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

Daredevil217

I’m curious if this new 5/4/5/5 release pattern will change your plans any. It seems like you almost have to let someone go or risk having all of them leave partially covered. Either way it really sucks. 

ThaRoadWarrior

It does seem that way; especially since my strategy of flipping 3*s and not favoriting them to champ right away means I’ve kind of been doing slash and burn agriculture - I have only about half the tier champed right now. 

However, I am still pretty focused on remedially champing the meta and important 5*s. That being said, it looks like to me iHulk and Too Soon 5* are going to be a Big Deal, so it’s a bad time to be flat footed on pulling latest.

ThaRoadWarrior

Current on-purpose roster check in:

Spid3r-Man: 205 (18 more and Fi5k will be champable)
Valkyrie: 309 (11 more and Gladiathor will be at 5/0/2)
Hawkeye: 311/500 shards

Current Latest:
Mr. Sinister: champed, 452 with 440/500 shards
Havok: 5/1/2 with 465/500 shards
iHulk: 0/1/1 with 365/500 shards

Incoming Latest:
Yelena: 0/0/0 with 355/500 shards

There are a decent amount of classics I've not been paying attention to that I see have a not-insignificant amount of shards as I track through the list - it's possible that there really are enough shards falling out of the system that it will become meaningful in a decent amount of time. It does seem like if you aren't at 10+ when they leave latest though that you're still in troufor a long road - especially if the feeder updates aren't going to be regular.

Kitty Pryde: 3/2/0 with 280 out of 500 (she is next on the favorite train, Frost at 299)
OML: 4/1/4 with 400/500 shards
5trange: 4/2/1 with 340 out of 500
Danver5: 5/2/3 with 330 out of 500
Lumbercap: 3/4/4 with 333 out of 500
Doom: champed, 460 out of 500
Goblin: 2/2/2 with 300 out of 500
Loki: 3/4/2 with 140 out of 500
Cable: 2/4/5 with 140 out of 500
Nata5ha: 4/0/1 with 325 out of 500
BSSM: 4/2/0 330 out of 500
Jean Grey: 3/2/1 330 out of 500

Then some that are decently covered but dismally sharded:
Hela: 5/2/4 with 30 shards


Unchamped 4*s:

2099: 5/5/2 0 shards
Wolfsbane: 5/3/2 0 shards
Ham: 2/3/4 50 shards (yellow cover coming this week from the movie event)
Th4nos: 5/4/4 with 95 shards
Maria Hill: triple 4s with 215 shards
Super Skrull: 3/3/2 with 175 shards (got an organic pull over the weekend, haven't earned any out of simulator yet)

29 of my 4*s are above lvl 300 - chavez is highest at 356 as you'd expect from my push last year, then i have a little grouping of Kingpin/hulkbuster/rogue/coulson between 310-312. 

33 of them are in the 290s, the rest are all down somewhere below that.

ThaRoadWarrior

Managed to cover all my remaining 4*s save Wolfsbane and Ham, both of those are at 10 covers. 

Still need 11 more Valkyries, but I’m 15 Spid3rs-man away from a Fi5k.

ThaRoadWarrior

Having finally organically covered my 2099, I champed him yesterday. And since I guess I just like watching the world burn, I've continued just pulling as I go. As you might imagine, I have of course been raking in the covers for Sinister.

Current latest:
Sinister: 457 with 440 shards
Havok: 5/1/2 with 465 shards
iHulk: 2/1/1 with 165 shards

Yelena: 0/0/0 with 355 shards
Apocalypse: 0/0/0 with 105 shards

Shard Targets:
Hawkeye: 415 shards
Valkyrie: 9 more covers to Thor
Spid3r-Man: 11 more covers to Fi5k

remaining unchamped 4*s:

Spider-Ham: 3/3/4
Maria Hill: 4/4/5 with 1 saved cover and 915 shards
Wolfsbane: 5/3/2 with 2 saved covers and 0 shards
Th4nos: 5/4/4 with 2 saved covers
Super Skrull: 4/5/4 with 0 saved covers and 370 shards

I'm really hoping this 5th green for Thor, when it finally arrives, is going to speed up my SCL10 grind. It just takes SOOOOOOO long to 4x clear PVE

ThaRoadWarrior

I agree with you based strictly on pulls, but there are also 1.5-2 colorless covers coming from shards that are a bit hard to factor in I think. I'm fairly confident I won't make it to 13 on Havok right now. I don't love that I got to 5 on red right away with him, so I'm sitting on all my shards until he drops out to see how it goes.

