Rift battle general discussion

[infine]

You got your rewards? I didn’t, and I definitely did 7 matches across the week.

Rewards are just out.

 

[Reshiram18]

Rewards were simply delayed a bit this week compared to last week, where the rewards were out within two hours of the end of the season.

 

[xcapibara]

Hey fanghoul, enjoy those easy points, ha! As soon as i saw “diamond 2” and saw that base and that bio-terrorist squiggly, i knew it was pointless to even try.

 

[fanghoul]

Hey fanghoul, enjoy those easy points, ha! As soon as i saw “diamond 2” and saw that base and that bio-terrorist squiggly, i knew it was pointless to even try.

Hah... Sorry

Diamond 2 again this season with 2064 points. I was curious if things would change and become more competitive after people realized that there were (relatively) easy rewards to be got, compared to getting millions of points in a weekend prize fight, but I guess not.

 

[evilgordo]

Season 2 results:

1742 at the start, ended 1695 which (still?) kept me at Gold 2 rank. Not complaining

 

[Ryouhi]

Okay, now that i've had some time to play rifts, here are my thoughts.
though first of all, i know this sounds very critical, but i understand the devs put a lot of effort into this mode, so i don't want to seem like i'm just bashing them. I just want to post my own perspective of the mode and what i personally believe could be improved.

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I like the idea - i do no like the stress that comes with a ranked mode and some of it's design choices.
I'm a casual player and i usually also avoid pvp/ranked modes like the pest. However, due to the great rewards that are available for playing, i feel very much that i *need* to play it right now (which does add to my frustrations)

---

First off, i do like that we're able to build our bases the way we want to. Finding which of your fighters fir which node best to make the strongest base possible. There's lots of strategies you can try out here. I really like this.
I also think this is an elegant take on pvp, as "direct" pvp would hardly work with this game's gameplay.

However, i do have quite a lot of issues with the mode.

First of all, matchmaking is probably the biggest offender.
I only very rarely get a balanced match. Either i get completely and utterly stomped or my opponent is.
Right now i'm playing a match and my opponent seems to have 11 fully or almost fully maxed diamonds at his disposal, most of them of course on the boss node and those with the 200% modifiers. I only have 5 diamonds, which are all in the realm of being level 40. That alone means that my boss node is around 65k FS while theirs is close to 100k FS. That's a pretty insane difference in combat strength, not to mention that he also has those same 11 maxed Diamonds at his disposal on the *offense* side, whereas i have to reserve my diamonds only for the boss node or else i dont have a chance to beat those either.
I'm not sure how to make the matchmaking fairer, without increasing the time to find an opponent to insane times. But as it stands now, i probably wouldn't even play this mode if it weren't for the 7 required matches a week.

This brings me to my next complaint.
Losing a node is extremely, *extremely* punishing unless you have a huge collection of max level fighters ready to take their place.
Not only do you give your opponent a whopping 500 points, you *also* lose access to your fighters. So now you have to retry the node, but with weaker fighters, making it harder and harder to keep yourself in the game at all, as your collection of available fighters gets smaller.
I'd consider myself more or less a veteran, playing since the game came out officially, yet my collection barely allows me to mess up once, lest i run out of fighters for the rest of the nodes.
The worst offender here is losing on the enemy boss node, as i will obviously use my best fighters on it, but if i mess up here, i may as well throw the game, since i will not have any way to retry it with a good set of fighters now.
Yes, you could theoretically spend Theonite on recharging your fighters, but i'll come back to that in a bit.
My suggestion: If you lose, your fighters will not be "used up", so at least you get a fighting chance when retrying a fight.

These two are probably my main complaints, making it agonizing to play this mode.
I am very averse to playing ranked modes in any way, shape or form, because it just makes me salty beyond believe, but due to the good rewards, i feel compelled to play this mode anyway, but these two things make it even harder to enjoy this ranked mode than necessary.

Other smaller complaints i have:

- Being able to spend premium currency in a ranked mode should not be a thing.
You should not be able to buy yourself advantages in a *ranked* mode.

- a few nodes just feel like they don't add any challenge aside of maybe adding a stat-multiplier.
Amongst those are for example the chance for specials to reset, since AI rarely uses their specials anyway or those that stun you, as they only come into effect if you mess up and due to the stat multipliers, messing up usually means you may lose your fighter anyway, so they dont feel like they add a lot.

