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.
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:
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:
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.
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 ScalingAs 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 damage296 Magneto blue: 6,867 damage213 Iron Fist purple: 4,558 damage304 Iron Fist purple: 5,946 damage200 Cyclops red: 4,621 damage334 Cyclops red: 7,483 damageThis 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.
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 damage367 Fist purple: 8,905 damageThat'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 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.