I’ve denied the signs too long... I’m a 5* player

Daredevil217

ThaRoadWarrior said:

So who all have you got now?

I’ll put their levels and builds I’m running (mostly I just took the most popular Gampendium build). For Cable, I know 5 yellow is preferred and I switch up depending on partners. But I tend to default to 5 blue because I like the stun. Also, I’m 4 ME Hulk covers away from champing Loki, so he’s my current Bonus Hero. 

L459 Cable 5/5/3
L457 Thanos 5/3/5
L456 Jessica Jones 5/5/3
L453 Black Panther 5/3/5
L453 Green Goblin 5/5/3
L452 Archangel 5/4/4
L452 Daredevil 5/3/5
L452 Okoye 5/5/3
L450 Ghost Rider 5/3/5

L440 Kitty Pryde 5/5/3 (3 saved)
L440 Thor 5/5/3 (3 saved)

L435 Kingpin 5/2/5 (4 saved)
L435 Loki 4/5/3 (2 saved)
L435 Captain America (IW) 2/5/5 (1 saved)
L420 Gambit 4/2/5
L360 Doctor Doom 2/3/2

All L255:
9 covers: Ock
8 covers: OML, SL, BiB SM, SS, IM
7 covers: Strange, SMPP
6 covers: BB, JG, BW, Wasp
4 covers: Cap
3 covers: Hulk
2 covers: Hawkeye
1 cover: Hela, CM

ThaRoadWarrior

You mind doing your boy a solid and seeing how it feels playing JJ/GRRR in PVP?

Daredevil217

ThaRoadWarrior said:

You mind doing your boy a solid and seeing how it feels playing JJ/GRRR in PVP?

What builds?

I tried playing some non-meta combos in Bullseye PVP and man I suck at this game! Found myself wiping a ton! I lost my very first match playing I believe panthos. Lost with GG/GR (who despite black overlap I thought could be great together). Wish I could remember the other combos. I just remember thinking either I suck, or there is a big discrepancy between the really good characters and “the rest”. Probably a bit of both. Like I remember playing GRRR and thinking I don’t know how you play more than 5 matches without going through all your packs! All that so say I’ll do it... and might not be the best judge. Think I’m losing the touch I had in 4* land lol. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I think 5/3/5 on both would be my first attempt. My Robbie is lvl 452 and my JJ is 390 at 4/2/3, so it’s hard for me to evaluate her black over GRRR’s. His stun is 1-turn regardless of cover stack, so I just leave it at 3 always (the stun is the most useful component of it, so the damage it does on second fire or when opponents match things can help, but it rarely makes the difference). My strategy for them is to try and get Hell Ride moving ASAP, which limits how many places DE can drop onto the board. For me at 452, green is the strongest color, so it accrues that for me whenever I match one of JJs traps. With how yours are leveled, I’m not sure you’ll have a similar experience. I’m playing around with those 2 + Okoye on the 5e node on DPvMPQ and it seems like it works there well enough.

This team will not be appropriate to go up against Gritty teams at all. The only way I can win against that team is by bringing in Main Event to pre-smash as many tiles as possible with Grand Entrance and Gamma Powerbomb set to 5 (too many Kittys can eat your Crowd Goes Wild tiles). You can take your time against Thorkoye (assuming winning at all is your goal, over winning quickly), and GR is good for green denial here. Just leave Thor for last and get Okoye off the board as soon as you can. 

As for health pack savings - I can usually get 1-3 matches against the "right" shaped teams without health packs by using GRRR and Chavez with AP boosts, or Okoye + somebody like that (chavez, medusa, now that he's boosted Yondu). I discovered in the Apocalypse event that the RTF I have on Okoye is making yellow the highest colored AP, so 4* Cyclops + Medusa was something of a revelation there. Get Cyke's yellow out, then every team up match gains team up + yellow. That escalates quickly, but won't translate to PVP. You'd need Star Lord, or maybe Daredevil? on that team to do it.

