PvE Guide v1.1 (Updated January 2016)

Eddiemon

Currently being reviewed and updated after threats and inducements from various sources. So if you want to tell me why my ideas are so terrible please either add to the thread here or PM me, this is your opportunity to shape the future advice for so many hungry eager young player minds...

Eddiemon's Complete PvE Guide v1.1
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Thanks to Nemek for some of the background work and plenty of forum regulars for arguing with me.
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Scaling: The increasing difficulty of your opponents based on personal success and community success. The devs refer to it as 'matching' or 'matchmaking', even in a PvE context.
Rubberbanding: An increase in points multipliers based on how far behind the leader you are.
Tanking: Deliberately losing missions to **** or reverse scaling effects.
Grinding: Completing more missions at lower point values in an effort to amass a higher score.
Node: Any individual stack of missions
Stack: Most nodes have between 2 and 5 mission completions before they go to either 0 or 1 points. This is the mission stack
Refresh: The time between completing a mission and that being mission being added back to the mission stack.
Base points: Every node has a base amount of points its missions are worth. This base value is used to calculate point increases due to rubberbanding and point decreases due to stack size reduction.
Clear: Completing every node in a sub once only.
Final Clear: Completing every mission you can in a sub as often as possible, before the sub ends.
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The points you get for any individual mission are determined by three things - the base points for that node, the amount of missions still in the stack and how far behind the leader you are.
The leader is an ambiguous term, because it depends on the event. For some events, such as TaT, the leader is always the global leader, even in sub events. In other events such as The Simulator, the leader is the global leader for that sub event. Basic information on a particular event can be found in mags1587's excellent PVE Format Guide which is kept updated for more assiduously than this. More specific information on an instance of an event can be found in the Events subforum.
The D3 communications team (and by that I mean David) have been good at letting us know what events are coming in the future. Check out the monthly sneak peeks in the General Discussion forum.

Rule 1: Timing is everything
If you want to succeed in PvE events then you need to get the maximum amount of points possible for your endeavours. At the same time you don't want to put in more effort than is required to win. In particular, this means that for the final clear of any sub-event you want to leave it as late as possible to maximise your rubberband bonus while being able to complete all the missions you need to complete.
You're also going to want to have all your nodes available with a full stack of missions at that time, so you need to stop playing missions at least a refresh duration and about 2 hours before the end of the sub event.
You could follow this behaviour back to the start of the event, but that generally isn't necessary. People rarely grind everything down to zero, and they also are rarely fixated on precision timings for the first few refreshes. So it all comes down to clearing missions in the last 2 hours.
I have assumed it takes you about 2 hours to completely grind down all the nodes in a sub, which is why I have gone with 2 hours from the end as the time. Your mileage may vary on this depending on your roster quality and the number of nodes. If your roster is poor and you can't complete every node 5 times before running out of healthpacks then start your final run later so you get more rubberband points for those nodes that you can complete. Or similarly if you are running maxed 5 starts that melt faces, you can probably start later to roll around in more rubberband points.

Rule 2: Don't Grind
Grinding looks attractive. You are getting more points and you get to pick up all 4 individual rewards. What's not to love? Scaling!
There are two forms of scaling in the game - personal and community.
Community scaling increases the level of opponents based on how many times the node is cleared in the event. This is offset by the amount of time other nodes are cleared and the amount of people who fail to clear the node.
Personal scaling is based on how well you perform. This isn't just based on wins and losses, but also looks at how healthy you are entering each match. So if you are healing in the event or even in battles outside of the event your difficulty will continue to scale up.
Community scaling drops between sub-events and events. Your personal scaling also seems to decay somewhat [anecdotal, not confirmed] between events and possibly between sub-events.
That 500 ISO bonus looks attractive and is worth just 1 more go of the node right? Not when you go to the fourth sub event and can't get any of the bonuses because everything is level 230. Basically if the mission isn't on your path to winning, let it go.

Rule 3: Manage your rubberbanding bonuses
Rubberbanding is based on your current point value compared to the current points leader as explained earlier. For any event there is a value 'X' which determines the rubberbanding bonuses. X seems to change between events, but it's not necessary to know the number, just know how to use it.
When you are within X points of the leader your rubberbanding bonus is 0, i.e. you only get the base points for the mission. When you are outside 10 times X points from the leader your rubberbanding bonus is 9 times the base points, giving you 10 times the base points for every mission completed.
In between those two points the rubberbanding multiplier drops linearly. So if you were 2 times X points away from the leader your points per mission would be doubled, 3 times X back would be tripled and so on.
When you are in the 10x bonus, or in no bonus, the order you undertake missions does not affect your point return. While in the middle where your multiplier is declining though it is important that you attempt the highest base value missions first. This gives you the best ratio of bonous points earned to base points used.
As a corollary it is generally good to do low value missions in the 10x bonus phase when you think you are close to that 10 times X value. This means that once the bonus does start to drop you can move on to your highest value missions without wasting too much of the multiplier available.
The rubberbanding effect appears to have been reduced. I don't know if anyone has studied it since Nemek left, but it doesn't seem to blow out to 10x anymore. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated

Rule 4: Manage your stack's refilling
Apart from rubberbanding, the other bonus affecting your points is the number of missions in the stack at the node. For most events this will be 5, but for some events it has been 2. There is nothing stopping them from making it 3 or 7 tomorrow, so you need to be adaptable.
If all the missions are in the stack, you get 100% of the base points times the rubberbanding bonus. For every mission missing from the stack you lose a percentage of the points equal to the percentage of stack used up. In math terms you get (current stack)/(maximum stack) of the available missions points with base and rubberbanding factored in.
In a 5 stack then the first mission is worth 100%, the second 80% and so on down. Each node regenerates one mission every refresh time from when you first took the stack down from full. Normally this means you want to hit a node once to take one mission off the stack, then wait for the refresh time before hitting the node again so that you are getting the missions at 100% point value. This is the best way to play if you can.
If you have a life and time constrains you from playing every refresh (generally 8 hours, I believe they have standardised on this but there is nor rule guaranteeing it), then you may need to sometimes miss a refresh. In these situations plan ahead and where you see you won't be able to play when a refresh is up you may be better served hitting each node twice and getting 80% of the points for the second clear rather than missing out entirely. Given that most subs are 8 hours long, you don't have a great window for a 12 hour gap in playing unless you manage your first clear right when the sub opens.


Rule 5: Rotate through all nodes starting with the biggest
The old rule used to have players grinding through individual stacks because of the way nodes used to refresh. Now that they only refresh one mission every refresh period regardless of how many missions you have taken off the stack, that method is actually counterproductive.

Now you want to hit your most valuable node first and work your way through the nodes in descending order of value. This is because you want to apply your highest rubberbanding bonus to your highest base value. If this is a regular clear then you want to hit each node only once in that order. If this is your final clear then you may want to repeat higher value nodes before starting on lower value nodes, as the larger rubberband multiplier is better applied to higher base values.

We've done the math on this, and if you fully exhaust the rubberbanding bonus then it doesn't matter much which order you do the nodes in, you get almost the same amount of points, varied only by the value of the very last mission you beat. But if you don't manage to exhaust the bonus then you can get a larger chunk of it by prioritising your mission choices

Rule 6: Don't rely on boosts
Boosts should be what it says on the tin. A boost. When you rely on them for sustained performance they ruin your game experience. If you need a boost to beat that opponent that one time for the special bonus mission, or to get past a progression mission, then that is a good use of a boost.
If you look at the information presented above on how scaling works, regular boosts will mean that you come out of missions better than you should. Which means that your personal scaling will increase to allow for the boost, and your opponents will scale as if you had a higher baseline ability than you do. You end up as hard up as you were before you started abusing boosts, but you are also flushing ISO down the drain.
Had you instead spent that ISO on leveling your characters you should always be slightly ahead of the games baseline expectations of you, or at worst level.

Rule 7: Powered up characters are awesome
No seriously. The first thing you need to understand is that 1* characters scale better than 2*s who scale better than 3*s and so on. A 3 star at 120 is about on par with a 2* at level 85. Their edge is that they can go to level 141. Even better, a 2* with only 2 abilities is designed to scale even better because their maximum level is lower again that a tricolour 2*.
So if you have a level 85 2* with a 30 level bonus it is more powerful than any 3* can achieve. Even better if it is a 40 or 100 level bonus.
Championing makes this even more true at the lower levels, though championed 3*s may be able to hold their own against boosted 2*s at the top end. We won't know until at least patch 94 which fixes boosted character performance

Rule 8: Higher level characters are bad
The matching algorithms in this game, for both PvE and PvP select your opponents based, purportedly on your 3 highest leveled characters for a given event. Now while I talked earlier about personal and community scaling earlier, there is also a scaling effect applied to the nodes based on your roster. We don't have access to the algorithm, so whether it sets a base level that is then multiplied by the community and personal scaling factors, or is also a multiplier in itself we aren't sure.

But we are sure that the more you level your characters the harder the nodes get. And this is significant in two ways - not only are your fights longer, requiring more health packs and resources and more time commitment on your part, but you also need to start your final clears earlier to get all the nodes. That is why you will often see players with only 2 star characters in the top 10 of events.

There are two character 'soft caps' that people aim for, Level 94 and level 120. Level 94 because your 3*s won't outlevel your 2*s and affect your scaling, and level 120 because most characters will have come close to their peak performance while still keeping opponent levels down.

In response to this the devs have changed the character ability scaling algorithms so that they reach peak performance at a higher level are less powerful in the middle levels to make 94 and 120 less attractive for 3*s. Unfortunately they screwed the pooch and we await patch 94 to see how this actually all plays out

Additionally they are in the process of deploying a new matching algorithm for PvE and PvP which is intended to make staying underlevelled a less beneficial if not completely pointless exercise. Once we've seen it in action analysis will be provided

Rule 9: Have the essential characters
Yes it's a mean rule that may be out of your control, but it's the sad truth that finishing at a high level without the essentials makes it very difficult to win or even achieve the top progression reward. Lacking one essential you can still make top progression by being diligent (unless they screw up their points prediction for the event, which happens.)

The one thing that many players do that helps here is hold onto cover rewards until the timer forces them to sell. This gives you 14 days where you can sub in a character you didn't have in your roster if you require them. For an early game player this can mean holding onto those 3 star covers you can't afford a roster slot for, and for more advanced players it can mean having the ability to sub in any 2 star character that you sold off.

Rule 9: Play for your objective
PvE has progression and placement rewards. There are optimal strategies to reach each target.

If you want the top progression rewards, or anything along the way, start early. The sooner you start, the sooner you start earning points. This is the hardest way to end up top anything though, as you have grouped yourself with similar minded people who are trying to amass as many points as possible, and maybe a few people who just needed some extra ISO or CP.

If you want the top placement rewards, starting around halfway through an event, close to the end of a sub is best. You will find yourself competing with people like yourself who are trying to snipe the rewards, but mostly you will be dealing with people who entered just to collect a few bonuses. There is a gamble as you could be the 1000th entry in a sub and everyone is ahead of you, or you could be the first entry and have a bonus. You are starting at the end of a sub so that you can get all the points for a final clear and have that edge over anyone who joins in 2 hours time.

And if you like to try your luck, joining in the last 30 minutes is a pure gamble. You could end up in a bracket with only 50 other people or you could end up replacing someone who got sandboxed form an early bracket and end up 100,000 points behind everyone. But if you don't have the time it's worth a gamble.




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Contributions
Some alternate explanations that seemed to help, or just people who added direction

mohio wrote:

As for nodes vs. stacks, nodes are just the term used for each "dot" on a map. Stacks is just a helpful term to visualize what is happening to the point values. Every time you beat a node the base point value decreases by 20% of the maximum, so previous users visualized that as 5 stacks, and beating a node removed a stack from it. Next time you're in the game, note what the point value is at full value, and then after you beat it. It should be 80% (although it could be slightly off due to rubberbanding changing the values, but the base value will have gone to 80%).

Nemek as mentioned for rubberbanding calculations.
Mohio for the alternate explanation of nodes and stacks.
Aleth for the question on essentials.
Malcrof for the bullying.

Eddiemon

As I have been prevailed upon to update this thing, I am putting version 1.0 here as a historical record.

Eddiemon's Complete PvE Guide v1.0
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This guide comes in two parts - This first post explains how things work. The second post below goes into the maths and deeper explanations for those who care about such things. Thanks to Nemek for some of the background work and plenty of forum regulars for arguing with me.
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Scaling: The increasing difficulty of your opponents based on personal success and community success.
Rubberbanding: An increase in points multipliers based on how far behind the leader you are.
Tanking: Deliberately losing missions to **** or reverse scaling effects.
Grinding: Completing more missions at lower point values in an effort to amass a higher score.
Node: Any individual stack of missions
Stack: Most nodes have between 2 and 5 mission completions before they go to either 0 or 1 points. This is the mission stack
Refresh: The time between completing a mission and that being mission being added back to the mission stack.
Base points: Every node has a base amount of points its missions are worth. This base value is used to calculate point increases due to rubberbanding and point decreases due to stack size reduction.
==============================================================================
The points you get for any individual mission are determined by three things - the base points for that node, the amount of missions still in the stack and how far behind the leader you are.
The leader is an ambiguous term, because it depends on the event. For some events, such as TaT, the leader is always the global leader, even in sub events. In other events such as The Simulator, the leader is the global leader for that sub event. For event specific information such as who the leader is, refresh times and so on, please look in the individual event threads. In most cases it can take 12+ hours to work it out so asking 15 minutes into a new event can be irritating.

Rule 1: Timing is everything
If you want to succeed in PvE events then you need to get the maximum amount of points possible for your endeavours. At the same time you don't want to put in more effort than is required to win. In particuler, this means that for the final clear of any sub-event you want to leave it as late as possible to maximise your rubberband bonus while being able to complete all the missions you need to complete.
You're also going to want to have all your nodes available with a full stack of missions at that time, so you need to stop playing missions at least a refresh duration and about 2 hours before the end of the sub event.
You could follow this behaviour back to the start of the event, but that generally isn't necessary. People rarely grind everything down to zero, and they also are rarely fixated on precision timings for the first few refreshes. So it all comes down to clearing missions in the last 2 hours.

Rule 2: Don't Grind
Grinding looks attractive. You are getting more points and you get to pick up all 4 individual rewards. What's not to love? Scaling!
There are two forms of scaling in the game - personal and community.
Community scaling increases the level of opponents based on how many times the node is cleared in the event. This is offset by the amount of time other nodes are cleared and the amount of people who fail to clear the node.
Personal scaling is based on how well you perform. This isn't just based on wins and losses, but also looks at how healthy you are entering each match. So if you are healing in the event or even in battles outside of the event your difficulty will continue to scale up.
Community scaling drops between sub-events and events. Your personal scaling also seems to decay somewhat [anecdotal, not confirmed] between events and possibly between sub-events.
That 500 ISO bonus looks attractive and is worth just 1 more go of the node right? Not when you go to the fourth sub event and can't get any of the bonuses because everything is level 230. Basically if the mission isn't on your path to winning, let it go.

Rule 3: Manage your rubberbanding bonuses
Rubberbanding is based on your current point value compared to the current points leader as explained earlier. For any event there is a value 'X' which determines the rubberbanding bonuses. X seems to change between events, but it's not necessary to know the number, just know how to use it.
When you are within X points of the leader your rubberbanding bonus is 0, i.e. you only get the base points for the mission. When you are outside 10 times X points from the leader your rubberbanding bonus is 9 times the base points, giving you 10 times the base points for every mission completed.
In between those two points the rubberbanding multiplier drops linearly. So if you were 2 times X points away from the leader your points per mission would be doubled, 3 times X back would be tripled and so on.
When you are in the 10x bonus, or in no bonus, the order you undertake missions does not affect your point return. While in the middle where your multiplier is declining though it is important that you attempt the highest base value missions first. This gives you the best ratio of bonous points earned to base points used.
As a corollary it is generally good to do low value missions in the 10x bonus phase when you think you are close to that 10 times X value. This means that once the bonus does start to drop you can move on to your highest value missions without wasting too much of the multiplier available.

Rule 4: Always let a stack fully refill
Apart from rubberbanding, the other bonus affecting your points is the number of missions in the stack at the node. For most events this will be 5, but for some events it has been 2. There is nothing stopping them from making it 3 or 7 tomorrow, so you need to be adaptable.
If all the missions are in the stack, you get 100% of the base points times the rubberbanding bonus. For every mission missing from the stack you lose a percentage of the points equal to the percentage of stack used up. In math terms you get (current stack)/(maximum stack) of the available missions points with base and rubberbanding factored in.
In a 5 stack then the first mission is worth 100%, the second 80% and so on down. Each mission individually regenerates in the stack after the refresh interval has expired.The whole stack is not renewed at once. So If I complete missions at 1:00, 1:10, 1:20, 1:30 and 1:40 the stack will be empty at 1:40. With a 12 hour refresh There will be one mission in the stack at 13:00 worth 20%. A second mission will arrive at 13:10 and the top mission will now be worth 40%. And so on up until 13:40 when the stack will be full and the top mission will be worth 100% again.
But if at 13:00 I had immediately attempted the mission that refreshed, I would have gotten only 20% of thepossible points, and when the next mission refreshed at 13:10 it would also only be worth 20% of the points. If I had completed all the missions in this fashion I would have gotten 100% of the mission points (20% x 5) where had I waited the 40 minutes I would have had 300% (100%,80%,60%,40%,20%).

Rule 5: One stack at a time
There is a temptation to bounce around grabbing all the big number bonuses first. That's well and good when you are in taht declining bonus stage and it has an impact on your final score. But beyond that you are better off always completing all the mission you intend in a stack before moving to the next node.
If it takes you 2 hours to complete all the mission you intend in a sub event, and it refreshes every 12 hours then you can force yourself to wait almost 14 hours between clears instead of 12.
Lets number the nodes 1-12. If you had started on node 1 and played it 3 times, then moved on to node 2 and never came back, then 12 hours after you finished playing node 1 you could come back and start into node 1 again because it would be back on 100%.
Whereas if you had done node 1 once for the big score, bounced through other missions, then hit node 1 again, done other missions and then node 1 again, you could find that it is 13-14 hours after your first attempt at node 1 before it is at 100% and ready to be played again.
In a 2.5 day event you generally have 12 hour refresh which allows you to comfortabley complete every sub event 4 times and not really have to stress about time until the final clear. But if you are adding 2 hours to that refresh time by not playing disciplined you end up having 56 hours of 'fixed' playing time and only 4 hours of flexibility instead of the 10 hours of flexibility you would have had.

Rule 6: Don't rely on boosts
Boosts should be what it says on the tin. A boost. When you rely on them for sustained performance they ruin your game experience. If you need a boost to beat that opponent that one time for the special bonus mission, or to get past a progression mission, then that is a good use of a boost.
If you look at the information presented above on how scaling works, regular boosts will mean that you come out of missions better than you should. Which means that your personal scaling will increase to allow for the boost, and your opponents will scale as if you had a higher baseline ability than you do. Yuo end up as hard up as you were before you started abusing boosts, but you are also flushing ISO down the drain.
Had you instead spent that ISO on levelling your characters you should always be slightly ahead of the games baseline expectations of you, or at worst level.

Rule 7: Powered up characters are awesome
No seriously. The first thing you need to understand is that 1* characters scale better than 2*s who scale better than 3*s and so on. A 3 star at 120 is about on par with a 2* at level 85. Their edge is that they can go to level 141. Even better, a 2* with only 2 abilities is designed to scale even better because their maximum level is lower again that a tricolour 2*.
So if you have a level 85 2* with a 30 level bonus it is more powerful than any 3* can achieve. Even better if it is a 40 or 100 level bonus. A Daken with any of those bonuses is just ridiculous, which is why when the PvE sports a 230 Daken people die. A lot.
But the message here is to always look at the buffed characters and be very very sure that they aren't better than your favourite regular team. Because they probably are.

Unknown

Eddiemon wrote:

When you are in the 10x bonus, or in no bonus, the order you undertake missions does not affect your point return. While in the middle where your multiplier is declining though it is important that you attempt the highest base value missions first. This gives you the best ratio of bonus points earned to base points used.

Rule 5: One stack at a time
There is a temptation to bounce around grabbing all the big number bonuses first. That's well and good when you are in taht declining bonus stage and it has an impact on your final score. But beyond that you are better off always completing all the mission you intend in a stack before moving to the next node.

Great guide and what I have followed myself to good results. However the two points above are in contrast to each other and there is a give and take there (more points by hitting high but less flexibility on timing by jumping nodes or vice versa)

mischiefmaker

Outstanding stuff, thanks for putting it all together!

One subtle thing that I think could use some discussion is that you really need to have a good idea of how long playing a node will take you (and you need to allow for community scaling to mess with that number), so that you have a good idea of when to start each round of grinding down the stacks.

Unknown

This was extremely helpful. Thank you for doing this guide.

Eddiemon

entropic01 wrote:

Eddiemon wrote:

When you are in the 10x bonus, or in no bonus, the order you undertake missions does not affect your point return. While in the middle where your multiplier is declining though it is important that you attempt the highest base value missions first. This gives you the best ratio of bonus points earned to base points used.

Rule 5: One stack at a time
There is a temptation to bounce around grabbing all the big number bonuses first. That's well and good when you are in taht declining bonus stage and it has an impact on your final score. But beyond that you are better off always completing all the mission you intend in a stack before moving to the next node.

Great guide and what I have followed myself to good results. However the two points above are in contrast to each other and there is a give and take there (more points by hitting high but less flexibility on timing by jumping nodes or vice versa)

Yes it is a balance. As soon as I cross the 10x barrier I will generally hit my three highest nodes once each, then go back to working down single stacks.

The exception to that is when I have left time tight, say it is 14 hours to the end of the event and I have just started my second last refresh. In that case I put the one stack at a time discipline ahead of point maximisation, because it will pay back in time available in my final attempt at the missions.

Eddiemon

mischiefmaker wrote:

Outstanding stuff, thanks for putting it all together!

One subtle thing that I think could use some discussion is that you really need to have a good idea of how long playing a node will take you (and you need to allow for community scaling to mess with that number), so that you have a good idea of when to start each round of grinding down the stacks.

Yeah it's not very scientific. Do you have boosted characters, are you about to get a bad board and so on.

I try to play the people, not the game. What I mean by that is that most people will use 2 hours or less as their rule of thumb. If you start 3 hours out you give too much rubberbanders bonus to the 2 hour starters. If you start 1 hour out you may get unlucky and not clear enough missions

So there is a sweet spot there between 120 and 90 minutes out that you are aiming for but I can't tell you when exactly it is for each event. Then you simply need to outplay your opponents on the run in.

Unknown

I always thought it's funny how very few people used Daken when he was boosted in the first Simulator Basic, even though you'd think this is a guy who needs no introduction on his credentials.

NorthernPolarity

Great job on the guide! One small thing: you said that a level 120 3* character = a level 85 2* character: was this just a ballpark estimate or based off of something else? A 3* character does the same tile damage at level 100, so that should be the equals point as opposed to 120.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Great job on the guide! One small thing: you said that a level 120 3* character = a level 85 2* character: was this just a ballpark estimate or based off of something else? A 3* character does the same tile damage at level 100, so that should be the equals point as opposed to 120.

