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

Unknown

So I've done fairly well in the past few tournaments, and I've managed to get my lazy Thor to 2/2/4 - with luck the upcoming Lord of Thunder will give out more Thor covers and I can boost that even higher. Right now he's actually replaced my 2* thor in my main team.

So given that Lazy Thor is probably going to be my first maxed out 3 star, I've been trying to think of who to pair him with, so I can choose what tournaments to focus my efforts on. If the upcoming nerfs weren't a factor, I'd probably go with cMags and Hulk, but until the nerfs are released it's hard to justify.

Anyone have thoughts on who lazy thor would pair well with?

NorthernPolarity

BelligerentGnu wrote:

So I've done fairly well in the past few tournaments, and I've managed to get my lazy Thor to 2/2/4 - with luck the upcoming Lord of Thunder will give out more Thor covers and I can boost that even higher. Right now he's actually replaced my 2* thor in my main team.

So given that Lazy Thor is probably going to be my first maxed out 3 star, I've been trying to think of who to pair him with, so I can choose what tournaments to focus my efforts on. If the upcoming nerfs weren't a factor, I'd probably go with cMags and Hulk, but until the nerfs are released it's hard to justify.

Anyone have thoughts on who lazy thor would pair well with?

Lazythor's primary colors are green/yellow, so he works well with anyone that doesn't intrude on both of those colors. This would include Psylocke, C. Mags, Black Panther, Doom, etc. Synergy-wise, I think he's just one of those characters that works well in any team composition just due to how strong his abilities are by themselves, so you just need to make sure that he is the primary user for his main colors.

Unknown

Single tear for Hulk moving down to mid-tier

NorthernPolarity

muffinmonger wrote:

Single tear for Hulk moving down to mid-tier

Whoops, forgot to mention the update. This was done because Hulk isn't really a good transition character: high-tier is reserved for characters that are good all around, whereas Hulk is more of a defensive specialist/niche character. I also modified Hood's description a tad.

Unknown

Polarity- how do you feel about BP being ranked the 4th best character in the game in the character rankings while he's mid-tier in yours. I'm inclined to lean more towards your view. Insane black, average at best yellow, pretty weak blue. Can't wait for the next character they make with a **** blue countdown tile....

EDIT: Also, do you still feel like Astonishing Wolvie is top tier? Cuz I literally never use him anymore, whereas I can still find uses for MN Mags.

over_clocked

^ Wolvie is obviously better than Daken, and Daken is mid-tier.
I do find use for him even when unbuffed, 'cuz he's faster than Thor quite often. He's also the only 2** offering strike tiles while having active abilities, so he pairs nicely with oBW.

While we're at it, I have a noob question of my own (not newb because I've been playing for 3,5 months already). I just dunno who else to ask.
What about attack tiles? I've noticed that when you put down attack tiles, they work every turn YOU make. There's no effect on the enemy when they make their turn. But if the enemy places attack tiles, they have effect on you always: when the enemy makes a turn and when you make a turn. Is that one of the rare cases when defense has advantage over offense? Am I confusing something, somehow?

NorthernPolarity

muffinmonger wrote:

Polarity- how do you feel about BP being ranked the 4th best character in the game in the character rankings while he's mid-tier in yours. I'm inclined to lean more towards your view. Insane black, average at best yellow, pretty weak blue. Can't wait for the next character they make with a **** blue countdown tile....

EDIT: Also, do you still feel like Astonishing Wolvie is top tier? Cuz I literally never use him anymore, whereas I can still find uses for MN Mags.

Something to note is that the rankings were done close to when BP was released and before the nerf, so people didn't actually get a chance to play with the character. I believe that the character would be ranked more around rank 8 if the rankings were done now, as I don't see him being that much better than The Hood, for instance. I'm also somewhat biased against characters that only have one good ability as I like my characters to be more versatile than that: I would definitely bump BP up to high tier if his yellow was buffed to 1 + 1/15 env tiles.

I think I should add a disclaimer that my character rankings are based off of how good the character is relative to the rest of the characters in that star level. While A. Wolvie clearly gets obsoleted a lot more quickly than MN Mags once you transition into 3* characters, he still feels like a high tier character in the 2* range simply due to how he can form the backbone of your team due to the strong red and decent green. He's definitely on the lower end of the top tier characters though as Thor/Ares are better, but I still think he's better than characters such as C. Storm and MN Mags, which are more reliant on synergies.

locked wrote:

^ Wolvie is obviously better than Daken, and Daken is mid-tier.
I do find use for him even when unbuffed, 'cuz he's faster than Thor quite often. He's also the only 2** offering strike tiles while having active abilities, so he pairs nicely with oBW.

While we're at it, I have a noob question of my own (not newb because I've been playing for 3,5 months already). I just dunno who else to ask.
What about attack tiles? I've noticed that when you put down attack tiles, they work every turn YOU make. There's no effect on the enemy when they make their turn. But if the enemy places attack tiles, they have effect on you always: when the enemy makes a turn and when you make a turn. Is that one of the rare cases when defense has advantage over offense? Am I confusing something, somehow?

