Polarity's Guide on Going From 1* to 3* (Updated: 1/22/15)

Unknown

ComradeVS wrote:

Great guide. Wish I found it (and the forums) just as I started not after I invested some time into it already.

I'm currently trying to finish my 2* team, and I have Thor, C.Storm and Daken as my 3 highest characters right now, and only Daken actually has max covers (though I'm only 1 away from Thor).

What characters (besides OBW) would make a good 3rd for Thor + Daken? Would Little Torch work well?

I was using Classic Storm as my other main for a while, but without having many Magneto covers, she's now tanking a bunch of colours and it's not anywhere as effective now.

You could throw in Ares there. He will make the perfect team and very often people will avoid them in PVP as they are annoying. Wolvie would also be a good 3rd person for this group.

I would strongly suggest to find some covers for CStorm and MNMags. I had CStorm maxed and I was playing her occasionally because she dies a lot. But when she gets matched with MNMags they do wonders. I mean MNMags tanks blue for her and also collects purple wich generates blue. Often the purple skill of mags will create cascades to a point that it will charge again or be very close to being ready again. Long story short, it doesn't take long to get this duo going (3-4 turns or a bit more if unlucky), but once they do it's game over even if you go against 3*.

Unknown

Okin107 wrote:

ComradeVS wrote:

Great guide. Wish I found it (and the forums) just as I started not after I invested some time into it already.

I'm currently trying to finish my 2* team, and I have Thor, C.Storm and Daken as my 3 highest characters right now, and only Daken actually has max covers (though I'm only 1 away from Thor).

What characters (besides OBW) would make a good 3rd for Thor + Daken? Would Little Torch work well?

I was using Classic Storm as my other main for a while, but without having many Magneto covers, she's now tanking a bunch of colours and it's not anywhere as effective now.

You could throw in Ares there. He will make the perfect team and very often people will avoid them in PVP as they are annoying. Wolvie would also be a good 3rd person for this group.

I would strongly suggest to find some covers for CStorm and MNMags. I had CStorm maxed and I was playing her occasionally because she dies a lot. But when she gets matched with MNMags they do wonders. I mean MNMags tanks blue for her and also collects purple wich generates blue. Often the purple skill of mags will create cascades to a point that it will charge again or be very close to being ready again. Long story short, it doesn't take long to get this duo going (3-4 turns or a bit more if unlucky), but once they do it's game over even if you go against 3*.

I wasn't sure if Ares was the way to since him and Thor use the same colours. I'll give it a shot. And I should be able to get another Yellow cover for Ares and get him to 5/2/5 after Children of the Atom is done.

I would love to get my CStorm (5/2/4) and MNMags(3/4/1) going, but I'm probably gonna wait until Thor/Ares/Daken are done or if I all of a sudden get a much of Magneto Red covers.

Thanks for the advice!

NorthernPolarity

ComradeVS wrote:

Great guide. Wish I found it (and the forums) just as I started not after I invested some time into it already.

I'm currently trying to finish my 2* team, and I have Thor, C.Storm and Daken as my 3 highest characters right now, and only Daken actually has max covers (though I'm only 1 away from Thor).

What characters (besides OBW) would make a good 3rd for Thor + Daken? Would Little Torch work well?

I was using Classic Storm as my other main for a while, but without having many Magneto covers, she's now tanking a bunch of colours and it's not anywhere as effective now.

I like little Torch for this team more than Ares: The problem with Ares is that he's a bit redundant with Thor in that both characters are good mainly for their yellow/green. Torch adds a pretty useful red/black to the team, and Daken tanks black for Torch to boot. Ares is probably better for defense but Torch is vastly superior for offense.

NorthernPolarity

Updated the 2* section with Daken / Hawkeye. New 3*s to be added in a future section.

Unknown

Thanks for a great guide!

yogi_

I'm not sure how much work this would be, but I was wondering if you could do a 2* - 3* character team selection whereby you have a full 2* roster and would like to play with a similarly levelled 3* character.

So, a person can look down an alphabetical list of the 3* characters and find out which 2* team mates match them well.

Other possible edits:

- Remove environmental reference in Classic Hawkeye.
- Remove jungle environment reference in M.Storm/C. Hawkeye 1* team area.
- Remove desert reference in 1* - 2* team area.
- Edit red/green reference to Storm in 1* - 2* team area.
- Remove the Tips area about LR from the 3* area - seems redundant now.

