Observations on SHIELD Simulator

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

When I get bored, I start to do experiments. So today I decided to spend 500 ISO skipping teams in Simulator and see what I could observe about the teams I was offered to face. To set the stage, I am a 5* player with 1d 11h left, and I am at 1877 ranked #234.

For clarity: I picked 50 as it was about the limit of my attention span. I make no claims that what I observed and documented represents absolute fact of anything, or is even useful, just that this was indeed what I saw in those 50 observations. I present this in case anyone else finds it helpful, interesting, or it spurs any other thoughts or areas (or ways) to investigate.

After I did all this it occurred to me: I should have tracked the name of the player it was offering me so I knew whether I was getting the same team twice from 2 different players, or just the same player twice with the same team. But I already spent 500 ISO skipping and didn’t feel like running it again. And while none of this is incredibly surprising, it did put some metrics on things I’d observed and thought I knew but now have some data to back up. Without further ado:

Individuals:

Bishop is (not surprisingly) the most popular character for these 50 unshielded 5* defensive teams. Beta Ray is still used more than iHulk but BRB has been out longer, so perhaps as more folks get more covers/levels for iHulk (now a classic, so shard away!) iHulk will climb higher. I was a bit surprised Kitty wasn’t higher, and in particular was lower than Apocalypse. But I guess the high HP pool makes Poccy better on the defensive meta.

Toon/# of appearances/% of the 50 teams it showed up on

Bishop 42 84%
Beta Ray Bill 22 44%
iHulk 20 40%
Okoye 19 38%
Apocalypse 15 30%
Kitty 11 22%
Hawkeye 5 10%
Peggy 5 10%
Worthy 5 10%
Gamora 2 4%
Onslaught 2 4%
Prof X 2 4%

Teams:

  1. Bishop/iHulk/Okoye: 19/50 or 38% of teams: No surprise that this came out number 1.
    Configurations: Left/Center/Right
    Bishop: 0/17/2
    iHulk: 7/1/11
    Okoye: 12/1/6
    Putting Okoye Left, Bishop Center, and iHulk Right was most popular.

  2. Apocalypse/Beta Ray Bill/Bishop: 12/50 or 24% of teams. Very much a nuisance with Apocalypse being un-stunnable and having the aforementioned high HP pool, plus Bishop being Bishop and either stunning your team or banking a bunch of Blue for Beta Ray to whack you with. I was surprised this one beat the #3 team below.
    Configurations: Left/Center/Right
    Apocalypse: 8/3/1
    Beta Ray Bill: 0/5/7
    Bishop: 4/4/4
    Putting Apocalypse Left, Bishop Center, and Beta Ray Bill Right was most popular.

  3. Beta Ray Bill/Bishop/Kitty: 9/50 or 18% of teams.
    Configurations: Left/Center/Right
    Beta Ray Bill: 1/4/4
    Bishop: 0/5/4
    Kitty: 8/0/1
    Kitty Left, Bishop Center, Beta Ray Bill Right most popular. As Patrick Swayze found out, nobody puts Baby in the corner, and nobody puts Kitty in the middle.

  4. Hawkeye/Cap Worthy/Peggy: 5/50 or 10% of teams. What does it say about the meta when the 4th most popular team in 5* land has two 4* characters on it?
    Configurations: Left/Center/Right
    Hawkeye: 1/4/0
    Cap Worthy: 0/0/5
    Peggy: 4/1/0
    Peggy Left, Hawkeye Center, Cap Worthy Right most popular.

The above 4 teams represent 45 of the 50 (or 90%) of the teams I saw when skipping. The other 5, L/C/R:
Gamora/Kitty/Bishop x 2
Apocalypse/Professor X/Onslaught x 2
iHulk/Apocalypse/Beta Ray Bill x 1

I wonder if Prof X/Onslaught combos will become more popular as more people champ Onslaught? My 0/1/1 Onslaught is staring at my 150 LTs and 4619 CP and asking me that very question…

Anyway. Hope you got some at least mild amusement from reading. Comment away!

