Thoughts on what I should do now.

talleman

I would saved the cp and just set strange as the only 3* bonus hero. He is one of the newer characters and i think you will get him champed very soon. Then when hes champed you can choose wich powers you want to max.

granne

Before Bonus Heroes came in I would have said yes, use CP for Strange. Now, though, it just isn't worth it. If you set him as your only 3* bonus hero, you'll have him fully covered in no time.

heybub

I say spend the cp to get buy the cover.  Might as well get something great that you can use now, than some random 4* in a LT pull.  I would only do this for 1-2 covers for very important characters until I have 3 top tier champed, then go with bonus hero's and token pulls to max out the others.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I think it's worth it.

jtsings

   Nevermind, I just talked myself out of it namely because I just ignored the prime rule for support characters like Strange: he's really awesome when he can work in the background behind some stronger tank characters but unless there's a buffed character in a PVE or PVP that covers his colors he's going to take every hit because he would be the highest level character with his colors in my roster.  And his health is pretty low for a 3* character.  I have a similar issue with Storm 2*, I use her a lot but when her level is too high she becomes an open target when I try to match her blue to unleash her best weapon.  I'll wait till I get someone to at least cover his blue and possibly yellow before I champ him.

granne said:

Before Bonus Heroes came in I would have said yes, use CP for Strange. Now, though, it just isn't worth it. If you set him as your only 3* bonus hero, you'll have him fully covered in no time.

   Unfortunately, I've had many of the top tier characters as bonus heroes but I keep getting duplicate covers of each of them, so in effect I'm wasting a bonus cover.  Almost all of the top tiers I've bonused have at least 5 covers in one color, so I keep switching them to keep from wasting that feature.  Right now I have my bonus cover on Scarlet Witch because she has the best distribution of covers and I enjoyed playing with her in the latest event.  My biggest goal right now is to get a good 3* line-up and my focus on bonus covers is to develop that line-up.

   However, you do bring up a good point, but I think I might make a total different U-turn and actually go against my current practice to aim for Black Panther to be my first champ; using bonus heroes.  He would cover Storm and Strange's Yellow and Blue and though he's not top tier for everyone, he seems to do pretty well in each of his colors and his health is good.  So for my play style he seems to be a serviceable choice; until I can get more covers for IM40 (who can serve the same purpose but has better offensive weapons.)  If I happen to get multiple blues for him I can just use them to raise his level when I finally do get a black or yellow.

Erndiese

Just a heads up from someone who is just a bit further along than you are, recently just started champing 3* BP blue is weaker than strange so strange will still tank blue. I believe my strange is 167 and BP is 170 maybe. BP will tank yellow I believe. 

Strange also tanks blue over daredevil and IM40. 

granne

Yup. That's because blue is Strange's strongest colour, which is pretty unusual. He does do better with a tank, but his burst healing helps to reduce the damage he takes.

How many 3* bonus heroes are you usually getting in a fortnight? I ask because dupes can become champ levels fairly quickly. I got Hawkguy from about 5 covers to champed within 2 weeks of his entering tokens, and got to apply 3 or 4 dupes as extra levels.

For 4*s, having a colour at five makes it less advisable to make someone your BH, but the same isn't necessarily true for 3*s, especially if you only need a couple more covers.

jtsings

Erndiese said:

Just a heads up from someone who is just a bit further along than you are, recently just started champing 3* BP blue is weaker than strange so strange will still tank blue. I believe my strange is 167 and BP is 170 maybe. BP will tank yellow I believe. 

Strange also tanks blue over daredevil and IM40. 

Yeah, I really only have enough to champion two so if I do BP and Thanos I can just ease into leveling Strange up until I have enough ISO and another cover to champ him.  I can live with just him having to tank blue when that time comes.

granne said:

Yup. That's because blue is Strange's strongest colour, which is pretty unusual. He does do better with a tank, but his burst healing helps to reduce the damage he takes.

How many 3* bonus heroes are you usually getting in a fortnight? I ask because dupes can become champ levels fairly quickly. I got Hawkguy from about 5 covers to champed within 2 weeks of his entering tokens, and got to apply 3 or 4 dupes as extra levels.

For 4*s, having a colour at five makes it less advisable to make someone your BH, but the same isn't necessarily true for 3*s, especially if you only need a couple more covers.

