New Feature in R191: Shards

pheregas

Chameleon said:

pheregas said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

pheregas said:

I'll probably never get a 3* shard to max.   By the time my shardable 3 has enough points to get the cover, I'll probably have already earned it organically.

3* shards are going to be for feeder levels for me. I'll just park it and never change it.

Yeah...  I'll see how that goes.  Might just park it at Hawkeye to get the 20 Kate covers I need to finally champ 5* Hawkeye.

It used to be I'd just select whoever gave me the LT or 4* next.

And the irony is not lost on me that I'm using 3* shards to earn a 4* to get 5* feeder covers instead of directly sharding the desired 5*.

Not to be all negative but.. how disappointing will it be if you pull the 5* Hawkeye you need and now those shards sit unused on the 3* and 4*?

It would surely be disappointing, but it would also be impossible.  I don't pull from special new release stores except for the earned new release tokens and I only pull from Latests.  Ain't nobody got time for classics dilution.

firethorne

So, now that this is in action, I see a potentially infuriating scenario.

Say you have a 5* at 4/4/4, and you specifically want to use the system to champ characters.  Say you get 450/500 shards, and then by pure chance you draw that final cover from a token.  So, you'll have a 5/4/4 and 450 shards.  That 450 isn't transferable to a different character, is it?  If you're using this as a way to champ old characters, it seems like you need to accumulate shards long before you'll know if you actually need them or not.  I honestly don't understand why they set that up as a per-character resource rather than a generic currency you could spend when you wanted on who you wanted.

DeNappa

firethorne said:

So, now that this is in action, I see a potentially infuriating scenario.

Say you have a 5* at 4/4/4, and you specifically want to use the system to champ characters.  Say you get 450/500 shards, and then by pure chance you draw that final cover from a token.  So, you'll have a 5/4/4 and 450 shards.  That 450 isn't transferable to a different character, is it?  If you're using this as a way to champ old characters, it seems like you need to accumulate shards long before you'll know if you actually need them or not.  I honestly don't understand why they set that up as a per-character resource rather than a generic currency you could spend when you wanted on who you wanted.

This scenario plus the decrease in "bonus return" stats have been the main concerns raised by the skeptics from pretty early in this thread .

shardwick

bluewolf said:

The "shards in other places" thing better come along quickly.  As of right now this all feels very much like being sold a "New and Improved!" box of cereal and finding out that they are putting 1/2 the amount in the same size box. 

Don't get me started on that. Reminds me of being a kid when a family size box of cereal lasted forever. These days you're lucky to get like three or four bowls of cereal from it.

Dogface

shardwick said:

bluewolf said:

The "shards in other places" thing better come along quickly.  As of right now this all feels very much like being sold a "New and Improved!" box of cereal and finding out that they are putting 1/2 the amount in the same size box. 

Don't get me started on that. Reminds me of being a kid when a family size box of cereal lasted forever. These days you're lucky to get like three or four bowls of cereal from it.

And then there are those tricks by which they decrease the size and keep the price the same, in order not to jack up the price. Candy bars are a good example of this.

RickOShay

Some of us are being way too negative. If BH was never a thing, we would completely love TH.

That said, (negatives):

We certainly didn't need a separate screen showing our Shards accumulated after every single token draw.

The current drop rate being lower than BH's needs to be addressed ASAP, to let us know how and where the difference will be made up (I believe it will be close to fair).

Man I wish we could transfer shards to a different character for an HP fee, or just have general Tier based shards. But I get that this takes too much chance away and would not allow for proper monetization.

Other parts of this implementation could have been planned differently / better.
Many of us have continually mentioned assembling a Player based 'Adviser' team, to correspond with the Dev's on roll outs like this. And I for one should NOT be allowed. I'm continually over-positive.
@IceIX

Back to the Positives that I believe many are overshadowing: 

Choosing your TH Cover color can have tremendous value. This will save me tons of draws on 5* Professor X for example. 
I just pulled 234 Legendary draws and got Xavier from 0/1/0 to 3/7/2 with 500 Shards saved. 
Never would I have assigned a BH to a character with 5+ in a color, but now I can safely hold those shards for when I pull again, and simply purchase the blue or black if it happens to run behind the others. 
So many 5* characters I went through months of dread simply because I couldn't rationally assign a BH to their build (6/4/1, 3/7/2, etc etc).

Look through the forums for people posting about BH Cold Streaks.
TH means that you will Never have a cold streak again. Yes we need to be earning shards from non-token areas of the game. We will. Hopefully very soon. 

