The Differences Between Playing with 4-Stars and 3-Stars: Boosts and Tiers

DesertTortoise

I wanted to clarify some misconceptions that players may have about making the 4-star transition and how different the game once you're firmly a 4-star player. To premise this, I think the game is much more satisfying, diverse and rewarding as a 4-star player and I think anyone making the jump should be really excited about it. I just champed my 21st 4-star which is a good mix of older, newer, low tier and top tier characters but the type of game you're playing once you're leaning on your 4-stars becomes clear fairly quickly and it's vastly different from the game 3-star players are playing. The two largest differences are the way boosted characters scale and the tiers characters are ranked.

Boosted Scaling

As a 3-star player, I rarely paid too much attention to who was boosted for the week. I was typically running LCap/IM40/KK and Cyke/Fist/Switch in virtually every situation. I'd used who was boosted as a tie breaker here and there but I'd never think to run a boosted Ragnarok over Kamala or a boosted Psylocke over LCap, no one really would. Boosted characters were more of a bonus rather than something that would define how you would approach events as a 3-star player, but that's very different as a 4-star player.

4-star characters scale with their boosts at a significantly higher rate than 3-stars. A lot of times, a 4-star that's boosted will deal twice as much damage on their powers while a 3-star will get very small boosts. As an example, let's look at my Iron Fist, CMag and 3 Cyclops (boosted moreso as an essential in PvP) who are all top tier 3-stars. I'll use their best damage in the best situations.

• 206 Magneto blue: 5,446 damage
• 296 Magneto blue: 6,867 damage
• 213 Iron Fist purple: 4,558 damage
• 304 Iron Fist purple: 5,946 damage
• 200 Cyclops red: 4,621 damage
• 334 Cyclops red: 7,483 damage

This is roughly a 25%, 32% and a 62% (and remember, he is getting a PvP essential boost which is much higher than normal) increase respectively. As your 3-stars get stronger, the level they get boosted to goes up exponentially and the damage they deal goes up along with it. 4-stars start way ahead of this curve. I'll use some of my 4-stars as an example now:

• 278 Wasp black: 4,646 damage
• 375 Wasp black: 9,583 damage
• 279 XFW black: 810 damage per tile
• 376 XFW black: 1,677 damage per tile
• 276 Spider-Gwen red: 9,672 damage
• 373 Spider-Gwen red: 19,804 damage

Worth noting, Wasp's black is one of the least ap:damage efficient powers in the tier but quickly becomes useful once boosted. All of these numbers are above a 100% increase in effectiveness and that's not atypical, virtually every level 270 4-star is twice as effective when boosted.

PvE scaling is much different as a 4-star player as well and factors greatly into why boosted lists are so important. My final node after 4 clears is level 325 no matter how many 4-stars I have boosted. This content can be trivialized with as a few as one champ boosted to 366+ and becomes a chore when no one is boosted (but certainly doable since 4-stars can punch way above their weight).

As a 4-star player, your boosted bottom tier character can easily replace your unboosted top tier character. This is a massive difference between the tiers and results in a lot of your 4-stars getting more play. Every 3-star or above player has characters they have never used or thought to use outside of 3-star essentials or for DDQ purposes that exist solely to gather champ rewards. There aren't many in the 4-star tier that share this same role.

This brings me to the next largest difference:

Character Rankings and Tiers

This difference in effectiveness of boosted characters leads into a problem I have with the way certain 4-star characters are valued when looked at through the lens of someone who has completed the 3-star transition. I truly think looking at tier lists as you become a 3-star player is a great idea. Go after IM40, Kamala, Magneto, Iron Fist, Switch, LCap and all the other top tier characters to make a useful beachhead of 3-stars that you will lean on through everything. You learn a ton about how to play the game, what makes these characters good and others bad and the best way to bring out the best in characters while you're doing this. You can also tell this is where the designers were doing a lot of learning too, because some of the characters have really weird niches or powers that don't really do anything particularly compelling or are toothless in execution. The 4-star tier is mostly free of this now that the worst characters have been reworked.

