Design your own Galactus event.

blinktag

Given the unquestionably negative response to the Galactus event (which I echo), I began to wonder:
What would make a *good* Galactus event?

Don't limit your answers to tweaking the one we've got. Assume an open-ended level of development support and gameplay change is possible, and let your imaginations fly.

Admittedly, some of these piggy back ideas already in the forum.

* A timed wave event where an unbeatable Galactus fries my team after 20 turns, and then I have the option to immediately introduce 3 more of my characters into the same fight (retain AP pool), just as enemy waves do. I can retreat at any time, or use my entire roster of characters. All characters are returned to health at the end. Unlock every few hours. (Gets the "unbeatable" feel, but allows collective damage to count toward my alliance's goals. Uses infrequently used roster characters.)

* Short (<6 node) PVE storyline that weakens Galactus. (Removes covers from his powers.) Unlocks every 12–24 hours.

* 4-person team (or 5-person, 6-person, etc.) against Galactus. New possible combos unique to this event. (Maybe make these unlockable by round?)

* Introduce heralds instead of intermediate goon nodes. (Golly, the goons were decidedly unthematic, and detracted from an already frustrating event.)

* Mechanics similar to current, but only obliterates one character at a time.

* Build up to Galactus with specific character rewards (e.g., Reed, Squirrel Girl), and then use those characters in 1v1 battles against Galactus (modified power set so as to actually be fun) as a mirror for actual comic storylines. For extra rewards or boosts in the main Galactus fight, not as the culmination on its own.

* Optional Silver Surfer loaner. Those with SS see a slightly more covered version as a loaner.

VA5

The event is very poorly designed. It requires little skill and almost is entirely luck based (I've had teams of maxed 3's and 4's destroyed in 1 turn).
Also the nodes to get into each battle are becoming increasingly hard but worth the same pittance in points.

What they should have done... each round be a different herald. The last round the big man himself. One big **** health bar that you can see your team widleing away at him. NO one kill team move either.

Dragon_Nexus

1) Minions. Level 150 maximum.
2) Galactus himself. He gains enough energy? You run away because he's too powerful to face. Your team retreats in whatever state they were in when the AP cap was reached. They are not dead, you don't have to use health packs unless their HP was low when you left.
3) Make the reward from minions scale up with Galactus' HP so if Galactus beats you, you're still capable of contributing to the score total with minions.
4) Galactus should do more damage as he levels up, sure, but his abilities should be closer to how he was in rounds 1-4. By round 5 he's too powerful. I could tell at round 1 that his abilities, when the damage increased, would become troublesome as they were. At round 5 with all the "improvements" they're unmanagable.

Really...I don't think there's much you need to do to the current event to make it feasable.

stowaway

I've said before (and have gotten zero responses or upvotes from it, so maybe it's just me) that I'd like to see an endless survival node, with escalating difficulty (and rewards) for each wave. You know going in that your team is doomed, it's just about how far you can get.

Say he keeps popping back up like in those Enemy of the State nodes where Gorgon keeps returning, but gets harder and harder each time, until you finally wipe. You have an unbeatable boss, as Galactus should be, but at least you have a sense of accomplishment; you're able to brag to your alliance, "Hey, I made it to wave seven!" And you get rewards that reflect the difficulty of what you achieved.

Also, heralds for the essential nodes, absolutely. It makes no sense that we're fighting Doctor Doom while Galactus threatens the planet. And it makes negative sense that defeating them takes health off Galactus's bar.

theo199

I prefer to forget.

Omega Red

Funny, I was thinking about it this very morning. Here's my take:

Five nodes, each featuring a family: Fantastic four, Avengers, X-men, Marvel Knights and villains. No essentials but you can only use characters from each family. Provide a loaner in each node to help those with less robust rosters. The game has enough characters to support this idea. Node fights versus heralds: Terrax, Firelord, Nova, etc. and Galactus robots as ap feeders.

Silver surfer as an extra boss fight or side quest. For the life of me, I cannot understand why a Galactus event does not make any use of him.

Five side quests, one for every primary node. Player gets to choose wich one he wants to play and once he makes the first clear of said quest he gets commited to that one and the rest get locked. Side quest provides a single reward: A four star cover from the family whose side quest you chose. Example: Elektra for Marvel knights, Ant-man for Avengers, Kingpin for villains, etc. The purpose of this extra reward is to give some incentive to transition players whose rosters simply are not strong enough to complete the full event run.

As for the boss battle itself, give Galactus infinite health and three passives: AP drain, health drain and stun. Make those passives strong enough to guarantee eventual defeat but also slow enough to allow a good, legitimate attack. Obviously, this would need to be heavily tested but I think there are many ways to ensure a Galactus win without depriving players from quality gameplay.

Alx85

If you keep his powers the same (turn three death) then keep his hp the same on the next go. Or do an ff8 (or multiple other games I'm sure). When he blasts a whole team then let us play a b-team and then another one and another one. Let us keep putting another team in, maybe cap it to three teams so nine characters and see how we get on. That would be different and fun and much better to test roster diversity.

