One Year Later A journey from newbie to veteran.

Davan

Okay I started playing exactly one year ago today. I have made the transition to the 4* tier and have 6 4* champs with probably 3 more being champed in the next month since they are at 250.

My friend got me playing and I had a blast playing the prologue. I didn't even know what the events were. I didn't know about newbie brackets or scaling so I thought if I joined I'd get destroyed.

After a week I got into the pve events. I looked up the forums and started inhaling information. I was having a blast. I couldn't finish every node or grind everything down but I slowly bulit my 2* up and started to make progression.

I was thrilled when I took top 20 for icemans release. Two covers, yes! I pulled one more from pvp token and then didn't see him for 8 more months haha. I pulled all my lts at the time and spent a little money for roster slots.

My 3* started to grow and soon I was able to do some dpd and score extra covers. It was great. Little did I know that 5* had just arrived. I pulled an oml yellow on his release. YES! oh nm bye bye scaling. Sold

Over the course of the next few months I sold 1 other 5* ss. I was fortunate (unfortunate?) that I didn't get any 5* for a long time during my transition.

Champing came and I started champing 3*. By the time I had 10 champed I was ready to do my first 4* champ HB. I was fortunate enough to join the Axe alliance family during the second Galactus run and been with them since.

So that brings me to today. Scaling is tpughtbut manageable but sometimes the fights take longer than when I was a newbie. I can hit t5 in pve if I feel like it and usually hit 1300 in 95% of pvps.

90% of my cp pulls are useless. I don't get excited about opening one and my 5* pull rate is abyssmal still. I have pulled 3 that's right 3 oml since I sold that first one. I have 4 Phoenix covers, 3 bssm, 4 ss, and 6 gg who is my highest. During a good week with close to 3 pvps and 2 pves I probably get about 140cp enough for 7 pulls plus crash lt.

I'm slowly losing motivation. I look at people with 3* rosters with more 5*. I also feel for people that pull their 4th or 5th extra 5* color but then again at least you have a pull rate. Rng was very kind on my 4* but awful on my 5*. It didn't bother me so much until my progress slowed to a crawl.

All in all I've seen lot's of positive changes and I'm looking forward to clearance ranks and the upcoming anniversary. Devs keep up the good work but please please stop having 5* be random. I want to actually get a useable one someday.

jffdougan

Your transition to 4* has happened much more rapidly than mine, but I don't know if relative amounts of money have anything to do with that. (I think that over 2+ years I've only just broken $60 with my second VIP round picked up as a thank-you to the devs for the SHIELD Level rollout.)

I now have 4 level 270s, three champed, with one more at full covers, after 2+ years. (My black Silver Surfer drop happened on Gen Con Friday.) It means I've had to endure the era of 3* characters rotating out of tokens, among other things.

Pylgrim

If it's any consolation, I very recently champed my 6th 4* as well. The difference is that I've been playing for almost 3 years And I haven't been slacking or anything. It's just a combination of the 3* transition being much much slower back in the day, and a terrible, terrible, terrible luck with 4* pulls almost through the whole of 2015.

like1tiger

I have just had my first year anniversary as well and I can relate to a lot of your topic. I have spent about $100 now on the game including 2 VIP purchases. I have 95 slots with 28 3 star champed but no 4 stars. I do have Covers for Rhulk but the iso needed is amazing. I also have pulled 23 5 star covers but not anything useful.
My first was an Old man Logan black and I have had terrible scaling since but have just put up with it. I have 6 4*s at 11-13 covers but I'm not sure I will even have the iso to champ them.
I'm in a good alliance and still enjoying the game I haven't played hardly any PvE except special events since the PvE change but I have been hitting 1300 in each PvP so at least I'm getting some more progression each week.

Quebbster

If 90% of your CP pulls are useless, wouldn't you be better off saving your CP until you can spend it in a meaningful way? With those kind of numbers, you'd probably be better off just buying select covers with CPs, or just collect a big honking pile of it while you build up your roster enough so that more covers are useful?
I absolutely agree that there needs to be other ways to get fivestars than pure blind luck though.

Polares

Quebbster wrote:

If 90% of your CP pulls are useless, wouldn't you be better off saving your CP until you can spend it in a meaningful way? With those kind of numbers, you'd probably be better off just buying select covers with CPs, or just collect a big honking pile of it while you build up your roster enough so that more covers are useful?
I absolutely agree that there needs to be other ways to get fivestars than pure blind luck though.

