5* Characters effects on PVP/PVE

fmftint

Raffoon wrote:

Wait..... the bigger thing here is that they just explicitly confirmed PVE scaling based on roster strength. (as opposed to only being based on performance)

The confusion is because we use the word scaling to cover two different effects
1 Baseline, the level your nodes start at. Determined by level of available roster
2 Personal, how fast your nodes increase in level. Determined by your performance

Unknown

The thing is, eventually, as you continue playing, Surfer will be the final goal.

And you will HATE yourself every day when you realize your Surfer could be one closer to god mode.

I couldn't part with it. I'd wanna cry when I hit that 4* transition mode.

dider152

I have every character introduced in the game. I have leveled most of my 3*s to lvl 144. My highest level 4* is Xforce at 155 while the rest are at 152. Since legendary tokens and DPD 4*, I try to lvl all my 4* as soon as I get covers, which is hard because of the iso8 drought. What we need is for the proposed double iso8 for Anniversary Week to be implemented year round.

Unknown

dider152 wrote:

I have every character introduced in the game. I have leveled most of my 3*s to lvl 144. My highest level 4* is Xforce at 155 while the rest are at 152. Since legendary tokens and DPD 4*, I try to lvl all my 4* as soon as I get covers, which is hard because of the iso8 drought. What we need is for the proposed double iso8 for Anniversary Week to be implemented year round.

That'd be really nice. However if they limit ISO, we can't level up characters within days and in some cases weeks. The least they could do is double the ISO in the store as the Mother Lode ($100) would barely be enough to get my WXF from level 180 to level 209. Basically, for a ****, 30ish levels is $100. Granted levels 70 through maybe 110 don't cost anywhere near that in ISO, but still it's a lot...

yogi_

fmftint wrote:

A alliance mate received this from CS recently:

When entering a PvE event or sub-event for the first time, the game will review your current Roster (including buffs/restrictions), and the difficulty of each mission will be based on the strength of your top three characters. Many (but not all) of the nodes in the easier missions are capped at a fairly low level, which means they appear artificially low to a high level team; somewhere between 30-50 usually. Then, when you make the jump to harder missions, it looks really stark because you are jumping up to the level you should be playing against, without the caps.

The matchmaking system for the PvP events does its best to pair you with appropriate opponents, which is not necessarily the player you are skipping matches to find. The intended function of the skip feature is to allow players to find favorable matches or avoid unfavorable ones. Keep in mind that one of the major factors that determine which opponents you're paired with is your personal rank in the event, but will still keep an attempt to find other teams with a similar strength based on the top three characters in your Roster.

As the Silver Surfer (Skyrider) character is level 255 when obtained with the possibility of reaching level 270 with its first Comic Cover applied, it is essentially considered to be the strength of a maxed out 4 Star character in your Roster, and the balancing for PvE events and the Matchmaking system for PvE events will take this into consideration when creating the difficulty for each mission and the matchmaking system for PvP events will take this into consideration when searching for an opponent in these events. As such, with a Silver Surfer (Skyrider) in your Roster, it will boost the difficulty you experience you encounter in PvE and PvP events due to its level compared to the rest of your roster.

Please keep in mind that if you enter an event for the first time with a Roster, and then quickly make changes, that event is not going to re-calibrate to the new Roster.

I am so absolutely screwed.

Should not have levelled up my only couple of usable 4* characters to their max for a couple of DDQ tokens, given I primarily play PvE with a even levelled only levelling up very slowly roster.

My scaling has gone nuts.

Terrible decision.

I wish I would have seen this earlier.

Sigh.

*
I wish it was an average of your roster rather than the top 3.

dr tinykittylove

yogi_ wrote:

I wish it was an average of your roster rather than the top 3.

Average wouldn't work, we would have people collecting 1* covers to tank their mmr, like the old system. But it needs a larger sampling than 3, really, especially with how great the disparity a 5* brings in and for the vast majority of players who level up whoever they can not knowing a 3/1/5 xfw or 5/4/1 iw won't do them any good.

wiz_biz

Pylgrim wrote:

In other words, this is definite confirmation that people in 2* land should not keep their SS. For people in 3* land it's ok because the system takes in account buffs, so if you have level 166 characters, they will be buffed to 240 anyway (290 for the featured one), so having a 255 will not increase things noticeably.

i wouldn't necessarily agree with that statement - i posted recently about my noob sister who rostered a surfer with a 2* roster at level 70. i've been monitoring her pve scaling. unfortunately the events that have run since she did it are not great to test against since some of the scaling is out of control for basically every roster, and one was a heroic. in addition, her scaling has always been a little higher than i would have expected pre-surfer, maybe due to having a very helpful alliance so she gets great advice and doesn't waste much time screwing around. but after getting some feedback on my post, looking at the numbers again, and watching what's going on in the current pve, i might want to modify our initial conclusion that there was little to no discernible impact after we get a bit more data - scaling may be impacted more than i originally thought, but it hasn't been insurmountable for her and she's managing without any sort of defeatist attitude and isn't remotely considering selling.

but, we're just talking pve here. if we want to talk pvp that's a whole different story. homegirl isn't getting anywhere in pvp for a minute, as she is now firmly in vet brackets.

yogi_

dr tinykittylove wrote:

yogi_ wrote:

I wish it was an average of your roster rather than the top 3.

