Gargantos Boss Event Change (Live) (6/23/22)

NemoAbernnigan

This event really makes the Quantum Realm support and Scorpion shine. Good odds at 5 purple AP at match start, and since my boosted Scorpion practically one shots Gargantos with his purple it makes the matches where I get the purple at start really easy. It's also really fun in the nodes. Enemy casts generate 2 purple if you have the red skill maxed, so getting the 10 AP from the starting 5 is just one match and one enemy cast. Then you get to just slam through enemies with the purple. 9 out of the 10 cost refunded on kills, and 4 powerful blows means you can often gain AP from casting it and getting multiple kills. First time I've really gotten to see Scorpion live up to his potential.

The other fun thing for me has been blowing people up with boosted Bullseye's purple, which Scorpion and Quantum Realm gets you the 7 for even with no purple matches, and filling the field with 13 strike tiles. Then if you have 7 green AP you can cast Scorpion's green and boost the strength of all of those strike tiles while hitting the enemy team, or you can use Venom's green which blows up the board and deletes the target.

My alliance is only on round 4 or 5 right now, but I haven't had trouble with the event yet, though I did get a character downed in a couple Gargantos fights before the patch. I'd say the difficulty level and restricted roster are definitely worth the rewards. I may need a more active Alliance for the next Boss event, as it's hard to make progress with only 2 Alliance members with full points, but that's my only issue. I'm hoping the standard 8 hour refreshes on the nodes will be enough to make full personal progression at least. If not, that's the one thing I'd change. Even someone not in an Alliance should still be able to make full progression on the personal rewards IMHO.

Daredevil217

I’m also tired of hearing there is no synergy amongst the 5*s. I’m just learning how great Yelena/Daken are together for those side nodes. Especially as many have a goon or two. Yelena keeps the AP in check, slowly spams strikes. Once there are two on the board, Daken’s repeaters can actually do damage and just melt fools. Either Venom provides a nice yellow outlet. Flash also has a cheap active black in a pinch, if you don’t want to spam Daken’s repeaters. 

Lots of synergy. Just no blue. 

purplemur

Thank you for a quick turnaround on a Boss Event!
Thank you for 2x ***** Covers! 
Thank you for another Heroic Event!
Thank you for working late on Friday and into Saturday to make fixes!
Thank you for responding to the thread and sharing metrics!

I have always loved AV and Scorps is really good, I covet a better Yelena: she’s a sleeper, I have a champ Doby but he has been meat more than bombs. 

Dark Avengers was a debatable choice. I don’t think totally awful out of touch etc, but; Only one active blue power, the bench is shallow and old. Shrug. Whats the scope of impact though: if this is the worst team affiliated heroic event then we have it pretty good!! Now we done with DA let the good times roll!! 

Ohh whats that? There is a Runaways tag?….looks at Gert…checks sharding queue….how about Mutants next!!!

keep up the good work and until Jim Shooter makes his triumphant return to Marvel Directing the hit Disney+ villain reboot: Petrusky; make mine MPQ!

Tony_Foot

IceIX said:

It's possible that players would have come back and tried it after saying "heck no" with the previous settings, but from the data that we were getting, the event needed a bit of a bump to make it more *generally* approachable. Post bump it's been great! We've been seeing a lot of engagement from players that don't normally get a look in, and Alliances overall are clearing further than they normally would. So while I certainly wouldn't say this is a total success, there seems to have been much more positive than negative with a lot of the negative things that can be actively worked on to fix in future.

And that even goes for non-Heroic events, so if you read that thinking that the sky may be falling and it's Heroics all the way down from now on, fret not.

Ok but then how about adding more covers and rewards past the normal progression. Not 5* but shards or covers for 4* for the players that don’t want to either treat these easy boss events like a weekend off or have to put in the extra work for the players in the alliance that can’t make the grade or don’t play.

The weekend off players still get the time off and those of us that want to continue playing get rewarded for it. 

Either way I expect every single time heroics are run pitchforks will be out, boss event or not because people can’t be bothered to learn new tactics that take longer than 30 seconds.

Tarelgeth

I won.  I beat progression, I got my reward.  I'm gonna keep playing to help my alliance get its reward.

Was this fun?  Not at all.

It didnt reward creativity or strategy in any way.  It didn't reward roster development.  All it did was say "Here's the two or three characters that make a difference.  Got them?  Yes? Good.  No?  Get wrecked."

Luckily, I've got a champed Scorpion.  I won.

Puzzle?  Yawn.  There was no puzzle here.  Nothing to be built or planned.  No design or strategy or coming at it from different angles and trying different playstyles.  Just win or lose on the flip of a coin.

Difficult would be good.  I hear stories of long ago when Boss events were introduced, you were *expected* to lose, and shaving more and more health off the boss each time was your measure of accomplishment.  Personally, I love the sound of that.

But this?  This wasn't hard (for me).  It was just annoying.  That's a bad method of artificially introducing difficulty.

Ultrace

I give due credit for updating the event based on feedback from the players, and definitely things are more manageable with the changes that have been made, but I feel that this event was poorly conceived and poorly executed from the outset, with almost certainly no testing or real consideration given by the development staff.

Heroic events are a great idea, and many old players (including me) support their return. They make lots of extra characters who just clutter up the roster (except for the odd Deadpool Daily and required PvP/PvE nodes) have a little more purpose. The problem in this case was the choice of which characters to use.

