Boss Rush - Enjoyment Poll

cardoor

I completed round 8, but would only rate my enjoyment 60%. The battles were fun once they got going, but there were too many first round loses due to obnoxious cascades. If not for champed Hulk, 4clops, and MoStorm I would have rated this much lower.

Nick441234

I'll give it 20%, so not to be totally cruel. I made it to round 4, and gave up. I wasn't going to waste my weekend on that rubbish.

IamTheDanger

Going to sticky this thread for a couple days to help give more accurate feedback.

I know a lot of people played it and even finished it. But just because someone finished it for the Peggy covers does not mean that it was fun. I gave it a 20%.

The Bob The

I liked it, then hated it, then got some enjoyment out of finding a safecracker team, then settled into tedium of only being able to use that team, then got disgruntled at the dependence on initial board strength, then quit after finishing r7 = 40% enjoyment.

BearVenger

I gave it 60%. I had family commitments, so I couldn't play hard most days. Once I saw what Round tier I would end up in (round 8, 2nd Peggy), I stopped and called it a weekend.

The thing with boss events is that I have to build a team and play them in one specific way - Maximize moves that can be chained together, limit AI's turns, deny colors, find self/team-healing characters. I feel like I'm defusing a bomb.

It also means that my boss matches last 20-30 minutes each, which limits when I can play a boss match. And for optimal play of 5 rounds and 6 bosses every 8 hours for 72 hours straight - oy, yer kidding me.

I played through to round 8 with CHulk/3Storm/KK. Once I got to Phoenix batting leadoff, that made walking away feel fine. Phoenix as a second/third opponent was okay, as long as I had enough AP to only allow her 0-2 turns. But with even an average board, I lost a character with each turn she got. Not real fun.

rc35

nick_chicane wrote:

I'll give it 20%, so not to be totally cruel. I made it to round 4, and gave up. I wasn't going to waste my weekend on that rubbish.

Ditto for me, except I gave it 40%, as I quite enjoyed the ~40% that I played of it before quitting.
And thanks to the OP for setting this poll up.

hodayathink

BearVenger wrote:

I played through to round 8 with CHulk/3Storm/KK. Once I got to Phoenix batting leadoff, that made walking away feel fine. Phoenix as a second/third opponent was okay, as long as I had enough AP to only allow her 0-2 turns. But with even an average board, I lost a character with each turn she got. Not real fun.

It's not even necessarily about giving her fewer turns (though that does help in terms of you not getting slaughtered by a random match 5), but also about figuring out ways to deny her red. With enough AP and the right teams, that's possible (for example, the Hulkfinite team case use KK purple to overwrite all the red tiles on the board). But right off the bat, that means you need to get lucky with the makeup of the starting board, and get lucky in getting enough AP to get something going before she gives herself enough red AP.

The Viceroy Returns

I Voted 20%
Got about halfway through Round 8. Phoenix was Level 481 with 84K Health.
As many have said, the concept is really neat, but the execution was terrible.

- Scaling was several magnitudes higher than it should have been. Which ALWAYS happens for any new content they release. For this it was even more reprehensible because of the broken design of some characters.
- The tile converting that several bosses had made these fights luck-based and put each fight on a timer of about 3 or 4 turns. A really bad cascade and the match was over due to their crazy high match damage alone, but then you throw in the insane Damage/AP ratio of their attacks and you're done.
- Boss Phoenix design at its core is over-powered regardless of scaling. I could have told you that that combination of "convert X tiles to a color", THEN "do something when 9 tiles of a color are present", along with a passive on any Match-5's is broken as hell. That the tile number check happens AFTER the tile conversion is just another FU. In Round 8 often I would get only one turn, maybe two. And I have a Level 453 OML.
- Boss Bruce Banner design is over-powered regardless of scaling, but not quite as bad as Phoenix. At least he doesn't have the Match-5 Passive or the "do something when 9 tiles of a color are present". But that he has a super cheap Team-Wide attack for MASSIVE damage meant that if he flipped, it often meant you're dead within about 2 turns.
- Round Clear score was only progressed by your personal score, and NOT alliance chipping away at a group bar. It was essentially NOT an alliance event. The presentation of it looks exactly the same as previous events, so I didn't even realize this until more than halfway through the event. The rend result is I felt like each alliance member was in their own separate world in stead of everyone in the same event. It just felt like a normal PVE this way, when events like these should be alliance team-building events.
- Having to fight 3 bosses in a row is rough. In the last few rounds, many can't even get past the first boss, let alone all three. It would probably better to have each round feature one of the bosses, and you only fight them in a single on-on-one confrontation. Due to how long it takes to down the first boss, they're build up all sorts of AP that when the round flips, they next boss goes apeshit with powers, probably wiping you.
- Were the bosses each person faced random? If this is the case, that's also pretty terrible, as some bosses I saw more than once (of course the broken ones like Phoenix and Bruce Banner I saw the most), and others I don't think I saw at all.
- The wave format also made it a mystery who they were, which made it really hard to plan the first time in who to use. I realize after the first time in you knew who they were, but I have no idea who is the 3rd boss in Round 8 cause I've never gotten that far, so it's of little help.
- As with all Boss Events, WHY do the sub nodes arbitrarily level up to insane levels after time elapsed instead of round cleared?!?!

