Can't seem to get 3* to create next team

Unknown

Hi all,

I've been a perpetual 2* player it seems for a long time. I have a "core" team of (all lvl 94):
2* Thor - 5/3/5
2* BW - 5/3/5
2* Mag - 4/4/5
2* Storm - 4/4/5

I stopped playing for a little while (6 months maybe) back at the time that Invisible Woman was the only other 4* besides Wolverine. Now with all these new covers, I find myself lost in how I can actually get enough 3* covers to make it worth my while. I read that a 3* cover that is around 100-120 is weaker than my 94 2* so what's the point even of trying to get those 3* covers?

My best 3*s I have are Punisher: 4/1/2 @ level 91 and Hulk: 2/3/1 @ level 78. Nothing else is close to being something I can farm covers for.
I guess I'm just confused by how some people have so many covers, either I am missing a huge part of this game (I do PVE, not PVP) or I'm doing something drastically wrong, or I literally have the worst luck in the world for pulling covers. I don't want instant gratification and D3 to give me all 3 and 4* covers, but if there's something I should be doing that I can work towards that would get me covers more efficiently I'd gladly do that.

Thanks in advance.

Unknown

FWIW, I'm at day 550+ (just got R & G!), and my highest covered 3* has 6 (Hood). It takes either:

1.) A looong time, or

2.) serious dedication, which leads to,

3.) a plan for what you want to accomplish (specific characters you're interested in, so you can pick what you play and how hard), or

4.) spending some cash.

Any of the above will obviously affect your progression, and any efforts directed at #s 2, 3, or 4 will obviously alter #1, as well as each affecting the other 3 respectively.

Having myself just started playing with a significant rise in interest (past couple months), I've noticed my 3*s slowly creeping toward relative viability (more covers on more cards, but still not competing with my 2*s)

As always, I would suggest Polarity's transition guide if you haven't seen it. Good luck!

DBC

Unknown

Thanks DBC - I have been a follower of Polarity's guide but it hasn't been updated since January. Is it still a relevant guide with all the changes and new characters lately?

Unknown

Daefish wrote:

Thanks DBC - I have been a follower of Polarity's guide but it hasn't been updated since January. Is it still a relevant guide with all the changes and new characters lately?

It allowed me to correct some stupid mistakes and has prevented some others, but I'm not entirely sure it is up-to-date as of right now.

That said, I can tell you that I've read and reread it since January, and the advice seems sound to me, and further, my recent experience has borne out its relavance.

Almost forgot, beyond Polarity, be sure to check out the "character" section and look at the "preferred builds" polls specifically. There are MUCH smarter, more hard-core players in the forum discussing builds, and they will (graciously) save you from yourself (*cough* OBW vs. *cough*) more often than not...

DBC

cletus1985

One very viable source that you're missing is hitting 300 in PvP, which should be doable with a 2* roster. I'd personally aim for 400 for the HP, but since they've changed MMR I'm not sure how easily that can be done now. Then at the end of the season you should be able to make up the difference from what you've gotten to the 4,000 point reward for the Heroic 10-pack which should net you a couple 3* covers with the increased odds, plus you'll get 10 tokens from the 300 point progression each PvP.

GrumpySmurf1002

Daefish wrote:

I stopped playing for a little while (6 months maybe)

(snip)

I guess I'm just confused by how some people have so many covers, either I am missing a huge part of this game (I do PVE, not PVP) or I'm doing something drastically wrong, or I literally have the worst luck in the world for pulling covers.

Your first sentence is the answer to your second sentence here. 6 months is an eternity of progress lost. And not playing PvP would also be a giant lost source of progress.

With steady play, that's many, many 3* covers not acquired over that time.

Vhailorx

The 2* to 3* transition is long and arduous (though likely better than it was 5 months ago).

I think the best strategy is the following:

1) spend hp only on roster slots. Buy as many of them as you can.

2) stash every 3* (and 4*) cover you get. Dont throw them away.

3) only open tokens of you have roster space for new 3*s (since you never want to throw a 3* away)

4) hit pve hard whenever a good 3* is the reward. Getting all 3 covers from a top 10 finish is the best way to build a 3* quickly.

5) join a top 100 pve-only alliance. A 2* roster can get excellent pve scores, and that extra alliance cover will help.

6) don't level anyone past @100 until you have several 3*s with 10+ covers (preferably well matches 3* that cover all 6 colors).

7) once you can get 300 in PvP (should be doable with 2*:-) play to at least 300 for the token (400 for the hp is even better)

Doing all that still took me almost 4 months to get a single covered 3*. But the growth curve is exponential once you get that first one. 4 months for the first 3*, but I now have 20+ just a few months later

Unknown

PvP it is - what events should I be doing to get to 300? Is that the Season events or weekly? Some of this I think is harder for me than before after teh change to healing. Before I was able to use BW to keep my team healed up so I could play more but recently with the boost to health (temp hit points) I find myself burning through health packs a lot more.