- No exp in this mode is a bit of a shame.
I understand this mode shouldn't be looked at as a way to level, but considering i am going to only bring my best fighters to this mode, it would be nice to get a good chunk of XP for my Diamond fighters here.

- I personally also do not like having a win streak multiplier in this mode.
Since the matchmaking is very wonky it feels mostly out of my hand whether i'm gonna be able to keep up said multiplier.
It just adds to the furstration of losing, because not only did i just lose Rankpoints, i also lost my nice coin multiplier.
I'd suggest increasing the base rift coin gain and removing the win-multiplier.

- the 2-hour wait time is annoying.
If both players managed to finish the rift, there is no reason that we have to wait for the countdown to reach 0, that's simply a waste of time.
Also, maybe there should be a way to forfeit a match.
I've been in a handful of matches where i either lost too many of my fighters to go on or i was just much too outclassed to even be bothered to try further. In those situations i wish i could simply forfeit and be done with it, instead of having to wait hours until my demise is *official*.

- In it's current state, i don't really feel like playing 7 matches a week.
It's not a huge number of games and i understand needing to keep the player engaged to not just passively gain rewards, but i do wish the number was a bit lower until some of these issues have been worked on. Maybe lowering it to 5 matches would be nice, but that's just a very egotistical complaint haha.

---

So yeah, that's my view on Rift battles right now.
I do believe this has potential, but as it currently stands, i am merely slogging through my 7 weekly matches to get my rewards and then i have zero desire to touch it, because of it's issues, combined with me not enjoying pvp, like at all.
I do hope this does not come across like i just want to bash the mode or the devs, but i wanted to put my perspective out here.

 

[Ryouhi]

-16 rating points every 72 hours of not participating in a Rift Battle.

This one hit me by surprise in the last season, now i know why i randomly seem to have lost a bunch of points despite having played my 7/7 matches that week.

When i read that you will lose points for inactivity, i assumed that you would lose points only if you didn't meet the 7 matches-a-week-criteria, not that you would lose them for not playing for 3 days.

Since you can finish your 7/7 matches a week by thursday morning with just the free tickets alone, you shouldn't be punished by not playing until the season is over. Now that i understand how the decay works, i will have to spread my matches around the week more, but won't really make me play more. This is simply inconvenient and doesn't increase my amount of matches played either, so it feels superfluous when we already have the 7 required matches to get rewards.

I feel the decay should probably be removed or at the very least be tied to the 7 matches a week thing.

 

[infine]

So I want to talk about those horrible scary defensive wins and math.

This thing has been bothering me for a while, but now I finally have Proofs.

I see a lot of people throw an otherwise equal game after a defensive loss and a lot of people complaining about losing an attempt being too punishing. Is it really?

Let's put it in perspective.

A good attempt on a general node in an equal game nets you around 2200pts. Out of those 500 are no death points, 100 are BB finish, 50 are combo, and about 250/250 are for HP/time bonus. So generally speaking you could still win a node by a hair's breadth and get around 2200-500-100-200-200=1200 pts. (you'd still probably get 20+ combo unless you parasoul/bella all the things). I've actually been there myself. Winning with a barely standing last character 3 seconds before timeout.

Now failing an attempt resets all your counters on the node and gives your opponent 500pts. This is the same as losing 500pts. Which is actually the same as winning an attempt but failing the no death condition. There's a theoretical possibility that you get MORE points by failing an attempt altogether and then succeeding on the next try than by having a phyrric one-attempt victory. Taking the above example, you could fail the attempt, get a do-over with 2200pts, substract 500 for defensive loss and still end up with 500 more points than just by having a fail victory.

If you fail an attempt not all is lost. A single failed attempt equals to a single slip up by the opponent resulting in a fighter death (say, on the boss node) that still looks like a clean attempt from the outside. Or 5 non-blockbuster finishes. Or just being slow and getting some excessive damage. Granted it might be lost, I had games where the enemy had both clean walkthrough and a high total score, but it's not guaranteed. I'd guesstimate if you can score over 21K points, you still have a good chance at victory even with a couple of failed attempts.

 

[POD_715]

I completely agree with this. I never get a chain of more than one win at a time because i keep getting pitted against much stronger players. I have 3 diamonds all below the lv50 Mark but i just got pitted against a lv70 player with 10 near max diamonds. He cleaned my board in 1 attempt so there's no point to me trying. I feel like there's a threshold where you're no longer pitted against pure gold players, but also pitted against much stronger diamond players constantly so I'm stuck in limbo unable to move. I don't know what the devs could do differently but it's very disheartening

 

[infine]

I feel like there's a threshold where you're no longer pitted against pure gold players, but also pitted against much stronger diamond players constantly so I'm stuck in limbo unable to move. I don't know what the devs could do differently but it's very disheartening

Nah, that's the way it's supposed to work. Well, not sure about supposed, but the way it inevitably works.

