4* DDQ: Your Thing is on FI-YAAHHHH!

udonomefoo

I went in with my 0/4/2 like "eh, I'll throw a few darts at it". Second turn of first match he cascades into enough red, green and black to fire all three powers. After the multiple crits in the cascade, the first fireball killed me. Then he kicked my corpse a couple times with flame jet and his black.

Yay! Now I don't have to try again.

Omega Red

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

PorkBelly wrote:

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

PorkBelly wrote:

I thought this feature was supposed to help people with the 4* transition.

You need to stop thinking this as virtually every 4* DDQ to date has contradicted that thought. Yes, they originally talked about a new DDQ feature to help with the 4* transition, but when LTs were implemented the 4* DDQ morphed into a mode meant to help people that were somewhat established in 4* land to continue to progress their 4* rosters and start picking up some 5* characters.

4* DDQ is hard. It always has been. It is supposed to be. Stop thinking it should be easy.

Or they could remove the TU and any other number of things to make it less tinykitty.

And, when a player with 7 covers (more than 1/2) has no chance, it certainly doesn't seem like 4* DDQ is there to aid even partially transitioned players.

A 2/2/3 Thing definitely has a chance at this. My level 147, 4/2/3 finished with enough health to eat a Fireball, which was still a red match and an aggressive recon away.

For me it's not an issue of whether it's possible or not. It's the amount of tries and the resources required. It's the awful experience of entering a match over and over again, knowing that you are most likely going to be wiped and you have to keep trying until luck favours you.

Omega Red

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor. There is a reason why week in and week out you see guys finishing with sub-level 150 characters while guys with 180+ characters complain about the difficulty. These people aren't continually getting lucky. They are actually good at the game.

The luck factor in this particular gamemode is huge, there's no way you can deny that. When you only have two, max three usable tiles while the AI gets four or even five, board configuration and cascades become decisive. The fact that almost everyone needs multiple tries to clear the node regardless of how well covered/leveled their character is proof of this.

TxMoose

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor. There is a reason why week in and week out you see guys finishing with sub-level 150 characters while guys with 180+ characters complain about the difficulty. These people aren't continually getting lucky. They are actually good at the game.

agree with you about a vast majority of the game, but unless you have a mostly covered 4* here, luck drives the match. yes I finished xf first try and starlord 2nd try and then with a similar covered thing, took 20. that - that is luck based where you have to apply skill to take advantage of the luck provided to you. this is mainly true of mid-covered characters like mine. things change drastically when you add a 5th cover to either of his abilities. what drops from the top is not skill. being able to successfully deny 4/7 colors is not skill. lucking into cascades of the right colors is not skill. those are the things you have to do to win with mid-covered characters here. skill helps and is essential, yes, but some of the best players in the game with fully covered things have had to take multiple runs.

fmftint

Omega Red wrote:

For me it's not an issue of whether it's possible or not. It's the amount of tries and the resources required. It's the awful experience of entering a match over and over again, knowing that you are most likely going to be wiped and you have to keep trying until luck favours you.

Did you not play Galactus? We're supposed to lose

simonsez

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor.

I beat it on my second try. The first time, HT still had over 4k health left when I lost. The second time, my Thing still had 15k health left when I won. I'm glad I got so much better at this game in those intervening 2 minutes.

Unknown

Omega Red wrote:

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor. There is a reason why week in and week out you see guys finishing with sub-level 150 characters while guys with 180+ characters complain about the difficulty. These people aren't continually getting lucky. They are actually good at the game.

The luck factor in this particular gamemode is huge, there's no way you can deny that. When you only have two, max three usable tiles while the AI gets four or even five, board configuration and cascades become decisive. The fact that almost everyone needs multiple tries to clear the node regardless of how well covered/leveled their character is proof of this.

I don't know, I'd say it's even LESS luck-based then most of the game. You're up against one character with 2-3 colors, and you can work on denying those colors, compared to a more standard 3vs3 set up, where the enemy is more likely to have a bigger rainbow of options while the player has a bigger rainbow of options. You can actually focus down one or two colors a lot better in this fight then a 3vs3 one.

