4* Build Rate Observations

Vhailorx

Today is day 401 for me, and I have just fully covered my first 4* for whom I did not direct buy any covers.

(for reference, I have a covered xforce for whom I bought a few covers pre-nerf, and now a covered imhb built on release events, 1k rewards and 2 up from token pulls. I also have 2 older 4*s at 12 covers from tokens and rewards: Elektra and fury, and a usable but weak prof X at 5/1/2.)

A few observations:

(1) a summer of easier 1k rewards is starting to show. I could struggle to 1k for key covers in thebspring, but it was prohibitively expensive. Now I am hp positive while getting 80+ % of 1k rewards since June. After 9 months without any real 4* progress, I now have 4 4*s at or very near max. I have 3 more just a few covers away. That said, my bench is still filled with useless newer 4*s all at 5 covers or less. This will get worse before it gets better at the current release rate.

(2) luck matters a lot. I got massively lucky to pull 2 imhb reds from up from tokens in May. That let me max his red in june, which was coincidentally when my iron fist became usable. I think the only way to have achieved 5 red covers without token pulls would be to have finished top 5 in his release pve, and made it through round 6 of the up from event, AND hit every 1k red cover since May (or perhaps with the 1300 cover, you could have earned 6). Those two covers have let me reliably get 1k withou much trouble, even when I didn't have the best weekly boosted 3*s. Really hard to overstate how important those covers have been, despite the fact that I did absolutely nothing to get them.

(3) the 4* pool is big enough now that building solely through 1k covers using really viable anymore. Despite number 1, the rotation takes way too long now, and it's only getting longer. I think this is an intentional design choice to make the expensive 1300 reward attractive. Legendary tokens should help, but perhaps not enpugh, since they will inevitably produce a lot of duplicate covers. I continue to think that demiurge really needs to introduce a method to earn more than 1 cover for a particular 4* in each event. Perhaps that will happen when 4* pvps enter regular rotation. Can't happen soon enough.


Does my experience track with other players? Interested to hear from the community.

PeterGibbons316

Exactly the same for me. On day 330, paid for XFW, just maxed IMHB with his blue in the 1k spot (only because I got really lucky to have like 7 of his covers after his release with all those Ultron tokens). I haven't been pushing for the 1k rewards because they are often characters that won't be useful to me for some time - because I don't have more than 7 covers for any character I haven't spent $ on.

At this point though I'm really not that concerned about 4* building because I don't have the ISO anyway. I still need another 80k to take my newly covered IMHB from 250 to 270, my XFW (5/5/3), ProfX (5/1/5), and XPool (3/1/5) are all 180, and IMO more deserving of ISO than any other 4* I might acquire. So personally my struggle is ISO, not covers.