Since you get matched by rift rating, each time you win it goes up and you get matched against stronger players without your own team really changing, and each time you lose, it goes down and you get matched against weaker players. So long rift streaks, either winning or losing, aren't normal and more of a luck (unless you already sit at whichever end of the spectrum).

It arguably wasn't the case during the first season (but even then initial ratings were pretty spot-on), but now the ratings are more or less settled, and you can score higher only by getting a stronger team. Otherwise you are bound to a win rate of about 50%. Your own skill determines not your win rate but the rating you're going to settle with a given team. If you have 3 diamonds and can win against 5-diamond people, you gonna settle with a higher rating. If you lose to pure golds - you gonna settle with a lower rating, but more or less with 3 diamonds you should be forever D4, especially considering higher ranks are not percentile. I guess the problem is D4 is pretty damn wide, and whether you are bad or good, in the end you'll still be D4.

 

[fanghoul]

I wonder if you could just take then entire first half of the week off to let your score sink, then do all your fights at the last minute so that you get a higher streak? That's probably overthinking things though, and I wouldn't want to bet on it working out well.

Also, I finally dropped to Diamond 3, which is a kick in the pants because it means getting one fewer diamond key per week, but it makes a lot more sense than Diamond 2 did. I'm pretty active in the game, but I was pretty certain I wasn't top 50 in roster strength, which this mode is largely about.

 

[Luke]

CHRIST
i am in awe

 

[infine]

View attachment 2992 CHRIST
i am in awe

Eeh, I had a 116K team during the first week IIRC, this one seems okayish.

 

[educavalcantee]

It would be nice if we could watch replays of our defense nodes. Btw, in prize fights too.

(Sorry for my bad english, i'm very happy to join the skullgirls community!)

 

[fanghoul]

So, interesting use of a natural diamond on what seemed like an easy node:

If you put Assassin's Greed Valentine on the Barbed Wire node right at the start, she is just short of immortal unless you bring the right counter to the fight. She regains 5% of her health when you're near and have a bleed, and hitting her or using blockbusters makes you bleed, unlike Bio-exorcist she can do it even when you're both blocking, and it just gets to be impossible to overcome the healing with damage.

There's solutions: Wulfbane, Bloodbath, any valentine with ICU (though doing enough damage could be an issue), getting backup from surgeon general. I just kinda screwed myself by not knowing how she worked and doing the node last, and having expended all my good options for beating her.

Anyway, thought I'd mention it because it was a cool bit of strategy.

 

[NinjaPenguin76]

---SNIP---

Lul

Ryouhi pretty much said the majority of what I was thinking (no doubt most of us), and others have made points I agree with too. I'm glad to know the matchmaking issue isn't just a problem with lower player levels- well, actually I'm not since it shows the issue is systemic. It makes me feel better I'm not the only one getting paired against people I have no business being though lol.

My absolute biggest peeves aside from matchmaking with the mode:
Having to wait for the timer to go down after both players have played to the extent the intend or can. I feel a simple "Finished" button for when players have exhausted all the attempts they plan to take at a base/beat all the nodes would be appropriate.

Having 3 fighters sapped with 0 return if you lose a node. I kinda feel like it'd be nice maybe for every node you win it works towards rejuicing a fighter somehow. Say half/a third or whatever's a fair amount of the FS of the node goes into a pool and it costs 100% of a fighters FS to battle with them again, or something.
Also the idea of a fighter not being used up if you don't use them in the match sounds somewhat appealing, since in some matches I pick conservatively to save who I have left, but I just end up sweeping really hard even though If I had messed up I coulda lost them all. That or if you stomp a match really hard with a single fighter of equal or lesser FS to the individual opponents (to keep it balanced) then it doesn't sap the ones who didn't fight.

Lastly the fact that if you tap battle when you mean to tap your base you can't cancel the search queue. I mean there's a 5 minute timer and in my experience barring 1 match that I found pretty instantly, I normally wait over 2/3 of the queue time before one is found. Why not have an option to cancel the search if you haven't connected with anyone? Seems like a basic functionality imo.