Kolence

@ThaRoadWarrior

Do you have only GRRR champed? What kind of teams are you offered to fight in pvp? Single champ 5*? Dual champ? Dual not-quite-champed?

Against single 5* champ teams (or if one is significantly higher level than the other), GRRR + Okoye are pretty strong. His red boosted by her black (which you have at 5 coveres according to gamependium) eats the enemy 5's health fast, since it's tanking a lot on AI's turn.

I'm not sure what mmr looks like these days, but a year or two ago, a 450 + 390 + the rest at 375 or lower still should've kept you in single 5* champ tier. Though it might also be affected by how many well/fully covered 5's you have not leveled.

As for GRRR + JJ, they don't really work that well, im my experience. Too much overlap. Still can win, but poor synergy (pretty much just bigger health pool). For speed though, it's probably better to pair any of them with a boosted 4* that can help really well when it's available. Or Chavez if nothing else.

ThaRoadWarrior

I appreciate the heads up on JJ/Robbie. I have my own thread over in Theories and Staristics about pulling as I go to transition to 5* play if you want to see the full spectrum of my experiences with it. But yes, GRRR is my only 5* champ, and I’m chasing JJ via Chavez, and need to get her to 360 to do it (301 currently).

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/76726/the-grand-experiment-can-you-transition-to-5-s-pulling-as-you-go-as-a-progession-only-f2p-player#latest

i que up single champ 5*s and highly champed 4*s mostly, though today I queued up a max champ Bagman, a max champ Bishop, and a lvl 456 5trange. I beat them by the skin of my teeth just to see if I could. But mostly I get served up 460-ish Kitty Prides and 300-370 4ocket teams. So technically a “single 5,” but it is a world of difference between that team and my 452 GRRR/301 Chavez...

Daredevil217

Tried out RRGR/JJ. Actually worked way better than I expected. BUT, I played them early against a wide variety of cupcake teams. Strange/OML, Loki/Surfer, OML/IM, Thor/Thanos, Widow/Thanos, and a Thorkoye team I believe. I did lose a few teams and or take some big damage. Mainly when I got hit with some cascades of death, but it was way more serviceable a team than I’d of thought. 

GR Green did actually result in some matches that triggered Jessica blue after the board shake. Super rare, but it happened. I mostly used her red and his black, but there were times when I only had enough for his red and thought a timely one turn stun would be a better play, and so I used it a few times. 

I said in another thread that B2R is my favorite PvP mainly because of my weird bag-trophy obsession. It was amazing the few times he was actually helpful. Used his yellow to increase the timer on my DD’s hand to hand and Kitty’s red. I used his blue to lock an enemy Jessica’s strikes after she cast red. And what happened was pretty cool. If all tiles are locked, no kitty countdown. But as soon as you make a match and unlock the title, a kitty countdown pops out and eats it next turn for damage. So I was unlocking tiles one at a time to slaughter the opponent. And of course, purple was useful for a swap in a pinch. Overall I found him more useful than a lot of tagalong characters because whereas the 3* are all about damage that doesn’t measure up to the 5* I’m running; Baggy is pure support. 

ThaRoadWarrior

The strategy with Hell Ride is less about creating cascades and more about making the Damning Evidence tiles easier to find by removing red and black from the board - leaving them primarily blue tiles to get created on. I like it in Simulator 

AXP_isme

But isn’t that somewhat counterproductive when that pair have no blue outlet and with your strongest colour as green it would just mean you end up with more hell ride repeaters trickling to the bottom of the board. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Not really. Hell Ride does really good damage so long as it has tiles to work on, and it gathers AP on red/green/black that you can burn to good effect. You need a certain amount of banked up blue to see where JJ's traps are, and then they too are doing very solid damage while generating AP in the background. The problem is that before you have the AP banked up, you can't really find them on purpose. So if you get Hell Ride out to chew through the red/black, they are almost certainly going to find their way to the blues that are left. And it's not like that red/green/black got destroyed, it got gathered, so you have all the usable AP anyway. then you can choose between the stun/chip damage from Chain Whip or the larger immediate damage with specials from JJ, and you get probably similar levels of damage from either's black. 

