Current Latest Crop: Profe$$or X is up to 454 - he is easily my favorite new 5*. I've been running him at 5/5/3 with board shakers, right now I like Doom/Okoye or Doom/3/5/5 5torm. It's not a strong defense team, but you can climb fairly reliably in pick-3 pvp with them. X/Okoye + team up boosts is my new anti-WCap or Bishop attempt. Hope for a match-N on turn 1 or 2 and you can often wipe out the jump-in-front right at the beginning. I find that to be about as reliable as Sabretooth.
Carnage: 1/0/3 Beta Ray Bill: 0/1/2
Got my first Okoye cover from Shards since they went live. Shuri is at 296, so 100 of those shards are from her, and then I just dropped the 560hp on the last 20 i needed to get to 501 in a random shard store deal. I pushed Okoye up to 435. I'll leave my 4* on Shuri to level 300, then move back to Hulkbuster until direct 5* sharding can finish Okoye. My 3* has mostly been set on IM40 in the background, he's at 216, and Hulkbuster is 296 at 301/400 shards due to an impulsive hp burn into a random shard store the other day to try and get ahead there.
I did level up Rescue to 435, I think she will go well with Okoye/Beta Ray Bill as an all-5 team, or she'll go well with Okoye/Bishop. I think it remains to be seen if I'll use her in pick-2 pvp or not.
My predictions on how long it would take to get a direct-shard 5* are about on track if we extract the hp-bought ones and Shuri rewards. I've been earning 7.84 5* shards/day, which means it's 63.78 days/5* cover by direct shards.
Right now I'm thinking I might just park my 5* shard target on Gladiathor for the foreseeable future, and just use my 3/4* shards to work on other characters in the background. Once Rescue and Fi5k are done, I'm still not sure yet if I want to go all-in on Gladiathor until he hits 5 green via Valkyrie/Ragnarok, or if I want to work on someone like Hawkeye, Lumbercap, or Hela.
One of these days I need to make a point to actually stop spending once the oldest 5 is champable; I've been swimming in Profe$$or X covers, he's up to 457 now with 0 movement on Carnage or BRB. Between Iceman, 5torm, and Profe$$or X, I had 17 covers beyond minimum viable coverage for them all, which is a whole 5*, so the obvious answer is to hold out for the next one to land before spending for sure.
I'm curious as I run out of un-champed 4* characters if I'll have the cp/lt income to continue to stay current this way. I'm working on the champ-tax for Magik right now, then I'll be down to just 13 left including Taskmaster (champable), Spider-Ham (2/3/4) and Northstar (New, 0/0/1). Just Mysterio, Taskmaster, and Black Cat are currently champable, but about half of the rest are above 10 covers.
One of these days I need to make a point to actually stop spending once the oldest 5 is champable; I've been swimming in Profe$$or X covers, he's up to 457 now with 0 movement on Carnage or BRB. Between Iceman, 5torm, and Profe$$or X, I had 17 covers beyond minimum viable coverage for them all, which is a whole 5*, so the obvious answer is to hold out for the next one to land before spending for sure.
Yeah, I came to that conclusion as well. Champ levels on X don't feel like they're worth as much as more pulls to get whoever comes next Rostered. I stopped pulling once I finally managed to get a cover for Bill for his Essentials, and I'm gonna hope my willpower holds out until I can at least see what the next 5* looks like.
over the weekend i got back to back greens for Carnage (3/0/3) and a green for BRB (1/1/2) this morning. I'm also 1 Shuri and 1 Hulkbuster away from having a champ-able Okoye and Rescue.
Now it's time to decide where to park my 5* Shard Target. Do I go for someone close to champable but not especially powerful, like: Fi5k (5/4/3) - Miles @ 293 Hela (5/2/4) - Magik @ 278 Cable (2/4/5) - Cyclops @ 291 Danver5 (5/2/3) - C4rol @ 301 Lumbercap (2/4/4) - Bucky @ 290
Or someone meta-adjace that's reasonably champ-able in the form of Hawkeye (2/5/3) - Kate Bishop @ 286
OR do I just take the long road and go after a playable Thor or Kitty? Kitty: (3/2/0) Frost @ 295 Thor: (2/0/2) Valkyrie @ 283
I'm leaning towards Hawkeye or Kitty right now. I just organically got the last cover I need to become part of the WCap problem, waiting on iso to champ him from 209. I may just sink iso into Hawkeye and take him from 372 to 405, and see if that team just kind of plays like it is.
