The boss fight is the challenge. The pins are the pest.

herm1978

And what do you get 25% of the times for slugging through the nodes? Nothing (i.e. crit boost)!

Frustrated1

If I was a dev for this game, I'd be ashamed.

OneLastGambit

The prizes for these two events have been good.no denying it.

3 covers of a top 4* and a 5* cover in run 1
3 covers of a mid -top tier 4* and a 5* cover in run 2

Plus tokens (yeah I pulled Jack but a vision from my vault but still generous none the less) then there was civil war tokens too which gave another chance at a 5* at greater odds (no 5* for me though).

However there's no planet in the universe where we should be fighting 6× enemies which are fully covered and levelled to the max on our roster. Even with a good 5* those waves nodes are very close to impossible. One of those wave nodes made us use war machine! A character which nobody had covered.

A pointer for next time ? Make the wave nodes levels half the max level on your roster. Still a challenge but not unfair. No complaints about the rest, other nodes were hard but doable and not unfair

Crowl

OneLastGambit wrote:

A pointer for next time ? Make the wave nodes levels half the max level on your roster. Still a challenge but not unfair. No complaints about the rest, other nodes were hard but doable and not unfair

Even your suggestion might be excessive for the wave nodes if they are going to make the essential on them a 2* or a brand-new 4* that almost nobody will have leveled by that point.

loroku

Ok, so it's not just me, then?

The top of my roster are champed 3*s, all about 170ish. However I recently opened my first 5* (after about 3 dozen tokens of course) and I wasn't sure if the 246 "normal" nodes were because the scaling was so poor for the event, or if the single 5* cover was screwing me over and this was just the beginning. (Or both!) But it seems like others are saying the (non-boss) nodes are destroying them? (I haven't been able to beat one since last night, still no problem beating IM / Cap.)

Trelocke

wirius wrote:

Because they want to ensure only a certain percentage win certain levels of prizes. If you can't compete or slog through it, then you aren't part of that percentage. Its all math, "engaging challenge" has nothing to do with it.

Then make the boss harder. I know I'm supposed to get roflstomped by the boss. The vast majority of event points come from the boss anyway. Let me kick the **** out of his peons. The points you get from these nodes don't start to get significant until the 3rd day anyway and it would be easy to keep these points lower as well. Highly developed rosters can still kill the boss netting the most points and everyone gets to play for the whole event.

When my essential characters get 2-shot in their node where I have to basically 2-man a 6 character wave node for roughly 1/4 of the points I get for killing the boss, I just stop playing the event. It's not fun anymore. I'm not going to buy health packs, I'm not going to buy anything when I'm just bashing my head into a wall.

_RiO_

loroku wrote:

(Or both!)

Yes; both.

5-star characters inflate scaling and PvP match-up. This is an unresolved issue and likely one that will take a lo

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ng time to be resolved, if ever. The track record the developers have for properly solving these type of issues in a timely fashion is not that good. Thus, unless you're already far into 4-star territory and are encroaching on championed 4-star territory, any 5-stars you are awarded or that you pull from legendary tokens are probably best sold off lest you screw yourself scaling-wise.

However, with the current event structure for Civil War, you're just going to get crazy-tier opponents no matter what your roster is, so it kind of masks the above 5-star problem.

rbdragon

Simple fix - either get rid of the wave nodes or....no, just get rid of them. They award nothing more and are vastly overpowered. I mean really - Rulk/HB/Quake on the 2nd half when their mana's been built up? At level 371???

That's just evil.

smkspy

Wave at this high level would be alright, if they were just goons, but top tier playable characters is a joke.

OneLastGambit

rbdragon wrote:

Simple fix - either get rid of the wave nodes or....no, just get rid of them. They award nothing more and are vastly overpowered. I mean really - Rulk/HB/Quake on the 2nd half when their mana's been built up? At level 371???

That's just evil.

Glad it's not just me on that node. I've lost to it more times than I lost to both bosses combined.

