Scaling post Spiderman

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So… IceX turns up to justify the ridiculous decision to let PvE scale to 395 because it’s “the only way to balance out a broken Spiderman who trivialises PvE”.

Well now Spidey has been nerfed into obsolesence and we get our next PvE event where they all but remove rubberbanding and make it a grind fest and, with presumably one sub to go, i’ve now got lvl 303 bad guys in Hells Kitchen. So apparently the scaling will still beat the hell out of you unless you play abnormally (minimize play, take unnecessary damage, suicide into nodes etc).

I’ve never understood the bullshit implementation of scaling your highest level node because you can easily kill your lowest level node and I don’t really see how such high level nodes are justified and I STILL don’t agree with the idea that having a strong roster deserves ABSOLUTELY no benefit in PvE because of the nature of % increased level scaling.

Top of my main bracket at the moment on just over 48k points has an 85 ares, one other 85 (MMN) then it goes down from there. I can only imagine his scaling is far more friendly than mine because he has ground the hell out of nodes looking at the way his points have progressed on refreshes.

So I was wondering what kind of scaling other people are seeing (maybe it’s just me) and whether people feel that it’s unreasonable for D3 to implement an unpopular change with a very specific justification (Spiderman) then completely remove the justification and leave the change in place.

It would be nice to know from them if they intend to leave this level cap in place unchanged and if they do I think we deserve to know more specifics on how scaling allegedly works. If I have to play completely unnaturally to do well under their system the least they could do is let me know the actual rules i’m playing under…

I still suspect the change was not put into place for such a lofty purpose as balancing but to try and force more health pack use, so I imagine it’ll be left alone in the hope that people will spend their HP to keep playing (I have decided I won’t buy any health packs for PvE since the stupid level cap was introduced and just retreat then prologue heal so, for me at least, it’s had the opposite effect).

2

Penn and Teller exposed the whole “Spider-Man causes high scaling” as bullshit. When I skip a node because it says hard, and 12 hours later it has jumped to deadly, no amount of not playing Spider-Man is going to influence this.

This is a 1 and 2* game now. If you have any high level 3*'s, the game is not going to cater to you anymore and will see to it that you do not have a great experience.

3

I’m at a little less than 42k total points and my last HT node was at 142 when the sub finished. Still a dicey fight, but overall scaling has been reduced for me a good deal.

4

yeah, i think when i checked the top 20 in my hells kitchen, only like 2-3 had more than a single character over 112 or so. this inverse roster difficulty thing is pretty dumb.

5

i’m sitting at 38k and my HT was 253.

6

I got burned by relying on rubberbanding to bail me out and did way too little in the first sub so I had to play catch up with minimal points. My Torch went from 152 to 196 in a day :s

7

I see what you did there… icon_e_wink.gif

(I know, it’s lame icon_e_sad.gif
I just wanted to take a break from the scaling in prodigal sun)

8

I think my HT went to 160+ after I last beat him (with cMagneto of course, as my lovely Hood/cStorm/MMN team failed after eating too many Flame Jets).
I dunno, I kinda like my scaling in this event. The last sub is decently hard, but nothing out of this world yet. I will take the damage naturally if I don’t abuse Magneto, and still probably get the 45k reward. I didn’t grind a single node to 1 in this event as far as I can remember. Only got 4/4 on very few missions.

9

When people talk about scaling, they almost always use the hardest node for the most points as the example. The scaling for tat node is always going t be wack because everyone is grinding it.

10

My OH and I have played similarly, have similar scores, and she’s seeing enemy levels around 40-60 higher than me.

11

OK, fair point so…

In the final sub I have 6 nodes over 250 of which 4 are over 295. 2 nodes are locked out , presumably for progress and i’m sure at least one will be around about 300 when it’s available. That was about 1 hour after the sub unlocked so I imagine it’s nothing to do with community scaling and all about my personal scaling.

12

Clearly the scale to 400 experiment is a complete failure. It’s not fun and people are quitting over it. Whatever algorithm is being used doesn’t work either. Spiderman had his balls removed so can we please set the max back. 400 lvl enemies have too much health and their skills do too much damage. What fun is it that if the enemy manages to get off even 1 skill your team is basically dead?? Seriously D3, skip one vacation, and fix the damn code or your game is going to crumble. People will not pay enough money to buy those money-required buffs to counter how many people are moving on over this. This is not a challenge, it’s merely not fun

-LoreNYC

13

Don’t know what you guys are doing but I have been grinding a minimal amount, never doing more than 3 stacks of any node and missing complete refreshes, yet my enemies are above 300 on many nodes. I understand their whole -counter spiderman argument - although I think it’s bogus. Since we don’t have spiderman in his stunlock state, and we’re taking a ton of damage/characters dying, why is scaling still so out of wack. I’ll say this again, people are quitting because what D3 has done here is not fun. Maybe characters should be introduced in pvp as well so we can ignore all this lvl 400 BS. Or we can continue to flock to something fun

14

Wow, that sucks, what was your scaling like at the end of Heroic Oscorp?

