Roster help for rookie

TPF Alexis

3* Iron Fist makes a rainbow with any red/yellow/blue character, which there are a lot of. It's not always necessary, but it is something that can be nice to keep in mind. When you're using his purple to generate black, that's another good one to fire right after Magneto's red to boost the cascade potential a bit.

DAZ0273

Maybe it is just me but I have no problems running IM40 with Mags, especially boosted Mags. If you fire any of IM40's offensive powers then you have to deal with the AP drain which is a pain for purple and black users (I assume that you have already used Recharge at this point thus not depleting your yellow), so having fairly cheap nuke and board shake to profit off the blue & red AP is a decent trade-off. I'm even happy to throw Thor in so his red can make more yellow AP for more recharges and you can build up his green Aoe.

Beerman63

That's a very interesting option, I'm gonna try that one for sure.
Besides I managed to also champ Luke Cage (really lucky with bonus heroes these days), so I'm also going to give IF, Luke Cage & cMag a try. Let's see which ones work the best. 

AardvarkPepper

1)  Normally 3* Iron Man is spec'd to 535.  Fix him.  His blue is super expensive and blue should typically be being used by Strange anyways, and the red offers pretty decent damage for a 3* (though it drains other colors but hey.)

2)  Forget trying to iso up all your characters.  Yeah the first few levels are cheap.  But even so you still can't afford the iso once you start pushing, and you will.  Look around the forums.  See how there's threads about people asking for more iso in events, how to manage iso.  You're not there yet, but you will be, and you may as well start saving iso now.

3)  "Also I decided to not keep covers for 2* Moonstone, Bullseye and Capt. America as I read they are fairly useful."  Looking at your roster, you're slotted all the non-Bagman 2*s, which is best for long-term roster development.  Reading that statement, it seems like you decided not to roster some non-Bagman 2*s.  But just to be sure, yeah, you want to roster each of the non-Bagman 2*s.

4)   I wouldn't recommend Patch (3* Wolverine).  The problem is he's slow and has no control game, he doesn't generate AP, and self heals himself only, so his applications are in practice limited.

What do you do with 3* Patch in PvE when you have a lot of Muscle goons that fire blue Countdowns that heavily damage your entire team?  Even enemy Hitman sniper rifles do a chunk of damage.  Or what happens when enemy Lieutenant keeps dropping heavy heals?  With no early damage or stun capacity, 3* Wolverine doesn't do much, and your team as a whole eats damage.  You can use Wolverine to soak a few hits, but if the enemy has damaging powers that hit your entire team (Mindless Ones come to mind), or if the enemy has multiple Countdowns, Patch can't soak everything.

Or let's say you're in PvE simulator at SCL 7 against a 4* team.  Or have a kind of hard matchup in PvP (not "difficult" but actually "hard").  Lack of board control and lack of stun mean 3* Wolverine is hard pressed to keep pace with enemy damage.  He just dies too much.

My guess (and yeah it's a total guess) is those touting Patch mostly don't actually use him these days unless he happens to be boosted in PvP.  And then if he is, great, more hit points, more damage, more regeneration, red's easier to get Patch tiles for.  But if he's not boosted?  I'd say not nearly as good, then he's in this kinda mediocre ground.

He's still OKAY.  But I wouldn't say he should be a priority.

5)  I'd say maintain the 2* farming, forget dumping iso into most 3*s, and prioritize 3* Iron Man, 3* Doctor Strange, 3* Hawkeye.  Then 3* Kamala Khan, 3* Captain America, 3* Black Widow, 3* Magneto, 3* Iron Fist, then 3* Hood in that order.  Thanos and Deadpool as you can.  And yeah I know the OP already has some, but I mean in context for others that might be looking for what to prioritze.

And why?

Iron Man:  Load of hit points, charges up a load of red and blue AP very fast with his yellow.  He doesn't regenerate, but his load of hit points combined with his quick AP generation means you can often kill or otherwise neutralize stuff that would heavily damage you, so he works out well.

Doctor Strange:  You know why in PvE (for some matchups anyways).  In PvP he's fragile but his stun, AP drain, and damage mean he's not terrible.

Hawkeye:  He generates AP off matching enemy specials, and has true heal.  This is your 3* go-to for enemies that generate specials.  His blue is weird to handle if you're not used to it, but once you are, you'll see he's nice.

Kamala Khan:  She generates temporary hit points when friendly powers fire.  She has a purple board shakeup that's kind of expensive but okay.  Her green is weak team damage, not as good per AP spent as Black Panther's.  But she's really there for temporary HP.

Captain America:  This is who you abuse along with Kamala Khan.  His powers don't do a lot of damage for the 3* tier, but he gets an AP refund if you can protect his Countdowns, and in the right matchups that's not hard.  You have enemy problem tile replacement, stun, protect tiles, and with Kamala Khan you keep generating loads of temporary hit points for the team.  He and Kamala let you fight "up" against some 4* teams, though it's a pain in the butt, I don't see better answers in 3* land.

I can't emphasize enough - if you use KK / Cap, and if the enemy team doesn't have board shakeup/destruction, you really punish them for it.  Yes it's slow, and yes you can suffer early chip damage, and yes other things.  But I can't think of any other 3* team that I'd fight championed 4*s with and win without using some crazy 5* teamup power or a bunch of 1* Black Widow stuns and a lot of luck or something.

Black Widow:  Yeah okay, expensive powers, which is usually horrible.  But she uniquely has three powers that have precision board control.  She's your go to in a lot of alliance events when you need board manipulation and where Captain America and Magneto just won't cut it.

This might sound kind of incidental, but it's not.  If you want alliance boss rewards, when it comes time, if you're looking to be in a top alliance, 3* Cyclops is not going to cut it.  You can't sell 3* Cyclops to an alliance leader that knows their stuff that looks at your roster.  3* Black Widow though, maybe.

