Heroic Venom PvE Discussion Thread 4/10 - 4/17

Unknown

In the end the 'play more' strategy is still overwhelmingly the best strategy to win alliance PvE events.

There are quite a few guys in SHIELD with like mid 20K score, but that's still almost 20K more than the guys who are under 10K in quite a few alliances, including ours. A mid 20K is hardly a 'dedicated' score but it's more than enough when other alliances have multiple guys under 10K. SHIELD ended under 30K per person on Deadly bracket, and I've seen people close to 38K at the top, so their average is about 80% of the top individual scores. In Simulator Basic, the top alliance score average score was about 2000 lower than the top indivdiual score which was 270K, so the average score is close to 99% of the top individual score. I think the difficulty of the events plus the limited roster simply took a lot of people out of contention. I know there are guys in our alliance that had to play with an 85 Wolverine as their best character, and that simply won't get you very far on Deadly.

Unknown

We were up in 1st throughout most of the event in the basic event and top 10 in the deadly event. Sunday afternoon we had dropped to around 10th in the basic trying to time our last push. We ended up 2nd in basic several thousand below S.H.I.E.L.D. I had seen them reach top 15 Sunday morning so my guess is they had a lot players hitting the last 2 refreshes pretty hard. Our alliance had really good participation in this PvE and I'm proud of my crew for our best placement so far. I'm a little bummed that S.H.I.E.L.D passed us, but if you're going to get beat by someone at least it was by the strongest out there.

Bowgentle

Decided to enter Deadly because boredom.
Seeing Slobofix with his maxed Baglady and X-Force warms my black heart.
I guess since he got reported for cheating but is still around this means that he got all that ISO legitimately.
So I bow to the amount of money spent.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I think the difficulty of the events plus the limited roster simply took a lot of people out of contention. I know there are guys in our alliance that had to play with an 85 Wolverine as their best character, and that simply won't get you very far on Deadly.

I was one of those guys in our alliance. But for me, that was my first character to hit level 85 (leveled a second one there this morning with ISO rewards), and I've only been in the game for a month and a half. I do know though that there was at least one player in our alliance who didn't have Wolverine at all, and was using a bunch of characters that were probably under 50 and maybe not covered so well.

Not that Deadly was easy, but for the most part my deadly levels were at most 20 higher than my easy levels. Still managed a top 10 in easy, top 20 in deadly. Having a 1/1/1 HT that was buffed up certainly helped. I'd love to add more covers for him as the green was quite brutal if you had a lucky green cascade or two. I didn't boost at all until the very end when I finally started dumping the accumulated boosts from the last week or so. I did get gutted a number of times on earlier attempts due to unfortunate enemy cascades.
"Oh good, I have two turns before that goon attack will go off, I should be safe"
Cascade, extra move, extra move, countdown done.
They're all dead Dave.
Even Wolvie?
He's dead Dave.
Even Torchy?
He's dead Dave, they're all dead Dave.

Unknown

managed to pull off another deadly mission in the last five minutes in round one to get hawkeye M's cover from both normal and deadly (now i need to get him to level 30 along with wolvie to use them in the event's round two as backups in case IM 35 and Storm get injured.

Modern hawkeye is now 1/4/0 so i'll probably get my rank to any of the three ranks for the red to max upgrade the red move. At this point, im not going for deadly unless i can obtain alot of isos and get storm and Iron man to 40+. I highly doubt i will though

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Decided to enter Deadly because boredom.
Seeing Slobofix with his maxed Baglady and X-Force warms my black heart.
I guess since he got reported for cheating but is still around this means that he got all that ISO legitimately.
So I bow to the amount of money spent.

Maybe everyone just assumed someone else was going to report him.. I know I thought about it but never got around too it. ;P

HailMary

Pamizard wrote:

managed to pull off another deadly mission in the last five minutes in round one to get hawkeye M's cover from both normal and deadly (now i need to get him to level 30 along with wolvie to use them in the event's round two as backups in case IM 35 and Storm get injured.

Modern hawkeye is now 1/4/0 so i'll probably get my rank to any of the three ranks for the red to max upgrade the red move. At this point, im not going for deadly unless i can obtain alot of isos and get storm and Iron man to 40+. I highly doubt i will though

Congrats on MHawkeye!

As for getting Iso to level IM35 & MStorm, SHIELD Versus could be a good source of it while you wait for the next set of LRs. Don't worry about incoming attacks, because scores in SHIELD Versus frankly serve no practical purpose.

Unknown

Hmm... How many refreshes will it take to get the Fired Up recruit tokens? Will I be able to get them just hitting the HT nodes for two refreshes?

Unknown

gamar wrote:

Hmm... How many refreshes will it take to get the Fired Up recruit tokens? Will I be able to get them just hitting the HT nodes for two refreshes?

That's all I care about for this round, and that's roughly my plan. 1 pass at each node, then HT after refresh, then done. The end time for this one just doesn't work with my day job schedule this week.

Unknown

gamar wrote:

Hmm... How many refreshes will it take to get the Fired Up recruit tokens? Will I be able to get them just hitting the HT nodes for two refreshes?

The first one in normal? Probably, though I'd have to doublecheck the numbers. The first one in deadly? Probably not. I don't think anyone got the second token in either difficulty the first round.

The progression reward structure for Heroic Venom isn't as awful as the previous event, but that's not saying much. Just making a ton of values in deadly 2x normal (base node points, progression tiers, rubberbanding x-value) isn't balanced when the player base approaches the two modes differently. They should have cut the progression tier numbers relative to the base node points by 25% or so on normal, and then either: 1) made the deadly progression tiers the same values as normal; 2) made the deadly progression tiers 1.5x normal and dropped the enemy levels somewhat; OR 3) made the deadly progression tiers 1.5x normal and increased the rewards relative to the normal rewards.