I'm not sure what everyone else's rate is but I probably get 4 or 5 bonus covers a week (maybe more).  I've tried getting covers for characters I didn't have hardly any of, like Luke Cage, and I got like 4 black covers to bring him to 5 black but switched him because I didn't want to waste the bonus hero advantage by getting yet another black.  IM40 would be and ideal candidate but, with my luck, I'd get my next 7 covers; five yellow and 1 blue 1 red and all of the dups would expire before I get him champed (I actually have 3 IM40 yellow covers set to expire in a few days already).  Seems like to me 4 covers would be a lot to get in a 13 day period.  (Even though I do only need 6 more Hawkeye 2*'s to get another red cover).  I guess I kind of assumed that the bonus hero favors giving you only one kind of color for a character, so it was pointless to keep trying to get covers if it favors giving you dupes.  Does it seem to be random for most other people?

jamesh

While Dr Strange has relatively low health, I've found him to have better survivability than some other higher health characters.

As well as his yellow passive shortening matches, his blue power is very useful: as well as stunning one enemy, it does decent damage over the lifetime of the countdown, and by depleting enemy AP it can prevent the enemy from firing a power at you.  Since the damage of both of these moves increase with character level, the benefit of levelling him probably outweighs having him protected by a stronger character.

heybub

jamesh said:

While Dr Strange has relatively low health, I've found him to have better survivability than some other higher health characters.

As well as his yellow passive shortening matches, his blue power is very useful: as well as stunning one enemy, it does decent damage over the lifetime of the countdown, and by depleting enemy AP it can prevent the enemy from firing a power at you.  Since the damage of both of these moves increase with character level, the benefit of levelling him probably outweighs having him protected by a stronger character.

I concur.  His yellow is a beast against goons...and low health doesn't matter when you don't get hit.  He can easily take out goons before anything goes off, and if one get close, fire off that blue to freeze them, and hit them with mad damage every turn.  

Even if there is only 1 goon, just save him for last as he'll hammer the active enemies.  My Strange is hitting for like 1800 damage for every countdown tile generated, and the blue does something like 1850 damage every turn.

You might get into some trouble against 3 active characters, but champed 2*s are going to be good against those, too, so you don't have to solely rely on Dr. S.

MarkersMake

jtsings said:
 

I guess I kind of assumed that the bonus hero favors giving you only one kind of color for a character, so it was pointless to keep trying to get covers if it favors giving you dupes.  Does it seem to be random for most other people?

It is indeed random. You have just had some bad luck, that's all. 

And as others have said, Strange is best used against goons (non tile-movers like soldiers, muscles, etc). If you have moonstone, soldier, soldier, then you just target moonstone. Within 3-5 turns, the soldiers will have activated enough powers for Strange to down moonstone. Just don't use him against 3 tile movers (eg. moonstone, venom, bullseye) unless you can hide him behind someone else. 

Symbiotes are trickier - they spam lots of powers, so Strange's yellow will fire often, but those powers tend to do damage every turn. It's a bit of a tougher balance. 

jtsings

MarkersMake said:

It is indeed random. You have just had some bad luck, that's all. 

Thank goodness. I just thought that was a game mechanic built in that it pretty much only spits out the same color, making it hard to get the covers to champ your characters.  I'm glad I've just been a bit unlucky.
 
  Thank you all for the extra input regarding Strange.  I think right now I'm going to focus on BP and I may target Strange for my next champ, rather than champing Thanos.  Thanos has a big enough punch with his black right now that I'm comfortable with him most likely my 3rd champ.  Your comments have been very helpful

optimus2861

Oh, and Strange is useless against Ultron Sentries of any kind. All their powers are passive, so they don't trigger his yellow. Highly annoying.

But against any other kind of goon, he's aces. Maggia Dons are some of the easiest wins you'll ever have; they spawn countdown tiles like mad. Once they get rolling (they generate three colours and only one of which can actually hurt you), Strange just burns them in no time.

jtsings

  Well the moment we all have been waiting for has arrived, I finally got my 13th cover for Squirrel Girl!  However, for the important news, I did get my 5th yellow (and 13th) cover for Strange.  Also since I have 1 cover for Thanos set to expire and we have a few covers in the verses gem season, it seems smart to Champ him too. Hopefully I'll have enough ISO when I finally get Black Panther's 13th cover to champ him.  SG will have to wait for a few weeks before I decide if she's Champ worthy just yet.  Thanks again for all your input and thank you for giving me reassurance that Strange is a very strong character, especially in Thug/Mafia levels.  This past event, I used him for about 90% of my nodes and he made them much quicker, plus I took way less damage on my team; even when I paired him with Thanos. 

   I'll follow up after I champ them to let you know if I noticed any level scaling spikes in PVE; I'm already seeing champed 3* characters in PVP, without having one champed myself, so I can't imagine my PVP experience will be all that different.   Even so, I'll still follow up just in case there are other people that stumble upon this post and are curious if there are any changes when you champ your first 3 star character (though most of you have said already, it does get slightly more difficult but is still manageable).

iron-n-wine

3* Strange is probably my most-used character in PVE, as I will use him even when not boosted (infact, when he was boosted I cant say I noticed a massive jump in his damage).