Trisul

yogi_ wrote:

I'm not sure how much work this would be, but I was wondering if you could do a 2* - 3* character team selection whereby you have a full 2* roster and would like to play with a similarly levelled 3* character.

So, a person can look down an alphabetical list of the 3* characters and find out which 2* team mates match them well.

Basically, utility characters will still be good. OBW is an amazing utility 2* that fits well with almost every 3* simply because her ap stealing is so good, and purple powers are generally lacking in MPQ. If you have a good 3* blue user (I can't really think of any except 3* Mags, which you can't use), MNMags may still be useful. Modern Hawkeye is nice if you have cascaders but adds very little else.

Falcon and Psylocke work well with the 2* strike tile generators (Wolv, Daken).

The powerhouse 2* guys (Ares/Thor/Torch/Daken) are still good and useful, but more dependent on what 3* guys you are maxing.

As long as you cover at least 3-4 colors you probably can't go wrong in picking 2* heroes to go with your team.

TL;DR: OBW

loroku

Another thing that could stand a review is the advice on the 1* -> 2* transition. I've been playing for a few weeks and getting my 1* crew off the ground was great - very consistent, very rewarding, and it felt like progress was being made. However, getting 2* characters going is taking much longer and I don't actually know how to go about doing it, since nothing really seems to get me closer and there's no amount of sustained "climbing" that can be done - progression seems like 100% random chance. In particular, these two pieces of advice are either wrong or I don't understand them:

- Participate in as much PvP as you can! The random drops are going to be your main source of 2* covers, so you want to farm those as much as possible. The 500 progression cover, 600 progresison hp the 600 progression cover, and the placement awards are going to be your lifeblood during this phase.

You're kidding, right? I have broken 300 progression points once and I feel like that was a lucky fluke. I have a full, good, solid 50-ish level 1* team and I cannot break 300 progression points, or ever get in the top 100 rank. After several (5 or 6) events in the top 200 or 300 rank, I can't even get that far anymore. I'm constantly trounced by 90+ / 100+ level guys - stuff where there is no way I could possibly win. At the end of the day: you are NOT going to be getting consistent 2* covers from PvP at this point. Also the main "reward" I get from each game is ISO, not covers. I've gotten maybe 3 or 4 2* covers in all those games of PvP.

- The Lightning Rounds are the best source of iso in the game: join at the very beginning (opening minutes) of each one, and you'll see weak seed teams that you can easily beat. You get a standard token and a good amount of iso for going up to 100 progression points which you can do off of seed teams, so do as many as you can to farm iso. Your team still isn't strong enough to compete in them yet though, so I wouldn't go for much more than that.

I don't get this, either. The "best source" of iso in the game gets me about ~300 iso? Because once you count all the awards, progression awards, and final reward, that's about all I get, especially around 100 progression points. The story mode is more profitable at this point.

I did extremely well in one PvE event and got one decent character; all my other 2* guys are languishing around level 20-30. I just can't get the covers for them. The low point was opening about 50 standard and ~10 heroic packs (all rewards from various sources over the last week or two) all in one day, and getting pretty much nothing for it. I got about 5 useful covers for two characters out of all that, and that's not enough to even start to make me use anything but my main 1* team.

The only thing I can figure out is that you just need to play for MONTHS. Eventually I guess you'll hit an event where your characters are luckily boosted and you can get a cover or two, but you need to do that like 10 times at LEAST before you can even start to get a decent 2* guy going. All the while, you're opening hundreds of standard packs for that tiny chance to get a good cover you need for a character you already have that doesn't suck.

It just doesn't seem like playing the game actually gets me any closer to anything. It also seems like from the descriptions that the progression slope has been changed quite a bit since the early days.

NorthernPolarity

@Loroku, how long have you been playing / stuck in the 1->2* transition phase? I added the 2* covers in PvP thing because I thought that the 2*s were rewarded at a good enough frequency to become the main source of covers with the old nerfs to changing the 2* cover rewards in PvP from 3 covers to 1.