Unknown

If I was redesigning the Galactus event, there would changes to both the nodes and the boss battle.

First the nodes would be completely different. The board would be overlaid on a giant machine. Every match made would break a piece of the machine behind it. Your goal would be to break every piece of the machine thereby hindering Galactus' eating of the world. Your heroes are beneath his notice at this point but his machines have built in defenses- drones that defend and repair the machine. Passive abilities lay down CD tiles that repair damage and ones that damage or stun your heroes while the drones make matches. When you have broken the machine pieces behind every tile on the board, you destroy the machine and win the round. This brings Galactus' attention down on you opening up the boss battle.

The second change is to the boss battle. I would keep the core of the battle but change the feel of the battle by tweaking things. He would not create cd tiles. At the beginning of each of his turns he would absorb any cosmic tiles on the board and create cosmic tiles. These cosmic tiles cannot be overwritten or blown up only matched away. The number he creates is equal to his level so first round he makes one per turn and round eight he creates eight per turn. They generate one ap each when he absorbs them. Galactus would have an incredible amount of health (a million at round one) and be immune to ap drain. He would also have a passive that drained your ap whenever you fired a power at him. He would be slower to power up than the current version but his health would balance that. A player could massive amounts of damage to him, especially in early rounds, but eventually he would build up enough ap to ko their team.

Unknown

The mechanics of my event would be simple. You start the fight and Galactus would immediately eat your entire team on turn 1, you lose! Game Over. You gain "points" towards progression awards based on how much HP Galactus ate.

There are only alliance progression awards in this event.

Round 1: Lose 3,000,000 HP for 1x stockpile
Round 2: Lose 6,000,000 HP for 1x
Round 3: Lose 9,000,000 HP for Yelena Belova
Round 4: Lose 18,000,000 HP for 1x crit boost
Round 5: Lose 36,000,000 HP for Bag Man
Round 6: Lose 75,000,000 HP for 1x standard token
Round 7: Lose 150,000,000 HP for Moonstone
Round 8: Lose 1 BILLION HP for 20

are you not entertained?!?

Buret0

I love the idea of sending in multiple teams to attack Galactus at the same time. You would need to give Galactus a way to prevent winfinite combos, such as force ending your turn if he takes X damage or if perhaps whenever you you use an ability. Otherwise the 1,000,000 health Galactus that you are intended to die to would actually end up taking insane damage from exploding heads.

Attacking different "parts" of Galactus would be how I would handle it. Make six teams to send against him at the same time. When one team destroys the part or is wiped, you jump to the next battle.

Galactus' Head, Body, Left Arm, Right Arm, Left Leg, and Right Leg would be the different battles, each with a unique ability set. Total damage dealt in the six battles would be the points achieved. Once a part is destroyed, you send in one fewer team the next time you face him. Once you have destroyed all six parts, you get Galactus' full attention and go into the final stage where you can really do serious damage.

In the final stage, Galactus needs 30 AP to do the full party wipe. He does this through matching tiles, a Hulkbuster type move that converts health into AP, and through a Hood-like AP theft of the team's cosmic energy. Instead of making this a 3 round battle, Galactus' final form will take serious time and you are not expected to be able to win... just do a ton of damage in the 15-20 turns you get before he wipes your party. You know that you aren't expected to win because he has 1,000,000 health in this fight.

The special thing about this fight is that when one character is downed before Galactus uses his 30 AP move, another character is subbed in from a three member reserve that you pick before the battle starts.

Galactus (Final)
1,000,000 Max Health.

Galactus' tile match damage is 550 + (30 * Round#) in all colors, but only 1 in team-up tiles. His strongest color is considered Blue. Galactus makes matches like a normal enemy.

Omnipotence (30 AP)
Galactus crushes the party, ending the battle. (Passive) Galactus is immune to stun and absorbs 1 AP of every color each turn.

Galactus' Will (passive)
Whenever Galactus receives damage greater than 1,300, he ends your turn. He then neutralizes up to 5 random enemy tiles, if he does so, he also consumes 2,000 + (200 * round#) health from himself and all enemies to gain 2 AP for each special tile so consumed.

Defensive Action (passive)
Consumes 4 AP. At the start of the turn, randomly place a strength 550 + (30 * Round#) red attack tile and yellow protect tile on any non-friendly tile and the enemy team gains a strength 550 + (30 * Round#) strike tile.

He can't be stunned, if you hit him hard enough he ends your turn (to prevent winfinite and other match five combos where the crit hits big), and if you have special tiles on the board, he consumes them to gain AP (making it tough to use Psylocke to steal his largest AP pool or using Star-Lord to hold on for a couple more turns). You can still use Hood and OBW to slow down his AP production (Loki is a huge risk because he creates special tiles), but that needs to be combined with solid damage. When Galactus consumes your health, he isn't doing direct damage, so protect tiles aren't going to save you.

