The Prologue Used to be My Roster's Personal Training Room

SunCrusher

And I'm going to miss it.

I didn't care about ISO (who was going to grind 20 ISO anyways?), True Healing was a foreign concept to me save for 2 star Wolverine who was almost always healed / fine anyways to begin with, and at the time that I left, I had long since given up on bargaining with stupid Juggernaut and Company to give me the rest of my covers which I all eventually earned all on my own outside of Prologue anyways.

What I cared about was 1) being able to use the Prologue nodes to test my various teams' synergies and 2) to play an amuse-myself-only game of match-3 featuring my favorite Marvel friends.

Now with my Prologue coming to an end, I'm going to lose both things once I finish-finish the Prologue and I kind of wish I weren't.

I have nodes that aren't 'finished' yet, but knowing what's going to happen, I can't bring myself to finish them because I know that once I do, I won't have anywhere to give my rostered teams a private training room to play in outside of the Events.

Do you know why I used to keep MPQ open even though most of my Event-specific roster members were either down for the count or in critical care and I otherwise ought to have had nothing else to do?

Because it was simply fun to.

I pulled out my non-Event characters and non-playable characters and created some zany combinations and just ran some nodes to see what could happen.

I won, lost, learned something, learned nothing... and just... had some fun on my own terms outside of PvE and PvP. No competition, no points, no ISO (again, 20! and again, it wasn't like Juggernaut was going to cut a deal with me anytime soon!), no HP.

It was fun and it was at times educational and it went something like this:

FUN: I could have a laugh at Devil Dino following Deadpool + Other Character around while terrorizing the various members of HAMMER. I don't know about anyone else, but the Prologue was about the only remotely safe place for a sorely under-covered Dino and Deadpool to run around in and come on - the two party-hards deserve to party together, right? Come to think of it, the Prologue was also the only safe place for me to bring out a LOT of sorely under-covered and otherwise non-viable characters to simply have a goaround.

EDUCATIONAL: I could try different team setups and see who could make Hawkeye's Speed Shot go absolutely ballistic or how strike, CD, and other tiles worked with and against each other. When I was confused about what, exactly, an ability did (the people whose abilities rely on pre-existing CD tiles and other if-then-but clauses seriously confused me) I could try and figure it out myself by running them in the Prologue. Seeing and experiencing is a whole another thing compared to an explanation.

... And soon, I won't have access to that anymore as all my nodes will lock and become unplayable and I'm honestly bothered by it and for several reasons.

1) I like bringing everyone out for some basic playtime regardless of how viable they are competitively.

For someone who struggled through the 'old' 1-2 and 2-3 transition growing pains, I have a fairly deep roster... and a LOT of 3 star characters who have a singular cover owing to the old 'earn covers + earn tokens' structure. ISO doesn't and won't help them until I get more covers and so many of them have been Vaulted over time and so getting more covers in any kind of reasonable amount of time is like a **** shoot.

Being able to bring out my single or sparsely covered characters (again, that Devil Dino and Deadpool example... or Mags who got nerfed, lost his Purple, and then got Vaulted before I could get more than 2 covers) and still just PLAY something non-competitively and simply for my own enjoyment goes a long way towards me being able to slog through these sorts of growing pains.

I can wait... if I can actually DO something with the characters I like and have... and I DON'T mean simply selling them off for ISO.

Seriously, as someone who likes match-3, I'd rather spend time matching 3 with my roster characters than playing something like Candy Crush or even Bejeweled which has multiple sorts of game modes.

2) Having my own 'Danger Room' in the Prologue gives me a non-competitive place to do reality-checks for MY teams.

Everyone on this board is seriously amazing when it comes to sharing information, advice, and hints including how various team synergies might work...

But a fully covered XYZ character of 355 or 535 or 553 or 545 etc build is likely going to work differently than the same character who's missing a variety of covers or whose covers are all mixed up because of missing right covers and having too many wrong covers and the Prologue gives me a chance to see just how and where the differences are... as they apply to MY roster.

Furthermore, it also gives me a chance to figure out what, exactly, do certain abilities do - especially the ones involving the who, what, where, when, and how and the if-then-but-and.

All that said, for myself, I don't NEED anything to come of that Prologue - rewards, healing, I don't know what else... except to just be able to play for a bit.

Thanks for listening!

MarkersMake

This used to be my playground...

/Madonna

Oldboy

It would be great if they could give us a Danger Room style node that's open all the time. It allows us to select our opponents, their levels and their covers specs. No actual health lost if you lose or retreat.

Want to fight goons only? Sure. Select sentries, goons, ninjas, combination etc

Want to try out your 3* team against a 4* team? Select away.

SunCrusher

Oldboy wrote:

It would be great if they could give us a Danger Room style node that's open all the time. It allows us to select our opponents, their levels and their covers specs. No actual health lost if you lose or retreat.

Want to fight goons only? Sure. Select sentries, goons, ninjas, combination etc

Want to try out your 3* team against a 4* team? Select away.

