Alpha Big Time

Instead of writing a new post with each update I will edit this blog post until the close of PvP Season 10. Spec Ops 12 is practically done for me. I’ll farm it a bit for gold and unique items, but I achieved two of my three primary objectives.

10 Sep 2013
It doesn't feel like a week since I have updated this post.
I have Doombringer. The final score with cancelling out some when I was at four stars is 486,236.
I have Five Stars in the second mission of Spec Ops 12.
I have Elektra.
I purchased Squirrel Girl.

I finished Gold in PvP as per my goal. I was in Diamond at 5.36% an hour and a half before the end. I left the computer because I was out of energy and had things to do. I finished at 15.60%.

The Spec Ops is still in operation for another six days. In that time I will continue to try to finish five starring it simply as a personal goal. If I get all the spec ops missions five starred then I may go back to the second and try for the gear again. I will also finish up Facing Facts which has thirteen days remaining. I am also going to shift focus to farming 6.6 for Momentum Generator to combine it with Dragon's Foot.

There most probably won't be any further updates to this post. Everything else is pretty much straightforward until the next Spec Ops or PvP season unless Playdom tosses something new at us.

03 Sep 2013
Four Stars in all missions for Spec Ops 12

01 Sep 2013

I purchased Cable

I have unlocked Squirrel Girl but have not bought her yet

I have four stars in the first two missions of Spec Ops 12

There was a new task to pop up today. Roundup, which I have started

Still have not earned Doombringer

PvP was a lot harder today. I ended at high gold. I may run a couple more later, but even with the five dailies I feel somewhat wrung out. I’m not sure what is going on. For instance, an opponent with a roughly equal armoury bonus and fewer heroes one-shotted my tanking general agent with a shield and full health. Their Cyclops was the first to go and paired with Wolverine. I never got a second action with any of my team. Their agent did have the Warbringer and Shepherd’s Staff affecting Cyclops at the time, but that was all the buffs aside from Agile and Combat Expertise. All of the guys on his side had almost half as many hit points as my heroes as well. I'm still trying to figure out how he did it as I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in his gear. Maybe all of his ISO-8 is slotted to health, attack, and accuracy with nothing to either of the defenses or stamina. Still, it was vicious.

He’s only level five, but I am thinking Cable might work well with Ares. Being able to use those strong single target L1 attacks of his without consuming vast amounts of stamina or hurting himself is nice so far. We’ll see how he shapes up after unlocking his L9.

31 Aug 2013

Current Goals in Order of Importance

1. Unlock Squirrel Girl.

2. Unlock Elektra.

3. Farm Spec Ops 12 for gold.

4. Get Gold in PvP.

5. Obtain Guided Repeater.

6a. Get five stars in all three missions for Spec Ops 12.

6b. Continue farming 3.5 for Doombringer.

7. Decide if I will bite the bullet on buying Dragon’s Foot or not. Luke Cage has a great attack that requires some set up and this weapon looks like it could do it in one step instead of taking a couple of turns. I’m curious how good the passive. The increase to crit chance might be enough to guarantee he crits. Throw in a Momentum Generator and he might be crushing things. It’s hard to theorycraft without solid numbers, but it has potential.

8. Build up my gold and command points reserve

9. Get the last star in 3.6 to unlock Golden Screaming Eagle.

Spec Ops 12

Spec Ops 12 is still running with fifteen days to go. I have already unlocked Ares and completed the score challenges.

Vindication Set

The Void Generator seems like it would be nice, but it requires a second piece of equipment which practically does nothing on its own. That being said, the shield effect is strong and the debuff denial is great. I’ve been testing it out against enemies that consistently stun me in PvE and not one stun stuck. I do not know if this is me being extremely lucky with the random number generator, or if this is working as intended. The basics for how it works is you activate the first item which is a quick action with a very minor heal, stamina gain, and a buff. The buff does nothing on its own.

When the Void Generator is activated it consumes that buff to activate a shield effect. Depending on which device you used to apply the triggering buff the shield either affects just the agent or your whole team. The shield removes and prevents harmful debuffs that don’t specifically destroy or prevent shields while removing a buff from the attacker. It could arguably be one of the best shield effects in the game. Without that buff it is an energy ranged weapon that removes buffs from the target of the attack with damage that will be quickly out leveled. Both items are on a two round cool down.