Magneto:  He's unique in that he shuffles tiles around, has a bomb, and some decent hit points.  Loki has a cheaper shuffle but is too fragile and has no bomb.  There's a load of stuff that involves needing to shuffle instead of outright destroy, and Magneto's ends up being the answer to a lot of potential issues.  (e.g. you don't want to blow up the board with 3* Storm if 3* Captain America's countdowns are on board.  But 3* Magneto doesn't have so much a problem with that.  Or say you have Iron Man yellow recharge countdowns or Strange's blue countdown or Hawkeye's countdowns or whatever.  Shuffling > destruction sometimes)  I won't go into it, but Magneto's good.

Iron Fist:  Against weaker enemies his Attack tile comes in handy.  Against powerful enemies, he does a load of late damage with his purple once black is charged up.  Kind of a mixed bag, but he works.

Hood:  Fragile and slow and conditional.  But he's still AP steal, and that's one way you can manage enemy AP along with Kamala Khan and Captain America.  Not "easy", not quick, but again sometimes he's just the answer you need.  He also teams with 4* Chavez if you want to accelerate your damage without using boosts.

Thanos:  He self-harms the rest of the team with his black passive but he's the king of PvE speed.  He can win you matches you would otherwise lose.  The issue with Thanos is, if you use disposable characters, usually your clearing the initial enemy is slower (since you're not using your best and quickest other characters), which offsets the quick damage his passive gets.  Still he's tremendously useful for initial clears in PvE and lightning rounds, so I'd say he's worth building up.

Deadpool:  Use this guy once every day at least to gain Deadpool points.  You get something in the region of 3500-4000 Deadpool Points when using Deadpool, and it takes 28,000 points to use his Whales to full effect.  If you really want a win, can build up 14 purple or 14 teamups (you can use allied teamup whales, but you still need to use your own Deadpool Points) and have 28K Deadpool points, there's your win.  Without whales he's an okay-ish bodyguard, but as his red damage is capped and his purple's slow he's really there for whales.  But you do want whales.

Again, you want Deadpool points.  Use Deadpool every day.

==

Honorable Mention:  Blade.  He populates the board with Strikes that other characters can exploit, and he has okay damage and a bit of AP control.  If you want to use Psylocke, or Daken, or Falcon, or She-Hulk, or if you have multi-step damage powers or team damage powers, or etc etc.

Other players comment stuff like Cyclops is good "especially boosted".  But I say naw.  In PvP sure, and the AI can't screw up using him.  But you're low on iso, and besides need to prioritize which character(s) to gold-star favorite to build up next.  It's not a question of what character is good in what niche situation, or even excellent in a niche situation.  It's a question of what few characters you should concentrate on to get the most gains in PvE and/or PvP, right?

it's like yeah okay Cyclops in PvP boosted, nice.  But it's like, if you get Cyclops champed then you didn't champ, say, Kamala Khan or someone.  And she could save you a lot of health packs.  Or whoever else you didn't champion that can benefit you in other ways.  I really don't consider 3* Cyclops much a priority in terms of 3* roster players doing what needs to be done.  He's sort of a luxury imo.  If you happen to have him, he's not bad.  But that's different to actually prioritizing him.

==

As to PvP - look okay, you get some hard matchups, and that sucks.  But real talk.  There's prizes to be won.  So what you do is this - you look at the time events start in PvP.  Unlike in PvE, they're not on a 24/48 hour cycle, they're on a 3.5 day cycle, so the times come out weird sometimes.  But hey.  Anyways, you look at the start time, you try to start when a slice begins.  Well not try.  Do. (A "slice" refers to any of the five starting times that you can select when starting the event)  When you do that, you get 8-10 matches against computer-generated teams that you can probably beat.  Now yeah if the game resets then you lose your remaining queue of easy matches, or if you exit the game and re-enter, or if you take a while then enemy players hit you then when you clear the node by fighting or rejecting the match, maybe you have a tough matchup where you had an easy one.  But whatever.

As a developing player, I'd say you want to target the - what is it, 10 wins?  that you can get HP from, at least, and if you're mostly fighting computer seed teams that shouldn't be terribly difficult.  You want the HP for roster slots.

And thanks to win-based progression (as opposed to score-based progression) you can cycle through matches until you find an easier match.  Select a node you don't want to fight.  Reject it.  Now instead of 30 bonus iso if you won that match you're at 20 bonus iso.  Select another node.  Reject.  Now down to 10 bonus iso.  Another rejection, 0 bonus iso.  But you still haven't lost anything.  You only lose when you start PAYING iso.

And what happens then?  Well just fight XYZ team with a garbage team (you don't even want to try to win, using the provided Essential (so your real character if you have one doesn't get hurt).  Then retreat, you don't even have to match a single tile.  You lose ranking points, but so what?  You weren't going for high rank anyways.  And your bonus iso counter reset, so you can keep looking for easier matches repeating the above.

I'm not saying you should push to 40 wins (though in my opinion you should to get the 4* character if you can do SCL 7).  But I think you should seriously consider it on occasion, and even if you don't usually PvP, consider trying to get that HP progression prize.  It's sort of low-hanging fruit if your schedule allows.  If.

==

"I admit I do have a bit of a problem playing with supporting characters like Black Widow. I’m never really that happy when she’s in my deck, though I read in the forums that she is super-useful, so I assume I’m not really using her correctly what would be good partners for my 2* and 3* versions of her?"

