Request : PvP for dummies

Jezzail

Hello good sirs and ladies.

I started out fairly casual and now feel like going competitive.
Thanks to Northern Polarity and his guide I feel quite able to invest more effort and time into the game (and, well, actually I want to throw money at it too)

there is a really good PvE guide by Eddiemon out there but no actual PvP guide.

As far as I understood, there was a time when PvP gave you a ton of useful covers and was actually quite comfortable with certain tokens you could buy on the side ( obviously Diabolical tokens with granted villains etc.).
Because I dislike all the goon squashing, I want to delve in your darkest secrets of PvP battle.

As far as I understood, the top players resort to "tanking", by fielding extermely weak characters to lose intentionally for a better MMR rating. Besides that, what are your thoughts?
Questions to that:

1. Your "seed team" is to lower MMR so you gain more points when you start playing with your roflstompers. - At what point of time do you join the fray? 1h before end? 30 minutes before end?
2. How do you mitigate downswings in your quest for more points? - Let's say some OBW worshippers smash your face in with 6-5 5er matches and your DD goes down lucky or whatever. Do you just throw your device into a corner and yell, while resigning? Is there something you do, when all your healthpacks are down and your C team only stands?
3. Is PvP worth the effort? - With a ton of events being hosted right now, I don't see myself participating in every event or LR. I kind of want to focus on the things worth the effort and not insanely futile in the long run ( LR seems too nerfed to be of any use for my full 3* transition.
4. What characters besides the usual suspects should I consider decent and worthy to invest in specifically for PvP?

Speaking of which, maybe I should give a roster overview to help you understand how I stand.
I would like to be an example.
I recently finished maxing my punpun and now have a decent choice between some chars. Let it be said, that I'm not put-off by the thought to spend money.

So taking into account, that after the recent Punisher event a lot of ppl will be in the same position let me give you said overview:

Punisher: 3/4/4 lvl 141 ; my favourite
GSBW: 1/2/3 lvl 53 , not well liked, but she is featured and I kinda want to go ahead and have a decent starting point when ever I can get a new 3* going
The Hood: 3/1/1 lvl 43, I love him so much, yet unplayable without his needed yellow and bluecovers. Kind of cool to have him in LR but it just is not that powerful at the moment
IW: 1/1/0 , lvl 30 nothing to say here. Useless at the moment
X-Force Wolvie:0/0/1 lvl 30 , same as IW
Dr. Doom: 2/1 lvl 28. Quite fun to play in LR and not that useless. I dig him from a personal point of view
Cmags: 0/1/2 lvl28 One of the 150+ dDR is the blue power, so basically just letting him simmer till the blue cover comes and a final statement is made by the devs whether he will be nerfed or not
LT: 3/1/2 lvl 27. he will be featuered next PvPevent and I heard he is obscenely strong. I guess many ppl will deliberate to push him or get some more covers for him. Btw. I think Thors are boring ... *sigh*
LC: 1/0/1 lvl 18, I liked cap since I was a child and a gold cap seems like a must have. unfortunately was on a business trip and could only play the events while on smokebreak ... so yeah .. wish I had more stuff for him
Ragnarök: 1/1 lvl 18. Heard he was a beast.. now he seems pointless, yet still fun
Hulk: 4/0/0 lvl 15, tomorrow DR will be the last green occover and will cap him at 53. Thinking about having him ISOpumped for defenseive teams
IM40: 1/2/2 , lvl 15, not gonna say a lot about him. I kind of think him grossly slow and not really cool...
Daredevil: 1/1/1 lvl 15. By far my favourite character in the roster until they get around to Immortal Ironfist. But i heard he is total **** , so gonna let him at minimum lvl until he is fixed or I feel like touching him
HT: 1/0/0 lvl 15 , business trip again
Loki : 1/0 lvl 15
Psylocke 0/1/0 lvl15 ; I love her so, ubut managed only 1 cover so far... well gonna wait till the opportunity pops
Spidey : 0/0/1 lvl 15, I know he is as legendary as cmags, nothing to say about besides that
Patch : 0/1/1 , yeah , well he is awesome and stuff, but too few covers to do something with him

