What are your thoughts after more than one year of boosted 5* in PvPs?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

This topic will concentrate only on PvPs because I don’t think anyone will be unhappy with more boosted 5* in pves.

I think boosted 5 has done a good job of increasing varieties of opponents superficially in the past one year plus. The reason is because when you reached past 1000 points, you will see mostly boosted 5* or maybe unboosted 550 5* + boosted 5*. The flavour simply changes every week.

Pre-boost, players were complaining about

  1. lack of varieties (seeing only meta 5*)
  2. lack of options to deal with meta characters
  3. how some characters were “unusable” unboosted in pvps.

The metas pre-5* boost were Colossus/Wanda, Wanda/Apocalypse, BRB/Polaris, Kitty/BRB and probably some other I can’t remember.

I looked at 2021 and 2022 releases and many of them, even though they are not meta, are able to deal with many of the metas effectively, or could work well with metas. This led me to believe that if boosted 5* were removed from pvps, we’ll see even more varieties, compared to the current situation of boosted 5*.

As for unusable characters, the dev’ll be working on this later this year, so let’s not touch on this.

Anyway, share your thoughts.

Edit: I just thought of this but please share what tier of player you are to give context. For example, are you a single champed 5* player, double champed 5* player, multi-champed 5* player, 4* player with fully covered capped at 4* MMR, 4* player, 3* player etc? If not, the default would be multi-champed 5* player.

2

I like it. Even if you have an unfinished character you can run them with some degree of success and I see players fielding those sort of teams which brings variety. Of course if you hit a bad boost week it can be a bit daunting and obviously the more 5* champions you have brings you a big advantage. I think it will depend a lot on what happens with the announced character rebalances. If a lot of the old 5’s get massive increases to health and powers it might make PvP more of a closed shop than it already is for the not haves, so we will have to wait and see.

Edit - I have 13 champed 5* (working on no.14) and every 4* champed bar Black Knight & Puck.

3

I love it.
It means variation in the teams you see.

4

I loathe it. I have built low-level dupes of powerful 4-star characters (Polaris et al) to be able to play 4-star pvp and avoid this maelstrom of unfun for me.

5

I’ve largely enjoyed it for variety, but it has really hung a hat on the characters who need a rework. I have all the 5s mostly baby champed save the 3 latest and 6 very old Classics for reference. There have been a few weeks where the boosted characters were all so ineffectual that it wasn’t even worth it to run them. Other times though there have been characters who really came alive in boost week and let me appreciate their powers even off boost, most notably Killmonger. These last few boost weeks have seemed curated (or randomly assorted serendipitously) such that you really only want to bring one of them because they share too many colors or otherwise utterly lack synergy. I’d be curious to know if that was intentional or not. I will say if you can run one boosted and one off boosted 5* who works well, your retal MMR is going to have a ton more variety than if you go in with your two best boosted 5s.

6

I love it. I’ve wanted to see it happen once we had a good selection of 5 stars. One of the things I missed the most when I made the jump from 4 star player to 5 star player when I decided to bite the bullet and champ my thanos and black panther, way back when panthos was the meta, was the lack of variety. When I was a 4 star player it was so fun to look at the boost list and pick characters that worked well together. Then as a 5 star player I was playing all panthos all the time and it became monotonous.

A new meta would pop up once in a great while and things would feel new for a bit but that would soon pass. Boosted weekly 5 stars have brought back that fun of looking at the boost list and trying to find fun combo’s using the boosted characters.

7

I love it. It rewards champ’ em all players.
Now it’s time for my daily digression.
On all gacha games usually the OP character, the one who helps finishing faster, becomes the meta character.
However, when you have a game on which 80% of the content will give you extra rewards for finishing faster, those characters are triple up valued (being the 20% content not focused on speed possibly puzzle gauntlet and boss events).
Then you design fun characters to play but slower that meta characters. They need the godboost.
Then you design defensive characters for to try to stop a bit those meta characters. None of them totally stops the most effective meta teams, so they need the godboost. A few of them actually have ways to kill fast, so become meta too.
Then you design characters who counter another characters or having a niche power. If they have ways to kill fast, they will become meta. If not, they need the godboost.
So, until something really changes, the godboost helps maybe a 70% of characters to see the light on modes which they are not designed to perform well.
Ways to change that, imo:

  • rebalance them to make them better on their role(fun playing characters more effective helping the team, defensive characters like armored wall, niche characters more lethals )
  • rebalance all of them to be faster and more damaging
  • include so many new content not focused on speed that the content focused on speed becomes the 20%; or give more important or solid rewards to not speed content.
8

As a “champ-em-all” player, I love it.

EDIT: 55 champed 5-stars, most of which are level 460 and lower. Every 4-star champed save Puck and Black Knight.

9

I have put my thoughts into the dev Q&A and am interested to hear their response. To me it’s a lazy, one-size-fits-all bandaid that has been applied to a group of characters for which one-size-fits-all does not apply. It takes ancient characters like Silver Surfer and makes them somewhat balanced in their nonboosted level MMR. It takes some newer releases like Ronan or Elektra to a balance-breaking level that was never intended for that character in their nonboosted level MMR.

