Suggested Revisions for Future Ultron-like PvEs

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I know this topic probably won’t make it in time for the rerun of the Ultron event that will begin mid-week, but I’m assuming that this new PvE format isn’t a two-off) and may be rerun, or (hopefully) repurposed for other boss characters. If that’s the case, there are some small changes that I’d suggest making to the format to make it smoother and more intuitive.

As an initial matter, I really enjoyed this event. The alliance cooperation aspect of it was great, and the change in strategy for the boss fight was an interesting change of pace. This is the most Puzzle-Questy event in the game, and that’s high praise for me.

(Note: I’m assuming for the purposes of this thread that the inability to continue to gain progression points after Ultron 8 is downed is a bug, not a feature. If this is, in fact, the intended behavior, I’d strongly suggest revising that, but I doubt that a surprise cutoff of progression points with no advance warning is an intentional design decision.)

First, I’d suggest unlocking the main boss node with each 8 hr node refresh. This will do a couple things:

  1. It’ll give a highly visible countdown to the next node refresh, since that wasn’t something that was available anywhere in the game itself (outside of push notifications after the fact).

  2. It’ll give alliance members with less-developed rosters a way to contribute something after they get scaled out of being able to clear essential nodes. Every 8 hours they can take a stab at the main boss and do some damage.

  3. It’ll mean that you can clear at any point during the 8-hour window without hurting your overall progress. Once progress starts slowing down, optimal clearing requires that you wait for your node to refresh on its own if you know your alliance won’t kill Ultron within that window, to get 6 shots at Ultron instead of 5. This’ll only benefit people at the very margins of being able to finish the event, which isn’t the case for most forum goers, but it’ll be a good quality of life change for everyone.

It’ll make the overall progression slightly easier, since it’s one extra shot at ultron every 8 hours, but it shouldn’t be too much of a change. Small tweaks to the health or progressions could be made to compensate, if needed.

Second, some additional information regarding the event structure would be very helpful to have in advance. In particular, the health values of each stage (and the health that we can take off with each fight) would be extremely helpful information to have. I think the team lock-in is a great feature, but given the structure of this event, it’s tough to course-correct down the line, and it would be good for people to have an idea of what they’re committing to in terms of event participaction.

Sometimes people have vacations or other commitments that will prevent them from being able to participate for chunks of the event. This would give us the opportunity to keep alliances together, if we know we can absorb some underperforming members, rather than having people sit out unnecessarily.

This information would preferably be in the event tab, but if that gets too cluttered, a forum thread would be fine, especially if there was a link to the announcement in the event tab. It’s true that this isn’t information that you’ve provided for other PvEs, but we’re also locked into teams for this one in a way that we’ve never been locked in before.

Neither of these suggestions are critical, but I think they’d be great quality of life changes that would make this event even better.

2
  1. Keep final battle open at end.
  2. Change Core Meltdown to 1 critical as opposed to 2.

I may be one of the rare few, but I actually like that we didn’t know what was coming at us and had to figure it out on our own (assuming you didn’t read spoilers). My suggestions: cutting the final battle off at the end is kind of dickish, and they should keep the main set of nodes open to let people grind to progression. Further the unfairness of the core meltdown’s critical cascades is ridiculous. If it was kept to 1 crit, even with a triple resolution it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.

3

Scrolling alliance scores like they do for regular PvE and PvP. If we’re committed to 20 people we should be able to know who is pulling their weight and who needs to be let go for not contributing.

4

The essential fights take way too long, mainly due to all the AI passives, particularly swarm. And very, very, repetitive. I went from excited to bored very quickly doing the same battles over and over.

Definitely keep Ultron available to grind points on, as half our alliance is under 600k and the node is gone.

5

I really like this event, and I wish more PVP events were like this (although, I think the sub events are too hard myself). Things that I’d love:

  • all PVE turns into something like this
  • there is no time limit. An alliance gets to keep the event open as long as it takes them to complete.