EDIT: I realized the individual grid was a little misleading when looking at each toon as a percentage of total toons (3 toons per team x 50 teams), so I recalculated the %s to be % of teams the individual shows up on (appearances / 50).

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@helix72
I’m surprised at those numbers , I run a Hulkoye combo and can use Bishop but I never have as I feel he makes the game unchallenging and I was never the bully to bring a gun to a knife fight . Obviously 38% are and probably are under professional help. The one I see by far ( estimate 50%) is the Gritty. The other is obviously BRBishop (30%). I battle the other 20% successfully for a fair challenge.

3

Very nice statistical outlook! I don’t do PvP, but it’s good to know I could use my champed Okoye/Bishop/iHulk and annoy the heck out of everyone. I’ve been using Daredevil (center) iHulk (left) Okoye (right) in the events, and that clears things up very quickly. Daredevil true heals up the damage that iHulk causes when he dies, and Okoye’s passive…well, it does a lot. :slight_smile:

4

The preference for Apocalypse over Kitty is not that hard to figure out if you assume that many (most?) players who are out (especially now) are not necessarily looking to float high as much as batter through enough teams to reach the 2000 or 75 win point reward.

Apocalypse is a much better option to fairly quickly defeat another BRBshop team over Kitty. He punches through the protects, as anyone reading this probably knows, and speeds up those matches considerably. The BRBshop combo alone is enough to dissuade many hits, so trading the top defensive (and slow) team for a more offensive (but still annoying on defense) team is a good approach.

I still strongly dislike using BRBitty on offense and only use it in pick-2 because it helps avoid hits. The very slow matches make is unfun to use, for me.

I do not see Onslaught PX becoming a major force in PVP, but I suppose I could be wrong. I have tried them out but I think they are not scary enough on defense; probably because after an initial big cascade hit, the AI won’t be smart enough to use Prof X’s purple or Onslaught’s blue appropriately. On offense it works fine and is a very fast way to take out any Worthy team I find. I don’t LOVE hitting PXslaught but it’s better than a BRBshop team, or for that matter a BRBitty team (generally).

5

@sambrookjm I like the idea of adding Daredevil to iHulk/Okoye though I’ve predominantly been running Valkyrie as my third in PvE. Have you tested both to see which is faster? My gut thinks Valk is faster but DD saves a few health packs.

@bluewolf just curious, since you don’t like BRBitty do you have a favorite PvP team for pick-2 and/pick-3?

6

I haven’t tried Valkyrie as the third. My Daredevil is champed (LVL 452, set at 5/4/4), which is why I’ve been using him. Valk is 301, so there’s a big difference in the damage dealing and health amounts.

While she might be faster, she has the exact same color layout as Okoye, so both purple and blue are low damage AP. The color overlaps is also why I gave up on Old Man Logan as a third. Daredevil gives a stun with his purple (which also increases the damage that iHulk dishes out) and has an active ability for the green that you inevitably gather up when iHulk makes a match. Daredevil’s green is also boosted by Okoye’s passive.

Okoye is usually the one that gets beat up the most after several rounds of iHulk returning from the grave. If that happens, switch the team out to Thorkoye, gather up the yellow, let her heal up, and send iHulk back in.

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@sambrookjm got it. I should have mentioned I run Okoye with a Rank 4 Talon Fighter support, making Yellow my team’s strongest color. So thanks to Valk’s Bounty Hunter I’m generating 4 Yellow AP (and simultaneously destroying 4 AP in the enemy team’s strongest color) every turn. Valk doesn’t tank anything so she never takes hits unless iHulk goes down (it happens occasionally when I get too many Green or Blue cascades) and Okoye just keeps on healing. But the bigger point is Okoye gets to 30 TU in no time, making iHulk’s passive an enemy team destroyer. You actually want to avoid making iHulk matches with this team, especially keeping as much Green on the board as possible.

