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Some highlights: Combined Arms not worth the trouble just for some Rags; Hawkeye's Speed Shot is glorious; did well in the Deadpool event; A Little Off the Top does 10 damage.

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Four 4* characters for what amounted to 150 HP. Plus effort. Not a bad deal but I could've saved 75 HP and a bunch of grinding if I had just bought a 12-hour shield right away. Instead I had to recover from a 150 point attack spree.

#marvel puzzle quest

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Anyone else feel like this was pretty ridiculous? On the plus side, I got a level 351 Supernova team-up and a Psylocke black out of it; not to mention a serious feeling of accomplishment. Yay for level 100 Hood and level 256 Punisher. 140 Thor helped too. And boosts. And a high level team up.

#marvel puzzle quest

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My new Rogue spec.  She's got Crushing Blows (moderate single-target damage/AP), Energy Drain (single target damage and heal), and Steal Power! Temporarily steal a passive/utility power from any character in the game besides mooks.

Clink the Link to read more!

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Went Camping, Missed Deadpool

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I won the Unstable ISO-8 event. My X-force has 5 red now, but I still haven't invested any levels into him yet.  The event was pretty grueling, and by the end most of my nodes were level 395. I haven't ever rocked 395 before, but thanks to Cmags (who's only level 80, but whatever) and Patch I was able to handle it, using two blue boosts every match. All in all it felt like way too much work. I'm going to take it easy for a while. In PVP I lose all the time, and it's frustrating, and time consuming, and I haven't managed a top 25 win in the last four events or so. My plan now is to do a few missions with a easy-to-beat team and hopefully get beaten a lot without making much progress until I get placed into an easier tier. My only usable (e.g. not Daredevil) 166 is Punisher and unless I feel like rocking CMags all the time, which gets old, all of my competition is much much better. Too many Hulks.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Oh, hey

I have been having trouble in PVP lately because, as it turns out, I don't use CMags. I started teaming him up with Punisher (only level 60 right now, but he has level 5 blue) and DEAR ME! He is unbelievable. I won a game on turn 2. I barely take any damage. He's not as good on defense, especially at such a low level, so I do get beaten a lot, but hopefully that will lower my MMR some. It's win-win. At least until they nerf him. It's times like these I wish I could refund all the ISO-8 I wasted on Daredevil.

Since PVP was giving me trouble, for the past couple tournaments I've tried to do a late-game push. But it backfired; both times I jumped into the tail end of a bracket and I couldn't even break 200th. Which is too bad, I really would have liked to get another Falcon cover (mine is currently 0/3/0). So in Top Gun I started early and hope I can just grind up to a decent score, thanks to CMags, maybe use Daredevil for defense later on. It still might backfire but at least I'll get a heroic token out of it, and maybe soften the Season 3 anticlimax (I thought I might get in the top 25 a while ago, now I doubt I'll get in the top 100). 

Simulator is going fine. after finishes of 1st/3rd and 5th/2nd I purposefully got into an active bracket for the third round, which will be harder to win, but should get me more points toward the main event (I'm currently in 5th). I'm not going to hold my breath for a top 2 placement or a Laken cover at 150k, but you never know.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Healing and Heat

I've been meaning to rant a bit about how the recent change to healing is probably good for the game. But I guess there's not too much to say.

The devs correctly identified why OBW was so overused, and dealt with it without spot-nerfing her.

In the context of a single match, healing is balanced, but the utility of being able to play many successive matches was why OBW/Spidey was so overplayed.

Healing through matches borks the adaptive difficulty, which leads to players stuck in "way too hard" mode. 

I'm already seeing way fewer OBW, but perhaps that's because I'm stuck in 141 hell thanks to my recent successes.

I dominated the previous round of Heroic Mode. I was in first by a few thousand points. If I can keep that up I might stay top 10 and get all three Sentry covers, which would be nice since I missed him during season 2. Sacrifice is bad enough when the strike tile gets placed in an out of reach corner. Combined with World Rupture... yikes.

As mentioned, I'm entering 141 hell. I just got my 13th Punisher cover, which is my second to the 141 cap (Frank is currently 130) after Daredevil. (Now that I think about it, Patch is sitting at 112 but has 13 covers.) And so I do pretty well and face mostly 141 teams and it is hell. And no, no one else is rolling Daredevil. Because he's pretty shitty. 

