How will 1-3 non-meta 5*s affect my PVP experience?

t4ng

Hey, I’m looking for some input/advice about how 1-3 non-meta 5* champs would affect my MPQ experience. I expect my PVE experience will improve, but that my PVP experience will get worse. The question is, will the trade-off be worth it?

Some background: I'm a day 1800+ player with a mature 4* roster. I have all of the meta 4*s champed (but not worthycap). All my decent 5*s with 9+ covers are softcapped at level 355. Three of my 5*s are champable, but none of them are meta (Thanos, Surfer, and OML). I’m wondering whether it may be worthwhile to champ my 5*s (or at least Thanos?) to make PVE faster/easier. I usually play PVE in CL 7, unless if I have the 5E. I expect having 1-3 5* champs will allow me to play CL9 consistently, and as long as I can place top 50, will be able to reap 4* placement rewards.

What I’m not sure about is the impact to PVP. I usually join PVP events 3-8 hours before event end, grind to 900 in a single session, then shield until the event ends. Generally this is pretty easy for me to do until I get over 800 points. The final few matches to get me over 900 are harder and require more skips, but still manageable. Without altering the way I play PVP significantly, will I still be able to hit 900 if I champ 1-3 non-meta 5*s? If my MMR starts matching me against teams with champed Thorkoyes/Gritties/Bishops/WorthyCap+HE teams, I’m guessing I’m going to have a bad time.

Any advice or insight will be greatly appreciated!

jtsings

  I'll try to offer my experience with having "almost" two 5* champs and it may give you at least some glimpse into what you'd experience.  I have a level 453 Okoye and 440 Thor for reference.  I've heard people say your best bet is to play slice 1 when it opens because it has more points but I typically try to get top 50 placement in other slices; which may mean I'm making it more difficult on myself but it works for me.  In my experience it's not very long before I start seeing Gritty teams when I get high enough in points.  And when you get really high in the 700-800 range you'll either see almost exclusively Gritty teams, a 5* with Bishop, or Captain Countdown (Worthy) with Hawke5e.  Okoye and Thor can handle Gritty most of the time and sometimes Bishop, but I'm not sure if either of your possible champs can take down those teams, but maybe because I don't have any of them champed myself.  In Shield Sim once you hit around 1700-1800 points you'll get almost exclusively Gritty and Bishop or two 5*s and Bishop and Capt Worthy and Hawke5e won't be far behind either once more people champ him.

   The speed issue is going to be another detriment, I would suppose, for you.  Thor and Okoye are super fast and ultra sustainable and most times I just opt for 40 wins rather than try to overcome the many hits I get when I reach 700-800 points.  Since your teams have the potential of being fairly slow and not all that great defensively,  you may get attacked a lot if you don't shield hop.  And just fyi my float point for Thor and Okoye on defense is around high 200 to low 300s (if I leave them out for an extended period of time, which is much lower when I was in 4* PVP.  

   Here's more on my single champ experience if you'd like to read more https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/78577/my-5-single-champ-season-experience-was-it-worth-it#latest .  The only thing that has changed since I wrote this is that seeing Gritty, now Hawke5e and Captain Worthy and Bishop everywhere is really sucking what fun there was in PVP.  I know there are people that are defending these "speed bump" characters but, unfortunately I don't have the luxury of having a wide 5* roster to counter them.  So my advice would be if you really don't care about PVP and are just going to help out with your PVE clear time, I would have no hesitation to recommend you champ all three.  If you care about placement in PVP or the 900 progression and want to spend little to no HP on shields, I would definitely say PVP probably will become significantly more difficult for you.

Daredevil217

Could another option be to just champ Thanos? That way you could be in single five star MMR and maybe use dual boosted champ four stars in PVP, but still get the fast clear times in PVE? Or would you have to use Thanos every PVP match?

Note: These are questions and not a suggestion, because this is something I bypassed myself, but might be worth asking other people who have done the single champ thing for a while.

ThaRoadWarrior

I have a lengthy thread detailing my experiences transitioning, and i now have exactly 3 non-meta 5*s:

Ghost Rider: Robbie Reyes
God Emperor Doom
5torm

I used to be able to hit 900 on demand as a 4* player by managing my float points and not shielding. Generally I could float at 650 un-shielded, and push those last points when it was convenient, but as soon as I champed GR : RR, that was 100% over. My new float point was 450 if I was lucky. The problem I found was that the game doesn't qualitatively measure which characters you have champed for your MMR. So as soon as you champ any 1 of them, you're getting fed to champion Kitty/4ocket teams forever. That's not as bad  now that Sabretooth exists, I've only just started sinking iso into mine and it has changed everything for me on that front. 

