"The Gauntlet" is wonderful

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
21

I still like the idea for The Gauntlet, but boss creep definitely sucks a lot of the fun out. If difficulty is based on my roster in the first sub, I don’t think every sim should increase a couple levels for every node I beat. The finale would be plenty hard if they were at the level 100 or so I started at, but adding 60-70 levels by sim 34 just makes it too hard.

If they are going to creep the power of each node up, then have my roster bumped +30 for Villians, +60 for Heroes, and +90 for the Finale. As it is now, I’m already punching above even the max boosted character on my roster by 20 levels. Also I’d like it if only the character you face is restricted, losing all my storms, thors, bw, or wolverines takes almost all the damage dealers out for a transitioning roster. OBW would be a great help on that mBW node, same for cStorm against mStorm.

22

The nodes get harder because the reward gets better too. That is okay.

The problem is that it’s pretty clear those nodes aren’t really playtested. It’s just this formula that keeps on add more levels the later you go and there might be some unknown scaling factor. For a maxed out roster, I’d say the 30+ which are all at least level 300 there’s nothing you can do about them from a gameplay point of view because you’re fighting guys that can drop your support and sometimes you tank in one move. They can also wipe out a guy like The Hood by just doing match 3s. Most of them would look like the enemy has 5 out of 7 colors that can instantly kill you the moment they’ve enough to use any move and you hope they get the 2 colors that wouldn’t kill you while The Hood does his magic. I’ve also beaten them without The Hood and you just need even more magic than usual.

23

No idea how to delete this

24

I have a 2* roster. (Punisher is 184 boosted). Sim 37 was level 205 when I beat it. I’m stopped, but Sim 38 is Rogers+Doom+Commander at level 225.

25

Stop bitching for bitching’s sake. It’s a refreshing change and it’s good they’re trying new things.

26

The very fact that it’s a new thing implies there’s tweaking to be done. Unless the complaints are “No more of this, only do pve like you’ve always done” there is nothing wrong with complaining.

27

As long as this gauntlet style is only something like once in a month event I’ll be happy. I tend to get less reward from this progression structure. Having the enemies at the start off finale already at 60 something levels above my own means that essentially I’ll have to Max boost each battle and hope to get lucky.

28

There’s complaining and there’s constructive criticism. This event is a wonderful change, something a lot of us have been asking for, but it’s not 100% perfect, and as long as we couch suggested changes like that, I don’t think they’ll find it discouraging. While there have been a few hiccups, this is probably the least problematic rollout of new content to date. Remember scaling? Team-up? True Healing? There’s a little room for improvement, but I suspect they’re just playing things a little cautiously until they’ve got a better sense of how this will work in practice.

29

It only looks good if you didn’t reach the end of the finale bracket where there are level 395 guys who can kill you with any move that does damage. They’re probably tuned for pre nerf Magneto except he’s not here anymore. Here’s my experience on Simulation 39, OBW + Deadpool + Ares level 380.

Enemy make 2 green matches - someone dies to Onslaught.
Enemy gets enough Sunder - 2 guys die.
Enemy gets 2 match red = someone is at 35% health (this is at least manageable)
Enemy gets purple = you’ll eventually die to Whales or AR

It’s also not unusual to see 2K damage done on a match 4. This isn’t even a particularly unfair team and all my games ended in about 2 minutes. How is this fun? What can you do when you need to deny 5 out of 7 colors (blue would greatly stall the game since Anti-Grav at this level is quite potent)?

30

If there really isn’t enemy level scaling, that’s good news. But still I don’t think I’ll be able to complete it cos each mission has higher level enemies. When I almost halved the second stage, it felt as if I hit my limit with level 124 enemies. Will try again tomorrow and see what happens.

31

I find it interesting that people are both praising the format and also complaining about the difficulty of the scaling preventing you from finishing nodes. The two comes hand in hand.

Why? Because D3’s core business model is selling covers. This means that all pve (and pvp) events must be set up such that only a portion of the players can get cover rewards in order to promote cover sells in those who didn’t get the reward.

In the previous pve format, this was done explicitly through the ranking system and competition through players. The system, while flawed in many ways, guarantees that X% of players get 3 cover, 2 cover, etc. In the current format, it has to be done implicitly, by making nodes difficult enough that a large percent of the player base cannot finish all the nodes.

The problem is that it is tremendously harder to balance difficulty in a static format like this. Set it too high, and nobody gets a cover, set it too low and everyone gets one. Do you want to take a guess at which way the company will err towards? Yep, the one that doesn’t hurt it’s bottom line.