In the Army of One event I skipped 10 matches in a row to try to find a non-powered-up-to-212 Punisher to fight, to no avail. Lots of 141 Hulks. Unless I can stun him going down he's bound to do at least 5k damage to my team, which means every other fight requires 3 heal packs. I stay the hell away from Dakens. 

So I roll Punisher and Thor (0/5/5, lvl 115) and swap in DD or GSW or even OBW. And take a lot of damage. It feels like my game is a little slow right now, and doesn't help when enemy cascades generate 10 AP of every color, which happens too often. This afternoon, I actually had the AI cascade into 5-matches in four different colors on the first turn. I lost that one, unsurprisingly. 

Hood has been screwing me over lately, stealing just enough to turn a swift victory into a clusterfuck nailbiter. The best was when I matched my 12th yellow to drop him and fuel Thunder Strike, but he ended up with 2 HP left and then stole a yellow AP and popped Twin Pistols, turning the game against me. Maybe I should level mine up. I think he's got 5 yellow now.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Rolling right along

I failed miserably in the Torch event, spend 150 on shields and still only reached 35th which was enough to earn a GSW cover I didn't need.

Placed 8th in the Juggernaut Hard Mode, which netted me one of each She-Hulk cover. She-Hulk is dumb, but she might be a cool character to play with.

Juggernaut was OK in that I used a bunch of characters I never use, primarily IM40 and Hawkeye (Modern). GSW and Storm (Modern) also got a lot of play; at the end when I just needed points wherever I could find them, rushing to 11 blue (esp. using IM40's recharge) for Wind Storm was the fastest way to win. I spent 600 on heal packs to stay in the top 10, seems worth it. 

I don't know if just seemed that way playing a lot of matches fast, but I had some really bad luck. I had a couple games where I never saw a 4-match, while the AI was cascading over and over. When I was doing well, Juggernaut always seemed to headbutt the turn before I could kill him, wasting hit points. One time I switched to another character because he was going to be killed next turn by Hawkeye's countdown tile, and he got 26 Green AP (and tons of other colors too) from one Unstoppable Crash cascade. Didn't go well from there... Ares mopped up.

I'm doing well in season 3. If I keep it up I will probably get at least one 10x cover pack at the end (if it ended right now I'd get 30x). Unfortunately the GSW tournament that just started gets me Daredevil covers I don't need, but at least that probably means DD is the upcoming featured hero, which will be nice to see him powered up to 212.

My LazyThor is 0/5/5 (currently 105). How weird is that!? He's pretty awesome though and I don't need to worry about him "wasting" red AP on Mjolnir's Might, as an AI.

Xforce is up to 2/4/1. Still not useable but thanks to the recent heal nerf, maybe better for PvP (not using up heal packs). I think I might try using Patch again...

#Marvel Puzzle Quest #LazyThor #She-Hulk

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Is there any Justice in the World?

This post was going to be a triumphant celebration. After a lot of grueling work I finished 1st in my bracket (of 1000!) in Heroic Oscorp, with a score just shy of 39K. (I have seen some bracket winners were sitting at 33K, and others stuck in 150th with my score, so I take it with a grain of salt.) 

It marks my first ever first-place win (and resulting in my 3rd red X-Force cover, who got a green to match through daily rewards today). However the rewards still haven't showed up yet; still pending after 36 hours, so ... let's just hope they haven't forgotten about me. It seems like a lot of users are having this trouble.  Oh well. I figure they'll get it done eventually. In other news, I was kind of ignoring Season 1, except trying for 3000 points to earn a black Hulk, until my friends alerted me that the reward for 5000 is a freaking 10-pack of heroic tokens! So I pushed hard in the falcon and rags events and got up to 1600 in the training room to get it. My rares, Blue CMags (decent) and black Hood (eh, sure), at least I could use them both. I recently got an unusable green punisher from a standard token--d'oh!  I may have mentioned before that I never get the featured hero from the 300-point token for PVP events. This still holds true, but I DID pop an Invisible Woman (yellow, my first) from one recently, which was awesome.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Dur

Forgot to play on the last evening of the Hunt so I fell out of top 100 and didn't get The Falcon. So aggravating. 

