Champ levels have not been invalidated

OneLastGambit

Why is everyone speaking about not adding champ levels to old characters when they're also missing that they can get a new character champed and blast up those champ levels pretty quick for those sweet rewards.

The new ones give the exact same champ prizes as old ones so let's not pretend that all of a sudden champing is useless.

If anything champing is now super efficient on those illustrious 12. They'll be flying through levels in no time at all. I mean I know it sucks not adding champ levels to elektra but you can add a few to medusa instead..seems like it's not bad

Vhailorx

OneLastGambit wrote:

Why is everyone speaking about not adding champ levels to old characters when they're also missing that they can get a new character champed and blast up those champ levels pretty quick for those sweet rewards.

The new ones give the exact same champ prizes as old ones so let's not pretend that all of a sudden champing is useless.

If anything champing is now super efficient on those illustrious 12. They'll be flying through levels in no time at all. I mean I know it sucks not adding champ levels to elektra but you can add a few to medusa instead..seems like it's not bad

This is a possibility, and it's why I am trying to adopt a skeptical position rather than a "sky is falling" one. But you are only right if players can reliably cover and champ the illustrious 12 fast enough. And that remains to be seen.

whycantwesyncpc

OneLastGambit wrote:

Why is everyone speaking about not adding champ levels to old characters when they're also missing that they can get a new character champed and blast up those champ levels pretty quick for those sweet rewards.

The new ones give the exact same champ prizes as old ones so let's not pretend that all of a sudden champing is useless.

If anything champing is now super efficient on those illustrious 12. They'll be flying through levels in no time at all. I mean I know it sucks not adding champ levels to elektra but you can add a few to medusa instead..seems like it's not bad

Yes, looking forward to screwed up rosters and scaling! Won't be enough to chip away at the giant resource wall erected that has now destroyed my roster and made the game unplayable. We all know you think the devs can do no wrong. Shame for those of us completely screwed that they apparently can. Can't champ the 12 if you can't roster them or level them. Especially now that there is a ticking clock to screw us over even more. Why even attempt to roster/level the 12 is there is zero chance of getting anywhere with is before they get rotated?

smkspy

That's assuming that you're lucky enough to get those sweet bonus rewards...which is quite clearly many will not. Some are already reporting only hoards and getting one sometimes none bonus pulls...reap that lotto satisfaction of control progress.

fmftint

The 27 champ 4s on my roster outside the newest 12 feel pretty invalidated, 2 events/week, 52 weeks/year, 104 events/year - the odd 7 day event, we'll just say 100 events/year. 43 characters in rotation will be awarded 2x/year.

Pvp is 3 events/week, 156 events/year, current characters seen 3x/year

Most players are not going to T5/10 so at progression only were talking 5x champ levels/YEAR for any character outside the draw pool

firethorne

They aren't saying it is useless, or that the rewards or champ prizes aren't good. They're saying it will be a lot harder to get. Lets say you have all but the current 12 4* characters in the new pool fully covered and champed. Under the old token odds, 12/45 would be a "new" character, and 33/45 would be a champ level.

Now, 100% of regular 4* draws from classic tokens will be "new", 0% of normal draws will be champ level. And 1/20 draws will include a second bonus favorite, which you may apply to champs at your discretion. Now, you may argue that the odds for "new" covers being better than old ones has its merits. I'll agree with some of the reasoning there. But removing the old ones entirely is massive over-correction, creating as many problems as it intended to fix.

Quebbster

Part of the problem is that even if you can champ one of the latest fourstars before it's banished, the early champion levels only give a fraction of the rewards the later levels do. Even if you can keep up with the Joneses you are still losing out when everyone on your roster is level 280ish and further progress happens at a glacial pace.

Nepenthe

Sure, you can super efficiently champ those new 12... If you've got about 4.4 million iso to level them all to 270 before they fall out of tokens and go into the old pool. But by then you'll have a newer new 12 to super efficiently champ! If you've got another 4.4 million iso. And who will go into the old pool.

Did you read any of the replies to your "retirement home" hypothetical in the other thread? A lot of us would rather pull more covers for characters we already had champed than for new characters. This change does make covering new characters much faster, but that's not the only thing people are after.

Omega Red

My plan is (was?) to keep a balanced roster. I can't level up five stars if I have no means to add champ levels to my four stars at a steady pace. Champing is not the end of the road for a character, it's max-champing. My Hulkbuster is currently at 280. It will take years, not months as I had planned, to level him up past 300. Not happy about that.

Azoth658

I love the new system personally. It makes you really think what character you want to work on. I'm making my bonus characters OML, 4cage and 3 cage to start. When I get bonus covers I'll always be working towards getting 4 cage champed.

It looks to me that it's designed best for picking one character per tier rather than I'll a 1 in 70 chance of the character I want getting awarded.

