Does roster strength even matter anymore?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So, I was playing the Sentry PVP this morning. I’m in Shard 1, so my this PVP is over in about 22 and a half hours, as of me posting this.

And it occurred to me that roster strength, I.E. the number of strong characters, the diversity in colored powers and the match ups available, really has nothing to do with placing well in PVP anymore. And it revolves around the shield cooldowns and the progression reward adjustments.

Let me elaborate:

Before Shield Cooldowns
Prior to the shield cooldown change last season, people routinely scored 2000 points per PVP, and when everyone went insane at the end of season 9, 6000 was not out of the realm of possibility.

For this reason, it was very important to have roster diversity because the later you are able to start and get high points, the better. If you started too early, you’d risk being put into a bracket with this extremely high scorers, meaning you’ll never sniff top 5 ever.

In addition, prior the shield cooldowns, the top progression reward was 1300. So you needed to start at a time that would give you enough time to get 1300, but late enough to avoid the big scorers, as I said above.

So, roster diversity was key to make strong runs in one set of health packs. When you run out of health packs, if you had an extra team or two behind your A team, you could get another 100 to 200 points before you had to shield or stop playing.

Also, Patch Daken was made very popular because of their ability to climb very high without ever really worrying about health packs.

After Shield Cooldowns

Now that scoring has been severely gated by shield cooldowns, plus the top progression reward being only 1000, starting as late as possible isn’t really that important. For example:

Prior to shield cooldowns, I would wait until 8 to 10 hours before the end of PVP and then I would Patch/Daken up to 700, then get as high as I could with the rest of my roster diversity. This usually ended at around 900 before my first shield. Then, I would try to get to 1300 and shield just before the event.
This strategy got me top 5 on a regular basis, further increasing the depth of my roster.

After shield cooldowns, I start whenever. I started today with 27 hours left. I climbed to 300 with Xforce Hood. Then I came back and climbed to 600 a few hours later. I’ll climb to 700 or 800 before bed tonight. And then I’ll hit 1000 tomorrow morning.

With the increased time frame plus the lack of ultra high scorers in the early brackets, I can take it pretty easy. I’ve used exactly 2 characters this PVP. Xforce and Hood.

Last PVP, I used exactly 2 characters. Xforce and Hood.

The PVP prior to that, I used…I think you see what I’m getting at.

Having 5 or 6 max leveled characters doesn’t help at all in PVP anymore.

**In Conclusion,**I don’t really have any sweeping statement or condemnation of the game attached to this post. I just kind of…realized this as bizarre and thought I’d bring it up to you all.

What’s your opinion on this? Are you experiencing a similar thing? Are you not using most of your roster anymore due to the new way to play PVP?

TL;DR
now that shield cooldowns are preventing 2000+ scores, or even 1300+ scores for the most part, there is no longer an urgency to climb as high as you can in your first 5 health packs.
This lack of urgency to climb as fast as possible means you can basically use your A team the entire PVP, negating any need for roster diversity, depth or strength.

Every player in this game is effectively 2 characters away from being a 1000 point scorer.
No real point to this post, just an interesting observation in how much this game can change.

2

I don’t think it ever mattered to be honest, at least at the highest levels of PvP. Each era of PvP had a team composition that was so health pack efficient that they could basically push up to whatever was needed for top 5-10 off of one set of health packs.

Pre C. Mags nerf era - C. Mags + Pun / Patch.
Sentry era post X-Force buff - X-Force + C. Mags
Nowadays - XF + LadyThor

I think it might have mattered for lower tier players, but if you had a full roster, you were always using the same two guys no matter what era it was, and you could afford to because they were just so efficient at killing the enemy team.

3

You’re right that’s it has never mattered to have 20 guys available for PvP, but for someone like me still pending getting 4Thor built, I find it helps to have options.

XForce is superglued to the left, but the right spot is a steady rotation of Thor, Cap, Deadpool, Daken, Hood, with Blade/Loki and maybe Grocket really just waiting for more Iso. Who I use in a given event depends on what I’ll pull with Surgical and what colors the essential provides. For instance, with Sentry I likely won’t use my red users because I want Supernova to hit defensively, so I’ll stick to Daken or Hood.

So basically, I think roster strength matters when you’re a tweener. Beyond the transition but not quite with the big boys.

4

I don’t think roster strength ever mattered. The guys who can true heal usually are the top tier characters anyway (Patch, Daken, X Force). Unless you’ve a bizarre case like your best 2 characters are Thor 4* and Daken which makes a very weird team to attempt to climb (you get very little burst offense out of Daken and thus very hard to do Thor’s combo) your best team is usually just the guys who can true heal + whoever to support him. After a certain point you can pretty much think of it as ‘insert X HP for Y more points’ because that’s all it is unless you are extremely unlucky or extremely greedy during a shield hop.

5

Roster diversity only matters in Gauntlet, so you have the opportunity to wipe out with a wide variety of teams before either throwing your phone or running out of characters and health packs.

6

I dunno, I used the exact same lineups pre and post shield cooldowns.

