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

ThaRoadWarrior

Probably so; I got a black for him last night also, so now he is 4/5/2 with 480 shards. I’m going to sit tight till 5Witch drops out I think next week too at this point. 

I started playing my 2*s that way at some point when I was really behind on champing 4*s - they can kind of be an iso distraction when you are chasing something above them - and it just stuck. You can solo those nodes with a good 2* Thor alone, but if you have “dead” low level characters the game won’t let you go in with a single, so I started champing 3 to avoid wasting health packs on 2*s. I have one of each rostered, I just only keep 3 champed at a time.

ThaRoadWarrior

Well, of course I couldn't leave well enough alone, and got a back to back Blue Ronan (1/1/2) and an LT champ level for 5Witch (455) this morning. I should have waited, but oh well lol. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Got a black for Knull, so he is 5/5/2 with 480 shards. I feel ok to stop pulling now since he is definitely finishing before he drops out of latest.

Ronan is 1/2/2 with 200 shards
5Witch is lvl 455 with 305 shards.
Electro is 1/0/0 with 415 shards (still NEW at this time)

Sighclops is at 205 shards, 295 to till he is complete.
Mordo is lvl 338 with 225 shards. Getting him to 340 will put my 5trange at 450 shards, so I’ll probably stop there and use direct shards to finish him. I’ll move my 4* over to Main Event to complete my 4/4/4 Loki after that. That’ll be a longish road, hulk is level 320 right now.

I’m 28 Kamalas or 47 health packs away from finishing Black Bolt. The race continues, but my money is on health packs getting there first. I kind of want to finish him before this Gambit boost week is over.

ThaRoadWarrior

Well fam, it was health packs by a country mile. Blackagar Boltagon achieved, and he does NOT work in this Thanos PvP with Gambit at all. He has comparable health to my boosted 3* thanos lol. Anyway, it’s done. Moved my 3* to Strang3 to push on Mordo.

ThaRoadWarrior

I was I was able to catch back up on Knull after that long run in Classic. He is level 451 now. I’ll sit tight on LTs until Odin replaces him, since I think that block of 3 unchamped characters will be the true test of whether or not I’m going to miss out on somebody.

Current Latest Crop:
Knull: 451
Ronan: 2/2/3 with 400shards
Electro: 1/0/0 with 400 shards

Odin: 0/0/0 with 400 shards (new)

current favorites:
Sighclops: 2/5/5 with 326 shards
Main Event: lvl 322 w/ 369 shards (Loki is 4/4/4 with 190 shards)
Hulk: 172 w/282 shards 

WampaX

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I was I was able to catch back up on Knull after that long run in Classic. He is level 451 now. I’ll sit tight on LTs until Odin replaces him, since I think that block of 3 unchamped characters will be the true test of whether or not I’m going to miss out on somebody.

I feel like I should pop back in and encourage you that this is a viable strategy. I haven't missed covering a 5* before they rotated out since posting back in June and am still building up my classics to 13 covers each (now sitting on 43 champable 5*s).

If there is any fiurther info I can provide on how this is working for me that might help you turn the corner, let me know.

ThaRoadWarrior

I went back into classic after champing Knull and landed a usable blue for surfer and a usable green for Parker Spider-Man back to back, making up some for my long dry spell and bringing both to 11 covers.

ThaRoadWarrior

Hit a blue for Banner (4/3/4) and a yellow for Goblin (4/3/4) that put me at the 250 5* cover milestone good for 700 shards. I put them on Sighclops to finish him up with a 451st cover, and moved my 5* favorite over to 5trange who just needs 50 shards. I was really torn on where to apply those 700 shards, but figured ultimately one was as good as the next. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Finally got the iso to champ Sighclops; pulled an LT champ level for Profe$$or X (467) out of classic. I'm sitting on 13LTs right now. I actually switched out chasing Loki to chasing Daredevil (5/3/3, with one saved), so I'm working on 4* Kingpin who is at level 342. I just think he'll be used more, even though Loki is just one cover from done. It felt like a really long road grinding MEHulk even though I needed one less cover to get him where I needed. 15 more pulls and Dr 5trange will be champable, so then I'll have to decide if I want to move that favorite to somebody like Ronan or Electro who are still in Latest, or keep working on low-covered classics. Right now my lowest covered classics have 8 covers, and from that crew the only one who is even kind of useful is Panther, the rest are like Wa5p and Nata5ha, Dr Octopus and Archangel.

dramatist

I don’t know if I’ve posted in here before but I’ve enjoyed reading about your journey. 