2* Black Widow, you use with 2* Wolverine and 2* Daken.  You populate the board with weak strike tiles through green matches feeding Daken, and Wolverine using his green power fueled by red.  Black Widow fires her Espionage power on I think purple and black?  and that power is a two-step power so benefits twice from the Strike tiles out.  You steal purple with BW's Espionage, then use BW's purple for even more AP steal.  Then you fire Wolverine's green with some red backing it up, fire Wolverine's red to kill something, then Daken's blue one or two times with all the Strike tiles out, and that ends the match.

Thing is, some players think Black Widow's about AP control because of her AP steal.  But she's not.  She's too fragile to get in a protracted match-battle, and her blue is too expensive to generate enough temporary hit points to offset damage.  Plus she really needs Strike tiles to feed her Espionage damage.  So she ends up being fast chip damage that uses her purple AP steal to fuel faster aggression.

And yeah if she's boosted the numbers change and in the right situation she is control/AP steal.  But generally?  I'd say Strike-tile empowered chip damage and accelerated aggression.  You can get some more usage out of her with 2* Bullseye's Protect.  But yeah really, her blue temporary hit points just don't pace enemy damage sufficiently.  Though she can put off enemy Countdowns with blue as well so she's okay at mass control (better than other 2*s) it's still not quite enough.  So IMO she's chip damage off 2* Wolv/Daken.

3* Black Widow is horribly slow.  I mean okay, you get enough green going and her green is a lot of fun.  But that's a real "if".  But her utility, and the reason I think she is mentioned as much as she is, is multiple powers that offer precision board control.  You can place a LOT of green tiles which means you can create 4-matches that blow up rows or columns, or 5-matches that create criticals and trigger abilities like 2* Hawkeye's purple passive or 4* Professor X's . . . I forget what color, you can look it up.  Her red targets multiple areas precisely (you can look up the precise tiles affected on the wiki), as does her green.  So in the end, those multiple powers means she's great against alliance bosses that require particular tile destruction like, I think the Doctor Octopus alliance boss?  Or some other things, yeah.

If you're talking partner for 3* Black Widow, probably 3* Iron Man and 3* Magneto.  Again, you don't really use Black Widow so much unless maybe she's boosted or for an alliance boss event, and when you do, you sometimes want her AP to be accelerated so she can build up faster, then you want multiple board shuffles, so that's how the team goes.

==

"Last point, I got a loadfull of characters waiting to be rostered, including some 4*. This would be Invincible, Medusa, Spider-Gwen and The Thing (which I think seems to be a pretty strong character). Is any of those 4 worth keeping / worth dumping one of the low cover 3* like Rocket Beast or Octopus? "

Who's "Invincible"?  4* Luke Cage?  4* Iron Man?  I can't keep track.  But Medusa?  Yeah Medusa is fantastic and a keeper.

The Thing is kinda garbage imo.  It's like, his protection is conditional on health.  So you have to worry about that, and that's really screwy.  And he's slow.  Random too I think.

Spider-Gwen?  If I remember right, she's in the whole web tile suite, and maybe she'd be okay with 4* Spiderman.  But yeah I would not concentrate on her.

Dumping 3* Rocket and Groot (I assume), Beast, Octopus?  As I see it, 3* Rocket and Groot has a pretty niche role and isn't useful for much outside teaming with 3* Thanos so you don't have to use health packs.  Beast is slow.  Octopus is slow.

BUT I do remember that 3* Doctor Octopus feeds 4* Carnage.  And 4* Carnage you end up using.  So you might want to keep on a 3* even if it's bad, if it feeds a decent 4*.  Something to think on anyways.

==

"What really confuses me is that, whenever I play PVP (Lightning Rounds and everything else besides Shield Simulator), 90% of the time will I get opponents with at least one level 270 character in it, which are impossible to beat. Why is that so? I read that the level of opponents is an average of the best 3 to 5 cards, and I am nowhere near a 270 level card, my average obviously would be around level 140 the most…"

Unless you really screwed around (in a carefully planned way) with your roster, you're going to face opponents with characters of near your roster's maximum levels.  But the thing is, boosts aren't factored in.

So the game sees you have a championed 3* at level 166?  Okay.  So you face other players with maybe levels 170-180 or whatever.  But THEIR 3*s are boosted.  YOURS may not be.  So yeah it works out to you're fighting level 270s or whatever.  Welcome to PvP MMR.

How could you have manipulated it?  Kept all your 3*s at level 70 or something like that.  Of course that would have meant forgoing PvE SCL prizes though so . . . not all sunshine and roses.  So it's not like you did bad.

==

"I got alot of CP points and I know I shouldn't use them for 4 or 5* covers now, but how about "upgrading" my 3* like IM40 with it? Is that a waste of CPs or would it help me at this point of the game?"

Both, but on balance at your current position it's more a waste than anything.

There's this point where you should be trying to push into PvE SCL 7, so you can get the featured 4* cover as a progression reward.  You don't have to do SCL 7 all the time, but when there's a good 4* (I think Medusa was recently featured for example?) you have the option.  But once you have the characters for that (and in my opinion you mostly do), you need to save CP for the eventual push into fully covered 5*s.  Which, you can look up how that works if you don't already know, but it's a load of hoarding, and I mean a load!

Again, you might want to crack some tokens when you're getting near 10 covers for some particular 4*s.  Like, 4* Rocket and Groot can really help your clear time, which helps your quality of life, so it's a consideration I'd make.  And 4* Medusa can help your survivability in a big way in some matchups (or just generally when paired with 4* Carnage, but even with 4* Rocket and Groot she has pretty decent burst healing for a bit).

But generally, you want to save.  There might be some exceptions, sure.  But IF there is an exception, there should be NO QUESTION in your mind that you're doing the right thing.  You should know specifically what character you're trying to increase, to what specific level, and what specifically you have to gain - and if you know all that, and also know specifically what you're giving up, then, well, like I wrote, you wouldn't have a question about whether you were making the right decision or not.