 

[Ryouhi]

The more i play, the more issues i face with the rift boss node.
I'm not sure whether this is a matter of not having strong enough fighters or not being good enough at the game, but so far i'm losing more to timeouts than to my team getting wiped.

So far i've gotten a few matches where i've won barely with 5-10 seconds on the clock or just straight up timed out.
That's usually when there is a certain fighter i've build my team around to counter.

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For example, i just matched with a player who had put a diamond Dreadlocks, Diamond Harlequin and diamond Surgeon General on the node.
So i went with my strongest fighters available for the job and one that counters dreadlocks' SAs. (UV, BB, SG)
I used multiple snapbacks on UV and BB to force Surgeon General to tag out because it is hard to counter her Heal otherwise due to the restriction of who can apply debuffs.
Too bad that so far this strategy hasn't worked in the three fights i have tried using it.
The game keeps switching in the same two fighters i want to avoid until i've taken care of the SG. So with that i've wasted precious 30-45 seconds just trying to get the SG to tag in.
After finally facing her, it still takes a while to beat even with my Diamond UV who has almost 19k Atk right now and is by far my strongest fighter by a long shot. Still it takes a really long time to whittle her down. By that time i've got a little over 90 seconds left on the clock to deal with the other two.
Bled DL down with Bloodbath to 20% HP and got the HQ down to 40%-ish when the time ran out.

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This is just an example and maybe i just need a better strategy to deal with this node. But due to the 200% HP bonus it is very hard to deal with a strong healer like SG, but getting her to tag in is purely a matter of RNG, wasting a lot of time.

Personally i feel like the node may deserve to be nerfed a bit in the HP department, or to have the mod changed to allow for more easily inflicting debuffs. Again, this may just be a matter of me being outclassed in my current ranking, but from my perspective the node may be a bit much at the moment.

 

[TonyPartridge30]

The more i play, the more issues i face with the rift boss node.
I'm not sure whether this is a matter of not having strong enough fighters or not being good enough at the game, but so far i'm losing more to timeouts than to my team getting wiped.

So far i've gotten a few matches where i've won barely with 5-10 seconds on the clock or just straight up timed out.
That's usually when there is a certain fighter i've build my team around to counter.

----------------------------

For example, i just matched with a player who had put a diamond Dreadlocks, Diamond Harlequin and diamond Surgeon General on the node.
So i went with my strongest fighters available for the job and one that counters dreadlocks' SAs. (UV, BB, SG)
I used multiple snapbacks on UV and BB to force Surgeon General to tag out because it is hard to counter her Heal otherwise due to the restriction of who can apply debuffs.
Too bad that so far this strategy hasn't worked in the three fights i have tried using it.
The game keeps switching in the same two fighters i want to avoid until i've taken care of the SG. So with that i've wasted precious 30-45 seconds just trying to get the SG to tag in.
After finally facing her, it still takes a while to beat even with my Diamond UV who has almost 19k Atk right now and is by far my strongest fighter by a long shot. Still it takes a really long time to whittle her down. By that time i've got a little over 90 seconds left on the clock to deal with the other two.
Bled DL down with Bloodbath to 20% HP and got the HQ down to 40%-ish when the time ran out.

----------------------------

This is just an example and maybe i just need a better strategy to deal with this node. But due to the 200% HP bonus it is very hard to deal with a strong healer like SG, but getting her to tag in is purely a matter of RNG, wasting a lot of time.

Personally i feel like the node may deserve to be nerfed a bit in the HP department, or to have the mod changed to allow for more easily inflicting debuffs. Again, this may just be a matter of me being outclassed in my current ranking, but from my perspective the node may be a bit much at the moment.

Perchance, do you have a Xenomorph Double? Using Doom timers, which go through the Sacrosanct fight mod, you can get through the node with a little bit of luck. I've gotten lucky in a number of boss nodes that I've chosen to attempt using Xeno. Can't remember if the perma-bleeds go through Sacrosanct, though.

 

[Ryouhi]

Perchance, do you have a Xenomorph Double? Using Doom timers, which go through the Sacrosanct fight mod, you can get through the node with a little bit of luck. I've gotten lucky in a number of boss nodes that I've chosen to attempt using Xeno. Can't remember if the perma-bleeds go through Sacrosanct, though.

I have her but haven't leveled her yet. But Doom shouldn't be the one thing required (and i use that word quite liberally here) to beat the node.

 

[Blimeylimey]

The perms bleeds do stick through sacrosanct. Xenomorph has a problem against surgeon general though because of the immunity.