The ChaHulk meta

killahKlown

@Sekilicious said:
I think we’ve circled back to the problem of can you climb with a counter without a huge target on your back. I think Thanos/Emma might be considered a viable grill team. I don’t know if something like Thanos/Wanda would be better or worse than Wanda/Hit Monkey. But that brings us to Thanos other problem is he is an old character and so is difficult to acquire.

It's only a problem if you value climbing without being hit. Some of us don't really care about taking hits. Biggest concern is quick matches, no wiping.

Bowgentle

@dianetics said:
I don’t think Thanos is viable. He does so much team damage you may as well just keep hitting skip and save those health packs.

I think Monkey Wanda is going to work a lot better and more reliably.

Run Thanos with your best boosted 5 of the week.
Unless you have a really gigantic Thanos, he shouldn't do more than 5k damage to your team, your boosted 5 won't care much about taking 25k damage per match.

Sekilicious

You guys don’t have to convince me there are viable counters and some of you can time getting to 1200 pts without shield hopping. It is very difficult with most rosters though and that is my only point in this part of the discussion. The closest I have ever gotten without hopping is 1150 with boosted SC this week. At that point I started bleeding points. If we are talking boosted Thanos that is a different story.

As an aside, my ‘best’ defensive team is Chasm (4/4/5 lvl453) and iHulk (2/1/1 lvl280). That is a prime candidate to be Thanosed to oblivion, and anyone with Thanos should do it repeatedly. IHulk only has 10k hp after all. It can float at 700+ pts while my meta team for the week SC (3/5/5 lvl458 boosted to 578) and mThor (5/3/5 lvl453) gets hammered at 400 pts (as does Chasm/mThor actually). The only place I have trouble floating with iHulk is lightning rounds.

entrailbucket

The matchmaking algorithm is responsible for that. Players who can queue the underleveled chasm/hulk team at 700pts won't have the tools to beat it. It'll be invisible to well-developed 5* rosters until you hit a certain point threshold.

Sekilicious

My MMR is well within the 5* range. If it calculated on top-3 it is at 460, and top 5 at 457. Maybe no one in that range has Thanos at a viable level. Also, I don’t climb with that team. Normally I climb with Chasm/mThor with SC and mThor the last couple of days. SC/Chavez for hops., since even unboosted that is my fastest team though vulnerable to being picked on. If anything I shouldn’t be able to leave iHulk on a defense team.

entrailbucket

Your roster controls who you see.

The team you use controls who sees you.

If I use a 1* team, I will fight 5* opponents, but only 1* teams will be able to fight me.

Except for retaliations from people you attack, your underleveled Hulk is only visible to players using 4* or underleveled 5* (until you cross a certain point threshold).

Sekilicious

If you say so. I get hammered by all sorts of 5* MMR jerks if I use BRB/Polaris so I’m skeptical.

entrailbucket

I assume Polaris is championed...champion 4* are likely handled quite differently than near-base-level 5*. Lots of new players use their one-cover 5*, so I'd imagine there's a carve-out in matchmaking for them, and this situation seems to confirm that.

Of course, most near-base-level 5* aren't capable of beating champion 5*, so perhaps the carve-out is something the devs should look into.

HoundofShadow

My mmr is similar to Sekilicious. Mine might be slightly higher. I used SC + mThor / AC to climb this week and I hit 1200 in slice 1. For your case, it's likely a timing or playstyle problem.

What kind of opponents are you hitting, point-wise?

Timing-wise, there isn't a specific timing to play. Just climb anytime 24 hours before the pvps ends, and don't climb a few hours (~5 hours) before pvps end.

dianetics

@entrailbucket said:
I assume Polaris is championed...champion 4* are likely handled quite differently than near-base-level 5*. Lots of new players use their one-cover 5*, so I'd imagine there's a carve-out in matchmaking for them, and this situation seems to confirm that.

Of course, most near-base-level 5* aren't capable of beating champion 5*, so perhaps the carve-out is something the devs should look into.

He’s alive !!

@Bowgentle said:

@dianetics said:

Run Thanos with your best boosted 5 of the week.
Unless you have a really gigantic Thanos, he shouldn't do more than 5k damage to your team, your boosted 5 won't care much about taking 25k damage per match.

I ran him several times on many different teams. It’s not good. Yes he pushes the team down but he also opens you up. Unless you have a super fat roster Thanos is not the answer.

