Roster management help

Voldemort93

Hi

Like everybody else I got many card on my rewards cache and too less roster spots for them. So a little guidance from the people here would be appreciated. Here's my roster:

https://mpq.gamependium.com/rosters/nitz9119/

Apart from these I have the following in my rewards cache

4 star: Black Widow, Uncanny Deadpool, Captain Marvel, Carnage, Peggy Carter,  Kraven the Hunter
3 star: Two covers of Falcon and Luke Cage, Single cover of Beast, Elektra, Quicksilver

I have saved Hero points for 5 covers. Since I have 41 covers of 3 star characters, I have started to slowly add 4 star into new character slots. Is this the correct time to make the transition? I currently have 12 four star characters. Thanks in advance people.

Dormammu

No, it's definitely not time. The ideal time to transition to the 4-star tier is after you have all the 3-stars champed.
My advice:

1) Farm your 2-stars (max-champ, sell, re-champ, repeat) to start earning more HP from repeated champ rewards which you can convert to more roster slots
2) Focus on champing the entirety of the 3-star tier
3) Hoard CP and Legendary Tokens - collecting 4 & 5-star characters you can't roster or who won't help you isn't doing you much good. An under-covered 4-star (in most cases) is entirely useless.
4) Stop putting ISO into 4-stars with 1 or 2 covers. Use your ISO on characters that can help you now (fully covered 3-stars). Even if you're swimming in ISO and have nothing better to use it for, that won't be true for much longer.
5) Stop putting ISO into 5-star characters with 1 or 2 covers. It will affect your MMR (PvP matchmaking) and if you continue to do it, you'll start seeing teams with champed 4-stars that you have no chance against right now.

Just let your 4-stars sit and gather covers organically while you work on your 3-stars. You'll get covers for progression prizes, alliance events, 3-star champ rewards, lucky Heroic Token pulls... once you're done or near done with your threes you'll find your fours are in better shape to start investing in. Then it's time to dip into your LT and CP hoard and make the transition then.

Voldemort93

Thank you for the tips. I have heard about these farming techniques only after joining the forum.  I have already began hoarding my CP and LT. And stopped pumping ISO-8 until I have sufficient covers. All the 4 star covers I have in my reward cache came from heroic tokens. Your advice seems very useful. But it presents a few dilemmas to me.

1. Should I throw away all the 4 stars sitting in my reward cache?

2. Should I throw out the single 4 star covers from my roster to make space for farming the 2 stars that I don't have in my roster?

3. My MMR currently gives me either 3 champed 3 star opponents or a 5 star and two 3/2 star opponents. Will it lower my MMR if I throw out some 4 stars?

4. I have read that 3 star charactes such as Vision, Elektra are not very useful. Should I try and champ them too?

monsieurmojo

1. & 2.) Not just yet; the problem with dumping all of them wholesale is that you've got some of the best 4* rostered as one-cover characters.  I wouldn't get rid of them just yet.  What I *would* do is maybe replace Wiccan with 4* Carol (who is probably consensus Top 2 at worst) and find somebody else (maybe IW Spidey) to replace with Peggy.  You're going to want those later. 

Addendum:  I think you'd be better served selling your single-cover 5*s.  You need the roster space for other things right now, you'll likely never get those characters finished, and they're doing you zero good at one cover.

3.)  Don't get rid of 4*.  Just stop levelling them until you have 5 covers in their useful powers (5 Carol black, 5 Red Hulk green, 5 Hulkbuster red, etc.), and keep putting ISO into your 3, and do yourself a favor and stop putting ISO into 5s.  

4.)  Roster them all, even if the lists say they're useless.  They *are* useless, but they'll be boosted occasionally, and you'll need them for PvE essentials.  Plus, you're going to eventually want the champion rewards they produce.

Like the Dread One says, never ever open Latest Legends or spend CP.  Just keep saving them, they're doing you no good right now.  Keep saving up HP, and use it *only* on roster spots.  Play as much PvE as your roster can handle, dabble around in PvP (in particular Lightning Rounds, SHIELD Sim, and such) for the early rewards.  Once you've got all of your 3* championed, *then* start opening Legendary Tokens.  When you finally do that, you're going to want to just open them until you run out of HP to roster the characters, then stop.  The goal is to get a useful cover out of *every* pull.  

Voldemort93

Thanks a lot once again. Will implement them monsieurmojo.