Champing Doom was immediately helpful, and was a night and day experience from Ghost Rider simply because of the true heal and non-conditional black nuke. He immediately supplanted GR as my lead character. Something interesting that happend to my MMR was that I immediately started seeing more interesting teams than Gritty everywhere though - having a pair of 450+ characters meant that I wasn't seeing as many big 4* partners for the solo 5*s I'd been seeing before. Of course that just moved me to the Thorkoye bracket for offensive queues though. 

Given that you have  a pair of true-healing wingpersons for your Thano5, you'd probably be a little better off than I was with just Ghost Rider, but conventional wisdom says thano5 is not a great PVP character. He is pretty great on new-release weeks I'd imagine, but I would bet you'll be using a lot of health packs with him even with the other 2 healers present. 

It may be worth mentioning I have a usable but un-champed Okoye at 6/4/1 lvl 405, and similarly a usable but unchamped Jessica Jones at 5/3/4 lvl 435.

My own Thano5 is 5/1/2 lvl 345. I use him with 5* Lord (345) and 4ocket (301) to clear easy nodes in PVP. With the characters at these levels, I can 1-swipe win those matches, and I can get exactly through 4x clears of the easy nodes (assuming no waves) before rocket gets Court Deathed to Death. Then i switch to some Okoye-based team for the harder clears, either Chavez, Medusa, or Strang3 depending on the opponents. 

ThaRoadWarrior

OJSP said:

[...] If we're unlucky, even greenchecking every node might not be enough for t50.

Greenchecking every node for me only happens on character releases, and it's generally good for t100 at best in SCL9. 

TPF Alexis

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Something interesting that happend to my MMR was that I immediately started seeing more interesting teams than Gritty everywhere though - having a pair of 450+ characters meant that I wasn't seeing as many big 4* partners for the solo 5*s I'd been seeing before. Of course that just moved me to the Thorkoye bracket for offensive queues though.

I had a similar experience. Kitty more or less killed the fun of the single-5* MMR. As soon as I champed another 5*, I started seeing substantially more variety.

ThaRoadWarrior

Also - champing my 3rd 5* didn't materially affect my MMR compared to a second one. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I do the 11pm EST one, and I just join right around event-start. Generally I 4x clear it shortly after it goes live, then within the hour before it shuts down I'll do final 2x. for Spider-Man 2099 that had me in the T70 range.

It may be different in a non-release event, but generally I just 4x clear every sub and walk with full progression on a normal event. That's usually T200

Warbringa

I green check every node in SCL 9.  If I have the required 5*, it usually gets me top 50 in slice 5. Sometimes I have to watch though as it may take a few extra clears on the last day if field is being competitive.  Sometimes I just join and sometimes I wait for flips.  

For the OP, if you enjoy PvP now, don't champ non-meta 5*.  Without meta 5*, PvP is grueling, especially with Bishop and WorthyCap in the game now.  

5* Thanos is really good in PvE if you have the supporting 5* to make him fast.  If he is your only 5*, he isn't that great by himself and I don't think that he will really speed up your play that much plus he will deal a lot of team damage to 4* characters who he is teaming with. OML and Surfer won't really speed up your PvE experience.

ThaRoadWarrior

What's the mechanism for "bracket shopping" and "watching for flips?" I see it being discussed like its' a thing we all do, but i've never figured out how to game that particular system.

t4ng

Everyone's responses have been very insightful, thank you all so much! Based on your various experiences, I think I will keep my 5*s softcapped at 355 for now. The hit to PVP doesn’t seem worth it.

Hopefully the upcoming ability to target heroes will allow me to finish off some relevant classics (my Okoye and Kitty are both at 10 covers). I’ve also got a hoard of about 200 Latest Legends tokens. If the character after carbage isn’t a complete dud, it might be worthwhile to pull my hoard to cover prof5/carbage/x, then champ everyone that’s champable.

Currently, for PVE I usually wait for flips and play in lazy brackets and can generally get top 50 in CL9 without too much difficulty already, so I imagine having some champed 5s can only speed that up.