Malcrof

Double edged sword here... play DPD, PVP and PVE for tokens, you will eventually get 3*'s, and as you get them.. they accumulate faster... but do you have the roster space? Do you have a team that can reliably beat DPD?

If you are going to spend money on a token pack, wait for a week you really want the DPD chars, then snag the 8k HP for the 40 pack.

Odds are you will get 1 or more of each, and possibly even 1000+ HP back for roster space.. just my $0.02

Unknown

Some other generalized advice:
Respec CStorm to 5/5/3, unless you're using her to suicide kill nodes.
Respec MNMags to have 5 in polarity shift (probably 3/5/5)
Respec OBW to 3/5/5
Respect Thor to 3/5/5

a 3* at 100-120 underlevelled can be stronger than a 94 2*.

Agree with most of the other advice, particularly playing Deadpool's Daily, and PVP to 400.

Tredo

The only point I would argue against in the threads above is buying tokens (even the DPD tokens). I know I've gone long stretches with nothing but 2* pulls. You could by a 40-pack and get nothing worthwhile. The ROI on token packs is not guaranteed. It could be amazing, or it could be horrible and dispiriting.

Unknown

daibar wrote:

Agree with most of the other advice, particularly playing Deadpool's Daily, and PVP to 400.

PVP 400 is of course good. But it was luck dependent for 2* rosters before. And it's next to impossible now. *Sigh*

orbitalint

Tredo wrote:

The only point I would argue against in the threads above is buying tokens (even the DPD tokens). I know I've gone long stretches with nothing but 2* pulls. You could by a 40-pack and get nothing worthwhile. The ROI on token packs is not guaranteed. It could be amazing, or it could be horrible and dispiriting.

Agree 1000%. If you're going to splurge on HP, might as well put it to covers you actually know you want, even then, I'd still advocate for patience as I've build my roster mostly on PVE/light PVP. I've bought under 10 3* covers (on saved up HP) and I have 30ish max covered 3*'s. DDQ has been a godsend for the transition too.

8k HP will get you far better results if you concentrate them in 3*'s you already have than going with a shotgun approach to have 1 cover of maybe 7-10 random 3*'s from pack pulls.

Token purchases are lottery tickets and should be treated as such - for entertainment purposes only, not a consistent way to get 3*'s. DDQ is probably going to be your best source to make your 3*'s better.

Malcrof

orbitalint wrote:

Tredo wrote:

The only point I would argue against in the threads above is buying tokens (even the DPD tokens). I know I've gone long stretches with nothing but 2* pulls. You could by a 40-pack and get nothing worthwhile. The ROI on token packs is not guaranteed. It could be amazing, or it could be horrible and dispiriting.

Agree 1000%. If you're going to splurge on HP, might as well put it to covers you actually know you want, even then, I'd still advocate for patience as I've build my roster mostly on PVE/light PVP. I've bought under 10 3* covers (on saved up HP) and I have 30ish max covered 3*'s. DDQ has been a godsend for the transition too.

8k HP will get you far better results if you concentrate them in 3*'s you already have than going with a shotgun approach to have 1 cover of maybe 7-10 random 3*'s from pack pulls.

Token purchases are lottery tickets and should be treated as such - for entertainment purposes only, not a consistent way to get 3*'s. DDQ is probably going to be your best source to make your 3*'s better.

biggest problem with this is.. how to get the cover to begin with to spend HP to buy the next level?

For instance.. my Falcon is now 0/2/1.. if i could, i would spend 8k HP on a 40 pack to try for that 1 yellow to get him started.. and maybe get some HP back with lucky pulls of 250 or 1k, and some other random covers i need

I know it will come in a couple months in DPD.. but waiting a couple months is hard lol

orbitalint

Malcrof wrote:

biggest problem with this is.. how to get the cover to begin with to spend HP to buy the next level?

For instance.. my Falcon is now 0/2/1.. if i could, i would spend 8k HP on a 40 pack to try for that 1 yellow to get him started.. and maybe get some HP back with lucky pulls of 250 or 1k, and some other random covers i need

I know it will come in a couple months in DPD.. but waiting a couple months is hard lol

Yeah, I get that. It's a chicken or the egg kind of thing. However, spending 50 dollars for a single cover (it comes out to a 94% chance of getting at least one of the color and character you want in the DPD 42 pack) seems a little stiff. Sure you'll probably get some other covers too but even then, you still only have one cover to then plunk down 20 bucks of HP for the rest of them. I don't know of many covers that are worth that. Maybe the 5th XF v2.0 black back in the day but that might be it.