The Dark Avengers are just a garbage team. They are. No offense to the Marvel employees who worked on the comics, or the D3Go employees who made the characters. Individually, there are some standout characters that are interesting, have good synergy with the existing roster of characters (like Scorpion or Agent Venom) or "feel" like their counterparts should (classic Bullseye), but this is a terrible team of villains filled with unlikeable characters who do not work well together. Mechanically, their synergy exists, but is limited, and even in the storyline of game events in MPQ we see the characters as inept, undisciplined and antagonistic toward each other. Read the dialogue of all their in-team bickering and how easily they are bamboozled by the heroes. How are we supposed to be excited about playing with this group? They weren't even a success in their own comics. In fact, I think the Dark Avengers is probably the least appealing affiliation of characters in this game where you could actually field a team of 3 of those characters -- excepting the Runaways, which is literally just three characters. 

To compound matters further, Gargantos is a horrible boss to put against this group. While the damage from his blue ability was toned down (and made 1 AP more expensive), he still eats away at 3 random AP per turn and hits for not insignificant damage if you don't have AP in that color. Why does this matter? Well, not only is it a really irritating boss ability, but the Dark Avengers are not filled with fast-acting characters who have powers costing 6 or 7 AP. Their passives are few (apart from those like 2* and 3* Daken that will actively punish you by creating special tiles for Gargantos to chomp). You're usually looking at three matches in a color to use its power, assuming that Gargantos doesn't eat that AP first. And while there are some team attacks available like Agent Venom's (even though he was a part of Thunderbolts, which should give us Red Hulk, Deadpool, Elektra and Punisher), for the most part if Gargantos does go invisible, you don't have much recourse until he comes back.

During the last Madness boss event, teams steamrolled Gargantos because they were fast, modern characters with effective passives, affordable powers, and the ability to combine synergies. By putting the Dark Avengers against a recent boss event (instead of the originals like Ultron and Galactus which were created in a different era of the game), all it did was remind players of why they don't like these dumpy, slow characters. The Dark Avengers, like their comic book storyline, are a relic of a bygone era and not one that will live on forever in the hearts of comic fans.

Carnifex

Finished personal progression on today's second flip, alliance has just finished full rewards on the third. 
The nerf was highly appreciated as without I'm not sure if we would have finished, especially during those higher rounds, the side nodes were still killer!

I understand why the devs wanted to try a heroic event, and to make us use teams we wouldn't normally. But with the lack of synergy between the DA, I only ran one team the last couple of days, so variety still wasn't experienced to be honest. I did start to enjoy the challenge, but I would have preferred to perhaps use at least two teams. 

Congrats to all who have managed to finish, and RIP to anyone without a champed Scorpion 

derrickn

So.   I just pulled two one-star Yelena's from the Peer Into Madness vault.    Which has no one-star covers.    ****?

ct451

derrickn said:

So.   I just pulled two one-star Yelena's from the Peer Into Madness vault.    Which has no one-star covers.    ****?

Before the 2*s in order. Always a fun surprise. I got 5 of those.

Dogface

derrickn said:

So.   I just pulled two one-star Yelena's from the Peer Into Madness vault.    Which has no one-star covers.    ****?

It does have 1* in it. They're just not located at the end

ct451

For those who don't understand why people complain:

This event is like you wanting to have pizza for dinner with all your favorite toppings but made to eat boiled cauliflower you don't like and when you complain they pre-chew the cauliflower for you to make it easier to swallow. 

Both fill you up but you only enjoy one.

shardwick

ct451 said:

For those who don't understand why people complain:

This event is like you wanting to have pizza for dinner with all your favorite toppings but made to eat boiled cauliflower you don't like and when you complain they pre-chew the cauliflower for you to make it easier to swallow. 

Both fill you up but you only enjoy one.

What if I told you that you could have cauliflower pizza with your favorite toppings and that you could also enjoy it? :O

Tiger_Wong

ct451 said:

For those who don't understand why people complain:

This event is like you wanting to have pizza for dinner with all your favorite toppings but made to eat boiled cauliflower you don't like and when you complain they pre-chew the cauliflower for you to make it easier to swallow. 

Both fill you up but you only enjoy one.

This event was nothing like that. Your comparison is terrible. 

ironsmudgie

While only having a few characters to play with was very limiting, it looks like I will stil be able to get max person progression.  And my very newly formed slacker alliance is doing very well, despite for a 1st time alliance event.  I would welcome the return of future Heroics.  As someone that started at basically day one of the game, and then took a few years off, passively grinding isn't as fun as a genuine challenge.   As long as we have plenty of notice to allocate resources, I enjoy it.

Omegased

My alliance has got thru this event as easy as a normal event.

If you have all champed 4s, this event was super easy. Agent venom would kill gargs in turn 2 or 3. To be frank, anyone who is hating on this event either hasn't even tried it, or have such a narrow roster it's laughable.

At round 7 I could do a full clear using maybe 4 health packs.

There isn't heaps of synergy but you don't need it. Scorpion self supplies ap, and agent venom hits hard.

Eirikr56

In later rounds the blue power still 1 shots anyway, so this nerf didn't really mean much from my perspective. Very very frustrating and it feels impossible if yoy dont have the couple of key characters champed.

derrickn

ct451 said:

derrickn said:

So.   I just pulled two one-star Yelena's from the Peer Into Madness vault.    Which has no one-star covers.    ****?

Before the 2*s in order. Always a fun surprise. I got 5 of those.

Oh, oops.    Yup, there they are.    Thanks for clueing me in.

TrixieTime

I must admit that I ended up really enjoying figuring out and playing Scorpion / Agent Venom / 3 Daken as a team. Good synergy and color spread. Hit full progression. 

Bad

Round 8 with 2 loaners and my bullseye level 252(not really that hard to have it for any player).
https://youtu.be/jQ4yZS8rMyY

CoxLargo

Lets hope next event, wont be this messy. It was their first... annoying AF, but hey wish for the next one.


BUT NO MORE 1* **** in any boss event vault!