Max covered characters at 114?

Unknown

Lately I've been looking at other players rosters just for fun (mainly the top players in each event) and a lot of them have pretty much every character in the game with max covers just sitting at 114 with 4*s around 140. Is this mainly just a PvE thing or is there some next level strategy that I;m missing here? Off topic but also, where are all the Cyclops covers? He is one of my favorite Marvel characters and I just got back into this game like 2 months ago after a long break and he hasn't been offered up as a reward or anything. Meanwhile BP is everywhere it seems like.

MarvelDestiny

As far as I know there is no next-level strategy going on here outside of mmr/scaling management.

Some people are trying to keep the mmr/scaling down by keeping their characters under-leveled. Others (like me) soft-cap characters while waiting to have enough characters to level at the same time. Nothing sucks more for mmr/scaling than having one or two characters light years ahead of the pack.

Punisher5784

Most players are scared of the crazy scaling. Right now I have roughly 12 characters nearly cover maxed at lvl 105. I want to wait until I have enough good characters with optimal covers before I start lvling everyone.

I made the mistake of lvling Mohawk to 120 while everyone else was 2* lvl 94 because my scaling looked like it jumped a lot. She was my first fully covered 3* prior to DDQ.

I'm sure many players r using this approach.

Unknown

Basically if you have a character at level 100 and your enemies are also at level 100, you can be nearly assured that if it was possible to get that character to level 200 with the same number of covers, your enemy is going to be higher than level 200, thus giving you a strict disadvantage. Now there is some minimum scaling factor so it's not like lower the level the better but the best level for PvE is definitely not the max level.

There's nothing to be scared about scaling. It's just harder. You can live with it but if you don't plan to be doing much in PvP then there's no reason to subject yourself to a handicap in PvE.

fmftint

The biggest advantage it gives you is options.
When you restrict your roster to a narrow level window it allows you to mix all tiers from 2-4 stars

Arondite

Uhh...I think it's because that's where ISO costs start rising.

I think you guys are reading too deep into it.

Xenoberyll

i have 7 maxed 3 stars at the moment, a handful between 135 and 155 and everybody else at 100-120.
i also have 4k ISO right now, which is why they're not all 166s...

when somebody becomes featured i try to get him to 120 at least, from there on it's expensive to level them but i try my best. It's just never enough ISO.

TxMoose

having a 'jacked up' roster with 2 high guys and everyone else held at 104 (see roster in my sig), I can say that scaling is hard and that any ending nodes in pve require either a very good group of boosteds or a group that includes my lthor. other than that, my essentials aren't crazy and the rest of the nodes are very doable normally (heroics suck, especially when thor/loki aren't included). as long as initial scaling looks at 3 or 4+ top characters on my roster, I don't think my thor/loki are throwing everything out of whack. i think where it gets very hard is if you max a group of 3-4 and they aren't all top notch guys, or if they don't have very good synergy. because that might see initial scaling similar (? who knows) to full maxed rosters and that could put you in a bind. as it stands i can still get t50 when i want. when i really wanted daken, was able to get t10, but truthfully t150 is a breeze. keep in mind i have most characters (except dino and beast), so I'm doing all essentials.

Pinko_McFly

114 is the average max level for 9 covers, 117 and 112 are also possible depending on cover distribution. The iso cost for levelling does not go up until 114.
That area for 3*s does seem to be the sweet spot for scaling as it allows you to still get use from your 2*s in the harder levels.
Under the old performance based Mmr, this strategy put you at a disadvantage, but now that your matchups are based on your roster level, this strategy still allows you to get 2* teams as opponents (though they can still be hard to find).
The devs have stated that the pve scaling is based on performance and there are plenty of people that use this as a reason to call the soft capping method foolish and an invalid strategy, but they refuse to acknowledge that your roster strength will directly affect your performance and consequently affect your scaling. So if you want to take 1 or 2 3*s up to 166, your pve scaling will follow suit unless you don't use those characters in pve.