For Kitty, I have a functional 4ocket at 305, and assuming I finish Carnage and BRB, some 5* special spammers in the hopper that would benefit from her. She is likely going to be increasingly and incrementally useful as covers get added and she gets leveled to match.
Thor is going to continue warming the bench until possibly 2 greens where the tile break increases to 4, but definitely 3 greens when his board shake reaches it's full potential.
I'd decide between Kitty or Thor. Kitty is closer to being done and pairing her with Rocket would set your MMR to a 5*/4* instead of a double 5*, so you'll probably have an easier time in Versus when climbing.
However, I'd pick Thor, because Valkyrie is better than Emma, so she would see more playing time. Thor/Okoye is pretty much the answer to beating a lot of teams at the moment (with a few exceptions).
Hawkeye at 2/5/3 is not bad for AP generation, but with him not champed and Cap barely champed, their health pool is really low, you'd only use them once or twice before needing health packs and they're very beatable now because a lot of people have had a lot of practice (although it may take some time, so they are still a deterrent). Even with a champed Hawkeye, you'd spend more time playing in longer matches compared to using Kitty or Thor teams.
Given the timescales involved in chasing all these characters, do I actually *need* a champion Thor to do what I need him to do, or can I stop at 5/0/2 and move on?
I think what I'm going to do is park my 5* on Gladiathor, then move my 4* to emma for the next 5 levels to get her to 300, then I'll go all-in on Valkyrie. Didn't see this Code Red vault coming at all - what an opportune thing. I was able to pull 4x times in there, got a hammond torch, a juggs champ level, a support token good for a dupe 1* tinkerer, and a mighty token good for an iso champ level on Magnet3o. I should have 1 more pull at least in there before it goes away; wonder if i'll land the hulkbuster or a shard slug on Okoye?
Given the timescales involved in chasing all these characters, do I actually *need* a champion Thor to do what I need him to do, or can I stop at 5/0/2 and move on?
For offense, even a 5/0/0 Thor works fine (like Gambatt lol). However, like any unchamped 5*s, he will paint a target on your back. His low health will make him very susceptible to AoEs.
OJSP said:For offense, even a 5/0/0 Thor works fine (like Gambatt lol). However, like any unchamped 5*s, he will paint a target on your back. His low health will make him very susceptible to AoEs.
This sounds like a job for a fast climb, leave out an annoying defense team strategy i guess lol.
I don't think I could swap out for a 450 Jessica Jones/274 Bishop and have it override a 451 Okoye/315 Thor, so it would probably have to be Iceman/X I guess?
Champed WCap this morning, got another Profe$$or X champ level for my trouble. Then took a few more pulls out of the Code Red vault and got 100 shards for Okoye and the 300th hulkbuster i needed to finish Rescue.
6 are actually champed: Professor X Jessica Jones God Emperor Doom Storm Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes) Iceman
but about 3,000 iso from now I'll have 7 with Rescue. then in another week or so I'll have gotten that final Shuri cover to finish Okoye, who is parked at lvl 435. After that, the road gets a little longer for shard targeting Classics, but it seeeeeeems like I'm on track to stay current with Carbage (3/0/3) and BRB (1/1/2) moving forward.
Fi5k, even being trash tier, is only 7 miles morales covers from done, so I may park my 3* shard target on Spid3r-Man for awhile and just get it when it shows up rather than trying with any particular effort to chase him. I ended up parking my 5* target on Gladiator Thor for now. What to do with my 4* shard is then up in the air after Shuri is done.
There are 3 ways of looking at what to do from now on: 1. Ignore Latests until Carnage moves to Classics. In the meantime, use the CPs to open Classics. That way, you would be getting more shards per CP to build up either Thor or Kitty. In the meantime, you might also get their covers from the tokens (it's a small chance, but it's there). 2. Keep opening Latests while targeting on Classic 5* at a time. 3. Hoard for special stores/new release store with Thor/Kitty and only pull when you can open 300.
