Boss Rush Event: Info & Rewards *Updated

broll

I can't believe this got unstickied... I hope they are still looking at the feedback.

So I completed Round 6, but it was a grueling slog that was not in the least bit enjoyable. I wasn't even close to max personal progression, which was a huge insult based on the amount of time and effort thrown at this turd.

How scaling felt:
1 - Easy
2 - Normal
3 - Hard
4 - Really Hard
5 - Brutally Hard
6 - You're kidding right?
7 - You thought you were supposed to win? lol
8 - I didn't get this far but I wouldn't be surprised if it was just 3 Galacticus'

How it should have scaled:
1 - Super Easy
2 - Very Easy
3 - Easy
4 - Starting to not feel easy
5 - Normal
6 - Hard
7 - Really Hard
8 - Brutally Hard

The points should have been scaled so that you were supposed to beat all 3 bosses 3-4 times before progressing to the next round.

Other things that should be changed to make this enjoyable:
- Stop with the essential nodes scaling up every 8 hours. They should unlock every 8 hours and scale with the round.
- It would have been nice if it were not the same 5 essentials the whole event. If someone didn't have those characters the event would have been completely unattemptable.
- Progression points were tuned way too high. As long as you were hitting all 5 essentials each hour, even if you didn't do so good on the boss, you should have achieved 25 CP.
- The alliance reward was an OK idea, but the prize was too weak. The ISO was fine, but their should have been more HP and either multiple 3* covers for first or one of the following: 4*/LT/25 CP
- The idea that this wasn't an alliance event was interesting. I think it could work as such, but it should have been announced that way. The fact that we weren't told it would be solo felt like a bait and switch.
- Fix the **** scaling for **** sakes!!!

This event was not fun in the least. This is supposed to be a game about playing as/with Marvel heroes. Don't you love watching your heroes continually lose over and over to their enemies? It's it awesome when the henchmen beat them before they even get to the main boss? No, that's not how these things work. The bosses usually lose, then come back later stronger over and over until they finally do win and it takes a heroic effort to beat them. That's what this event should feel like, not this:

liminal_lad

3-4* transitioning player. Ended with ~300,000 to go and was in first place for my alliance. I was out of health packs, out of boosts, and out of time.

It was so painfully agonizingly close. I can see if that was the goal and ALMOST respect it. But that last Phoenix was brutal and her match fives far too plentiful. I just wish I had gotten the CP. It would have been a nice consolation prize. In the end I finished 2/12 attempts on round 8 and almost beat Phoenix two other times. Once I got past her, the next two rounds felt almost easy.

[slight edit for clarity]

BatteryHorse

Just a few points about Boss Russ.

I actually completed it, got all rewards and finished first in my alliance, which is silly because my roster is very middle of the pack. After the first few rounds I had to use Charlie's Angels, and in the last couple of rounds I used the Hulkstorm winfinite team. That worked for me because my Hulk was one level higher than Storm, so he tanked almost all colors. I could get his anger to trigger four times in one turn fighting Phoenix, flood the world with green and then grind them down.

But, that can't be what the developers envisioned, right? Understandably they don't like winfinite combos, matches with Hulk/KK/Storm take *forever* for me, just mindlessly spamming Storm's Lightning Strike on a loop like an idiot. There is absolutely no way for me to put together a conventional team that could compete with those bosses, and no way for me to get enough points for all rewards without that team. I know there are a couple of other teams that work, like RHulk, 4Cyc and Storm (I think?)

There was no creativity, no cleverness, no need to have a deep roster or to have invested in strong teams of characters. You either lose every match in frustration or you wind by mindlessly spamming. Just bad design.

Edit: Our alliance had tossed out some ideas, like having your heroes boosted progressively higher to match the enemies. Kind of like Clash of the Titans, in the last round maybe you have heroes that, with some clever teams and some creativity, you can actually try to beat three bosses in a row. Level 550 Squirrel Girl vs Boss OML, and other such nonsense. Y'know, fun.

Felonius

I managed to get the blue Peggy cover, and it was an unfun slog to even get that. I stopped at that point. I had time I could have done a few more fights, but I was done with the losing, and just quit. I was no where near meeting personal progression (which sucks considering how hard/much I played). I think my last boss fight win was in round 4 or 5, after that I was lucky if I beat the first of the three bosses, and by the last two rounds I was lucky if my toons weren't all three dead by turn four or five from just match damage alone, with me maybe having done 4-5k damage and barely putting a dent in the first boss' health. In many games, it would start with me making a standard 3-tile match, then on the first turn, the boss' passive would grant them cascades, multi-matches/crit, and I'd lose a character. Turn one, straight-up dead, and I'm down to two toons. On the first boss' first turn. That's just WRONG!