==

"As you can see I champed some 3* already, I have to admit I used 20 CP on getting the last cover for Patch, I guess its worth it though as you all recommened him to me as being a good partner for IM40. Is 3/5/5 the best build for Patch?"

I'd say 535.  Think on it.  Let's say you're using Wolverine 355 to tank and for bomb red.  So his green is . . . what?  You just sit on it?  So you're going to late game, aren't you, if you're building up to 14 red?

But if you ARE going to late game to build up to Patch's red then you ALSO have AP to fire other powers.  So if you go 535, using green followed by whatever other powers means each other power does a chunk more damage.

So yeah 355 Wolverine?  Sure, in the right conditions.  But generally you use 3* Wolverine's green to power everyone else's aggression.

==

"What do you think is the best level for PvE at the stage I am right now? I'm not a big grinder, just a casual player who gets about 25-35000 points at level 4 currently (depending on how much time I got).

Furthermore, I got 4 4* covers in my queue, it's really sad that I have to let go of them cause of roster limitations. Currently I have the following 4* waiting to be rostered: Main Event Hulk, Elektra, Peggy Carter and Bishop. Really thinking about keeping Peggy, I read that she is a really strong 4*, so wouldn't that be a waste to sell off her cover...?"

Looks like I was too late for you to save 4* Medusa.  Oh well.

My advice?  Play at least at SCL 4, for the 3* cover you get at progression.  Play up through SCL 6 if you feel at all comfortable.  But you ALSO want to look at the featured 4* character offered as SCL 7 for every event.

You know you can't afford to play SCL 7 all the time, it's a huge time sink.  But if you want *particular selected 4* covers*, then you can't ignore any possible source for those 4* covers.  And I'd say that includes PvP as well as PvE.

As to ME Hulk, Elektra, Peggy Carter, Bishop -

ME Hulk has free swaps.  But he's more "seriously annoying" than "deadly" on defense.

Elektra too niche.  She's okay.  But again, not best.

Peggy Carter, I dunno.  People will say "but she's amazing boosted".  Look okay, any 4* is amazing boosted.  The thing about Peggy Carter is she used to be a real pain what with making powers more expensive to use.  But now?  now I just don't know, you have 4* Rocket and Groot and Medusa, which you did before, sure, getting their passive power on.  But now you also have 4* America Chavez and 5* Kitty Pryde, and just a lot of stuff these days goes off passive powers that generate damage, and that, Peggy Carter's not so good at stopping.

It's like yeah in a year maybe we'll see some nerfs and sure she'll still do well in some matchups and maybe you could say decently in PvE.  But where I think I would have said some months ago that Peggy Carter should be high on the list of considerations, now not so much.  It's like . . . yes?  But it's more a "not no" than a "yes" really.

Bishop, yeah, he's part of this combo with 4* Deadpool and stuff, pretty annoying in the meta.  Again, that might change with the meta, and if you really think on it, Bishop is sort of specific.  But I think Bishop might end up being one of these characters that pushes the new anti-meta.

==

"Btw, is it worth keeping my Prowler? He has 3 covers already, though I don't enjoy playing with him at all, it seems quite hard for me to use him and he's not really fitting in any of my teams."

I'd say no.  Keep a couple roster slots open, so you can cycle Essential characters in that you get as progression rewards in PvE.

==

Parting comment - if you're not already in a top alliance, think about it.  Alliance rewards add up.  If you can't consistently manage your schedule and you don't want to take the trouble to merc out, and if as you wrote you're often not making full progression, okay.  But even if I'd say that's not top 100 PvE alliance territory, at least look for a top 250 PvE alliance, I don't think that would be out of the question, and maybe see if you can get some sort of hybrid alliance and get a bit of PvP rewards going on too.

Like yeah I know it's just a game and doing too much leads to burnout, and etc.  But if you want to progress your roster - you wrote this thread, you're taking time to play, you're taking time to plan - I'd say maybe you should at least consider those alliance rewards, yeah?

DAZ0273

Wow. Well the good news Beerman (good name!) is that you will probably be solidly in 4* land by the time you finish reading the above post.

AardvarkPepper

DAZ0273 said:

Wow. Well the good news Beerman (good name!) is that you will probably be solidly in 4* land by the time you finish reading the above post.

Lol.

Beerman63

Wow, thx alot for the extremly in-depth help, I'll probably going to have to read through it more often to get everything and combine it with my experiences. 
Really appreciate the time you put in writing all this! 

BlackBoltRocks

DAZ0273 said:

Wow. Well the good news Beerman (good name!) is that you will probably be solidly in 4* land by the time you finish reading the above post.

He'll champ God Emperor Doom and 5* Captain Marvel by the time that happens.

Beerman63

A few comments from my side in bold - I did manage to read through everything much faster than I progressed in MPQ

Normally 3* Iron Man is spec'd to 535.  Fix him.  His blue is super expensive and blue should typically be being used by Strange anyways, and the red offers pretty decent damage for a 3* (though it drains other colors but hey.)

Thanks for the hint, I changed IM accordingly, didn’t realize that the impact of his red would almost double… Really helped, cause as you wrote, blue is for Dr. Strange

 

 

"Also I decided to not keep covers for 2* Moonstone, Bullseye and Capt. America as I read they are fairly useful."  Looking at your roster, you're slotted all the non-Bagman 2*s, which is best for long-term roster development.  Reading that statement, it seems like you decided not to roster some non-Bagman 2*s.  But just to be sure, yeah, you want to roster each of the non-Bagman 2*s.

 

Yeah, I’m rostering all 2*s now, now I’m at the point where some are already max-champed, so I’m starting to build them again.

 

I wouldn't recommend Patch (3* Wolverine).  The problem is he's slow and has no control game, he doesn't generate AP, and self heals himself only, so his applications are in practice limited.