The bottom tier of 3-stars are really bad. Sentry, Psylocke, Spider-Man, Ragnarok and the like can be useful when you make every effort to make them useful, but then you're better off with someone else at that point. The juice isn't worth the squeeze to center a team around them and even boosts don't make up this difference. A Psylocke that's 50% better is still worlds behind a CMag or other top tier character. The difference in the 4-star world is that the difference between the lower tier characters and the highest can be covered by weekly boosts.

The best way of dividing the usefulness of characters into tiers is:

• Exceptional when boosted, very useful when unboosted
• Excellent when boosted, useful when unboosted
• Very useful when boosted, niche when unboosted
• Niche/unuseful whether boosted or not

If you put the 4-star characters in these buckets, there's maybe one or two in the last tier (Eddie and arguably Ghost Rider). Just about everyone else is the third tier or above. If you did the same with the 3-stars, you'd probably get a lot at the top and maybe as many as 10 to 15 in the last tier. All of this is to say that the #30 ranked 3-star is not the equivalent of the #30 ranked 4-star, regardless of the list you're looking at. Agent Venom may be #40 on your tier list you're looking at but do not confuse him with being the equivalent of Doctor Octopus or Psylocke. Agent Venom is lethal when boosted and I'd use a boosted Agent Venom over an unboosted Cyclops, IMHB or even Peggy (in some cases!). This isn't to say Agent Venom doesn't deserve that ranking, maybe he is behind thirty something 4-stars, but these rankings have to be looked at completely differently.

These two differences go hand in hand, but I hope it gives people a better understanding of how the game changes (for the better!) once you begin transitioning.

abominatrix

Thanks for writing this up. I'm in about the same spot (17 champed 4*), and I noticed very early that even the characters that get badmouthed at this level (like Fury) are more beastly when boosted than just about anybody unboosted (I would put Fury in the 3rd bucket; he's not that useful unboosted, but both his purple and blue are frightening when he is),.

The 4* tier also benefits from the fact that the devs have learned quite a bit about character creation since the game started, and the 4* tier is the primary benefit of this. In the 3* tier, the best characters are either pure damage dealers or were re-worked late, like IM40. In the 4* tier, there is significantly greater variety, and in my book, variety=fun. They don't hit it all the time (ahem... Mordo... ahem...), but even non-top tier characters like Gwenpool, Cho or Jessica Drew have interesting mechanics,... and when boosted, watch out!

aa25

Great write-up! Could you also comment on how the lifepoint change between 3* and 4* as well ? I think that part is another important key difference.

Bowgentle

DesertTortoise said:

I wanted to clarify some misconceptions that players may have about making the 4-star transition and how different the game once you're firmly a 4-star player. To premise this, I think the game is much more satisfying, diverse and rewarding as a 4-star player and I think anyone making the jump should be really excited about it. I just champed my 21st 4-star which is a good mix of older, newer, low tier and top tier characters but the type of game you're playing once you're leaning on your 4-stars becomes clear fairly quickly and it's vastly different from the game 3-star players are playing. The two largest differences are the way boosted characters scale and the tiers characters are ranked.

Boosted Scaling

As a 3-star player, I rarely paid too much attention to who was boosted for the week. I was typically running LCap/IM40/KK and Cyke/Fist/Switch in virtually every situation. I'd used who was boosted as a tie breaker here and there but I'd never think to run a boosted Ragnarok over Kamala or a boosted Psylocke over LCap, no one really would. Boosted characters were more of a bonus rather than something that would define how you would approach events as a 3-star player, but that's very different as a 4-star player.

4-star characters scale with their boosts at a significantly higher rate than 3-stars. A lot of times, a 4-star that's boosted will deal twice as much damage on their powers while a 3-star will get very small boosts. As an example, let's look at my Iron Fist, CMag and 3 Cyclops (boosted moreso as an essential in PvP) who are all top tier 3-stars. I'll use their best damage in the best situations.

• 206 Magneto blue: 5,446 damage
• 296 Magneto blue: 6,867 damage
• 213 Iron Fist purple: 4,558 damage
• 304 Iron Fist purple: 5,946 damage
• 200 Cyclops red: 4,621 damage
• 334 Cyclops red: 7,483 damage

This is roughly a 25%, 32% and a 62% (and remember, he is getting a PvP essential boost which is much higher than normal) increase respectively. As your 3-stars get stronger, the level they get boosted to goes up exponentially and the damage they deal goes up along with it.

