A PvE Guide For Beginners (updated 21st April 2017)

morph3us

Updated 21st April 2017, with updated values for node minimums, and minor tweaking in the FAQ.

Introduction

There appears to be some confusion about how PvE (Player versus Environment) point structures work amongst newer players to the game, so this is in the way of a rough guide to those players as to how to play a PvE event, and how they are structured. This definitely isn't intended to be useful to veteran players. A PvE event is a Story Event (as opposed to Versus).

The Basics

Subs
A PvE event is divided into Subs. Usually, there is a Main Sub, and then Sub-Events linked to that Main Sub. The Main Sub is the first event that appears on your Story tab. Usually, you need to play the Main Sub in order to unlock the first Sub-Event, which will appear next to the Main Sub. Depending on the event, you may need to go back to the Main Sub every time a Sub-Event finishes, in order to unlock the next Sub-Event in that overall Story. In some events, each Sub-Event unlocks automatically.

Story events are generally 3, 4, or 7 days long. Sub lengths are either 24 hours, or 48 hours.

Nodes
Each sub is comprised of a series of nodes. There are five types of nodes.

Team up nodes – this is often the first node in a sub, where you get a loaner of the featured character (and is the only node in a PvE event where you will get a loaner). The Team Up node is usually set at a Trivial Difficulty.

Easy nodes – there are always 3 easy nodes (the Easy Node Track), where the difficulty is set to Trivial or Easy. These nodes are worth the lowest points.

Hard nodes – there are also always 3 hard nodes (the Hard Node Track), where the difficulty is set from Normal to Impossible. These nodes are worth a high number of points.

Essential nodes – there are also always 3 essential nodes. These nodes require a specific 2*, 3*, and 4* character. Essential characters rotate with each Story, but not Sub-Event. If you don’t have an essential character, you cannot play that node. These nodes are worth the highest number of points.

Non-repeatable nodes – these tend to exist in older events with lots of nodes, or with a significant node reward, where, once you finish that node, you cannot play it again.

Points, refreshes, and node stacks

Each node is worth a fixed number of points. When you beat that node, you get those points. The value of that node remains the same for your first four clears. This is for non-survival wave nodes only. After the fourth clear, the node goes on a 24 hour cooldown timer, at which point the value of the node decreases by 33%. The node will then start to regenerate points at a rate of 1.375% per hour, until by the end of the 24 hour timer, it is worth the full number of points. If you clear the node three times while it is on the cooldown timer, the node will be worth 0 to 3 points only, depending on the node type.

• Join Forces missions will be worth a minimum of 0 points.
• The first three easiest missions will be worth a minimum of 0 points.
• The 3 harder missions will be worth 1, 2, and 3 points respectively.
• The 2-Star, 3-Star, and 4-Star missions will be worth 1, 2, and 3 points respectively.

For survival wave nodes, it takes only two clears before the node goes on a 24 hour cooldown timer.

The first four times you beat a node, the difficulty of that node will increase up to a maximum difficulty. Note that the 2* essential node has a lower maximum difficulty than the 4* essential node. Commensurate with that, the 2* essential node is worth fewer points than the 4* essential node.

The total number of points available within a PvE event are fixed. In other words, it’s not dependent on how others are doing in your bracket, it’s solely dependent on how you play. The total points available per sub tend to increase as the event progresses (ie – Sub 2 will be worth more than Sub 1, Sub 3 more than Sub 2, etc).

Every time you beat a node, it adds another 24 hours onto the time required for that node to regenerate back to its maximum point value (ie – if you beat a node twice consecutively, the timer will show 48 hours to maximum point value).

Optimal PvE timing and play

The optimal way to clear a PvE sub now is to do a full clear four times (for standard nodes, two clears for survival wave nodes) as soon as you enter the sub. You should try and delay any further clears until close to the end of that sub. By "full clear", I mean a clear of every node available to you once. So a full clear four times is clearing very node available to you four times (which sets your 24 hour timers going).