 

I champed him already, but I have to admit that he is not my favourite partner for IM40… I do prefer GSBW (even though she’s not yet champed). If the board is not too bad I manage to load up her green within a few turns, which destroys most of the enemies already. The rest will receive IM40s red and the game is over. Sometimes I get problems if I can’t load up IM40 fast enough but it’s not too often…

 

I'd say maintain the 2* farming, forget dumping iso into most 3*s, and prioritize 3* Iron Man, 3* Doctor Strange, 3* Hawkeye.  Then 3* Kamala Khan, 3* Captain America, 3* Black Widow, 3* Magneto, 3* Iron Fist, then 3* Hood in that order.  Thanos and Deadpool as you can.  And yeah I know the OP already has some, but I mean in context for others that might be looking for what to prioritze.

 

Well, I did a lot of that, “only” ones from your list not yet champed are Hawkguy, Kamala, Cap, Hood, Thanos and Deadpool. Whats really annoying is that, even though I got 9 covers for Deadpool I still don’t have a single purple (“whale”) cover. I do like to use him cause he chops down strong opponents quite fast with his red, so I do use him every day. Must have a lot of whale-points so far cause I can’t use them yet… Thanos is a character I seem to never get covers for, I got 3 and 2 of them are from DDQ…

As to PvP - look okay, you get some hard matchups, and that sucks.  But real talk.  There's prizes to be won.  So what you do is this - you look at the time events start in PvP.  Unlike in PvE, they're not on a 24/48 hour cycle, they're on a 3.5 day cycle, so the times come out weird sometimes.  But hey.  Anyways, you look at the start time, you try to start when a slice begins.  Well not try.  Do. (A "slice" refers to any of the five starting times that you can select when starting the event)  When you do that, you get 8-10 matches against computer-generated teams that you can probably beat.

 

Starting doing that some weeks ago, helpful indeed!

But Medusa?  Yeah Medusa is fantastic and a keeper.

 

Well I got that information a bit too late Other players advised me that Kamala Khan is a similar character so I dumped Medusa then… I did save 4* Cpt. Marvel, from what I read she’s one of the most characters in 4* land. Also keepin America Chavez.


Dumping 3* Rocket and Groot (I assume), Beast, Octopus?  As I see it, 3* Rocket and Groot has a pretty niche role and isn't useful for much outside teaming with 3* Thanos so you don't have to use health packs.  Beast is slow.  Octopus is slow.

BUT I do remember that 3* Doctor Octopus feeds 4* Carnage.  And 4* Carnage you end up using.  So you might want to keep on a 3* even if it's bad, if it feeds a decent 4*.  Something to think on anyways.

 

Well I got them all rostered cause I already have a few covers, so I don’t want to waste them away.

"What really confuses me is that, whenever I play PVP (Lightning Rounds and everything else besides Shield Simulator), 90% of the time will I get opponents with at least one level 270 character in it, which are impossible to beat. Why is that so? I read that the level of opponents is an average of the best 3 to 5 cards, and I am nowhere near a 270 level card, my average obviously would be around level 140 the most…"

 

Unless you really screwed around (in a carefully planned way) with your roster, you're going to face opponents with characters of near your roster's maximum levels.  But the thing is, boosts aren't factored in.

So the game sees you have a championed 3* at level 166?  Okay.  So you face other players with maybe levels 170-180 or whatever.  But THEIR 3*s are boosted.  YOURS may not be.  So yeah it works out to you're fighting level 270s or whatever.  Welcome to PvP MMR.

 

I get that point, but what confused me is that my opponents often don’t have boosted 3*s but 4* and even 5*s. Generally these only have one cover, still it’s strange that I have to fight those and even though they are one-trick ponies they still have a lot of strength and whenever they manage to do their attack it’s quite devastating… Like, in the current PVP event I should fight level 251 4* Gamorra, lv. 300 5* Kitty Pryde and lv. 251 4* Star-Lord. How is that even possible?

 

if you're not already in a top alliance, think about it.  Alliance rewards add up.  If you can't consistently manage your schedule and you don't want to take the trouble to merc out, and if as you wrote you're often not making full progression, okay.  But even if I'd say that's not top 100 PvE alliance territory, at least look for a top 250 PvE alliance, I don't think that would be out of the question, and maybe see if you can get some sort of hybrid alliance and get a bit of PvP rewards going on too.

 

At the moment I am quite alright with my alliance, during the last two alliance events we manage to get 3 covers for Prowler and 3 covers for 4* Thor, so that’s quite fine I think. Not saying I won’t consider something new in the future, but at the moment I’m happy with where I am

AardvarkPepper

BlackBoltRocks said:

DAZ0273 said:

Wow. Well the good news Beerman (good name!) is that you will probably be solidly in 4* land by the time you finish reading the above post.

He'll champ God Emperor Doom and 5* Captain Marvel by the time that happens.

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/4/forum-rules-please-read-before-posting#latest

You don't like what I write, as you've commented in other threads, that's fine.  I get it.  But I'm not forcing you to read anything, and I'm not doing anything wrong.

What I did do in this thread is point out things that others ought to have but didn't.  Like re-spec'ing 3* Iron Man and keeping 4* Medusa.  Like giving specific answers to specific questions that had remained unanswered regarding 2* and 3* Black Widow usage.

If you don't like what I write, I can respect that.  If you want to make jokes at my expense, that's as it goes.  But if I keep seeing a repeated pattern of negative behavior, I'll have to report it to moderators.  Not because of any personal bad feeling towards you, you understand.  But if forum posters are allowed to repeatedly be disrespectful and dismissive towards one another, that creates an environment in which more negativity and disrespect becomes the norm - regardless of any original intent.

==

"Well I got them all rostered cause I already have a few covers, so I don’t want to waste them away."