For those curious, I updated my roster link (in my signature). I tried all sorts of different teams. It didn't really seem to matter. Fail. Fail. Fail. Most of my points were coming from the subnodes.

And since I wasn't wining the center node, there were no prizes to be won from that, and strangely, completing the subnodes wasn't awarding XP. That seemed like a bug. All round a very unprofitable event, especially given how much effort was put into it.

D3, please don't run this event again. It was bad.

Thanks.

madsalad

More like "Boss (C)Rush (your hopes and dreams)"

AMIRITE??

chamber44

Mr_Sinister wrote:

JHawkInc wrote:

ChuckFan wrote:

I used a gimmicky Hulkfinity build to get past r7, but in r8 it stopped working for me because Phoenix didn't hit me hard enough to trigger Hulk's anger on a simple match 3, but plenty enough to down him with her skills! I have champed 4s and my 5s are all base level. Thing is this build did work for some of my alliance mates in r8 because they had champed 5s. How silly is it that I actually need Phoenix to do MORE match damage for me to succeed!?

Do you have 4* Cyclops at a usable level? I ran Cyclops/KK/Mohawk, same basic idea as the Hulk/KK/Mohawk team, but you get more damage output from Cyclops along the way (mine is level 131, 2/5/5, more red covers would drastically up the damage; I got through round 7 with several wins, and am only skipping a try at round 8 because IRL stuff had me miss enough potential clears that I'd need perfect play to come close to that Peggy cover, and my Peggy's well covered enough I'm just going to pass on it)

How does this work?

You need to have KK's purple maxed (lower her green) and MoStorm's green maxed (lower her black). Then have 4Clops at 5/3/5. Once it gets going, it's either Winfinite or you'll loose in two matches. You can cast KK's purple to feed MoStorm's green, which then fills up MoStorm's yellow and Cyc's Red and Blue. I would get close to losing one of them in the first round, but then i'd finish with (fake) full health thanks to KK's yellow. MoStorm's yellow ensured that 4Clops's red was always worth 12K in damage, so even with 2/3rds unboosted, was still a strong team.

Then we met OML and his **** 10K for 7 green AP (including an AP-generating cascade). No more MoSKKlops.

MPQ_Daywalker

I have no idea if anyone at Demiurge is going to read through 38+ pages of comments on this event, but in the off chance that they do, I wanted to give my perspective.

On paper, I seem to be the type of player who would most embrace the changes made in Boss Rush, almost like it was tailored toward me... I'm the only member who hits top progression in boss events in my very casual alliance (we've never made it past Round 6 as an alliance in the past), I have a roster philosophy where I aim to level and champion all characters one day (whether they're someone others consider a waste, like Star-Lord, or top-tier, like Iceman; they're champed) and I enjoy a PVE challenge (The Gauntlet is my favorite story event).

I think the move to personal progression from alliance progression was intentional, and was an attempt to reward players in all alliances instead of just alliances made up of the strongest, most competitive players. But speaking as someone who finished Round 7 (and stopped) on his own this time and got two 4* covers for it, I greatly, greatly prefer working with my alliance rather than against them, even if it means I get one less 4* cover for my efforts. Maybe I'd feel differently if the scaling/difficulty wasn't turned up to 100 out of a possible 10, but I don't think so.

As I said above, I like events that challenge the players and encourage us to try different team combinations and tactics to progress. Events like The Gauntlet generally reward people for having extensive rosters with well leveled characters. This was not such an event. Once we hit Phoenix midway through Round 6, Banner/Hulk in Round 7 and Phoenix again at the start of Round 8, it no longer mattered what characters you bring to the fight. If you let that boss get a turn and you don't have invisible or airborne characters, your team will be downed (how quickly depends on how the RNG falls). The passive tile generation (and then active powers, and then tile matches) of Banner and Phoenix meant we were at the mercy of however the tiles randomly fell.

In Round 6, at least you could spend the first wave against OML spamming special tiles so Phoenix in wave 2 would have fewer places to convert to red tiles... For Round 7 you could deny or take away green (RHulk) but were generally so battered by the end of the wave from match damage and critical hits you didn't have much left for subsequent waves. But for Round 8... sometimes you got a few moves to set something up, but more often than not you were taking massive damage after your first turn.