That might be the clever advice, because this is a game where you need to think in the long run, BUT it is also a game where we should be having fun, and a big motivator for having fun with the current structure of events, rewards, etc. is getting the new and shiny new chars, and since they were released, 5 chars in particular. So I get what the OP feels.

Now, speaking in my particular case, expect maybe Punisher and Peggy, no other 4 release has 'exited' me in the last 6-9 months. Once you have 6-7 of the top/good 4s champed, it is easy to lose interest in the rest of them, specially when it was so hard to champ them. Now, levelling 4s has improved, and I think this is a good reason not to go to 5 land, now that you can champ 4s almost as fast as they get released. You can play now with a lot of different 4 char combinations, so it is probably better to stay in 4 land than going to 5 land where you will use two chars for everything. So yeah get as many 5 covers as possible, level them to the 360 range and wait until you have at least 4 or 5 5s you can champ to go fully 5 land, that would be my advice.

So, pulling 5s is my main motivation to keep playing, I still love the game, but I want more chars I can use, so I need more Spidey, GG and IM covers (also BB or Banner, it is just that I have more covers of those 3). Then my luck is whimsical, my pull rate in latest is really bad but good in classic, and I pull 5s in batches, this season I am pulling GGs, last season was Cap (sigh), two seasons ago it was Spidey, etc. Just a few, 2 or 3, so they improve a bit but none is usable yet, because I need them to be 9-10 covers at least, so I can use them in PvE and they don't die in a few turns

So going back to the OP, I think that Shield Clearance is the hope for most of us that this can be improved, at least a bit, and I also think that if this is not good, a lot of people will abandon the game

DTStump

I just completed one year too. That was one week ago. My 4* tier is looking like this right now:



So I have most 4* characters rostered (29 out of 38, but I'll be happy rostering everybody but Howard and Devil Dino). However, as you can see, no characters have more than 4 covers. That is going to change when I tap into my reserve of 14 LTs + almost 1400 CP. But that is not going to happen until I stop drawing new characters...

So it could be worse

Davan

I'm very grateful for how fast I moved. My 4* pulls as well. Hb, jg, rulk, xpool, thoress, and punmax are my champs. Champing cyke now. Icrman is parked at 250 for last cover from pvp. Quake and x23 are next . Kingpin needs 2 yellow and the rest besides Peggy and Nova I don't care to much about.

As for 90% of my covers being useless I mean because they are for characters I don't plan on champing or duplicates of 5cover powers. Champ levels are nice but it is minute gratification.

Basically this game has been great to me. U just hate to have my progress stopped at the last tier of play. I don't expect champed 5* but I figured I would have 2 or 3 at 7 or 8 covers by now since 5* were released. 3(4) covers of oml since his release and a pool that is getting more and more diluted. If I can't expect to progress what's the point?

Quebbster

Davan wrote:

I'm very grateful for how fast I moved. My 4* pulls as well. Hb, jg, rulk, xpool, thoress, and punmax are my champs. Champing cyke now. Icrman is parked at 250 for last cover from pvp. Quake and x23 are next . Kingpin needs 2 yellow and the rest besides Peggy and Nova I don't care to much about.

As for 90% of my covers being useless I mean because they are for characters I don't plan on champing or duplicates of 5cover powers. Champ levels are nice but it is minute gratification.

Basically this game has been great to me. U just hate to have my progress stopped at the last tier of play. I don't expect champed 5* but I figured I would have 2 or 3 at 7 or 8 covers by now since 5* were released. 3(4) covers of oml since his release and a pool that is getting more and more diluted. If I can't expect to progress what's the point?

Unfortunately the game is a Marathon, not a sprint. It rewards you for having a diverse roster. It may not look appealing to level up the lesser characters, but speaking as someone with all two- and Threestars champed, as well as two dozen fourstar champions... The champ levels are anything but "minute" when you almost never have to waste a cover, and it gives me CP to keep opening legendary tokens.
I realize this is partially reinforcing what you are saying about how the pace of progress has stopped though. Fivestars being random access only is a big barrier to get through.

broll

I'm actually right at the 6 month mark myself so I thought I'd talk a little about my roster for comparison.