15

The hardest node this time around was probably HT + 2 Pyros. Daken is extremely powerful if you have him leveled, and you’re actually facing relatively weak heroes in the Avenger lineup who is also missing Storm for some inexplicable reason. With Daken recently leveled to 115 I feel pretty comfortable taking on most 395s if they don’t have an AP pump even without Magneto. I almost beat the 395 Hawkeye + GSBW + Wolverine with 114 Punisher, 125 Moonstone, and 102 Falcon and that was because I didn’t have Redwing at level 4 (can’t get rid of Hawkeye’s blast arrow one turn before he died, which exploded for 7K damage all).

16

what are you guys talking about? I love it when ares makes one green match and blasts me for 8k on turn 2. that’s the definition of “working as intended.”

/sarcasm

17

I think it wasn’t quite as bad. The problem I see is - why should we make an endgame that’s so ridiculously tedious? What happened to some sense of empowerment from all the work we put into our characters (ignoring the fact that the ones we play a lot because they’re fun/good get the carpet pulled out from under them)

The best part of puzzlequest is achieving that peak - the one where you can blow up the screen with cascade after cascade demolishing enemies. Not the one where you die a lot because ‘the game cheats’ so you put it down and play something fun.

We want that part of puzzlequest back please.

Reeling it back to spiderman - I think he was just an excuse to bring in scaling to the point where you have to buy buffs if you want to play. He could easily have been fine-tuned by raising costs of blue webs 1 or 2. He could easily have been fine tuned by limiting the number of webs that could be used for healing. His shield change is fair now that the bug with 4/5 pink was fixed but the point is that everything seems to be pushing towards D3 wanting us to waste our ISO on buffs to have a chance at getting lucky and beating the computer that cheats. Why can’t we have the fun version back?

We all knew the spiderman nerf was coming but he was made nearly useless. If a purely defensive character can’t stun as well as several offensive characters in the game, how can we make room for him against a horde of level 300-400 enemies who match for 400+ damage and 1-shot half the roster if- god forbid - they get off 1 ability.

Time to go back to 230
icon_neutral.gif

18

Do u think they care lol… They think of money much more than player benefit … So just play the game or leave

19

Another issue to consider here is the recent trend of power creep that found its way into the game.

Back in the day, a trio of 141s saw 230s as a difficult, but potentially doable challenge (notwithstanding 2AP Ragnarok, of course).

However, if one considers the latest powerhouses added to the game, the “Gold Series Collector’s Edition” covers, the original logic of the game completely falls apart. Combined together, these three, Steve Rogers, Modern Thor, and Classic Daken, pretty much break the game as a rainbow team of ultimate death.

Lazy Cap covers Yellow, Lazy Thor covers Red and Green, and Daken will cover Purple and Black. Blue goes to Lazy Cap or Daken, based on roster priority. Full color coverage.

Then, take a look at their powers.

Red - Game ender by Cap + returns AP by CD tile
Yellow - Game ender by Thor → Green
Green - Game ender by Thor
Blue - Cap - Best stun in game, short of Modern Widow, plus AP returns on a CD tile; OR Daken - Chemical Reaction for a cheap speed kill if needed.
Black - Daken regens incurred damage.
Purple - Daken drops up to 2 strike tiles per green match by EITHER SIDE for FREE.

I don’t think Phantron is even needed for an argument that a team of the 141 Lazys can relatively easily mow down any of the original 3s + DAs at 230 (Ares might be troublesome), short of a beneficial cascade in the computer’s favor. All of these characters punch WAY above their weight class for 3 characters.

Granted, the devs tuned the game in this way, so that’s really not on our heads to blame to be placed.

Now, the continual punishment of playing the game “efficiently” is a bit worrisome. I agree that tuning should have long already been done to prevent players from scaling their levels that high. Spidey is four months too late, and who knows when they will get around to addressing CMags’s blue. That said, the indirect message to everyone that scaled their levels to the stratosphere via Patch + CMags or Spidey stunlock that the only way down the PvE scaling ladder is to sit out 2 or 3 events until their rating reaches a nominal level is a load of tinykitty. Correct the imbalances, reset everyone’s PvE MMR, and then let the system work as designed.

20

^ nitpick: Daken doesn’t cover blue match-wise, only ability-wise. As is the case with the original Daken, his strong colours are green/black/purple, with green being the strongest. That is, in a LC/LT/LD trio, Thor will only cover red.