2*s
Maxed: OBW, cStorm, MNThor, MNM
Others: 5/4/4 Mawkeye, 3/5/5 Wolvie, 4/3/5 Ares, 5/2/4 cap, and my worst trolling ever 1/5/0 Moonstone ( note, that since she is hosted in the event I noted in my spreadsheet 17 times Moonstone and except the one random pink every single one was her red ability)


After reading through the forums I would give myself the advice to go for punpun, cmags and TH for a decent team. I have to wait roughly 50-60 days until the blue ablity from cmags will be rewarded. So basically the choice at the moment is:
Get the monies and feed TH till max 5/5/3 as a buddy for punpun until cmags is up, or draw ressources from my current pool, which is basically LT, BP and GSBW.


Eager for your replies.


***
Btw. ESL here, any mistakes maybe kept and cherished, for I am a wordsmith

Unknown

Jezzail wrote:

1. Your "seed team" is to lower MMR so you gain more points when you start playing with your roflstompers. - At what point of time do you join the fray? 1h before end? 30 minutes before end?
2. How do you mitigate downswings in your quest for more points? - Let's say some OBW worshippers smash your face in with 6-5 5er matches and your DD goes down lucky or whatever. Do you just throw your device into a corner and yell, while resigning? Is there something you do, when all your healthpacks are down and your C team only stands?
3. Is PvP worth the effort? - With a ton of events being hosted right now, I don't see myself participating in every event or LR. I kind of want to focus on the things worth the effort and not insanely futile in the long run ( LR seems too nerfed to be of any use for my full 3* transition.
4. What characters besides the usual suspects should I consider decent and worthy to invest in specifically for PvP?

1. There are the seed teams that you fight, and the **** team you put in to get beat up. Both are important because in order for your **** team to show up, you need to win 1 match with it. The worse team you can find to beat, the worse team you can have in the tournament and the more you'll get beat. As for when you have them join, it depends on the tournament. For LR I'll get to 100-150 points or so, then put in my seed team. The timing doesn't matter as much because I'm not sticking around for the entire tournament. When it comes to the bigger tournaments, I usually enter with 1.5-2 days left, get up to 300-500 points depending on my mood, then put in my **** team until I'm ready to start my rise for final placement 8hrs or so before the tournament ends.

2. With tanking, it's very rare that I'm fighting teams I can't handle. If I start running low on heath packs, i often use OBW to heal in the Prologue.

3. PvP is definitely worth the effort, if nothing else get to 300 points and you can get a pack. It's good ISO to level your guys. LR is good for getting to 100 points and getting the ISO from that. If you can start getting higher placings, you can get some good 3* characters. Having a lot of characters is important to doing well in the long term. Not to mention there's the new pvp Seasons.

4. Scarecrows are also good if you're going for high points. A high level Hulk for instance, while not always that hard to beat, and probably worse on offence than what it's replacing, is often skipped just because the massive hp makes the fight take a lot longer. Aside from that, level whoever you get, your 141 Punisher should be a good enough deterrant for weaker teams.

HailMary

1. "Seed teams" are AI bots that the devs put in at the start of each event to inject initial points into the system. There are roughly three classes of seed teams: teams with a basic featured character and a pair of L1/L2 chars, teams with a small featured char and L20 accompanists, and Batt1e_Ange1. Some example seed team names: Pyromantic, KicksThatKick, too_many_pants, MonkeyMan_#### (some 4-digit number), and of course, Batt1e_Ange1. Seed teams have zero points and inaccessible rosters.