The 5 star character makes my PVE very easy. Especially with all the goon-type opponents. I use 5* Cap and 4* Chavez. Her critical tiles placing power is too good and helps me repeatedly go at PVE. So I think I'll keep Cap. The other two I realized I hardly use them. So maybe I'll sell them out to lower my MMR in PVP. 

I realize the 5* Cap is going to make my life little harder at PVP. But I believe with IM40 and Thanos, I can take on them.

Could you tell among the 4* in my reward cache anybody else worth saving other than Captain Marvel?

(I thought Wiccan was a strong character)

But it's going to be so painful to throw away my 5 star characters. 

Dormammu

Voldemort93 said:

4. I have read that 3 star charactes such as Vision, Elektra are not very useful. Should I try and champ them too?

Just to expand on this from monsieurmojo's excellent advice, all characters above the 1-star tier have their occasional uses. They rotate in and out of PvE events as essential characters, you need them to complete Deadpool's Daily Quests, and they all offer excellent champ rewards. (You only need one maxed 1-star to do the 1st node in DDQ, which it looks like you've already figured out.)

Remember that this game pays it forward. 2-star champ rewards give you 3-star covers. 3-star champ rewards give you 4-star covers. 4-star champ rewards give you 5-star covers. Plus you're getting tokens mixed in there. So champing the entirety of each tier helps you transition to the next. 2-stars drop like rain in this game so farming them all (except Bagman who is too rare) over and over is easy. It's also possible to champ all of the 3-stars - there is a reasonable number of them. The 4-star tier is where things get tricky - there's so many of them that champing them all is difficult, and with how often they are released it's hard to keep up. I'm still working on them after transitioning to the 5-star tier. You may have to pick and choose which ones to roster occasionally; use these forums to determine which are worth keeping.

Dormammu

Voldemort93 said:

Could you tell among the 4* in my reward cache anybody else worth saving other than Captain Marvel?

Carnage and Peggy.

monsieurmojo

Peggy, for sure.  Get her rolling with IM40, and she's a one-woman wrecking crew.  Back before R&Gamora or Carol, PvP was all Peggy, all the time.  Carnage is terrific with Medusa, Professor X, Nico, or anybody else that buffs or steals tiles.  XFDP is amazing when you're in 4* land facing 5* teams, his black procs every turn, and though his red is expensive, it's great at saving health packs.  Plus, since so many high-level early 4* use some combination of red/yellow/green/blue, his colors fit into a ton of teams.  I think it's still too early to tell on IWBW, but it's telling that you never see her in PvP (unlike Valkyrie, who was released around the same time and is everywhere when boosted). Kraven is garbage-tier except against goons in PvE.  I think it's safe to say that you can sell that one.  

As for your HP/roster slots, I'd just keep expanding your 3* and 2* roster first, and just roster the 4* as you build up any excess, or when you happen to pull an upper-tier character.  Jarvind's excellent "Mostly Accurate 4* Guide" (http://https//forums.d3go.com/discussion/56176/a-mostly-accurate-4-ranking-updated-4-30/p1) is a great place to get a feel for these characters and whether you should roster them or not.

Above all, just have fun with this.  Don't sweat the roster stuff too much.  Have fun with your characters, and enjoy your time here.  Once you get fully into 3* land, concentrate on your 4*s.  Dabble a bit more in PvP.  Keep coming back to the forum for advice.  We were all in your shoes at some point, and for most of us, it wasn't all that long ago.  

Heartbreaksoup

monsieurmojo said:

Kraven is garbage-tier except against goons in PvE.  I think it's safe to say that you can sell that one.  

Oh, I don't agree at all.  Kraven's extremely good against a couple of the Dark Avengers in PVE as well.  Add him to any team that is facing Bullseye and Daken and as soon as they've got four special tiles on the screen - say, two purple Bullseye shields and two red Daken strikes - and Kraven just passively starts thrashing them with his Think Like the Enemy power.  His black power is meanwhile doing around 10k damage.

My advice: don't throw any of your characters away if you can help it.  One of the rules of RNGesus is that as soon as you sell that Kraven, you'll end up with another one.

You don't need to sink ISO into your 4*s or 5*s yet.  My experience has been that the 4* characters are mostly useless until they have about six covers.  At that point, start adding ISO.  The thing is that their basic match damage isn't any greater than a 3*'s match damage.  There's just no point in spending ISO on them until they're actually able to benefit your team in PVE.