To anyone else reading that recently completed this transition, what were your main source of covers? I'll update the section accordingly if I see more feedback on it not matching up to current times.

loroku wrote:

The Lightning Rounds are the best source of iso in the game: join at the very beginning (opening minutes) of each one, and you'll see weak seed teams that you can easily beat. You get a standard token and a good amount of iso for going up to 100 progression points which you can do off of seed teams, so do as many as you can to farm iso. Your team still isn't strong enough to compete in them yet though, so I wouldn't go for much more than that.

I don't get this, either. The "best source" of iso in the game gets me about ~300 iso? Because once you count all the awards, progression awards, and final reward, that's about all I get, especially around 100 progression points. The story mode is more profitable at this point.

Err... did you follow that bolded part? The whole point on LRs is that you can beat up on seed teams (which typically have the buffed character at level 60 like yours, and two level 2-15 characters), which are extremely easy to beat and take maybe half the time of a match in prologue. This means that you fight 5-6 teams in the span of say 15 minutes and get 1k iso for your troubles, which is a good amount more efficient in terms of iso / time than any other part of the game. Prologue might be comparable if you're still doing a first clear of all the nodes, but once you start reclearing the nodes and getting those 20 iso booby prizes, you're going to be wishing you were grinding the first 15 minutes of each LR instead.

NorthernPolarity

yogi_ wrote:

I'm not sure how much work this would be, but I was wondering if you could do a 2* - 3* character team selection whereby you have a full 2* roster and would like to play with a similarly levelled 3* character.

So, a person can look down an alphabetical list of the 3* characters and find out which 2* team mates match them well.

Other possible edits:

- Remove environmental reference in Classic Hawkeye.
- Remove jungle environment reference in M.Storm/C. Hawkeye 1* team area.
- Remove desert reference in 1* - 2* team area.
- Edit red/green reference to Storm in 1* - 2* team area.
- Remove the Tips area about LR from the 3* area - seems redundant now.

Thanks for the edits, I've updated the guide accordingly. In terms of the 2 - 3* character team selection, there's too many permutations to list out all of the possible combinations, but I'll add a section explaining theory about what types of 2*s go well with 3*s (basically Trisuls post about color coverage and support characters generally scaling better).

Trisul

My main source of 2* covers was indeed PvP.

The odds aren't too likely (I heard speculation that it was 1 in 9 chance of a 2* cover, but I think it's worse than that), but it's still the best way to get 2* covers. I'd play a lot of shield sim, that's how I finished my first 2* guy (Wolv). Don't get me wrong, it took a LONG time, but compared to the 2* --> 3* transition, it's nothing. Just have patience and enjoy the game!

300 iso (excluding match bonus rewards) every two hours is a nice bonus for LR days. Once you finish the prologue, that's the best and most consistent iso source. You can farm prologue for ISO while you can, but it'll always be there later when your roster is stronger too.

It's pretty difficult for a 1* --> 2* transitioning character to hit 300 points in standard PvP, but it's possible. One tip is to wait until the last day of the PvP event. You typically get matched up against weaker individuals as opposed to at the beginning of events, since a wider range of players will have a decent point total.

NorthernPolarity

Updated that PvP event tip to reflect how its hard to get 500 points in the 1->2* transition. I think I remember getting 400-500 somewhat consistently back in the day, but times have changed.

Trisul

Hey NP,

If you're making some guide edits, you should add PriceCzech's spreadsheet. Since the level shift, it's the best roster tracking spreadsheet I've found, and because it imports data from the MPQ wiki, it gives everyone incentive to keep updating the wiki.

PriceCzech's post is here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7725#p204650, and the link to PriceCzech's spreadsheet is https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... RYoUGACA-8

yogi_

Glad I could be of help.

Also found the build description for m.Storm doesn't match her description now. Side note - is new recommended build for her now 5/3/5 (since essentially the introduction of TU crippled her former amazing Red and though early black damage isn't sensational, the difference between 3 and 5 is noteworthy)?

Also also - a reference to desert environment in the 1*- 2* team composition area.

Also also also - a reference in Hulk about Spidey's stunning which is now no more.

Also also also also - HT's ideal build references desert.

Also also also also also - Delete "This has recently become a lot harder since the amount of 2* covers given out as PvP rewards has been drastically reduced..." from the 1* overview (as their inclusion in things like LR has made them easier to gain) and edit surrounding text as you see fit. For a brand new player, this historial note is irrelevant.

