Support Circuit Post Mortem - what do you think and what did you get?

Felessa

I liked the event, but I don't think it does enough to add access to supports

I liked the event as "new content", but dislike the time required, vault size and placement aspect of it, playing only one time each mission and 3x the boss one, as I think it should be, something quick and simple like DDQ, and not another "normal" PvE grind...

I think I got a total of 13 vault tokens, which gave me only one support (duplicated), some Riso and the rest were 2*s... and that's it, if there was something these event really improved, was my 2* character acquisition

ciriquen

I think I opened 18, I got 1 advanced support and 3 standard supports, but was awesomely lucky and got 1, 2, 3, and 4 star supports! All were dupes, but the 3 and 4 were upgrades from 1.

JHawkInc

Vhailorx said:

I had absolutely absurd luck.

Bought every 100hp daily deal, and a few 10 packs too. Was chasing an rtf like everyone else (until the wakanda vault happened).

From about 85 pulls, I got

2x Master tokens

2x advanced tokens

4x standard tokens

2 of the fixed supports (not the rtf)

A few 3*s, iso, and lots of 2*s. (Plus the cost3 and other resources from progression)

From those tokens, I actually got my first two 5* supports (1 from an advanced token just to show how crazy lucky I was!).  5* Chimichangas and blackbird are now mine, for whatever that's worth.

I also added a rank to 4 or 5 lower rank supports (including getting to rank 3 on some new supports where that really matters). And I got rank 1 victorious and pocket radio.

All in all I think that is a far better outcome than anyone can expect from that vault without having tens of thousands of HP saved, or whaling heavily. 

My thoughts in the event are as follows:

(1) I think my particular outcome was great and should probably be a little bit above average for a veteran player's experience. A month long even that provides 1-3 high level supports, plus additional ranks for a handful more, and adds1-2 completely new supports seems like a good reward level for regular players.

(2) the fact that my outcome was so outrageously lucky suggests that the rewards need to be tuned up a bit.  I would guess that I got a top 1-5% outcome, but I think it should be more like a top 20-35% outcome.

(3) the last thing this game needs is another event asking for ~70 matches on a strict schedule in a 24 hour period.  The grind needs a serious quality of life improvement.

(4) rewards in mpq rarely go up, especially on the second run of an event, so regardless of my preferences in #2 above, I expect the next iteration of this event to be less generous.

(5) I remain very uncertain about the relative value of the newer 3x stronger abilities supports versus the older 5x weaker power supports

(6) the delta between the utility of some support powers versus others is outrageous.  + a bt of damage v. dark avengers is trash tier. %chance fortify a friendly special tile on match/power/turn is incredibly useful. %chancr start with 6-12 AP is match-ending with the right setup.  I feel like a balance pass is necessary for some of the older, useless supports.

(6) relatedly, the character locks on supports are irritating.  Imaging pulling a 5* ancestral realm, only to realize that you have a grand total of 10 BP covers across his 3 iterations.  What a waste.  Same with all the villanous supports in a game that is maybe 15% villains. My own 5* chimichangas are way more intriguing than my 5* blackbird, just because I don't have any of the 5* X-Men champed just yet. Obviously they can't all be exactly as useful, but the gaps do seem quite wide.

(7) I want supports that subtract match damage from Characters to improve our ability to tinker with which character tanks what color.

(8) also, more placement rewards for a pve event?  And only top 3 get the support tokens that the event is theoretically about?  C'mon!

(9) as always, enemy variety is nice, and newer events have an advantage (it's not all dark avengers!).

80 pulls here.

One loose support (Rank 2 Yaro Root, don't remember if it's a dupe or if mine was only Rank 1 beforehand)
2 Master Tokens
2 Advanced
4 Beginner
decent number of Red ISO pulls, a handful of 3* covers, and the only 4* cover (pulls that weren't purple ISO or 2*s, at least)

Korg and Avengers Tower both improved to Rank 4 (they were 2 and 1 respectively, I believe). Blackbird went to Rank 3. Got my first Victorious (Rank 1). I was "chasing" anything of higher rank, and any Victorious/Tinkerer since I didn't have those at all (just for the record, I pulled a Rank 4 Talon Fighter way back at release, or I sure would have been chasing one of those instead). So, I have a whole lot of RNG for free yellow AP at the start of the match, that'll be interesting once I get some red ISO invested in both of them.