Definitely a fun change. But a bit of burden to the rest of the alliance when you are going to visit your family over the weekend and can’t contribute as much as you’d like.

6

This is probably too complicated, but it’d be nice to see each round’s tab stay open until each individual reaches a certain milestone (max progression for that sub?). Points gathered after the alliance completes that sub wouldn’t matter except for overall progression (which hopefully might alleviate some of the “only half the alliance is meeting max progression in the main” issues).

7

I loved the event & the sentry fights, so I only have 2 minor suggestions/tweaks. (Assuming the server issue was a one time thing.)

1: Keep Ultron scoring the same & add scoring to the Ultron Prime nodes. If you spread 250K points across the 8 fights, 100K for prime 8, 50k for prime 7 etc. you give everyone in an alliance that finished off Ultron a chance to move up 1 prize tier. This will also stop people from finishing in 1-1.5 days & then grinding QS nodes for tokens.

2: Let us see the full leaderboard.

8

Suggest adding 2 bonus rounds (9 and 10) not tied to Prime Nodes at 8 and 10 Million health respectively, capped at final round 8 levels. Gives us all the chance to continue grinding for tokens (because they are worth it) and everyone can hit progression. Fixed. Maybe throw in a 10 Pack for any crazy alliances that beat Round 10.

Regarding gameplay mechanics, I didn’t think it was terrible (however, I never saw any essentials above 190, my last Prime Node was at 212 for reference), should be somewhat challenging once you get past Round 6, but now there’s extra room for lost points in case you wiped. Perhaps my time was skewed since I was using Cage (5/3/5 though, which was more that sufficient), but I didn’t think the Essentials were impossible by any means. Granted, if I was facing 240+ essentials, I’m sure it would’ve been a different story altogether. Scaling is just borked regardless of event it seems and I doubt it’ll be fixed for this next event, lol.

9

I found the scaling of this event to be almost perfect. It was challenging, but once you figured out how to handle the Sentries, it was still tough but manageable. Please, please, PLEASE don’t jack it up to 11 for the next run just because there’s a 4* up for grabs. Leave the scaling knob alone for the next run. Swarms that deal 1,000 damage apiece and criticals that explode the board and take down a 12,000 health character will NOT be fun, but jack the Sentries to any higher levels than what they were on this run and that’s exactly whats going to happen.

10

If next run has the same numbers as of now, then we alredy have a lot of information to work with. If D3 changes anything they should at least tell us what.

11

I thought my roster was good, I’m strong in 3* land - 10+ 166s (though no relavent Cage icon_rolleyes.gif
) with a freshly nerfed XF and a buffed but still useless feeling IW. I can’t tell if my luck is bad or its the design, but I keep getting hit on round 6 by cascades that do about 50% to 166 LThor. And I’m pretty much #1 maybe #2 in my alliance. We are casual, struggling to even get everyone in on the event, but those of us that have pushed hard are pretty much stuck waiting on a timer at this point.

I ‘want’ to like this event, but it feels EXACTLY like what I was concerned about, content steered towards the top echelon alliance, that due to how thigns are operating right now, WAY out-class everyone else. I don’t have a recommendation to solve this, if they make it too easy, then the top will complain, but hell we can already see with their being two QS nodes, that one of them will be SW next time, and most of us won’t be able to unlock her, making those who are top now likely the only ones capable of getting IM Hulkbuster. Outside of my alliances top 5-ish, the rest seem pretty much ‘done’ with the event due to difficulty, so am I supposed ot just leave my alliance to function as a merc?

I guess my thing is, usually solo, if you try hard enough, you can do well, but the ‘wall’ is real hard on this one…

  • Unreall
12

I agree, there was more Strategy in this Alliance PVE than in any other one.

Hardly any of our alliance were running the same teams, everyone found a team that worked for them, and switching them up when they needed to because of an essential.