Don't forget, for 48 hour subs, there is a single cycle of clears available at the 24 hour mark.

You won't have enough time for the timer to refresh fully by the end of a 24 hour sub. If we assume that you start your clear of a sub as soon as it begins, and it takes you 2 hours to get all the timers going, that's 22 hours remaining before the sub flips. The longer you leave it before you hit the nodes for the final clears, the more points will have refreshed. You need to balance this with how long you think it's going to take you clear all the nodes several times.

The end of sub grind down
Once a sub is finished, its points are no longer available to you, obviously. The node refresh timer therefore becomes irrelevant towards the end of a sub, and any points you can obtain in addition to your initial full point clears are valuable as a consequence. Playing a sub’s nodes repeatedly in the last few hours before a sub ends is called the end of sub grind down. How far you grind down the nodes in a sub at the end depends on how much free time you have, your ability to repeatedly beat a node without sustaining too much damage, and your number of free health packs. Also bear in mind that you’re going to need to have enough characters standing (or health packs) to play a new set of nodes when the sub flips and you get a new sub-event to play.

Remember that it takes an additional three clears to reduce a node to a value of 1, with a decrease in value of 1/3rd for each time you beat it. You may have a residual small value fourth clear available to you, depending on how long you have allowed a node to regenerate its points before the grind down. A node that is worth 700 points on the initial clear, will be worth 462 points on the second clear, and 231 on the third clear, and 1 point (or close to it) on every subsequent clear. In other words, that’s approximately 1300 points left in the node for your end of sub grind down. Players tend to leave a lot of points on the table in the end of sub grind down, and not realise just how many points are potentially available to them. You can easily get 7k+ points in the end of sub grind down.

Progression vs Placement
Admitted this sounds difficult and time consuming, hitting each node 7 times over at each sub flip. When you start playing MPQ, you’re usually placed in a newbie bracket, which means overall event scores are lower, and consequently, you don’t need to post as many points to place well. In other words, you don’t need to grind all the node stacks down to 1. Secondly, you don’t need to get your four clears in immediately as for each new sub flip. If you hit a node within a couple of hours of a sub flip, you’re not leaving many points on the table (remembering they refresh 1.375% per hour of their maximum value). It’s a different story if you’re playing in veteran bracket.

If you’re playing for progression rewards, don’t worry too much about optimal clears. The devs appear to have calibrated progression such that getting four clears in at any time per sub will reach or exceed progression.

It’s also always better to hit a node early, rather than late, in terms of 48 hour subs. A node doesn’t accrue any more points after it hits its maximum value, so if you have a balanced life, and other things to do, it’s generally better not to leave points on the table and hit the node early rather than late.

That Legendary Token
We tend to see a lot of threads on the forums complaining how it’s impossible to reach the Legendary Token in some events. For any given PvE event, there’s a maximum number of points available (assuming completely optimal play), and the progression targets are set accordingly. The LT progression for the new PvE format appears to be set for 3-4 clears per sub, without any grinding required.

Other miscellaneous odds and ends

What is scaling?
Scaling refers to how difficult a node is compared to your roster. There are three sorts of scaling, personal, community, and repeated node clear scaling. Community scaling was turned off some time ago. Personal scaling appears to be calculated based on your individual roster level at the start of an event. More specifically, the initial starting level of your nodes are based on the top 3 highest leveled characters in your roster, including boosts for that event. Trivial/Easy nodes are capped. Nodes scale up by a set amount per victory up to 4 node clears.

Okay, so I understand scaling. What's the best way to level my characters for PvE?
Initially, you're going to be playing PvE events with your 1*, then 2* characters, so at this early stage, your aim is to max out a good stable of 2* characters.

Things start to get a bit tricky with 3*s. At first, you want your 3* characters to stay relatively close to your 2* characters, since you won't have all that many of them, and you don't want to make your 2* characters irrelevant by pushing a few 3* characters well above the 2*s, so that the 2*s get scaled out of the nodes. The new Championing mechanic helps with this a bit, as you can level your 3* just ahead of your championed 2*s. Eventually, you'll have a broad enough stable of 3*s that you can outlevel your 2*s and it won't matter that you make them irrelevant.

