Boss Rush Event: Info & Rewards *Updated

Bowgentle

I limped into round 7 by going 0/I don't even know how many attempts in round 6.

When someone with a level 456 Surfer, 452 OML, 435 Phoenix and 28 champed 4*s can't beat round 6 of 8, something is very very wrong with the difficulty of an event.

But keep on keeping on, Demiurge. Collect feedback for another two days. Then adjust.
This too will pass.
Also, money.

simonsez

Chipster22 wrote:

even some 3* players on round 6.

You say that as if you don't understand that scaling results in no advantage to better rosters in this event.

simonsez

simonsez wrote:

Chipster22 wrote:

even some 3* players on round 6.

You say that as if you don't understand that scaling results in no advantage to better rosters in this event.

Orion wrote:

I never beat round 6 in 11 attempts, but I only got to Surfer once. And I was using 2 champion 5*s.

Bowgentle wrote:

When someone with a level 456 Surfer, 452 OML, 435 Phoenix and 28 champed 4*s can't beat round 6 of 8, something is very very wrong

Let me rephrase: You say that as if you don't understand that scaling makes this event easier for those 3* players...

MLDB

Enough has been said about the insane scaling that I have nothing to add besides I agree it was a horrible oversight.

I will address, however, overloaded kits. Phoenix by far is way stronger than any other based on her passives ALONE. Generating 5 red tiles a turn, but then also being able to collect them and deal damage if more than 9 are on the board? So we have AP generation plus a greatly improved Hood passive in 1 passive. Then passive 2 gives her AOE+ random 3 turn stun on a 5 crit, plus she can't be stunned back? No other boss has the ability to feed into free 9k AOE +stun without making a single match. If the generating red doesn't make a match-5, the cascades afterward have a great chance to! She doesn't even need Mind Crush to wipe a team.

If boss rush is retooled, please don't overlook phoenix as needing some toning down. Take away the stun or the damage on a match 5, or take away the auto collect if more than 9 red are on the board. Maybe even both, because there's no counter strategy to both.

In comparison, Banner, the other tile generating fiend needs to SPEND AP to do aoe, there's no 3 turn stun, he stops generating green tiles like crazy after he gets enough AP to transform and smash, and he can un transform if green is less than 7. He's at least got some counter strategy to him. Phx is just putting you at the mercy of RNGesus at maximum capacity.

kobu

Arphaxad wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update: 1:25 PM 10/14/16

Greetings, all.

The dev team wanted to let everyone know they have been reading your feedback and taking it into consideration. Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"Hey everyone, We're trying a bunch of new stuff with the initial run of Boss Rush and we appreciate hearing your thoughts. We'll look at our data to see how people did and combine that with the feedback to help improve future runs of the event. Thanks for playing the event, and keep the feedback coming!"

Thank you.

Come on Anthony, you're not this stupid. You didn't NEED 3 and half days of data to know this event was screwed up. You knew this event was scaled too high for the majority of your players.

Next time, if there is a next time, err on the side of caution and make the event too easy. Then scale it up if needed. But this plan of killing our motivation and then hoping we stick around for the real event is not working.

Agreed with starting off too easy. Ramp up slowly, gauge feedback, and ease off when complaints of too easy and too hard reach parity. The worse that could happen starting too easy is peanuts compared to what's being expressed in this thread. Everyone who might think it's too easy and boring will be right back in the next Story event, complaints mostly forgotten. This though? This will not be forgotten.

And here's how this event has impacted how I feel about the game...I have a routine now where I jump up each morning and do my DDQ. Until this morning. This morning, I didn't even want to fire up the game. I forced myself to, and I'm only on my third node when I normally would be done hours ago. I played some Star Realms instead, got some **** draws and lost a lot, but at no point did I feel like a carrot was being dangled just out of my reach.

It's the complete opposite of how I felt after Civil War. I was doing my best there, still got stomped by House Party Protocol, but still came back to help my alliance score as many prizes as we could. There was some frustration, sure, but it was also exhilarating to win later rounds and inch closer to our goals. Here with Peggy covers being a pipe dream, I don't even want to try.

Dragon_Nexus

kobu wrote:

Agreed with starting off too easy. Ramp up slowly, gauge feedback, and ease off when complaints of too easy and too hard reach parity. The worse that could happen starting too easy is peanuts compared to what's being expressed in this thread. Everyone who might think it's too easy and boring will be right back in the next Story event, complaints mostly forgotten. This though? This will not be forgotten.

Definitely. Hell, it probably would have benefitted them if it was too easy. One big fireworks display as we vent some frustrations "Ha take THAT OML you over powered monster!" as your boosted 3* team stomps a level 300 OML on Round 8 or something. We get this big glorious send off to the anniversary, everyone gets 3 Peggy covers as a big thank you to playing the game and we all leave with happy smiles having earned loads of anniversary tokens, maybe some Devil Dinos, a ton of ISO and other rewards and finishing off with a fun event that got us three covers for one of the most desirable 4*s in the game.

But instead we got brought to the party, handed some gifts and then kicked in the balls whenever the music stopped.

Wjohnson992

simonsez wrote:

simonsez wrote:

Chipster22 wrote:

even some 3* players on round 6.

You say that as if you don't understand that scaling results in no advantage to better rosters in this event.

Orion wrote:

I never beat round 6 in 11 attempts, but I only got to Surfer once. And I was using 2 champion 5*s.

Bowgentle wrote:

When someone with a level 456 Surfer, 452 OML, 435 Phoenix and 28 champed 4*s can't beat round 6 of 8, something is very very wrong

Let me rephrase: You say that as if you don't understand that scaling makes this event easier for those 3* players...

It really doesnt.

Vhailorx

MLDB wrote:

Enough has been said about the insane scaling that I have nothing to add besides I agree it was a horrible oversight.

But that's just the thing, It was NOT an oversight! How much evidence do we need to know that demi wants the game to be much harder than we do?

Galactus event last year
the first several PVE tests
the current 2* essential node "bugfix"
The great un-leavening after Season XXXI (no more baking)
The general trend towards longer, harder matches.

they just keep trying to make the game really hard and telling us it's a fun challenge over and over again. And we keep acting all surprised and frustrated by it over and over again!

Demi: There are too many game mechanics in MPQ that brutally punish failure. Change those underlying mechanics and you can ramp up the difficulty without destroying the player experience. But right now YOUR GAME IS NOT FUN WHEN YOU MAKE IT THAT HARD!

Nepenthe

I'm on round 7 and I think I'll be able to finish it. I've been using ProfX/GSBW/SWitch and +2 purple, +2 all AP boosts. It still takes a lucky starting board to get a win, but the round targets are set such that it doesn't take that many wins to get through. So far a 50% win rate or so has allowed me to make progress. Not sure about round 8. It feels very much like the first run of Galactus though, where a lucky board and winfinite could get some people through, but if you don't have those heroes or don't have the right starting board, there's no chance to win.

I liked the idea of boss waves. I love survival nodes, and I've loved most of the boss events (with the exception of Galactus's first run massacre). But this just didn't really work. I admit there is a certain tense challenging fun in making sure you keep having enough purple to not let the boss have a single turn, but that tight-rope suspense is not fun over and over through a long event. And for people without that certain combo, they just seem out of luck. I'd much rather be trying out different teams out of my 15 championed 4*s customized for which set of bosses I'm facing in a round, but that doesn't work and they just get wiped. Instead I'm using a cheap trick combo of two 3*s and an underleveled 4* to make it so it doesn't matter what boss I'm facing at all. If they get a turn, the match damage or a single power will kill me, so once I get winfinite started the boss is nothing but a sack of hitpoints. Not the varied challenging boss battles I think the devs were going for.

I hate to say it, but I think the existence of reliable winfinite combos is breaking the game. The devs obviously want to have challenging events, but anything with enough match damage or early-turn damage potential to be a threat to winfinite is going to be devastating for any other 3* and most other 4* rosters. If they scale this down so people can have a reasonable chance and winning with other rosters, winfinite will just roll over the bosses. It's perfect for long fights and survival wave nodes.

*One change I've been trying now is ProfX/GSBW/Jean Grey. In round 7 it's make or break before SWitch's countdown has a chance to go off, so I've had some luck with using Jean to tank purple an buy me a few extra rounds to get purple matches or a match-5. Give it a shot.

Nightglider1

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

But instead we got brought to the party, handed some gifts and then kicked in the balls whenever the music stopped.

"Musical ****" is a terrible game.

DeNappa

Wjohnson992 wrote:

[snip]

simonsez wrote:

Let me rephrase: You say that as if you don't understand that scaling makes this event easier for those 3* players...

It really doesnt.

Being a 3* player myself (hopefully not for *too* long any more) I can confirm that the bosses still stomp the **** out of you. That said, it could very well be the case that 4*/5* players have it even harder. At least psychologically...

Bowgentle

Nepenthe wrote:

The devs obviously want to have challenging events, but anything with enough match damage or early-turn damage potential to be a threat to winfinite is going to be devastating for any other 3* and most other 4* rosters.

And champed 5* rosters, for which winfinite isn't an option.
This event is just broken for everyone except the softcappers who also dominate all other PVEs.

GurlBYE

simonsez wrote:

simonsez wrote:

Chipster22 wrote:

even some 3* players on round 6.

You say that as if you don't understand that scaling results in no advantage to better rosters in this event.

Orion wrote:

I never beat round 6 in 11 attempts, but I only got to Surfer once. And I was using 2 champion 5*s.

Bowgentle wrote:

When someone with a level 456 Surfer, 452 OML, 435 Phoenix and 28 champed 4*s can't beat round 6 of 8, something is very very wrong

Let me rephrase: You say that as if you don't understand that scaling makes this event easier for those 3* players...

I get your frustration but one thing I won't to dash out is the myth of this being a cake walk for 3 star players.

The main problem isn't "ease for lower players"

The glaring issue is having scaling pressing down on your neck no matter how much you progress.

Lower players also have 1 team to use. The main reason that higher level players are having so much trouble and why the game is cooked is because they screwed with scaling before the game could handle it.

5 stars started out at 255. 4 stars ENDED at 270.
There are like 10 of those characters.

Scaling should not have nearly been as harsh for that part of the game, because even as powerful as they were made to be, on average even the players there have 2/3 options.

But this has been the trend since 2's 3's and 4's when people were soft capping for pve.

This event is just exacerbating a lot of the issues with the game.

It seems at this point sadly the expectations of advancing to feel more powerful in game is happening nowhere but the prologue.

Notice they even make us do the trial nodes with soft capped characters? And they also entirely stopped the pvp trial nodes once 5's were introduced?

peanut_gallery

The piss poor design of the PHX boss has already been covered in depth, so I won't rehash that here.

But putting her first as the opening boss for round 8, combined with her piss poor design, is just tinykitty tinykitty tinykitty piss poor game design and downright sadistic.

In prior rounds you at least had a chance to build up AP and go in guns blazing.

Now you are at the fate of RNGesus from the first move. Twice now she's had a crit on her very first move and essentially wiped out my team in one to two moves.

I'd have significantly better odds in Vegas, or even pulling the 5* I wanted from an LT, as that's what the "challenge" in round 8 comes down to: Pure luck from the first move. No strategy or real gameplay involved at all.

There is simply no reason continue to play this absurd event. With PvP and a new PvE coming up, wasting health packs on a slot machine boss battle makes no sense.

insomnia99

I have a question about the side battles. After I play them once they lock and say "mission complete." Yet before I start they say "0/4 rewards" available. Why offer four rewards if you can only play once? Relplaying the boss does not open them either. Is this the same for everyone else?

GrimSkald

Btw, if it affects anyone's will to continue in Boss Rush, Peggy's blue is the progression reward for the next PVE. It does affect mine - my Peggy is (now) 5/1/4 - an extra blue will do nothing but tempt me to spend CP and Iso.