Counting tiles gets tedious to make sure you are within 5-7 or under 4 (because the Flyers heal ON 4 even though their description says MORE THAN 4). Perhaps have them pulsate so we can count them easier, I miscounted and cleared one just to get smacked with a swarm… dang it. But swarms are better than those critical tiles anyday!

I think the scaling was just right. Loved the Ultron Prime nodes too. Thank you D3 for a great event, though it needs some tweaking.

13

When the last round is beaten and the main node disappears all the participants should just get all the progression prizes immediately.

14

I’d prefer to see more rewards for clearing the main boss pin. Instead of the standard roulette of 4 and the 20-Iso booby prize, what might be nice would be a boss-specific progression ladder of prizes. Something like this:

  • 1 clear = 500 Iso
    2 clears = 25 HP
    3 clears = Gold token
    4 clears = 1000 Iso
    5 clears = 25 HP
    6 clears = Gold token

As for the progression I think if the numbers were just tweaked so that alliance members could not accidentally(?) be locked out due to completion of the event, that would be super. No, I’m not suggesting it be easier. It does seem counter-intuitive that a cooperative event would end up having some alliance members elbowing others out of the chance to win progress rewards, though.

+1 to all the people that have posted asking for full leaderboard visibility. I understand that a proper scrolling board is something of an impossibility, but if the board is only 20 I daresay that ought to be quite doable.

Oh, and I recommend OP edit his/her first post to add in whatever good ideas float to the surface. Good post!

15

For sure take out the 20 Iso option on the main node. Especially with the limited clear options.

Also agree it should unlock the center node every 8 hours when the essentials change over. It made for some weird interactions when the essentials changed and the node was still locked for an hour and a half.

As to progression awards, there needs to be at least enough points for a 20 man alliance to get 20 people to the top. Our entire alliance scored 17.6 million so even if you wanted to spread the rewards around there is a limit to how much you can do so. Total possible score needs to be at least 20 million (in this case) if not more like 25 million to cause a buffer.

Overall the event was fun on a bun. Exactly what I’d like to see PvE become, with some polished elements added. 3x Progression covers, multiple essential options, and a 1/1/1 progression based awarded new character. That part at least was well done.

16

On the whole, I liked the event. Even though it doesn’t look like my alliance is going to get to Prime 6, the frequency of tokens and the 3/4* drop values means I felt like my time was generally well-spent. I didn’t feel like I was spending four days grinding with nothing to show for it (which has happened in previous PVEs when the progression was scaled to the point that getting there felt impossible). I saw tangible improvement in my roster as a result of this event.

A few things I didn’t like or would change:

  1. The Sentries in the essential fights just don’t work the way the tooltip text implies they should. That tells me either there was no proofreading, no testing, or both. The Sentry Gunner in particular is OP because of the way every goon is allowed to process every passive, if possible. Core Meltdown needs a nerf.

  2. I feel like the health of Ultron went in the wrong direction. Like, hear me out here.

The first three waves flew by for our alliance, and we’re only going to end up somewhere in round six when the first run is over. I can’t imagine what top-level alliances must have done in terms of speed. Really, shouldn’t it have gone the other way? Ultron starts off as the Big Bad, and as you whittle him down, he has progressively less health in subsequent rounds, until you finally defeat him. That would have given low- and mid-tier players more opportunities at the essential prizes when the scaling was more low- and mid-tier user friendly, even if they weren’t able to jump right in when the event began.

And, y’know, that ignores that many people COULDN’T jump right in. A friend of mine in my alliance couldn’t get in at all until round four, so he not only missed the prizes in the first three waves, but he got squeezed out quickly because he didn’t have Quicksilver and he was being hit with mid-event scaling before he ever had a handle on how to deal with the Sentries and Ultron.

I’m not saying Ultron should be having the equivalent health in rounds 6-8 that he had in round 1, necessarily; I get that the health growth is meant to keep the cover rewards in Prime nodes 6-8 challenging to reach. But having the first few waves be easy enough that a few dedicated players can blow out those rounds before the lower-level players on the roster get a chance to play seems off somehow.

