The influx of goons in revamped missions is insulting

puppychow

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

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.

For this iso brotherhood event, I adopted a maximized-health-packs approach, meaning that I try to grind the nodes relying on the 5 free heals as much as possible. For me, this means a full clear of the sub every 4-6 hours (since I need sleep too ). And while I'm losing points because I'm not playing optimally, I'm still in the running for top 5 in my bracket.

simonsez

I have to say, I'm really confused by this thread. Phantron, you've rolled with every stupid change that's been foisted upon us, and now you're quitting over something that has always existed? This seems like a really odd place to draw a line in the sand.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

I have to say, I'm really confused by this thread. Phantron, you've rolled with every stupid change that's been foisted upon us, and now you're quitting over something that has always existed? This seems like a really odd place to draw a line in the sand.

Maybe enough is finally enough for him?

A few months ago I started paying serious attention to MPQ after playing very little for 560+ days, and in that relatively short time, I've already begun to question how long the game (sans DDQ) as it stands lasts for me. With the amount of unattractive changes and situations I've witnessed in such a short amount of time, I can only imagine what it would have been like to experience firsthand some of the things I've only read about...

While it does strike me as odd to see his name attached to an "I give up" post based on his prior contributions, everyone's got their, "Yeah, that's about all I can tolerate" point, and perhaps this is his.

DBC

wymtime

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

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.

I think the issue with this is the way scaling buffs characters. It is not that normal or hard difficult is not liste for each player it is the base levels of the enemies that matches how they buff. So a 1 or 2* that gets buffed to 300 does a lot more damage than a 3 or 4* buffed to 300. So when a node turns normal for a level 94 team and the opponent is levels to 120 that opponent does not do the same % of damage compared to a normal level for a 3-4* player.
They should re look at how 1-2* level, or put more 3*-4* opponents in PVE.
I actually don't mind the solo character plus 2 goon feeders. I have lost some people but generally don't have much issue even on high levels. I would rather face 2 goons than Ares, bullseye, Moonstone buffed to 250-300.

TheOncomingStorm

Phantron wrote:

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.

1) glad it's not just my imagination that there have been more villain/goon combo nodes. I'll go further than what you said. This a clear effort by the developers to facilitate transition rosters to dominate pve.

Consider this, their scaling means they'll be using teams with obw and/or stormneto. They are best equipped to deal with these nodes.

2) scaling has been off since they moved to this new pve format of 3 easy, 3 medium essential, 3 hard nodes. Really, my 1 cover 2* node has the same scaling as my cover maxed level 4*? Yes, that makes plenty of sense.

The hard nodes have been off since the Ultron event. They seem to start about where they used to finish. It's like mpq is intentionally ignoring the fact that we'll have to play that node a total of about 5 times minimum per clear.

But bc they changed so many things in such a short period (weekly character buffs, health buffs, new pve format, etc.) I can't tell if my scaling is off or my perception of my scaling is off.

3) damage aside, the scaled nodes just take forever to play. I'm sorry the over scaled nodes. I'm not sure if it's the health buffs it not, but somehow, they streamlined the subs, but my playing time has not decreased.

4) I've said this since the moment they revealed the time slice changes; I don't know who mpq is listening to, but it's the wrong ppl. They had a small contingent of ppl complaining about end times. So because the vast majority liked the time slices so they were silent on the issue, they went ahead and made the change.

I'm hoping with pvp points solving dry shards, they'll open more time slices in pvp and pve.

5) the real reason for the problems in pve continues to be that most of the pves are not true pves. I'll go further, they've fixed so many things in the game, that this issue will quickly become so glaring as the one thing most wrong with this game. Pve needs to be pve, not pvp with a story.

Imo the problem continues to be mpq is overly concerned with reward distribution than player experience for this particular issue. I don't understand why if a player does X amount of work, it's bad for them to get rewards bc another player with more time does y amount of work.

I guess I'm asking why is time spent (even when the amount is absurdly too much) the determining factor in who gets rewards instead of gameplay (like in gauntlet or Ultron).

