Newly thawed caveman from not all that long ago

garbanzo

I've just started playing again after about a year of retirement. I have some thoughts on how the game has changed while I've been away, which I'll put here (a) just in case it's of interest to any of you and (b) in case you can fill me in on what I don't know about the meta.

For context, I'm a day 1177 player, and I started back up again on the first day of the last PVE event. (Was it Thick as Thieves? My memory is terrible.) When I put the game down last year (ish?), my roster was squarely in 5* territory, but far from top tier. IIRC, I could almost always get T25, sometimes T10, in both PVP and PVE at SCL9 (highest at the time), as long as I got a decent bracket flip in PVE. I haven't been back long, but here's what I notice:

1. The 5* meta is much more varied than it used to be. I'm seeing a lot of different teams now, and I'm using a lot more different teams than I used to. I used to pretty much alternate between Gritty and Thorkoye, but now I have to think more about how to counter specific enemy teams. (I still haven't figured out a good counter to iHulk or maxed out Bishop, though.)

2. PVE at SCL10 is much less of a slog. The green node is an interesting challenge, again getting me to use more of my roster (boosted Quake got me through the iHulk team last event) and the missing 2* essential node gives me MINUTES of my life back. I just find I'm thinking about strategy much more than I was when I put the game down last year.

3. Shards! Yay! Much better than the bonus hero system--especially in my position, missing a bunch of characters.

4. Supports still seem pointless. Have I missed any exciting developments here, or are they just as disappointing as they were at launch?

Again, you probably shouldn't trust my memory too much--I could definitely be wrong about what I was thinking when I put the game down last year. But I'm just really heartened by what looks like a much fresher game after a year away, and I don't think the freshness is just because I've been away. I really think the devs have done some good work here. I'm glad to be back.

BriMan2222

First, welcome back!  

To answer a couple of your questions, the best counter that I have found for iHulk is Beta Ray Bill and kitty as every time hulks passive aoe goes off it will set off BRB blue tile and create 3 defense tiles for kitty to boost and pretty soon he'll be doing -1 damage each turn.  Then get kitty red on the board to add some attack tiles as well.

The best counter to Bishop is Apocolypse with a mutant partner so that he is unstunnable. If you don't have apocolypse then the next best thing is the skip button.  Bishop has been the most broken character in the game since he was released.  

As for supports, they are still disappointing BUT the fact that the last several updates have included a bunch of upgrades to the support interface leaves many of us anticipating some sort of upgrade to supports themselves.  Why spend all this time upgrading how we see and equip supports if you aren't going to give us some way to get and upgrade supports??

garbanzo

Thanks for the reply! Sadly, I haven't got either BRB or Apocalypse yet. I do have a skip button, though. And OK, I'll hold out hope that supports will become worth thinking about one of these days.

DeNappa

garbanzo said:

2. PVE at SCL10 is much less of a slog. The green node is an interesting challenge, again getting me to use more of my roster (boosted Quake got me through the iHulk team last event) and the missing 2* essential node gives me MINUTES of my life back. I just find I'm thinking about strategy much more than I was when I put the game down last year.

Uhm. I don't know what PVE you're playing, but I think most PVE SCL10 players would disagree (see for example this recent thread). The difficulty is good, but the amount of grind is insane esp. due to the excessive amounts of enemy health. 

bluewolf

DeNappa said:

garbanzo said:

2. PVE at SCL10 is much less of a slog. The green node is an interesting challenge, again getting me to use more of my roster (boosted Quake got me through the iHulk team last event) and the missing 2* essential node gives me MINUTES of my life back. I just find I'm thinking about strategy much more than I was when I put the game down last year.

Uhm. I don't know what PVE you're playing, but I think most PVE SCL10 players would disagree (see for example this recent thread). The difficulty is good, but the amount of grind is insane esp. due to the excessive amounts of enemy health. 

I can see how a person who was gone until recently might think this....it depends on your goals a little, I guess, and how much time you are willing to spend on the game.  Do you want to clear quickly?  Do you want to experiment as much as possible?

