Grand Experiment 2: Treading Water in the SCL 10 Post-Shardpocalypse

BlackBoltRocks

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I got Scorpion champed today, moving on to Throg. By the time The Hunt is done, I'll have Silk ready to go as well, and I'll be caught up to Dark Beast. I've been on something of a 5* dry spell, and it's not looking awesome for Adam Warlock right now. 2/3/3 with 480 shards; I think he's out next right?

I've mentioned it in a few other threads, but I'm curious to mess around with some of the charge tile spammers alongside the high-match damagers that have been coming out. I'm curious if that is going to be a viable team strategy or not.

I was discussing with Daredevil, as well as some of alliance mates, about Adam Warlock vs Colossus. The general consensus is that Colossus is notably superior to Adam.

Colossus always gives you the match damage boost and protects you against enemy match damage. His base Yellow is 945 plus a 126% boost.
Adam only boosts his own match damage when he's above 50% health, and doesn't give himself or his teammates any damage protection whatsoever. His base Yellow is 866 plus a 113% boost.
Colossus' Black is miles better than Adam's.

The only advantage Adam has over Colossus is that the former can heal. So I'd pass over Adam in favour of Colossus, especially since any Adam covers you draw now will become Colossus covers later.

HoundofShadow

I think Charged + Critical would be wicked. However, with lots of charged tiles on the board, you run the risk of the AI powering up their aps faster. 

Base damage * 3 (charged tile) * 3.5 (typical critical multiplier)

Thrown in Rogue and your multiplier becomes 31.5x.

mdreyer93

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I got Scorpion champed today, moving on to Throg. By the time The Hunt is done, I'll have Silk ready to go as well, and I'll be caught up to Dark Beast. 

Scorpion is great, my new go-to with thorkoye against wave nodes. Get 10-15 TU AP and 13ish purple and lights out.

ThaRoadWarrior

So is that factoring in Warlock’s team damage and trap damage, or just comparing match numbers? 

ThaRoadWarrior

I ended up getting a blue Colossus out of an event token; never in all my days until first with Sighclops and now Colossus. Also finally broke my dry spell and got a Warlock out of latest. Current crop:
Warlock: 2/3/4 (480 shards)
Yellowjacket: 4/3/2 (490 shards)
Sighclops: 1/1/0 (390 shards)

new:
Colossus: 0/0/1 (65 shards)

I’ll be curious to see how things go with Warlock. I guess there is still time for a rally. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Let the Warlock Rally commence - pulled a yellow today. 3/3/4 with 480 shards. I've also been sinking hp into that Not Easy Being Green vault and gotten 500 shards of Doctor Octopus for my trouble. He is up to 2/2/2 with 455 shards. I haven't really been making much of a note here about incidental background progress on my elder classics that were below 10 covers, but some of them have been moving around. For those who may be interested (just in order of level off my roster) here are my un-champed classics:

5* Lord: 5/1/4 - 445 shards
Daredevil:  5/2/3 - 15 shards
Bolt: 4/4/1 - 15 shards
Panther: 3/1/4 - 40 shards
5trange: 5/2/3 - 400 shards (he feels like he has had the most movement from mordo or daily rewards)
Archangel: 2/2/4 - 260 shards
FA Cap: 5/2/1 - 0 shards
Gambit: 3/4/3 - 470 shards
Jane Grey: 4/2/1 - 400 shards
Surfer: 3/2/3 - 25 shards
Banner: 2/3/3 - 50 shards
Widow: 4/1/1 - 280 shards
Doc Ock: 2/2/2 - 455 shards
Black Suit Spider Man:  4/2/1 - 450 shards
SMPP: 3/1/3 - 250 shards
Goblin: 2/3/3 - 130 shards
Havok: 5/3/3 - 362 shards
Iron Man: 3/2/2 - 435 shards
Loki: 4/4/2 - 400 shards
Wa5p: 3/3/2 - 20 shards

Everybody else is champed, or in Latest or NEW, and listed elsewhere. I'm still working on Gambit and Havok, and I may go after Bolt or Daredevil next. DD5 just seems generally solid, but I'm feeling like some of these higher power cost characters may benefit from charge spam from Bolt.

ThaRoadWarrior

Pulled a green for Yellowjacket, he's up to 4/3/3 with 490 shards. 

I was using Profe$$or X/Apocalypse on either side of my Sighclops in the essential node of Spider Silk: Red Letter today (Fury/Coulson/3Cap, got up to lvl 605), and that team worked really well with the exception that unless you manage to make a few team up matched before a match-n, Sighclops won't be doing any swapping when you fire his yellow. But the team worked really well even for that. I was mostly using Profe$$or X to add yellow tiles to the board rather than any of his other colors, and then just color-shifting stuff with Onslaught, and stacking my match damage with Clops. I wonder if that's any better when he has a stronger build that 0/1/1? 

ThaRoadWarrior

I got a 13th for Yellowjacket today, still have my fingers crossed for an organic Warlock pull before he drops out. Once he does I’m going to sit tight until YJ leaves though, try to get caught up. Pulling across Magneto was a big coverage blunder I think.

HoundofShadow

How many cps and LTs do you have now?

ThaRoadWarrior

0 LTs, 18cp. I’m spending as I go, generally only stopping when next to leave latest is champed, so I just get what I get. 

mdreyer93

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I got a 13th for Yellowjacket today, still have my fingers crossed for an organic Warlock pull before he drops out. Once he does I’m going to sit tight until YJ leaves though, try to get caught up. Pulling across Magneto was a big coverage blunder I think.