No 1. will allow you to cover one of the Classic characters faster, but in exchange for delaying the progress for Carnage (and possibly Beta Ray Bill if you're unlucky). No 2. will allow you to continue championing Latests, but delaying progress on the chosen Classics. No 3. is probably the hardest, but the most reliable.
It's a tough call, because either way, it requires a lot of time. However, considering you've been doing fine so far, I'd probably take route no 2. Your current 5*s are good and once Okoye is done, you'd have an easier time and enough characters to play around with, to make interesting teams with the 3*s and 4*s. Although Thor is good on offense, nowadays I'm seeing many other teams because they're better on defense.
You're actually in a similar position to me, when I was trying to slowly complete my Classics, only with worse dilution (unfortunately). I chose No.1 while occasionally missing out on one or 2 Latests, which made my game slightly harder, but eventually I got there. The good characters I managed to complete before (barely) leaving Latests were Gambit and Kitty, while I completed Thor and Okoye several months after they left Latests (mainly due to feeders and occasional Bonus Heroes)
#2 is largely my plan - it seems like the most reliable way to move forward considering my general play style and habits.
I think the refinement to that strategy I'm not 100% sure about is the relative value of finishing up sub-optimal, but nearly finished, characters like Fi5k, Cable, Hawkeye, Danver5, or Hela vs just taking the long road of chasing the really good ones like Thor and/or Kitty.
The Quantity of my bench short-term vs the Quality of my bench long term. I'm thinking that the longer I push off chasing one of them, at some point I'll decide I should have started doing it forever ago I'm sure (I almost certainly should have just chased Okoye all last year directly vs Jessica Jones, but then again having a near-max Chavez to pair with my otherwise lame 5*s helped out a bunch, so that part of the strategy turned out well).
While I'm on Thor for now, I'm still very torn as to whether or not Kitty isn't likely to be the better choice considering the general trend of specials-based new releases that have been coming out.
2- Thorkoye can still smack teams like 40 levels higher than them on offense.
3- Valkyrie is better than Emma (but you really probably won’t use either over 5* options).
4- While his best option is clearly Okoye; he can fuel any RGY user.
5- While trash on defense it’s still the fastest team on hops.
Kitty is paired with Grocket 99% of the time. I’ve heard of the Kitty/Bill/Carbage team in Sim; but having not faced it yet, I’d find it shocking if Thorkoye/Professor couldn’t make light work of that trio. One thing Gritty does way better at is defense. That said, Bishop has usurped them as the go-to shield. I was playing Lightning Rounds and every single team was Bish/Jess or Bish/Bill. I remember being one of the only playing Bish/Jess when everyone was playing Gritty. Now it’s getting much harder to find a Gritty to hit and I actively seek them out. All that to say they are not the defensive team they once were.
One thing to consider though, with the talk of rebalances; I’d have to imagine Bishop will be the first one looked at. I imagine they will nerf him so he’s no longer meta; which would put Gritty back in the drivers seat as the best defense in pick 2. No one knows how long that will be though and the reality is, people have found ways to deal with that team. IF Bish is nerfed you’ll be happy you have Thorkoye who can eat through Gritty teams often without needing a health pack.
BRB is actually really good, for the AP gain you get off his Protect spam being destroyed rather than that spam existing for its own sake. Even at 1/1/2 he is very effective at kick-starting the Okoye/Rescue multi-tap attack, though having a 452 Rescue and an un-champed Okoye means that i'm struggling to stay flush with Team Up right now.
And Carbage is actually super wild when you put him in the mix with Kitty. I'm curious if Thorkoye would get it done - my current counter to it is more of a surgical strike, trying to not match any of the specials and stun them with somebody. I may be taking the wrong approach - If my DD5 were better that's probably the move. Rescue/Bishop can do it also. I don't know, that's a novel team but I doubt it's The New Gritty or anything.