PVE has always been about grinding, but until SCL10 you could do it very quickly (once you spent enough time/money on your roster and you were in the right SCL for your roster).  T10 players were playing SCL9 with a stop watch to time their clears to the second (I believe; they timed them very closely) with elaborate spreadsheets showing when to hit which nodes to squeeze out an extra point or two and win the bracket.  Even if you weren't chasing T1 you were probably running approx the same team every time and it wasn't very interesting.....just easy. Pretty boring too, beyond occasional 5Es or long waves messing up your clears a little.  But it was definitely faster! (T10+ folks ran Thanos and Rocket EVERY TIME they played PVE and these characters are over 3 years old now.)

SCL10 has made it all take longer and possibly shaken up which teams you use....strategy is actually a factor which (at least initially) made it more interesting.  Now that they've run everything 2+ times I feel like most players have settled into their best teams (Thorkoye plus someone, usually.....if your Okoye is big enough you can run her with Hulk and 3nos or something) and the game is just becoming even more boring to me because there's not a lot of thought involved, but it all takes longer.   Experimenting can be a bit interesting but there's also not much room for error....before you went optimal to chase points/placement, now it's a bit more of a matter of whether or not you can actually win.

I'd be curious to hear from the OP in a couple months, or even a month, about how much they like PVE once the novelty of SCL10 has worn off.  

garbanzo

bluewolf said:

DeNappa said:

garbanzo said:

2. PVE at SCL10 is much less of a slog. The green node is an interesting challenge, again getting me to use more of my roster (boosted Quake got me through the iHulk team last event) and the missing 2* essential node gives me MINUTES of my life back. I just find I'm thinking about strategy much more than I was when I put the game down last year.

Uhm. I don't know what PVE you're playing, but I think most PVE SCL10 players would disagree (see for example this recent thread). The difficulty is good, but the amount of grind is insane esp. due to the excessive amounts of enemy health. 

I can see how a person who was gone until recently might think this....it depends on your goals a little, I guess, and how much time you are willing to spend on the game.  Do you want to clear quickly?  Do you want to experiment as much as possible?

You're both right. I told you my memory was bad, but I think part of why I quit was that competing for PVE placement was (a) a time sink, (b) grindy, and (c) starting to be incompatible with my schedule. I tried scaling back to just progression, but it somehow still felt like a grind, probably because I could feel how slow suboptimal teams were.

Now I'm more wholeheartedly unconcerned with placement. With holes in my roster, it's easier to feel like I'm improving without those placement rewards, and I want to spend time engaged with the game--I'm not worried about speed. (Also, missing essential 5*s means speed won't help much.)

DeNappa is totally right (of course) that if I were trying to be competitive, I'd hate SCL10 more and it would feel both grindy and frustrating.

I'm not *quite* in the 20% effort/80% reward camp, but maybe like 40% effort/85% reward.

I'd be curious to hear from the OP in a couple months, or even a month, about how much they like PVE once the novelty of SCL10 has worn off.  

I'm curious too! I'll check back in.

DeNappa

Actually, I never play for placement, so I'm not concerned with 'fast' clearing of nodes in the interest of a high ranking. The amount of HP to grind through is the same for competitive and non-competitive play, though, and IMO it's too large.

But I don't want to hijack your topic to turn it into another SCL10 rant . So allow me to make a comment on one of your other points:

4. Supports still seem pointless. Have I missed any exciting developments here, or are they just as disappointing as they were at launch?

While I agree that some supports are pretty useless, there are other supports that actually give you a lot of benefits if you have them at a decent rank/level and eqiupped on a character that can employ them well. For example, Royal Talon Fighter on Okoye is a huge game changer, especially if you have it at at least rank 2 or even better, rank 3. Likewise, Sharon Carter is a big boost to WorthyCap, and there are also many supports that have a chance to give you extra AP in the start of a match (e.g. my 5pX has Quantum Realm, giving a chance to start a match with +5 purple AP, and my 5Thor is equipped with an Atlantis support that may give +5 green AP).

Unfortunately the way to obtain or rank up supports is still trash. They have pushed out some updates recently that improved the user interface around Supports, so that gives a sliver of hope they may actually be improving upon that in the future, but we have no way to know. (I'm not sure if the community manager for MPQ was fired or something, but the past months we seem to be getting only the default announcement posts)