In the early 3*-4* transition you have very limited roster slots.  SOMETHING is going to be discarded.  The question is whether three or four or even seven 3* covers are going to benefit you, as opposed to having a slightly earlier headstart on a 4*.

There's some characters that I wouldn't prioritize, but as long as you have them pretty well built up, may as well not discard them.  Namely, 3* Black Panther and 3* Cyclops.

Of the characters on the roster, considering current development, I'd think about discarding 3* Hulk, 3* Bullseye, and 4* Thor.  Ask around before discarding, of course.

3* Hulk:  Fed by 2* Moonstone, feeds 4* Hulk.  Sure, 3* Hulk gets fed covers by a 2*.  But what do you get?  If he's activating his black passive, it's nice for board shakeup and green AP generation, but you need healthpacks.  His green and red are slow for what they do.  4* Hulk isn't a standout.

4* Thor:  Not the worst 4*, but you probably won't end up building her until quite late.  I'd say for a player in the early 3*-4* transition, you'd get 4* Rocket and Groot, Medusa, and Carnage, and that's quite a lot of gold-star favorited covers.  Then after that probably 4* Captain Marvel and Agent Coulson, not because they're "good" per se (they are pretty decent) but also because you get some covers through daily rewards and feeders.  Then it would depend on the meta and what you just happened to have on hand, but there's a load of 4*s that come up a lot - Gamora with stun, multi-step damage and instakill; Vulture with AP generation, Iceman with stun and team damage, Jean Grey with team damage and special tile removal.  Then there's counter type 4*s like Bishop and Deadpool.  So though I'm not sure what *exactly* your order of building 4*s may be, I don't think Thor ends up near the top, even though you already have three covers for her.

3* Bullseye:  Fed by 2* Bullseye, feeds 4* Kingpin.  3* Bullseye isn't "bad", just a bit specialized and slow.  For example, if the opponent is spamming special tiles, 3* Hawkeye generates AP off matching them away, and has a suite of powers that include true healing.  If precision tile removal is needed, 3* Black Widow does the trick.  If Special tiles need to be spammed, 3* Storm can do that as well.  So you get into this sort of area in which okay, maybe you use 3* Bullseye with 3* Falcon, or against wave nodes, but though he's nice enough, he's not really "needed" so much.  And Kingpin isn't great for a 4*; he has his uses (as does 4* Thor) but not so much a priority.

==

There's other characters I didn't recommend cutting for reasons.  4* Prowler you already mentioned thinking of cutting so no need to go into him.  3* Gambit, Octopus, Mystique, Rocket and Groot though:

Gambit and Octopus are slow.  But Gambit feeds 4* Rogue and Octopus feeds 4* Carnage.

Mystique is sort of mid-tier.  But feeds 4* Iceman.

3* Rocket and Groot feeds Drax, and Drax isn't great.  3* Rocket and Groot isn't great either, but I'd not necessarily cut him, because if you want a 3* tier answer to high chip damage, I'd guess Rocket and Groot might be *part* of an answer (though he's so slow, really).

"I get that point, but what confused me is that my opponents often don’t have boosted 3*s but 4* and even 5*s."

Once you climb to a certain number of points, your matchups get tougher.  I've heard you can manipulate the MMR to a degree by, say, keeping 13-cover characters at level 70 or so?  then you won't get terribly difficult opponents even when you climb a good deal higher in points.

But that wouldn't have worked for your setup anyways, as you're pulling prizes from PvE as well as PvP.  If you want to cut real time spent in game and maybe your schedule gets locked up, keeping levels low could be the way to go - but doing so means you pretty much cut yourself out of decent PvE prizes.

So eh, get used to that win-based progression for those 4* progression prizes.

AardvarkPepper

I get that point, but what confused me is that my opponents often don’t have boosted 3*s but 4* and even 5*s. Generally these only have one cover, still it’s strange that I have to fight those and even though they are one-trick ponies they still have a lot of strength and whenever they manage to do their attack it’s quite devastating… Like, in the current PVP event I should fight level 251 4* Gamorra, lv. 300 5* Kitty Pryde and lv. 251 4* Star-Lord. How is that even possible?

Might be boosts.  (called "Powered Up" formally)

http://marvelpuzzlequest.wikia.com/wiki/Powered-Up

I don't know for sure, as you might be referencing the event that just expired so I can't check which characters were boosted.  But the way I see it, 251 boosted works out to 176 un-boosted.

And if MMR currently ignores single-cover 5*s (which I think it does, or maybe even a couple covers in 5*s), then what happened is the match making system said look okay, you have some level 170s (3*s).  The other player had level 170s (4*s).  The system didn't account for boosts (it doesn't as far as I know).  So hey, good match.

So my guess?  Opponent chose some 4*s that they happened to have boosted (but not championed), their boosted 4*s / boosted 5* faced off against your un-boosted 3*s.  That's my GUESS.  And if they happened to have 13 covers on those 4*s (or a lot of covers anyways), well, boosted 4* damage scaling is way nastier than boosted 3* damage, never mind what happens if your 3*s aren't even boosted.  That's just how it works.

And if that particular thing didn't happen?  If you just get hard matchups in general?

I think when you climb high enough on points, you just get nastier matchups, unless you really did something different with roster management (and if you did, you'd effectively restrict the tier of PvE prizes you could earn.)

==

Yeah it sucks, but that's how it goes.

As to the "ignore 5* thing" - well, there's a bit of a story to that.  See, new players would get a super-ultra-rare-kewl-wow-awesome 5* and would want to keep it.  But then that would screw their MMR and their dinky 2* roster and single 5* would be facing championed 4*s.  ("Hey look, a single cover 5*, level 255.  Championed 4*, level 270.  Not a big difference, this match is fair!"  under the old matchmaking anyways, which I hear they changed so that WOULDN'T happen).