The basic idea behind using seed teams to simultaneously tank and farm Iso is this: Enter an event immediately when it opens. You should see only seed teams in your nodes. If any nodes don't have seed teams, hit "skip," and you'll usually get a seed team. Keep one seed team "reserved" in a node. Do not fight it at all. Use the other two nodes to get fight-completion Iso, get progression rewards, and get on other people's radar. When you're bored with actual fighting, use the weakest team you have which can beat that seed team you "reserved." Now, go beat that seed team. Then, do not do any more fights, until you want to stop tanking. Now, people who see you in their nodes will see your puny final team, and they will beat it, because it's easy points. Them beating your puny team lowers your MMR, which means you'll be matched up with weaker opponents in future fights.

2. Generally, yes. You kinda just wait for your health packs and character health to regenerate. You could also use a Prologue mission to heal: get a Prologue mission that deals little damage but has relatively tanky enemies (I like the solo-Venom missions), send in your OBW with your injured chars, and focus exclusively on maximizing OBW healing for your team.

3. Generally, yes. PVP is where the majority of covers, HP, and Iso rewards come up. Covers, in particular. For example, the current 9-day PVE gives out a maximum of three 3* covers at the end of that 9 days, gives out tokens along the way for sub placement, and gives out a couple of 2* covers for progression. Contrast that against a 2-to-3-day PVP that gives out three 3* covers at the end, and PVPs usually run back-to-back. LRs have been nerfed. For people with a solid 2* team already, they're really only good for Iso farming.

4. Depends on what your "usual suspects" are.

- Your Punisher is solid. I wish I had your Punisher.
- If you're willing to drop enough money to max out Torch (I assume "TH" = Torch?), you're much better served maxing out LT (and you'll save a bit of money ). LT is possibly the best 3* right now.
- BP is quite strong, as well, but will be neutered by your Punisher on defense: BP's only serious strength is his black power, and Punisher's black costs less, so the AI will usually use Punisher's black.
- Do not Iso-pump Hulk to L53 for defensive purposes, because Hulk is completely useless without any black covers. Also, L53 Hulk deters literally no one who's willing to fight maxed 2*s.
- CMags is awesome. I'm building a LT + BP + CMags team, and they are mighty. I wouldn't buy 9 covers for him, though, esp. if you already have Punisher and are buying LT. Run Punpun + LT + OBW. That's a scary team.

Cheers

Jezzail

Hey, thanks for the replies.

Solid answeres I got there.
I finally understood the tanking stuff and I think I'll apply it after the Falcon PvP or during the next Lightning rounds.

To what score do you guys aim usually? I can easily get to 800 but finish "only" in the top 25. My goal is to hit the top 10 frequently, so I will try to get to that with 850 (and a lot of cursing I guess) and 900 ( don't see it in the near future, but well, we will see).
Thing is, that I get easily discouraged when ppl start to target me after I hit a good and sufficient score, so I tend to use shield only during the 8 hours final period.

Next tip I try to embrace is the expanding roster business. Point is, that I recorded the last 50 tokens ( silver, gold, PvE, PvP tokens ) I got, and I sh*t you not : 17 2*s and 33 1*s was the outcome. I believe that never happened before. Going one week without any 3* pull. So I am kind of at the verge of tears when I hit a token reward. Hope I can get to the 5k in Season 1 soon to try it with the 10er Heroics. If they do not yield a single 3*, I think I will take my money and brutally raise my roster to a full tripple team by force.

Speaking of roster.
I read a lot in the forums and it seems, that Mr green and The Hood are usually avoided. Which is perfect because I want them at some point in my line up. Punpun is a hell of a fun choice in offense, but I can kill 2x3*s teams running him when controlled by the AI and when I with my mediocre gameplay can kill a double 141 3* with my usual 141/85/85, everybody else can.

Btw. I found a suitable mission in the prologue and tip my hat in gratitude. It takes a bit or crashes the team completely but I can regain my posture quicker then waiting for the packs alone and not playing.

So, LR are not worth the effort I get that. I always had the sneaking suspicion, that the PvPs with featured characters ( see the GSBW or current Falcon ) yield way more for the civilized grinder then the LR. But I guess, if you have the Villians maxed you can dish out some good face melting.