I’m in a similar spot but have taken longer to get here. I have 39 5* champs, all the 4*s except Kate Spade and Alligator Loki. No 4* max champs but I’m getting very close with a handful. I have 2 copies of every 3* and 2* at the moment but I will be dropping some 2*s soon because I just hit 300 roster spots and I never use most of the 2*s. 

I don’t play as much because I really don’t enjoy PvP but I’m trying to at least get to the 10 cp reward. 

Anyway, I was unable to finish Scarlet Witch before she rotated out of Latests but finished Knull so I have decided to pull Classics with cp and hoard Latests until Knull rotates out and see how close I come on Ronin, Electro and Odin. 

I feel good about finishing Ronin because he only needs 4 covers. I sharded Scarlet Witch who now needs only 45 shards to champ and I’ve had pretty good luck with Classics. I draw five Classics every time I get 100 cp and have gotten some good 5*s including covers for Okoye, Apocalypse and Colossus. I’ve only gotten one cover for an unchamped 5* and that was a Loki cover. I’m enjoying the 20% bonus for my cp. 

entrailbucket

Team Classic Tokens unite!

ThaRoadWarrior

I ended up burning a bunch of HP in the daily deals to get the last 100shards I needed to finish Loki earlier. I moved my 5* shard to Goblin(4/3/4) to get him to 4/4/4, where I’ll leave him until the spend 2 billion iso milestone black cover rolls in. I’ll probably move it to Banner (4/3/4) after that depending on what happens with Ronan (4/3/4) as he is leaving latest. Kingpin is level 347, so 13 more of those and Daredevil is finished.

ThaRoadWarrior

OK, Ronan is now complete, pulled an organic blue.

Current Latest crop:
Ronan: 5/3/5 - 0 shards
Electro: 2/1/2 -215 shards 
Odin: 1/1/0 - 460 shards

Shang-Chi: 0/0/0 - 400 shards (NEW! status at present)

Current Favorites:
5*: Goblin: 4/3/4 - 235 shards
4* Kingpin: lvl 354, 335 shards (6 more and Daredevil will be fully covered)
3* Bullseye: lvl 250, 22 shards

I opted to champ Pirate Kate for the saved up champ rewards instead of saving up for Loki, so he's still sitting around fully covered. Since I'd been adding levels to Daredevil, and he has a saved cover in the bank, I'll probably champ him before ronan or loki, but that will be pretty cheap since he's already at level 435. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Just champed Ronan, really reaching to find a novelty team for him in simulator and coming up pretty short so far. I want to use Cable in there, but that may be part of the problem…I wish I had a functional Odin so I could try Odin/Ronan/Heimdall in simulator. 

entrailbucket

Hawkeye!  Or Goblin.

atomzed

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Just champed Ronan, really reaching to find a novelty team for him in simulator and coming up pretty short so far. I want to use Cable in there, but that may be part of the problem…I wish I had a functional Odin so I could try Odin/Ronan/Heimdall in simulator. 

I tried Ronan, Odin and GG. GG will fortify the special tiles, especially Ronan repeater tiles. Ronan repeater tiles spawn on random colours which will trigger Odin passive effects, and in no time at all, when Odin jumps forward he will take zero damage. However I can’t really get it to work because my Ronan is still not champ and my Odin tank too much colours to be able to “jump from back”. The team is also a slow team. 

HoundofShadow

I tried that team too and it was fun (watching Odin get hit for 1 damage) and slow (to get the fortification) going. One team I encountered used Shuri/Odin/Colossus. 