I've reached the conclusion that sitting on all my resources just to stay current makes ALL my roster progress way too stair-stepped (no progress, loads of progress, no progress, loads of progress), and I don't really enjoy that. So spending as I go has advanced my progress on all my shard-target classics in a meaningful way. I only need 7 more Spid3r-Mans to wrap up Fi5k, my Valkyrie is at 315 shards (8 covers +85 shards to go), and Hawkeye is at ~440 shards, so there is measurable progress towards my 5* roster even though it's looking a bit grim for Latest Legends moving forward to champ them as they come out. Apocalypse is for sure going to be a big deal when he lands, and iHulk seems like a pretty big speed boost for PVE, but for my own roster I still feel like playing a little bit of classic catchup on thor, hawkeye, and Kitty is going to matter a lot for my quality of life.

ThaRoadWarrior

I definitely think you are doing it the "right" way, I just dislike the terraced agriculture approach to roster growth. And right now, release rate being what it is, it seems like I'll be pulling as I go anyway because I'll just be unlikely to be covering them completely (assuming i don't skip someone on purpose). 

I think it's going to be an interesting project to see how long it will take to grow my Kitty up to champable after Hawkeye is done. I think this is the real test of shards - can you go from effectively 0 to hero in a "reasonable" amount of time? How many covers from champ rewards will I get compared to direct shard covers? Given that Frost comes from the secondary drops of Cyclops, what shape will my 10 cover Cable be in by the time I'm done with Kitty (probably not a whole lot higher lol)?

ThaRoadWarrior

I ran the math before shards were in progression in SCL10 -

It takes ~167 legendary pulls to get a 5* directly, without any bonus shards
It takes ~ 27 legendary pulls to get a 4* champ level without bonus shards. But mighty tokens and heroic token drop rates make that very hard to reliably predict on a calendar with the data I have, since I've never tracked mundane token pulls to see how many I get or not a day/week/whatever.

Using that math though, it takes 540 legendary pulls (20 covers) to get a 5* cover from 4* champ rewards up to lvl 340, then it drops in half as they come every 10 levels to 270 pulls. But also it's harder to predict if you're focusing fire, because of the way they've split down the covers into multiple shard drops earlier in the tree. So some of your direct-shard earnings might put you over when you hit the slug of shards at 335 etc. Depending one where they fall in the featured rewards, you can get a big slug of shards out of events now just for showing up for progression too.

So really the most reliable way I've found to kind of predict my pull rate is to go back to posts in this thread, see when I moved my shard target, and then divide my progress by however many days it's been, and extract my covers/day rate from that. But now that SCL10 is live, and there are shards out the ying yang in both PVE and PVP, and you can get slugs of bonus shards, it really is tough to put it on a calendar in a meaningful way.

I suspect it will take dramatically less time to chase Kitty than it did to chase Jessica Jones, even though she is in much worse shape at only 3/2/0, especially since Chavez is unfed and Frost has half a feeder in 3* Cyclops whereas Chavez did not.

I only need 4 more covers for Spider-Man to complete Fi5k, then I'll move that shard target over to Hawk3y3. Valkyrie is 7.5 covers away from that 5th green i need for Thor, then I'll move it over to Kate Bishop who is at 295. I've been splitting my shard targets for so long I'll be very interested to see what, if anything, changes by focusing fire like that. Then it'll be all-in on Kitty.

Also I champed Th4nos yesterday, he's quite fun in pick-3 with BRB and Carbage. Now it's just Wolfsbane, Maria Hill, Super-Skrull, and Hellcat to champ. Also Ham I guess.

ThaRoadWarrior

Organically pulled a red Miles this morning, completing my hunt for Fi5k. Nowhere close to having the iso to champ him though. I'm not in the hugest hurry though; I think I might use the iso to champ Super Skrull and Maria Hill first, just to see what it's like to be basically caught up on 4*s for the first time.

I moved my 3* over to Hawk3y3.

I noticed my 4* Cyclops is at 299, and my Cable is actually at 2/4/5, so he's also decidedly feedable. So once it's time to move from Hawkeye/k bishop/ hawkey over to cyclops/frost/kitty, he probably will end up champable by default as well depending on how many flips of 3* cyke i go through. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Pulled an organic Cyclops right after posting that, so he is at 300 and Cable is at 12 covers now. I'll have to see if parking my 3* BH on cyclops will result in 6-7 flips as I chase Kitty via Frost. I'm curious which will happen first lol. 

