Where do characters come from? (Comparing cover sources)

GrimSkald

So, I decided that I truly could not appraise the effect of removing most of the characters from tokens until I had a good, solid look at where the covers for my own characters came from. I track a lot of info, I should be able to get a good idea. I decided to post it here to give other people the benefit of this analysis. Of course, everyone's experience is going to be different based on their activity and level of play, so I decided to go into great detail first. To prevent this from being a huge block of text, I decided to put information behind the "spoiler" tag and possibly break it into multiple posts.

So to start, I'll go into my own Roster level and how much I play the game.

I am on day 1064. I am making the transition into 5* play one character at a time - I have a leveled Black Bolt and have covered Widow and Strange. I have all the 4* characters, 36 of them are champions. My highest level 4* character is IMHB at 310, I have 8 over 300. My roster is in the signature, I update it every week or two.

I play for a few hours every day, ten minutes here, a half-hour there. I tend to clear to most check marks in PVE, get to 900 or 1200 in PVP. Other than the 1 cover from top 50 or 100 when they are introduced, I have yet to win a 4* from placement, but I get the ones from progression 99% of the time (I think I've missed three or four total in the last year.) I keep my VIP renewed mostly for the SHIELD Intercepts and a bit more ISO. My roster is in the signature, I tend to keep it updated every week or two.

So that will give you an idea of my ability to get tokens and covers, let's break it down. I'll start with my highest level 4*, Hulkbuster:

Hulkbuster is a bit problematic to track exactly as I had him max covered before the advent of the Champion system in January of last year. Here's all the information I have on him, what I've got and what I've drawn:

Level: 309

Covers from Tokens: Total 34
Heroic: 6
Taco: 0
PVP: 4
PVE: 3 (Including 2 from the bonus Ultron 10 pack which was given as compensation for high targets)
Legendary Tokens (classic and latest) : 20

That is a total of 34 from tokens, just under 2/3 are from Legendary tokens. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell just how much of that level 310 is from these tokens. 310 is 40 levels, add 13 to that and we get 53 covers, total. 53 minus 34 leaves 19, so normally that would mean that I've gotten 19 from other sources (progression, champion levels, etc,) but I'm pretty sure I've burned several IMHB covers. Let's knock 5 off the top, so that means I probably got 29 out of 54 covers from tokens, about 53.7%. It could be more, it could be less.

A better example may be Iceman. According to my roster history I fully leveled him between 3/10 and 3/17, so well after the Champion system was in place. I don't think I had to burn any covers for him, though I could be wrong. At most it was 2 or 3.

Level: 298

Covers from Tokens: Total: 28
Heroic: 1
Taco: 0
PVP: 0
PVE: 2
Legendary Tokens: 25

In this case the vast majority of Iceman's token covers came from LTs of one kind or another. There are 41 covers total here (13+28,) so about 68.3% of his covers came from tokens, almost all of them Legendary tokens. 13 of them came from elsewhere.

At this time, the most recent 4* that's out of the 12 in token packs is War Machine. Let's look at him:

Level: 280

Covers from Tokens: Total 15
Heroic: 0
Taco: 0
PVP: 1
PVE: 1
Legendary Tokens: 13

I'm pretty sure I never burned a cover for him, so I have deployed a total of 23 covers (13+10.) 15 out of 23 is 65.2%

So that's about it. I'm going to take a break from all this number crunching, and maybe I'll look at some 3*s, but those will be a lot dicier to predict since almost all of them were introduced before Champions, so I burned covers for them regularly. It appears that between 55 and 65% or so of the covers I used to max and level my characters came from tokens, mostly Legendary Tokens. That's actually less than I thought it would be, but I don't exactly feel great about losing that leveling ability for my 4* Roster. Well, that leveling ability for all-but-a-handful of characters - the more I add to the bonus the less significant that % is....

MissChinch

Thanks, that was enlightening and depressing... I was secretly hoping for a majority to come from vaults and rewards (the sources that didn't just dry up overnight)

sc0ville

When a Momma cover and a Daddy cover love each other very much...

GrimSkald

MissChinch wrote:

Thanks, that was enlightening and depressing... I was secretly hoping for a majority to come from vaults and rewards (the sources that didn't just dry up overnight)

It is, but as I said, I expected the proportion to be worse. Also, the "PVE" tokens are almost all Vaults, so there's that, but as you can see they're negligible. Also, on the bright side, none of the three I looked at got covers from progression in the PVE after their introduction (they're too old for that,) so there's that as well. I think we can say with authority that a healthy majority of covers come from LTs, at least at my play level...

sc0ville wrote:

When a Momma cover and a Daddy cover love each other very much...

I was seriously considering starting with that line, but it was going to be long enough already...

MojoWild

People have a lot of extra time to think way too much about this stuff...