Average wouldn't work, we would have people collecting 1* covers to tank their mmr, like the old system. But it needs a larger sampling than 3, really, especially with how great the disparity a 5* brings in and for the vast majority of players who level up whoever they can not knowing a 3/1/5 xfw or 5/4/1 iw won't do them any good.

Actually, you are right - well thought through.

The extreme example of the current system would be a newish player, who for whatever reason happened upon 2 different 5* character tokens.

Bowgentle

Take that thing from CS with a grain of salt.

Scaling in Heroics is just as bad as in normal PVEs, I do not believe it takes restrictions into account.

GMadMan040

No. No. Just no.

No matter what the circumstances, no one should sell off a top tier character. Especially one that is so great from the get go. Even a one cover Surfer does great match damage. And if your cover is blue, he becomes instantly wonderful for you.

For one thing, selling him gets you next to nothing. For another, acquiring him is very difficult and will only get more so over time as new 5* are introduced.

wymtime

Keep him and use him for LR seed teams. He is a huge meat shield and will tank everything and then you don't have to waste health packs on him. You primarily run Parch Daken, but now throw SS in for fun.

puppychow

florida92 wrote:

dider152 wrote:

I have every character introduced in the game. I have leveled most of my 3*s to lvl 144. My highest level 4* is Xforce at 155 while the rest are at 152. Since legendary tokens and DPD 4*, I try to lvl all my 4* as soon as I get covers, which is hard because of the iso8 drought. What we need is for the proposed double iso8 for Anniversary Week to be implemented year round.

That'd be really nice. However if they limit ISO, we can't level up characters within days and in some cases weeks. The least they could do is double the ISO in the store as the Mother Lode ($100) would barely be enough to get my WXF from level 180 to level 209. Basically, for a ****, 30ish levels is $100. Granted levels 70 through maybe 110 don't cost anywhere near that in ISO, but still it's a lot...

I am in a similar situation. I have every cover in the game, aside from 5*. My highest level character is at 181. I'm also holding 15 legendary tokens. I'm not opening them until the next 5* is released. In the meantime, I'm hoarding iso like mad. 560k so far. I've accumulated 1/2 of that just during this season.

I think you need to CHANGE how you spend iso. Before, I was just leveling up my 3s. But with the introduction of 5s into the game, those 3* aren't going to compete w/ a max level SS. So my focus now is to hoard iso so that whenever I get a 5* on my roster, I can level up my 4*.

The thing w/ pve is that you NEED a core of teams to handle the nodes at normal difficulty. So if a 5* will boost normal rating to upper 200s or low 300s, then your roster has to have guys that handle the load. So I anticipate the need to bring up my hb, xf, thora, xavier, jean, & co. in the near future, and I'm hoarding iso for that reason.

so here are the ways to get iso quickly:

1. The easiest iso maker in the game is DDQ. Aim to fully clear it daily. Lots of high iso rewards, with a 3* that you can either keep or sell for more iso. That would be my BEST advice to accumulating iso quickly.

2. Try your best to hit LR and attack the seeds to reach 100 points. Don't spend any iso for boosts. There is a round every 2 hours from Tuesday 1 pm est through Thursday 1 pm est.

3. Participate in the pves. The nodes also give generous iso rewards (generous = anything over 20 iso).

4. DO NOT SPEND ISO to level up your characters unless they assist you in accumulating more iso.

Hope this helps.

dkffiv

babinro wrote:

Does anyone even have proof that deletion of your highest level character(s) will IMPROVE scaling?
I'd hate to recommend deleting something as rare as SS just to see nothing change at all.

I had a bug where my sandbox steam account somehow inherited my bot account's characters (basically all mostly uncovered level 40s) and my PvE levels were extremely low. I went to another computer that I played my sandbox on and uploaded the correct data to the cloud, restoring my maxed rosters. The PvE levels stuck for the rest of the sub but at the start of the next the node levels were back to normal. Levels seem to be calculated at the start of a sub/event and are stuck until the next one opens.