I managed to finish 105 in SCL 10 for a Hellcat, but I’ve been struggling to climb her PVP for some reason. I like her, she is a big help against SAP teams, and her repeater is light years better than Frost's for 1ap less. 

Hawkeye 5* is at 499 shards, and I need 7 more Valkyries to get a 5th green for Thor. Hawk3ye is at 236.

Current Latest Crop:
Havok: 5/2/2 (used my shards to even out his green, still have 215 shards)
iHulk: 3/1/1 (165 shards)
Yelena: 0/1/0 (355 shards)

Sinister retired to classic at 458 with 190 shards.

ThaRoadWarrior

I'm about 30k iso away from having enough to champ Fi5k; I figured I'd just do that, champ them top to bottom as it were. Also the revised welcome to shield event was fun, the LT from that got me a green for Yelena, 0/1/1 now.  I wasn't able to climb even to 900 in the Hellcat PVP just due to life n stuff, but all the random shards + placement have me with a 1/2/2 Hellcat with 150/400 shards, and the remaining 250 still at the top of Webbed Wonder, so that's still pretty okay for a 4* release for me. 

I got those shards i needed for a Hawkeye cover, he's 3/5/3 now. He won't be materially better until i'm all the way to 5 purple though, outside of numbers increases.

ThaRoadWarrior

Fi5k is champed, but I haven't played with him yet - i'll mess with him once Simulator (pvp) goes live for the new season I guess. I figured champing from the top down was the better play, those 4*s are going to be there till whenever. 

*edit - ran him in Women of Marvel a little bit. there's a pretty wide boost list in there, but being pick-3 it was the easiest place to do it.

First team was BRB/Carbage. It worked out fairly well, in that there were loads of trivial friendly specials to donate. The problem here is that BRB is your battery, but he is just straight up better on those active colors than KP, so he is kind of dead weight on this team outside of having a useless black outlet.

Second team was Sinister/Carbage. My rationale for this team was that Sinister would help you manage enemy AP pools for Kingpin, and he has a more useful black drain for your black AP to trickle out of. The problem again being that FI5k's blue is his primary direct damage ability, and Sinister's is largely better. So, still on the hunt for a better team for him. I wonder if he'd work better with Yelena as an AP manager?

ThaRoadWarrior

Kingpin is decently fun with Vulture, you just have to fire his green off a bunch of times. He tanks basically everything, which means he dies first, it does work. There's no specific synergy per se, but he also works alright with Profe$$or X.

So Havok dropped out of latest at 5/2/3. Who knows if we'll see a feeder again. 2 of those covers were from event shards. That run of Simulator at SCL10 was wild lol. I was t200, and didn't even hit the final rung of progression, just nope'd out after the CP.

ThaRoadWarrior

I was on a very long cold streak, but it broke pretty hard.

iHulk is now 4/2/2 with 465 shards.
yelena: 2/1/1
apocalypse: 0/0/0

Onslaught: 0/0/0

interesting interaction I discovered in the Onslaught pvp vs Apocalypse: his red targets the weakest alive enemy, so when Onslaught was invisible it just hit nobody rather than shifting to the next viable target.

ThaRoadWarrior

Landed another red for my hulk right after this post. Will he die like Havok at 10 covers? Time will tell.

ThaRoadWarrior

iHulk is now 5/3/3, with most of a shard cover on deck. Will I get one more organic, and will he get featured once more? We shall see..

ThaRoadWarrior

Got the last 4 Valkyrie covers I needed from PVP, so Thor is 5/0/2. I’m all in on Hawkeye’s tree now.

ThaRoadWarrior

Got a purple Yelena today, 2/2/1 on that one. Still 0/0/0 on Apocalypse.

ThaRoadWarrior

Yellow Apocoalypse on the vine now, but I burned all my hp chasing those Valkyrie covers in PVP and won't be able to roster him for awhile. I did max-champ my second bagman, I guess I could free that spot up for him, but i'll probably just sit tight till i get the hp

ThaRoadWarrior

I was able to roster Apocalypse, and pulled another yellow for him. I have a shard cover on the vine from this past story that I'm going to sit on until he leaves latest, that way I can try and fill in any potential gaps in the coverage. Current crop:

iHulk: 5/3/3
Yelena: 2/2/1
Apocalypse: 0/0/2 (505 shards)

Onslaught: 0/0/0 (380 shards)

Current crop of favorites:
Hawkeye: 3/5/3 (305 shards)
Kate  Bishop: lvl 299 (81 shards)
Hawk3y3: lvl 259 (204 shards)