Post "true healing" hints for 2*s

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Ok, 2 quick disclaimers..

  1. I am not a 2* player (have several 141s) BUT In preparation for the nerf I got my MMR into 2* range and spent a while playing 2* vs 2* with no healing
  2. I think true healing is garbage and this is in no way endorsing that crap

So here are a few hints, specifically for PvP.

1) MOST importantly think about when you join PvP. If you join right at the beginning you can kill some seed teams for ISO BUT, in my experience the brackets are tougher. I’ve mucked around a bit with PvP starting strategies since the sharding change and I can report certain times of day are consistently better. Now i’m not going to say when because if I do then they suddenly become much worse if people all flock to them icon_e_smile.gif
making the advice irrelevant. Bottom line vary your start times til you find easier brackets. It is, in my experience, far easier to improve your placing through bracket manipulation than any actual playing strategy (barring blowing loads of cash on shields).

2) If you have a decent size 2* roster you can get some benefit out of those other characters but WHATEVER YOU DO do NOT use your best team first. Using your best team (Ares/Thor + OBW or Ares+ Thor generally), blowing all your health packs to go as long as you can THEN using your weak teams means your final defensive team is terrible and you get ripped apart. Make sure your very last win is with your best team and the safest way to do that is to be playing with them, with 5 health packs availible (in case of nightmare cascades and needing to retry) after using all your garbage.

3) Only shield if it’s going to get you something and don’t do it too early. Until you know how your bracket is going to shape up you have no idea if your early 500 points is worth protecting to build on or not. By all means shield for rewards towards the end of an event but I see a lot of ppl shielding on 400-500 2 days out. I don’t see any value in this at all, even if those points were an effort to achieve. If you want to struggle to 500 points and shield then join PvP with a day to go and minimize the shields you have to use.

4) If you are using a weaker team because you have the heroes there and want to extend play then be sure to hit someone worth a lot of points. That way if you fail you lose almost nothing and if retal nodes are still forming for losses there’s not much point in hitting you back for almost nothing. Your best team will still end up being your defensive team when you’re not playing (see above).

5) Beware using bad teams too late on in an event. Most people have experience of the 2 phases of PvP. There’s a long period where hits are pretty rare then a big flourish at the end as people jockey for position. Have a weak defense team out at that point, even if it’s only for the time it takes you to get a win with your best team can easily cost far more than you’ve earned from that win.

6) If you are only using 2* heroes and are facing lvl 100+ 3* heroes then tank… the first rule of tank club is don’t talk about tank club icon_e_wink.gif
but if I can get into the 2* bracket to do some testing you can too! icon_e_biggrin.gif
. OFC if anyone asks it was all a glitch in the system, cause I would never tank and it’s impossible anyway icon_e_wink.gif
.

7) Don’t be afraid to retreat if you’re going to lose and it won’t down your heroes. The faster regen timers, while nowhere near enough to balance the healing nerf, do mean that heroes can get healthy a fair bit quicker than before. This is particularly true of lower health heroes you don’t often use and wolverine/Daken. Not so much for Ares and Thor… icon_evil.gif

Finally, here are the 2* pairings I think are usable to some degree icon_e_smile.gif

Obviously you have the standards… OBW + Ares/Thor, Ares + Thor and MMN + Storm. No point making any other combos involving those heroes because they are best used as listed (especially MMN + Storm). I will note one decent combo for Thor because you might have chosen Ares + OBW as your best team and want some use out of Thor before moving to them…

-Moonstone + Bullseye: Moonstone’s red is decent and her purple isn’t terrible in PvP because it acts as a nuke or you can match away Ares’ Sunder CD timer. Bullseye wants to be with a purple user to get value out of the tiles you’re matching for his purple and his black is fractionally better than Moonstone’s in most circumstances (though both are pretty bad). You lack green and yellow outlets but beggars can’t be choosers icon_e_smile.gif

-Daken + Thor: Thor is a one man team and pheremone rage is good with thunder strike. You can get wins with this team and might even get a few out before Thor’s health is too low with friendly boards.