Unknown

Since I don't feel like typing it again:
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=33200#p417628

fmftint

j12601 wrote:

Since I don't feel like typing it again:
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=33200#p417628

CS says you're incorrect

squirrel1120

Pylgrim wrote:

In other words, this is definite confirmation that people in 2* land should not keep their SS. For people in 3* land it's ok because the system takes in account buffs, so if you have level 166 characters, they will be buffed to 240 anyway (290 for the featured one), so having a 255 will not increase things noticeably.

More accurately, I would say that people in 2* land shouldn't even consider opening their legendary tokens to be forced into this decision. Back when I made my 2->3* transition, I never opened any token unless I had an extra roster slot with no character to fill it. It cut down on deleting characters I didn't have by quite a bit, and certainly bumped my roster up in bursts. Compulsion to open tokens before you can roster what you might get from them is probably the biggest detriment to someone's endgame.

SirLanik wrote:

The "hard" and "deadly" don't mean anything- they are just a rough comparison of enemy level to your roster average level.

Your roster average level does not determine PVE scaling.

Everyone else had massively insane scaling on that node too. I beat the 395 enemy with my Loki (boosted to 200) and then two others that were 140 and 130.

So, short answer- selling Silver Surfer will NOT reduce your PVE scaling. I would not personally recommend selling him, as he's an incredibly valuable tank that will only get better with time. I have one now with blue ability, and it's hilarious to true heal for about 3k.

The only thing I agree with here is the comment about the "hard" and "deadly" ratings not having much true meaning... other than effecting quite a few players in a 'psyched out' method, they are just there to provide a rough estimate of the challenge a player can expect. Just as often as not, that rating doesn't mean a darn thing. 'Sure, that node is "easy", its just a 166 Ares with green feeder goons, and I have a max 3* roster, no problem....'

There are quite a few in our pve based alliances who have seen massive changes in pve scale and pvp mmr. SS *does* effect both. The belief that the levels of nodes faced in pve were only based on characters used in pve was one I held for a long time. Commentary made by IceX (even going as far to generate fully leveled rosters on new accounts to 'prove' this 'fact'), and theory crafting based on that information by forum vets all made it sound pretty logical and believable...

... until a slew of people who'd recruited SS into their underleveled rosters started running into impossible matchups directly afterward. In pvp their game considers them to have a roster far higher than their actual weight class. In pve, a jump up of 50+ in every non-trivial node is pretty significant at level 94. More than 50% difficulty for recruiting one semi-useful character?

As just generally commentary on the situation, there is no 'just do this' solution a player can do to address this problem (short of possibly deleting the 5*). This needs to be addressed and resolved by the devs. They made a game that loves to bilk new players out of real money with the lure of making them think it'll get them somewhere in the game, but there are going to be a lot of these new players that are going to put the game down pretty quickly when they start wiping constantly to the content after recruiting a single 5*...

Maybe, just maybe, things should actually be setup like IceX had claimed they were, where damage taken was the main factor in determining node levels as opposed to having it based on the levels in someone's roster.

simonsez

squirrel1120 wrote:

Maybe, just maybe, things should actually be setup like IceX had claimed they were, where damage taken was the main factor in determining node levels as opposed to having it based on the levels in someone's roster.

Because tanking should be rewarded, and good gameplay penalized? No thanks.

mindsuckr

The system seemed to work fairly well (other than people leveling just one character the whole way) until SS came into play. It seems like the easiest solution would be to bring back Surfer's starting level to like 120 or so, and make leveling him to his current starting level be SUPER cheap in terms of ISO. Like 1 or 10 ISO a level. This lets people who who want to use him bring him to his current level for a minimal cost, and lets people who are not ready to have their game change drastically still recruit him without major negative effects.

dr tinykittylove

mindsuckr wrote:

The system seemed to work fairly well (other than people leveling just one character the whole way) until SS came into play. It seems like the easiest solution would be to bring back Surfer's starting level to like 120 or so, and make leveling him to his current starting level be SUPER cheap in terms of ISO. Like 1 or 10 ISO a level. This lets people who who want to use him bring him to his current level for a minimal cost, and lets people who are not ready to have their game change drastically still recruit him without major negative effects.

Actually sounds like a very workable idea - cheap early levels to bring 5*s to a usable state, like they did with 3*s, but new players who get lucky don't screw themselves unknowingly. And because 5* powers scale up more by level than by covers, unlike 3-4*s, people can't keep his levels artificially low to take advantage of scaling/mmr if they want to use him.

Unknown

I literally got screwed on this today. I am mid 3* with three soft capped at 130 and everyone else between 80-105.

In pvp eight is enough I was facing guys from 120-160. I added SS and joined trial by combat and now there's only teams with maxed 4* lvl 240 guys available. PVP is now completely unplayable and assume the same will happen to PVE.

I have to sell SS. I am not going to chance absurd levels right before anniversary events. Thanks for this Devs.