What is softcapping?
Softcapping is the practice of deliberately keeping your characters underlevelled in order to keep your scaling low. It can be a very successful way of ensuring that you don't face overscaled nodes. The downside of softcapping is that it may limit your ability to participate in Versus events (since scaling doesn't come into play there), and it also means that you lose the ability to Champion your 3* characters.

What is rubber-banding?
Rubber-banding refers to an increase in the point value of a node above its maximum value, based on how far you are behind the leader in an event. From what we can tell, any rubber-banding effect is very weak (ie – it doesn’t add all that many points), and it only applies if you’re substantially behind the leader. It also tends to really only apply late in an event. In other words, rubber-banding doesn’t make more overall points for the event available, it just helps late starters get some earlier progression rewards.

When should I start my end of sub grind down?
This depends on several things: how long it takes you complete each match, how far you want to grind the nodes down to, and whether there are any survival nodes in the set (since they take longer to play). If you’re intending to grind to 1 point, I’d suggest at least 2 hours out from the end of sub. Otherwise less than that is fine.

Hey, I'm playing optimally, how come these guys have so many more points than I?
There are a couple of different answers to this question, depending on the circumstances.

If you've joined an event late, and are in a relatively full bracket, it may be because the leaders have had more opportunities to clear the nodes than you. It may be that your current bracket opened before a sub flip, and the leaders have had the end of sub grind down, and you joined after the new sub started, which places you at a significant disadvantage.

If you've joined a fresh bracket, and you're halfway through the sub, but you notice a few guys or gals with way more points than you, it's likely that they've "overground" the nodes (possibly because real life is getting in the way, and they just want to get the points up, or because they're just playing for Command Points). Overgrinding means that they've cleared to activate the timers, and kept on clearing down to 1, without leaving the points to refresh a little over time. Or, they've done their final clears earlier than you. In this instance, don't sweat it, by clearing early, those guys are taking an early lead, but they're losing a substantial amount from the points available by hitting the nodes early. If you stick to four early-ish clears, plus a reasonable grind at the end of the sub, maths will win out, and you'll overtake them comfortably.

If it's the end of a sub, or the sub has just flipped to a fresh sub, and some guys are way ahead of you, it's probably because you haven't ground down the nodes at the end of the last sub enough. To reiterate (from above), most typical players will do 3 clears per sub, plus an extra run or two through the nodes in the last couple of hours. You're leaving a boatload of points on the table if you do that. If you're in a newbie bracket, and that's enough to keep you in your desired position, keep doing that. If you're in a vet bracket, and you're being hammered, you need to grind down your nodes more.

What different sorts of PvE events are there?

Standard PvE events
These are events with an open roster. In other words, you can play with anyone at all from your roster. Most events are this type.

Heroic PvE events
Heroic PvE events used to be roster restricted, which made them more difficult.  You are now allowed to use your entire roster in Heroic events, so they're essentially an expanded, competitive version of the Prologue now.

The Gauntlet
The Gauntlet is a special type of PvE event, consisting of three subs, one of easy difficulty, one of medium difficulty, one of hard difficulty. The easy sub needs to be completed to unlock the medium, and medium to unlock hard. The essential nodes do not need to be completed to unlock the subsequent sub. The Gauntlet is progression reward only, there are no placement rewards. Final progression rewards cannot be reached without the essential characters (with a 4* essential near the end of the hard sub). Point values from each node in the Gauntlet are one time only; in other words, replaying a node in the Gauntlet will not give you additional points. The Gauntlet is probably the most difficult PvE event in MPQ, and is a good way of measuring your roster development – the better your roster gets, the further you will get through it.