-Daken + Hawkeye: OK, getting wins isn’t massively easy BUT if you can do it this team lasts pretty well without health packs. Hawkeye avoids onto Daken who has true healing. He can also nip into the prologue if badly beaten at the end of a match and get better there. You only have 2 actives on red and blue but Both do good damage if the CD tiles live and explosive arrow synergises well enough with pheremone rage. It’s possible to win vs OBW + Ares/Thor but only if the board is pleasant and you can outplay the AI (second one easier than the first)

-A.Wolvie + Hawkeye: Similar to Daken + Hawkeye except you get a green power to make your strikes, you have an alternative red for pretty solid single target damage and you can only get back to half health when battered which is not really enough to start a fight but does leave a shorter regen timer (along with double heal speed).

Now none of this comes close to replacing OBW’s healing but hopefully it’ll help make the best of a bad situation. Worth noting some ppl have claimed better usage out of OBW by spamming her blue early and preserving more health by trying to get chunks taken out of the temporary health pool during the fight instead of permanent health. Certainly worth a try.

2

So I need a bunch of healthpacks available at all times, gotcha.

I’ll go CMags-Storm, then Daken-Wolvy, then Thor-Moonstone, then Ares-OBW as my last of four matchups I might be able to win with.

Of course, they’ll get beaten up each matchup, and then I’ll have to wait several hours to play again.

–This is all very good advice, and well written. But I don’t think the 2* roster has any chance to compete without paying for healthpacks. They’ll simply have to play more matchups than is currently possible with their rosters.

3

Hope I didn’t give the impression I thought my post fixed anything at all… hence the best of a bad situation stuff.

All I was trying to say about health packs is save them until you plan to use your very best team and use that team last. Let the less valuable teams you’re using just to try and get a few extra wins get hurt/downed then heal all on their own. The most important part of playing order is to be sure to use your best team last so THAT team is the one people have to beat to take your points away. No point wasting your free health packs on garbage heroes just because you’re now trying to use them as best you can.

As far as competing with 3* teams staying ability… I have nothing. At least for the broken combo teams or super sustain of Daken/Patch.

You can, however, drop the threshold for earning a 3* cover by a couple of hundred points be getting into a softer bracket. There are brackets where you don’t have to beat ANY decent 3* teams in the rankings to get at least something useful, you just have to outdo other 2* teams and hope they aren’t going to buy health packs and pay to win.

Just to re-iterate… I hate the healing changes. I feel they are GROSSLY unfair on 2* players and i’ve said so a few times.

They don’t affect me at all… I don’t use OBW, Spidey or prologue healing. If anything they probably make PvE placing easier for me because 2* players are somewhat screwed in PvE too. None of that gives me any pause for thought in saying the changes are BOLLOCKS and should be reversed right this second (except they can leave the faster regen rates in if they like icon_e_biggrin.gif
)

4

Also…

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5

Couple things to add to the points:

  1. Open your bracket (BUT DO NOT PLAY) as soon as possible after the event goes live. You will see the seed teams, and they will still be there (3-10 of them) once you actually join the bracket. They can get you 50-100 easy points with minimal damage and in the 2* range…efficiancy is KEY.

  2. Only shield after you have played with your A team. Once you break the shield, opponents will be seeing your defense team until you win/lose a match so the stronger that is the better. While unlikely, it might save you a loss…and again, efficiency is KEY.

  3. You lose health when retreating, it can even down a char, so make sure you are recognizing situations where you should retreat early. With the shortened health regen only needing a char to heal, ie not downed, is a significant difference. (did they tweak the down times as well?)

Thank you for working on the tips, it definitely seems that the 2* world is going to be a wasteland of bodies for a while with people quitting and new players having a harder time even getting to the top of it for opponents.

