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

Punter1

Agreed - it's not quick and definitely a marathon approach.  I wouldn't have Doc Ock done without it, for sure got at least double digit Carnage covers from 3* Ock.  

ThaRoadWarrior

The shards are just so spread out across the 3* tree that you basically have to max them out; unless you are grinding 10s of 4* covers you are unlikely to get more than one 3*s worth from it. Maybe growing the she hulk tree from scratch would be meaningful.

skittledaddy

Punter1 said:

rainkingucd said:

Punter1 said:

A long, many year journey, finished on the weekend when Doc Ock was champed from Carnage after PVP rewards came out.  

That leaves just S Daken at 11.5 covers and Havok at 9 covers to champ.  

With neither of those having a feeder I'm currently lost as to who to favorite at the 3* & 4* level.  Weird place to be.  I've set my 3* as Patch just cos, and I'm working on any dupe 4* close to re-champ.

From the sounds of it, your next 4* target should be Reptil.  Rumour is that he's feeding Havok.  

Saw that - though it's unconfirmed and will have to wait a few weeks until he can be fave'd. 

I have gone the 3* Shulk route and will fave 4* Shulk too when available for now.  

Reptil feeding Havok is confirmed, btw.

rainkingucd

I would agree @ThaRoadWarrior .  For 1-2 covers of 5*, I would have targeted the 3* feeder, and yeah, maybe gotten 1 cover out of the process. 

But my three 5* that had to travel a long long 4* route to finish up, I think the 3* feeder helped at least speed it up a bit.   

My 4*Captain Marvel was of my best covered 4* (thanks Bonus Heroes!), but still I had to dupe her up to 300 to finish 5* Marvel

Invisible Woman went from 295 to 360 to finish up Doom

Black Widow now working on getting her dupe to 280 to finish up 5* Widow.  

For each of them, I targeted the 3* feeders along the way.  3* Marvel/Doom must have re-champed 3-4 times at least in the process. That's at least 9 4* covers I got via feeders.  

3* Black Widow on the other hand, with 4* Widow the secondary, doesn't really feel like she's contributing to the 5*.  But I suppose a few hundred shards here and there doesn't hurt

Punter1

Happy if Reptil is a Havok feeder, means I "only" need 63 Reptil covers to finish Havok... might take a while still.  Not sure why all the secrecy with announcing this if that's the case.

As everyone loves graphs... I found this post as the best list of 4*s with release dates and graphed my current cover count for those older 4*s.  It's only 64 of them up to Jubilee in April 2018 (ignored Dino & Howard), but all my 49 dupes are in the list.   

Highest: #43 Cap Marvel - 158 covers
Lowest: #16 Mr Fantastic - 85 covers & #15 Sam Wilson 93 covers - back-to-back 2015 releases with limited love even though Mr F is a SS feeder.

Carnage is ~20 covers higher than his timeline peers - Doc Ock says thanks.  Same with old Wolv XF, he was fave'd at one point to get OML done, currently 30 covers better off than IW.  

Peggy, Cap M, Medusa, Riri, R&G, America all on the high end, benefit from being good characters that i would have chased when a 4* player and being around during the limited 12 style of packs.  

ThaRoadWarrior

Finished covering Doc Ock but I need more iso before I can champ him. Since I need 18 more N4tasha covers to finish widow I decided to park my 3 and 4 on their respective widows to see if it’ll help. After that it’s just this half a cover for Black Suit and I’ll be caught up.

rainkingucd

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Finished covering Doc Ock but I need more iso before I can champ him. Since I need 18 more N4tasha covers to finish widow I decided to park my 3 and 4 on their respective widows to see if it’ll help. After that it’s just this half a cover for Black Suit and I’ll be caught up.

Huh.  Funny, I'm also 18 covers away with N4tasha.

Race you!

ThaRoadWarrior

I’m down to 17. See you at the finish line.

ThaRoadWarrior

Managed to get the iso I needed to champ Doc Ock today, so that is done. It’s been happening in a different thread, but I’ve been experimenting with actually timing my PVE sub clears in SCL10. With animations on, single clearing the yellow node and 4x clearing everything else all in one go like I usually do, it took 1:06 minutes. The next day I turned off tile physics and animations, and it saved about 10 minutes even though I actually wiped a couple times. The teams I used on that run were:

rocket/juggernaut/3* lord on easy nodes - it’s a single swipe win so this can’t be improved on easily

hard nodes: iHulk (455)/Ghostpool (456)/Okoye (458, 5*RTF)

pick-2: Okoye/iHulk

Challlenge: Shang-Chi/Sersi/Onslaught

houndofshadow has told us they can do an SCL10 3x clear in 30 minutes or less reliably using shang-chi based teams with no animations, and I will be timing that myself today to see if I can do it. I’m skeptical personally, since that team is mega board dependent, but it does hit super hard so I don’t want to write it off without trying.

HoundofShadow

My second account with single champed mmr (SC) was flagged a few months back for clearing pves too quickly (getting T10 on first bracket). All has been cleared with CS since then. I think it's a pretty good piece of  evidence.

Punter1

I must be old skool... but i still mostly rely on 50% Thor + boosted folks.  I am surprised others in that similar champ-em-all baby champ 5s land don't mostly use the boost list for reliable speed and weekly variety.  

My champed 68 5* average at level 457.5, Kitty is my highest at 478.  I find Hulkoye very board dependent and other non-boosted meta teams similarly a bit more inconsistent.  Half-Thor can make any middling-but-boosted character pretty consistently speedy, though I am never competing for T10.  

