Sigh I don’t understand why there aren’t more rants about this. But the scaling in City Watch is really quite counterintuitive to what it should be.
I understand the need to scale the game mode to provide players with a challenge. But with things the way they are, I feel very punished for increasing my heroes’ power. “Oh you want to upgrade your heroes? Let me make it harder for you to achieve the same farming goal as a player who didn’t.”
Why would you punish players for getting stronger 
It scales so it doesn’t punish you regardless. Also it promotes a more balanced roster if you’re struggling. Instead of working on your top 5 work on everybody else and it gets easier.
This is a good statement.
If developer don’t want to fix difficulty / enemy power, at least they could make a cap for enemy power, so people won’t get punished for being too strong, or at least least reward gold and disk power that scaling up with the strength of the enemy.
Most games indeed have similar mechanism, that when you are stronger, you get to fight stronger enemies. But in almost all those games, your loot will also get better.
I don’t agree that city watch is too strong. If you work on more than 5 characters and play smart. You shouldn’t have a problem. I beat some lvl 134 today. It’s not punishing for getting stronger. It’s scaling. Who wants a game that is too easy?
Now, I will say, maybe the gold or city watch coins should also scale with the difficulty of the enemies. It feels bad knowing someone going against lvl 74 is getting the same amount of gold as me killing 134
There is a lot of, " oh i should have thought about that" moments in this game.
What about your team level power… looking at it, as a single incident of a method…but really disney heroes is more of multiple mini-games.
That alone makes it deceptive if you dont keep a log.
I learnt that from the poker game from one of the surveys (fixed algorithm - its fixing either way)
So your team level power, the amount of heroes plus their power…when things get ridiculous hard, people never put themselves in a scale.
How many heroes do you have? How many are blue 2? Why does one blue 2 have 3 stars.
We see this alot in the arena and colloseum where a 16k can be ranked between two 20k players etc.
Why?
Most assume its the line up and thats half the answer.
Its a tale of two strokes.
One is where the scaling of the game is defeating its first established odds.
Two is that the balance of crimewatch is hung as a whole in odds of the other events.
So in one hand you need a lot of heroes for surge, on the other you need a team of 15 select, after that you need a team team of 5 elite, maybe 2 reserves.
All in all, players start having multiple heroes almost immediately and start powering them simultaenously.
Crimewatch doesnt punish you for getting stronger.
Is the scale disproportionate because of the games increase? Yes.
But crimewatch is only affected by this because of its requisite strategy… to keep everyone full hp, to sacrifice heroes with good skills but are under the radar.
For your next increase to have useful disks. To not increase dash knkwing the seperation of one badge will cost you when he was good where he was…
Overpowering useless skills.
Having more stars than you can currently handle.
If you cant handle it, it means youre winning somewhere else (arena etc.)
Not a punishment but a strategic balance that has “urbanized” beyond itself.
Suggestions to develop balanced roster is good, but in reality when people work on friend disks, those heroes equipped with 4* or 5* disk with disk level also maxed will have apparent higher power compared with those heroes who don’t.
This brings a power imbalance between heroes that cannot be solved, because when you use one hero to do friend mission, you cannot use it in another.
An easy fix could be citywatch enemy power do not calculate power from friend disks. Many people are unequipping friend disks before refreshing city watch, and this change could greatly ease their pain.
Another could be city watch enemy power is based on average power of your heroes, instead of max 5 power, but this might bring advantage to those who only develop 15 strong heroes, which is not so good imo.
I do have a balanced roster. 16 of my toons are completely maxed with exception of disk stars. I’m placed 14th on my server’s ranking board. My guild mates pepper the upper rankings- 4,9,11th. So imagine how annoyed we are the lower power levels have barely any issues dealing with CW while we fail to complete it day in and day out.
I’m happy to have a challenge. I get when something requires me to demonstrate some level of skill and strategy to accomplish. But what I don’t get is when a game punishes me for being ahead.
If my scaling resulted me in getting a little more resources. Sure. That’s justified. But no, we are facing the a distinctively more difficult gameplay for the exact same reward.
I do believe this should be reviewed. There is an element of progression punishment in play here, no doubt.
Most of us understand it’s scaled based on team power, but perhaps that is wrong; or an element of it is wrong (especially disks).
The gold coin increases aren’t significant enough to match the crazy power increases. And of course City Watch & Disk Power rewards don’t improve either.
The fact more players are resorting to taking disks off and re-applying later is proof that something is broken.
There needs to be a level cap on opponents, what is the point of having our characters with max skills if they will still fail against the opponent with higher levels? We pay serious coin and invest a lot of time in the game to get those max level/max skill characters. For what? City Watch to render them ineffective? Not cool.
There is no proper strategy here, it’s simply a sacrifice/raw power contest. While City Watch has reasonable rewards - it’s quickly becoming my least enjoyable part of the game.