A 5* is extremely handy to have in PVE, even with only one cover and at its flat level 255, because you'll do 400-450 damage per match on their three strong colors.  My go-to PVE team has always been 5* Daredevil - like, as soon as I got one - 3* Strange and somebody else.  I see you have three 5*s, which is great.  If you're playing PVE, just use the same character until they get below 50% health, bench them and put one of the others in.  

TPF Alexis

Heartbreaksoup said:

monsieurmojo said:

Kraven is garbage-tier except against goons in PvE.  I think it's safe to say that you can sell that one.  

Oh, I don't agree at all.  Kraven's extremely good against a couple of the Dark Avengers in PVE as well.  Add him to any team that is facing Bullseye and Daken and as soon as they've got four special tiles on the screen - say, two purple Bullseye shields and two red Daken strikes - and Kraven just passively starts thrashing them with his Think Like the Enemy power.  His black power is meanwhile doing around 10k damage.

I hadn't thought of this until I hit a point in one of the nodes where he's required that Daken's strikes got out of hand, and then suddenly Kraven just started doing a bunch of damage every turn, and it was pretty awesome.

DAZ0273

One thing to remember about low cover 4* before deciding to sell (and for you swashbuckling MPQ players who love some 1 on 1 goodness) is keeping an eye out for the special makes character invisible "can do Crash of the Titans" covers. This includes Prof. X purple, Howard the Duck purple and I would guess (but she hasn't had one yet) Black Widow Infinity War. Oh and Invisible Woman - duh! It is a horrible slog BUT it is possible, I did the Prof X one myself with a 0/1/1 build and nearly won Howard's also at very low covers.

Voldemort93

Hi once again. New doubts

Following your ideas, I have been developing my roster. Currently I have almost all the three star characters and have champed about 15 of them. My highest of the 3* is at about Lvl 183 and the lowest at 40. 

What would happen if one of my 3* alone ended up with a Lvl at about 270 while the rest just remained at 170. Will this make my MMR unfavourable? 

To be a little more elaborate, beyond champing these 15 characters, should I make sure that they all remain at similar levels? Or it doesn't matter if one is better than the other?

Asking this because I was wondering of getting bonus heroes from a single champed character so that his level rises much quicker than the others?

lakantanz

If you have started farming your 2 stars, you shouldn't get to a situation where you have only one championed 3 star miles higher than the others.  Your 2 star feeder characters should also get championed and they will be the fastest risers in your 3 stars.

I am currently on my 2nd rotation of my 3 stars after having sold almost all of them once (bar only three now) and recovered and leveled/championed them.

Doctor Octopus is at level 255 championed and has not yet reached 270 at all.
Captain Marvel is level 247 championed and has reached 270, been sold and leveled all the way back up to 247 again.

Should give you some idea of just how many covers you can get from your 2 stars, they really do make a massive difference once you start to farm them!

As to your bonus hero, I would rotate it to characters that don't have 13 covers yet.  Focus on the ones commonly regarded as better and then start doing the rest.  With saving covers to get your 13th cover, it isn't as big a deal to get a 6th cover of a colour, but I would still focus on those without 5's in colours already to speed this process up.

Dormammu

Voldemort93 said:

Currently I have almost all the three star characters and have champed about 15 of them. My highest of the 3* is at about Lvl 183 and the lowest at 40. 

What would happen if one of my 3* alone ended up with a Lvl at about 270 while the rest just remained at 170. Will this make my MMR unfavourable? 

Their max level is 266. Since you have 15 of them champed they're all going to start slowly climbing. The only way one of them would get ahead is if you set them as your lone bonus hero and never changed it. I don't advise doing that.

But, theoretically, if that did happen - yes, you'd find MMR would match you up against frustrating opponents. But only because it wouldn't be able to find anyone else with a single max-champed 3-star with all the rest at 170 to match you up against.

DAZ0273

Once you have champed 3* then using your bonus hero is best for one of two strategies:

1.) Champing any of the remaining 3*. You can do this quickly with BH.

2.) Strategically gaining levels to obtain specific prizes. Normally these would be 4* covers, CP and LT's.

It can happen organically that RNG just gives you more of one particular character - for example I have a max champed Patch as my only maxed 3* - nearest to him is Super Steve at 260. I didn't bonus hero Patch more than any others nor did I flip 2* Wolverine's farm many more times than others, it just happened that way. The rest of my 3's are fairly evenly spaced between the first wave I champed and the second wave.

It is definitely advisable to try and level your 3's reasonably evenly because it means you will have a selection of boosted characters to use each event.