The "usual suspects" afaiu Spidey, Cmags and Patch.
The current rise in LT and LC are kind of churning the meta, it seems. And I still have no definitive answer on the viability of BP. I think most people rotate their roster to fill their needs or fill the weaknesses of featured characters (and your team is way scarier than what I had in mind xP @HailMary) .

I think the real question is: "Who is here to stay?" or "Who can I use almost all the time?"

My current roster holds two and a half choices.

1. TH ( The Hood ), defensive beast and I like his fluff. Blue is OP and two molotov countdown tiles on the board with superfluent black infused hurt a lot.
2. LT, I had him buffed to 96 in The Hunt, and he had around 500 more health than punpun. So naturally I would go for him as a tank choice due to a lacking Hulk ( got the black from season 1 progression yaaaay)
3. cMags. Granted I have to wait almost 2 months at least to get his blue from daily rewards, but he seems one of the supreme rulers at the moment. ( until he is nerfed, whenever that is)

But yeah.
Thanks for the input. I will now continue to ponder. Thursday will be judgement call, new month, new monies and hunger for victory.

HailMary

I actually just broke 900 for the first time in the PVP that just ended.

I think I've only ever failed to get Top 10 once (possibly twice) in the past two months.

No 3*s among 50 tokens is unlucky but not uncommon. I'm completely F2P, so I naturally wouldn't suggest brute-forcing your primary team to L141 status, but hey, having a 3xL141 team is awesome. I just got my second L141 (CMags) last night. He's quite competent, even with a 4/4/5 cover distribution.

L141 Hulk is avoided simply because he has so much HP. L141 Hood is avoided because of his blue. Both are great defensive deterrents. LT is better, though.

LT + Hood is a solid choice. And yes, most PVPs are 2 chars + required char. So, roster diversity is good, but having a solid 2-char core is almost better.

Unknown

Talking about PVP, I guess I'll use this topic for my question too:

What determines what team other people face when they see me in PvP? Last match I won?

Also is it based on separate nodes or just in general? For instance, using a modern Storm in a desert node, will she show up as part of my team for other people in every one of the three nodes or just in the desert one?

HailMary

sup123 wrote:

What determines what team other people face when they see me in PvP? Last match I won?

Yes.

sup123 wrote:

Also is it based on separate nodes or just in general?

Just in general.

Unknown

Is it the last team you won with in the event, or globally? Can I win with a scrub team then play with my A squad in another event, or will that replace my team?

Unknown

clockwork_robot wrote:

Is it the last team you won with in the event, or globally? Can I win with a scrub team then play with my A squad in another event, or will that replace my team?

In the event.

Meto5000

Sort of weird question. If I level my character after I win a fight with him, will the character that other people face be the level he was when I won a fight with him, or his current level?

HailMary

Meto5000 wrote:

Sort of weird question. If I level my character after I win a fight with him, will the character that other people face be the level he was when I won a fight with him, or his current level?

Not a weird question at all. I had exactly the same question a few weeks ago.

Others see the exact team, with static levels, that you won your last fight with. If you won a fight with L60 OBW, then leveled her up to L85 without winning any more fights, your opponents still see L60 OBW.

Unknown

Ok, my brackets are getting tougher so I've been thinking about tanking but still have some doubts. I guess a lot of these might not have clear answers but it's worth the shot

-Is the MMR shared between all PvP events? Or do you get separate MMR for Lightning Rounds, for example? I ask this because LR look like a great way to tank right now, so I want to know if they would help me in the other PvP events. Quick, easy to get seed teams, rewards are not great, sounds great for losing on purpose.

-What is MMR based on? Points, Wins/Losses? Does it take into account the same things PvE scaling does (aka health at the end of the fight)? My reasoning for asking this is because I want to know if I need to get points first to lose them later, or just go straight into losing.