Yes you'll get the latest 12 heroes more frequently but that means you get to play with them.

As a casual the fact that my Medusa and Danvers are unplayable is deeply depressing as they have cool new powers. But now my chances of getting them are drastically improved instead of pointless covers like falcap or Reed who I have to throw away.

I mean I think we can all agree that there are few terrible characters that have been released of late and even the slightly useless ones they tend to have a fun new mechanic. Like wasp, she's not great but with starlord and kingpin she's a tile buffing machine.

GrumpySmurf1002

Vhailorx wrote:

This is a possibility, and it's why I am trying to adopt a skeptical position rather than a "sky is falling" one. But you are only right if players can reliably cover and champ the illustrious 12 fast enough. And that remains to be seen.

Yeah, but it can be estimated based on your own earn rate.

Based on the last couple months, I do about 25CP per day and 0.75 LTs per day, roughly. A character should last about 7 seasons in the tokens. (it's not quite 2 characters per season), so that's 196 days in the tokens. So if I only open latest tokens, that's 196 * 1.75 = 343 covers. Spread over 12 characters is 28.58 per character.

Assuming an average of 4 covers per release (based on my own personal efforts), that's 32 covers. Then you also have other sources (vaults, heroics), so I can say I'm fairly confident I'll get about 34-35 covers per character. If I decide to switch back to Classics instead of Latest, then that's an extra 4 per character.

One downside, my LT rate is reliant on 3/4* champing, so good chance I'll take a hit on that number, but for now I'll keep it.

So I'm looking at level 300ish characters, with some lagging and some gaining depending on distribution. That's fine I guess, since my highest is 315ish right now, but it's not terribly exciting when there's another 70 champ levels of rewards that are going to be awfully tough to achieve.

Stax the Foyer

Yup. This reduces the short-term value of the champion rewards because it pushes the expected collection date for the really good champion rewards for the vaulted 4*s. (The 3* change is neutral, because that's a generally fixed pool with a lot of other expected cover sources.)

You'll be getting slightly more 4* covers. They'll just be feeding the bottom tiers of the champion reward ladder for now, instead of being evenly distributed. It's a net loss for some veterans in the short to medium term, both in terms of champion reward progress and in terms of progression of their 4*s to a viable (boosted) state as compared to 5*s.

EDIT: Everyone's milage will vary, but GrumpySmurf's estimated champion level of 300 before new characters leave tokens doesn't get them to where I'd consider them viable boosted when compared to 450+ 5*s. I've gone from seeing steady progress on characters that will impact my gameplay, to seeing signficiantly reduced progress on those characters in favor of others who will never reach viability during their period in the token. Not saying that'll be the case for everyone, by any means, but lots of people I play with are in a similar boat, and that's why some people aren't happy with this combination of changes.

TimGunn

OP has a fair point; HOWEVER, he/she ignores the problem that we don't have the 12 chars champed yet and don't have the ISO to champ them all.

Probably more of a temporary problem. Sink all your ISO into the 12 chars and hopefully catch up at some point. But not looking good right now.

HaywireII

I play the Story Mode events to the check marks (sometimes to Top 10 but not always) and Versus events to 900. It looks like I'm earning roughly 35,000 ISO a day and 17 command points a day. In a 6 week release cycle of two 4 stars and one 5 star I'm getting enough ISO to champ four 4 stars and enough tokens for 35 classic legends or 28 latest legends.

I know everyone is different but I don't see any problem with getting ahead of the "pool of 12" over time and having them all champed and putting my bonus tokens towards champ levels for other characters of my choosing. I imagine that at the start of each season I will champ the 2 new characters then hold tokens until next season. I'll actually get to a point where I can guarantee that I'm not wasting any pulls even though I haven't championed every 4* character in the game.

Vhailorx

TimGunn wrote:

OP has a fair point; HOWEVER, he/she ignores the problem that we don't have the 12 chars champed yet and don't have the ISO to champ them all.

Probably more of a temporary problem. Sink all your ISO into the 12 chars and hopefully catch up at some point. But not looking good right now.

But this is likely to lead to a constant cycle where we are all scrambling to cover and level new 4*s as quickly as possible, and then champ them up to 280 or so just in time for them to enter the vault (assuming we can even collect iso fast enough to handle this pace).

And that sucks because 4* champ rewards get exponentially better. for example, levels 340-349 reward 28cp, 15k iso, 200 HP and a legendary token. Ignoring the LT for 271 which is outside the standard champ rewards patter, 272-282 is 11CP, 1 LT, 7.5kiso and 100 HP.

So in exchange for a 5% chance to pull a character of our choice, we are potentially giving up an awful lot of RNG champ levels for older 4*s from LTs. And we will now be even more pressed for iso than we already are, because holding off on champing a new 4* dud (either to champ an older 4* or to put some levels on a 5*) will now mean a signficantly increased probability of wasting 4* covers. Just because the potentials downsides of this systems aren't as obvious as the nice new favorites feature doesn't mean that this new system has no downsides. . .