Anyway, I'm going to reiterate what I said before - this is just one event. Yeah, it absolutely sucks, but I'm not going to quit over it. Whether or not anyone else does is their decision, but it seems like a waste.

I do think it's a bad idea for an event in general, and they'd be better off just using the Bosses elsewhere.

an1979

I went into tryhard mode - just to see how sick later rounds are (and maybe grab that yellow)

However not only is this event TiNyKiTTy up! but as always this game stays buggy as hell!
(Of course making banners slowing down the game takes priority over fixing crashes and testing events... I bet those last 2 days were spent hard on new ones!)

Using Hulkfinite.

I got 30.000 (or maybe even 15.000) in round 7 for at least 3 times instead of 45.000
Points for one (or two) boss were not counted.
It seems that if you manage to make "no moves given to boss" you might get a fat NOTHING!

Before boss: 73.739


All 3 bosses killed +45.000
As it is counting down it should be: 73.739 - 45.000 = 28.739
However only 30.000 is deducted: 73.739 - 30.000 = 43.739


After boss ("outside): 43.739 where it should be 28.739


In the end I had to do about 4 more clears in round 7!

It seems you have to allow (both 2nd and 3rd) boss maybe one move near the end when you have ~30AP to immediately clean after him?

Nepenthe

Bowgentle wrote:

Nepenthe wrote:

The devs obviously want to have challenging events, but anything with enough match damage or early-turn damage potential to be a threat to winfinite is going to be devastating for any other 3* and most other 4* rosters.

And champed 5* rosters, for which winfinite isn't an option.
This event is just broken for everyone except the softcappers who also dominate all other PVEs.

I figured that was probably the case, but didn't want to speak to it since I'm not there myself. My best 5* currently has only 8 covers, so my iso is still going more toward championing promising 4*s. I assume that with champed 5*s the bosses are scaled to where winfinite would just die from match damage?

Vhailorx

GrimSkald wrote:

Btw, if it affects anyone's will to continue in Boss Rush, Peggy's blue is the progression reward for the next PVE. It does affect mine - my Peggy is (now) 5/1/4 - an extra blue will do nothing but tempt me to spend CP and Iso.

Anyway, I'm going to reiterate what I said before - this is just one event. Yeah, it absolutely sucks, but I'm not going to quit over it. Whether or not anyone else does is their decision, but it seems like a waste.

I do think it's a bad idea for an event in general, and they'd be better off just using the Bosses elsewhere.

This is a great point. I was feeling quite irritated about finishing Round 7 after being forced to miss a few boss hits for RL reasons. But since my peggy is now 4/1/4, the Round 7 cover is effectively useless to me (unless the unstable iso vault and her upcoming taco vault have yellow).

And if I can pile on the complaining about demi: bad form making Peggy's most important power much harder to get than her other two. yellow was the top 5 cover for her release and the round 8 cover now. It was available as the 1k cover in her release PVP (not the much easier to reach 800 point cover). Even if cover rewards are determined by RNG, the dev team should curate the rewards to make sure there aren't such absurd imbalances (and there is a very clear pattern of powerful passive powers being the Top 5 cover for release events. I don't think release cover rewards are RNG, even if the rewards for later events are).

fmftint

Nepenthe wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Nepenthe wrote:

The devs obviously want to have challenging events, but anything with enough match damage or early-turn damage potential to be a threat to winfinite is going to be devastating for any other 3* and most other 4* rosters.

And champed 5* rosters, for which winfinite isn't an option.
This event is just broken for everyone except the softcappers who also dominate all other PVEs.

I figured that was probably the case, but didn't want to speak to it since I'm not there myself. My best 5* currently has only 8 covers, so my iso is still going more toward championing promising 4*s. I assume that with champed 5*s the bosses are scaled to where winfinite would just die from match damage?

I'm not a champ 5 player but I do have 3 above 400. Winfinte will not work for me in round 7 I've tried a couple times and GSBW (206) is dead before the first incantation can resolve. Round 7 level 479

I tried hulkfinite but my MoStorm is higher than my Hulk, he only tanks red and blue so if I can't get him out front on the first 2 turns it's game over