Moonbiscuit's Adventures in Scaling

wiz_biz

moonbiscuit is currently on day 58, with a roster of primarily 2*s at level 66. she pulled a surfer from the legendary token she received from the hulk PVE and is volunteering to test the scaling impacts of adding him to her noob roster, as well as using him in PVE events.

i've been tracking all her enemy levels throughout meet R&G (opening levels as well as her general scaling fluctuation throughout each sub), and she's going to roster him for venom heroic. then in the following PVE, she's actually going to start using him on hard nodes.

that being said, just wanted to tap into the brains out there to confirm at what point it is best to roster him. i was thinking as soon as she finishes meet r&g but before she actually joins a bracket for venom heroic. does that sound about right, or is there any benefit to starting the event first and adding him after she's gotten through the first sub or anything? any input would be appreciated!


and before anyone chimes in and says the devs have confirmed it won't affect scaling...i am well aware of that. nothing wrong with trying to validate it though. especially on the usage aspect in pve - i assume there have to be plenty of noobs/casuals who don't frequent the forums or know a thing about the nuts and bolts of scaling, so we're just really curious to see how significant the impacts are when players take him out for a spin in pve. will they live to rue the day, or is the hype overblown? WE SHALL SEE!

Malcrof

wiz_biz wrote:

i was thinking as soon as she finishes meet r&g but before she actually joins a bracket for venom heroic. !

You nailed it right there.

wiz_biz

thanks malcrof! looks like that's what we'll do tonight when she wraps up meet r&g.

hopefully there won't be much to report once he's rostered but not used, but it could get interesting when the simulator pve rolls around. more to come!

mindsuckr

Will you be using this posting or making a new one?

WelcomeDeath

Bad idea. I can actually tell you it will affect your scaling if you use him. See, a couple weeks ago, I lost my entire roster due to a glitch in the game, lost a couple days play. Devs resolved it, got it back. Signed into pve event, my scaling went back to how it was when I first started. That's with every 3* above level 100, all but 3 above 120, and 10 maxed. Highest a.i. level was 40 or so on hard levels on hulk pve first sub. Used only low level characters for first and second sub, no noticeable effect on scaling. 3rd sub went all out, used only 166 level and cleared all nodes to 1 in about an hour. Next sub? All the way back up to 200+ for a.i. on hard levels. Roster surfer all you want, don't use him on pve until you've got other characters of similar level to support him, or you will mess up your scaling and u don't know how to get it to go back down, I've tried killing off my entire roster before to no avail when it refreshed

wiz_biz

mindsuckr wrote:

Will you be using this posting or making a new one?

i'll do a new write up once we get in a little deeper, probably right after the simulator pve gets going. so far everything is going as expected though, she did roster SS last night before joining the venom heroic event, and there is definitely not any obvious scaling effect just by having him rostered.

i know some guys on reddit had a thread about that last week and it got pretty confusing as to why their levels were going up, and it's hard to speculate when you don't know what kind of performance history they have...thankfully i watch moonbiscuit like a hawk so i've got much better context this time. and so far, so good.

wiz_biz

Welcome Death wrote:

Bad idea. I can actually tell you it will affect your scaling if you use him. See, a couple weeks ago, I lost my entire roster due to a glitch in the game, lost a couple days play. Devs resolved it, got it back. Signed into pve event, my scaling went back to how it was when I first started. That's with every 3* above level 100, all but 3 above 120, and 10 maxed. Highest a.i. level was 40 or so on hard levels on hulk pve first sub. Used only low level characters for first and second sub, no noticeable effect on scaling. 3rd sub went all out, used only 166 level and cleared all nodes to 1 in about an hour. Next sub? All the way back up to 200+ for a.i. on hard levels. Roster surfer all you want, don't use him on pve until you've got other characters of similar level to support him, or you will mess up your scaling and u don't know how to get it to go back down, I've tried killing off my entire roster before to no avail when it refreshed

honestly, this is about what i'd expect, and i've heard similar tales about people's accounts being restored and their scaling drops much in the way you described. i've always thought that was more due to losing that past performance ranking factor with the restore than anything having to do with roster levels, then once you start returning to your normal playstyle (sounds like you've got PVE and the grind on lockdown), it will kick back up to adjust for your good performance.

we know it's really risky...but the thing about moonbiscuit, she is quite bold in the face of a challenge. i posted this in another thread last week, if it tells you anything about her. it also happened to be the day she beat her first big enchilada, so she was riding pretty high. (although, she's not lost any of her fervor to carry it through in the interim!)

wiz_biz wrote:

so my sister has graciously volunteered to do some testing...well, maybe it wasn't that gracious

when i warned her of the risks of potential scaling increases her response was "i'm starting to get confident that i can eventually do anything! I'M DRUNK ON TACOS AND ENCHILADAS!!!

when i told her she could possible get f'd and what the general consensus is on how scaling works, her response was "yeah but how f'd? Major f'd hard forever or WORTH KNOWING CONCRETE RESULTS AND NOT WHAT OTHER DIP***** ON THE INTERNET SAY?!? i'm brave and i want to do it FOR SCIENCE!"

so, she's quite committed. worst case scenario, she sells off SS (no big loss) and tanks an event or two, and hopefully everything will be manageable again. in all honesty, if we have to resort to that, i think it's pretty disappointing. i want to give devs the benefit of the doubt that non-forumites who pull a surfer and heaven forbid, actually use him, won't be punished for the rest of their mpq career just for wanting to play with their shiny new toy. but i guess we'll see.

the simulator pve should be an interesting test for this...from what i recall, the hard nodes are stupid hard and scale pretty badly anyway. so if she reserves SS just for those nodes and still tries to take as much damage as possible, will it render the game unplayable? or could it actually help her out? i guess we'll see!