ThaRoadWarrior

So as best I could tell, Ronan really wants to have his repeaters spam out and get matched, and the fortification trick allows me to double dip on them during a match. As people are saying, Ronan isn't a hyper fast character, so I was trying to piggyback off of the fortifications in such a way that it would cheapen my powers via Heimdall. My Goblin is still 4/3/4 unleveled, but I agree I think he's a strong contender, using either Heimdall or Odin. So I tried:

Cable/Heimdall/Ronan - the gimmick here being that Cable passively fortifys repeaters when you make a yellow match, has a good green (eventually), and Heimdall's red is better than Ronan's. Ronan tanked everything and died pretty fast against a lot of teams, so that was kind of a non-starter against the Simulator meta sea.

Then I swapped out Heimdall for Vulture on the premise I could earn blue for ronan and green for cable in the background, but same deal there, it was last vulture standing fairly quickly.

Then I tried 4* Torch/Heimdall/Ronan on the premise that every time a power was fired, it would foritify repeaters, and then if I used To4ch's red, it would destroy all friendly repeaters thereby doing his scalable damage followed by Ronan's scaled damage. It sort of worked, but somehow I feel like Heimdall was the weakest link in that chain. I kept going up against Apocalpys/5Witch/Colossus teams and getting punched down on too fast. I did fire off Torch's red with a board full of Ronan's repeaters, and that nuke slaps really hard - it reminded me of the old Hammercap + Okoye + a board full of charged tiles doing a billion microhits nuke. I think Torch/Ronan is a pair that could have some superior third wheel than Heimdall and be a fun pick 3 team, I'll keep working on it.

I also tried 4* Torch/Apocalypse/Ronan, and it worked pretty well but Apocalypse did a lot of the work and I'm trying to find cool teams that don't necessarily lean on the traditional boosters.

I went into Clear 1 (level 530) of the 4* Torch/Coordinator/1* Iron Man challenge node using my unleveled, unfinished Goblin/Knull/Ronan on the premise that both those characters have CDs that want to get shortened, and Goblin brings an active yellow that will do that for you as well as an all things being equal better black and better purple than Knull. It worked, I made it out the other side without taking much damage, but Knull is a real wet noodle without a SAP booster and I don't think he added much. 

At this point I thought it might be good to start playing around with Countdown Shorteners, so I tried Okoye/Coulson/Ronan, and wiped pretty hard on clear 2 of that same node. The gimmick with Okoye here being more that she will add team up to the board while Coulson burns it down to shorten CDs, and whatever TU is left in the bank will add to the already sizable damage Ronan deas.

After that I tried again, still clear 2 of that node, with 4* Carol/Jessica Jones/Ronan - this time, the premise was that JJ's traps, when found, would generate black because Ronan tanks that, allowing either Photonic Barrage or Body Check, and JJ can seed the board with a bunch of decent starter strikes for Carol to enhance as Ronan's CD burns down from Executive Decision. The problem I think is that this enemy team is very dangerous if you let it sit out for long, because 4* Torch will escalate things very fast at these levels and a goon will fortify all his repeaters basically immediately.

I tried Flaptain/JJ/Ronan also, but that one wasn't really working out either. I think a Flaptain based team would work better with Apocalypse maybe; somebody who can make use of the protect tiles and isn't going to add any new countdowns to the mix.

Anyway, since I needed to get moving on clearing this sub today, I set aside the exploration after that for awhile.

HoundofShadow

If you are looking for the fastest team that will help Ronan spam his repeaters, look no further: Shuri and IM40 are all you need. Get  8 red and 6 yellow. Fire Shuri's red and you can cast IM40's yellow twice. That will give you 24 blue aps and you can fire it 8 times due to Shuri's power cost reduction. That will give you 16 repeaters, which Shuri can fortify them again. 4 turns later, the board will be maxed out with Ronan's repeaters. Throw in Support to make things faster, like start with 5 yellow or 5 red.

ThaRoadWarrior

I feel like I just don't even consider using my 3*s at all anymore. Have you tried that team against 5* or SCL10 leveled teams? Seems like IM40 would survive against some goons for enough turns to burn his CDs down, but there are definitely a bunch of those challenge nodes he wouldn't be appropriate for.