6. My own personal pet peeve of pve scaling is the quagmire mpq has put me in. If I use only my very best characters I can adequately handle most of my hardest nodes. However, this will only make my scaling worse, and how is it fun to be pushed to use only certain characters? If i use other characters, not only do matches take too long, odds are greater I'll wipe, which means more time to do the node again.

This issue is best illustrated in the gauntlet. The nodes are set to a level my roster is supposed to be able to beat. It makes no tiny kitty sense for the nodes to scale bc I did what I was supposed to do. The locked nodes are already at higher levels. So when scaling from beating previous nodes makes future ones higher, it's really double scaling.

The real bottom line is beating nodes that your scaling says your roster should beat, should not penalize players for doing what that are supposed to be able to do.

7. To make pve more like pve, I would suggest if a player hits the top progressive, they should be guaranteed to receive the lowest top tier reward. In other words, they should receive t150 rewards for normal 3* rewards pve.

sc0ville

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

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.

Thanks, I was beginning to feel crazy like I was the only one missing something. I had to force myself to remember what node he was speaking of because it was entirely un-exceptional to me. I got a late start on my final clear and that was one of the only nodes I grinded down to 1.

I don't know why you'd use blade on that node to begin with, he's not a character that screams goon+ hero node to me. I cleared to with my standard team without much issue. Currently #3 in scoregasm/phantron's bracket.

Unknown

The guys saying "I do fine clearing to 1" is like saying "I win money in Las Vegas playing slot machine so I don't know what you're doing wrong". Someone has to be lucky but that's not a long term sustainable strategy. I did fine on the Kingpin + 2 yellow feeder nodes compared to others last event. It's not because of anything I did anything other people don't know about. It just turned out that during my clears the purple tiles were in a more accessible place to get Master Plan going compared to say Simonsez who posted about that node being too hard while running the identical team, and additionally for reasons nobody can understand my scaling was lower than his so that also pushed the node in my favor.

The massive increase of goons are worse than what's before because goon strengths are inevitable and almost uncounterable. If the enemy has a 395 Iron Fist you bring Hulk. If they have a 395 Blade you probably want to bring someone decent at red since you'll be focused on matching reds. Doesn't mean if you go with what I said you'll easily win against those guys but at least you can do something about their strengths. When Iron Fist knocked out your Hulk in 5 turns you can say, 'well I had the right strategy but the AI got really lucky', or just blame Iron Fist for being way overpowered. When a goon drops one of your guys with just match damage there isn't anything you could've done better to avoid it. Same with when a Flamethrower gets deposited at the bottom of the screen with no way to match it unless you get 5 free moves in a row. Scaling magnifies all these problems such that it is far more apparent, but even if say there are only two scaling setting in the world: level 250 or level 300, just because you're playing a level 250 Kingpin + Muscle + Hitman doesn't mean that node isn't going to lead to some serious angry moments. The fact that everyone else is even more screwed than you does not make up for the stupidity of that node. If you want an example of this, just run the introduction node with the default team 10 times. Even in the ideal opening like say you Recharge into a Unibeam to immediately knock out Moonstone, there will be games where those Shadow Knives/Unstable Blasts are in a position you absolutely can't reach and the game will drag on for a long time. You might even lose those games. And this is where your team has almost double the level of your opponents. Usually it's the other way around!

On the time slice issue, I think saying this time is good for you or not good for you is missing the point. If they move everything forward one hour I'll be back to as close ideal as it gets, but it'll likely be not ideal for someone else and there's no reason why the game has to cater to me over anyone else. I play quite a few games competitively and follow a lot more games where people play competitively, and I've never heard of things like, 'Bob is one hour away from the ideal timezone, he could've been someone great otherwise.' I recall some MMORPG having a EST or PST bias, but that's 3 hours and even the most hardcore MMORPG I don't know of anyone who simply can't make it to the top due to a 3 hour timezone difference. It's both this realization that being '1 hour off' is likely to drop me a tier, and that I may have to make considerable sacrifices to get better at defeating goons to get to where I was that made me question why I am even playing this game. Even though it's just a label, I do feel insulted losing to guys with no name titles. If you're to make a list of the most powerful characters in the game in a team environment, it'd probably look something like:

1. Ultron
2. Ultron Fighter
3. Muscle
4. Kishu
5. Ultron Gunner

And it'll be a while until you find a playable character (likely Iron Fist, or maybe IMHB). Maybe it's superflous, but I do play a superhero game to try to defeat impressive sounding guys, not henchman. I remember a random MMORPG gave an interview saying they phased out all the 'rat' enemies because they found that players get very angry when their max level guys gets defeated by a rat boss. Sure, a rat or a dragon boss with the same stats should be functionally the same encounter, but there's a reason why you see a lot of high end dragon bosses and probably no such thing for a rat boss.

Vhailorx

Perhaps the problem Phantron is that there aren't many great anti-goon 3*s or 4*s that are also top tier characters.

Falcon has his uses, but isn't fast enough to handle goon countdowns. And who else is there? Star-lord can overwrite one countdown at a time, but it's a 4-match power. xforce has decent boardshake (if you keep him 5/5/3), but he isn't what he used to be. Lazy Cap is great, but even he can get overwhelmed by ninjas, or thugs, or anyone that puts out tons of tiles. Blade is also, and he takes some time to get going and suffers against tile-movers that can shake up his web of red strikes.

So while there are plenty of good top tier teams to handle teams of tile-movers, there aren't nearly as many teams for countering goons. That's fine at 270 or even 320. But it breaks down at 395 when it's not possible to bring obw or a similarly squishy anti-goon character to handle countdowns because there is also a tile-move doing 500 damage per match (even if they aren't be fed ap).

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

The guys saying "I do fine clearing to 1" is like saying "I win money in Las Vegas playing slot machine so I don't know what you're doing wrong". Someone has to be lucky but that's not a long term sustainable strategy.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know scoville's track record. It's impossible that you have to learn something, you do everything right and the game itself is broken because it's not working.

Unknown

Vs hard 1 enemy + 2 goons I've generally found myself resorting to LCap + MNMags + someone who tanks purple + b/p boosts. Even then, I can't always stop every flamethrower or every pistol, causing an instant retreat. The game doesn't reward trying different combinations enough and despite the clamor for roster diversity, it just doesn't hold true in PVE.

Unknown

Vhailorx wrote:

Perhaps the problem Phantron is that there aren't many great anti-goon 3*s or 4*s that are also top tier characters.

Falcon has his uses, but isn't fast enough to handle goon countdowns. And who else is there? Star-lord can overwrite one countdown at a time, but it's a 4-match power. xforce has decent boardshake (if you keep him 5/5/3), but he isn't what he used to be. Lazy Cap is great, but even he can get overwhelmed by ninjas, or thugs, or anyone that puts out tons of tiles. Blade is also, and he takes some time to get going and suffers against tile-movers that can shake up his web of red strikes.

So while there are plenty of good top tier teams to handle teams of tile-movers, there aren't nearly as many teams for countering goons. That's fine at 270 or even 320. But it breaks down at 395 when it's not possible to bring obw or a similarly squishy anti-goon character to handle countdowns because there is also a tile-move doing 500 damage per match (even if they aren't be fed ap).

It's a problem even at 270 but it's less of a problem compared to if the node was 350 or 395.

It is probably by design that characters who are good at handing goons aren't good at handing other characters. That's a fine tradeoff until almost every node has a combination of both. It seems like goons are used assuming they're inferior to playable characters even though they're not (and if it's intended that's just messed up). Here's a mental exercise. Imagine you're able to use a goon at level 166 stats in all environments, and a game restriction that says you MUST use the AP for the goon's power. For example if you've a Pyro, you can only use green for Flamethrower (unless Pyro is downed). Now given those restrictions, would anyone not run a Muscle on their team? If your queue pops up a guy with level 166 Muscle in PvP, is your reaction going to be "LOL easy win" or "???" Since goons are way overpowered compared to player characters, only way overpowered characters can possibly handle goons and they did a pretty good job at cleaning that up by now, but D3 apparently still doesn't think goons are way overpowered.