When you look at the statistics for the event, I encourage you to not just look at how many people cleared how many rounds. But look at the team compositions used in those final rounds. I've never been a big fan of "winfinite" teams; I don't find them fun and the requirements to keep certain characters at certain levels goes against my personal philosophy of "champion them all as you get the covers and ISO." But I'm quite certain that if you look at the stats, especially for Round 8, you will find nothing but "infinite" turn teams. Teams like Hulkfinite that could take 45 minutes to down 3 waves of bosses. And people did it, because... well, because Peggy Carter's yellow cover is awesome. But I can't imagine any one of those players actually enjoyed doing that or would have done it for a lesser prize (heck, if it had just been a special LT token, like the "Red Room" token we got with the last boss event, I think the number of people completing would have been exponentially less). Full disclosure: I probably would have tried to use the Hulkfinite team myself (since I have yet to pull a yellow for my Peggy), but mine is broken -- my Storm is way higher level than my Hulk, so she tanks green.

This is not a call to "nerf" or break infinite teams, but rather to make sure you realize that those teams were the only way to get past a boss that can and will down your entire team in 4 turns or less.

This thread has many suggestions on fixing the event, and in my view it comes down to a few major points:

• Communicate major event changes in advance (and if not in advance, still communicate them)
  • If you go back to the first page of this thread, the only communication we have from D3/Demiurge on the event, at no time were we told this was personal progression and not alliance progression. That's a huge change to omit and not address at all.
• Plan out the boosted characters more for the boss event
  • Either boost all characters or put a lot more thought into which characters are being boosted, because with personal scaling whoever is boosted is going to have to be used by the players, since the bosses will be scaled to that level.
  • Kingpin was boosted, after having been boosted the entire previous week. That was too much Kingpin, and that's coming from someone who has him champed and really likes using him. (Oh, and now I'm using him again in Nefarious Foes, a day later.)
  • X-Force Wolverine was boosted, even though he is arguably the 4* that benefits the least health-wise from a boost (and there was no way his heal tile would go off against the higher level bosses), and his most powerful power, Surgical Strike, was broken by the bosses' strongest color always being yellow, which leads me to...
• Don't give bosses the same (insanely high) match damage for every color
  • It defeats the purpose of any "strongest color" powers in the game and makes every single match (and cascade) by the boss painful.
• Bosses should either have powerful tile-changing passive powers or be able to match tiles -- not both
  • Every single one of these bosses would have still been difficult to defeat if they weren't able to match or weren't generating green or red tiles passively. Having them do both means strategy by the player goes out the window. You are down to just random luck on how the board falls as to whether your characters survive the next turn, and that's not fun.

liminal_lad

One additional "I don't think this is how it ws meant to work" comment: Every successful round 8 match took me a MINIMUM of 30 minutes.

Cylaali

**** boss rush. that's all.

westnyy2

_Daywalker_ wrote:

I have no idea if anyone at Demiurge is going to read through 38+ pages of comments on this event, but in the off chance that they do, I wanted to give my perspective.

On paper, I seem to be the type of player who would most embrace the changes made in Boss Rush, almost like it was tailored toward me... I'm the only member who hits top progression in boss events in my very casual alliance (we've never made it past Round 6 as an alliance in the past), I have a roster philosophy where I aim to level and champion all characters one day (whether they're someone others consider a waste, like Star-Lord, or top-tier, like Iceman; they're champed) and I enjoy a PVE challenge (The Gauntlet is my favorite story event).

I think the move to personal progression from alliance progression was intentional, and was an attempt to reward players in all alliances instead of just alliances made up of the strongest, most competitive players. But speaking as someone who finished Round 7 (and stopped) on his own this time and got two 4* covers for it, I greatly, greatly prefer working with my alliance rather than against them, even if it means I get one less 4* cover for my efforts. Maybe I'd feel differently if the scaling/difficulty wasn't turned up to 100 out of a possible 10, but I don't think so.

As I said above, I like events that challenge the players and encourage us to try different team combinations and tactics to progress. Events like The Gauntlet generally reward people for having extensive rosters with well leveled characters. This was not such an event. Once we hit Phoenix midway through Round 6, Banner/Hulk in Round 7 and Phoenix again at the start of Round 8, it no longer mattered what characters you bring to the fight. If you let that boss get a turn and you don't have invisible or airborne characters, your team will be downed (how quickly depends on how the RNG falls). The passive tile generation (and then active powers, and then tile matches) of Banner and Phoenix meant we were at the mercy of however the tiles randomly fell.