The first time I got through the first wave, I forgot it was a wave (falcon tends to drag fights out) and celebrated before taking a hb punch to the face followed by rulk finishing me off. Utterly ridiculous. I think the devs should be forced to complete all nodes (with the kind of rosters we all have) before they get paid for creating

PuceMoose

OneLastGambit wrote:

rbdragon wrote:

Simple fix - either get rid of the wave nodes or....no, just get rid of them. They award nothing more and are vastly overpowered. I mean really - Rulk/HB/Quake on the 2nd half when their mana's been built up? At level 371???
That's just evil.

Glad it's not just me on that node. I've lost to it more times than I lost to both bosses combined.
The first time I got through the first wave, I forgot it was a wave (falcon tends to drag fights out) and celebrated before taking a hb punch to the face followed by rulk finishing me off. Utterly ridiculous. I think the devs should be forced to complete all nodes (with the kind of rosters we all have) before they get paid for creating

That was indeed a rude surprise when the second wave appeared, showing top-level four stars. My levels were 267-268 or so. I was quite lucky with my Blade/Lazy Daken/Falcon combo, and managed to stomp them with 5k+ worth of attack tiles a turn. I wouldn't have had a chance though if I had opened with a terrible board.

Vhailorx

My highest character is level 281. On each side I had a single, 1-cover 5* boosted to 345.

My sub-nodes have been level 290 since saturday afternoon and 300+ for the last 4 refreshes. It's not impossible by any means, but it is incredibly tedious. sucked all the fun out of this event. Only kept going because I didn't want to let my alliance down (and sadly we are going to finish heartbreakingly close to finishing round 16 )

The Bob The

Crowl wrote:

It is idiotic that they have scaled both sides at the same time, if the boss is only in round 3 on one side then the gatekeeper nodes for that boss should also be at the round 3 level too, rather than 300+ so that people who find one side has outscaled their roster still have something they can do.

To make matters worse, the nodes are scaling against your highest characters when they all have a required character that might be horribly undercovered or a much lower level.

Well, except then we'd all just go play the easy side to unlock the harder boss. They could make it so you have to play the nodes on the side of the boss you want to unlock, but I think that might be worse - a few times, I was glad to be able to have a second option on a particularly ugly wave node.

smoq84

Those fight would be ok if:
- the 2* nodes were capped to their limits,
- the wave nodes had goons in the first wave.

Polares

OneLastGambit wrote:

rbdragon wrote:

Simple fix - either get rid of the wave nodes or....no, just get rid of them. They award nothing more and are vastly overpowered. I mean really - Rulk/HB/Quake on the 2nd half when their mana's been built up? At level 371???

That's just evil.

Glad it's not just me on that node. I've lost to it more times than I lost to both bosses combined.

The first time I got through the first wave, I forgot it was a wave (falcon tends to drag fights out) and celebrated before taking a hb punch to the face followed by rulk finishing me off. Utterly ridiculous. I think the devs should be forced to complete all nodes (with the kind of rosters we all have) before they get paid for creating

Man it happened the exact same thing to me! I forgot it was a wave node, I was already celebrating when I got a punch in the face and then two green hands crashing my head. Of course I lost.

The second time around knowing what was coming I denied also green and red and I won.




This is something I hate about wave nodes, not knowing what are you going to fight in advance. It is very unfair and it can lead to loses the first time you play the node just because you dont know what it is coming.

I also hate that when the second wave enters it uses all the AP gathered from previous rounds immediately. The player should have at least one turn to do something

nwman

If the scaling is intended to stop progression, then just make 1 sub node and the boss node scale really high, or just the boss node which ever is needed, but making all of them scale super high seems just mean.


There was a dev. post about the simple ai and something about making the AI smarter makes the game harder.

I honestly would rather a slightly smarter AI than the stupid scaling system we have now. Sure you could make the AI a lot smarter and maybe ruin things, but some test events with some AI changes, things like match 5s that it takes for example may be enough. Maybe changes to when / how it fires powers, or collects ap. are needed. But the current system seems like it scales until you get a bad board and wipe, or you get a good board and win easy.

Can someone figure out a good poll for this. I think I'm not alone in this view.