Alliance locked PvE events
These are cooperative events against a supervillain (Ultron, Galactus, Civil War to date). When you enter this event, you will be locked into the Alliance leaderboard of whatever Alliance you are currently with, even if you switch Alliances during the event. There are personal progression rewards, and Alliance progression rewards for Alliance locked PvE events. There are no placement rewards. The Alliance progression rewards are generally set for full alliances of 20 players, so smaller Alliances will generally not get all (if many at all) of the Alliance progression rewards.

There is a main node in these events, where you play against the boss villain. Regardless of whether you win or lose against this boss villain, any damage that you do to him accrues towards your personal and Alliance progression score, and the main node then locks for 8 hours. There are five nodes associated with the main node. When you beat one of those nodes, it unlocks the main boss node for another attempt. These nodes lock after you beat them too, and unlock on a fixed timer, separate from the boss node. Generally, it’s best to wait for the main boss node to unlock on its own timer, after beating all five surrounding nodes, as it gives you six attempts at the main boss. The surrounding nodes unlock sooner than the main boss node, but you only get five attempts if you use them earlier than the main node unlock.

TxMoose

this should help new players a ton. thanks for doing it morph. deserves a sticky or put in announcements. I know there is a 'pve guide' but the pve guide jumps into advanced stuff and doesn't lay the groundwork for the beginner. I wish this post was around when I started - would have explained a lot.

The Bob The

At this point, this guide needs to replace the currently stickied ones, which as far as I can tell are both at least partly out-of-date. I think one FAQ you might add is "Hey, I'm playing optimally, so how's come these other guys have so many more points?"

Thanks, morph!

morph3us

Thanks, Bob, added that question in the FAQ.

Happy to add or expand the guide as based on feedback otherwise.

Huatimus

Nice guide, not sure if this is considered too advanced for beginners, but I personally feel that the section on personal scaling needs to be expanded upon, because it has huge impact on your current PVE and all future PVE events.

Personal scaling appears to be calculated based on your individual roster level at the start of an event.

Initial starting level of your nodes are based on the top 3 highest leveled characters in your roster, including boosts for that event. (Trivial/Easy nodes are capped) So when you're a beginner, don't aim to level your characters to their max yet. It is costly and only serves to raise your difficulty. Only level them if they are well covered, and preferably evenly among all your useable characters. If you don't have any 5* or 4*, it would also be good to soft-cap 3* at levels 94 up to 104.

morph3us

Huatimus wrote:

Nice guide, not sure if this is considered too advanced for beginners, but I personally feel that the section on personal scaling needs to be expanded upon, because it has huge impact on your current PVE and all future PVE events.

Good thought. Things just got a lot more complicated with the introduction of championing, though, in terms of soft-capping vs level maxing and championing. I'll have a think about it, and see which way the forum consensus goes before expanding the section about roster strength and scaling.

Unknown

So if you have received all the rewards from a node you can continue to grind points on it ? If so this is why I am falling behind.

morph3us

Sygerdazical wrote:

So if you have received all the rewards from a node you can continue to grind points on it ? If so this is why I am falling behind.

Yes, this is correct. You can continue to grind points from a node, with diminishing returns down to a value of 1.

BumpoTheClown

Great summary, and excellent for people new to the game.

One suggestion: For those who haven't played games like this before, it couldn't hurt to spell out that "PvE" stands for "Player versus Environment", and it's a term used in video games for modes where the players aren't directly acting against each other. Especially since "PvE" is what everyone calls it in MPQ, even though the term doesn't actually appear in the game client.

morph3us

Updated as per the suggestions from Huatimus, and Bumpo.

Xzasxz

Great guide, helped me understand PvE mechanizm a lot (I'm still quite new here). Yet I would like to add something.

morph3us wrote:

Introduction

Optimal PvE timing and play

It’s always best to wait as close to the full eight hours as you can, before playing a node again after you beat it, in order to maximise the number of points you obtain from a given node. Based on that, in a given 24 hour sub, you want to clear the full set of nodes when it first opens, 8 hours after that, then another 8 hours after that (so 3 clears in total).

