Phantron wrote: Given the prizes give out in the Avenger Elite you can think of shields as being 'free', at least to the guys who are trying for first place. I doubt you'll see this kind of behavior duplicated anywhere else. If you were doing that on a regular PvP tournament you'd have spent more in shields than whatever you're trying to win cost to just upgrade straight up unless that was your first cover, and if you've that kind of HP to burn you probably should just buy the special deal packs and save yourself the headache. At any rate the general strategy outlined is still applicable everywhere else. You won't have those crazy shield off/shield on moments happening all the time but the general concept also still applies.
walkyourpath wrote: pasa_ wrote: Can we have some timing figures? How many minutes it takes for the mob hits to arrive? What number of hits after reshielding? I can only guesstimate, but the first day I didn't get attacked too much. The time for retaliation and frequency gradually increased as the tourney got closer to an end. Certainly, most of my unshieldings in the last 8 hours brought at least one attack within 1-5 minutes of me reshielding, again reinforcing my one and done approach to pushes. For the last hour, my shields reflected somewhere between 8-10 attacks in the final stretch, as being in first meant that I was always the highest point value for anyone trying to make a desperate scramble. I only unshielded once in the final hour, and even that was a scary gambit - a 2-3 minute vulnerable period, with 10 hits in an hour coming in? Spread those out evenly and you're looking at a roughly 1 in 6 chance of a hit landing unshielded. I've rolled enough 1's on a D6 playing tabletop RPGs to know that it's not the kind of risk I want to take when 3 days and 5K is on the line.
pasa_ wrote: Can we have some timing figures? How many minutes it takes for the mob hits to arrive? What number of hits after reshielding?
locked wrote: I find it ridiculous that to place anywhere close to top 10, you *have* to use shields, but oh well. Maybe sometime I... oh I mean, maybe sometime a midlevel player, too, can reach the point where they can throw HP at events, and without Rags' help at that.
locked wrote: I find it ridiculous that to place anywhere close to top 10, you *have* to use shields, but oh well.
walkyourpath wrote: Second, I actually gained 10 points on defense in the last hour (about 20-25 in the 5 hours before that) when I made a desperate single match push after real life intruded for the two hours just before and I couldn't do anything but queue up matches occasionally. While I was open, Bugpop, who was playing like a beast down the stretch, lost a round to me while I was vulnerable. I don't know whether my D got a lucky cascade or the board just dried up for him, but that's just the point - a high health team exposes you to more chances that the AI hits a miracle or that you get starved for AP when trying to end matches quickly. None of this is to say that a defensive team is the best team, or the only option - just saying that for me, it worked out very well at the end and allowed me to execute my plan and get off Zombie Island with a tidy profit. I hope this is helpful to others and sparks some interesting conversation. If not, you're a masichist for reading this far anyway and you deserved what you got.