Even if I have collected enough blue to fire his stun, I will generally hold onto it until I'm in a situation where a goon countdown is about to resolve, and like @jamesh said, his relatively low health isnt a problem when your team never gets hit!

jtsings

BlackBoltRocks said:

jtsings said:

    However, for the important news, I did get my 5th yellow (and 13th) cover for Strange

I highly recommend champing Strange immediately if you have the iso. That's largely because he will be boosted for the next week starting today. Have fun using him in Iso-8 Brotherhood! 

No doubt!

I actually got a bonus cover to get my 13th cover of BP, now the race to get 60000 more iso begins lol.

jtsings

  Well, I will have to say the PVP difficulty did go up considerably after champing Strange and Thanos.  Before, in clearance level 6, I was able to start with a few easy rounds to get to 200 points but this go round it started with me having a pretty high level match just to get my foot in the door.  (I guess it could also be because this is the first versus that I've had a pretty high level covered featured character?)  And every round thereafter the matches were still tough but where as before I was able I could interchange different teams I was pretty much stuck with using Strange, IM40, and Kamala Khan (which was a pretty darn good team, btw).

   However, my next dilemma is a tough question I would like your insight on as well.  I'm probably only going to be able to champ 1 character before their extra covers expire and I wonder if anyone has experience with one, or both of them, to see which one might be best.  If things go in PVE like they normally do I should be able to either Champ:

       Luke Cage(3*) or Rocket and Groot(3*).

   I, of course, do have Black Panther that could be champed but he's got no covers set to expire and I'm not sure if it would be worth losing the extra covers in the other characters to champ him.   Or am I wrong?  (I'm not even going to bring squirrel girl into the discussion, lol )  If anyone has any input on Luke, R&G, or BP that they could share it would be great.

  And also one last question for now.  If I have a cover in my queue and my character is already maxed with covers, if I raise the characters other power do I lose the cover I'm using to upgrade the color.  For instance, I have two covers for Rocket and Groot in my queue.  Their at 4/4/5 right now but I'd like to max out their green (cause I've heard it's devastating).  Will it put a cover of the color I'm downgrading in my queue or will I just lose the green cover altogether and be left with the 1 cover I didn't use?

granne

Re-speccing means you lose that extra cover, but in some situations that's a price worth paying.

Both Cage and R&G are great, but I would vote for Cage in your situation. He will save you health packs, which, as an early 2*-3* transitioner, will be important for you. R&G will also save you health packs, but only on themselves.

Cage also benefits from re-speccing on the fly depending on his opponents (although not as much as his 4* version). You can crank up his protect tile against tile-movers, and his other two against goons.

Cage + Fist + Scarlet Witch will take you far in Shield Sim.

talleman

Im not sure that i understand the question but if you champ your character you can choose wich colours you want to max.

For example: you have a 5-5-3 champ but you rather play him/her 5-3-5 then you just have to go to train character and switch for free

Regarding Cage, R&G and BP i recommend you to champ Cage first. His red will help you alot especially at 2*-3* transition. He also have a cheap black with decent damage. And if you save doubble black AP it turns to massive damage + stun.

jtsings

talleman said:

Im not sure that i understand the question but if you champ your character you can choose wich colours you want to max.

I mean, they're not champed yet but since I have a cover in the queue when I go to raise level of character it gives me the option to raise his green ability, but only because I have a green cover in the queue.  So what I'm asking is, in that situation, will a cover of the ability I'm downgrading, let's say blue, go in the queue or will I just lose the green cover but upgrade my ability?

granne said:

Both Cage and R&G are great, but I would vote for Cage in your situation. He will save you health packs, which, as an early 2*-3* transitioner, will be important for you. R&G will also save you health packs, but only on themselves.

Yes, I actually use Cage a lot because of the extra shield after the first turn, especially in lightning rounds.  And that's only with two red.  And I almost always save up 12 Black and whack the strongest character on the other team.  What really kind of makes the debate interesting is that I use IM40 a lot and he would feed blue to Strange and green to R&G which seems like would make pretty daunting offensive team.  However, I don't have a good title moving defensive character so Cage would make sense in that respect as well.

MarkersMake

For a non-champed character, if you use an extra cover to upgrade one power, you will not receive a cover back for the power that you downgrade. If you did, you would be able to do that over and over, and endlessly re-spec that character, which is reserved to be one of the big advantages of championing. 

Sometimes it is worthwhile, though - particularly since many abilities have huge power increases at 5 covers.

Re: Cage - how far along are your Scarlet witch and Iron Fist?  As others mentioned above, they make a great trio, with SWitch feeding Fist purple, who then feeds Cage black, who then punches everybody's lights out.