That makes 4 clears in total, not 3:
1. at start
2. start +8 hrs
3. start +16 hrs
4 at the end

morph3us wrote:

Introduction
Each node is worth a fixed number of points. When you beat that node, you get those points. The value of the node then drops about 16%. The node then goes on an eight hour cooldown, where it is worth a diminished number of points. The node regenerates roughly 2% of its overall point value per hour, until by eight hours, it returns to its original value. This is the 8 hour node refresh.

I was thiking about this whole "Optimal PvE timing". Let's assume, that for we will not do "The end of sub grind down" for any reason. 3 hard nodes , 6 times each makes 18 fights in a row. Plus these essential nodes ... Limited roster doesn't allow me to play like this.

Lets' assume that each game takes zero time (to make calculations easier). So if we have 700 points node, if we beat it 4 times (according to the schema above) we earn 4x700=2800 points. What if we do it in 6hrs interval instead? Why 6 hrs? Because it is the time of 10 health packs regeneration. We should have following hits (if I am correct):
700 + 670 + 640 +610 +580 = 3200

So we get more points in the second case. But what if we make "The end of sub grind down". Then we would get:
Case 1 - 4x700+583+466+349+232+115=4545
Case 2 - 700+670+640+610+580+463+346+229+112=4350
First case gives us more points. But we take into consideration the ammount of games reaquired to finish the final grind. Will we be able to make it?
The worst thing is grinding the node down at the very begining. We loose at least 1/3 of all the possible to earn points regardless of what we do later.

All this "Optimal PvE timing and play" becomes more difficult in implemetation. I made some indications for me:
1. Do not let points be wasted - hit each node before it is fully recovered.
2. Do not health packs be wasted. Once You have 10 of them - hit some nodes, to make use of them.
3. Hit each node at least 5 times a day. As close to full recover as possible.
This should allow me to get LT in each event.

BlackSheep101

Xzasxz wrote:

That makes 4 clears in total, not 3:
1. at start
2. start +8 hrs
3. start +16 hrs
4 at the end

Clears are generally assumed to be full clears. There's no time at the end to allow for the nodes to refresh completely. That's why the very next section goes on to describe the end-of-sub grind.

Ebolamonkey84

Xzasxz wrote:

So we get more points in the second case. But what if we make "The end of sub grind down". Then we would get:
Case 1 - 4x700+583+466+349+232+115=4545
Case 2 - 700+670+640+610+580+463+346+229+112=4350
First case gives us more points. But we take into consideration the ammount of games reaquired to finish the final grind. Will we be able to make it?
The worst thing is grinding the node down at the very begining. We loose at least 1/3 of all the possible to earn points regardless of what we do later.

All this "Optimal PvE timing and play" becomes more difficult in implemetation. I made some indications for me:
1. Do not let points be wasted - hit each node before it is fully recovered.
2. Do not health packs be wasted. Once You have 10 of them - hit some nodes, to make use of them.
3. Hit each node at least 5 times a day. As close to full recover as possible.
This should allow me to get LT in each event.

Each case both has 9 total hits of each node. Case 1 has 6 passes for the final grind, and case 2 has 5, so you really aren't saving yourself too much grind there. That difference of a few hundred may not seem like much, but most full clears are between 2500-5000, so the difference will be much larger. Added up over 3-7 subs, and top placement seems unlikely.

If you are only going for the LT though, then most of this is unnecessary. Typically 3 passes at full value plus a few more hits of other nodes will be more than enough for max progression. Just doing 3 full clears a day will get you ~45% of the total available points, and LT progression is within 46-60% of max points.

Ouroboros9999

Ive read in Eddiemon's guide that from 2nd through final clears you should work from hardest to easiest nodes. Does that make sense if rubber banding is minimal?

It seems you might weaken characters more and use up more hp, but maybe that helps scaling somehow if you characters are not at full health when starting each node?

TxMoose

Ouroboros9999 wrote:

Ive read in Eddiemon's guide that from 2nd through final clears you should work from hardest to easiest nodes. Does that make sense if rubber banding is minimal?

