afraid of leveling my 4* characters!

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  • [Deleted User]
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  • Marty17
    Marty17 Posts: 503 Critical Contributor
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    puppychow wrote:
    Marty17 wrote:
    Right, so basically if you levelled a character, lets say a star.pngstar.pngstar.pngstar.png & it happens to be boosted too, you pretty much shot yourself on your own foot. Well, I guess I forever will see this ridiculous scaling on my PvE!

    The first thing you should do when a new pve event is available to is READ THE RULES. This section will tell you exactly which characters are featured/essential, reinforcements getting buffed for this event, and the weekly buffed characters. As a player, the ideal method of tackling pve is to build teams around these specific characters, and rotate them to save on heal packs. That's the ideal situation. However, to pull it off you need a diverse roster and that's why I would recommend people spending their hp on slots, in order to expand their rosters.

    As far as leveling goes, it goes both ways. While your characters getting boosted will mean scaling is increased, your characters should be powerful enough to handle those nodes. It you can't clear consistently, then the issue may be how you constructed your roster.

    Let's play the extreme scenario. IF you feel you made a mistake in maxing out a 4 star.png , and everyone else on your roster is like half the level of the max character, you could simply sell the 4 star.png . Yes, it's a desperate measure, but it could potentially realign your pve scaling, and put you in a position to place high in future pve events, and get iso, hp, cover rewards.

    Well, currently I have 2 lvl270 & 21 lvl166, I'm in the process of bringing other star.pngstar.pngstar.png to lvl166, figured it'll make no major difference since there's 2 characters at 270.
  • Unknown
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    Marty17 wrote:

    Well, currently I have 2 lvl270 & 21 lvl166, I'm in the process of bringing other star.pngstar.pngstar.png to lvl166, figured it'll make no major difference since there's 2 characters at 270.

    Yep pretty much at that point your 3 stars isn't going to impact your PvE scaling, buff or not, your 2 maxed 4stars is what scaleing PvE events will base itself off. As 3 Stars when they are buffed only hit lvl 260 if I remember correctly....

    As Puppychow explained in earlier comments, the worst thing you can do in terms of pve scaling is level one or a handful of characters to max level whilst disregarding others... This is a very natural thing for most players to do who don't do much research into the game mechanics.

    My general advice to my allience members has always been always level your characters in tandem, do not have a few which are significantly higher than the vast majority of your roster. I'm usually the one bearing the bad news when a new player has scored a 4 star cover, when I explain given the rest of his roster is at lvl 15 or lower, that lucky draw is actually unlucky for them for pve until he gets more or his characters past that lvl 70 4 star character..

    There has been a number of times I'm just sat here and think to myself do these developers actually know the word "repercussion" as half the time it seems (to me at least) they don't fully understand the impact of some of their changes they make or elements of their game design...

    To emphasize my point, the developer's desire to make the weekly buffed characters to encourage more diverse use of characters, was in my mind mainly to encourage a change in the PvP mindset. I'm not going to go into full details of the effect of that change in terms of pvp but more specifically with PvE events... For a new player like the one i mentioned above who just got a new 4 star character and it happens to be buffed either for the event or the weekly. That player will ultimately be at a huge disadvantage in a PvE story event. Granted it's not ideal to start PvE events until you maxed out a few 1 stars or have 2stars at lvl 50 or above. Lets say they have a couple of characters at lvl 50, but none of them are buffed either for the event or weekly..however that lvl 70 4 star character is buffed. Immediately all his/her story nodes are scaled to a lvl 160 character (the resultant level of a buffed 4 star at lvl 70). As you can see with the rest of the roster at lvl 50, that player is going to be a severe disadvantage!

    Back to my original post... in my case I have a couple of 4 stars sitting at lvl 170 fully covered and around 12 or so maxed 3 stars. With the rest of my 3 stars at the lvl 100 to 138 range. Depending on which characters are buffed, usually I have a couple of characters at a similar level around the 200-260 range when buffed. not a huge problem. The problem arises when it manages to buff one of my lvl 170 4 stars but none of my 12 maxed 3 stars. Suddenly the PvE scaling has actually made the game more difficult for me in this situation because of the skew of difference in levels in my buffed roster.