Comments
Profe$$or X is up to 454 - he is easily my favorite new 5*. I've been running him at 5/5/3 with board shakers, right now I like Doom/Okoye or Doom/3/5/5 5torm. It's not a strong defense team, but you can climb fairly reliably in pick-3 pvp with them. X/Okoye + team up boosts is my new anti-WCap or Bishop attempt. Hope for a match-N on turn 1 or 2 and you can often wipe out the jump-in-front right at the beginning. I find that to be about as reliable as Sabretooth.
Carnage: 1/0/3
Beta Ray Bill: 0/1/2
Got my first Okoye cover from Shards since they went live. Shuri is at 296, so 100 of those shards are from her, and then I just dropped the 560hp on the last 20 i needed to get to 501 in a random shard store deal. I pushed Okoye up to 435. I'll leave my 4* on Shuri to level 300, then move back to Hulkbuster until direct 5* sharding can finish Okoye. My 3* has mostly been set on IM40 in the background, he's at 216, and Hulkbuster is 296 at 301/400 shards due to an impulsive hp burn into a random shard store the other day to try and get ahead there.
I did level up Rescue to 435, I think she will go well with Okoye/Beta Ray Bill as an all-5 team, or she'll go well with Okoye/Bishop. I think it remains to be seen if I'll use her in pick-2 pvp or not.
My predictions on how long it would take to get a direct-shard 5* are about on track if we extract the hp-bought ones and Shuri rewards. I've been earning 7.84 5* shards/day, which means it's 63.78 days/5* cover by direct shards.
Right now I'm thinking I might just park my 5* shard target on Gladiathor for the foreseeable future, and just use my 3/4* shards to work on other characters in the background. Once Rescue and Fi5k are done, I'm still not sure yet if I want to go all-in on Gladiathor until he hits 5 green via Valkyrie/Ragnarok, or if I want to work on someone like Hawkeye, Lumbercap, or Hela.
I'm curious as I run out of un-champed 4* characters if I'll have the cp/lt income to continue to stay current this way. I'm working on the champ-tax for Magik right now, then I'll be down to just 13 left including Taskmaster (champable), Spider-Ham (2/3/4) and Northstar (New, 0/0/1). Just Mysterio, Taskmaster, and Black Cat are currently champable, but about half of the rest are above 10 covers.
Yeah, I came to that conclusion as well. Champ levels on X don't feel like they're worth as much as more pulls to get whoever comes next Rostered. I stopped pulling once I finally managed to get a cover for Bill for his Essentials, and I'm gonna hope my willpower holds out until I can at least see what the next 5* looks like.
Now it's time to decide where to park my 5* Shard Target. Do I go for someone close to champable but not especially powerful, like:
Fi5k (5/4/3) - Miles @ 293
Hela (5/2/4) - Magik @ 278
Cable (2/4/5) - Cyclops @ 291
Danver5 (5/2/3) - C4rol @ 301
Lumbercap (2/4/4) - Bucky @ 290
Or someone meta-adjace that's reasonably champ-able in the form of
Hawkeye (2/5/3) - Kate Bishop @ 286
OR do I just take the long road and go after a playable Thor or Kitty?
Kitty: (3/2/0) Frost @ 295
Thor: (2/0/2) Valkyrie @ 283
I'm leaning towards Hawkeye or Kitty right now. I just organically got the last cover I need to become part of the WCap problem, waiting on iso to champ him from 209. I may just sink iso into Hawkeye and take him from 372 to 405, and see if that team just kind of plays like it is.
For Kitty, I have a functional 4ocket at 305, and assuming I finish Carnage and BRB, some 5* special spammers in the hopper that would benefit from her. She is likely going to be increasingly and incrementally useful as covers get added and she gets leveled to match.
Thor is going to continue warming the bench until possibly 2 greens where the tile break increases to 4, but definitely 3 greens when his board shake reaches it's full potential.
Anyone have any advice?
However, I'd pick Thor, because Valkyrie is better than Emma, so she would see more playing time. Thor/Okoye is pretty much the answer to beating a lot of teams at the moment (with a few exceptions).