Malcrof

Pinko McFly wrote:

114 is the average max level for 9 covers, 117 and 112 are also possible depending on cover distribution. The iso cost for levelling does not go up until 114.
That area for 3*s does seem to be the sweet spot for scaling as it allows you to still get use from your 2*s in the harder levels.
Under the old performance based Mmr, this strategy put you at a disadvantage, but now that your matchups are based on your roster level, this strategy still allows you to get 2* teams as opponents (though they can still be hard to find).
The devs have stated that the pve scaling is based on performance and there are plenty of people that use this as a reason to call the soft capping method foolish and an invalid strategy, but they refuse to acknowledge that your roster strength will directly affect your performance and consequently affect your scaling. So if you want to take 1 or 2 3*s up to 166, your pve scaling will follow suit unless you don't use those characters in pve.

The iso per level stays at around 500 until 120, then it jumps into the 1k+ range.

I leveled 15 chars to 120+ when the reduction hit.

Pinko_McFly

Malcrof wrote:

The iso per level stays at around 500 until 120, then it jumps into the 1k+ range.

I leveled 15 chars to 120+ when the reduction hit.

Yes you are 100% right, and I did the same thing in regards to leveling. I'll blame typing on a phone and an apparent brain fart.

Unknown

I actually advise my alliance members against lvling over lvl 94 if their primary focus is story events and not verses events! Even if they have things fully covered... A lot of it is due to scaling of events.. This is probably the only game I know of where it actually hurts you to level your characters for PvE content!

The impact of scaling isn't as bad as it use to be, because they lowered the impact of match up damage past lvl 270 being extraordinarily high for lower tier characters, a lvl 395 Juggernaut was a death sentence the moment you saw him. However powers and health still scale up. The problem is unless you can fully cover and fully lvl several 4 Stars, you hit a kinda bell curve in terms of your rosters relative power level as your character levels go up... The peak of the bell curve is very subjective because of the constant change to characters and their powers, personally I think it peaks at lvl 94 with 2 star characters. (Note: I say relative power level when compared to a normal difficulty node, a 4 star roster is still going to be stronger than a 3 star roster etc, etc... but relative to a normal node, a 2 star roster is when things are easiest and hence strongest point in pve)

It's sad to think I actually had a much easier time with pve events when I was with 2 star characters than I am with 3 or 4 star characters! Bad game design as far as I am concerned, simply because it gives the player no incentive to improve their characters for the purpose of pve events.

Verses events that's a different matter, but not everyone likes playing against over players, and some people are very confrontational about being forced to play against another player for any reason!

Ruinate

skydivearcher wrote:

I actually advise my alliance members against lvling over lvl 94 if their primary focus is story events and not verses events! Even if they have things fully covered... A lot of it is due to scaling of events.. This is probably the only game I know of where it actually hurts you to level your characters for PvE content!

When the iso changes hit, I leveled my 3* guys to 100 and mixed them up with some 2*. The 2* were tanking for my 3* and that pissed me off. I leveled them up to 119 and now it's better.

udonomefoo

I'm one of those weirdos with 20+ level 114 characters. It's a combination of everything that's already been said here. Except ISO cost, I've got almost 180k just waiting until I'm ready.

The main one for me is:

fmftint wrote:

The biggest advantage it gives you is options.
When you restrict your roster to a narrow level window it allows you to mix all tiers from 2-4 stars

I like being able to still mix in my 2*s when forming teams.

I still don't have many strong 3*s optimally covered. Seems like all the bottom tier characters have been given out liberally since I joined, but the top tier ones like Cage, IF, Cyc, Kamala, Cmags and BP haven't shown up hardly at all (I'm sure that's a coincidence ). I'm waiting until I have some of the stronger characters ready before I start going up from there. If that means I can only get t100 in pvp for now, aside from an occasional lucky bracket placement, then that's fine.