And for you, yeah, okay, that's not great.  Because if you have even a single cover 5*, that can be pretty weird.  Like 5* Thor with a green cover, or 5* Jessica Jones blue, or 5* Kitty Pryde yellow.  Though Kitty Pryde purple isn't very nice either.  Not so much a problem if you're running some 4*s, but when you're talking 3* hit points and 3* damage scaling, and further you don't even have synergetic boosted 3*s, well, yeah.

And if you think on it, and you think "yeah, that IS kinda um, tinykitty", look into it, research some, get some opinions, post on the boards so maybe the developers will see.  Because it is . . . yeah maybe not the greatest thing I think.

==

That said, if that's the reality, you're going to be facing these problematic 1-3 cover 5*s of up to level 270 base (and more when boosted) that do 3K passive damage, you're going to be facing covered 4*s that though not championed still do nasty damage when boosted and covered (which they may well be).  And when that happens?

Well, you just skip that match.

Your first skip means you get less bonus iso for the next match you win.  But it doesn't COST you any iso.  So you skip, then you skip, skip, maybe skip again.  Only then does it start costing you iso.  And what do you do then?  You take a team of disposable whatevers, do the fight, instantly retreat (don't even make a match, you don't need to).  You lose, your characters take damage (scaled to their tier), and you lose rating points.  But that's okay.  Now you can skip more matches, and you keep doing that until you get something you think you CAN defeat.  And you don't lose iso at all, in fact, with judicious skipping you always get max iso for the matches you play.

And if you do this long enough, your rating drops enough so you face easier opponents.  I think.  Though if you drop too low, you might end up facing harder opponents because the players that played to point rewards then let their points fall after they got what they wanted end up with low ranking points.

At any rate, though it's a pain to get 40 wins-based, again - if there's a really good 4* featured, that's how you get it, through win-based progression rather than points-based progression.

. . . though there's exceptions even there, I won't get into all that as it involves a lot of collaboration &c.

Beerman63

which 3 characters would you recommend me for the bossbattles in the next team event? i remember i had problems with Galactus last time...

Persephone

I just played the first round of Galactus. 
I don't know where your roster is at this moment.  But, I'll tell you how I beat him with my roster.
First team I ran was IM40, GSBW, and 3* Hawkguy.  Galactus is immune to stun; however, I used Hawkguy's blue anyway because what I wanted was his second arrow, explosive one.  I let IM40 go to recharge, and then I fired as many arrows that I had AP for.  I didn't care if first arrow countdown (bola arrow) expired or was matched away. 
You can keep track of what arrow is on which blue by tapping on the blue tile.  A popup message will inform which Hawguy's arrow is assigned to that tile.
When the countdown tile for explosive arrow went off, it instant killed Galactus.
Second team I used was Spid3y, Wolverine Patch, and El3ctra.  Why?  I got bored with the previous team.  I used Electra's black to prevent her from taking any damage.  I ignored Spidey's stun power.  I wanted his yellow power, When The Going's Tough.  The board was light on yellow, so i could not do as I planned.  However, I gathered enough red to fire off Electra's Crippling Blow and then I got green to use Patch's  Berserker Rage and Galactus went down.  
I hope this was helpful.

DAZ0273

IM40 and Patch are boosted, an excellent starting point as any. If your Hawkguy isn't up to much then GSBW is a good third, her purple can make green for Patch or of course her own sniper power and all 3 benefit from recharge. To make best use of Patch's red nuke then you'll want his red higher than Widow's so that when IM40 stuns himself Patch gets his tiles.

Beerman63

tried your suggestion of im40, patch& gsbw, that worked excellent. he was done in 6 turns. 

AardvarkPepper

Beerman63 said:

which 3 characters would you recommend me for the bossbattles in the next team event? i remember i had problems with Galactus last time...

Best would have been to find an alliance specifically coordinated to help lower rank players get high progression scores on Galactus.  There's two parts - first, you want players with championed 5*s so you can get powerful teamups (and if not, at least 4*s, but really 5*s is better).  Second, the alliance as a whole has to collaborate.  Typically everyone hits boss only at the beginning for reasons I won't get into; this "flips" the boss into the next round until about round 4.  Then depending on roster strength, some players get the go ahead to fight all nodes - if their rosters are weaker, they need to fight all nodes right away, but ideally they want to . . . okay anyways it's a bit involved and I won't get into it here.

Probably you entered with your current alliance.  So that means mostly making do with what you have.

For teamups, you want 5* Thor or 5* Jessica Jones (Thor preferred).  They're cheap and do a lot of damage.  Otherwise, I think 5* Black Widow (expensive), 4* Luke Cage (expensive), maybe 4* Mordo (not sure if his purple translates), 4* Wolverine, 3* Punisher (for his red), 1* Juggernaut (for green).  Possibly 2* Storm's green.  3* Deadpool possibly as well.

Basically you have to fend damage but also kill Galactus who's going to be between 16K and 32K hit points (at the point where he might cause problems for you anyways).

3* Iron Man is boosted; he's your go to for AP acceleration and damage off his red.  After that, there's some different solutions to Galactus depending on your roster, but your choices are a little limited.

3* Black Widow helps blow up the board so cosmic tiles don't land so much.  But she's quite slow, so if you run her, go after yellow (for Iron Man) and purple (to shake up the board and make green).

3* Wolverine is boosted, so his damage will be okay.  But for this event you might want to spec him back to 535 or 553, and wait for Iron Man to be stunned to fire Patch's red.  Problem is, again Patch is kind of slow, and you don't have any followup attacks for after he drops green.

It's kind of raw, and depending on how far your alliance is, this team won't work too long, because Galactus will kill your team.  Team-ups help, but there's this point at which Galactus is really aggressive.