The only thing about that event that made it worthwhile was getting two rares with my last two Heroic tokens. Uni-beam (eh) and Grey Suit Widow's 5th Green power, which is so freaking awesome, since now it does almost two thousand damage (a lot more once I level her up from roughly 70) to the enemy team.  Still I'm not too enthused about the game right now. The rewards for simulator are like, Rags and Daken. Poo. And grinding at Season I seems like a chore as well. Maybe I should dump my friends-only alliance and join one with 20 players to get decent alliance rewards.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Overload

I've been having trouble keeping up with the events lately. I'm still sitting around 150th in the overall ranking for The Hunt, but with seemingly two events a day it's pretty hard to stay focused, especially since two more events for Season 1 just showed up, along with lightning rounds (which I skip) and regular PvP.  I totally flaked out on Hotshot, which meant no Punisher cover (I have no trouble reaching 50th in a given PvP event), which meant "AUGH!" because I love Frank and I use him all the time and he's level 105 (4/2/2). I would be kicking myself the most if it was a green cover, but missing out on any is kind of a downer. The Hunt is going okay, anyways, though I slacked a bit on one of the last ones--these side events have a million missions and are incredibly time intensive, but I can do pretty well mostly doing the three "required character" missions. I hope I can get down into the top 100 (I'm not holding my breath for top 50) to get a Falcon. He looks like one of the best characters released since... Ares maybe? Regardless he looks amazing. I imagine it will be hard to accumulate more than a couple covers (especially since I'm in a small, friends-only alliance, usually rank 1000-2000, so no cover rewards for me) but I could see him becoming insanely useful. His flock spams the board with decent protect tiles, blocking damage AND enemy countdowns. His passive sounds, well, weird, but however it works, it seems awesome.

And then there's Nick Fury! What a cool-sounding Legendary. There's no doubt Fury would be a 4-star when he appeared, and it sounds like his powers are pretty interesting. I hope that his "Avengers Assemble!" actually adds characters to the battle; that just seems really cool.  Having gotten two red X-forces and no other legendaries during my tenure, I don't expect to pick up a Fury any time soon. I hope the next character they introduce is a two-star, just so I have something new to collect that won't take forever.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Disappointment?

Because I missed a round sick, I didn't manage to get a Steve Rogers Cap in the Simulator event, which will make it harder to get the Human Torch in the Red ISO-8 event. Oh well. MPQ might be on its decline for me since I picked up the Diablo 3 expansion. 

I did, however, finish Daredevil and (lucky rolling on some standard tokens) got 2 green Patch covers which is pretty slick (from 77 his max is 102 now). He's nuts against mooks now, since green makes like half a dozen strike tiles that deal over 1000 damage a match with OBW's Espionage. Both of those characters are powered up during the current event which is pretty useful. Someday I will get Loki's black to level 5 and Patch will be insanely potent. As it stands I generally use Punisher 105 who's green and black are reliably awesome and less chancy than all those horrible enemy strike tiles.

Seeing that I can get a Steve Rogers at 93333 points, I will probably work actively at the Red ISO-8 event. The sooner I get him, the sooner I can use him in those easy, valuable missions.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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This Game is Weird

After getting to 100k points in Rounds 1 & 2, I got sick for a whole day during round 3 and didn't bother playing, (got some standard tokens) thinking "eh, 100k to the Daredevil Red, maybe not..."  So today I logged in basically just to grab my daily rewards and take a look at round four. My jaw figuratively dropped.

To set this ridiculousness up, during the first couple rounds I basically just did the "Required Character" missions a couple times each, each day. They were, let's say, level 75 and level 110 (normal and hard), and worth around 3000 to start.  Today, in round 4, the missions were Level 30 and 40, and worth 5950 to start! I got 40k overall points in about 20 minutes, doing 6 matches, making me much more confident I can get that Red Daredevil cover and max him out. INSANE. I have no idea how the difficulty scaling works, but thanks, D3.  I also jumped about 100 spots in the ranking (since I wasn't trying hard and in about 230th). I still might not get a Steve Rogers or two, which would be a shame because I don't need the OBWs. But maybe. I will put in some actual effort tomorrow evening to get to 200k and ensure at least one Steve cover, just to have him for events in the future. 

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Simulator rd. 1 and No Holds Barred

I took it easy on Simulator so I don't grind down my mission values in round 2. Even so I was easily in the top 10 Hard Mode (spent about 8 hours at 1st) and top 50 Normal.  No Holds Barred was kind of a roller coaster. I didn't jump in until a day left, but the competition seemed really tame so I gave it a shot. I had pushed up to the high 400s earlier and then with two hours left was in third with about 575 when I got hit twice and slipped to 8th. I needed to take a break and put a shield on.  At 25 minutes left I broke the shield with the intent of pushing to the top 5. I even might have made 1st--as the leader was still just shielded at 590--which would have been really great. But in those last few minutes I got hit three times for 40 each--brutal--so I ended up with third. 

