How much practice do you need to do to 'get gud'?

I see a lot of condescending comments surrounding people beefing about content difficulty.

When the new CM event came out, I knew Aspect of War and the other unit draining nodes would start the 'get gud' versus the 'too hard' crowds.

As I've aged, the content scaling up has been harder to absorb. Job, kids, wife and life all demand attention.

If I only have an hour, maybe two, to play per day, and in game resources are limited, how can someone maximize their playing time to get better?

Grinding arena isn't practice for questing. I'm hoping we can all agree on that.

Actual questing practice costs energy, and we all know there isn't enough of it. Does it take someone take a practice run at a path in a quest and then run it through the 2nd time? That's double the energy. Who has enough energy to start running full energy refill paths twice in the top couple of maps in UC?

I know I'm not alone in this: In UC quests, when I get to the boss, I have a whole line up of champs, almost untouched and then **poof** they're all gone. How does one 'practice' against a boss that's at the end of a full energy charge?

That being said, there are more and more instances of low energy usage for practice for specific champs. I mean, practicing against Rhulk or Emma now doesn't cost a lot of energy and they carry the UC level of death. The UC level of death is you screw up and your dead, no wiggle room.

It's tough to get meaningful practice in and I think a lot of people here would appreciate suggestions!

Comments

Sungj

Grind ROL or if you're at that level LOL bosses. A lot of what makes people "git gud" at this game are internalizing skills and combo timings. LOL has an aggressive AI that matches uncollected, act 5,variant, etc AI so it's good to practice against. Watch dork lessons videos on intercepting and that will take your gameplay to a whole other level especially with aspect of war and LOL is a good place to practice it since your parries are limited anyway. There really isn't a shortcut to getting good. Unfortunately the reality is your skill level is pretty much based on how much you play, the arena grinds and other game time will improve your skill level. If you don't have a lot of time you're going to have to play with the focus of getting better in LOL which can be very tedious since there is no reward attached to it.

Strikerrx8

I want to know too some guy told me that on chat

unknown

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John757

It takes 10,000 hours to master a skill

DNA3000

You can't practice easily against the precise situation in every event map (and in some, but not all cases I wish there were) but you can try to intelligently break down an encounter into pieces that you can practice.

First of all, you can try to practice against new champions to get used to their specials and attack animations. You can do that even in the heroic and master maps: bring champs that are more than strong enough to wipe the floor with them if needed, but just don't wipe the floor with them. Bring champs that won't insta-kill them and see how their specials work, then kill them. You have many runs against every boss in heroic, then master, before you need to face them in uncollected (or master, if that's your final port of call).

Next, many nodes have specific tactics you can use against their mechanics, and those tactics can be practiced everywhere. For example, if a node has mechanics that punish you if you hit into block too often, you can practice not hitting into block in any duel. Some of that is just unlearning the muscle memory of using hitting into block to push them back and encourage them to counter attack, and you just have to take conscious control back in those fights.

Sometimes, you need to practice with different champs just to learn them, before you ever enter the map. This sounds trite, but no one knows everything about every champ. For example, I love using Void against MODOK. You might think that's because his debuffs stack up on MODOK and deliver damage without me having to attack into him, but that's actually not even half the story. The other half: Void has a really, really, REALLY good heavy attack. It has multiple swings, and it launches Void forward a significant distance. In other words, Void's heavy "chases" the target across the screen, something most heavy attacks don't do. You can heavy MODOK all day long and chances are he won't be able to back away from those heavies, and conversely you can use them while you're still a significant distance away from him. Oh, and Void is immune to incinerate: if you make a mistake and MODOK heavy-counters you, no problem. You don't see any of this "on-paper" you have to play, and play, and play, to learn it.

And sometimes, you just have to try to learn in the deep end of the pool. For example, you may discover that you're fighting a boss that has masochism, and your parries are being converted into too much healing: you aren't making progress on that fight. If you record it and study it (or if you're one of those people who can do that in their head while playing), you might discover that you were doing tons of damage but because you were so cautious about not getting hit back you were fighting too slowly, allowing masochism to recharge, and feeding the boss too much healing. You might decide that given your roster and your skill level, it would be better to play aggressively, bite the bullet and push forward, try to outrace the masochism timer, and if you die, you die but at least you didn't let the boss heal, which means you still have more champions to deal more damage: the important thing is not to go backward.

And sometimes, failure is useful. All the practice you put into this month's quest might not get you the win, but it might make you stronger for next month. Sometimes, the best thing in the long run is not to spend past content and win, it is to not spend past the content and lose, because you end up stronger doing it the hard way.

KattohS

Currently working on getting better at intercepting here.

allinashes

Unfortunately "gitting gud" means taking reps, lots and lots of reps. Frequently.

When I was pushing thru Act 5 and then immediately into easy path of LoL while doing AQ/AW my playing was the best it ever was. Not amazing but very good for me. Now that I'm basically in retirement my play has gotten sloppy.

No AW, very little arena, just EQs and monthly events mean that I'm just not as sharp at I could be but I'm not tied to the game either. So it's a trade-off. With strong enough champs and the right strategies you can still do fine even if you're not razor sharp.

RagamugginGunner

Getting good at the game is no different than any other game or sport. If you wanted to get good at sport you would identify your strengths and weaknesses and hone your strengths while attacking your weaknesses. MCOC is no different. You can run arenas and take every fight stun immune by not using parries. You can duel the top defenders with 3* champs. You can take 4* to master mode instead of your r5 5* champs. You can run LOL or Variant until you run out of champs, back out and do it again. That all takes time and effort. It's much easier to auto-fight with maxed out champs but it doesn't make you better at the game.

OrcDovahkiin

A good device lmao

Snizzbar

I've been playing an hour or two every day since Feb '15 and I'm still not very gud

cookiedealer

This is what I learned. It's not just playing the game, but to get good, you have to face/practice higher level content, and there, being attentive to and knowing when there are openings and opportunities to intercept. Only when you are aware of how each champs specials look like, 2nd (ending) mediums look like, what each opponents heavy attack looks like, can you practice punishing the AI properly

Worknprogress

It was continuing to push myself to either get my current alliance to aspire to higher tier wars or moving to alliances that compete in higher tiers that forced me to get better. Moved from path 1 in gold 1-2 to path 4 or 5 in Plat 1 in a little over a year

Worknprogress

Meant more when there were 29 other people that would suffer bc I dropped the ball than say in something like a challenge or EQ

DTMelodicMetal

Beginner’s guide to “git gud”:

ROL - Bad practice (passive AI, no sp3)

LOL Rulk/Star Lord - Good practice (aggressive AI, high health + limber teaches you how to effectively manage parry, random evades are common in end-game content, low energy cost with common end-game AI ideal for practicing advanced fighting strategy like different ways to intercept attacks)

Map 5 - Bad practice (passive AI, Sentinel Syndrome aka AI walks up to you stands there does nothing)

Act 5 runs with 0 item use - Good practice (common end-game nodes, 5K+ AI attack common in end-game content)

Uncollected event quest runs with 0 item use (same as above, UC boss fights usually take skill and creative roster/strategy planning to solo)

Arena before infinite streak - Bad practice (AI is unpredictable and often has all or nothing, see Sentinel Syndrome)

Arena infinite streaks - Good practice (low AI attack and 0 energy cost good for working on fighting strategies that aren’t ready to be used in end-game content)

Tier 1-3 AW - Best practice (3 minute fights with difficult node combinations require skill under pressure to solo defenders)

xNig

You want an alternate way to get good?

Complete UC on 2-3 accounts. By then you’ll be so familiar with the bosses animations that when they appear in AW it isn’t a big problem.

phillgreen

As soon as you realise your capability, understand that some fights are beyond you and have the brains to back out instead of blowing hundreds/thousands of units to try and keep up with a perceived curve of achievement, you have already got gud.

phillgreen

I wait until everyone else has found the easy way to knock over difficult (for me) content then go after it. Sure, it will still take effort but we have a whole month for most stuff yet the first week is always full of hopeful aspirants wanting to plough through with no research whatsoever then wondering why they got wasted.

Sixshot1

One of the best things you can do is learn to intercept. It's risky, but sometimes intercepting is the only way to finish a fight. This is something you can practice just about anywhere, including arena.
LoL Rhulk is great for practicing baiting specials, and managing your opponents power, which can minimize the number of times you need to intercept by making sure your opponent has enough power for you to bait a special as often as possible (the majority of specials are punishable)
+1 for watching the dork lessons videos on intercepting, Dave shows a lot of neat tricks.

MMCskippy

@Snizzbar --- We might be twins!

I've played a long time... and I'm not that good. I've changed how I hold my device a number of times and that has really hurt me. I also started playing on an ipad mini and then switched to an iphone 5s and now I'm on an iphone 7. Switching devices always takes an adjustment.

I think that all of these strategies are good to follow, but I think the biggest hurdle to overcome is time.

And this may be an important thing for developers to understand:

If you're FTP and only have a few hours per day to play, layering 15 levels of node buffs and character abilities is a strange choice. If I have to read and comprehend the poor descriptions in the game for every node, that cuts down on my playing time.

RagamugginGunner

MMCskippy wrote: »

And this may be an important thing for developers to understand:

If you're FTP and only have a few hours per day to play, layering 15 levels of node buffs and character abilities is a strange choice. If I have to read and comprehend the poor descriptions in the game for every node, that cuts down on my playing time.

Those modes aren't developed for players like that. There are 5 difficulties in most events. The top levels aren't for the casual players who only play an hour or two a day. To curtail content to players like that would ruin the game.

MMCskippy

@RagamugginGunner I get what you're saying, but I believe the root cause of all of the current issues with certain masteries not working and certain champ related bugs are because Kabam doesn't develop a way to add difficulty without adding node buffs or global buffs on top of node buffs.

It just seems like Kabam measures the difficulty they've achieved by the units or items it generates, not based on how long the fights take, or the skill needed to complete the fights. Using a spend rate as metric to ramp up difficulty only benefits cheaters and people with true skills. It doesn't seem sustainable.

RagamugginGunner

MMCskippy wrote: »

@RagamugginGunner I get what you're saying, but I believe the root cause of all of the current issues with certain masteries not working and certain champ related bugs are because Kabam doesn't develop a way to add difficulty without adding node buffs or global buffs on top of node buffs.

It just seems like Kabam measures the difficulty they've achieved by the units or items it generates, not based on how long the fights take, or the skill needed to complete the fights. Using a spend rate as metric to ramp up difficulty only benefits cheaters and people with true skills. It doesn't seem sustainable.

I agree with the 1st part 100%.

I mostly disagree with the last part. They're continuing to push the difficulty, to keep their end game players engaged. This event was hard, but for a great player with a great roster it wasn't a unit grab or even cost any units.

Personally, I used most of my pots, which were in overflow and 4 single revives. I have probably the best team for the challenge, which helped but even guys who don't are able to get through it w/o having to spend any units.

MMCskippy

I've tried my Corvus (4* 5/50 Lvl 60) with the synergy team that my roster has and he has a hard time killing the highest ranked IMIW in Level 1 of the event before the Aspect timer runs out. I was thinking he would down IMIW before the Aspect timer runs out, but evading all the unstoppable/unblockables stretches your time out too far for the damage he deals.