I have been flooded with questions about fixing people's defensive PVP results. And the short of it is, I can't really help you tweak because it involves a deeper look at you, your gear, your heroes, your resources and your metagame than I am willing to do for anyone but a select few people I know and care about in real life. And, if I did have the time and willingness to do it for the random AWC (what's up with that, by the way, register for the site. Only good things happen), there would be some short term benefit for the random AWC, but come next evolution of their meta, I'd have to do it again. And they'd tell their friends, and I'd have more people. The reality of it is, I have only so much time and so much desire. And I have a real job, a real wife, real student loans, real bills. So, here's this post. I'm gonna help you to help yourselves.
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| I am a fickle devil! |
Some ground rules. I am disabling comments on this thread. I am a fickle demon and I don't really feel like answering a ton of questions on this particular post. I am intensely fascinated by AFK PVP strategy, but I don't want to be Dr. AFK. Sorry.
This post is about the work you put in to get better at PVP. I will present exactly zero easy solutions. Firstly, there aren't any. Secondly, they will be different tomorrow. There are some basic solutions if you're serious about PVP that merit discussion, and we'll discuss them. But the single thing that will make you better at PVP (and AFK as an extension) is repetition.
This post is not for everyone. It is not quick and easy. If you are looking for a quick fix, look elsewhere.
With that, we are off.
The Basics[]
Okay, I assume you've found your PVP armory page. Is it maximized? Is every slot filled with something? Are you holding large quantities of things that could improve your armory. Free things or silver cost things or cheap gold things, depending on your spend preference. Special Op drops and the weekly gold slotting items can improve your bonus quickly.
I also assume you understand the hero bonus page. No, I assume you don't understand it. Let's go for the basics of that, then get a bit more advanced. First, getting a new hero is worth more than leveling an old hero (1-9... things change in the 10-12 range). Five times more. So, there is more value in having 40 low level heroes than 10 mid-high level ones. But the advantage of having 10 high level ones is that you can improve your bonus a lot by obtaining a bunch of cheap heroes. Somethings I do. I get every new hero when they come out. I have the luxury of being on top of that. If I get a bunch of people at once (got Beast, Deadpool and Ghost Rider within a week of each other, IIRC), I level them together, because it's a lot faster to level three people to level 4 than it is one person to level 9. Cheaper, too. Level up those lowbies. It's easy gains.
The Bad News[]
The math doesn't work. If you are like me, you will be attacked more times in the early go of a tournament than you could possibly attack other people. So, you can either overcome that by improving your PVP bonuses and strategy (possibly by spending gold... sorry, there it is) and winning more AFK, or by volume fighting. I won Deadpool with a combination of those. You can check out my blog about the last day of the last tournament. Notice the volume of fighting. And I sucked at AFK PVP in that tournament. So, you don't really have to get that good at AFK, you can volume fight your way through, assuming you can fight and win consistently enough.
There are golden children out there. They spend a lot of money on gold purchaseable items and slot these for PVP. They will have bonuses you cannot fathom. They will beat you. It doesn't matter much what you do. If you are in one of the very hostile level thresholds, there will also be agent parkers who deliberately supress their agent's progress to stay better in PVP. The hostile level thresholds are L60 and L100. At L60, they get the 4th slot, the Quantum Jumper and another page of bonus. If you are L59, you will be matched against people at L60 who will have massive advantages. At L100, there's an extra page of bonus and ISO Crystals. Not as big a disadvantage, but still, a steep hil to climb. The short of it is, unless you are Agent Wanderer, there will always be someone better than you. And even Agent Wanderer can lose 100+ points overnight.
The Work[]
Here's where we get to the work of it. First, you need to break down your meta. Do ten fights (5 challenges, 5 practice). Make them against ten different people in your meta. If you want to do more, that's great. But 10 should give you a good feel for what's out there.
Log every hero, every agent, and every gadget. Log your results. Note what was an easy fight, what was hard. Note who went first and who went last. The more complete your log, the more useful it will be. Practice PVP is very useful for this, now that challenge points are restricted.
Analyze your log. See what characters are most present. See what gave you problems. Ask yourself, are you playing a standard meta team, or are you playing against the meta? If you are playing a standard meta team, whatever gives you problems will get the rest of the standard meta problems. If you are playing a non-standard team, you might want to run this again with a standard team.
Break down your log. Are people running a lot of tanks or are they going tankless? This is the central question. If they are running with a tank, you need a tank solution. Stunners, Stealthy attacks, Ground attacks and Subtle attacks, debuffing and Cornered all are anti-tank tech. Develop your plan for getting around a tank. Remember, the AI is a moron. So, if your plan involves combining two devices or hero moves on two heroes... get back to the drawing board. If it's no tanks, you need to look at classes. What are the dominant classes, and are they covered. For instance. If your meta involves a lot of bruisers, it would make sense to run a blaster, assuming that tacticians are not being paired with the bruisers. If there are tacticians, you will want to bring infiltrators. And if they are bringing a scrapper to cover the tact who is covering the bruiser, you will want to bring a bruiser, to cover your infiltrator who is covering your tactician. Complicated? Yes.
Plan around the main threat. At lower levels, it's the heroes. At high levels, it's pretty much always the agent.
Your agent should carry gear that was from the problem list. If you had trouble with it, someone else will have trouble with it. You want to give them trouble. You do not want to rely on two and three device combos, like the Electrostatic Arm-Galvanic Arm-Power of Four combo. The AI will mess that up.
Now you're ready to see some results. Set your team. Log your record from your profile. Go to sleep. Wake up, check your results. We logged the record in case we get more than 30 attacks and can't break them all down. If you won 40% or more fights, you're doing very well. Consider, assume you get attacked twice for every fight you start. Let's say you start 30 and get hit 60 times in a day. You win 28 of the 30 you start. 28-2. You win 24 of the 60. You're overall record is now 52-38. Not too shabby. If you are winning at 50-60%, that's probably as good as it's gonna get.
If you're under, try to think through what the AI is doing with your gear, from your careful observtion of other teams. Figure what you're trying to have the AI do, and tweak your gear to make the AI do it better. I did this and turned a 30% team into a 55% team, with the switchout of one very popular gadget to one neglected low level piece of junk that I'd never used. Overwatch was the low level piece of junk that made a decent AFK team great. That was a long time ago, though.
The Pep Talk[]
Tournaments are long. So, it's worthwhile to do the work now, in the early stages. You are going to suck at this. But it's possible that you could get better. You have to do the work, keep track of the meta, and adjust. You have to experiment. You have to be ready to fail at this before you are going to succeed. It takes a lot of losses to make it clear. And it will never be clear, because you can't see the AFK fights, so you have no idea what the AI is doing wrong. But, if you start now, tweak and tweak until you find something that works, you could do well in the later part of the tournament when it counts.
Good luck.
The Post Script[]
DO NOT POST QUESTIONS ABOUT AFK PVP ON MY MESSAGE WALL! As I said, I don't have time or interest to do the work necessary to make you better at PVP. You have to invest the time and thought yourself. If you ask as question on my wall, I will refer you back to here and close the thread. Sorry, but I wrote this so I wouldn't answer questions. You don't get how the repetition and the volume of questions makes me nuts. You want a quick answer, WW2 Cap and P5 Emma Frost, either class. You want a good answer, read the above and come to your own conclusion.