Daredevil's now at 5/3/4, and will have the max level cap after I earn another cover in Simulator overall. I don't think he's the best match with Punisher (my other 100+ character, his green might kill a lot of traps) but I am glad to finally have a maxed 3-star. Well, once I spend a lot of Iso-8.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Ack! Lord of Thunder: Recap

For no good reason at all I decided to push for a good spot in the Lord of Thunder event. After reaching 500 (which was 5th at the time) I shielded myself overnight and then again after a few matches (had to get things done), until I broke my shield 10 minutes early and played for the last half hour. 

With 10 minutes left, I was in 4th place, and then attacked twice for 60 total I slipped to 5th... And then the server went down for a few minutes. Ack! Luckily, I got back in and played a couple more matches and was safely in third (715?) at the end.

I netted three Psylocke covers, which was nice as she was just a singleton for me, and an impressive 2500 Iso-8/100 HP. Recently they ramped up the rewards for top 10, at the expense of good rewards for anyone else (though Hero Points are easier to get now). I think back at the times where I was fighting for the 75-45 spot and those three uncommon covers. Making it only one cover is pretty brutal to low ranked players, just that much harder to get a full suite of powers and raise an uncommon to a competitive level. I suppose people will at least get the one with a moderate effort (top 200, instead of top 150). 

Hard Mode Juggernaut is going okay. The difficulty is a bit higher than last time, but my ThorToo is 20 levels higher, so it's sort of a wash. I haven't been trying hard to reach 16500 yet, but I'm in the top 100 and the first Heroic token I earned was yet another useable Hawkeye, which is decent. He's now at 5/3/4 and still sitting at level 6. I would love a ThorToo (Red, please) or Psylocke from the next one, though... 

#Marvel Puzzle Quest

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Juggernaut (Hard Mode) Round 1

Finished Hard Mode Juggernaut in the top 20 last night, getting two more Thor Too covers. Competition was pretty fierce; clearly there were at least 25 other people who were grinding away for those last few points like I was. It's a little sad because I was tantalizingly close to the top 10, having crawled up from around 75th place an hour and a half until the end, but never quite broke it.

Near the end I even risked (and twice successfully completed, no doubt thanks to the retired +150% damage to H.A.M.M.E.R. boosts I burned) the final level 150 Daken mission after it jumped in difficulty (and score), but even after I finished it I had slipped a couple of spots down to 14th. So I figured I would have to settle for 20th. But at least I held onto that. My Thor Too is now level 30 (38 max, I think) which should make the next round go even smoother.

I was rolling 18 (powered up to 110) Thor Too, 50 Storm (Modern) and 40 Captain America (5/5/3). I am a proponent of Cap's yellow at skill 5 but unsurprisingly I was using my yellow for Thor's Thunder Strike. A few times Thor got killed early (Usually Ragnarok chaining combined with Daken's strike tiles) and Cap had to finish by himself, the slow way, and managed.

Only one mission got too hard for me in the end, it was the second-to-last one with Magneto, which had increased in level to the mid-80's. His purple power, Magnetic Transposition or whatever, was SO brutal. I had killed Daken quickly but then Rags got a nice chain and then BAM. Something like 17 swaps for 300 damage each. Thor's down, I tried to hold out with Cap, but then Magneto popped another one a few turns later. 

It's incredibly broken because it does full damage every time, not just damage for the swaps available.

I didn't bother trying that one again after the difficulty jumped, though I probably should have, as it was the highest valued one by the end of the night. During round two I will remember to kill Magneto first. Ugh.

For round two I beat the starter mission early this morning (hoping to get an off-hours crowd that is less competitive.. we'll see if it backfires) and am going to wait to do any more until tonight, or maybe tomorrow, when they have gained a lot of value.

I should probably spend the time on the Lord of Thunder event, but I haven't found a doable fight yet and have used a lot of skip tax. I must need to lower my MMR since all of my opponents are like, level 141 Model 40s and Punishers with better Thor Toos than me. It's frustrating.

#Marvel Puzzle Quest