  1. Something else I’d do: have the event progress on a timer of some kind, where if the alliance takes down Ultron before the timer expires, it gets a bonus reward of some kind. Leave the essential nodes up for token grinding or whatever until the next round is scheduled to start. Put the cover rewards for rounds 6-8 as those timer bonuses. If the alliance doesn’t take down round 6 on the timer, it doesn’t get the round 6 bonus reward, but still has the opportunity to play the round 6 Prime fight and tackle round 7. If the alliance doesn’t take down round 7 on the timer, it doesn’t get the round 7 bonus cover, etc. The Ultron Prime fight rewards should still be good rewards, but instead of locking 37% of the event behind a wall that many alliances will never reach, give them a chance to experience that content; just reserve the cover rewards for the alliances who accomplish the task of taking down Ultron.

I feel like a lot of the dropoff some alliances saw in play during this event was probably an ‘oh god 3 million HP we’re never going to take this down’ kind of malaise. If there were a steady progression with the timer dictating whether the bonus reward is achieved, there’d be a reason to keep playing - keep trying to take him down, keep grinding essential node rewards, but if you can’t get there, you’re not going to be stuck on the same wave for three days (or however long).

  1. Get rid of the 20 ISO booby prizes. They’re stupid no matter what, but it’s more defensible to have them if you can just play the node ad infinitum because it never closes. Getting hit with a 20 ISO booby prize after a 20 minute fight against Ultron, which then locks until either 8 hours have passed or you take down an essential, is kind of insulting. I’m not saying it has to be 1000 ISO or 25 hero points or anything like that, but 20 is a pittance. Set it so that you collect rewards in the essential nodes or Ultron fights until you’ve collected all four, and then you get 140 or 250 ISO or something like that. You don’t need to be giving away the store if the user isn’t getting the four main rewards after a fight, but you do need to respect the time they’re putting into that fight. If they don’t feel like their time is being respected, they’re going to play less.
17

It’s not a big deal but i’d like a final win screen after beating the last node on ultron prime.
After fighting an epic battle for several days the end is a bit anticlimatic.

18

  1. More different types of Sentry Ultrons. People got bored of fighting the same 5 Dark Avengers over and over, so it stands to reason that 3 Sentries are even worse. Maybe make another 3 that can’t move the board, and add them to the mix.

  2. Scarlet Witch cover (or whatever the Main Prize is) at 1M Individual. I highly doubt that most casual Alliances were able to unlock the Scarlet Witch prize nodes. The guys that were pulling the weight should get at least be able to get one SW cover for their efforts.

  3. Overall, I think the Raid Boss format itself is nice for the occasional change of pace. I can see them running a similar format, but having, say, Kingpin as the primary adversary.

19

I’d definitely like to see this. At this stage, this style of event is too much of a lottery for the casual Alliances in terms of pulling a SW cover, as you’re never going to clear to round 6, and you’re therefore relying on token drops. Getting to 1 million individually requires a heap of effort, when only one or two people in a casual Alliance are hitting the nodes, since there’s a lot of waiting for timers to tick over, so the reward should be worth it. There’s also a lot of grinding a main boss node that is only giving 20 iso for each run, since you inevitably end up stuck on a single round for a day or so.

20

Overall it’s an interesting event. I like very much the coming of puzzle mechanics into the game.

The few gripes :

  • limiting the special tokens to the two new character essential pins is hard. Keeping them away from most of the new and casual gamers, especially in the coming second Ultron event that will very probably give them to the hard to get Scarlet Witch. All five essentials should have the possibility for a special token win.

  • In the same vein, beating the central Ultron pin should never grant a 20 ISO reward.

  • If an alliance is composed of people able to do 1 million damage each, they should be able to. Either correct the math, or let people hit Ultron till they reach one million even after the end of the 8th round.