TimGunn

Vhailorx wrote:

TimGunn wrote:

OP has a fair point; HOWEVER, he/she ignores the problem that we don't have the 12 chars champed yet and don't have the ISO to champ them all.

Probably more of a temporary problem. Sink all your ISO into the 12 chars and hopefully catch up at some point. But not looking good right now.

But this is likely to lead to a constant cycle where we are all scrambling to cover and level new 4*s as quickly as possible, and then champ them up to 280 or so just in time for them to enter the vault (assuming we can even collect iso fast enough to handle this pace).

And that sucks because 4* champ rewards get exponentially better. for example, levels 340-349 reward 28cp, 15k iso, 200 HP and a legendary token. Ignoring the LT for 271 which is outside the standard champ rewards patter, 272-282 is 11CP, 1 LT, 7.5kiso and 100 HP.

So in exchange for a 5% chance to pull a character of our choice, we are potentially giving up an awful lot of RNG champ levels for older 4*s from LTs. And we will now be even more pressed for iso than we already are, because holding off on champing a new 4* dud (either to champ an older 4* or to put some levels on a 5*) will now mean a signficantly increased probability of wasting 4* covers. Just because the potentials downsides of this systems aren't as obvious as the nice new favorites feature doesn't mean that this new system has no downsides. . .

Yes, the pace is ~30,000 per day (~380,000 every 2 weeks). This is achievable. Will require commitment!

Guess we will find out in 7-8 months how high we can get Mordo/Coulson after them being in packs a full term. My first 4 star champ was about 9 months ago and is currently only 286 under old system.

But yeah, it is kind of sad that my favorite Jean Grey is going to move at a snails pace from now on.

SnowcaTT

Wish I would have recorded all of my resources gained from champ levels of my 30ish 4*'s this season.

Because next season it's going to be a small fraction, considering I have 5 of the 12, champed and two are leaving in a week.

No problems - just have to champ all the new ones! OH WAIT, MY RESOURCES WERE JUST CUT TO A FRACTION OF WHAT THEY WERE. Right.

Crowl

Stax the Foyer wrote:

You'll be getting slightly more 4* covers. They'll just be feeding the bottom tiers of the champion reward ladder for now, instead of being evenly distributed. It's a net loss for some veterans in the short to medium term, both in terms of champion reward progress and in terms of progression of their 4*s to a viable (boosted) state as compared to 5*s.

EDIT: Everyone's milage will vary, but GrumpySmurf's estimated champion level of 300 before new characters leave tokens doesn't get them to where I'd consider them viable boosted when compared to 450+ 5*s. I've gone from seeing steady progress on characters that will impact my gameplay, to seeing signficiantly reduced progress on those characters in favor of others who will never reach viability during their period in the token. Not saying that'll be the case for everyone, by any means, but lots of people I play with are in a similar boat, and that's why some people aren't happy with this combination of changes.

300 seems like a huge overestimation as anyone with a well developed roster is inevitably going to be trashing more covers now as they won't have millions of iso on hand to champ every single one of these characters, with my roster my chances of drawing an unusable cover went from under 15% to over 21% before I had drawn any 4* covers under the new system.

Spiritclaw

As I understand the change, the majority of characters will not be available in token packs at any given time unless you choose them for your bonus hero. I've gotten two Iceman covers and a 3* Strange as bonus heroes in the first 24 hours of this feature. I'm not sure why people aren't perceiving more choice as a wholly good thing.

Vhailorx

Spiritclaw wrote:

As I understand the change, the majority of characters will not be available in token packs at any given time unless you choose them for your bonus hero. I've gotten two Iceman covers and a 3* Strange as bonus heroes in the first 24 hours of this feature. I'm not sure why people aren't perceiving more choice as a wholly good thing.

Because the choice is only meaningful 5% of the time. Meanwhile 31 of 43 4*s have just been taken out of LTs effectively forever. So that's 72% percent of LT pulls that now have a drastically different set of possible outcomes. Assume that the 72% of changed tokens pulls now has a much worse set of possible outcomes.

Consider 5% of your total token pulls. Then consider 72% of your total token pulls. Which one seems like a bigger deal to you?

This is a slight oversimplification, but I think it gets the point across. . .

Spiritclaw

Previously, we had no control whatsoever over 100% of our token pulls. Now we control 5% of our token pulls. We're also now getting 105% of the number of covers. The chances of getting a specific needed character was getting smaller and smaller, and as I recall it was a lot smaller than 5%. The random stuff is now concentrated on a specific group, but you can still get a specific character of your choice more often than you could have last week.

This is not a bad thing.