Not to mention, how both PVE and PVP also rely on the luck of getting a good bracket at a good time to get rewards easier, or getting the right PVP fights in when you skip a ton while praying you don't show up in anybody else's queue...

Only difference is that this one singular match is waaaaaaaay harder then the others, there.

Malcrof

Ok, let me tell you a little story about Thing vs Torch....

My Thing is 1/2/4 lvl 152.. on my 4th try this morning, i got very , very close to winning..

by my 16th or 17 try, i was out of boosts, out of patience, almost out of health packs (started at 6am EST.. and tried every chance i got lol).. When i lost #20, and those on Line can attest.. i got a touch upset.. and quit.

Quit MPQ for the day.. i don't need anything from The Gauntlet, didn't need any rewards from BoP, and 20 losses in 4* DDQ was enough for me.. time to play something else for the day (of course i had to finish my last heal pack, try 21 didn't go well either).

10+ minutes later, i forgot i had quit, so i opened the game up, had a health pack.. and won so easily, you would thing the game was apologizing to me.. i mean seriously.. trivial event node easy......

22 tries later, i had a shiny new yellow 4Cyc.

The End.

simonsez

colwag wrote:

I don't know, I'd say it's even LESS luck-based then most of the game. You're up against one character

That's exactly why it's more luck-based. A bad board or a bad cascade is pretty much an automatic loss. When it's 3 vs. 3, you have way more time to overcome bad luck and to let things even out and stabilize.

simonsez

Malcrof wrote:

22 tries later, i had a shiny new yellow 4Cyc.

I'm glad you added that detail. I got the same cover from my "random" token pull.

Xeonic-Ice

I stopped counting since I'm over 30 attempts at this point with a 2/2/2 127 Thing. Closest I've come is getting Torch to 3k health. I'd say about half of my attempts thus far have had insane cascades by turn 3 for Torch, where he successfully casts all 4 abilities.

One of these attempts I'll get lucky and get to cast green twice...I hope.

Ruinate

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor. There is a reason why week in and week out you see guys finishing with sub-level 150 characters while guys with 180+ characters complain about the difficulty. These people aren't continually getting lucky. They are actually good at the game.

You must not have played any games that take skill.

Dauthi

0/3/5 here. It is bad enough Thing's yellow is useless, I have no red. His red is pivotal in this since stunning is great 1v1. So it all came down to luck for me (and a bit of strategy). Got it on my 6th try or so.

I got lucky and managed to collect a decent amount of green while denying red, but this left the impending black. I just waited for him to use it and used my green in hope it removed most of the attack tiles. It did, and bought me enough time to get enough green to finish the fight.

While my thing is covered well, not having any red hurt really badly.

PeterGibbons316

Ruinate wrote:

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor. There is a reason why week in and week out you see guys finishing with sub-level 150 characters while guys with 180+ characters complain about the difficulty. These people aren't continually getting lucky. They are actually good at the game.

You must not have played any games that take skill.

You must not have an intelligent rebuttal, and have to resort to ad hominem attacks.

PeterGibbons316

TxMoose wrote:

what drops from the top is not skill. being able to successfully deny 4/7 colors is not skill. lucking into cascades of the right colors is not skill. those are the things you have to do to win with mid-covered characters here. skill helps and is essential, yes, but some of the best players in the game with fully covered things have had to take multiple runs.

Exactly what tiles drop from the top cannot be known, but you do know the tiles around the hole that will be generated, and therefore the likelihood of a potential match-4/5, cascade, favorable, or unfavorable match. You can use that to your advantage. If you find yourself in a position where HT has 5 red and one more red match will mean your loss, then you don't make a match that even has the possibility of creating a potential red match for the enemy.

You can't deny 4 colors. Not for the length of time you would need to with such a high HP pool and low damage output, and so you have to prioritize. How you prioritize is skill, not luck. Know HT is going to make a green CD tile that might end the match quickly for you? Avoid green matches until it is out so that it can be quickly matched away. Know he has Inferno coming? Try to leave TU tiles in the center where the Inferno tiles land, or leave quick matches of random colors there so that the attack tiles can be matched away. There are skills and strategies you can use to overcome the bad luck from an unfortunate cascade.

