How to Maximize Bonus Heroes - Choose the Right Ones!

notamutant

With the new bonus heroes feature, I thought having a discussion on the optimal way to use it would be appropriate. Additionally, a new optimal leveling strategy should be used, covers allowing. Here is my opinion broken down by tier.

3 stars: Unlike 4 stars, the chances of you max champing a 3 star eventually is pretty likely. For this reason, I suggest you favorite your lowest covered 3 stars. Pick maybe 3 of them to favorite. Try to do it evenly so you can catch up all your 3 stars to the same levels. That way, you will be less likely to throw away covers in the long run. If you don't have a 3 star champed already, and they aren't in the available draws, unfortunately, you are better off just focusing on those in the pack until they are at around the 200+ range.

4 stars: You might be tempted to choose older heroes to favorite so you can still pull additional covers for them. Don't do that at first. Choose the newest character in the 12 pack, assuming they are decent, and get bonus covers for them. You want to max cover them as early as possible. You will be pulling the most covers for them over the next 6 months to a year. The sooner you champ them, the less covers you throw away. Level them first as well. The oldest characters in the batch, unless they are good and near max covered, ignore them. No reason to favorite them. Once you have most or all of the good characters in the 12 pack from say 10th oldest to newest fully covered and championed, then you should go back and pick an older 4 star to get bonus covers. I suggest picking the best characters in the game for that (Iceman, Jean Grey, Nova, Hulkbuster, Peggy (once she leaves the packs)). Focus on the ones that already have the highest champion levels from that group. Only have two of them favorited, and make sure they are complementary (I.e. Nova and Iceman or Hulkbuster and Jean Grey). That way, you will be able to keep pushing them up to high levels and make them usable even when not boosted in PvP. You have to stick with this strategy until those characters are in the 350s before moving on to other 4s to get the most bang for your buck.

5 stars: This one is a bit trickier. You can take one of two approaches assuming you aren't fully in the 5 star tier yet. The first approach is just work on getting your two highest covered 5 stars finished so you can use them in PvP, and favorite those two. Only do this if they are top tier 5 stars (not worth using on Banner for example). The second approach is pick multiple 5 stars that you plan on using, and have 6+ covers for, and hope to evenly cover them so you can level them all at once. A third approach that might have mixed results, is focus on one five star at a time. Only do this if you are prepared to enter the 5 star tier with just one 5 star, so I don't really recommend it. If you are already in the 5 star tier, and have 2-3 max covered top tier 5 star, you are better off focusing on one 5 star at a time that is already champed, so you can keep adding champ levels. Remember, a level 470 5 star is much stronger than a level 450 5 star.

You will have to do much more careful ISO planning with the new feature, as you are more likely to pull extra covers for non-champed characters now. ISO will become even tighter than before. Every time a new 4 star is added to the 12 pack, you will be in another ISO crunch. Eventually it will slow down, but it will be much more intense for a while.

Let me know if anyone thinks my ideas are bad and I should feel bad, and would like to share better strategies.