HoundofShadow

You can always draw healthpacks from vaults. I don't know why some players can be healthpack conscious. Some of them have over 1000 Sweet or whatever Taco tokens and they can't bear to use it. At worst, you use 20 healthpacks, and the game will refill your healthpacks every 36 minutes as long as you have fewer than 10.

dianetics

If I have less than 500 I’m not happy. I try to use less than 1 health pack each day.
I want a buffer to push PvE/PvP if I have to.

killahKlown

Health pack usage is not something I've ever thought about in this game

Bowgentle

If you're above 9 health Packs at any time, you're doing something wrong.

Bad

To use a big amount of healthpacks, to have to draw resources from other side, to wait for healthpacks refilling, is not something players desire, specially when pvp was more fun and more diverse before chasm.
For that reason hit monkey has been released, in order to make pvp reasonable again.
A few minutes ago I fought a chasm Mthor big wheel team with my chasm, SW Crystal team. When his chasm was alone I spend 5 minutes matching with him until I won.
That's not reasonable, nor fun. Just set his regeneration at 5 and the enemy will struggle to down him.
A match mirror is crazy and not choosing chasm is a target in the back.
Hit monkey indeed will help to down that character with his increased 35% damage, so I'm waiting that monkey like if was the new messiah.

Sekilicious

@entrailbucket said:
I assume Polaris is championed...champion 4* are likely handled quite differently than near-base-level 5*. Lots of new players use their one-cover 5*, so I'd imagine there's a carve-out in matchmaking for them, and this situation seems to confirm that.

Of course, most near-base-level 5* aren't capable of beating champion 5*, so perhaps the carve-out is something the devs should look into.

I firmly believe that only being able to leave championed characters on defense would solve a few problems people have with 2 or 3* PvP. If no one in my MMR can see me because I left a 2/1/1 lvl280 iHulk out but my lvl280 Polaris (as she was when I used her) is visible that is a problem.

Bowgentle

Well they're reworking MMR anyway.
Maybe the magical invisible climbs will be over then.
Or someone will just invent a new spell.

Sekilicious

@HoundofShadow said:
My mmr is similar to Sekilicious. Mine might be slightly higher. I used SC + mThor / AC to climb this week and I hit 1200 in slice 1. For your case, it's likely a timing or playstyle problem.

What kind of opponents are you hitting, point-wise?

Timing-wise, there isn't a specific timing to play. Just climb anytime 24 hours before the pvps ends, and don't climb a few hours (~5 hours) before pvps end.

We may have the same MMR but I have probably 1/4 of the 5s you have champed. The only time I have ever had two champed boosted was when KK and mThor were boosted.

entrailbucket

I believe boosted characters do not affect matchmaking anymore, because when they did (years ago, when 4* boosts first became a thing), that caused big problems.

Matchmaking is really complicated because it started off simple and then players figured out ways to exploit it (over and over and over again). It's had about 100 increasingly bizarre fixes, one-offs and exceptions applied to it, some of which were designed to fix exploits from the early days of the game that don't/can't even exist anymore.

If they actually are redoing it from scratch, they'll need to be very careful to not introduce new exploits, because players will be looking for them right away.

HoundofShadow

Weekly boosted 5* was introduced in May/June 2021. Back then, I had only ~15 champed 5* and there were about 57 5*. My probability of hitting one boosted 5* was pretty low, which is ~1/4. And my best non-boosted option were 5* Wanda/Colossus. Anyway, we can only agree to disagree on this.

It's probably time for the dev to remove boosted 5 from pvps because I believe there are enough varieties in pvps. Shield sim is a pretty good reflection of what you would see in pvps: pretty much one meta + any common partners. SC/Riri + mThor should be pretty common and they are considered glass cannon. Hit-Monkey/Wanda is a glass cannon. Chasm would be much easier to deal with. Wouldn't non-win-based players prefer climbing on glass cannons than slogging against boosted 5*? You get fewer variety but your climb would be easier with all these glass cannons.

Reworked mmr will probably come next year and I wonder if they would inject fake players/seed teams into mid/late climb. Doing this is probably the best way to solve mmr and lack of variety problem for different tiers of players if they remove boost from pvps. This will also solve problems for 1-4 players who are paired against similar tier players who put 5* characters out on defense. The algorithms will push players pre-made duos if there's a lack of opponents and adjust their levels based on their top 3-5 average.