I started playing on 3/11/16 and yesterday was my 180th day. From a total noob perspective this game can be very confusing to start out with how things are now. I joined an alliance of friends and one of them is a super whale, so I think I ended up opening up several LTs very early (not to mention I whaled pretty hard my first few months, I think I had 85ish roster slots by month 2). Before I was even close to max on a 1* or 2* I was pumping ISO into 4* and 5* because higher level equals better right? Wrong I found out. By the time I started looking at the forums I found out I was playing all wrong and ruining my scaling. I also had no idea the champion system existed or how DDQ worked. I had 3 5* 2 over them in 280s or so before I even had 1 max (non-champed) 2* and my scaling was awful, the game was unplayable. Through reading the forums I ended up selling my highest 5* which was a back in black Spiderman (haven't seen a cover for him sense ). This helped scaling but didn't fix it.

I started focusing where I needed to, dropping down to 1 1*, getting a team of 2*s champed and focusing on DDQ while my main game scaling was so bad. I've ultimately come to the conclusion that if I were to play my account over a again from the beginning I would have horded CP and LT tokens until I had at least 3-5 3*s champed.

Anyway long story short I just championed my 21st 3* yesterday. I have 3 more characters with 13 waiting to champion. 3 with 12 and another 9 with 10-11. Lately I've been a machine stamping out 3* champs, I've done about 4-6 in the last 2 weeks alone.

The 4* transition that I know is coming looks like it's going to be rough unless Clearance fixes things. Currently I have an Ant-Man with 8 covers, a few with 7, but the large majority only have 2-3 covers. However I'm now getting the 25 LT from PvE progression every event since that change so this should help.

As far as 5*s I've been pretty lucky compared to the OP I guess (or unlucky as they made things difficult for a time). Currently I have a Silver Surfer with 5 covers, a Steve Rogers with 2 covers and 1 cover for: Black Bolt, Green Goblin, Jean Grey, Bruce Banner, and OML. However they don't do me any good in the short term as they are all pretty terrible with 1 cover. I used to use Silver Surfer to tank for me when my scaling was off, but those days are behind me and I no longer need him as crutch.

zaloner2

Day 877 player here

new to forums, thought I'd share my story

started this game for the love of everything that is marvel and had no idea the addiction this game would become. my transition to 4* land, if you can call it that, has been a uphill battle. I seem to have the unlucky instances where I get a character that everyone raves about right after they get nerfed. X-force to be exact, then femthor. RNG blessed me with Rulk covers so those are the 3 that I've been having a lot of fun with lately.

X-force wolvie, thoress, and Rulk are champed - JG, HB, Iceman......disappointing how under covered they are.
29 3 stars champed, some over 190
I recycle the 2 stars that give me covers I like and need.

5* land is what I dream of everyday. if only I could get OML covers. IM and BSS are at 5 each

With the introduction to shield rank and the next installment of clearance, looking forward to another 877+ days

OneLastGambit

I pose a question to those who want to sprint through and cover everyone quickly as possible...what happens when you have them all?

To me (and this is only my subjective opinion) the journey itself is the reward in the game. I've seen a lot of vets retire for various reasons in my 400 days of play but I don't feel like I will 'burn out' and I think the reason is this...to me playing is the prize. The covers I get for various characters are merely facilitators of the prize. Perhaps there will come a day when I do feel like I want to quit but I don't think there will be.

Set yourself the goal of simply enjoying playing as it seems from your OP that your enjoyment comes from getting covers and having that type of mindset will always end up with disappointment.

Its almost an analogy for how people behave with money, it's merely a facilitator of life it's not the point of it. The point of getting covers should never be so you can get more covers. Hope you're enjoying the game still

OLG

Davan

Let's be honest though it's a match 3 game. After about your 5th time through a pve event it's pretty much the same. I enjoy competing though in pvp and pve and earning my covers . My alliance family is another huge part of it. They're been incredible to me.

I want to be able earn my covers . If it's 125cp for a guaranteed 5* token so be it. It's better than what we have now. Get top 10 in pve 5times get a 5 star token. Hit 1600 in pvp 5 times get a, token. Maybe clearance ranks will be something like that I don't know. I don't need to sprint to 13 cover 5* but I do need to move.