Boss Rush IS redeemable, but only if they fix the scaling, fix Phoenix's design, and change it to be a real alliance -based event, where everyone works together to down the single boss (not a wave of three mystery over-powered, broken designed bosses).

ntmad8tr

They definitely need to test with very high level teams prior to release. I can understand that they probably test with an average level team but for those of us with a pretty high level roster things get ridiculous real fast. It was ok until round 6 in which it pretty much turned into a health pack eating waste of time.

Vhailorx

ntmad8tr wrote:

They definitely need to test with very high level teams prior to release. I can understand that they probably test with an average level team but for those of us with a pretty high level roster things get ridiculous real fast. It was ok until round 6 in which it pretty much turned into a health pack eating waste of time.

I don't think the problem here is a high level/low level split. (though demi doesn't seem to have a great understanding of what it's like to build a 4* and 5* roster in practice, or how champed 5* rosters play).

The problem is that the design of the bosses is crazy. Phoenix especially. She has 5* phoenix's tiles shifting power, plus Prof X's blue (but with aoe damage) PLUS IM46's blue (but with ap collection). And she does ALL of that passively at the beginning of each turn. It would be hard to intentionally design a more gamebreaking powerset than that. She is extremely challenging for all levels of play.

It's true that lower leveled rosters have more options because the 3* and 4* tiers are deeper. But in the end it doesn't really matter if you are playing with a 4* roster and her skills do 7k aoe or 19k single target, or a 5* roster and her skills do 19k aoe and 50k single target; the result is the same.

BearVenger

The Viceroy Returns wrote:

- Round Clear score was only progressed by your personal score, and NOT alliance chipping away at a group bar. It was essentially NOT an alliance event. The presentation of it looks exactly the same as previous events, so I didn't even realize this until more than halfway through the event. The rend result is I felt like each alliance member was in their own separate world in stead of everyone in the same event. It just felt like a normal PVE this way, when events like these should be alliance team-building events...

Boss Rush IS redeemable, but only if they fix the scaling, fix Phoenix's design, and change it to be a real alliance -based event, where everyone works together to down the single boss (not a wave of three mystery over-powered, broken designed bosses).

Lemme just counter that I like the intra-team competition this time, as I was able to message everyone in my alliance that they didn't have to knock themselves out to clear this event. One of us will get 3*Storm, some will get Heroics, and some will get progression prizes and a relaxed weekend.

By contrast, Ultron/Galactus/Civil War require everyone to lock in and have the same level of commitment to every 8-hour cycle for a weekend. That stresses me when I don't know when my breaking point (or family/friend interruption) is gonna come and I've irrevocably spoiled 19 other guys' effort.

BearVenger

hodayathink wrote:

(for example, the Hulkfinite team case use KK purple to overwrite all the red tiles on the board).

You call it Hulkfinite, I call them The Green Party.

Nightglider1

IamTheDanger wrote:

:commandpointsbig: Going to sticky this thread for a couple days to help give more accurate feedback.

Could you maybe re-sticky the main "Boss Rush Event" thread while you're at it?