The assumption seems to be that overall points earned in deadly would end up being 2x the overall points earned in normal (since the base node points were doubled), but this effect was just about completely offset by the increased node difficulty--I don't remember what the final numbers looked like, but for much of the event, *fewer* points were being earned on deadly than normal, not twice as many.

Unknown

Does anyone over there play these events, even one time, before they are released? I know it has been discussed but do they not realize how frustrating, boring, and completely UNFUN these venom "snare every other turn" matches are? Even when you win you feel like you just wasted time.

Unknown

Assuming the numbers turn out to be similar like round 1, you should be able to hit the fired up token reward by just hitting the HT required mission a few times.

However, I'm not sure what happens to the deadly bracket this time because the level increases seems to persist so it is possible it gets hard enough to make oveall points even lower, though if that happened it'd generally mean nobody could hit certain rewards at all and it's far beyond the ability of any one person to try to change it.

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Decided to enter Deadly because boredom.
Seeing Slobofix with his maxed Baglady and X-Force warms my black heart.
I guess since he got reported for cheating but is still around this means that he got all that ISO legitimately.
So I bow to the amount of money spent.

Yeah this guy is on top of my PVP bracket.
When I joined he was shielded at 200 odd points.
After I made my run to the 300 Heroic token he was shielded at 400 odd points.
Log in today to see him up top alone shielded at over 700 points.
He sure spends a lot of HP on shields, not to mention pretty much every maxed character.

Unknown

For what it's worth, this particular event caused a dedicated member of our Alliance to pack up and quit MPQ altogether.

I can understand his frustration; maybe this game just doesn't like me, but when the easy mode is throwing out L144 opponents, and I can't even get past the first node in deadly, the only reason I haven't rage quit is that I just basically bowed out this event. I do poke around at the early nodes in normal, but with the limited roster selection, I just can't get very far.

So if the intent of this PVE was to cull the herd, it's working.

Unknown

Okay, whoever decided it was a good idea to not reset the round for Deadly, the Venom mission is borderline unbeatable when it uses the scaling from the last round. It was barely beatable at level 70 but not at 150 or whatever it is now with 2 purple generators.

I'm normally quite supportive of making game harder, but you can't use the scaling where people are barely beating, and apply it to pretty much the hardest mission in the whole series (Venom + purple generatoring goons).

Clintman

Phantron wrote:

Okay, whoever decided it was a good idea to not reset the round for Deadly, the Venom mission is borderline unbeatable when it uses the scaling from the last round. It was barely beatable at level 70 but not at 150 or whatever it is now with 2 purple generators.

I'm normally quite supportive of making game harder, but you can't use the scaling where people are barely beating, and apply it to pretty much the hardest mission in the whole series (Venom + purple generatoring goons).

If the scaling was consistent, then I would not mind. If it followed any logical sense then I would not mind. But people with weaker rosters than I do are starting with levels in the 100's to the 150's while mine is at 86.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Okay, whoever decided it was a good idea to not reset the round for Deadly, the Venom mission is borderline unbeatable when it uses the scaling from the last round. It was barely beatable at level 70 but not at 150 or whatever it is now with 2 purple generators.

I'm normally quite supportive of making game harder, but you can't use the scaling where people are barely beating, and apply it to pretty much the hardest mission in the whole series (Venom + purple generatoring goons).

Minute 1, round 1 - that node was at level 187 for me. I think I died enough it's now down to around 150, still impossible. I really don't understand why they don't want some us - or at least me! - to actually play the game.

Maybe it is because I seem to be one of the few forumites who does not use tanking as a strategy. Maybe it's a carryover from hockey, but the last thing I want to do is cultivate a losing attitude

Clintman

beezer37_84 wrote:

sms4002 wrote:

beezer37_84 wrote:

jozier wrote:

Plenty of SHIELD members played multiple refreshes.

And some (maybe most) of us played more than we normally do since it was so easy to wipe out on random nodes.

Exactly what they WANT us to think!

Actualy Phantron is correct, I want everyone to think we all entered with hours left and did one clear

God I hate the venom event, first time I have had to buy health packs because of getting jacked up on one node and losing my team.

Unknown

There is obviously some disconnect between what is merely hard and what is impossible.

Daken, for example, is very very hard. But you can hope you might get lucky and not have too many green matches early until you can do something. Sure 9 out of 10 times this doesn't work and you still die, but you at least have a plan.

In a fight against Venom + 2 purple generator it goes like this:

You make your move.
Venom makes his move, doesn't matter what.
You make your move.
Venom makes his move, doesn't matter what.
You make your move.
Venom stuns you and matches a purple
Venom stuns you and matches whatever
Venom stuns you.

There's nothing being 'good' would have any impact on this because it doesn't even matter what tiles Venom is matching when he's got 2 guys generating purple. I'm pretty sure nobody was actually doing those for points on Deadly after you got them out of the way the first time.

I think part of the problem is that these missions are still designed as 'anti-Spiderman' even though you can't even use him here. The Venom mission wouldn't be too hard if you could use Spiderman. Heck, you can get just let him stun first and let him build up some web tiles for you and then you can lock him down forever. But of course, we can't use Spiderman in this event at all, but the event doesn't seem to be aware of that, which is why we have the Venom + 2 purple generator. It'd be like having lazy Thor + 2 green generators in Simulator Basic. That's obviously designed with Spiderman in mind, and without Spiderman there's almost no conceiveable way you'd be able to beat that if the enemies are at least level 150+.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Venom's shenanigans.

I was just coming to say that. That's exactly what Venom does. Even when I'm color denying purple, which admittedly isn't too often because who among the allowed roster can use it, but still, I've tried on occasion and he still stuns me way early. I think he's cheating.