-It works the same way on offense and defense? Putting a low team on defense after beating a seed team does the same as attacking someone with a low level team and losing? If so, can I just retreat?

-How often is the MMR updated? After each fight, at the end of each event or what? For instance, there's a LR, a Punisher PvP event and the S.H.I.E.L.D. simulator going on right now. Tanking a lot on a few LR would affect my opponents in the other PvP events right away, or is it taken into account just at the beginning when making the brackets or something else?

If someone could shed some light, I would appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

Unknown

I have a few answers I think, but someone more knowledgable can correct me.

1. MMR is shared among PvP events, including SHIELD training. LR is a great place to tank.
2. I believe it's more wins/losses than anything. You need at least some number of points to tank, in LR I usually make sure to get 100+ points then put in my tank team. It does seem that they've made some changes where after certain point thresholds in PvP you fight people with that amount of points moreso than what your MMR would dictate. You can go from fighting 1* teams to 3* if you start to hit 700+ points.
3. No idea to the first part, but retreating definitely does affect your MMR. My general process for tanking in SHIELD is to take a low level team, retreat 3 times and then let them get killed off the 4th match.
4. This I don't know, but I do know that at the quickest you still need to clear out pre-loaded queues at a minimum.

Unknown

AethD wrote:

I have a few answers I think, but someone more knowledgable can correct me.

1. MMR is shared among PvP events, including SHIELD training. LR is a great place to tank.
2. I believe it's more wins/losses than anything. You need at least some number of points to tank, in LR I usually make sure to get 100+ points then put in my tank team. It does seem that they've made some changes where after certain point thresholds in PvP you fight people with that amount of points moreso than what your MMR would dictate. You can go from fighting 1* teams to 3* if you start to hit 700+ points.
3. No idea to the first part, but retreating definitely does affect your MMR. My general process for tanking in SHIELD is to take a low level team, retreat 3 times and then let them get killed off the 4th match.
4. This I don't know, but I do know that at the quickest you still need to clear out pre-loaded queues at a minimum.

Oh,thanks. More reason to play LR now then. And good to know about the retreat thing, people seem to hit me only when I don't want to lose points.
And by SHIELD do you mean the old simulator or this new season one? Because I would not like to lose points for the season but then would have to wait for lightning rounds to tank.

Unknown

sup123 wrote:

And by SHIELD do you mean the old simulator or this new season one? Because I would not like to lose points for the season but then would have to wait for lightning rounds to tank.

Both, the old one isn't around anymore, but I still do it on the new one. In general, I usually can lose 4+ fights and win 1 or so to gain the points back. There's a long time until a push in SHIELD points are necessary.

vudu3

This is a question I've had about PVP retaliations for quite a while ...

When you have a retaliation available, is your opponent's point value determined by their current score or their score at the time they attacked you? For example, if I have 300 points and someone with a score of 100 attacks me they'll be worth less than 20 points if I retaliate right away. However, if I wait to attack/skip them could they potentially increase their points to 1,000 and then I could hit them for 50+ points? Or will that retaliation node always be worth sub-20 points?

mohio

The points you get is determined at the time you beat them, so it can definitely go up. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the game will still show you that it's only worth 17 or whatever, so you just have to assume that the guy kept climbing and is at a much higher point total. Also sometimes the after-match screen with your point total will be wrong because of this. So it'll show you you gained one amount, but if you look at your score in the main page afterwards, it will be different.

Unknown

The number of times I've entered a battle thinking I'd clear a progression award by ten points and ending up with x99 points has probably been responsible for more cursing at my tablet than just about anything else.

vudu3

mohio wrote:

Also sometimes the after-match screen with your point total will be wrong because of this. So it'll show you you gained one amount, but if you look at your score in the main page afterwards, it will be different.

This answers so many questions! Thank you!

simonsez

This seems like a good place to ask this question: does tanking even work anymore? My hands are cramping, and I don't even see the opponents getting weaker at all.