Current scaling and AI. vs a smarter AI with less scaling required.

Bryan Lambert

Ultimately, it's this (assumed) insistence on limiting rewards to a set percentage of the player base that is going to ruin every story event.

The Devi have ended up with a game where the skill-luck balance is heavily weighted towards luck, both in the matches themselves and in the 4- and 5-star meta. Which means the large-scale outcomes they're trying to control or limit are ALSO based heavily on luck. Which means a lot of potential variability.

Which means that whatever they put in place to gatekeeper rewards is going to be big and clumsy and heavy-handed and arbitrary and awful, because if it were based on skill or strategy, we'd all figure it out or read about it here and then the Glorious Percentage would fall by the wayside.

They say they make things more challenging, but that's not true. They make things harder. Galactic, for example, got harder as a boss not just by doing more damage, but by increasing his abilities to the point where no player, no matter how skilled, could employ strategies to stop him. Fundamentally unfair. Civil War II wave nodes got more difficult based on a timer, not on player performance. Fundamentally unfair.

People who play video games for a long time learn to recognize unfairness in a game design almost as a gut instinct. As a visceral negative reaction. And there's a LOT of unfairness in MPQ right now.

Redrobot30

The crazy thing is, that even after you barely manage to defeat the OP subnodes what do you get as a reward???

Critical Boost...

One of the last refreshes I went a perfect 4/4 with critical boosts as rewards on the nodes I could play on one side.

Dragon_Nexus

rbdragon wrote:

Simple fix - either get rid of the wave nodes or....no, just get rid of them. They award nothing more and are vastly overpowered. I mean really - Rulk/HB/Quake on the 2nd half when their mana's been built up? At level 371???

That's just evil.

I don't mind them existing, just cap them depending on which round you're on.
The scaling as it is increases over time, which is a terrible way of doing it. You could be on round 8, you could be on round 2 and you face the same level 300+ enemies by the end.

It baffles me why it was set up this way. On a very basic level I'd say cap the enemies at no more than 50% of the boss' level. so I'm on round 5 and the boss is level 250 (I think?), the pins can be at most level 125. By the end a level 500 boss has level 250 pins. It's still kinda high, but at that point you're expecting the creme de la creme of alliances to push on through that with the best rosters.

That *at the very least* is how it should work. Scale the pin difficulty depending on which round you're on, not by how much time has passed since the event opened. All that does is penalise people for not grinding through to round 8 sooner.

Blahahah

The only problem I see isn't necessarily the scaling nodes. It's where exactly the line can be drawn for people.

For example, lets say they made the pins super easy, but then the boss would have to be hard to make up for it. People would complain it's just another "You're supposed to lose" scenario (which in Galactus's case actually made sense since he is a top tier lore-wise). They'd complain that it's too hard and thus they can't enjoy it, and it should be easier.

Or they make the nodes harder but the boss easier ala Ultron (where honestly if you had any kind of target clear you would find it difficult to actually lose), people would complain about why the pins are too challenging but the boss is so easy.


When you equivocate the two, you get what we had where you're fighting level 300 nodes to fight a level 300 boss, and people don't like that either.

Where is the line drawn? Where's the point where the nodes are engaging enough to validate their existence, yet not "too hard I don't wanna spend health packs" level? How strong should the boss be to where he is hard enough to justify him being the boss, but not "you're supposed to lose lul how dare they make a boss challenging" inducing?

I do like the idea of capping the scaling per node, but the only problem is then you'll lose engagement for a lot of people (well maybe not, people like things easy). If I'm in round 6 and the enemies just passed 250, then my roster of level 375 Ant Man and Thing and 305 SWitch is still going to just roll them. It's not even an event, it's just "something to do" that, if not in the game at all, wouldn't change my day. Go in, shave the boss, wait 5 hours, repeat. Though with my scaling, that's basically how it was anyways since my waves were never really above 250 anyhow.

Also to the idea of "just remove the nodes", they should just remove all but the last node in every event. Then the game would totally be more fun and engaging. Why play PvE by that point, you might as well just play PvP.