Getting characters to 10 covers to be ready for Shield Training:
This will be just as tricky as it was before, but at least you have certainty on how many pulls it will take from different token areas. With BH you had No Guarantee that you will earn covers from a certain number of draws. Sure you had odds and expectations, but no certainty.
With TH you can be Assured to get 1 4* cover from 27 Latest draws, or from lots of Heroics, and now the upcoming Mighty Token draws. Maybe some of us will assign new characters as our TH immediately once they can be set. Watch your shards a bit and plan accordingly. It's a bit more management and we're stuck on that character now. 
Well, ask around to see how many people had Worthy Cap at 5+ yellow and very few blue and red...

randomhero1090

@RickOShay

I complete agree with the shards should just go into a bucket tier you can use at any time on any toon.  Progression is brutal in this game already unless you pay-to-progress AND play a every freaking event AND place from time to time.

1:167 for a 5* is just outrageous.  I don't care, at all, what the odds were before.  The odds are terrible.  I just hit 166 total saved pulls.  Will be 167 later today.  That took me ~2.5 months to save up.  So I am going to get maybe 5x5* a year???????

Don't even get me started on the 4*.  The odds are just silly. 

Yes, being able to pick your color is HUGE.  Big win.  But with the volume and speed of new toons, you have to increase the rate at which you earn covers.

MegaBee

What does TH stand for?

crackninja

MegaBee said:

What does TH stand for?

Targeted hero

maltyo9

MegaBee said:

What does TH stand for?

Totally Horrible

MegaBee

crackninja said:

MegaBee said:

What does TH stand for?

Targeted hero

Thank you! I have no idea why my brain wouldn't lock onto that.

tiomono

RickOShay said:

The drop rate being less than BH currently needs to be addressed ASAP, to let us know how and where the difference will be made up (I believe it will be close to fair.)

I feel like the removal of rng on the color of covers is close to fair already. When they add more shards to other areas as they said they would it will be a little bit better.

Dogface

I see some comments about the usefulness of BH for ST (getting to 10). While that is ofcourse the case if you're near 10 covers, if at 6 or so BH wouldn't do you all that good either. F.e. my Human Torch is now at 5 covers. It seems he will be necessary in the next ST. Getting 5 covers in that period isn't easy. 
And tbh, it isn't the biggest problem if you don't get a cover from ST, bc it's almost always a T100 reward in PVE.

dlegendary0ne

How do you convert shards into a saved cover?  For example, a duplicate 3* I want to save covers for until I have enough to max champ it.

tiomono

dlegendary0ne said:

How do you convert shards into a saved cover?  For example, a duplicate 3* I want to save covers for until I have enough to max champ it.

I think you just leave the shards alone. It would be redundant to have shards transfer to saved covers when you can stock up so many shards.

dlegendary0ne

tiomono said:

dlegendary0ne said:

How do you convert shards into a saved cover?  For example, a duplicate 3* I want to save covers for until I have enough to max champ it.

I think you just leave the shards alone. It would be redundant to have shards transfer to saved covers when you can stock up so many shards.

I see.  So instead of rostering a duplicate, one would just save up enough shards to make another max champ.  Then one would just sell the current and recruit the other.  That works.  Saves a roster slot too.  Thanks!

jackstar0

Making us push more buttons is a step in the wrong direction.

8rock_MPQ

So now that you can’t get a new 5* as a bonus hero, is it better to try for them while they’re in the LL store? I’m thinking it is and then setting our favorite 5* to someone we really want.

spidyjedi84

Like I said, anyone expecting vast amounts of shards coming from the developers, look back to what we got with supports and RISO. Notice those amounts of RISO never flowed at the promised levels from D3 for those of us who bought into the concept of Supports.
How are Supports doing at this point? Oh, well Support Circuit has been completely discontinued due to the high grind to low rewards elements that fans were upset about and your chances of nabbing a non-duplicate Support at a level worth developing are even more preposterous than getting an old 5-star cover.
Also, no new supports have been developed in more than half a year, despite having multiple films they could have pulled items from to develop into a support, because the ratio of what you could do with the items was already limited when they took them from five different abilities per Support down to 3.
Shards are Supports 2.0, just with a integrated monetization element attached from day one.  

Godzillafan67

dlegendary0ne said:

tiomono said:

dlegendary0ne said:

How do you convert shards into a saved cover?  For example, a duplicate 3* I want to save covers for until I have enough to max champ it.

I think you just leave the shards alone. It would be redundant to have shards transfer to saved covers when you can stock up so many shards.

I see.  So instead of rostering a duplicate, one would just save up enough shards to make another max champ.  Then one would just sell the current and recruit the other.  That works.  Saves a roster slot too.  Thanks!

@dlegendary0ne - not exactly.  The cap on shards is 9999, so once you hit 9900 you'll want to covert those into 33 covers. Though I'd cash them at 3900 and just have a new champ up and running if that works for you, though I'd presume that there'd already be dupe absorbing the shards based on regular cover acquisition.