The "if I could" statement makes me feel like you aren't actually thinking about it. Just wanted to lend my perspective.

P.S. - I'd still wait on guys like Falcon.

IF, Cyc, BP, Cage, Patch, Daken, Fat Thor, KK, CMags, and Hood would be the people I'd want to start making good progress towards. We're towards the end of the cycle in DPD, so Daken purple will be coming up soon too .

Vhailorx

Malcrof: it sure does suck having a 0/2/1 falcon. But it sucks a lot less than dropping 8k hp in a 40pack that doesn't give you the 1 cover that you want (and the odds of getting any one cover from a 40 pack are very small).

At the very very early stages, token packs can be worth it because almost every 3* cover will be useful. But, at the very early stages, roster slots are scarce too. That is why I recommend investing in roster slots and building slowly. It will take a bit longer, but is cheaper and resource efficient.

Finally, the ddq should make this process must fast than it was 6 or 8 months ago. Having even 1 cover for a 3* ensures that you will eventually get access to all 3 abilities with a little patience.

TLCstormz

If I didn't mind losing so much, I'd rewind time and do ONLY PvP. That is the 110% cover overflow in the game. From what I observe, at least. Playing there is where it counts.

Zen808

Don't underestimate PVE. If you're chasing covers, it's not a good Time-Reward ratio. But with the new format, most PVE subs run 24hrs, and give some form of gold token out to top 40%. It doesn't take a lot of effort to make Top 40%. That's some low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking.

Unknown

Not that this is by any stretch a great idea, but I was in pretty much the same situation as you, including a very long break before ddq came around. I would randomly pull 3*s or get one cover randomly from PvE or PvP back in the day and had to sell off most of my 2*s to make room for a single cover in at least 5-10 3*s. At the time I was sitting on 300k ISO, roughly enough for one and maybe a half characters, but I Never had the characters to dump the ISO into, so I went on a spending spree with standard tokens. It's not glamorous, it's not even a mediocre way to get covers, but it did help. I'd average a 3* roughly every 10-15k ISO, so with RNG that meant I got about 20 or so covers, luckily I got a few 3* Cap covers and since coming back, he's now one of my 2 fully covered characters, and he destroys PvE

As people have said, you're also not ideally covered on your 2*s, it might not seem worth only stealing 3 AP, but at 8 cost, OBW's recon is a lot faster and snowballs a lot quicker, when I see an OBW with 11 cost It's generally a free kill. She's sadly still a very core character for me even though I finally have a full page of lvl 100-120 3*s, to the point where I sometimes consider building a second one because I use her so much.

Otherwise, like people say, just jump on specific PvE/PvP events and go for specific characters that you want, if you have time for all of them, so be it, but try to get a core team, and keep them around level 100 until you have at least 3 of them to level up, otherwise you run into problems.

Arondite

Build a Magneto (Modern) 3/5/5.
Build a Storm (Classic) 5/5/3.

This should take about 2-3 Weeks if you're playing pretty regularly.

Use this team to play late in each event (final 2-3 Hours). Use U/P boosts to end matches as quickly as possible and hopefully sustain as little damage as possible. Try to climb to ~400 minimum, as the HP Gains will actually prove significant over time. If possible, fight for higher (though pushing too high too early will make you a prime target for late-climbing 3 Star players), and with any luck you can snag a T100/T50 placement, which rewards signficant HP and a 3 Star cover. If you can land T100 66% of the time, you're getting 2 covers a week.

If you're feeling this frustrated about 3 Star progression, you're probably inclined to (or are already) discarding 3 Stars you don't see as "useful" or feel like you won't finish. This is progression suicide, since the number of 3 Stars is so diverse, you're going to rarely get multiple covers for one character in quick succession. Rather, if you get "lucky" and pull 3 separate 3 Star covers a week, odds aren't good that it will be for someone you have if you're only holding on to ~5 characters and selling the rest.

Additionally, if you're buying roster slots and holding on to each 3 Star you manage to pull or otherwise acquire, Deadpool's Daily Quest also offers an incredible amount of progression, albeit dispersed over a wide field. It will be quite some time before DpDQ alone makes any single 3 Star playable all by itself, but as supplementary progression it's an astounding utensil that you should absolutely be utilizing if you want to enter the 3 Star realm.

Vhailorx

I would be shocked if new stormneto is good for 500 points in the current PvP environment (but haven't been in 2* land in PvP for quite some time).

Otherwise I agree with arondite's advice.

DO NOT DISCARD 3* if you want to progress. I know it seemspointless to hold on to that 0/0/1 hood, but it's the only way to get anywhere in this game. That doesn't cost hundreds of dollars.