Hey all,
Wanted to share a few things about how Galactus works and what we're expecting versus what we're seeing.
To start, it seems like a lot of people are on a basic disconnect here, looking at the boss battle similar to how Ultron ran in terms of how things work. Meaning that Ultron should be going down pretty regularly. He's powerful, but his real power lies in the fact that killing his body doesn't stop him. You need to crush every one of his drones and main bodies to win. So winning rounds is a pretty regular occurrence. Game-wise, what this means is that players won fairly easily against Ultron and took their lumps against the drones. The stopping timer there was health packs based on when the drones finally wore you down. What this also meant is that the higher end Alliances would chew through the entire Event in about 12 hours and let it kinda sit for 3 days.
Galactus is different. The "minion" fights against the villains are relatively simple. They're there as minor hazards but relatively easily winnable. Galactus on the other hand is a massive threat. He's not going to be stopped by gnats. Iron Fist punching him in the toe isn't very painful. So he gets bored and swats them away. In game terms, this means that players are going to be beaten. Winning a round against Galactus is an achievement. You're supposed to lose. Every time you do, you're still chipping away at his life. It's an exercise in damage in aggregate. Over the 3.5 days, hitting him over and over to finally bring down the big bad is somewhat slow, but certainly effective.
Overall, most of the higher end Alliances are in Round 6 or knocking on the door to Round 7. Which is actually slightly faster than we were expecting people to get just based on the math. So everyone's doing pretty darned well in terms of progression. There are some teams rockin' the Winfinite, other teams that are pushing through with some interesting strategies (who woulda thought OBW would be a rock star against Galactus?). Not many Alliances are getting anywhere near full clears. Which is actually intended. You're supposed to lose your Health Packs on Galactus, rather than against the minions like on Ultron. It's also why we changed up the play method for this round too so that it's not just a flip flop between Ultron and minions till you win. There's a set number of times you can hit Galactus before you need to take a break to let minions refresh. That break means that you have plenty of times for Galactus drained Packs to refresh while you can go in and get some Black Vortex in. Or play Simulator (up soon). Or get your Devil Dino on when that starts up. It's a different design than the rush of Ultron where that was pretty much all players did while it was open.
Long story short, you all are doing really well against Galactus. Yes, the gameplay is different. I'm sure most of you aren't used to going into a battle with the idea that you may well lose. But given that you're still pulling out wins with pretty strong regularity, I don't see any reason this wouldn't continue into Rounds 7 and 8, and on to Cyclops awesomeness.
At the outset, going into the boss battle, you're looking at winning like normal. After all, it works elsewhere in the game, and it worked against Ultron. So suddenly getting rocked by Galactus is a shock. Keep at it. If things are really going to go poorly, we'll look at doing refresh timer changes and the like that we can do server-side as a quicker band aid style fix for run 1. After that, we'll figure out what we want to do for difficulty on run 2 (and any other runs that we do in the future, of course).