I think Wolvie is only better than Daken because Daken can't level up to 85. If he could tank colors in a maxed out 2* team, his sustainability might actually make him better than Wolvie. As for the attack tile question, I thought that your opponent attack tiles only trigger during the end of their turn. I'll double check this, but I don't think that they also trigger at the end of your turn.

NorthernPolarity

Rewrote the Hood's evaluation and bumped him up to top of mid-tier. He's still underrated right now, and deserves to probably be above Hulk/OBW/BP in the character rankings imo.

Unknown

Love the Hood! I main Mags/Punisher/x and I most often find Hood to be the best fit as the third.

mischiefmaker

Attack tiles trigger at the end of the owner's turn, regardless if the owner is stunned. Pretty sure locked is confused -- perhaps she saw attack tiles triggering when the opponent was stunned, which looks like at the end of your own turn?

kensterr

How about **/***/*** and full *** team composition suggestions?

over_clocked

mischiefmaker wrote:

Attack tiles trigger at the end of the owner's turn, regardless if the owner is stunned. Pretty sure locked is confused -- perhaps she saw attack tiles triggering when the opponent was stunned, which looks like at the end of your own turn?

I know about stun not protecting against attack tiles, I have to double check against modern Storm or something.

Edit: I probably got confused because of the damage ticks shown, it looks like enemy attack tiles only attack after the enemy's turn/your turn if you stunned the enemy.

yendi

Thanks for this guide -- it's been very helpful as I attempted to play the game again (I gave up on it when it first came out, but am liking what I'm seeing a lot more now).
I have one stupid newbie question: You say to hoard HP for hero slots, which makes sense. But it also seems that leveling character powers beyond a certain point is impossible without spending HP (along with covers), too. Is there another way (a reward of some sort) that I'm just not aware of?

Thanks!

Cousin Simpson

mischiefmaker wrote:

Attack tiles trigger at the end of the owner's turn, regardless if the owner is stunned. Pretty sure locked is confused -- perhaps she saw attack tiles triggering when the opponent was stunned, which looks like at the end of your own turn?

I can confirm this; in one Simulator mission, the AI was down to its last character with ~2000 health left while I had about 3 (buffed) attack tiles on the board. Then two of my guys got killed and my third remaining character got hit with a 7-turn(!) stun -- I ended up surviving and winning the match without ever waking up from the stun, thanks entirely to attack tiles.

Cousin Simpson

yendi wrote:

Thanks for this guide -- it's been very helpful as I attempted to play the game again (I gave up on it when it first came out, but am liking what I'm seeing a lot more now).
I have one stupid newbie question: You say to hoard HP for hero slots, which makes sense. But it also seems that leveling character powers beyond a certain point is impossible without spending HP (along with covers), too. Is there another way (a reward of some sort) that I'm just not aware of?

Thanks!

I think that you can generally avoid spending HP to level your characters (I presume you mean by buying their covers) by instead winning covers in tournaments.

over_clocked

yup, never ever spend HP on a cover unless it's a rare 3*** cover that really makes a skill useful, you haven't got it in ages and you have 35+ roster slots, and also some 3 - 5k of spare HP.

yendi

Cousin Simpson wrote:

yendi wrote:

Thanks for this guide -- it's been very helpful as I attempted to play the game again (I gave up on it when it first came out, but am liking what I'm seeing a lot more now).
I have one stupid newbie question: You say to hoard HP for hero slots, which makes sense. But it also seems that leveling character powers beyond a certain point is impossible without spending HP (along with covers), too. Is there another way (a reward of some sort) that I'm just not aware of?

Thanks!

I think that you can generally avoid spending HP to level your characters (I presume you mean by buying their covers) by instead winning covers in tournaments.

Actually, I feel really stupid -- I'd assumed that when I saw a power-level with both a cover and a Hero Point listed on it, that I needed both to level it, so I never clicked on the cover in those cases. Sigh. Never mind.

Unknown

locked wrote:

yup, never ever spend HP on a cover unless it's a rare 3*** cover that really makes a skill useful, you haven't got it in ages and you have 35+ roster slots, and also some 3 - 5k of spare HP.

I understand the idea behind this statement, but I don't know that I fully agree with it. I was capped at 9 covers for **thor and 6 for **storm for over 2 weeks. With 25 roster slots and no character progression in weeks, I bought 3 covers for my existing 2*'s. I pumped some ISO into them and managed to place top 50 in every event except final simulator basic in the last week. This was completely due to new key covers. The investment resulted in several hundred HP, thousands of ISO and some useful 2* and 3* covers and about 15 recruit tokens.

It was worth it for me.

over_clocked

^ Sure, I keep forgetting that most players can infuse some HP into their game if they need to. I'm F2P by necessity

Unknown

locked wrote:

^ Sure, I keep forgetting that most players can infuse some HP into their game if they need to. I'm F2P by necessity

Indeed I had purchased some HP But the money was already spent and it was about where to allocate the resources I had. If I had to eek out all my current roster slots on HP rewarded from prologue + events, with my abysmal luck with recruit tokens, it would take me years.