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

entrailbucket

ThaRoadWarrior said:

It's not NOT working yet, though Electro fell out with a bad spread. She had 3 saved green and 12 usable covers, so I could have done the 3:1 swap, I just figured it was better in this case to do the 33 pulls I needed to finish her with Shards. I think it gets even easier if you can set your shard target to Next Unchamped Out while you pull in classic too. I may attempt that if somebody good shows up after Gamora, I think it's too late for Shang-Chi to see how it would go. 

This is exactly what I do -- shard target is always set to Next Unchamped Out.  I guess it's different for me though, because I don't have unchamped classics to bonus.

I also do the 3:1 cover swaps immediately and with no regrets.  My general philosophy on this is that any resource is more valuable right now than it will be at some indeterminate time in the future...call it "time value of covers" I guess.

ThaRoadWarrior

I guess it just depends on the value of the champ vs the value of an LT down the road. I’d probably do it for Shang-Chi, and I’ve done it for others, but for Electro I don’t think I’ll need her for anything for awhile so I’m cool to chase that last 95 shards the old fashioned way.

entrailbucket

Electro was murder when she was boosted though!  I would've missed not having her championed that week.

Edit: To be honest, I do the 3:1 cover swaps mainly just to say I do, because I find that it drives people crazy. 

There's this idea among a lot of players I know that any inefficiency or suboptimal allocation of resources will totally destroy you, you'll "fall behind" and then have to quit the game in shame.  I just really enjoy proving them wrong. 

Also I have absolutely no patience and I get bored saving any resources at all.

ThaRoadWarrior

I didn’t have the iso in the bank to do it either I don’t think, so it was kind of a perfect storm of “guess I’ll just wait…” lol

ThaRoadWarrior

I can respect sub optimal contrarianism; I think a lot of people are scared to deviate from the known sure paths in this game for exactly the reasons you’ve said. But really it seems like if your roster is shaped right, you kind of can actually live off the land and not have to store up every resource like Smaug. Had I been a full cover off on Electro I’d have done it, but since it was only ~100 shards that wasn’t a big time expenditure for me. That’s always kind of my metric - what is the real world calendar impact of doing it this way or that way? Like I could just resign myself to finishing my classics when they finish through organic pulls and put my favorites on Latest, but it feels to me like I’m making broader progress the way I’m doing it now. 

dramatist

I thought I was not going to finish Odin at 2,5,5 but with no boss event he’s going to get featured in PvE again so I lucked out there. 

My Shang Chi is just 1,3,2 so I’m worried that Ultron is going to be 460 before I get the Shang Chi covers I need. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Is Ultron as bad as he looks? Mine is still just 1 cover and I never see him in PVP.

entrailbucket

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I can respect sub optimal contrarianism; I think a lot of people are scared to deviate from the known sure paths in this game for exactly the reasons you’ve said. But really it seems like if your roster is shaped right, you kind of can actually live off the land and not have to store up every resource like Smaug. Had I been a full cover off on Electro I’d have done it, but since it was only ~100 shards that wasn’t a big time expenditure for me. That’s always kind of my metric - what is the real world calendar impact of doing it this way or that way? Like I could just resign myself to finishing my classics when they finish through organic pulls and put my favorites on Latest, but it feels to me like I’m making broader progress the way I’m doing it now. 

I think it's just way way more important to do what's fun, and I realize people are sick of hearing that at this point, but a lot of people still don't get it. 

For some players, optimizing resources in that way is fun and they really enjoy it.  For others it's not fun, but they stick to the optimization "rules" because they feel like they have to -- it's the only way to progress or maintain their place. 

That's just not true, there are lots of ways to progress!  I feel like the collective obsession around optimization contributes a great deal to the negative attitude so many MPQ players seem to have.

trewiltrewil

Man I thought this was working for me, but I am currently on a 0 for 56 streak for LL and I think I am going to miss Odin by at least a cover now. Maybe my production is just a tiny bit slow still. 

TheRiddler

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Is Ultron as bad as he looks? Mine is still just 1 cover and I never see him in PVP.

I don't think I've seen him once outside of his PVP.

