**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
How much practice do you need to do to 'get gud'?
MMCskippy
Posts: 352 ★★
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!
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!
5
Comments
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.