who's been on the forum for 18 months, with 8000+ posts and a reputation pushing 2400.

I hope you change your mind. I like reading your posts, even if your paragraphs are sometimes very, very long.

And I have to keep re-reading that bit, just to make sure I read what I think I read.

OnesOwnGrief

Post like these make me wonder what am I doing different if I'm able to play these nodes down to 1 without much issue. I can honestly say that it feels like longstanding members of this forum seem to be playing an entirely different game than me. They may use the same language but their issues seem to be inapplicable to what I've been experiencing.

Linkster79

Even though I have been unaffected by the recent issue regarding the game dropping, all of Phantrons points along with the absolute silence of anybody in officialdom has made me uninstall too. There is absolutely no way that I should have to struggle against a bloody 1* character with 2 goons with the roster I have. Falcon, LCap and Hulk can't seems to bring down a lowly spy and her lackies? I thought these were supposed to be superheroes not cannon fodder!

Tomorrow would have been my 365 Devil Dino day, but you know what? **** it! This game has so much potential to be great but has been ruined by the need of Demiurge to try and squeeze every last drop of money out of it. Think of how great Puzzle Quest and Puzzle Quest 2 are and then truly think of how awful this game is in comparison. Lack of story, having to pay to win in PvP or if you don't want to pay to win then give up sleep to win. No other game I have ever played in my 30+ years of gaming has actually tried to make me revolve around it and change how I run my life.

To those in charge of D3P take some time of work and take a good long look at the F2P mobile market and especially Puzzles and Dragons to see how it should he done.

mr_X

Second the reconsideration phantron. Your posts are always well thought out, articulate and good to read, but on the other hand I do understand your frustration. I uninstalled and burned my first roster.

Only came back because I saw someone playing the game on the bus with a new character and sorta fell back into it.

Scoregasms

I think a simple/easy/quick fix would be to cap the max scaling to say 320 on any PVE nodes, that is still plenty difficult, but still more fun than frustrating. Yes, it would give those who have a more mature roster a slight advantage, but shouldn't that actually be the case? I do not have max 4* for this reason and it's dumb that I have to stop their progression simply because I want to play PVE along with PVP.

While I do see 395 levels, I typically plateau around 350-370 levels during my final grind periods for the early subs, so not as early or often as those with 270's in their roster . I also think new folks will still enjoy an easier time at PVE with a cap at 320 and can still do well, but the game should want folks to max out characters to make the experience more enjoyable.

Ever since they started boosting a bunch of characters, it does seem like scaling has gotten worse (just an observation, not based on facts mind you). As Phantron pointed out, goons are just overpowered when paired with tile movers, if the opposing team can freely gen AP AND make tile matches each turn, they should give AP to both teams, lol. I always wished if a tile mover was paired with a goon, goon generated AP is halted until tile mover is dead or stunned. But that probably would make things too easy (or too complicated to code), so lowering the max scaling cap I think is a better choice.

Was wondering where you went Phantron, you are in my bracket and just seemed to drop off!

GrumpySmurf1002

ArkPrime wrote:

I don't know why people assume you have to play optimally. Get a couple less covers and sleep, duh.

This. Never understood either why the difficulty should be such that you *can* play optimally. The issue is/always has been that the difficulty isn't standardized.

It shouldn't be impossible for a 270 roster to beat and a cakewalk for a 94, but that's where most of the harder nodes end up.

puppychow

Moon Roach wrote:

Wait a minute. Phantron has uninstalled the game. No rage quit video, just a calm and reasoned viewpoint on goons with a throwaway line buried in the middle.

Phantron: someone who's been on the forum for 18 months, with 8000+ posts and a reputation pushing 2400.

I hope you change your mind. I like reading your posts, even if your paragraphs are sometimes very, very long.

And I have to keep re-reading that bit, just to make sure I read what I think I read.

I, too, join in asking Phantron to reconsider quitting the game. I've started talking to him on steam pm just a few weeks ago, and I find him to be an extremely witty, intelligent, insightful character. It's sorta like talking to a mirror. LOL

But yeah, I totally understand the frustration of the cheesy goon feeder nodes. Deceptively easy, but very high probability of getting wiped by an unkind board.