If it gets to the point that you're really dead, don't forget your 2* roster.  Especially if you have good team-ups from your alliance, you can try using 2* Captain Marvel's yellow (though you may not have her with enough covers).  Or if you find you need a bit of precision board control, maybe 2* Magneto or 2* Bullseye.  Not saying to run all 2*s because they die so fast, but sometimes maybe they can get something done that you need.

==

Notes on 2*s:

2* Storm at 553.  Abusing 2* Storm's yellow passive is great if you can get it to work, but in practice she's just so fragile and the rest of the team is fragile and it doesn't work well.  UNLESS you got it to work, which is possible.  But if you haven't quite got the hang of 2* Storm's passive yellow, 553.

2* Ares at 445.  Making his green cheaper doesn't matter that much, the red difference to trigger can make a difference but in practice unless you're really abusing it (which I'd guess you're not, just because you have 3*s so don't need Ares so much), and yellow does benefit from more covers.

2* Human Torch at 535.  His black is horribly expensive, and though Torch is one of the few outlets for black, it ends up not usually being used anyways.  Red is high damage and fast, green is I think best damage for AP though you have to stockpile AP for that to be true.  Generally I'd guess you wouldn't use Torch because he's fragile, but if you do, probably you want to end it quick, so 535.

2* Bullseye at 355.  You won't get that many Prot tiles out anyways, so 3 is fine.  As to the others, they're precision board control and benefit from more covers.

2* Captain America at 355.  His yellow is so crazy expensive and does so little, it's basically useless.  Plus more covers in red helps the power.  You'll probably never use 2* Captain America anyways because his damage is so horribly low.

2* Moonstone at 355.  Usually you actually want the purple to target as few colors as possible, because if you can hit any one of multiple random targets you probably won't get the one you want.  Then too, her other powers benefit from more covers.

Beerman63

Once again I did quite some progress the last weeks, I got 12 or 13 champed 3*s now, and almost all the "important" 3*s are rostered already (the link to my roster is in the signature below). At the moment I have Kamala Khan and Scarlet Witch as my Bonus Heroes, especially with SWitch I hope she will progress fast as I finally got the first cover for her 2 days ago. 
I am experimenting alot with different 3* teams at the moment, still trying to find a decent one  WITHOUT either Strange or IM40. Currently I need quite alot of health packs cause one of them is always in my team, so maybe someone has a suggestion for an alternative or two... As for PvE, I now play Level 6, so usually I get 2 3* covers per event (I get about 30.000 - 35.000 points), which is a good progress for me.
I do have some more 4*s in the wait, but I guess I will have to let them go (Warmachine, Cloak&Dagger, Howard the Duck).

DAZ0273

Beerman63 said:

Once again I did quite some progress the last weeks, I got 12 or 13 champed 3*s now, and almost all the "important" 3*s are rostered already (the link to my roster is in the signature below). At the moment I have Kamala Khan and Scarlet Witch as my Bonus Heroes, especially with SWitch I hope she will progress fast as I finally got the first cover for her 2 days ago. 
I am experimenting alot with different 3* teams at the moment, still trying to find a decent one  WITHOUT either Strange or IM40. Currently I need quite alot of health packs cause one of them is always in my team, so maybe someone has a suggestion for an alternative or two... As for PvE, I now play Level 6, so usually I get 2 3* covers per event (I get about 30.000 - 35.000 points), which is a good progress for me.
I do have some more 4*s in the wait, but I guess I will have to let them go (Warmachine, Cloak&Dagger, Howard the Duck).

Howzabout trying Hulk & Thor with IM40? You can generate some mean green! Thor then generates yellow for Iron Man and Iron Man generates red for Thor and everybody generates green! Hulk & Thor have pretty decent health too and two outlets for green. Did I mention green?

Another option is IM40 and Cap. Despite what that lying movie Civil War said, these two are best buds! IM40 feeds Cap that lovely blue and Red and he stuns and slams his way through the opposition - he is particularly good against goons.

Or howzabout having your very own laser cannon? Pair Iron Fist with Cyclops to power up his black whilst Cyke also accelerates his own red through his yellow. Add Panther for rainbow coverage and you would also be creating all 3 types of special tile and also be able to use IF to fire off Panther's AOE as an alternative to Cyke's big blast (or if he stuns himself).

Honest opinion on those 4* covers:

Howard the Duck is the only Limited character that you will get from PvE on a semi-regular basis but you simply will not use him. More covers will come so I would let him go.

War Machine is pretty average but if it is his Blue cover then it has a niche use against invisibility characters (like, say, a certain upcoming Venom boss!) - that said a one cover 4* might be too much of a liability.

Cloak & Dagger are one of the very best support characters at 4* level, if would be them.

Hope some of that helps (probably not!)

ThaRoadWarrior

I agree, if you're going to hang on to one of those 4*s, it'll be C&D.

Unless it's Howard's Duck, Duck, Loose! power, which as a young roster can really save your bacon when you aren't worried about speed. Just go invisible, and nibble away. (but still probably roster that C&D instead lol)

You mentioned you have 2 3*bhs, I'd encourage you to drop down to just the one you want first, then move on to the next one. You'll get there much faster that way.

DAZ0273

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I agree, if you're going to hang on to one of those 4*s, it'll be C&D.

Unless it's Howard's Duck, Duck, Loose! power, which as a young roster can really save your bacon when you aren't worried about speed. Just go invisible, and nibble away. (but still probably roster that C&D instead lol)

You mentioned you have 2 3*bhs, I'd encourage you to drop down to just the one you want first, then move on to the next one. You'll get there much faster that way.

Ah - yes, forgot about Howard's purple - that also makes his Crash winnable, so good call on that (but still probably roster C&D).