I have 12 5* champs, a trio of meta characters at 490 470 460, the rest in 450s mostly recent metas or their LL companions. I still have 20-some 4* I can’t champ because of ISO.

5* boosts have not made me want to champ em all, quite the opposite actually. If a character doesn’t greatly improve my PVE times (only Shang Chi since Apoc’s release) or make it easier to fight characters more than 100 levels stronger than them (only Wanda, Colossus, and Shang Chi since Apoc’s release), they are even easier to skip now.

I used to really enjoy playing competitive PVP once I got into it, even with a relatively small roster, often shield hopping 10+ times an event and spending money on HP offers to be able to keep that up. I don’t play like that anymore, often times using 1 or no shield at all, some times not even playing PVP at all. My natural HP gain is fine for roster slots and that level of PVP play so I don’t spend anything anymore, and that time I spent in PVP is spent on other games.

Looking at other responses in the thread, of course the champ em all type players love the boost, because they get to play big roster bully against players in their nonboosted level MMR.

I’d be interested to see a new experiment for this next year while the new devs are working on rebalances, keep the boosts but change MMR based on boosted levels. Then when you have boosted 5*, you are in 550 MMR for the week. I know a bunch of players in the 550 MMR would love to see a new crop of fresh meat every week using the boosted mid and low tier characters. I wonder if champ em all type players might have different opinions on that experience?

10

Are u sure that boosted five stars take your mmr upto 550 level I was of the opinion it was only based on regular unboosted levels

11

@mani82 right now boosted 5* do NOT affect MMR. That’s the reason so many champ em all style players are enjoying it so much.

12

Champ em all players cannot get to 550 because they are spending their resources in that way.
Everyone spends resources in the way everyone wants/can. 550 roster players choose to skip all characters and level only okoye, after her they can level any other character for pvp. And MMR reacts limiting them to another 550 players.
Champ em all players with baby champed 5*s never should fight with vets 550 rosters, who easily may have the same character 20 levels more, so it’s an unbalanced topic in any case.

13

Four Star Player here. i hate it, it’s bad enough to with deal soft cap 5 star players, the weekly boosted 5 makes it more hard and no fun. its needs to end

14

This reinforces my assertion in the “sweeping rebalances” thread about how hard it is to pivot a roster to adapt to a change in character power. The 5* transition was super punishing before the boosts, I don’t know what it is like now but I bet pretty grim.

15

It’s fine, I guess. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say there’s more variation now. It’s sort of an artificial claim. From week to week, you end up using different characters, but within any given event you are still either attacking and/or skipping the same exact teams over and over again. Not sure there’s anything they can really do about it, though.

As a 5* player, the 4* tier is even more irrelevant. Sometimes, I don’t even bother healing my 4* and just use the loaner. Largely gone are the days of a boosted C4rol being a legitimate option.

16

The problem with the hoard for 550 strategy is once you have the best of the best, there’s no incentive to spend for or chase anyone else. You can just ride Okoye/Switch until the wheels fall off. You honestly think the developers would reward the hoard playstyle and punish players who actively chase/champ every single character they can? Hilarious.

I saw some rumblings from people concerned that the regular rebalances might mean that a character they skipped suddenly becomes top tier and they’re left in the cold. Good! I think the developers have always wanted people to chase as many characters as possible rather than sit on a pile of gold guarded by the dragon Apocalypse. If the best character could be anyone next week (via a boost and/or rebalance) then you are either incentivized to chase everyone (probably their goal) or get “left out” occasionally. (I put it in quotes because in reality the Okoye crowd will be fine even if Iron Man finally takes his place as a top ranked character).

Oh and to answer Hound, god boosts literally saved PVP for me. Best change to the game in a long while.

17

I dunno, I am very leery of live service games drastically altering the value of various game elements retroactively, especially pay-to-win elements. I recognize that balance passes are essential to game health and some modifications are inevitable, but games that ask players to make a long term time/money commitment should be reluctant to make players feel like any investment they make in the game could go up in smoke tomorrow.

As for the main topic, I mostly agree with borstock. Boosted 5*s are a decent way to inject some week-to-week tram variety, but the fundamental structure of PVP in the game inevitably leads to a sea of the se defensive teams showing up at each player/slices float point.

18

I find it irrelevant as Shang is just going to one punch any character regardless of boost . I just had him KO a 250K Mr Sinister with one hit and he wasn’t even angry yet . There’s only 2 types of players now. Those that have Shang and those that will use boosted 5*.

19

Never thought about it from that perspective. That’s fair. Though I don’t think they are going to nerf the good ones. Just buff the bad ones (which people usually celebrate. I haven’t seen anyone get angry about an improvement unless it’s game breaking). Like I said, the Okoye crowd will be fine, because Okoye is still great even if Iron Man is now also great.

20

You are not considering defense. SC is great for climbing, but when people complain about “lack of tram variety” they mean defensive team selection. People want to see lots of different opponents so that the event feels like less of a slog and they especially don’t want to see the same two or three teams on every node. SC is very bad on defense and is therefore largely irrelevant to the discussion of team variety.