Even if you don’t have a Rank 4 Talon Fighter, there are a few other Yellow-boosting supports (Korg, Element Guns) if you want to give it a spin. If Yellow isn’t my strongest, I’m not running Valk for sure. In the meantime, I might just give my 4/2/3 Daredevil a spin and see what he can do.

8

So basically the meta is very stale.

We need a meta mix-up!

9

Aren’t iHulk and Apocalypse 2020 releases? How often are we expecting changes? Thorkoye was top dog for years.

10

Sure they are, but they are not shaking up the meta enough to dethrone the others.

You can just stun IHulk after the first move with Bishop and Kitty will just keep going to work with Grocket
Apoc Just has an enormous health pool, but again Kitty Bishop and BRB Can just out last you with defensive tiles and stuns.
Plus Ihulk just makes BRB even worse if his blue is on the board.

I dont think Apoc and Ihulk are enough to shake the meta up.

11

I think might be an important miss. While I know there are several similar teams out there when I get high enough in PVP I know that I start to see the same 4 or 5 players cycle through many many times before seeing a unique player. However I’ve never tracked to see if it’s the same with Shield Sim.

12

At 1877 in Sim and one day left, odds are you will be seeing many the same people out if you are doing all your skipping at a certain time. I’ve certainly been in that situation.

As far as preferred teams… since @helix72 asked… I just prefer using teams that have more offense or do some passive dmg. As far as really hating BRBitty right now, it’s mostly about pick-2 PVP. In a pick 3 I could bring Apocalypse with my BRBitty if I want and have some 4 offensive colors, where in a pick 2 (assuming the essential is not doing much) you end up mostly with blue and green to do dmg with. Fighting them, it’s very likely you will end up with them putting blue out and too often you are slogging through a board full of boosted protects, and the match runs way longer than I think any match-3 game on a mobile device, that rewards speed above all else, has any right to.

Onslaught/Prof is a team I can now run that is fun. Thorkoye is a giant target but does the job well. Apocalypse and Thor is decent and fun, Apocalypse and BRB is ok. Hulkoye is decent to use because it’s fast and interesting (managing Hulk is a puzzle in itself).

It’s simply not true that Hulk (with Okoye) isn’t one of the meta characters at this point. He is too strong and too passive.

Apocalypse is not meta but at least counters Bishop. Prof X and Onslaught can one-shot Bishop pretty easily (although he’ll probably leave a bunch of blue behind). They can mess your day up pretty badly, but it’s hit or miss so they are not a meta team.

I think they have done more to shake up the meta, or at minimum provide counters to characters, in 2020 than they did for most of 2019. Part of that may be due to the extreme ramp up of the 5* release pace.

Let’s look at the 2019 5s…

Doom
5 Cap Marvel
Hela
Rescue
Storm
Iceman
Prof X
Carnage
BRB

If you had not been playing the game at all from January to July (until Iceman) you would basically be OK having no covers for those characters (except for 5Es).

Iceman is good on offense (and I use him in SCL10 all the time) but didn’t change the PVP meta because he’s not strong enough and the AI isn’t smart enough to chase blue (making yellow his strongest color was not great for this character, although I guess it means he might match away that Champion Defender thing sometimes).

Prof is in the very good category. He’s pretty great on offense and on defense you worry about cascades, but odds are he picks the wrong ability when he uses purple.

Carnage is a scarecrow but mostly for annoyance’s sake (no desire to sit through attack tile animations or the auto-match padding match time). I never see him in pick 2 in my slice. (well, maybe very rarely)

BRB…no need to discuss.

In general they are doing better recently to change things up. You could argue most of the 2020 people still depend on an old meta character to really work but that seems OK to me. To remove Okoye, Kitty and Thor from meta teams for good would mean either nerfing them or power creeping them in a blatant way, and I don’t think the game really needs to do that.