From the buffed level we can see that A level 125 2* is far superior to a level 141 3* (compare say, Ares in Simulator Basic to any nonbroken 3* and it's not even close. Even Punisher doesn't compare favorably).

2* usually have better damage per AP in any nonbroken cases (and if you want to go broken cases pre nerf Wolverine/Thor is quite competitive against any broken 3*), so at level 100 this advantage becomes even bigger. They still have less HP than a 3*, but this game tends to favor offense over defense. For example Moonstone can do an effective 2K Gravity Warp at level 125 for 8 purple on a clean board (1500 damage + at least 3 AP gained). That's 250 damage per purple, which is not even a good damage color and it still beats most red abilities, and 99% of the time you're far more interested in how hard your special moves hit than having more HP to withstand the enemy attack. In fact with the current massive scaling to PvE, a lot of time you just die from full health in one move, so having less HP isn't even an issue.

Eddiemon

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Great job on the guide! One small thing: you said that a level 120 3* character = a level 85 2* character: was this just a ballpark estimate or based off of something else? A 3* character does the same tile damage at level 100, so that should be the equals point as opposed to 120.

I never actually did the comparison, so I could be wrong. I thought the consensus was 120, but I am happy to change that number if it is broken.

Unknown

At level 100 a 3* has similar match damage, more HP, but generally less damaging abilities than a 2*.

For example a level 89 Psylocke's Psychic Knife at 5 red does 658 damage and leaves a 133 strength strike tile. Compare to say, Wolverine's Feral Claw which is 6 green for 520 damage and 1+1 every 3 red AP 40 strength strike tile and it'll generally be better if you have at least 6 red sitting around. Or just compare straight up to Adamantium Slash, which is 12 red for 2884 damage. Even if you get 2 Psychic Knives, 1300 damage + 266 strength strike tile is probably not as good as just doing 2884 damage immediately, and the first 2 Psychic Knives cost at least 12 red AP (if somehow did it twice with 2 red strike tiles out already, and the 5 red AP version is nowhere competitive against Adamantium Slash). Sure, that's just the special move, but that's also what you care about the most.

aussiemac

Great post Eddiemon! I look forward to the math stuff!

Unknown

Thanks for this! You've made a very complicated system much clearer (:

Question: When should I start playing the sub-event? Should I begin right at the start of the 2d 12h, or should I wait a few hours until people have started? Does rubberbanding work right from the start? I.e. If I start 6h later, would those who have played already and thus have higher levels than me rubberband my nodes into higher point rewards?

DrNitroman

Great work, thanks Eddiemon.
The gap between players who know this forum and those who don't is growing wider...

mohio

Naixiew wrote:

Thanks for this! You've made a very complicated system much clearer (:

Question: When should I start playing the sub-event? Should I begin right at the start of the 2d 12h, or should I wait a few hours until people have started? Does rubberbanding work right from the start? I.e. If I start 6h later, would those who have played already and thus have higher levels than me rubberband my nodes into higher point rewards?

I think the answer to your question depends very much on what your goals for the event are. Because sub-events put you in small-ish pods (200 people or whatever the case may be), you can usually enter with 1 hour left and as long as you play optimally get great rewards since everyone else will have entered late as well. This strategy however won't get you the most points in the main bracket so your main bracket rewards might suffer, as well as your progression rewards since you won't get as many total points. Basically the difference is that you will get an insane amount of points from the rubberbanding effect (since it will rubber band based on a global sub-event leader type of thing), but your base points will suffer since you will only clear the missions once or twice at maximum.

So, if your goal is to place highly in the sub-events, you can simply wait until they are nearing an end and play as many high-point missions as you can until it ends. But, if you also want to collect all the progression rewards in the main event and want to place highly there as well, you likely want to start early and follow the guide about rubberbanding and all that good stuff.

