Best Of

It's the weekend.

Someone has just admitted to cheating in their "please take back my ban" post.

We all know what happens next.

I couldn't agree more. Not because of the tuning, because I actually don't mind it. Sure the defender attack level could be dropped a bit, but that's not the point. I'm in a very low key alliance & our main chat is about 50% saying, not only is it not worth, but they. actually can't do it. That shouldn't happen in especially a monthly quest that 95% (?) of the player base looks forward to. I hope this makes it way to the eyes of who needs to see it. Otherwise, this might lead to death of the game I've been reading & hearing about since I started playing in 2018…

I can't wait for the positive spin they are going to put on this on the next live stream.

"Hey guys we listened and we decided you were right so we are loweing the HP and ATK values"

Not gonna work on me, I seriously wonder who thought this was a good idea and gave the OK, its not even the 1st time... Remember the first Nightmare raid? Something along the tune of "it's supposed to be difficult..."

Exactly, they could have added a node, something that you actually have to play around; but no all they did is overtune the stats so a little mistake means huge damage and revive. For a big change and improvement they took the laziest route possible.

I also think that there's a risk in scaling the difficulty based on your top 30 prestige champions, at least with the new EQ format. I'm not exactly sure how the system works behind the scenes, but this is at the very least how I view the problem (or at least one of them).

Back when the EQ switched to requiring certain utilities out of your champions (was that with the Cav difficulty back in the day?), there was some pretty severe pushback since people didn't always have those pieces of utilities available in their ranked-up champions. However, in the end I think it was a wise choice since it guided people's rank-up choices so that they got those utilities available in the future. Since you could use a team for the entire chapter, you could focus on that utility for a few champs which then set you up well for the future. You don't need more than a few Tech champions that can heal block or have an armor up buff or power drain, for example.

However, with this new format, you suddenly do need 15 champions in the various classes with these specific pieces of utilities. Instead of gently guiding you toward improving your roster, it punishes you for having a diverse set of utilities among your ranked-up champions. I think it worked well when Kabam first introduced the Valiant EQ since that was a set not-too-hard difficulty, but when you need those unranked champions to be able to beat defenders whose strength is based on the strength of your strongest attackers, things changed drastically. Suddenly you couldn't dig deep into your roster and use your underleveled and underranked champions, because the content wasn't scaled for r1 champions when your top 30 prestige is mostly dominated by r3 and r4s.

As I said, I don't know how things work under the hood. I'm trying to not assume too much. However, I suspect that it might be difficult to base a difficulty on a player's highest-ranked champions (even a generous number of them) if your design is constantly asking them to pick a lot of champions from far beneath that pool of top champions. I suspect that I would have complained significantly less if the Elder difficulty had looked similar to the old EQ format, where one full team of my highest-ranked champions could do a six-fight run and a boss. I still think that some stats are significantly overtuned, but I would at least have had the champions required to comfortably deal with the content.

However, I feel as though the adaptive difficulty and the new EQ format formerly known as Valiant difficulty are at odds with what they want from the players. In one corner, we've got the adaptive difficulty system that focuses in on your highest-ranked champions and what kind of challenge they need; in the other corner, we've got an EQ format that cares less about your top champions and more about the breadth of your entire roster.

I'm not really sure how those two systems are meant to co-exist. At least in this first outing, my experience is that they really, really don't.

Bear in mind, this EQ has more fights than the act 8 crucible…totaling at a whopping 96 fights. And not only is there more fights, the fights/quests are also more restrictive. This whole thing is a ridiculous oversight that needs to get addressed sooner rather than later, not just next month. Everything about this quest is just off

Adaptive was a good idea but it was really badly carried out I love the lore EQ gives but I don’t think it’s worth it this month :(