Hawkeye at 2/5/3 is not bad for AP generation, but with him not champed and Cap barely champed, their health pool is really low, you'd only use them once or twice before needing health packs and they're very beatable now because a lot of people have had a lot of practice (although it may take some time, so they are still a deterrent). Even with a champed Hawkeye, you'd spend more time playing in longer matches compared to using Kitty or Thor teams.
I don't think I could swap out for a 450 Jessica Jones/274 Bishop and have it override a 451 Okoye/315 Thor, so it would probably have to be Iceman/X I guess?
Professor X
Jessica Jones
God Emperor Doom
Storm
Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes)
Iceman
but about 3,000 iso from now I'll have 7 with Rescue. then in another week or so I'll have gotten that final Shuri cover to finish Okoye, who is parked at lvl 435. After that, the road gets a little longer for shard targeting Classics, but it seeeeeeems like I'm on track to stay current with Carbage (3/0/3) and BRB (1/1/2) moving forward.
Fi5k, even being trash tier, is only 7 miles morales covers from done, so I may park my 3* shard target on Spid3r-Man for awhile and just get it when it shows up rather than trying with any particular effort to chase him. I ended up parking my 5* target on Gladiator Thor for now. What to do with my 4* shard is then up in the air after Shuri is done.
1. Ignore Latests until Carnage moves to Classics. In the meantime, use the CPs to open Classics. That way, you would be getting more shards per CP to build up either Thor or Kitty. In the meantime, you might also get their covers from the tokens (it's a small chance, but it's there).
2. Keep opening Latests while targeting on Classic 5* at a time.
3. Hoard for special stores/new release store with Thor/Kitty and only pull when you can open 300.
No 1. will allow you to cover one of the Classic characters faster, but in exchange for delaying the progress for Carnage (and possibly Beta Ray Bill if you're unlucky). No 2. will allow you to continue championing Latests, but delaying progress on the chosen Classics. No 3. is probably the hardest, but the most reliable.
It's a tough call, because either way, it requires a lot of time. However, considering you've been doing fine so far, I'd probably take route no 2. Your current 5*s are good and once Okoye is done, you'd have an easier time and enough characters to play around with, to make interesting teams with the 3*s and 4*s. Although Thor is good on offense, nowadays I'm seeing many other teams because they're better on defense.
You're actually in a similar position to me, when I was trying to slowly complete my Classics, only with worse dilution (unfortunately). I chose No.1 while occasionally missing out on one or 2 Latests, which made my game slightly harder, but eventually I got there. The good characters I managed to complete before (barely) leaving Latests were Gambit and Kitty, while I completed Thor and Okoye several months after they left Latests (mainly due to feeders and occasional Bonus Heroes)
I think the refinement to that strategy I'm not 100% sure about is the relative value of finishing up sub-optimal, but nearly finished, characters like Fi5k, Cable, Hawkeye, Danver5, or Hela vs just taking the long road of chasing the really good ones like Thor and/or Kitty.
The Quantity of my bench short-term vs the Quality of my bench long term. I'm thinking that the longer I push off chasing one of them, at some point I'll decide I should have started doing it forever ago I'm sure (I almost certainly should have just chased Okoye all last year directly vs Jessica Jones, but then again having a near-max Chavez to pair with my otherwise lame 5*s helped out a bunch, so that part of the strategy turned out well).
While I'm on Thor for now, I'm still very torn as to whether or not Kitty isn't likely to be the better choice considering the general trend of specials-based new releases that have been coming out.
3- Valkyrie is better than Emma (but you really probably won’t use either over 5* options).
BRB is actually really good, for the AP gain you get off his Protect spam being destroyed rather than that spam existing for its own sake. Even at 1/1/2 he is very effective at kick-starting the Okoye/Rescue multi-tap attack, though having a 452 Rescue and an un-champed Okoye means that i'm struggling to stay flush with Team Up right now.
And Carbage is actually super wild when you put him in the mix with Kitty. I'm curious if Thorkoye would get it done - my current counter to it is more of a surgical strike, trying to not match any of the specials and stun them with somebody. I may be taking the wrong approach - If my DD5 were better that's probably the move. Rescue/Bishop can do it also. I don't know, that's a novel team but I doubt it's The New Gritty or anything.