    If anything PvE scaling should take a mean average of a couple (six to eight) of your highest level characters and base it off that mean average unbuffed level NOT the highest level of your characters after buffs!

    Now this will mean the pve event will be easier for more people and also lessen the impact of a situation like that I described with a new player. However making it easier can potentially cause server issues, as more people will grind towards the end of a PvE event. But that would need a whole scoring system overhaul to avoid that
  • Marty17
    Marty17 Posts: 503 Critical Contributor
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    Marty17 wrote:

    Well, currently I have 2 lvl270 & 21 lvl166, I'm in the process of bringing other star.pngstar.pngstar.png to lvl166, figured it'll make no major difference since there's 2 characters at 270.

    Yep pretty much at that point your 3 stars isn't going to impact your PvE scaling, buff or not, your 2 maxed 4stars is what scaleing PvE events will base itself off. As 3 Stars when they are buffed only hit lvl 260 if I remember correctly....

    As Puppychow explained in earlier comments, the worst thing you can do in terms of pve scaling is level one or a handful of characters to max level whilst disregarding others... This is a very natural thing for most players to do who don't do much research into the game mechanics.

    My general advice to my allience members has always been always level your characters in tandem, do not have a few which are significantly higher than the vast majority of your roster. I'm usually the one bearing the bad news when a new player has scored a 4 star cover, when I explain given the rest of his roster is at lvl 15 or lower, that lucky draw is actually unlucky for them for pve until he gets more or his characters past that lvl 70 4 star character..

    There has been a number of times I'm just sat here and think to myself do these developers actually know the word "repercussion" as half the time it seems (to me at least) they don't fully understand the impact of some of their changes they make or elements of their game design...

    To emphasize my point, the developer's desire to make the weekly buffed characters to encourage more diverse use of characters, was in my mind mainly to encourage a change in the PvP mindset. I'm not going to go into full details of the effect of that change in terms of pvp but more specifically with PvE events... For a new player like the one i mentioned above who just got a new 4 star character and it happens to be buffed either for the event or the weekly. That player will ultimately be at a huge disadvantage in a PvE story event. Granted it's not ideal to start PvE events until you maxed out a few 1 stars or have 2stars at lvl 50 or above. Lets say they have a couple of characters at lvl 50, but none of them are buffed either for the event or weekly..however that lvl 70 4 star character is buffed. Immediately all his/her story nodes are scaled to a lvl 160 character (the resultant level of a buffed 4 star at lvl 70). As you can see with the rest of the roster at lvl 50, that player is going to be a severe disadvantage!

    Back to my original post... in my case I have a couple of 4 stars sitting at lvl 170 fully covered and around 12 or so maxed 3 stars. With the rest of my 3 stars at the lvl 100 to 138 range. Depending on which characters are buffed, usually I have a couple of characters at a similar level around the 200-260 range when buffed. not a huge problem. The problem arises when it manages to buff one of my lvl 170 4 stars but none of my 12 maxed 3 stars. Suddenly the PvE scaling has actually made the game more difficult for me in this situation because of the skew of difference in levels in my buffed roster.

    If anything PvE scaling should take a mean average of a couple (six to eight) of your highest level characters and base it off that mean average unbuffed level NOT the highest level of your characters after buffs!

    Now this will mean the pve event will be easier for more people and also lessen the impact of a situation like that I described with a new player. However making it easier can potentially cause server issues, as more people will grind towards the end of a PvE event. But that would need a whole scoring system overhaul to avoid that

    Yeah I get ya, I'm being optimistic now as I only have about 20 more characters to level then all of my roster is max levelled :p

    Final question, so now that it's established that the scaling is based upon my 2 lvl270 characters, I assume the scaling can't possibly get any higher (lvl300+?!) if I were to level more star.pngstar.pngstar.pngstar.png to its max?
  • puppychow
    puppychow Posts: 1,453
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    theoretically, the highest level for a node is 395. With community scaling turned off though, I don't think anyone will see that. Since you got max 3/4 star.png characters already, I don't think an additional 270 or two will screw up your scaling.
  • Unknown
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    Yep community scaling off, your chances of seeing lvl 395 nodes are rare, but by no means impossible... If you do exceptionally well when clearing your nodes.. i.e. taking next to no damage all the time... your personal scaling will rocket you to the max node level rather quickly...