Redrobot30

I gave it 20%. I thought it was interesting in the beginning. The mechanics were a welcome change. Having slogged through and beat round 7 I decided I was done getting punished and stopped playing it. The agony of getting through rounds 6 and 7 probably tarnished how much I liked getting through rounds 1-5. The progression rewards were just too horrible to make me want to keep going.

Like my football coach used to say:

" Good decision, poor execution."

ZeiramMR

The OP covers my thoughts pretty well. At my scaling level, most of the rounds were doable with the right team for a given set of bosses. Not with a 100% success rate, but enough that the gameplay took some thought to lower the high challenge level. As others have been saying, Phoenix was too strong and needs adjustment in future runs.

While I suspect they will run this again with changes to make it fairer, remember that the boost list is likely to be different and that can help/hurt the difficulty too.

TLCstormz

The definition of the 20% option is EXACTLY how I feel, and how the majority of how I've heard everyone else feels.

Hopefully, people will actually READ what they are voting for.

Saeva

BearVenger wrote:

By contrast, Ultron/Galactus/Civil War require everyone to lock in and have the same level of commitment to every 8-hour cycle for a weekend. That stresses me when I don't know when my breaking point (or family/friend interruption) is gonna come and I've irrevocably spoiled 19 other guys' effort.

And you have the option of leaving your competitive Alliance for a few days, moving into a much more casual Alliance that will appreciate any progress, and then moving back while everyone who does like the rare intra-Alliance cooperative nature gets to do something different than the usual PvE. You still get to play the boss events, without the stress, and others, who don't mind the stress, get to play a cooperative event that only comes around a few times a year.

That's a big part of what makes it special -- it's a rare thing. Yes, it can be draining, but you can always temp jump Alliances if needed. People who wanted to play a cooperative event, on any level (casual or competitive) didn't even get the option.

TLCstormz

IamTheDanger wrote:

:commandpointsbig: Going to sticky this thread for a couple days to help give more accurate feedback.

I know a lot of people played it and even finished it. But just because someone finished it for the Peggy covers does not mean that it was fun. I gave it a 20%.

Wow!!!!! Thank you so much for being a normal human being, with this decision.

Everyone needs to upvote IamTheDanger's post to the high heavens! ESPECIALLY at a time when we had someone/s locking a whopping 14 threads of complaints on the board's first page, deleting multiple posts in the main Boss Rush thread, AND issuing out formal Board Warnings to several different people because they spoke up about how shady they believe the game makers to be.

Kudos, Danger. Truly. :+D

firethorne

20%. I had some fun on round one, dropping severely from there. I won the first Peggy cover, because that is my absolute most wanted 4* right now, but still couldn't bring myself to get more than one of them, despite needing them all, even taking in consideration the one upcoming in Unstable ISO8.

But, I think the most infuriating thing is the blatant disregard for the players exemplified by this event. History has repeated itself. The devs have tried this, "You're supposed to lose," bull **** before. And that statement caused a huge backlash. The devs absolutely know that, or if they don't, they're obliviously inept. But, they double down on that exact design. You're supposed to lose. You're supposed to burn all of your health packs, not progressing one round. Your side nodes are supposed to raise insane amounts, and raise by a function of time, not your progress though the actual event. All the same **** that we have told them we hate, again and again and again.

Smudge

Had the layout of the event been changed in some appreciable way instead of recycling the tired old "8 hour refresh, 5 non-boss nodes, one boss play per node beaten" mechanic, I might have gotten a little more out of it.

I understand tried-and-true, but I think that same mechanic every time is what makes these boss events tedious for me. We went away from the 8 hour refreshes in regular Story mode for a reason, and trying to do that over my weekend when I have less time to play is not fun.

That being said, had I not felt like I was beating my head against a wall and had this actually been an alliance event with meaningful awards for me (my Peggy is 1/0/3, so no appreciable impact for my roster), I might have had at least an ounce of fun. As it was, I tapped out after wiping twice in round 4. I'm a bit of a masochist, but nothing like this.

0% enjoyed, overall 0/10, would not play again.

SnowcaTT

I played through round 7. I swore I was going to quit round 4, 5, 6, 7, and finally stuck with it on 8.

The entire event was miserable. Was "glad" to see the problem-plagued typical PVE return today.

0%. If I never see Boss Rush again, it will be Too Soon.