In Round 6, at least you could spend the first wave against OML spamming special tiles so Phoenix in wave 2 would have fewer places to convert to red tiles... For Round 7 you could deny or take away green (RHulk) but were generally so battered by the end of the wave from match damage and critical hits you didn't have much left for subsequent waves. But for Round 8... sometimes you got a few moves to set something up, but more often than not you were taking massive damage after your first turn.

When you look at the statistics for the event, I encourage you to not just look at how many people cleared how many rounds. But look at the team compositions used in those final rounds. I've never been a big fan of "winfinite" teams; I don't find them fun and the requirements to keep certain characters at certain levels goes against my personal philosophy of "champion them all as you get the covers and ISO." But I'm quite certain that if you look at the stats, especially for Round 8, you will find nothing but "infinite" turn teams. Teams like Hulkfinite that could take 45 minutes to down 3 waves of bosses. And people did it, because... well, because Peggy Carter's yellow cover is awesome. But I can't imagine any one of those players actually enjoyed doing that or would have done it for a lesser prize (heck, if it had just been a special LT token, like the "Red Room" token we got with the last boss event, I think the number of people completing would have been exponentially less). Full disclosure: I probably would have tried to use the Hulkfinite team myself (since I have yet to pull a yellow for my Peggy), but mine is broken -- my Storm is way higher level than my Hulk, so she tanks green.

This is not a call to "nerf" or break infinite teams, but rather to make sure you realize that those teams were the only way to get past a boss that can and will down your entire team in 4 turns or less.

This thread has many suggestions on fixing the event, and in my view it comes down to a few major points:

• Communicate major event changes in advance (and if not in advance, still communicate them)
  • If you go back to the first page of this thread, the only communication we have from D3/Demiurge on the event, at no time were we told this was personal progression and not alliance progression. That's a huge change to omit and not address at all.
• Plan out the boosted characters more for the boss event
  • Either boost all characters or put a lot more thought into which characters are being boosted, because with personal scaling whoever is boosted is going to have to be used by the players, since the bosses will be scaled to that level.
  • Kingpin was boosted, after having been boosted the entire previous week. That was too much Kingpin, and that's coming from someone who has him champed and really likes using him. (Oh, and now I'm using him again in Nefarious Foes, a day later.)
  • X-Force Wolverine was boosted, even though he is arguably the 4* that benefits the least health-wise from a boost (and there was no way his heal tile would go off against the higher level bosses), and his most powerful power, Surgical Strike, was broken by the bosses' strongest color always being yellow, which leads me to...
• Don't give bosses the same (insanely high) match damage for every color
  • It defeats the purpose of any "strongest color" powers in the game and makes every single match (and cascade) by the boss painful.
• Bosses should either have powerful tile-changing passive powers or be able to match tiles -- not both
  • Every single one of these bosses would have still been difficult to defeat if they weren't able to match or weren't generating green or red tiles passively. Having them do both means strategy by the player goes out the window. You are down to just random luck on how the board falls as to whether your characters survive the next turn, and that's not fun.

Great post! Only thing I would add is to perhaps allow us to stun the bosses or at least the ones that can get get stunned. Surfer and Galactus should be exempt. Some of the best characters in the game feature this ability and they were essentially taken off the board.

Dragon_Nexus

Someone earlier ran a jokey post about finishing 2nd or 3rd in the event against your alliance rather than 1st and getting better rewards.

Literally happened to me. I used my three heroic tokens and got TA Hulk green, Spider Woman red and a Captain Marvel cover to add to her champ levels. Way better than getting just a single Storm green.

That's how broken this event was if I came out with better rewards than if I'd fractured my psyche trying to grind for 3* Storm and Peggy Carter covers.

ClydeFrog76

Anything from a Red yet?

Omega Red

There's too much **** in this game to cover at this point when designing a boss battle. I understand it's not easy but boss rush was just lazy design.


We have stuns and airborne so, "Boss cannot be stunned or sent airborne".

We have invisibility so, boss deals AOE damage.

We have healers so, high match damage.

We have winfinite combos so, three-turn countdown to death.

We have DP whales so, waves.

We have five star characters so, cheesy OP boss versions of said characters.

We have whaled five star characters so, ridiculous scaling.


What's the point of having a large, mature roster when all of it is effectively nerfed hard for effects of this event. Bobby and all the other stunners? Useless. Hood, OBW, Loki and even the overrated Peggy? Useless. Kingpin, Captain America and any character whose skills rely on countdowns, which is like what, half of all characters? Useless. Charged tiles creators like Surfer, Thora or Chulk? Useless. Special tiles creators like Blade, Patch? Useless. Invisible characters like Miles or BSSM? Useless. That leaves you with good ol' Hulk and his anger and Captain Marvel with her energy absorption that paired with the right winfinite broken combo can give you something with a remote resemblance of a chance.