7

I enjoy using my roster when I have time to kill. I throw 1s and unlevelled 2s at seed teams, higher level 2s and under-covered 3-4s at 2* and early transition teams, midlevel 3*s at transition teams, then pull out my top tier when I want to make the final push. It makes for a relaxing, health-pack saving climb.

8

Does roster diversity really matter that much in the Gauntlet for most people? It didn’t for me, and I’ve got a very full roster. Sure I might have messed around with some oddball teams on the easy nodes just for the lolz, but once it got down to serious business time with overleveled nodes it was some combination of abusing boosted characters and XForce/CMags (I sadly don’t have a 4* Thor), maybe some Whales or a gimmick team for specific tough ones.

Most of those nodes are just too hard to screw around with. Using my diverse roster was just going to result in a diverse group of dead heroes and I’d still have to use the powerhouses to get it done. Just like using my diverse roster in PvP is just going to get me hit by a lot of retaliations. I like my deep roster. I like collecting, I do use some lower tier characters in PvE for fun and profit, and it’s nice to always be covered for Heroics and featured PvP, but in all honestly if I was truly power-gaming most of my roster would just be taking up space.

9

So if roster diversity doesn’t really matter, is there any point in leveling anyone except Thor, Hood, Wolverine and Daken, other than when you’re just starting out?

I have a maxed Lazy Thor, Hulk, Patch, Daken, Deadpool, Blade, Sentry, Hood and Loki and I have HT,Cap, Falcon, Fury and Marvel all about 100.

I used to use them more when I was trying to get that last 100 or 200 points out of my initial climb when I was out of health packs.

Now they sit, sad and lonely.

I just finished leveling Loki and don’t even feel the need to use him, since I just Xhood until I’m out of health packs and then wait until I have more health packs to run that team haha.

It sounds like I’m pretty much done with the game until a 4hor cover comes up. Then I should hit 1k. Then back into remission until the next thor cover comes up haha.

10

Basically only helps for heroics and required character nodes for PVE

11

It doesn’t matter in the Gauntlet because unless you’re fighting for top 10 it doesn’t matter when you finish. But for a PvE event with sufficient scaling (usually Simulator Hard) the time you finish does matter since generally speaking whoever did the most in the last 8 hours is probably going to win so if you can throw some extra guys to get squeeze an extra win that’s still a good thing. Lately scaling hasn’t been high enough where this would matter because you can usually just take your best team and beat everything 5 times and are more likely to be restrained by time than health packs.

12

That’s what I’ve been preaching - why level the 3*'s? I put all mine to 127 and I’m moving a few up further so when buffed they hit the psychological level 200, but why bother? I rarely use any of them, like others say here I run X-force (Daken until 4hor is ready), over and over through event.

It’s not only getting boring for people to -see- X-force/(Thor) over and over, I would imagine it is getting boring for people to -play- this combo over and over. Hopefully there is some fix to this in the future - until then I’m hoarding ISO to primarily put into 4*'s, as the 3*'s seem to matter little.

13

Nothing matters except Xforce/4thor. It’s fine, but wth am I facing nothing but 270 xforce/4thors when I don’t even have a single 166! haha

You would think the devs would be scrambling to fix this broken game and nothing else, but nope. We just get more useless chars and continue to play a broken game. It’s fun, but you would think the people up top would be concerned with longevity. You would think the devs who are making a career from this would be concerned with longevity.

All fluff, same broken stuff. MPQ gonna MPQ.

14

IMO 8 hour refreshes probably nerfed whatever advantage roster diversity gave in any PvE. With 3 hour refreshes, it was worth it to have extra teams lying around such that you could stagger who you use and have people healthy for every other refresh.

With 8 hours, your A-team should always be healthy, so there’s less of a need to be able to dip into the reserve.

15

Roster Diversity never mattered in PvP because of how defense works.

If you had every character maxed out, you would NOT continue your PvP runs with a sub-optimal team. You risk slower progression with higher rate of attacks. Essentially, if you don’t have your best team as the LAST team you fight with, you’re going to be attacks. So if my Xforce-Magneto team gets wiped 3 times, and I’m out of health packs, I will stop and shield up. I CAN continue to fight and win with my other characters (Black Panther/Doom, for instance), but they are slower and more vulnerable. I’ll likely lose more points than I gain by using them.

PvE, diversity is only useful because you’ll get locked out of certain characters. Every now and then you’ll swap out a character or two depending on the fight (My teams are Xforce/CMag/Hood or Steve/OBW/Hood), but you’ll likely rely on no one else.

16

By “really matter that much”, are you asking if roster diversity is “helpful” in Gauntlet? That’s pretty far from what I was saying.

17

I used to use most of my roster in PvE to reduce the rate of personal scaling–trying to squeak by whenever possible. It seems that my levels are starting higher and jumping up more quickly now, though, so I’ve been forced into big-boy territory more and more quickly.

18

In pvp it never mattered. In pve, it’s mattering less and less with the obscene scaling requiring you to use the few options that can actually beat a trio of 15-20k enemies. Granted you can probably use a lot more if you don’t care about dying and wasting your time but it would be nice if D3 didn’t lock out half your roster by making scaling so ridiculous

19

It matters about as much as it did before. Extra teams means less health packs, but if you have the health packs you are using your A Team for everything all the time.