Unknown

A problem I noticed in this thread from players and I suspect also devs is that people don't seem to realize when winning against ultra cheap nodes has almost nothing to do with your skill when others bring up this being an issue. Take the two historically difficult combo node: Don + IM35 + Magneto in TaT, and HT + 2 Grenadier in Prodigal Sun. I've always done very well on those nodes, and the latter node has always been where I go for the kill in terms of score separation. I've thought out both nodes in considerable depth and have what I believed to be an optimized strategy for them, and you know how much difference that makes? I consider to be pretty lucky if all the preparation I did impacted even one match in either of those nodes. It's something like 2% strategy, and 98% split between whether you had some broken character and luck. Now that the broken characters are pretty much all gone, the dominant strategy to approach these nodes would be 'pray AI doesn't use Flame Jet' and 'pray AI doesn't use Magnetized Particles'. I'm pretty sure I have much better than the average luck since I was usually able to clear those down to 1, but I've never told anyone all you need is to have some good strats or play better to beat them. I'm quite willing to tell you that I have had a very good run on those including say 3 consecutive matches without Flame Jet ever being fired, and it's got almost nothing to do with what I'm doing but rather the AI just keeps on skipping Flame Jet. Yes I do bring the most powerful team I can, but it's not like any of that matters if the AI simply used Flame Jet or Magnetized Particles on first opportunity. At my scaling Magnetized Particles can generally one shot anyone when I was doing that node, so the only way I was winning was either a lucky 3 turn kill on Magneto, or that AI decided to use their blue AP for something else. It's not because I was somehow able to outsmart the AI. Stronger players will still be able to do it more consistently, but the cheaper the node is, the less skill/roster matters.

Pylgrim

I, as other have commented above me, had 0 problems with that node. I believe I cleared with Patch/Daken/Loki? With that I am not trying to say that your complaint is invalid, btw. Goons do scale pretty gruesomely, some more than others and when combined with a PC, it may be outright unfair. Have you tried Hulk-bombing?

The complaint I don't understand much is the one about the time shift. I mean, it is pretty bad that it messed your schedule (and many others') but in the same way, it fixed the broken schedules of many others. You cannot take that change as though it was targeted against you, they surely took a look at their numbers and made a change that would benefit the higher percentage of people. Mine got a bit broken, too, placing my sleep time smack in the middle of a refresh. For the current event, in the slice that I am, it means that I need to let 11-12 hours pass between my first and second refresh, forcing me to play the third only 4-5 hours after. However, I've noticed that even playing sub-optimally like that I still can place top 5. Yes, I will never, ever be 1-2 but that doesn't concern me.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

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.

I wasn't just throwing out a likely combo, I was stating that the use of Falcon + OBW + Fathor will clear this node if you play it correctly. Concentrate on B/P, steal with OBW, match the falcon tile to free it up ASAP, hit Yelena with CtS (from all the green you're collecting), use OBW blue if the flamethrowers are down to 1.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

I, as other have commented above me, had 0 problems with that node. I believe I cleared with Patch/Daken/Loki? With that I am not trying to say that your complaint is invalid, btw. Goons do scale pretty gruesomely, some more than others and when combined with a PC, it may be outright unfair. Have you tried Hulk-bombing?

The complaint I don't understand much is the one about the time shift. I mean, it is pretty bad that it messed your schedule (and many others') but in the same way, it fixed the broken schedules of many others. You cannot take that change as though it was targeted against you, they surely took a look at their numbers and made a change that would benefit the higher percentage of people. Mine got a bit broken, too, placing my sleep time smack in the middle of a refresh. For the current event, in the slice that I am, it means that I need to let 11-12 hours pass between my first and second refresh, forcing me to play the third only 4-5 hours after. However, I've noticed that even playing sub-optimally like that I still can place top 5. Yes, I will never, ever be 1-2 but that doesn't concern me.