Also also also also also also - Punisher, Mags (Classic) and the Pun/Mags combo have numerous environment tile references but I suspect you are redoing some of these areas, so just a reminder.

Unknown

Awesome guide! Thanks for putting this together!

loroku

Thanks a bunch for updating the guide! This thread is pretty much the bible for new players. I have definitely steered others this way!

NorthernPolarity wrote:

@Loroku, how long have you been playing / stuck in the 1->2* transition phase?

Honestly not long enough to really complain. A few weeks. It's just hard when the 1* progression is so straightforward and feels like you're really getting somewhere fast, and then you hit a wall, and it takes weeks instead of days to move forward. (I guess that's just the FtP way?)

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The Lightning Rounds are the best source of iso in the game: join at the very beginning (opening minutes) of each one, and you'll see weak seed teams that you can easily beat.

Err... did you follow that bolded part? The whole point on LRs is that you can beat up on seed teams (which typically have the buffed character at level 60 like yours, and two level 2-15 characters), which are extremely easy to beat and take maybe half the time of a match in prologue. This means that you fight 5-6 teams in the span of say 15 minutes and get 1k iso for your troubles, which is a good amount more efficient in terms of iso / time than any other part of the game.

Yes, although this is where we have different experiences. But your main point is correct, and I see that now.

First, I tend to only see the level 1-5 seed teams for a couple of matches, and then I start to see either real players or the 20-35 level seed teams. I can still usually handle the 20-35s, but they are not pushovers, and take longer. Then, by the time I've defeated one or two, I see real players (i.e. impossible to win).

Second, I have never played 6 games in 15 minutes, ever. Either I'm still just not that good or my roster isn't strong enough, but even fighting a single level 60 character and two level 1s, my games are much closer to 5 minutes than 2, and tough games are more like 10. And I tend to use health packs after two or three games at most, which means I can't play as long, either.

So, I have tried 2 different lightning rounds today and here are my experiences. My first one, I got 1 game in on a weak seed team - that was starting 20 mins in - and then I couldn't really fight more due to getting matched to real players. Total ISO gained: 340 (30 bonus + 140 reward [high] + 100 reward for 25 progression + final 70 for placement in top 100k), but total time: about 7-10 minutes. So that's like ~300 ISO (on average) per 5-7 minutes, which is still really, really good.

My next lightning round I started 1 minute in and went go-go-go. I had two boosted characters (unusual) and I went as fast as I could. Here's the summary:
- At top speed I fought about 6 games per 30 minutes; I fought 11 total in about an hour with a short interruption
- Average reward for each match is about 140-ish (including the 30 bonus ISO, and counting each 1* cover as 100 ISO)
- Got two 2* covers (high), but one was Bullseye so that's just 250 ISO
- Total ISO with final placement reward: 1980, or basically 2k / hour

The trick (which I've never pulled off before) was to make sure I played CONTINUOUSLY, as fast as possible, and not let my game reload or hit the servers. As long as the game didn't realize I was rising in points, (still never got close to breaking 200), my opponents were still seed teams. But as soon as it reloaded all my opponents were suddenly monsters, and I couldn't play/progress further.

That was going as fast as I possibly could and with some lucky results. Normally, it's more like ~3 games or so before I can't play anymore (especially with more interruptions), so more like ~500 ISO per 20 minutes or so. You are right in that if you can play super fast, you can keep your seed teams coming longer - but normally it's not that quick / easy. But, ultimately you're still right that LRs are the best efficiency for time vs. ISO gain in the game.


My only concern now is whether or not LR MMR exists, and whether it affects your normal PvP MMR. If you keep going all out, you could easily lock yourself out of PvP VERY quickly. It certainly only took me about half a dozen top 300 finishes before I couldn't finish in the top 300 anymore in PvP. I hope going all out in the LRs doesn't make this worse!

loroku

One more tiny, tiny edit for you: in the 1*->2* transition opening paragraph, you have that 2* tokens are gotten at 300 and covers at 600. Covers are actually at 500 (at least I've always seen them there).

Sidlon

Thank you again for continuing to update this amazing guide that I only wish I'd seen early on!

When you can, it'd be good to reflect the cMag nerf.

Unknown

Is it possible, for new players like me, to add an abstract about MMR and how it works to the guide, too?

Unknown

Says this topic was updated 9/19/14. Which part exactly was updated? I am confused