You can steal his two special tiles, but they will probably just end up feeding him AP when the attack tile goes off. Better to just bring a bit of board shake to handle the special tiles... and make sure that you don't hit him when you've got too many special tiles on the board, or this fight will be over soon.

The fight isn't fair and you are expected to lose. However, you aren't going to lose on turn 3 and you can feel really good about hitting him as hard as you can for as long as you can. As far as I can tell, the fight doesn't have any major exploits that will allow someone to actually do 1,000,000 damage, but good teams would be able to feel good about wailing on Galactus for awhile.

At the end of the battle, your heroes are healed to full... let's say by one of the other heroes who weren't in the fight.

alphabeta

Given they aren't going to rework the entire event before a second run I'm going to focus on a few tweaks that might make it better.

1. Essential nodes to be capped and ties to the round you are in
r1 essentials level 15
R2 essentials level 30
R3 essentials level 45
R4 ....
R8 there becomes 120 which will still be challenging but given they'll want to keep some of the death element of G allows you to go into your roster and preserve a team for Gman

2. G can only add 1 countdown tile to the board if he already has any on the board to begin with.

3. Absorption of cosmic tiles end his turn (like twin pistols for hood) so you've a chance to steal before he kills you.

4. r 1 - 4 cosmic tiles give him 1 black ap, r5 2, r6 3, r7 4 and r8 5 - single colour limit bring she hulk and psylocke into contention.

5. They'll probably have to up point required for alliance rewards if they do 1-4 because more people will win a bit more often and we can't have people win and have fun during anniversary.

6. Beating G always gives a G hungers token

7. Make odds on G hungers and anniversary tokens better - it's like for half a week and you've got such a disenfranchised player base yes this is against your nature but trust me it might be all that keeps some people playing.

8. Extend the sale - if you do a reasonable shot at 1-7 I'll happily spend the money I was planning to and have held off because of the state of this event and maybe even a bit more - as is I'm likely to drop game for good as soon as halo 5 and Star Wars battlefront come out

blinktag

Some great ideas here, and an interesting read.

Crowl

Rather than going for a completely new design, fixing/updating the current one would be good too.

Minion fights, these should relate to his machine so they would be survival nodes with you having to kill one part of the machine while an unending wave of robots would keep spawning to repair it or attack you so you couldn't completely ignore them. Each node you destroyed would add an additional round before Galactus started to put down his countdown tiles in the main fight so they would have much more relevance to the fight. At least two of the nodes should remain trivial through the entire event in the same way we get a few trivial nodes in each pve.

The Galactus fight should only happen once per lockout and with the extra time you had earned in the earth nodes, his fight should scale more linearly so he should not be gaining more countdowns, more cosmic tiles, more ap in each round, just one of them. Every person should be able to have one try per round, even if your alliance has already cleared that round, your score would contribute to your personal progression and not cause a lockout.

Rewards should be iso, HP or event tokens and you should not get 20/40 iso before other rewards are given out. Personal progression rewards should be as before except that tokens should replace specific covers and the legendary token, alliance rewards should be token, token, token, token, cover, cover, cover and legendary for completing each round.

GuntherBlobel

There's a lot of good suggestions here! My main concern is that the Devs don't know how to balance their own game. Because they created game-winning (-breaking) combos that end the game in 3 turns, I think they felt Galactus had to do the same. Bad idea. Unfun!

To balance things a bit better for everyone, I would obviously reduce the CD and cosmic tile AP to be something manageable, like we had in Rounds 1-4. That way, success in Galactus isn't built entirely on exploits and out-of-control combos. Galactus should not be programmed to win on turn 3. The problem, then becomes how to input a risk vs. reward for AP generating combos that can go off the rails in just 3 turns. The player should also take a risk when trying to win the game in just 3 turns.

My solution is to add a low hit point character called Herald of Galactus (Firestorm) to the Galactus minigame:
Faithful Servant (passive)
Lvl 1 Psychic Feedback just like Jean Grey. Minimal damage, steals no AP, but ends the turn whenever match-5s occur.
Firestorm is always getting in the way! If the enemy team plans a critical strike, Firestorm dutifully interrupts them to spare Galactus and delay their plans. Whenever the opposing team creates a match-5, Firestorm stuns the enemy team for one turn.

This way you have to choose whether you want take out the Firestorm first (risky), and then go all out on Galactus with AP generating combos (rewarding). Alternatively, you could try to earn enough AP through 3- and 4-matches to ignore Firestorm completely.

I would also make minion fights worth more points. They were not trivial in any way (in a good way). They should be rewarded as such.

P.S. I take no responsibility for the inevitable Jean Grey + Loki + Galactus node in the next Guantlet.

EDIT: As others have mentioned above, wouldn't it be cool if multiple Heralds were involved? The herald could change each Round, opening up different strategies. Terrax could use AP to attack individual heroes, for example, which would delay Cosmic Wrath and change up the strategy immensely for that one Round.