32

It’s fine to make stuff hard, but the roster based scaling has to go on static content. In the past community scaling and rubberbanding tends to ensure any mishaps in initial scaling is fixed later, because if your scaling is too high initially you’re less affected by community scaling and if your scaling is too low you’re affected more, and rubberbanding ensures that you can’t just sneak in some extra clears while scaling is favorable and never worry about losing your lead. Neither mechanism exist in this event, because it’d be utterly stupid to have either mechanism in a format like this.

For example, in the villians bracket, having a level 270 X Force adds 30 levels to all my nodes compared to someone who only has level 166 characters. This gap gets wider, and by the finale cover it’s close to +70-80 levels on all enemies by estimate, and there’s no way X Force is powerful enough to make that difference so your fights are strictly harder. But wait, there’s more. The 166s are facing around level 350 enemies at the end, so enemies can’t be higher than 395, so maybe it’s unfair to them because my enemies can’t go to level 450 like they’re supposed to if X Force is indeed that powerful! It’s basically a roluette with everyone having an equal opportunity to get totally screwed by scaling.

Events like this should be handled like Balance of Power or Combined Arms, where 1* and 2* are brought up to a level where they can be competitive to 3* but not overpowering, and then all the enemies can be a fixed level. Even if you screw up the buffs, it doesn’t screw the guys with the significantly better rosters. That is if we have a ‘Juggernaut headbutts everyone’ gauntlet event because they buff him to level 270, at least everyone could add a Juggernaut whereas currently you’d have delete X Force to lower the scaling and I think that wouldn’t even work because the scaling is already set, so you’re simply screwed. I’m not convinced any of the finale bracket was tested with X Force in mind because the only thing that can possibly work is an early Surgical Strike/Magnetize Particle so that you end up stealing 5 or 6 AP a turn which basically means the other side isn’t getting AP anymore, but even then winning is far from assured because your level 300+ enemies can drop a match 4 that hits as hard as a level 166 AP consuming move. I have plenty of fights where even with a complete AP lockdown I still have Magneto and The Hood on the verge of death from the 600 damage match 3s, 1500 damage match 4, and multiply that by 3-4 if they get a crit tile in there.

33

I was about to mention this point… but I could always trust sandmaker to mention this point icon_e_smile.gif

Some of us have already argued that the reward structure of the previous PVE is flawed BUT good in its own way.

But there are so many people who wants it to be PURE progression reward. Now they got it with the gauntlet. Pure progression, no grinding.

And when there is no grinding, how do you differentiate your performance? Well, the bar has to be set higher. The nodes are more difficult, because well, we don’t have to complete it multiple times. We just have to complete it once.

As sandmaker said, if all we want is to have game mode that gave us 3* covers easily, it is unlikely to happen. In the previous reward structure, only top 15% get the 3* covers. In the gauntlet, 100% people can get the 3* covers. Hence, D3 have to set the bar higher.

I predict more ppl will complain about the gauntlet, because I am “not getting the 3* I was getting”.

I like the gauntlet because I treat it as a pure puzzle game. How do I beat it once with the minimal damage? I don’t have to rush through it, bec speed is no longer the essence. It’s a different way of playing it.

34

I really like this idea, partially because it would fix the scaling issue, but also because it would allow me to use my entire roster. I would like to be able to use some of my 1* or 2* characters against some of these teams, but there’s no way I can right now because with their low health, there’s no way that they’d survive long enough.

35

i think the best thing about the gauntlet is that if u are not into it…for whatever reason…YOU CAN JUST IGNORE IT. Ive been playing it leisurely…it has started to get difficult to the point where i no longer think its a good investment for my time. And i have simply stopped focusing on it. I dont have have to worry about anything outside of what i value and deem appropriate reward for my time. THAT is the best thing about this event.

marc

36

That really goes for any of the events…

Or, they could set the difficulty at a managable level and toss mainly the 2*->3* players (that are still being screwed everywhere else in the game, mind you…) a fair chance at some old 3s. Starting 1 players would not be able to manage past the 2* rewards, but with those 2* rewards would likely still get something they need out of the event. Meanwhile, the majority of the veterans would have already built those old 3s up during their climb to 3 land, so In their case it’s 2x or 3x a small lump of 500 ISO in the pocket. On the grand scale of things, that kind of currency does very little to influence the game economy.

Heck, you could even have this managable version of the Gauntlet serve as an outlet for ‘vaulted’ 3*s taken out of the token rotation and kill two birds with one stone that way. It’s perfect, really.

37

I like this event’s format. It is wonderful to not have to grind nodes repeatedly. The later nodes becoming very difficult is fine with me. When you only have to beat it once, it is a fun challenge and not a chore. Many good games have difficult bosses that you have to try fighting several times before being able to win, and you feel a sense of accomplishment after that.

