Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-10812391-20130730191550/@comment-209.165.195.44-20130731015806

Mystery guest here again. You're right; boss strength quickly outpaces your ability to one-cube them. I tend to forget that people aren't mind-readers, and I should have mentioned in my previous post some of the things I've been seeing.

Early in Full Assault, I didn't have the juice to one-cube freshly scanned Tier 3 Level 1 bosses (Tracer 1s) with a 100% success rate -- please don't laugh -- so I let the ones I scanned rot in my queue. After I MTMed my Windcharger from the previous episode and put him in my deck, I started getting a 100% kill rate on scanned T3L1s, so I started killing every one I scanned. But then I began seeing a lot more T3L2+ bosses than before, and a lot fewer T4 bosses. So I stopped killing T3L1s to see what would happen. Would I be stuck getting non-one-cubable bosses for the rest of the episode? Because that would mean no more energon for me, and as a result, fewer battlecubes for when I switched to point-scoring mode. I started scanning T4 bosses again, so whew.

My working theory is this: When the game decides what boss to throw at you when you scan, one of the factors it considers is your recent history of self-scanned, self-killed bosses -- the bigger the bosses you've killed lately, the bigger the bosses you'll scan. The way I play the game, I want to see one-cubable bosses ASAP after getting a level-up full cube recharge, just so that the hourly cube timer doesn't stop. I don't worry about how little the bounty is, I simply want to convert my hourlies into permacubes. And so I don't kill the biggest boss I can reliably kill, just the guy under him. To be sure, by the end of Full Assault, maybe 75% of the bosses I scan were T3L2+ bosses, but I got enough T4s at crucial times to keep the hourlies coming.