One other thing to consider is that while waiting to start the event will increase the rubberbanding (you can open the screen and check the points on the missions available to see how large the rubberbanding is to verify this), it will also likely increase the community scaling portion in each node. So if you are fairly new, you might want to start asap since the scaling could make some nodes too difficult to clear later in the event. You will get passed later on by people with better rosters due to rubberbanding, but at least you will pick up some of the mission rewards and get some points you might not have been able to get later.

Unknown

Currently, the personal scaling is the dominant factor in determining your overall difficulty so waiting to join later doesn't have an adverse effect and you get the full benefit of the rubberband.

I remember when it was the other way around for Simulator Basic. The 2500 iso reward mission started out at level 100 or so but if you joined a day later it was level 200!

mohio

Glad to have that corrected - I was going on the fact that I've looked at the nodes early on and then actually started playing a day later to see levels went from ~50-60 to ~100. This is without playing at all so I don't think my personal scaling went up at all.

Unknown

mohio wrote:

Glad to have that corrected - I was going on the fact that I've looked at the nodes early on and then actually started playing a day later to see levels went from ~50-60 to ~100. This is without playing at all so I don't think my personal scaling went up at all.

They do go up as a community but this is nothing like the first iteration where you'll see your nodes go to 230 before you even played it. Having it go up by 50 or so levels is not a big deal because if you played earlier, they'd go up by about that much anyway.

The scaling components are still being worked on so they may easily change. Right now personal scaling domintes the community scaling for all practical purposes, but it hasn't always been this way.

Unknown

that why pve suxx.
can't we just have a map with node to clean and difficulty and points rise with clean up until u reash the cap.
final stage will be max lvl ennemy in hard fight ( so maybe i will use boost x 30 a day ) or medipack...

Yeggy

Eddiemon wrote:

(...) 1* characters scale better than 2*s who scale better than 3*s and so on.

Yeah, ok.

Eddiemon wrote:

Even better, a 2* with only 2 abilities is designed to scale even better because their maximum level is lower again that a tricolour 2*.

No. I disagree and I see no proof indicating otherwise.

All 1* 2* and 3* two-powered characters have the exact same scaling when it comes to tile damage compared to their three-powered counterparts. A Juggernaut has the same base tile damage as an Iron Man 35 at level 40 (in different colours of course). That's a very good indicator of how a character scales. I would argue that's the only indicator of how the character scales compared to others of the same rarity. All other scaling is done on a case by case basis. This includes Hit Points and how their abilities.

Now I may agree that Daken scales ridiculously well, but you must note that he is one of two unique characters with an on-match ability that triggers off anyone making a match. The other being Bullseye. Also note that Daken has 0 active abilities. His passives are thus made fundamentally stronger since he can't use any AP for anything. Any ability that heals a character every turn for free scales extremely well with buffed levels and makes them impossible to beat for some people. (Hi patch and pre-nerf 2* Wolvie). Also note that this game has no such thing as an Artificial Intelligence. There is only **** Intelligence, invented by D3. Daken has 2 abilities that don't require the RI (**** intelligence) to do anything to start winning, all they have to do is retardedly match ANY tiles outside of Env. The player will eventually have to match a green if the RI doesn't. The pain begins.

Yes, Daken and Bullseye are ridiculous when buffed. So is Juggernaut. Not because they are two-powered and scale much better than same rarity three-powered characters, but because of how their kits were implemented coupled with the RI (do I have to remind you what it means?). Maybe the designers did make two-powered characters abilities scale better to compete, but they are still weaker.

WAY Off topic:
As a side note I would like to say that there is only one "true" two powered character and that is Ragnarok. He only has high tile damage on 2 of his colours and they both do the equivalent damage of a "tier 2" colour of any other character of same rarity and level. So at level 115, Rag does 51R and 51G damage where an Iron Man 40 at 115 does 57R 51Y 44Blu. Thus an equivalent damage of a "tier 2" colour. This design choice still confuses me. He is unique no doubt.

Oh and feel free to convince me otherwise. Sorry for throwing in a couple of bashful comments about certain design desicions.