I've never been especially stuck on the need to have a rainbow team - occasionally it burns me when i go up against say a Mordo, or get stuck with Agent Venom as a required, but generally speaking I think treating that as a requirement is over-valuing it, or at least under-valuing characters with power synergy. Also at the 5* tier, you kind of get what you get and don't get upset, and then have to find ways to make what you have work for you. If I had loads of options, I probably wouldn't run that team on purpose. 

AXP_isme

Hell ride always seems to suffer from the law of diminishing returns. Each turn the repeater survives it becomes less and less likely that it will achieve its potential on the next turn (board refresh aside). It also has the unfortunate consequence of removing the traps on red and black without causing the additional damage. I get that it helps concentrate the traps on blues and increase the marginal frequency, and hence the likelihood of available matches, in colours other than red, green and black. But the benefits of that, aside from pure damage, is limited to a pile of blue ap you can’t use and the extra green ap to create more hell ride repeaters. That just seems counterproductive in the mid-term. 

I’m not advocating for a rainbow team. While it’s nice to have the match damage and be able to fire other powers it’s not necessarily a good choice. Making a strong coherent pair/team is always preferable to a weak rainbow team. 

As a a team I can see where this could be fun but it just doesn’t strike me as either fast or efficient (not the only two criteria of any value but two of the more important ones). 

ThaRoadWarrior

Just figured I'd re-iterate a few points about that team:

• I'm not suggesting it as an empirically good team. GRRR is my only 5* champ, and I've hitched my second 5 cart to the Chavez/JJ wagon on the premise that Chavez is the gold standard of play-up 4* characters, (so if I have to max- champ a 4* to get a second 5, I don't want it to be Bucky/Lumbercap even though i could do that more quickly) and she gives out a lower top tier 5* that is feedable on my roster in Jessica Jones. At the time, my Okoye wasn't feedable via Shuri, though she now is. I'll work on that next year, but hopefully I'll start getting 5*s via latest before then.
• Since GRRR is my only 5, I play him all day every day, and have a very nuanced opinion about what his powers are and are not good for. MMR being what it is, I've had to get creative to figure out how he interacts with the various metas in play. 
• I actually play this team, so I can tell you that it works better than you think it would offensively, even with a 4/2/3 lvl 390 Jessica Jones, but it as you say isn't particularly fast. It's not like Damning Evidence stops doing damage after you get 30blue AP in the bank, it just makes it more likely you'll do that damage turn on turn. So sure, you can't spend that blue, but I guess so what, right?
• Actually in general, I find that Gho5t Rider is better than he looks on paper in a pure "can he win?" environment, but he isn't going to change the meta for being slow. But I'm stuck with him, and it's either sell him, or find him a buddy right? And since 5*s aren't just dangling from the trees, you can't really say "well, I want that one, so I'll get that one," you have to say "of the ones I can get, this one is the best i can do"
  

Daredevil217

Happy Hela Day to all! My update here is that I decided to open until I maxed Doom. I pulled just slightly below average so it took 116 pulls from the hoard to get there (he was over halfway there to start). Here are the results!

116 pulls
16/116 5* (13.8%)
1/16 5* BH (6%)
6/100 4* BH (6%)

6 Doom (2 of each color)
7 Hela (4 red/ 1 green/ 2 black)
3 Captain Marvel (all green) now 0/4/0

Applying the covers got me an additional 18 pulls to the hoard (12 LT/159 CP), about 150k iso and 2750 HP.

My single bonus hero was the red IW Cap I needed for my 2/5/5!! So I champed Doom, Cap, Talos and brought Hela to her max of 375. ME Hulk is two covers away from Loki being my next champ. Also of note; War Machine and Bucky hit 300, popping out a champ level for IW Cap and a cover for 5* Iron Man. 