I just came back to the game and Sentries is a new thing for me as we never had them before. I had seen the Tiatsu (spelling?) ninjas from playing Enemy of the State before, but not the Sentries. I seriously had a, "Uh oh. ****, now what do I do?" moment as I stared the row of them in the face for DDQ and realized that I had brought the wrong team out.

Being able to interact with the various potential opponents like you just described in a Danger Room setting would be really useful in my opinion and it would actually really help me right now to get back up to speed in terms of figuring out how the new characters and goons work.

But ohhh those Sentries and all those tiles.

TPF Alexis

I've thought this a bunch of times. Most recently when I was trying to go through and figure out exactly what numbers go with some of Hawkguy's later arrows at the current cover/level combo I have for him. Would have been really nice to not have to worry about if it was messing up my timing for my clears or if a bad board would end up wrecking my team for a while or something.

More generally, yeah, it would be nice to have a place to play just to play. No rewards needed, I enjoy the game play in and of itself. Just give me something to do with the Game when I'm waiting for PvE Nodes to regen and I've pushed up past my competence level in PvP and need to wait until I get attacked and lose a couple of times before I can get opponents I can beat.

killerkoala

lol i used to grind out 20 iso at a time when i first started the game. wouldn't log out till i gain at least 500 iso from prologue, did that days and days and so far being iso starved has yet been a problem, my alliance calls me the scrooge mcduck cause i swim in iso.

Skrofa

I don't think they are, but once it's completed it just sits there unused and a waste of space. I think that is what the OP is talking about.

It would be nice to find aome new use for it

SunCrusher

mexus wrote:

Are they removing the Prologue? I don't use it so bothers me personally not but bummer for those who do use it.
Just curious to see where the announcement is

Like Skrofa said, once you're finished, even though it's still sitting there, there's nothing you can do with it. You can see the nodes, still, but you can't revisit / replay because they're now locked once you collect all of the rewards.

Used to be, the nodes would stay unlocked.

Skrofa wrote:

I don't think they are, but once it's completed it just sits there unused and a waste of space. I think that is what the OP is talking about.

It would be nice to find aome new use for it

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry I didn't clarify.

NMANOZ

I would like to see the Prologue have new seasons like the PvP.

Punisher5784

Wow you must had taken a 2yr break. What made you come back? The game is completely different now than when you used to play

Dormammu

Waaaay back in the day I used to do the same thing with the Prologue - sort of a testing grounds. But it's been locked out for forever; I forgot the Prologue tab was even still there.

When I want to experiment now I do it in the season simulator. The thing runs for a whole season so it's not like losing in it makes any difference (those points can be easily made up). I don't play it competitively anyway. I like it better than the prologue because you get a better idea of how well your experiment is going against some legitimate competition.

SnowcaTT

I still would do monthly VIP if it reset prologue every time you re-upped it.

BoyWonder1914

Dormammu wrote:

Waaaay back in the day I used to do the same thing with the Prologue - sort of a testing grounds. But it's been locked out for forever; I forgot the Prologue tab was even still there.

When I want to experiment now I do it in the season simulator. The thing runs for a whole season so it's not like losing in it makes any difference (those points can be easily made up). I don't play it competitively anyway. I like it better than the prologue because you get a better idea of how well your experiment is going against some legitimate competition.

MMR can create a problem for this. Yes there aren't any real stakes from a points perspective, but your opponents are still limited by your roster strength. If you're a 3-star roster, or a 3-4 star transitioner for example and want to test some synergies with the new Hawkguy, your opponents are still gonna be 3-star champ teams, or teams with a mixture of champed 3s and 4s. Not exactly a safe place to practice with an undercovered/underleveled 3-star. Same goes for someone with an undercovered 4-star, that just wants to see how they work, or test power synergy. The SIM can still prove helpful, but it's not as nice as a full layout of of mostly all-goon nodes and low leveled 2-stars.

DapperChewie

mexus wrote:

Seems I am the confused one. I really thought the missions were replayable (for smalled ISO8 reward) but I never even tried it. I haaaated the prologue myself, I forced my girlfriend to play it for me.

There's a lot of good rewards in there, like 5000iso, a bunch of HP, or just some extra 2s if you're running a farm.

The prologue used to be infinitely replayable, but a year or two ago, they figured out that people were using the easy nodes as a way to heal up their characters (like, with OBW or Spiderman) and 1) implemented True Healing, and 2) made the prologue nodes lock after you'd gotten all the rewards from them.

Now, if you want to heal up your true healers without health packs, you have to play the easiest node in pve.

Dormammu

I remember farming one of the first nodes in the prologue (three level 1 goons) for 20 iso every time. One match and a minor cascade would end the fight with maxed 2-stars, so it took about 10 seconds on the short end; 20 seconds if you had to perform three matches to down all goons. It was tediously boring, but in 10 minutes you could make 1000 ISO. Of course, there were no alliances, there weren't multiple PvE and PvP events going on at the same time, no lightning rounds, and XFW was the only 4-star.

ISO was scarce and we did what we had to do. I'm not ashamed.