ThaRoadWarrior

entrailbucket said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I can respect sub optimal contrarianism; I think a lot of people are scared to deviate from the known sure paths in this game for exactly the reasons you’ve said. But really it seems like if your roster is shaped right, you kind of can actually live off the land and not have to store up every resource like Smaug. Had I been a full cover off on Electro I’d have done it, but since it was only ~100 shards that wasn’t a big time expenditure for me. That’s always kind of my metric - what is the real world calendar impact of doing it this way or that way? Like I could just resign myself to finishing my classics when they finish through organic pulls and put my favorites on Latest, but it feels to me like I’m making broader progress the way I’m doing it now. 

I think it's just way way more important to do what's fun, and I realize people are sick of hearing that at this point, but a lot of people still don't get it. 

For some players, optimizing resources in that way is fun and they really enjoy it.  For others it's not fun, but they stick to the optimization "rules" because they feel like they have to -- it's the only way to progress or maintain their place. 

That's just not true, there are lots of ways to progress!  I feel like the collective obsession around optimization contributes a great deal to the negative attitude so many MPQ players seem to have.

For me, as someone who is 100% F2P for the life of my play, the "fun" in optimizing was trying to get ahead of the system a little bit. So I manage my roster reasonably optimally, but I'm also not afraid to attempt nonsense here and there as evidenced by this thread and it's ancestor that is lost to time and space.

HoundofShadow

I'm trying a hybrid approach of playing SCL10 for featured Latest 5* and T10 in SCL 9. Then, I pull Classic from my excess CPs. What's stopping me from committing to Classic pull is because I have a few 5* I really want to champ, like Heimdall, OMD and Adam Warlock etc. So, I'm waiting for them to appear in special store. OMD appeared recently and I pulled that store because of him. With about 40% 5* champ, the chance of pulling champ reward is pretty high. I pulled 50 Classics in September and got 5 5*. 3 of them were champ rewards. The sample size isn't big but if I don't have any classic that I really want to champ, I would have committed my excess to Classic.

entrailbucket

Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon -- at this rate they're going to run out of Classic tokens over there!

entrailbucket

Finally found this...here's a thread from 3 years ago that's relevant to this discussion:

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/73975/confessions-of-a-hoarder

Sekilicious

That was a fun thread. Imagine the cruelty of putting Wasp in LL with Okoye, haha. 

I can sort of see the point of hoarding but, frankly, no one with a 4* roster now will ever ‘compete’ with players who have meta characters max champed, their 4* farm rolling, are hoarding for the next Apocalypse to the point where they are skipping out on Shang-Chi, and have established relationships on Line. Being competitive means you have to play the PvP meta game for numerous years and hope the established veterans get bored and leave.  No wonder we get threads complaining about every single non-meta character.  If anything, that thread just reinforced that pulling from Classics is better for your long term mental health than hoarding can ever be. 

That being said, Thor and Apocalypse together sounds like tons of fun. I better hoard for that at least.

dianetics

I did classic pulls for a long time as a 3 and 4* player not knowing what I was doing.

I stopped when I decided to try and jump up to 5* land.

I will probably go back to pulling classics once I have 2 full 5* teams.

as it stands I have 1 5* team and 2 pick 2 teams.
I have to get back to hoarding once Shang chi leaves. So maybe this time next year I will get back to pulling classics.

ThaRoadWarrior

Just landed a blue for Iron Man bringing him up to 12 covers and 335 shards. War Machine just hit 320, so I may put my 5* fav on IM after Electro rather than onto Ultron like I was thinking. May as well finish up the vintage characters.

ThaRoadWarrior

Banner is champed, which got me the 47 5* champion milestone. I’m only 60 shards away from finishing Electro as well.

ThaRoadWarrior

I had a pretty epic dry spell in latest now that Gamora is there, but I did eventually pull a yellow for her and a purple for Shang-Chi who is now 1/4/1 with 500 shards in the bank. I'm not spending his shards till he drops out or has enough covers to champ to avoid another Electro situation. Pulling those latest finished up Electro who is going to be on the iso backburner as I re-champ much less expensive characters for the saved cover LTs pulling for Shang-Chi, so I moved my favorite over to Iron man who needed 150 shards to complete. Also just this morning I pulled a 10 pack in the D+ vault, which got me 200 wanda shards good for a champ level, but left me sadly with only 80hp or so. But applying that stack of 4*s has be back up to 640, so I'll be able to roster Gamora soon enough.

Captain_Trips88

Just pulled Odin from classics, face palm