6

I haven’t been in 2* land for quite some time so I’m not sure if 1hour is a reasonable amount of time to be able to play with just the 5 health packs with the new change. So with that disclaimer out of the way I think the 2 best strategies for 2* teams who want high placement will be:

  1. enter with 45 min-1hr to go and grind like hell to the end. I recently did this and got 11th (10th was literally one point higher) with like 565 points. I think a 2* team would have a reasonable shot at top 25 this way although it will hurt their season score and alliance contribution since they can clearly put up more points than that.
  2. enter with ~a day left (as bonfire noted, picking start times can be HUGE so find a good time icon_e_smile.gif
    ) and initially get up to ~500. This should be doable in one play session, but if not, get as high as you can. Then in the final 3-8 hours depending on how much you’re comfortable with shielding you can start your final climb hopefully from around 300 points or more. By the time you start running out of health packs you might be around 750 or so, which is when you get hit with the full zombie horde anyway so you probably want to shield.

Does that at all sound reasonable? I think people claiming they’ll only be able to play 20 minutes or so are exaggerating some, but I don’t know for sure.

7

I dunno how things were back when you had a 2* roster, but for me, there’s only a small handful of available characters.

Out of 12 2* characters, only 9 can go to level 85. Of the 2 that are stuck at 69, one has as much health as a Call the Storm, and the other has as much health as Storm.

Of the 9 viable characters left over, one deals damage to itself which used to be easily mitigated and is not now.

Of the 8 left over, one doesn’t even have 3,000 health.

Of the 7 left over, four have under 3,500 health

Of the 3 left over, your team is Cap, Thor, and Moonstone.

With no ability to heal a 2* roster in combat, you can’t play long without having to use your health packs, which don’t last long.

To be honest, my 2* roster only has 5 leveled toons, Ares, Thor, OBW, CStorm, and MNMags. I have Cap and Wolv covered, but I wasn’t spending the iso (that I don’t have) on them since I had a pretty decent team that I could shuffle around and have fun with as I wanted.

My three squishy guys can’t go more than two or three rounds before they’re dead, and my tanks don’t go much further. One good cascade takes such a chunk out of them that I usually heal them before going into the next round. There’s only so much you can do with five characters and no heals, and it doesn’t take long to be wiped.

8

I’ve had quite a few PMs asking me what “tanking” is and how you do it…

Tanking is intentionally losing to reduce your MMR (matchmaking rating) which means you fight weaker opponents. So if you’ve done well in the past through healing and are facing rosters stronger than your own you can get back down to facing other 2* teams (in theory you can get all the way down to weaker teams than your own but that takes a chunk of time and a big enough roster to keep getting it killed.)

As for how to do it… not going to post that on the forum because the devs don’t like tanking and they think every fight should be a “challenge”. By challenge they seem to mean a fight where you take a bunch of damage and, now you can’t heal it, hopefully buy health packs even though they are a fucking terrible deal at that cost. You should be able to work it out from the looking back in the forums, replacing the word “retreat” with “fight til your heroes are ALL downed” and assuming it takes a lot more effort than it used to. As for more detailed stuff… the first rule of tank club is don’t talk about tank club icon_e_wink.gif
. My special techniques are for Ace of Blades members only icon_twisted.gif

9

Here’s my hint.

Put the game down.

Enjoy life.

Don’t perpetuate D3’s greedy garbage

10

Tough to gauge new hints/strategies because:

  1. New character PvE event where healing was moot (outside of Sim or prologue), rosters limited, and thus health packs focused and burned there. This also took out two key characters (cStorm, mHawk).
  2. Simultaneous no OBW featured PvP event, so healing is again a moot point.