As for your other points, I agree with 1/2, I feel like I had a lucky "above-average" experience, but feel that this shouldn't be the case. I made no progress at all towards rank 5 supports, and many veteran players will have even slower progression than I have. If I had earned ONE Rank 5 Support, it would take me... what, 5 1/2 years to get the rest at this rate?

I'm mixed on the grind/clears, because they've been attempting to run them during 2-day sub events, which does away with the weird downtime when trying to play (sorta) optimally, and I actually like that. But it's definitely an imperfect implementation. Same amount of work, progression only, with a week (or at least 5 days) to complete it, would be so much easier for most to juggle.

I'm pretty sure Supports with only 3 perks (instead of 5) are just outright inferior. The only reason they were changed was to make Supports "stronger", when the whole reason people complained they were weak was because we couldn't gain them OR enough Red-ISO to level them up. I think the whole decision to go from 5 to 3 in the first place was stupidly misguided, and they haven't effectively done what they said they were trying to do. One of my "MPQ Pipe Dreams" is that they'll acknowledge it was a bad idea and go back and add two more perks to those supports (even if it means tweaking the strength of the existing perks)

I agree that there's a disconnect with character-specific perks and villain supports. There are too many villain supports and not enough villains that pair well with them. (side note: I'd love a Hydra villain that makes my Hydra Henchmen even remotely useful) Four Black Order, but none of them really shine with Thanos. As for the perks, they could use some... opening up. Spidey Sense ought to work with Miles and Gwen and Ham, and should give a bonus perk to any version of Peter (not just the 4*). Avengers Tower should give a bonus perk to any Avenger, not just Iron Man. The level of specificity and restriction makes sense if you have our ~200 characters and a thousand supports, not 50.

Also, I do give a thumbs up for the node/enemy variety, and the fun of the Large Pin. Support Circuits was a success in that regard (even though I wish they could just... figure out what it takes to write new events with characters we already have).

Jormagund

I liked the event, but I don't think it does enough to add access to supports

I started off with 1 three star support, 6 two star supports and 5 one star supports.  I'm in 3 star land and supports can be really useful in PVE, so lots of room for improvement.  However, as I need HP for roster slots I was limited to pulling the tokens from rewards and placement, 20 in all.

I got lucky though and got the three star support from the vault... oh wait, it's 3 star Kimono Beads, a duplicate of my sole current three star support.  Red ISO is OK but they probably swung too far from the original meagre rewards and it's pretty easy to get that amount elsewhere; so a bit of a wasted pull.

Things then improved slightly, I got 1 basic support token which upgraded my Blackbird from 2 to 3 stars and with my penultimate pull scored a 1 star Quantum Realm which was actually new.

Overall then levelled one support and got a new one which I wouldn't have done without support circuit, but in the same period they also introduced Atlantis so I still have 36 missing.  Good to have growth but not personally significant in this rotation although obviously some people fared better.

The extra rewards from the nodes/progression/placement are nice and the enemy teams are more interesting for now than the normal PVE events.  Whether this changes and it just becomes a weekly version of Simulator due to repetition or stays fresh I don't know.  The Boss battles are OK but I don't feel they're challenging enough compared to the normal nodes.

Running concurrently with PVE and due to my understrength roster I've had to drop from playing SCL seven the first week to six to maintain health packs.

I'd hope to see the vaults rejigged so we can either save tokens as with Tacos or reducing some of the filler items to increase the odds of supports/support tokens.  It would also be nice, as has been mentioned elsewhere, if rewards in PVP, PVE and Support Circuit were looked at again to try and encourage people with stronger rosters to play higher levels.   Instead of the current situation where lots of stronger players are dropping down to lower levels and reducing beginner/intermediate players chances of good placement.