New threshold

No, not a biking post.

I was playing Puzzle Quest yesterday, and there's this thing called the Daily Deadpool.  It's a set of five missions that run every day.  They aren't identical every day, but they follow a pattern.

The first is taking on a two-star hero with two NPCs (for lack of a better term.  These might be robots, or soldiers, or ninjas, but things which don't get to move the tiles).  The hero is level fifteen, and the two sidekicks are level ten.  Win that one, and get 500 Iso-8.  Pretty easy (though I do remember when it was a challenge).

The second, which requires taking on the first, is two waves of foes.  The first wave is four NPCs of around fortieth level (there's some variation here).  When you defeat that wave, a second appears that is one three-star hero with three more NPC sidekicks.  Again, all around fortieth level.  Win that one, and you get a recruiting token for a two-star or better prize (though their definition of two-star leaves much to be desired.  It includes healing packs, for goodness' sake) plus 200 Iso-8.

This one has been routine for me for a while.

If you beat that one, you can continue on to the 'Third time's the charm' mission.  That one features three seventy-ish level heros (and you can't use those heroes to fight them, which can suck badly).  That one I've shied away from, but I took it on yesterday and beat it (with both of my games, even).  Win, and you get 1000 Iso-8.

Irrespective of the results of those three, there are two more missions.  The first requires you to have a particular three-star hero (it occurs to me now that this is also the hero that leads the second wave of the two-wave fight; never noticed that before), who you then use, along with two others, to fight three sixtieth-level heroes.  Since this is generally one for whom I have one cover (and is therefore only level forty), this one is quite a challenge for me still.  I've been winning it, but it's been nip-and-tuck every time.  If you win, you get another two-star token (again, for some weird definition of two-star).

If you win that mission, you get a final challenge, four waves of a mix of NPCs and heroes, each around level one hundred to one-thirty.  I've tried this a couple times before, and gotten my butt kicked each time.  But if you win, you get another cover for the three-star hero from the 'Dat Required Character' mission.  Only predictable way to get a three-star cover, although it's limited in a couple ways (first, it's a cover that you already have, and second, it can't be a four-star).  Still, it's pretty sweet.

So, yesterday was Spider-Man, and I was feeling optimistic, so I tried it again.  And this time, after a long and painful battle, I won.  It was kind of draining, as I was feeling like I was about to lose both times when the wave of heroes appeared.

And to add to that, I realized yesterday that, if you finish all five missions, you get a 2000 Iso-8 prize (that was part of why I wanted to try the four-wave mission yesterday).  It turns out that I was more excited about the Iso-8 than I was about the Spider-Man cover, yesterday, though I can think of a number of characters for whom that would not be the case.

Still, it felt really good, and makes me look forward to the day when even the four-wave battle is an easy one (that won't happen anytime soon).