AKA How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Surfer
Since the release of Silver Surfer, I’ve been seeing a lot of conflicting accounts about how rostering him may or may not affect your PVE scaling or PVP MMR. Never one to shy away from a spreadsheet-related challenge, I took the opportunity to see what the hubbub was all about. Grab the popcorn folks, I’m a little verbose.
Background:
67 days ago, a MoonBiscuit was born unto MPQ. She stealthily cut her teeth on the prologue in seclusion, and eventually mentions to little sis that, lo and behold, she’s got an account up and running! I was commanding casuals back then, but we decided to move to a group that would help accelerate her growth. We managed to land a really wonderful T100 PVE alliance that has facilitated her progression through all the extra treasure as well as instruction from some great advisers. She has built a very solid 2* roster and even has a couple of serviceable 3*s. Currently her core roster consists of 13 characters ranging from level 70-73.
Then the legendaries were introduced. She won the inaugural token from the Hulk PVE, and it turned out to be a surfer. At that point, there was a disparity of about 190 levels between surfer and her core roster. Two others in our alliance pulled surfers around the same time and had some major complaints after rostering him, which really got me wondering if the tales of scaling terror were legit. MoonBiscuit is also one who will rarely shy away from a challenge, so we came up with a quick test plan with the hope of shedding some light in the form of hard data on this highly anecdotal topic.
The PVE Test:
The plan was to begin tracking her enemy levels over the course of the Meet Rocket and Groot PVE, while SS was sitting idly in her “trophy hole”, as she’s taken to calling it. We would get a baseline on initial enemy levels and general fluctuation after subsequent clears and once the event ended, but before she joined the Venom Heroic event, she would roster SS. She would play the Venom Heroic event as usual, letting SS sit the bench. Initially we had discussed letting him make his debut on the court in the following Simulator PVE, but eventually decided against it. It’s still under consideration for later, only on extremely difficult PVE nodes, but we’re playing that by ear at this point.
The Results:
Meet R&G enemy levels obviously had no big surprises, as SS was still in the trophy hole. Initial levels followed precedence, nothing too exciting there. Interestingly though, I did see major scaling upticks on subsequent clears for a lot of nodes in all the subs (going up almost 20 levels by the 3rd clear), which supports my prior general observations of her being a high PVE performer, being able to come up with the best combos she can and get out with minimal damage. Her beginning-state scaling seems to be a bit higher than others of similar roster levels.
Venom Heroic yielded somewhat similar results. The first sub was once again, business as usual, minus the fluctuation in subsequent clears. Scaling stayed very level throughout the course of the first sub. The second sub (Rescue Aunt May) had much more substantial scaling which was a big concern at first, until I played through it myself and talked to some alliance mates about their own scaling on that sub. Across the board, there were major increases for all on a couple of the nodes (particularly Masquerade); however, she was able to create major downticks for her subsequent clears. The third sub behaved much more like the first, and my take-away was that the second sub just had a general increase for everyone but was not a real point of concern.
Finally, Simulator rolled around and we also collected data there. There were some very highly scaled nodes, but again, those nodes were scaled very high for all of us. Simulator has never been a walk in the park, and she definitely struggled with beating the higher level nodes, although that is mostly attributed to a limited 2* roster that doesn’t have all the tools to consistently win matches against the likes of XFDP/Thing. She didn’t do as many subsequent clears on Simulator, but initial levels were comparable to what myself and others were seeing in relationship to roster levels and scaling history.
The PVE Conclusion:
Having been through 2 full PVEs after rostering SS (and looking at the data so far in Thick as Thieves), I can say that there’s nothing in the numbers that causes any kind of concern related to PVE scaling. Again, she has never used him in a PVE to date.
Unforeseen Consequences:
One thing we didn’t consider going into this was the impacts on MMR and PVP bracketing. Prior to rostering SS, MoonBiscuit was solidly in the baby brackets for PVP. Once she rostered, she immediately got thrown in with the big boys. She shares her leaderboards with me and I recognize names that have similar season scores to my own (I’m in vet territory), and see guys breaking the 2K barrier in PVP tournaments in her brackets. Once again, her highest leveled characters before SS are about 70, so this is definitely a big detriment in the PVP space.
Before SS, she could easily get up to 500 and retain most of those points, but now she is very lucky to finish with 300 points, and that’s with a lot of effort. She’s losing a lot of iso to the skip tax, and even then the best matchups she can find outclass her by 20+ levels. She has used SS in the PVP space only to take him out for a test drive, but he is definitely not part of her standard PVP teams.
The Final Take-Away:
While we were thrilled to confirm that there were no discernible PVE impacts when SS is rostered but not used, the PVP impacts are immediately pretty obvious. We’ve discussed if she should consider selling off her SS to bring down her MMR and make PVP more lucrative, but she is committed to keeping him. We will just continue to tweak her approach and timing for PVP to maximize her points in the meantime.
There are a lot of people out there who have posted concerns and complaints about what SS has done to their scaling and MMR. I tend to take it all with a grain of salt, particularly in PVE, since so much of scaling is more dependent on performance history and percentage of health lost. Since I’ve always watched Moonbiscuit’s performance like a hawk and was even taking note of her enemy levels long before SS making his way to her roster, I am now firmly of the belief that as long someone doesn’t use SS to tank in PVE, there should be no concern there. There may be a day when we decide to play around with that as well….but today is not that day!
I completely understand any noob’s frustration, particularly in the PVP space if they are immediately dumped into a bracket they aren’t equipped for. Is a noob/casual expected to know all the mechanics of scaling and MMR when they unwrap their shiny new toy and just want to play with it? I have a sneaking suspicion that many others who don’t have an advisory panel to tell them to keep their SS usage in check are having a much harder time of it.
But ultimately, this is why MoonBiscuit is a true champ (borrowed from comments in other discussions around the impacts of adding SS to your roster):
“Naysayers gonna naysay and I wanna yaysay. I wanna be able to tell other young noobs, you can do it, dream big, go hard, your game will catch up I swear. I’m a newer/low level player, recruited SS and don’t regret it. At all. Yes, pvp just became a hell of a lot harder and I’m losing constantly but it’s making me better. Much better.
There is a Michael Jordan inside of all of us that learns from every failure, embrace him!”