Agreed. The smart way to beat city watch is to get your top 5 upgraded to a certain skill level, then start working on all your other characters as well. This helps for when your in the 5th wave and your top 5 is just defeated, you can have another 5 characters just as strong jump in and complete the City Watch for the day.
That’s where it gets frustrating. Maybe it’s just my server’s meta now, but it’s insanely infuriating to meet players that are higher leveled than you in wave 3 and 4.
City watch scales to your total team power if I am not wrong in my observations. Which essentially means it is punishing you for upgrading your spare toons. As opposed to keeping your top 5 in power then executing a hard stop.
This essentially means that if I have more characters, and more of my spare toons are upgraded, i’m Diluting the effectiveness of my main team. Let that stew for a moment - my city watch is harder as compared to another player who didn’t upgrade their spare toons, because they will be able to use their main team through more battles than me. Let that stew in your minds and honestly tell me how that is fair for me as a competitive player.
I’ve got some of the most upgraded toons in the entire server and like so many of those people around me, I cannot clear CW. Do you know ANY other game where the top players become unable to beat a game mode because they got too strong??
I don’t completely disagree CW calculation method(s) should probably be tweaked. However, with a higher overall team power wouldn’t that suggest you have more usable heroes for CW to defeat said team that’s too powerful? I don’t know what your strategy is for CW, but perhaps that is what needs to change for a complete run. I’m assuming you’re running the same 5 hero team the whole CW and it would be unreasonable to suggest difficulty needs to change for that convenience.
No, we are having 20+ units with full energy at round 5, and with a level cap 75 on our side we are facing lvl 130 enemies.
I’m always down for a challenge but this getting out of hand. Wave 5 all 120+ and Tia, Cal, Sulley compositions. Most heroes have level dependent skills and only so many are effective against that setup. It feels like we’re being forced to level a very specific set of heroes just for CW now to continue enjoying it the way weaker players would. I would at least like to see some team variance of at least 3 heroes between fights… not the top arena teams all of the last wave. I mean we love fighting a 129 Tia, Cal, Nick, Quorra, Sulley build right? Haha, plus there’s the issue of the screen misclick when selecting retry and touching anywhere else saves the results (your wiped team).
I’ve been on the “City Watch is too hard on hard” train for a while now. When my level 75 guys were fighting lv109 mobs on the last fight, I knew I would never beat it. It came to a point where its dang near impossible to actually do it and you’re relying completely on RNG of the last wave not to have a Sully (Lets be real, Sully is a monster and I had him alone decimate my teams).
I’ve seen arguments above talking about how if you’re failing at city watch, its because you’re stronger elsewhere. I disagree. I have a large portion of champions spread out at lv76 with maxed skills and frankly, if you don’t have the right combinations of champions, you’re going to fail no matter what.
Any heavily reliant crowd control character (abilities that temporarily take enemies out of the fight) is pretty much useless. Frozone is a prime example of this as I’ve never actually seen him achieve freezing anything high level in comparison. Certain tanks just can’t handle the stress of the fights high damage (I’m looking at you 5* maxed out Chief Bogo) and plenty of other champs just don’t have the survivability cough Dash. All in all, CW makes you instead rely on having a stellar maxed out core team with a couple replacements and when any of them are taken out of the fight, thats game over.
The team I use? 5* P3 Nick/Sully/Violet/Yax and a 4* WALL-E. MY backups are a 5*Zurg and Ralph. None of them have been good enough to take on the last fights of zone 5 teams on hard. Specifically the invincible Sully.
Its too hard on hard to an obsurd point and needs to have a cap based on… well, something.
I am even stuck at the Friends battles
I am level 80 (current cap on my server) and the screenshot below shows the last few teams I had to face in my City Watch over the weekend. I was able to clear them all, but it takes way too much time to set up all the heroes with max energy in the lower levels to make sure you can clear at the end.
The Update 1.3 patch notes did state that they are working on improvements for City Watch. I hope the difficulty scaling is a priority.
Wait. You’re telling me it DOESN’T calculate based on average team power? Because I remember having a few weak white heroes and CW Hard was a breeze but the moment I leveled at least 3 to purple, the next day it got difficult. Those 3 weren’t even my strongest. So I do think it’s based on the overall average.
All I know is today I couldn’t beat CW on Normal. And I’m using 5* maxed out units. This needs to be adjusted badly and I’m not sure why it isn’t after all the complaints.
Totally agree that City Watch difficultly needs to be re-worked. I have enough to make Sully a 4* and Mike a 5*, but I don’t want to do it because I’m afraid it will imbalance my roster and make City Watch un-completeable. There is something seriously wrong when the game discourages you from improving your roster.
Yesterday I tried City Watch on normal. Wave 4 was level 150, all P3’s and 5 stars. Took me 25 toons to beat. Support told me that if they can’t find a player on your server to match your power level they pick a player and boost their attributes.