There are two other weapons in the set right now with the last probably hitting the store at the end of the Spec Ops. All of these consume the charge from that first device for extra effect. If you want the full effect you will be running two of these at most as you need two separate devices to get the buff which procs the extra goodies. In addition, the buff does not stack so there is probably no reason to ever run more than one weapon from this set on an away team as the AI might waste the charge and you are left with turns where you have no charge available. I could see using this on an AFK team paired up with Sudden Support and Phoenix Flare due to the cool downs making it harder for the computer to screw up the order in the first two turns. I have trouble picturing a scenario other than that where I might trust the computer to use these two items correctly in the first turn unless you take all quick items.

The biggest problem I have is that the trigger items don’t do anything on their own. The highest tier one will do damage to Venom when used, but other than that they are tying up a slot to make another item nice, but not worth the two slots. The set would work better if the weapons were boosted by the charge but didn’t consume it or if the trigger buff was a passive and the quick action was something like Subtle Halitosis. I’m interested to see what the final piece to the set will be and how it will finish off the set as that has the potential to make all the difference.

PVP Season 10

PVP Season 10 is also under way with eight days remaining. I am fluttering back and forth between Gold and Diamond right now. I do the five dailies for the lockboxes and roulette. My goal is to finish in Gold.

For the first half of the season I saw very little on defense outside of Rescue, Phoenix, Wolverine, Cyclops, Kitty Pryde, Omega Sentinel, and Magneto in that order. I would estimate roughly four in five matches had Rescue. This has diversified over the past couple of days as pretty much every attack team is running a reliable answer to Rescue now. Those names are still showing up, but with alternates and a few more characters showing up more such as Hulk for those not carrying a Warbringer as almost everybody seems to have and Union Jack is making the rounds. I have no clue what people are running on offense which is the downside to having two separate PvP setups now. Most people were too lazy to switch back and forth between attack and defense before so it was easier to know what people were running.

For most of the event my attack team has been an agent with Hoarfrost Mace, Girl’s Best Friend, Nanite Inductive Nailgun, and Signpost leading Nightcrawler’s Infiltrator Swashbuckler alt and Daimon Helstrom. Nightcrawler is the workhorse and can dish out the damage along with three of the basic four debuffs and a stun. Daimon is support that might do some damage after a couple of turns, especially if I need to prevent healing or resurrection. There are so many tacticians on defense that you don’t want him attacking all the time so it’s nice that he has so many options to do things other than hit people. My agent’s job on that team is to be a wall. Daemon helps prop the agent, and sometimes Nightcrawler up.  Most of my gear is out leveled as it’s all from events except for the Girl’s Best Friend which I got more recently as a random and it replaced my old one. It’s still pretty far below my level. I am not dropping gold on being any more viable in PvP for this event however. The item is a bit hard to tell it's usefulness just from reading the description, and while I've been in Vibranium league on the last day I was never able to be on at the end of the event to defend it so have yet to get a suit outside of a bug that affected many people last season and Playdom decided to let everybody keep the rewards that were handed out.

I tried Satana early on with different combos over a few days. Turn sequence matters way too much with her. She is extremely fragile. If she dies then she takes her ball with her and leaves you with the lovely debuffs she puts on your own team. Nobody can really protect her as she weakens them to where they can’t take much of a hit either. Maybe white suit Thing or Collosus, but the only alt I have for Colossus right now is the P5 bruiser and I tend to prefer him swinging if possible.

I was running Spider-Woman and Luke Cage with my agent having four useless items and the starting uniform equipped on defense to make the five dailies easier, but even fluctuating up into diamond I am winning my assaults so the five dailies isn’t really a grind. I’ve been experimenting with quite a few setups on defense and am nowhere near finding something I am happy with. I spent two days swapping gear around on my agent to try and make Daimon and Fantomex work. In theory the two of them should be giving me a 60% chance not to be hit before Evasion or anything like that enters the picture. Storm might have been a better choice than Fantomex for this, but his comes from a passive that can not be removed and I was trying a blaster agent for much of those two days. Problem is I have absolutely no clue how the computer would run those two together. I’ve never seen much of either of them before let alone together. They both have the potential to make the enemy attack their own people, but Daimon has to do it in a very specific way and I don't know how the computer runs him. The Luke Cage/Spider-Woman combo has won more defensive battles than some of the stuff that totally outclasses them. I can’t help but wonder if somebody saw them and had no clue what to do. The only characters more shocking to see in PVP are probably Thing and Mr Fantastic. Hmmm…

Covert Task

The Squirrel Girl unlock has seventeen days left and I am sitting at the last task as I am contemplating buying Cable before I do it as he means another roulette as I run the mission to unlock her. I could go unlock access to buy her right now, but I have a weakness for hitting as many roulettes as possible even though I know I can run it again later.