Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9234979-20130531181805

At 8k deck strength, I am not a big fish and have to add my meager contribution to taking out big bosses in the help queue and just hope enough dudes join in to finish the job and get us all our points. I snipe for finishers where I can, but when I'm in the tank with guys who can hit with tens of millions of strength, I typically don't get an opportunity to finish with my max of 2-3 million single cube strength. I giggle when fortunate timing and unfortunate math allows me to snatch the finish out of some other poor guy's hands and get that cube back, but it doesn't happen often at this level. So I have to guess whether a guy will get finished and just throw my lot in. Sometimes 200 million points disappear between one refresh and the next, so there's no real way to call it, but by the same token, I've seen so many L6 bosses wither on the vine with less than 20% health left.

So now, as my cubes dwindle in the final push, I have gotten a lot more conservative. I used to jump on L6 Megatrons if they got below 50%, but that's burned me too often. Even 25% has burned a lot. So now I try to wait until under 20%. But of course so many guys can finish that, that I wind up missing a lot of things I should have joined.

What do you use to determine whether to hit a boss? For me, if the guy who made the first hit and put out the help request has hit for 100m or above, it's promising. If he has hit for 150m it's really promising. And if he has hit for something like 180m, I'm pretty sure that baby is going to go, and going to go fast. That early momentum seems necessary to get other people motivated to join, and to allow for enough other small hitters like myself to fit into the available slots to do the rest of the necessary damage with our single cube shots.

If the first guy has done less than 100m, or worse, only about 40-50m, I am very wary and I hold back longer than I otherwise would. That's a lot of ground to make up for the rest of us small hitters if we're talking about 320m or 260m or whatever total, and there's no whale lurking around to pop in and finish it for us in dramatic fashion (which you never know). Realistically, if the first guy does 150m, that's great, but that's still a hell of a lot left to do.But it just seems to lead to more finishes than hoping for a pack of charitable 40m guys to chip in and do the heavy lifting.

Also if there is a flurry of promising initial action but then nothing for the next 10 minutes, I am imagining that finite list of help requestees who have already assessed this opportunity and have said, "Not for me, not unless it gets down to 20m points or so. Can't risk getting hung out to dry again." You kind of figure if the big fish are going to play, maybe they'd already have played by now. But I suppose they want to finish like anyone and are maybe waiting around thinking, "Not for me, not now. Let the smaller fish get it down below 80m then I'll swoop in for the finish." I guess you never know.

Am I imagining all of this or have you guys noticed the same things and think the same way? What makes you jump on a help boss earlier vs. waiting it out? After a certain point in the game, I'm happy to spend my cubes without finishing as long as I get my rank points, but  I still have to be judicious.

Also I wonder how all of the above logic and observations change as the days tick away and then as the final hours tick away. I have noticed so many L6s withering on the vine in the past 18 hours or so (leading into the final 12 hours or so), and can't remember how it has gone from there in past events. Have you guys noticed this happening more or less in the final hours of previous events? On the one hand, there's the thought of a mad final scramble for points and therefore more liberal/risky spending of cubes and therefore more boss finishes. On the other hand there's the thought of more of a rank-preservation strategy and conservative spending of cubes as they dwindle and become more scarce, resulting in more bosses withering on the vine. What have you noticed? 