If you can win stuff with Daken they're obviously not scaled at a point where it'd matter, but even scaling isn't the whole point. HT + 2 Grenadier at 395 is obviously broken. If they fixed it such that he's just level 40, nobody would have a problem with the node. This doesn't mean HT + 2 Grenadier is suddenly a well designed node. It just means scaling has rendered its difficulty irrelevent so you don't have to worry about how dumb this node is. As long as scaling is something completely out of player's control, it's not even a band-aid solution since none of us have the option of just lowering the scaling to begin with. By the way, the goons do not quite do enough damage to trigger Anger with their normal matches (match 4/5 will). Whether this is a freak accident or intended, it means one of the tried-and-true tools to deal with ultra high level nodes no longer works most of the time. They'd have to have someone like Daken, Blade, or Iron Fist for this to work, and ironically since they nerfed Daken 2*'s Phermone Rage it's actually pretty hard to pull this off even against Daken. Refer to Dffiv's post about how even the introduction Moonstone node can turn out to be surprisingly difficult, and this is a node where the enemies are roughly at half of your loaner's levels instead of the other way around. Imagine the same node and your damage taken is multiplied by 9, and that'd suddenly seem like a pretty stupid node. That roughly represents the expected difficulty on a hard node (level 300 guys have 3 times the level and do 3 times the damage and have 3 times the HP, so they're expected to do 9 times the damage). I learned very quickly that you got to use all the loaners because even if you had all those characters maxed you'd still take significant damage from any stray Unstable Blast/Shadow Knives and you absolutely can't afford to pile up any additional damage at this game, and this is supposed to be the freebie node?

I'm not saying they need to change the time slice to be better for me. I'm saying it's stupid that we have to be arguing about 1 hour difference which does impact your placement in very tight PvE events. I don't know of another game where being in the wrong time zone by 1 hour has a significant impact. I've heard of Euros having problem playing on US time in quite a few games, but that's roughly half a day, not 1 hour. This is not a deal breaker for me, but just something that occured to me part of the reason I need to deal with so many of those stupid nodes is because the time slice has moved one hour away from my optimal schedule. Of course even on my optimal schedule I'd still have to deal with a lot of stupid nodes, but it's just easier to see the problem now that you are likely to fall out of your usual finish.

Unknown

shade_tree wrote:

Phantron wrote:

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.

I wasn't just throwing out a likely combo, I was stating that the use of Falcon + OBW + Fathor will clear this node if you play it correctly. Concentrate on B/P, steal with OBW, match the falcon tile to free it up ASAP, hit Yelena with CtS (from all the green you're collecting), use OBW blue if the flamethrowers are down to 1.

You need some perspective on what a level 300 goon can do. They'll do match damage for about 500 on every color. Yelena has about 10K HP while her 2 Pyros have 12K a piece. OBW can take about 7 match 3s before she gets downed though she'd only match black in this team setup. Falcon's ~8K HP isn't exactly much against the match damage we're talking about, as a match 4 will do 1K. A 2 chain will do about 800, and a 3 chain will do 1000.

A Flamethrower will do about 4K damage to everyone, instantly knocking out OBW. A second one will finish Falcon if he's not already downed from the minimum of 500 match damage per turn. A CtS does less than 5K damage to Yelena, which is only half of her HP. Adding a Thunder Strike is still not enough. Even if you defeated her with such a limited offense you still have the Pyros pumping out a Flamethrower every 2-3 turns. Falcon can pick up roughly every other one but it only takes two to slip through to lose the game. The node is not terribly complicated. All you do is knock out Yelena pretty quick and then hope the Flamethrowers don't get placed in somewhere you can't reach, because the guys with strong offense are rarely good at dealing with CDs. However, your success is solely dependent on where the Flamethrowers end up at. You absolutely cannot take CD defense because the game would drag on way too long with Yelena able to move the board and bringing their massive match 3 damage to wear down your team. Perhaps you can go with some modest form of tile defense like say X Force + Iron Fist + Prof X, but X Force can't knock out a 10K Yelena reliably now in one hit even if you hit your Surgical Strike, and while X Force is a decently strong tile destroyer, it's hardly a reliable one against Flamethrowers. Since Surgical Strike no longer drains AP, you'd also have a very short clock after you take out Yelena, since their highest match is green (Pyro), so your Surgical Strike will wipe out all the green tiles, including the Flamethrowers, but now there will be only 1-3 green tiles left giving you virtually no chance to stop the new Flamethrowers.