But here’s some thoughts to add, some from playing, some theoretical:

  • OBW is fine. Difference (I think) is needing to load up her blue as quick as her purple now. Faster you can raise the armor, better off you’ll be sustaining multiple games. Espionage and ARecon are still quite strong. Will be a staple of 3-teamers, and still pretty active in 2-teamers I suspect.
  • Wolvie’s up to 50% heal isn’t very helpful. When he’s at 51%, he’s still vulnerable to one-shotting if you’re not quick/careful.
  • Daken’s considerably more important than previously. He’s the one character that can sustain. Problem is once you max the 85s, he doesn’t tank many colors for you. Debating whether to double up and under-level some of the key characters as a reserve team, mostly for PvE use (because under leveled 2*s are as much defensive suicide as Storm/Mags)
  • Not sure that Hawkeye will help. You can keep him healthy, but from what I saw in the PvE, your tanks will take a beating while waiting to launch his red. Maybe with Daken as you said, but skeptical it’s fast enough against the big guns. Captain and Moonstone with their ~4500 health are probably good enough to suicide for one game each while main guys heal.
  • Bullseye is probably underrated now (though still desperately needs an active of at least moderate strength). Couple purple matches and he’s negated match-3 damage, which is a big deal when prime matches hit for 120-150 a pop. Not helpful for 2* guys, but saw a 128 hulk + bullseye team in PvP. That’s gotta be tremendously annoying now, where with OBW’s heal it’s a pretty easy target.
  • Anyway, Magneto-Bullseye is unconventional, but polarity + no match3 damage + Mag’s red nuke ‘might’ work. His random blue potentially blowing up shield tiles is a negative.

Overall, there’s some room to work with, but it’s definitely a more treacherous road now.

11

I think “True Healing” left your suggestion as the only “true option”.

12

These are good hints but i think the title is a little misleading since these are all completely applicable before true healing as well. Character composition wise, i dont think too much had changed from the current meta of ares/thor/obw. Any team featuring daken feels miserable since he cant tank any colors in a standard rainbow 85 team (obw/ares), and in a 2 person team + loaner, (say thor+daken), he doesnt tank anything except black/purple, which you dont want to match anyways. Obw is still probably the way to go due to how absurd recon is.

13

The Widow Event is already giving me a taste what PVP will be like in the future.

And it’s a complete beating. Facing an Ares is insane, you may win but he will have damaged your whole team heavily. A Storm Call from Thor is also absolutely devastating.

It does kind of suck that I have to spend my Iso on more 2* Characters like Magneto and Daken now when I already have 3* with 7-9 Covers.

We’ll see how it goes once I have Mags and Daken.(Actually I don’t want to level 2* Daken, please talk me out of it)

14

True BUT, the idea is to try to find a way to prolong play now you can’t simply heal mid fight / in prologue. OBW + Thor/Ares is still the best team (as I stated above) but the question is, is there a way to get some use out of the less useful 2* heroes without causing yourself issues with your defensive team being too weak. You can then use your top team, devoting all your health packs to prolonging their play at the end of your play session.

Also, now you can’t essentially swap time for points up to 700 ish I was trying to help ppl with a way to optimise their chances of getting rewards (ideally 3* covers ofc). Assuming you haven’t always played for 30 mins every 2.5 hours the chances are you can no longer play the way you used to without buying health packs, so trying to give ppl some pointers on what they can do to soften the blow a bit.

Also agree that the above was generally applicable pre healing nerf (apart from trying to get usage out of crap 2* heroes icon_e_biggrin.gif
) BUT weren’t anywhere near as important because you could simply stick to the same pairing of OBW + 1, play pretty much as long as you like with health packs only for unlucky cascades and essentially exchange time for points at your leisure. If you could play without ever thinking about optimised PvP start times, alternative 2* pairings etc then there’s no reason to think ppl know about it now that they might need it. At least tha was my thinking.

Regarding Daken… that’s why I only had him with Hawkeye as something you can try but isn’t easy to win with. Avoid lets him tank everything barring boards lacking in purple tiles. Aside from that I agree, it’s too hard to have him tank colours you actually want to collect, which is an issue. (He needs a 3rd cover)

15

I think this is actually of the problem. Many players didn’t play efficiently before, because they relied on OBW healing. Now without it, small inefficiencies add up more quickly.