This week using BRB & HalfThor + Polaris on the pick 3s, Thano5 on the easy nodes.  It feels pretty speedy, though I don't time and I am usually doing stuff when I do my morning 3x clears.  This morning was 45 mins, plus check email, read news, read new forum posts, do early morning spreadsheet tasks & make coffee & bagel for breakfast.  

Some weeks the boost list can be pretty sketchy and I rely on Shang + Half-Thor.  

Sekilicious

HoundofShadow said:

My second account with single champed mmr (SC) was flagged a few months back for clearing pves too quickly (getting T10 on first bracket). All has been cleared with CS since then. I think it's a pretty good piece of  evidence.

That’s pretty crazy. But goes to show how good SC really is. Maybe I need to stop worrying about my iso expenses 

ThaRoadWarrior

I was very skeptical, but on Arctic Circle (an admittedly very easy sub with mostly goons and no waves or unique nodes), I decided to match Hound's test of doing 3x clears for a total time to get a more realistic comparison. I used 3* Lord/rocket/Juggernaut (4* corvus glaive support for boosted purple damage, leaving only yellow to be tanked by Rocket) on the easy clears, and then I switched to 5* Professor X (lvl  472, no support at first)/Shang-Chi (lvl 452 with a 3* Reality stone)/America Chavez (lvl 370, no support) for the harder nodes. 

My rationale for Professor X over any start of turn battery was that he is going to do an additional 10k of damage + single AP gather on any match 4/5, so I won't be penalized for keeping a combo going. I went with that 3* reality stone support that I got from being active on the forum over my 4* Sharon Carter because of the additional red damage. It does .8 crit boost as well compared to Sharon's 1.0 boost. There are probably other supports to put on X and Chavez to assist here, maybe Taskmaster Sword on Professor X (I eventually did apply the sword to X, but i didn't put anything on Chavez. I'll probably give her something that has a % to start a battle with AP in the bank). 

My initial hot take: this team IS super fast on most nodes. Doing 3x clears of the entire main track took 11:35 seconds with animations and physics off. However, when i went over to the challenge node, this team wiped a couple times and I bogged down a bit, and then on the Pick 2 nodes it really didn't "feel" as fast as hulkoye because of how board dependent it is in the absence of a battery character.

Total 3x of everything clear time was 32:54, which is slower than Hound, but still in the ballpark.

I went through and did 1x more clears to get full node completion, but I swapped out Chavez for Professor X on the pick-2 nodes - this felt much faster to me. the total time is 44:54. This is a pretty big quality of life improvement to shave off a total of 20 minutes by turning off animations and using this team. It's still a lot of minutes to grind, and you have to focus a little more due to the precision tile placement you're doing.

ThaRoadWarrior

Sekilicious said:

HoundofShadow said:

My second account with single champed mmr (SC) was flagged a few months back for clearing pves too quickly (getting T10 on first bracket). All has been cleared with CS since then. I think it's a pretty good piece of  evidence.

That’s pretty crazy. But goes to show how good SC really is. Maybe I need to stop worrying about my iso expenses 

Shang-Chi is kind of like a muscle car without power steering. it's very powerful, but you really have to pay attention to what you're doing.

Grizwald

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I was very skeptical, but on Arctic Circle (an admittedly very easy sub with mostly goons and no waves or unique nodes), I decided to match Hound's test of doing 3x clears for a total time to get a more realistic comparison. I used 3* Lord/rocket/Juggernaut (4* corvus glaive support for boosted purple damage, leaving only yellow to be tanked by Rocket) on the easy clears, and then I switched to 5* Professor X (lvl  472, no support at first)/Shang-Chi (lvl 452 with a 3* Reality stone)/America Chavez (lvl 370, no support) for the harder nodes. 

If you Elemental Gun at Rank 4 on Juggernaut, you only need to worry about Yellow when Rocket of Star Lord are boosted.

HoundofShadow

Use 5* Colossus and Thanos and you don't have to worry about Juggernaut not tanking.
Throw in AW and you have a 5/7 chance of one match and down.

As for CN, I also use other non-typical SC teams, depending on who the CN enemies are. For example, one of the CN has 4* Juggernaut. So, I'll use SC/Electro/Nick Fury.

ThaRoadWarrior

It's a non issue if Juggernaut isn't tanking one or even two colors. he tanks team up and nearly everything else, and it's a 100% chance of a single swipe victory as long as you have the enemy with the most health targeted. Other teams I've used for easy clears are Thano5/iHulk/Gladiathor. it's not a turn-1 slam dunk, but 5* court death usually has Thor at half-health by the time you're on the final easy node after 4x clears so it's an organic way to do that without retreating a bunch of times. Only danger there is if iHulk gets court deathed to death and you have to burn a health pack.

Elemental Gun I don't like, because it has a chance to fortify a friendly special on match which will sometimes proc and slow you down. I preferred Juggernaut to Thanos with animations on, because Court Death has a lengthy animation compared to Juggernaut just doing the thing efficiently. It's less of an optimization with animations off though. 

Sekilicious

r4 Elemental Guns are great if running Juggs with Polaris and Grocket. Juggernaut tanking everything makes makes SCL9 a breeze. Irrelevant with 5* rosters of course. For the easy nodes, and now the 4*DDQ, I have stun batons on him to let him tank in six of seven colors over Grocket and Gamora. I don’t have r4 guns anyways. Every now and then, when I need either to match yellow or a strike I wish I had Elemental Guns. I should champ Ultron and Gamora and see if they can make 3*Thanos faster.

ThaRoadWarrior

ultron is terrible in my experience - complete waste of time over Kitty if you are interested in strike pumping assuming you have her available. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I tried replacing Chavez with Killmonger, I underestimated how board dependent that team is when criticals art creating themselves in the background. I'm going to replace her with Onslaught and time it now.