Pylgrim

Phantron wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

I, as other have commented above me, had 0 problems with that node. I believe I cleared with Patch/Daken/Loki? With that I am not trying to say that your complaint is invalid, btw. Goons do scale pretty gruesomely, some more than others and when combined with a PC, it may be outright unfair. Have you tried Hulk-bombing?

The complaint I don't understand much is the one about the time shift. I mean, it is pretty bad that it messed your schedule (and many others') but in the same way, it fixed the broken schedules of many others. You cannot take that change as though it was targeted against you, they surely took a look at their numbers and made a change that would benefit the higher percentage of people. Mine got a bit broken, too, placing my sleep time smack in the middle of a refresh. For the current event, in the slice that I am, it means that I need to let 11-12 hours pass between my first and second refresh, forcing me to play the third only 4-5 hours after. However, I've noticed that even playing sub-optimally like that I still can place top 5. Yes, I will never, ever be 1-2 but that doesn't concern me.

If you can win stuff with Daken they're obviously not scaled at a point where it'd matter, but even scaling isn't the whole point. HT + 2 Grenadier at 395 is obviously broken. If they fixed it such that he's just level 40, nobody would have a problem with the node. This doesn't mean HT + 2 Grenadier is suddenly a well designed node. It just means scaling has rendered its difficulty irrelevent so you don't have to worry about how dumb this node is. As long as scaling is something completely out of player's control, it's not even a band-aid solution since none of us have the option of just lowering the scaling to begin with. By the way, the goons do not quite do enough damage to trigger Anger with their normal matches (match 4/5 will). Whether this is a freak accident or intended, it means one of the tried-and-true tools to deal with ultra high level nodes no longer works most of the time. They'd have to have someone like Daken, Blade, or Iron Fist for this to work, and ironically since they nerfed Daken 2*'s Phermone Rage it's actually pretty hard to pull this off even against Daken. Refer to Dffiv's post about how even the introduction Moonstone node can turn out to be surprisingly difficult, and this is a node where the enemies are roughly at half of your loaner's levels instead of the other way around. Imagine the same node and your damage taken is multiplied by 9, and that'd suddenly seem like a pretty stupid node. That roughly represents the expected difficulty on a hard node (level 300 guys have 3 times the level and do 3 times the damage and have 3 times the HP, so they're expected to do 9 times the damage). I learned very quickly that you got to use all the loaners because even if you had all those characters maxed you'd still take significant damage from any stray Unstable Blast/Shadow Knives and you absolutely can't afford to pile up any additional damage at this game, and this is supposed to be the freebie node?

When I say "Hulk-bombing" I mean Hulk+Patch to give them enough damage to trigger anger, which thanks to BR's strike tiles deals over 1k AoE damage, plus lots of damage in green cascades. Usually it takes only 3-4 turns to down any team using this. Obviously, not sustainable on the long run, but good against those particular nodes that rub you the wrong way.

Unknown

In the infinite wisdom of Professor Farnsworth, I can comfortably say:



Soon we'll have lvl 395 Carnage + Goon nodes. For 7 AP, he'll wipe your whole roster.

Unknown

theHappyDance wrote:

In the infinite wisdom of Professor Farnsworth, I can comfortably say:



Soon we'll have lvl 395 Carnage + Goon nodes. For 7 AP, he'll wipe your whole roster.

I think they should do Kishu, Sentry, and Carnage. It's a brand new way to die to a red power every game!

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

You need some perspective on what a level 300 goon can do. They'll do match damage for about 500 on every color. Yelena has about 10K HP while her 2 Pyros have 12K a piece. OBW can take about 7 match 3s before she gets downed though she'd only match black in this team setup. Falcon's ~8K HP isn't exactly much against the match damage we're talking about, as a match 4 will do 1K. A 2 chain will do about 800, and a 3 chain will do 1000.

We clearly play this game a little differently. I beat this level consistently with this combo but YMMV. Good luck.