It seems you might weaken characters more and use up more hp, but maybe that helps scaling somehow if you characters are not at full health when starting each node?

unless you're fighting for t10 in normal pve or t20 in a 4* release, or started the pve halfway through and are still trying to make progression, the points left on the table grinding top down vs bottom up aren't uber critical. the benefit of grinding top down (something I typically do) is that the max level team you might face might be 280 instead of 326 (seems to be the new top end?), which might save you some health packs. for gwen I ground top down and only had to go to tacos for health packs once and ground all but 3 nodes to 1 and those 3 only had 1 hit left in em, and t10'ed the sub easy enough - and t20'ed the event (could not grind sub 1 very much). the drawback of grinding top down is you're hitting the top point nodes earlier than "as late as possible", so they won't have recharged quite as much.

also, when I say I grind top down, I mean I start with the hardest nodes of the sub, which many times is not that last node of the line. in dp vs mpq, that last node with hulk and dp was 4th hardest - carnage essential, deadpool required, and the ares/daken node (second to last) were all harder. any essential with a very hard combo like a tough carnage matchup I get out of the way first. i'll never get t5 doing that but I'm ok with that. if you aspire to be THE best, you'll have to grind bottom up and time it to where you can start as late as possible and get that last node to 1 just before times up. at the top of all aspects of the game speed is key.

The Bob The

Yep. If you're planning to grind to 1, start at the bottom. If not, top-down is probably fine.

Also, I like this tip (from aesthetocyst, I think): Grind each node within a clear of 1, then do a final pass through them all to pick up the additional points that have regenerated while you were clearing. Might seem piddlin' small, but some of these t5 rankings get decided by a few hundred points (or less!).

morph3us

Agreed. If you're aiming for T5-10 placement, grind from easy to hard. That gives your high value nodes as much time as possible to regenerate. The downside is that it does push your scaling up a tad in the hard nodes, which will make them harder to clear. Also, make sure you give yourself enough time to grind the hard nodes down, if you're hitting the easy ones first. It's easy to grind the easy nodes down to 1, then realise you haven't left yourself enough time to grind the hard/essentials down to 1 as well, which is much worse than grinding from hard to easy in terms of points left on the table.

The other thing to consider is health packs. You don't want to run out of health packs in terms of the hard node grind down, so sometimes it can be valuable to stagger your grind between hard and easy, since you don't need your A team to hit the easy nodes.

morph3us

Updated with details for the new PvE format.

clownstyle

Great guide. Really helpful, thanks

phiwalker

Hi, thanks for that guide, I've read a few of them and this made the most sense.

I'm a noob, so I'm trying to grasp what it all actually means.
Before I was just going through and clearing everything I could. Trying to get 6/6 on a node and moving on.
I just realized due to this that you could go back and get more points on some of them.
But this was literally taking up most of my day since my roster isn't super great, and it's getting tedious day after day.

Here's what I don't get:

Full clear? Are we talking going for 6/6 on the nodes or just 1/6 on each to clear the sub event of each node once then going back 8 hours later?

I can get up to 4/6 on the nodes without the points diminishing. So should I clear 4/6 first run through, then 8 hours later do the fifth, then 8 hours later the 6th, and final clear being get whatever I can? Or do the above? Or do 4/6 first run through then go back clear what I can, then 8 hours later do the same? I'm not understanding the 8 hour thing since the timer says full points in 24 hours.

For instance we're currently on a heroic mission, I'm saving the main one because it renews itself in 24 hours.

But the subs, I got to 4/6 as said, but now it says full points in 24 hours. But the sub event ends in about 14....

If someone could lay it out in layman's terms about progression only, because I'm not getting it.
Some people are saying they're doing full clears in 2 hours and in my head I'm asking "how?".

Sorry if this is annoying or simple to some people, for some reason it's not clicking for me.

spatenfloot

A full clear to me means 4 of each node so the points are refreshing. The stuff about 8 hours is out of date. Things changed since then. After the forth clear, wait as long as you can to clear the final 2 times so you get more points. In a 24 hr node, that won't completely refill the points.