The best and maybe only way to fix the game.

snlf25

We can all agree that 5* characters have broken the game. Once you break that seal and roster them, you are stuck with using them pretty much exclusively as scaling renders the rest of your roster useless outside of DDQ and Lightning Rounds. As soon as you do it you are stuck in the boring cycle of using your best 3 toons exclusively, you watch as level 100 and below soft cappers trounce your PvE scores, every battle feels like round 8 against Galactus as you pray you can beat the 4* essential node you have like 3 covers for and you pray you get the CP from the final node so maybe you can have a teeny tiny better run next time. You beat level 300+ Juggernaughts and Carnages with feeders for laughable boost prizes or standard tokens for God's sake. You fight the same damn Dark Avengers - 1*s and 2*s roided out and mega powerful compared to your champion gelded 3*s for the most meager awards imaginable. And fighting them is so very stale and awful and boring. Then the PvE tests come along and nothing is better, you gotta grind more if you can because the latter nodes get hellaciously difficult, worse than they ever were before especially since the level 325 cap is gone.

So you get pissed off and either quit or you sell your 5*s so you can get reasonable difficulty back and get back to enjoying the game you love. This has been bad for the long term health of the game for sure.

There are two ways I can see to fix it. You can nerf the entire 5* tier which I think is a terrible idea. The much better way to do it is to buff the lower tiers. Give 2*-4* tier more health and more damage to bring them more in line with the too aggressive power creep. It has been done before and should be done again. I really don't think the devs intended this many 5* to be out in the wild but they are. Undo the nerfing of the entire 3* class you guys did.

That wont fix scaling by itself. Next you need to count the entire roster of the player, minus 1*s and minus duplicates so we can't artificially lower our scaling by rostering multiple copies of weak toons. Both number of covers and levels need to count in the equation because you guys are so tight with iso you could crush coal in your buttcheeks and make diamonds. Just because I have The Thing at 4/2/3 doesn't mean he should crank my scaling. I might have 9 covers but he is utterly useless because he is only level 75! Levels should be the heaviest deciding factor!

Rewards need to be improved. On the progression side, you should get a minimum:
5,000 iso (roughly double)
8 event tokens so you can empty 10% of your vault
one cover of each essential toon - yes that includes the 4*
5 health packs
2 sets of power boosts
100 HP (double)
25 CP

For individual match rewards, get rid of critical boosts add an extra iso reward and double all iso rewards. So if you get screwed on the final node at least you get a couple hundred iso. On wave nodes, each clear after the first should give you a set 500 or 1000 iso depending on difficulty, up to the 7 times all other nodes give you.

Razamataz

Another easy way would be for the 1s who lucky enough to get à 5star but it's unusable,make a feature where before you join event you have option to use or bench your 5stars.if you choose to bench they would be locked out and not used in scaling like in certain heroic where roster is locked out

DFiPL

I'm just going to point out two things here...

snlf25 wrote:

you watch as level 100 and below soft cappers trounce your PvE scores

snlf25 wrote:

Just because I have The Thing at 4/2/3 doesn't mean he should crank my scaling. I might have 9 covers but he is utterly useless because he is only level 75! Levels should be the heaviest deciding factor!

Can't have this both ways. If levels are the "heaviest deciding factor," you're going to see those soft-cappers continue to "trounce your PVE score." But those soft-cappers aren't going to be a factor in PVP. That's the trade-off they're making.

Don't get me wrong, scaling has been, and continues to be, my biggest beef with the game. I disposed of the first 5* I ever pulled on my main account for that reason. I have two, currently, but they're both single-covers, and I've got close to a dozen 3* champions now that I didn't have before. So I don't feel the nut-punch as keenly.

snlf25 wrote:

Rewards need to be improved. On the progression side, you should get a minimum:
5,000 iso (roughly double)
8 event tokens so you can empty 10% of your vault
one cover of each essential toon - yes that includes the 4*
5 health packs
2 sets of power boosts
100 HP (double)
25 CP

For individual match rewards, get rid of critical boosts add an extra iso reward and double all iso rewards. So if you get screwed on the final node at least you get a couple hundred iso. On wave nodes, each clear after the first should give you a set 500 or 1000 iso depending on difficulty, up to the 7 times all other nodes give you.

