2 critiques about Ultron and future boss events.

Phumade

IMHO, The replay of Ultron really highlighted these issues.

Now that we have 3 different boss events it, it might be appropriate to discusss what worked and didn't work in boss events.

My main criticisms are:

1. The sentries eventually get boring and repetitive. I remember thinking in the first run that the sentries were cool because they were the first drones that had active skills. but at this point in the game. 3 full days of side node drones are dull and uninspired. In comparison. Look at galactus and Civil war. The changing lineups in the side nodes makes it more engaging and interesting. Thematically, I could see that having random characters would see odd and hard to explain, but the actual gameplay experience would improve as a result. perhaps they need to consider on the last day switch out the drones to add in some regular characters. Even though we have already finished the event. I would consider replaying side nodes for fun if they had alternating matchup.

2. The lack of a second dual leaderboard is super apparent. Probably the best part of Civil war, was the fact that you could immediately switch to the other side and keep playing through the entire 3 days. Lets be honest and acknowledge that the top 50 alliances in the game can clear ultron in 2days or less, so now they are standing idle with no thing to play in pve. Yes, I know TaT is about to go live. However, Civil war was alot of fun and it really points the way with respect to future boss battle formats.

Does anyone else have any suggestions or comments about how the 3 Boss events stack up against each other?

oh. p.s. The first intro to galactus was amazing. IMHO all the boss events should have a 2 week rollout introduction. Even in replays, its a nice way to build lore and anticipation. For example, look at the awareness of Ultron vs. Galactus. This run pretty much snuck up on people if you didn't read the forums. A nice slow week tease would have built engagement and excitement.

edit: As I think about it. you could have a cool ultron tease by emphasing that he's escaped into the the internet and is quickly regaining consciousness. For Civil war maybe you tease some avengers focus pvp event which leads into civil war. Lots of fun postiive ways to encourage speculation

ZootSax

Phumade wrote:

My main criticisms are:

1. The sentries eventually get boring and repetitive. I remember thinking in the first run that the sentries were cool because they were the first drones that had active skills. but at this point in the game. 3 full days of side node drones are dull and uninspired. In comparison. Look at galactus and Civil war. The changing lineups in the side nodes makes it more engaging and interesting. Thematically, I could see that having random characters would see odd and hard to explain, but the actual gameplay experience would improve as a result. perhaps they need to consider on the last day switch out the drones to add in some regular characters. Even though we have already finished the event. I would consider replaying side nodes for fun if they had alternating matchup.

While your other points were good (especially the one on getting more lead time with communication), I disagree with this point entirely. Galactus was far and away my least favorite boss fight, not because of the boss mechanics themselves, but because we had to face the same, damn, over-scaled Dark Avenger teams in the subs that we have to go against in literally every other PVE, save a couple. Considering they wouldn't lock out any Avengers here, I couldn't see anyone else but the DA replacing sentries. While the sentries do get repetitive, they're thematically appropriate and it's only a rarely-run, 4-day event, so it's hard to get too bored of.

If anything, as many others have said, they should tie the scaling of the sentries to what round you're on, rather than automatically having them jump 200+ levels after 24 hours because...reasons...

To address your second point, if they ran Ultron and Galactus concurrently with Gauntlet and ran Civil War with its pairs, it would go a long way to providing plenty of content without forcing people's schedule too much. Top alliances won't need to have much any overlap, and if different characters were boosted for both events it would help normal players not be too drained on resources. Just my $0.02.

No any event, I really enjoyed yet latest Ultron run again. I wouldn't want it all the time, but I sure hope it enters the regular rotation so that we get a boss every 2-3 months.

simonsez

Phumade wrote:

Does anyone else have any suggestions or comments

Compared to normal PvE, this event is awful on ISO. The second day, I only made around 9k, and that includes DDQ ISO.

Polares

simonsez wrote:

Phumade wrote:

Does anyone else have any suggestions or comments

Compared to normal PvE, this event is awful on ISO. The second day, I only made around 9k, and that includes DDQ ISO.

THIS IS A MUST for any future Boss battle. Iso draught is already too severe, so please devs don't make it worse. They need to at least double the amount of iso, and they need to change rewards in the nodes.

Oh and remove the **** STUPID CRIT BOOSTS!!!!

GrumpySmurf1002

simonsez wrote:

Phumade wrote:

Does anyone else have any suggestions or comments

Compared to normal PvE, this event is awful on ISO. The second day, I only made around 9k, and that includes DDQ ISO.

Definitely. Progression is the same for a 3.5 day event (2520) but I only made 13k + 2* cover + 8 std, 6 heroic over the course of it.

Normal PvE is 7950 per day (plus tokens and sub rewards) - so Ultron shorts you badly

padei_panda

I didn't notice the short ISO, maybe because I was occupied with the gain in CPs.
I really liked that each boss round offered a few CPs!! Thanks devs.
(I think there was 2 or more per boss round)

So when my alliance cleared round 6 and 7 and moved on to round 8 on the one day, my CPs made a big jump.

fnedude

At least for this event, the 25CP reward was at a low enough level that if you played once per day (like I have to because of work/family), I was able to score the 25CP by round 7 by beating every node 1x.

Every other boss battle, I'm short by a significant amount to reach the 25CP (because I can only play 1 round per day).

Taganov

I quit shortly after the second Ultron run, but what I do remember was TOKENS. That's why my beyond casual alliance got into it at all. I noticed this time that they took away tokens and added the ability for Ultron to move the board. Perhaps reverse that for future boss events? Thanks.

TxMoose

can we ramp up side node difficulty a little slower than straight from 50-300??? no idea why that's a good idea. at least we all know what's coming now that we've done it so many times. it just seems like it could be better done than that.

TimGunn

yeah i was hoping it would be ultron and galactus run at the same time. Can try to save the world from Ultron or Galactus (and only top alliances will be able to do both). Maybe for the anniversary!

Or could even be lazy and do Ultron black vs. Ultron white.

I also think there should be a group boss at the end of every season. Could get repetitive. But could be fun, like it is all leading up to that.

LordXberk

Agree to remove the crit boosts and include some event tokens! Simple fix: replace the crit boosts w/ event tokens!!

Also, was disappointing to have the main Ultron boss not provide any rewards whatsoever after Rd 8 was cleared. The nodes still gave you a shot at some ISO, so why not have Ultron himself keep giving out rewards? As stated before, the t50 alliances knocked this out fast (including my own - go MPQU!), so we were left w/ nothing to do on the PVE side unless you wanted to beat Level 300 sentries for a shot at ISO and then take down the boss Ultron again just for that same chance to hit another node (and often get a crit).

rbdragon

I can only assume the scaling issue is because we get 3 trivial nodes then three overscaled nodes in a regular PVE, this is D3's way to do that in a boss battle. Not that it's a good idea mind you, but that's the only thing I can think they've been doing.....

One thing I really dislike about boss battles, or any event with locked nodes really - why do single clear nodes have randomized rewards? Why not make it a single iso/hp/token prize (hint - NOT a )?

The rest of the event was good. Ultron was difficult, but not OP. The sentries were strong, but again, not OP.