Reconsider Health and Damage Scaling

babinro

Recently the devs reduced the level scaling in The Gauntlet. In my case the Sim 42 node drop from level 545 to level 466 enemies. While these changes create a MUCH better experience I feel it also showcases some of the fundamental problems with our current take on difficulty scaling.


Health Pool Scaling is Excessive
Here are a few examples of health pools from The Gauntlet:
- Level 466 X-Force Deadpool has 60,060 Health.
- Level 425 Scarlet Witch has 43,788 health.
- Level 384 Doc Octopus has 31,924 health.

Large health pools like these cause a few problems:
1) They limit roster diversity.
Simulation 12 Node in the Gauntlet has level 379 enemies which instantly tells me that their health pools are too high for anything but 5* tier to handle in a reasonable amount of time. This is the games way of telling me to forget about 95% of my roster for the rest of the event. Or more accurately, it's telling me to forget about all offense oriented non-5*'s for the rest of the event. Passive characters like Hood, SW and Loki may still be welcome.

2) They increase match length.
While I don't have numbers to back this up it certainly feels like I'm casting a lot of skills to take down that 60,060 health deadpool and his friends. That kind of match typically involves Phoenix getting 14-21 purple AP, 9-18 red...OML needs 16 yellow and 16 black. With that much ready to go I can probably down one person and severely hurt a second. Then MBW TU the strongest and whittle the team down through strike tile match damage.

This kind of match is great once and a while but keep in mind the game is giving us dozens of nodes to clear that can be cleared up to 7 times each. This issue exists in traditional PvE events as well. It's not limited to the Gauntlet alone.

Match Damage Creates Artificial Difficulty.
This is admittedly less of an issue than Health pools but it still 'feels' wrong from a gameplay perspective. 5* tier match damage and PvE enemy scaling leads to some prohibitive match damage.

This creates situations where the required character, Beast for example, could easily die from accidentally tanking match damage a few times. Making the required character both meaningless and a hindrance unless they have some passive impact on the board.

From a player perspective it's simply not satisfying. Nor does it make a victory feel all that 'earned' from the other end of the spectrum when you're the one decimating the enemy with simple match damage.

Solution - Make Challenge more about firing off powers
- Lower Health Pools across the board.
- Make Health Pool ranges a LOT tighter than they are now.
- Slightly reduce or tighten the range of match damage to put focus on firing off powers to win.
- Increase skill damage as needed to ensure matches stay fast with match damage reductions.

I realize this is easier said than done and that finding a balance between health and damage is tricky. I don't have a specific solution to offer that will solve things either. I'm just pointing out something that feels unsatisfying with the current approach at difficulty.

If challenge was more focused around skill damage then we'd potentially open up roster diversity.

From a 5* player perspective, I'd like to see a game where my 4* championed characters felt somewhat useful as a substitute to use when I didn't have access to my 5*'s. They'd clearly be weaker but they wouldn't be 'worthless' by comparison like they are now.

Note: I realize that a maxed champion 4* is substantially better than a lower champion 4* but that only shows that the rate improvement by champion levels are too slow. Power from championing 4*'s should increase quickly and drastically before leveling off slowly like it does with leveling the characters using ISO.

aa25

Here is some idea about the number to back up your point about the match get longer.

If we look at a character and ask the following questions

1. How many times this character needs to deal match-damage to kill himself ?
2. How many times this character needs to cast his power to kill himself ?

The problem with this approach is that the characters need to be chosen carefully. For examples, we can't compare Rulk and PX.

Below are numbers for 2*Thor and 3*Thor killing themselves with 3 covers red power and match damage from green tiles.



Hope these numbers are what you are looking for.


Raw data. In case the image link expired

2*Thor
Lv | Hp | Red Power at 3 covers | #Use(times) | # Red AP needed | Green tile damage | #tiles
15 1140 149 7.7 63 8 142
94 5880 772 7.6 61 43 137
144 7992 1022 7.8 63 57 140

3*Thor
Lv | Hp | Red Power at 3 covers | #Use(times) | # Red AP needed | Green tile damage | #tiles
40 2640 432 6.1 49 19 139
166 10200 1370 7.4 60 61 167
206 12600 1496 8.4 67 64 197 (From my Gauntlet node)

OneLastGambit

Your last point on champion levels increasing power too slowly is both good and bad at the same time.

None of us like that it takes about 50 champion levels before you notice a real difference but if you reverse it and make it so progress is fast and then slows down the it encourages soft capping. The obvious and logical solution is champs levels always add the same with every level.