It matters how much damage you take.
Forum posters saying it’s an “offensive metagame” are referring to high tier PVP play. If you’re not between shields trying to push 1100 or 1300, you should actually be worrying about how much damage you take, not just the speed of the match. This was true before the healing change as well. As such…

Denying the AI colors is MORE important than getting your own colors! Watch which colors the enemy needs. Watch which colors they’ve collected. Watch how much AP have and no how much they need to use an ability. Know which abilities you DON’T want them to get off, and make sure they don’t get them off. This usually means taking the colors so they can’t take them. But it also means making matches so that after the replacement colors drop in, there’s no more matches of that color available. Doing this, you can literally dictate which colors the AI takes once you know their priorities. Once you’re efficient at this, the only way for them to get them to get, for example, enough green for Call of the Storm is for a cascade to be caused at the top of the board with the new colors dropping in. Learn to see what the board will look like after you make your match.

Daken is underrated.
OBW/Ares/Thor were actually the last three 2*'s I got max covers for. I spent the first half of my 2* days playing Daken/Cap. And looking back, I was pretty efficient with it. Cap was mainly there to get out of the way for Daken. Daken tanks green/black/purple. Keep matching green. Set up the board to make sure there aren’t red matches available, and to a lesser extent yellow. When there’s no green matches, match black or purple just so Daken takes the damage. Deny the AI abilities (see above). If there’s a smaller nuke, let Daken take it so he can heal past it. If it’s a larger nuke Daken can’t survive, put in Cap. Cap’s abilities, if you happen to end up with enough AP to use them, are perfect for not disrupting Daken’s strike tiles.

…but really,
this isn’t a competition against D3. It’s a competition against other players who have similar abilities. If you have maxed 3*'s, you’re competing against maxed 3*'s. You can’t pull ahead with a better roster at that point, so you have to use better strategies.

Same with 2*'s. There’s hundreds of players in your bracket with maxed 2*'s. Why should you place above them? In the past, there’s been two reasons:
a. You play longer sessions than them.
b. You play more efficiently and win a higher % of matches than them.

Choice (a) isn’t as strong anymore without OBW. Get better at choice (b).

Everyone wants to win a 3* cover. You do realize that the top 100 in a PVP is the top 20% if entrants, right? That means out of 500 players, you have to be better than 400 hundred. Those 400 would love the cover too, and they all have varying levels of 2*'s available to them. Show that you deserve to win the cover, ahead of the other 400, instead of complaining that D3 didn’t give the covers to you.

16

Perhaps for single wins it would be possible to gather a nearly dead CStorm, a half dead Ares, and Bullseye (or Venom). Go into a game and only make purple and black matches. Let CStorm do herTempest thing. Repeat until over. Next game try getting red matches for Ares.

17

Still experimenting but running three main teams in BW event

Storm+Magneto - obvious

Daken-Thor - Daken covers green damage for Thor and he has the punch to carry Daken.

Wolv-Ares - Wolv Green, Ares Yellow, Red depends on situation.

I have gotten more battles out of Daken/Thor than the other 2 pairings.

18

As for slogging through PVP, I have played with Wolveringe + Ares just now and it was awesome. They have the same attack power for their colors.

(I dont know exactly which one the game chooses tanks the damage, but you can probably tell me)

With Wolverine tanking all colors you can build up quite a lot of AP. Plus you get to use Claws instead of Onslaught early in the match. And when Wolvie gets low you can match just yellows while building up Sunder.

19

I’m sure these teams work to some extent but I would still recommend avoiding pumping ISO into Moonstone, Bullseye and mHawkeye. It might extend your playtime somewhere now but it’s going to make the transition to a 3* roster take even longer. It takes 70K ISO to fully level a 2* character and I think that ISO would be better if put towards budding 3* characters. A level 85 Punisher is better than a level 85 Moonstone.

20

While true, one lvl 85 3* doesn’t do squat when you can’t heal him, and from all accounts it makes it more likely to face stronger opponents thanks to your MMR. That’s ignoring whether one even has the covers to get a 85 lvl 3* to begin with, or how long it will take to get them if you don’t.

I honestly think the change in healing eliminates this idea of ‘transition’ to 3*. You’re now either a 2* player or a 3* player. If you get caught in between, you’re in trouble.