    This was a huge problem when people were using prenerf CMags and Spiderman. As you could easily get into a state where you can infinitely chain stun the enemy team til they're all dead.. The chances of it happening with today's current heroes is smaller because most infinite stun teams are nerfed very quickly, only person that may be able to do it these days is dare-devil. (discounting gorgon as he is not player obtainable)

    It's also odd that because personal scaling is based on how well you do, protect tiles actually become a hindrance to difficulty too! As protect tiles reduce the damage you take, thus the game thinks you are doing much better, so it shoots the difficulty up! Yep although it's great you won't be using health pack as often early on, you end up using more later because scaling has gone through the roof! Again like I said, it seems the developers want to punish players for not wanting to buy health packs and doing too well... I know they need to make money... but frankly I think there are better ways. (i.e. don't have the essential character? you can hire it for a hp cost per use). How protect tiles cab adversely effect your scaling makes characters with protect tiles somewhat undesirable if you want to keep the game easy especially towards the end of a PvE sub or event. Again a very strange developer decision if you ask me.

    So if you want to control your personal scaling, make sure each node you do, your characters take moderate to heavy damage. Anything less than 25% of your total health in damage will result in a personal scaling increase after about 3 or 4 attempts on that particular node. I'm not sure of the precise numbers

    This will mean you don't want to be using your buffed max level 4 stars on the static easy nodes (lvl 70 and under) as you will easily decimate the enemy and thus the game thinks you're doing too well and it will impact your harder nodes in a bracket. You won't see the static nodes increase in difficulty but the harder nodes and the essentials will scale up after a couple of node completion successes. So in essence you need to balance speed and damage to control how much your personal scaling goes up. The last two PvE events I've not noticed it go up much if at all except on a couple of goon only nodes where I consistently took no damage, one of which jumped from level 180 to 280!
  • puppychow
    puppychow Posts: 1,453
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    If you're ever in the hunt for the top of a bracket, you know that you'll be buying heal packs left and right in order to continue raking in points and keep up with your competition. I don't think heal packs sales need to be goosed, and I'm sure D3 realizes that. What they want to do, instead, is to convince players to buy slots in order to unlock the essentials. That's where the money maker is, along w/ cover pack sales, for pve events.
  • Dauthi
    Dauthi Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
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    This is yet another reason why PVE is breaking the game. Nobody should be afraid to level their characters. What kind of backwards game inflicts this kind of mentality on its players?

    Players should be excited to level as high as they can because it will help them, however the PVE system is actually hostile towards veteran players. Players who have all their 3*s won't play half of the PVE's anyways, so there really isn't a need to give a handicap to weaker rosters.

    Perhaps instead of looking at levels, the system should look at total covers currently obtained (not counting repeats).
  • Xenoberyll
    Xenoberyll Posts: 647 Critical Contributor
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    The problem is that the scaling becomes much harder the higher up you are. Also they're buffing 1 or 2 stars mostly - characters that scale a lot better than your 4star does. Add 100 levels to a 4 star and the difference is small compared to the difference those 100 levels make on a Juggernaut.

    It's a general problem with this game that improving gets punished.
  • Druss
    Druss Posts: 368 Mover and Shaker
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    Speaking from experience I had 20 or so 3* at max level 166 & X-F @ Lv 220. I enjoyed the game , playing far too much, probably 4+ hours daily & competed for 1st place in PvE's.

    I had about 700,000 iso & decided to max Fury to 270 as well as X-Force - this utterly killed the game for me. In order to compete in PvP now I have to use XF/Fury/Featured as facing Lv 350's Hulkbusters etc all the time. In PvE node scaling often starts in the Lv 240 range - I'm sorry but 2*Daken, Bullseye, Moonstone & Jugs at this level is purely luck to beat & are definitely not grindable.

    I now find myself barely reaching top progression in PvE, almost given up in PvP & only doing DDQ - anything else feels like a slog.

    In short: DONT LEVEL 4* PAST 166!
  • [Deleted User]
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