I'm not saying there is NO luck involved. You are always limited by your possibilities. Sometimes you get a board littered with great matches for your opponent. But that's one battle of many. Over time that luck balances and skill is the determining factor in your success. If you can't win in 20 tries with 7 covers (barring a 0/5/2 build or something stupid on a character like Thing that has a completely useless skill in this particular event) it's not because you kept getting unlucky, it's because you don't have enough skill.

Ruinate

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Ruinate wrote:

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Stop blaming luck for your wins and losses. This is a skill-based game with a luck factor. There is a reason why week in and week out you see guys finishing with sub-level 150 characters while guys with 180+ characters complain about the difficulty. These people aren't continually getting lucky. They are actually good at the game.

You must not have played any games that take skill.

You must not have an intelligent rebuttal, and must resort to ad hominem attacks.

No need to get upset. I wasn't attacking you. Not everyone plays those games and I don't either anymore. There isn't a single person who plays an e-sport game seriously that would say MPQ has a high skill ceiling. Everyone here plays MPQ and I don't mean to insult anybody by saying that, but it's a fact. Play some Starcraft and report back.

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

Exactly what tiles drop from the top cannot be known, but you do know the tiles around the hole that will be generated, and therefore the likelihood of a potential match-4/5, cascade, favorable, or unfavorable match. You can use that to your advantage. If you find yourself in a position where HT has 5 red and one more red match will mean your loss, then you don't make a match that even has the possibility of creating a potential red match for the enemy.

You can't deny 4 colors. Not for the length of time you would need to with such a high HP pool and low damage output, and so you have to prioritize. How you prioritize is skill, not luck. Know HT is going to make a green CD tile that might end the match quickly for you? Avoid green matches until it is out so that it can be quickly matched away. Know he has Inferno coming? Try to leave TU tiles in the center where the Inferno tiles land, or leave quick matches of random colors there so that the attack tiles can be matched away. There are skills and strategies you can use to overcome the bad luck from an unfortunate cascade.

Now I see where the disconnect is. This is basic strategy/common sense.

Xeonic-Ice

I was about to give up, but I finally beat it.

30+ attempts (lost count)
2/2/2
level 127
8487 hp
Red does - 970 and 1 turn stun
Green does - 1555 destroying a 3x3

Those that are claiming it's skill over luck, I'd be curious to see if anyone else had better results with a similar build. This one really felt like 90% luck, at least for me, using the above build.

Unknown

I usually like to see these as well, so here's the top ten from my bracket
1. (me) 2/2/5 130
2. 5/3/5 180
3. 5/3/5 270
4. 4/4/5 191
5. 5/3/5 270
6. 3/3/4 209
7. 5/3/5 232
8. 5/3/5 270
9. 5/3/5 230
10. 4/3/5 210

I don't keep stats anywhere, but anecdotally, this seems like a higher average than some of the others.

udonomefoo

Don't think it matters for my chances here, but an alliance mate just pointed out that they changed the TU to IF pink. It will still gen black, but that's not as bad as the steal.

edit: it's a low level one too, converts 4 tiles.

scottee

Dauthi wrote:

0/3/5 here. It is bad enough Thing's yellow is useless, I have no red. His red is pivotal in this since stunning is great 1v1. So it all came down to luck for me (and a bit of strategy). Got it on my 6th try or so.

I got lucky and managed to collect a decent amount of green while denying red, but this left the impending black. I just waited for him to use it and used my green in hope it removed most of the attack tiles. It did, and bought me enough time to get enough green to finish the fight.

While my thing is covered well, not having any red hurt really badly.

I had a slightly better 1/3/5 Thing, and the single red didn't help at all. Only one turn stun didn't really do anything. Definitely a high level green or red is required to win this, otherwise you don't have enough damage. Took me 8 tries by the way.