It does seem a bit unfair that some have to fight against much higher level enemies than others only to get the same rewards. Though I do understand the need for the event to be playable by all. For future gauntlet events, I propose a 4th sub that could run parallel to the other three. This will have nodes of fixed difficulty no matter who plays it. First timers and veterans will get the exact same enemy levels in this sub. It should be made clear in the event that this sub is not meant to be beaten by everyone, and is more of a test to see how far your roster can go compared with others. This will be like the tough boss in an RPG. You must have a party of well experienced members in order to win the end game.

38

My 2c. I like the idea, I hate the reward system. I’m long time 2* player so I have all required 3* but dayum, if you are newer player you might as well not touch that mode. Villains - requiring specific 3* to get 2* cover, what? Heroes - require THREE specific 3* to be able to win one 3* cover, wat?? If you don’t have all three of Black Panther, Punisher and Grey Widow, the only 3* cover comes at the end of 42 slog mission, which isn’t exactly cake as you can see from other responses, even less when dealing with limited roster. Comparing to standard PvE, rubberband made sure that with just about any roster you were able to easily get 3* from point reward, and as long as you didn’t join at exact start of event, you had fair chance at second 3* from placement reward, even w/o essentials.

I feel switching rewards so that clearing all non-essentials gives you 2* cover in Heroes and 3* cover in Villains, and moving HP reward to top position would make it more fair.

39

I just don’t understand the complaint from others with strong rosters that they are facing a challenge that is unfairly hard - it’s supposed to be a challenge, that’s one of the things that I find enjoyable. It’s not like this event is offering rewards like a new character - they are covers that those with established rosters already have and if the difficulty isn’t your cup of tea then “oh noes”, you lose out on a bit of ISO.

FYI - every node is beatable without boosts as long as you have the required characters. I was able to make it through each one, and another member of my alliance was able to beat the final node of 395s with a couple of 2*s. You might lose out to a cascade, or get frustrated that hood seems to be the answer to the toughest nodes, but if you are constantly losing maybe it’s an indicator that you should mix up your teams and try some new combinations.

40

Please ad me to the list of people who like the format of the Gauntlet (a truly PvE event where I’m not competing against other players) but who also thinks that the level of difficulty is INSANELY wrong.

The level of opponents in the 3rd stage is truly wrong. I’m sure players who have full rosters of 3* characters who are maxed out will disagree but for the majority of players, short of a random lucky collection of cascades, it’s impossible to complete stage 3. And I’m saying that as a player with 2 maxed 3* characters.

This really highlights one of the key problems I’ve had with the game of late. In the beginning, up until max 2*, the game was awesome. I happily spent money on the game because I thought it was fantastically well made and it deserved my funding.

And then I started transitioning to 3*.

Unless you have spent a fortune on the game and have a large roster of maxed 3* characters (and some 4*), the game becomes incredibly unenjoyable once you pass maxed 2*. You suddenly are playing in the death pool against opponents you have no chance at all of being competitive with (so PvP becomes pointless and unenjoyable) so you invariably switch to PvE so that you can at least get some sort of rewards for your game play. Now, with the Gauntlet, that’s over and done with. Now, PvP is pointless because the game thinks, in PvP, that I can compete against the pool of death (and I can’t) and, in PvE, it thinks I have a diverse enough roster to be able to tackle insanely overpowered opponents (which I can’t). So, now, even though I am more powerful than I was when I was playing maxed 2* characters, I am utterly incapable of winning. I went from a player who was competitive in PvE events, capable of earning satisfying rewards, to a player who has zero chance (short of insane luck which I’m not going to pursue) of even completing the PvE event.

Seriously, I went from someone who regularly (about once every other week) spent $20 on the game (yeah, I spent a stupid amount of money on it…) to someone who’s absolutely not willing to spend a penny on it, despite being two covers (thus $20) away from having my final covers for Patch. Why spend money on a game where I know it won’t improve my gameplay because I’m not a member of the pool of death? Why spend money on a game that I am enjoying less and less? Why spend money on a game that I’m thinking about no longer playing?

The Gauntlet is a great idea since it truly is a PvE event where I don’t feel like I have to compete against pool of death players but it is horribly executed because I need to be a member of the pool of death to truly benefit from it.

This is a great game until 2* max. I assume this is a great game once you have a large roster of maxed 3* characters (especially Sentry and The Hood…). This game is incredibly not fun between those two stages, the largest timeframe most players will occupy.

D3, you’re at risk of losing a player who has spent a large amount of money on your game. You’ve already lost my willingness to spend money on the game and now you’re on the verge of completely losing me as a player. While I am hopeful that you will fix the entire game so that I can again play PvP and enjoy it and feel like I have a chance to be competitive, all I’m asking for right now is that you fix PvE so that I can feel like I have a chance. Otherwise, I won’t feel like I have a chance in any aspect of your game so why would I keep playing?

Please fix.