One reason you may be having a bit more trouble with Warlock is that the upcoming event will only be his 4th PvE where he is the 5* reward (and likely his last). Recent others have been the 5* reward 5 times before rotating out.

ThaRoadWarrior

Yeah maybe; I’m still an organic pull short even with one more feature. Of course I just pulled a saved champ level for Yellowjacket instead...

HoundofShadow

Can I assume that without playing in SCL 10, you won't be able to champ all or most of them before they leave Latest? 

ThaRoadWarrior

Hard to say. I’ve been in SCL10 without dropping down since it came out. I’ve only recently been able to hit 1200 in PVP. It seems more likely that you need to stop at 13 covers for everyone if you really want to be sure. RNG is going to RNG for sure on pulls.

HoundofShadow

In SCL 10, you get between 2 to 3 covers equivalent of shards for latest 5*, so it cuts the number of LTs needed by about 20 to 60 LTs. If your average baby champed 5* is 455, I think I can consider pulling my LTs while still playing scl 9. Of course, there's always RNG, but that aside...

ThaRoadWarrior

The state of your 3 and 4* roster will matter a lot too - how often you are hitting good rewards. Basically you are looking for an average pulls per day that will shake out to enough pulls across someone’s tenure in latest to cover them. If you stop once the next out is covered, it sets you up for the next batch. It just gets tough when RNG finishes like the last out before the first and second, then you have to decide to keep pulling or not.

every so often somebody will drop out of latest for me at 10-12 covers, most notably Havok who I’m working on currently. 

Also it's probably obvious, but unless you need to apply your first cover to roster the character, it's best to sit on the shards until they are about to drop out, or you could otherwise complete them, that way you aren't as tied to a bad RNG build

ThaRoadWarrior

Ok, FINALLY got an organic pull of Warlock, sitting at 4/3/4 with 480 shards. So after Cosmic Chaos ends I should be at 4/4/4, and the I’ll have half a cover worth of shards after Infinite Pursuit.

Sekilicious

So out of curiosity, what was Shardpocaypse refer to? Where shards replacing bonus covers negatively received here?

ThaRoadWarrior

They gave out feeders to everyone who didn’t have one, and didn’t catch everybody up to the shard drops they would have gotten. So you got the full cover of your character was at 280 or more, but if you had lvl 300 or 370, you just got a flat 100 shards during the initial rollout rather than the total number of shards you would have gotten.

people felt penalized for having high level characters, and there was talk of whether or not we should all soft cap at 299 moving forward to avoid that happening in the future with feeder announcements. It was a huge backtrack from the precedent we’d had since the introduction of 5* feeders where you would get the cover rewards 1 to 1 for 4*s you had advanced beyond whatever level the cover drop happened at.

*Edit* - I reread that, and it wasn't as clear as I'd like. So for those who may be coming to this way after the introduction of shards:

Before shards, we had bonus heroes - it was a system where you would occasionally get additional full covers of characters that you selected from every play tier. Shards were implemented in a staged rollout, so it wasn't as fully complete of a system as it is today and was pretty unpopular at first. Additionally, there weren't always 5* feeders build into 4* rewards (though this feeder system was implemented WAY before shards were). When that was implemented, older 4*s were chosen to drop 5* covers (full covers, every 20 levels from 280 up to 340, then every 10 levels after that up to level 360, for a total of 6 covers per character). So when bonus heroes were removed and replaced with shards, we started referring to it as Shardmageddon or Shardpocalypse because it definitely felt like a deliberate slowing down of your ability to progress. At initial rollout, you could only get them in small bits from pulling tokens. Eventually they were added to progression, SCL10 was rolled out, and bonus shards every 40 maybe? pulls were added to give back some randomness. But that took months to complete.

In December of...19? it had been a LONG time since any new feeder 4*s were announced, we were in a situation much like we are now in fact (save the the release pattern in those days was 4*,4*,5* rather than the 4*,5*,4*,5* we have now), they told us that all the unfed 5s would be getting feeders, and a bunch of 3* characters would be getting secondary feeders. This event became known as Shardmass (Shard Christmas, being in December). However, it turned out that rather than doing what had always been done prior and giving the full retroactive amount of covers (in this case shards), no 4* secondary shards were given out from 3*s, and for 4*->5* rewards, any character you had who was at 280 got that full cover, but no amount of levels beyond that would get you more than a flat 100 shards. So if you had a character at 360 under the old system, and they were made into a feeder, you'd get a 2/2/2 drop of full covers, but under the new system, you'd get a full cover + 100 shards, hard stop. This did NOT go over well, and so you saw a bunch of review bombs, people stopped spending etc, and then they opted to come back and "make it right" by giving out the full amount of retroactive rewards people were led to expect in the first place. That catch up was known as Shardmass 2.0. 

At any rate, I've always been F2P, and I only at the time had a Rogue above level 300, so it barely affected me at all, I was short a Gambit cover essentially. I was feeling pretty burned by the Kitty/Rocket meta at the time though, so the loss of the Sabretooth shards I was expecting were my biggest gripe. So it was a bummer, but life goes on right? Anyway, that was the point of this thread though - how possible was it going to be to cruise along as an F2P player under the new system, and here we are.

Sekilicious

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining