Boss Rush - Enjoyment Poll

Arks

I enjoyed it, my roster is still quite newbie (only 2 and 3*) but I'm proud that I finished round 7 (2 peggy covers and #1 in alliance...though I suspect most got bored and stopped). Overall it taught me to use tactics a lot more instead of just brute force which my roster lacks. And it gave me something to do during typhoon weather outside

El Satanno

Boy, am I ever late to the party. Mad props to cardoor for identifying a very important, and apparently all-too-oft forgotten, point. I'll repeat it here just to reinforce the point:
Completion/playing time =/= fun. I made it up to round 8 but I stopped having fun somewhere around 5. I rated it 40%.

My roster is able to tackle most challenges between my champed Logan and Phoenix, 25 champed 4*, and complete set of champ 3*. I love Gauntlet, and have enjoyed every other boss fight (excepting Galactus 1). It is fun to stack up against a stiff challenge and come through in the end. What isn't fun is an opponent so horribly broken that they wipe out my A-team literally on turn 1. That's what Phoenix did to me on more than a few occasions: Make red, match 5 (or two), green power, red power. Game over.

Not. Fun.

Hulk was pretty close to having me throw in the towel because he was just slightly less ridiculously over-powered. I'd even go so far as to say he might have been an appropriate final challenge. The side nodes scaling up was okay although I think they became a little too tough by the end considering that I absolutely had to be at full health for my impending wipe to the boss waves.

On the upside, I made it to round 8 despite only clearing round 6 about 5 times and round 7 twice. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned here, but that does speak to some thought behind the design. If we're "supposed to lose" (and I am really tired of that line being brought up all the time) then at least partial success is rewarded. I appreciate that. The rebuilds for the bosses were of mixed quality. Generally they were interesting and fun to fight against, given that they weren't wiping you out in two turns.

My simple recommendation to help make this event more palatable is simple: Make it health-independent. What you go in with is what you come out with. A common refrain I heard during it was that trying to clear the bosses just drank all your health packs. That leaves you either unable to play the rest of the game(!) or avoiding the boss node altogether. Leave our health packs out of it and at least we are less likely to feel like even attempting to win is a waste of time.

Evilgenius_9

Not a lot to add, except I voted 20% just because I think I see the potential of what they were trying to do. It would have been difficult but maybe doable if the bosses were stunnable.

Etheus

I enjoyed most of this event. Banner was difficult - maybe a a little too difficult. A small tweak is probably all that's needed. Maybe lower his passive green tile transformation by 1 every turn. Phoenix was completely ridiculous and broken. I'm fine with losing and a challenge. Phoenix was not a challenge but a completely random flip of a coin between instant death and you will probably still lose before you get a chance to do anything. The scaling of the side nodes was appropriate. On the final set of nodes I had OML die once and took heavy damage in a few others. But because Phoenix wiped my team 3 times in a row on her first turn, I finished with 0 health packs remaining for PVP.
Phoenix is completely broken. Everything she does is too powerful. She transforms too many . The second part of her passive generating ap is also broken. For how often the second part of her passive triggers, the damage is too high. Her passive aoe is too easily triggered and does too much damage. Half the time it wiped my team on the FIRST turn it was not even due to a match 5. The cost of her isn't ridiculous, but it is too easily acquired. The damage is also broken when it can one shot champion 5* after all the passive damage and cascades that occur within the first 3 turns - on those uncommon attempts that lasted more than 2 turns.

The only reason that I subjected myself to finishing round 8 is because I wanted that cover so that I could champion Peggy. Any other 4* as a reward and I would have given up after the second time Phoenix wiped my 2 champion 5*s in < 3 turns.

Kaazz

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.

Uh... I have a team with no chars over lvl 170 - that's champed 3 stars and several 4 stars. And I couldn't beat the boss waves in round 5. So I stopped playing. Having a lower roster was NOT an advantage.

ClydeFrog76

Dayum, look at dem stats!

The biggest fail the game has ever seen, and it had some serious competition.

morph3us

I voted a little while ago, but thought I'd add a few comments as well.

I voted 40%. I finished all 8 rounds, but the enjoyment was pretty much gone after round 4 or 5. The boss fights were way too RNG dependent against Phoenix and Banner. I won 2 rounds out of 13 attempts in round 7, and didn't beat all three waves at all in round 8. My worst attempt in round 8 was a turn 1 wipe to Phoenix for a grand total of 336 points. The order of operations needs to be addressed - if Surfer's passive states that at the beginning of the round, if there are more than X number of cosmic tiles his nuke goes off, that's what should happen. When I end my turn, that's the number of cosmic tiles present at the beginning of his turn, not X + the extra ones generated by his passive at the start of the turn.

The scaling was too steep - it sounds like most players were starting to give up by wave 4 or so.

I finished it because I was pig-headed enough to want to finish it, but I was so burnt out at the end of it, I couldn't bring myself to play Nefarious Foes, even with a Nova cover and Peggy cover on offer.

I also reiterate what El Satanno, and a number of us have been saying - it's fine to reward us for partial victories, and it's fine to design an event in which we're supposed to lose, provided it doesn't wipe our health packs in the process. The nodes are on a timer anyway, there's a limit to the number of clears we can attempt. Every time I hit a Boss Rush refresh, I was locked out of the rest of game because my characters were dead and I was out of health packs, so instead of playing PvP, I went and did something else. Probably good for me, but consumer disengagement isn't a good thing if you're a dev.