And the money-grab side of it was shameless. I understand that you need to create frustration in order to promote purchases but this time you stretched that rubber-band a little too far. Because not only one needed to have the winfinite combo, but boosts, stockpiles and health packs. I'm surprised that Deadpool points cannot be purchased because they are just as valuable and for many it was the kicker that allowed them to complete round eight.

techfiend

Another full day with complete radio silence. Totally unprofessional. This isn't going away, and we deserve more than "Thanks for the feedback!"

zodiac339

I'm going to look at this in comparison to the rewards from normal PVE placement. Normally, 1% of players could get top 10 and a Legendary cover. I'm guessing more than 10% got a cover this Boss event. Frustrating play, but more getting a cover is a positive.

DTStump

zodiac339 wrote:

I'm going to look at this in comparison to the rewards from normal PVE placement. Normally, 1% of players could get top 10 and a Legendary cover. I'm guessing more than 10% got a cover this Boss event. Frustrating play, but more getting a cover is a positive.

I'm guessing less than 1%.

I don't think we get anywhere with guesses.

zodiac339

DTStump wrote:

zodiac339 wrote:

I'm going to look at this in comparison to the rewards from normal PVE placement. Normally, 1% of players could get top 10 and a Legendary cover. I'm guessing more than 10% got a cover this Boss event. Frustrating play, but more getting a cover is a positive.

I'm guessing less than 1%.

I don't think we get anywhere with guesses.

71% of responders in round completion thread got past 6 or better. Sure, not the entire community comes here, but promising numbers. I don't endorse Boss Rush at the difficulty it was set at, but rewards were still good I think.

broll

zodiac339 wrote:

DTStump wrote:

zodiac339 wrote:

I'm going to look at this in comparison to the rewards from normal PVE placement. Normally, 1% of players could get top 10 and a Legendary cover. I'm guessing more than 10% got a cover this Boss event. Frustrating play, but more getting a cover is a positive.

I'm guessing less than 1%.

I don't think we get anywhere with guesses.

71% of responders in round completion thread got past 6 or better. Sure, not the entire community comes here, but promising numbers. I don't endorse Boss Rush at the difficulty it was set at, but rewards were still good I think.

Only a very small percentage of any game's player base actually goes to the forums. Not sure if anyone has a stat on this, but I'd be surprised if it was even 10%. That small percentage is also the people most invested in the game so they are usually top or very high performers. This would be like looking at the income of the top 10% of people in a country and deciding that minimum wage is fine.

To put this in perspective. I'm in a small alliance and I'm pretty sure none of them ever go to the forums. Out of 20, I'm the only one who went past round 3.

kobu

zodiac339 wrote:

DTStump wrote:

zodiac339 wrote:

I'm going to look at this in comparison to the rewards from normal PVE placement. Normally, 1% of players could get top 10 and a Legendary cover. I'm guessing more than 10% got a cover this Boss event. Frustrating play, but more getting a cover is a positive.

I'm guessing less than 1%.

I don't think we get anywhere with guesses.

71% of responders in round completion thread got past 6 or better. Sure, not the entire community comes here, but promising numbers. I don't endorse Boss Rush at the difficulty it was set at, but rewards were still good I think.

The effort to reward ratio was by far the worse I've ever seen since I started playing. I opted to spend most of my time in Versus instead. I spent a couple hours finishing the progression rewards and got far greater compensation for my time, and it was pretty fun too. Hilariously, I pulled a yellow Peggy while others were repeatedly punching themselves in the face.

famousfoxking

zodiac339 wrote:

I'm going to look at this in comparison to the rewards from normal PVE placement. Normally, 1% of players could get top 10 and a Legendary cover. I'm guessing more than 10% got a cover this Boss event. Frustrating play, but more getting a cover is a positive.

...


71% of responders in round completion thread got past 6 or better. Sure, not the entire community comes here, but promising numbers. I don't endorse Boss Rush at the difficulty it was set at, but rewards were still good I think.

I think it makes more sense to compare to other boss events like Galactus, Ultron and Civil War. Anecdotally, I normally get two covers from one of those, and I got 0 from Boss Rush. Now, I got zero because I quit once I realized it wasn't going to be at all fun, so obviously ymmv.

Edit: Actually, I generally get three: round 7 plus 1 from progression.