L459 Cable 5/5/3
L457 Thanos 5/3/5
L456 Jessica Jones 5/5/3
L453 Black Panther 5/4/4
L453 Green Goblin 5/5/3
L452 Archangel 5/4/4
L452 Captain America (IW) 5/5/3
L452 Daredevil 5/3/5
L452 Okoye 5/5/3
L450 Doctor Doom 3/5/5
L450 Ghost Rider 5/3/5

L440 Kitty Pryde 5/5/3 (3 saved)
L440 Thor 5/5/3 (3 saved)

L435 Kingpin 5/2/5 (4 saved)
L435 Loki 4/5/3 (2 saved)
L420 Gambit 4/2/5
L375 Hela 4/1/3

All L255:
9 covers: Doc Ock, Iron Man
8 covers: OML, SL, Surfer, BiB Spidey
7 covers: Strange, PP Spidey
6 covers: Bolt, Phoenix, Widow, Wasp
4 covers: FACap, Cap Marvel
3 covers: Hulk
2 covers: Hawkeye

Daredevil217

I currently have about 233 pulls left (24 LT, 5150 CP); and about 350k iso after my spending spree. I’m wrestling with some questions:

1. Is it worth it to chase more Doom covers (currently 450) since you WANT him tanking and his match damage is low? Or is it best to leave him be since he’d need a lot of covers and isn’t really great?

2. I really wanted to “champ them all” as I go; but Marvel starting at 0/4/0 means likely a lot of wasted pulls to get her there. I had the same issue with Wasp who I skipped and thanks to a feeder is 4/2/0. Luckily my bad luck has been relegated to some garbage characters. But I always fear the rework. The question is do I skip and hoard until both Doom and CM leave? By then I’d hope to be back over 300 pulls with Hela having a nice head start. 

Thoughts?

ThaRoadWarrior

Not sure my opinion should be all that weighty, but I might pull till the 5th showed up. I also prefer champing everyone to skipping generally, but I imagine a glut of “less than” characters might turn out to be a liability at some point.

i can’t really opine about Doom - I still primarily use mine as an anti-gritty stalking horse. 

crackninja

Personally I'd stop pulling and skip CM for the greater good.  Just puts you in a much stronger position going forward, and CM seems like someone you will never miss other than for completionist purposes.

Daredevil217

Random update: 

I ended up deciding to roll the dice and pull in Latests, seeing as how Rescue looks super trash. I think I’d rather skip her than Marvel.  With some bonus hero help I was able to get Hela to 450 and my 1/5/1 Marvel ended only at 452 (expected it to be way more lopsided with that heavy green start). On the path to finishing them Doom grabbed some levels and is 454. 

I also got the feeder covers needed to finish Loki. 

So, I now have 16 5* champs (I’m including my max-covered but purposely under-leveled Thor/Kitty in that number). After I get another Thanos from resupply and the Strange feeder drops my roster will look like this:

L459 Cable 5/5/3
L459 Thanos 5/3/5
L456 Jessica Jones 5/5/3
L454 Black Panther 5/4/4
L454 Doctor Doom 3/5/5
L453 Daredevil 5/3/5
L453 Green Goblin 5/5/3
L452 Archangel 5/4/4
L452 Captain America (IW) 5/5/3
L452 Captain Marvel 5/3/5
L452 Loki 5/5/3
L452 Okoye 5/5/3
L450 Ghost Rider 5/3/5
L450 Hela 5/5/3

L440 Kitty Pryde 5/5/3 (3 saved)
L440 Thor 5/5/3 (3 saved)

L435 Kingpin 5/2/5 (4 saved)
L420 Gambit 4/2/5

All L255:
10 covers: Iron Man
9 covers: Doc Ock, OML, Strange
8 covers: SL, Surfer, both Spideys
6 covers: Bolt, Phoenix, Widow, Wasp
4 covers: FACap
3 covers: Hawkeye
2 covers: Hulk, Rescue

All 4s in tokens are champed (but never get used). Having all the meta characters, I’m starting to look at some of the more niche characters as targets. Strange for goon PVE, OML for more true heal/strike spam, Surfer to counter Bishop, and Spidey to counter Gritty would all be excellent roster additions. The two i fear that will be lost in classics forever that I’d like are Black Bolt for the charged tiles and Hawkeye for the slow winfinite. 