Honestly, I'd like to see PVE go to pure progression rewards, and I'd like to see the ceiling established in such a way that PC players can reach the ceiling without having to sacrifice familial relationships or friendships (or employment; I don't think I've hit a max progression since I got a job last July). But that's neither here nor there.

OneLastGambit

IF levels are going to be the decisive factor in scaling then you have to take into account a problem :

What happens when a 2* player pulls a 5*? Their level average dramatically increases. You can play through it if you're patient (happened to me and I decided to live with it for a while and accept my new limitations)

The fix (which would stay in line with your idea of levels being the deciding factor) is to make all new covers of 4* or higher level 70.

They made 5* level 250 to be instantly usable but in all honesty they're not. The match damage is not worth the trade off of increasing your level average by so much.


----
Then you have the problem the devs have been trying to eliminate for months : soft capping. Under a level based system people will soft cap. They'll do worse in PvP but better in pve.

In my opinion the best method of solving all these issues is to make your scaling performance based (not just current but past too). It should take into account YOUR average position in the leader boards of every event and scale accordingly.

This fixes a lot of problems (not all though) those crazy nuts who grind every event to death will find their scaling goes horrible forcing them to sit out or play less like an OCD psychopath in order to lower their scaling thereby making it occasionally easier for the rest of us to hit t5

DTStump

OneLastGambit wrote:

In my opinion the best method of solving all these issues is to make your scaling performance based (not just current but past too). It should take into account YOUR average position in the leader boards of every event and scale accordingly.

This fixes a lot of problems (not all though) those crazy nuts who grind every event to death will find their scaling goes horrible forcing them to sit out or play less like an OCD psychopath in order to lower their scaling thereby making it occasionally easier for the rest of us to hit t5

I might be wrong, but a probable consequence of this is that people just tank "bad events" or whenever they don't have the time, in order to have a really easy time when it matters.

The result is that in all events, but especially in "good" ones (e.g. character releases), you have a certain percentage of players with an artificially low scaling thanks to previous tanking.

Then, you may not see the same names in the top rankings every event, but instead you will likely see mostly people who took the time to tank properly (a kind of rotation of "good tankers").

This is not very newbie-friendly, because optimally tanking is a very counter-intuitive behaviour. I'm not sure this effect is in alignment with what the developers would want.

DFiPL

OneLastGambit wrote:

They made 5* level 250 to be instantly usable but in all honesty they're not. The match damage is not worth the trade off of increasing your level average by so much.

Depends. They're not instantly usable in PVP, for sure. If anything, a one-cover 5* attracts more hits than it repels, and the fights that queue up for you aren't going to be beatable unless your flankers are leveled and buffed.

PVE? Maybe a different story. Depends on which 5* and which cover. I've found a pretty great synergy for one of the two 5* on my roster with two of my champed 3*. I only have a single cover, but that specific cover works REALLY well with the 3* partners. I'm not saying it makes my fights faster or sends me zooming to the top of the leaderboards, but it's a trio both potent and fun to play, which is all I can really ask for.

I have gotten CP from some tough fights that I'm not sure I would have gotten without that 1-cover 5*.

Depends.

Polares

Thing is, 4s have already been buffed A LOT in the last changes (3s were nerfed though), the 'problem' is that you need to champion them and get 20-30 covers to start feeling the effects, then when that particular 4 you have with the 30 extra covers get buffed for another 70 levels you realize he is a super monster.

Iceman can get to 454 level when you have him maxed championed and buffed. At this level his blue does 30k !!!! And his green 12k+1k for every blue!!!. As you can see he is much better than most of the 5s at that level!!! The only big advantage of the 5s is the match damage (you can see all that I am saying also in the Balance of Power PvP were all chars are at 550 and 4s are the best chars).

But of course, getting this extra covers for the 4s is a very slow process ...


I think a big improvement FOR EVERYTHING would be to get node rewards based in the scaling or level of the node. A lot of people has suggested this in the past, and it would be a wonderful solution for the iso problems in 4 land and for scaling (if I fight tougher nodes at least I get more iso). I find it amazing that this is not already implemented...

RBwilliams07

Since the 5*s are what messing up the scaling due to them starting at such a high level they should reset them all to say level 100 and any new 5*s start at level 100.

Want to level them to 255 like they the Dev's want you to start with, have the option to level them to 255 for free with 0 ISO.

Already put ISO into your 5*? You get the ISO back when it resets to 100, cost 0 iso to go to 255 and then have the option to put the ISO back into the character at the same cost.