Thing is, 3*s scale up enormously with higher levels.

367 Magneto blue: 10,794 damage
367 Fist purple: 8,905 damage

That's a 98% boost in case of CMags and a 95% boost in case of Fist.

A high level 3* player should absolutely pay attention to weekly boosts because 266 3*s are monsters when buffed.

Of course 4*s scale up even better, but top 3*s can absolutely pull their weight at very high champ levels.
Trash like Falcon will always be trash, even at 266.

DesertTortoise

Great point, Bowgentle. 266 3-stars are almost more of a 4-star player's toys than a 3-star players toys so I didn't mention that. I almost went into how level 270 is the magic number where a character, regardless of stars, doubles their damage output when boosted. A boosted 266 3-star gets close enough that it's significant and they can outperform unboosted 4-stars so they're worth considering when boosted as well. Like you said, even if the all of the 3-stars on your roster got to 266 there's still total trash characters that wouldn't be considered even when boosted while there's way fewer of those at the 4-star level. 

Roland113

Thank you for writing this up.  I'm just starting the transition (2 4star champs) so this was a great and relevant read.  Thank you.

Dormammu

The reason bottom-tier 3-stars are so bad is simply game creep. For the most part, the 3-stars you want to avoid are the oldest ones because the game has simply passed them by. Spider-Man and Ragnarok were launch characters, Psylock was one of the first releases (as was Punisher), Sentry is very old...

3-stars still scale pretty good when boosted, it just doesn't seem like they do. If Gamora normally does 1200 damage with her red and does 1800 damage when boosted, that's pretty unimpressive. But apply the same scaling to IM40's or Cyclops' red attacks and suddenly the numbers seem much bigger, even though they're getting the same percentage of boost as Gamora.

aa25

DesertTortoise said:

If you put the 4-star characters in these buckets, there's maybe one or two in the last tier (Eddie and arguably Ghost Rider). Just about everyone else is the third tier or above. If you did the same with the 3-stars, you'd probably get a lot at the top and maybe as many as 10 to 15 in the last tier. All of this is to say that the #30 ranked 3-star is not the equivalent of the #30 ranked 4-star, regardless of the list you're looking at. Agent Venom may be #40 on your tier list you're looking at but do not confuse him with being the equivalent of Doctor Octopus or Psylocke. Agent Venom is lethal when boosted and I'd use a boosted Agent Venom over an unboosted Cyclops, IMHB or even Peggy (in some cases!). This isn't to say Agent Venom doesn't deserve that ranking, maybe he is behind thirty something 4-stars, but these rankings have to be looked at completely differently.

These two differences go hand in hand, but I hope it gives people a better understanding of how the game changes (for the better!) once you begin transitioning.

I decided to share my viewpoint on this after thinking about it more. This fact can be interpreted in a different angle. This could mean staying in 4* land is pretty much the same with asking whether you have the boosted 4* of that week since even boosted bottom-tier can be much better than unboosted top-tier. In other words, most of the unboosted 4* are not important. (I know and I think there are a few exceptions like Peggy, 4marv, Ice, etc.)

Edit: Or you can call people who can play with 2x champed 4* each week a separate land from who can not. (Like 4* players are those who can run unchamped 4*, 4.5* players are those who can run champed 4* each week)

DesertTortoise

Certain 4-stars by themselves boosted can pretty much run through a PvE event if they have colors that are easy to get an excess of. I'm running Mordo/3Fist/SWitch through Venom Bomb and I'm mowing everything down. I have Spider-Gwen, Wasp and XFW boosted but I couldn't make a team that's as fast as the Mordo team using any one of them. I pretty much ran Spider-Gwen, Wasp and XFW throughout the entirety of the previous event without a problem, but it's all about having 4-stars that can anchor a team and run through your clears the fastest so it's not always quantity. 

PvP has a few different factors but it probably plays a bit more into the idea that you're at at tremendous advantage on any week you have more than one 4-star boosted.