Waiting for all three Latests to rotate out is going to be rough but it’s still cool to think that I started this transition in January (albeit with all the good people covered) and now have a versatile roster 16 deep!

ThaRoadWarrior

Nice! Now that you can run it - can you see how practical my GE Doom/Lumbercap/Yellow Battery anti-gritty strategy is? Start with a killable Doom, put him in front to be slain, then revive him with Lumbercap. I don’t know who the best yellow battery is; I don’t know one at the 5* tier. I’d try Cyclops (Classic) or Valkyrie (assuming doom has the best stats over Lumbercap?) with my roster though.

BoyWonder1914

I was going to welcome you to the tier, but then I saw that the original post is from 1/20/19 and that you're wayyyy farther along than I am lol. 

I read all of the post, and it was a good read. Lot of things I could relate to - I made the transition myself a little less than a month ago now. I don't have quite as awesome a starting lineup, though I do have DD and BSSM, so I get the luxury of eating Gritty teams for lunch during my PVP climbs. PVE is definitely a much more awesome experience, though I should put some more iso into my 5s. I'm learning now that 12-cover Lv 435 characters can be just as viable as a champ, as long as the covers are distributed the right way. For example, 

- My Thanos is 4/5/3. The 5th cover of Court Death doesn't make it hit any harder, it just reduces the amount of damage that it does to your teammates. You mainly use Thanos for his black anyway - though I'm sure the purple will be nice to prevent the enemy from dropping CDs or specials, that doesn't necessary scale with level. No reason no to pump some iso into him. 
- My Thor is 4/5/3 as well. Though I'd ideally want his Green at 5, destroying 1 extra tile when he's at half health probably won't make a world of difference. Although his lower health right now at Lv. 255 makes his green easier to trigger, he's also a greater risk to try to bring on any kind of serious nodes. The iso in him would mainly just be to keep him alive a little longer, while he works his battery magic. 
- My Strange is 3/3/5, soon to be 4/3/5 after Mordo's champ reward update on Friday. Then I'll just need 5 more champ levels on Mordo to get that last purple. The main reason I'd be using him though, his yellow power, is already at 5 covers, and has been for some time. Should have put some iso in this guy ages ago. 

I've bumped Thanos & Strange up to Lv. 300 for now, as those are my 2 biggest targets for an improved PVE experience. Okoye is my next target after those 3, who's at 4/3/3 at the moment. 

Kolence

BoyWonder1914 said:

- My Thanos is 4/5/3. The 5th cover of Court Death doesn't make it hit any harder, it just reduces the amount of damage that it does to your teammates. You mainly use Thanos for his black anyway - though I'm sure the purple will be nice to prevent the enemy from dropping CDs or specials, that doesn't necessary scale with level. No reason no to pump some iso into him. 
- My Thor is 4/5/3 as well. Though I'd ideally want his Green at 5, destroying 1 extra tile when he's at half health probably won't make a world of difference. Although his lower health right now at Lv. 255 makes his green easier to trigger, he's also a greater risk to try to bring on any kind of serious nodes. The iso in him would mainly just be to keep him alive a little longer, while he works his battery magic. 

With Thanos, 5 in black also increases the stun to 2 turns, which can be pretty helpful when you're using him against a higher level team, and not just to speed through easy nodes.

I've had Thor stuck unchamped for a long while, at 4 green and 435 (Archangel got covered and champed before him, even though I was just opening as I'd earn LTs or cp). That last cover and increase from 4 to 5 tiles destroyed, really makes him noticeably better at cascading. Plus the auto damage improves too with the extra tile and levels. 
At least that's how I remember it, as unreliable as that may be...