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

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
I got Eros’s Arrow to 5* and honestly kind of forgot why I was doing that lol. I’m trying to decide if I want to try and push all my 2* up to 3 next, or just keep focusing on one meta support at a time to 5. I moved it to Leapfrog for now to be like the cool kids since it is 2 and doesn’t get useful till 3 anyway.

Current 5* supports are just Chimichanga, Royal Talon Fighter, Power Stone, Eros's Arrow, and Shuri's Lab. The only supports I'm fully missing are Mind Stone and Soul Stone. None are at 1* but at 2* I have Gamma Rays, Helicarier, Leapfrog, Implanted Bomb, Skrulluminati, Thanos-Copter, and Totem Dagger. Regardless of age, 3* is a new power unlock, so it kind of feels like a worthwhile effort to push them up across the board.

Focusing on getting one to 5 at a time will mean rewards will ultimately cascade faster than leveling all at the same time, since rewards for any of your 5 supports go to the one you favorited.

That said, unlocking a 3 star power you will actually use or need of course trumps this.

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
I mean taking one to 3, then another to 3, and so on, always focusing on just one at a time. But there are a lot of older supports that don’t give out free AP till they hit 4* that I also have my eye on, so it’s really just trying to decide on an order of operations for them.

I honestly still don’t know what most of them do, the text is truly too small to read on an iPhone.

Wow, what a weak complaint. Haven't you simply used another phone to take a picture of the iPhone, then sent the picture to your desktop and zoomed in there?

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
I mean taking one to 3, then another to 3, and so on, always focusing on just one at a time. But there are a lot of older supports that don’t give out free AP till they hit 4* that I also have my eye on, so it’s really just trying to decide on an order of operations for them.

I honestly still don’t know what most of them do, the text is truly too small to read on an iPhone.

I think you should consider the alternative before making a decision to ‘soft cap’ supports. I stopped leveling 1, 2, and 3 star supports when I have enough shards a long time ago. Instead, I take the long approach and let the shards sit there. I assume that over time, I will eventually pull the right token for them to level to 4. It wastes a lot less shards over long time. If you use shards to level from 2 to 3 and then pull the 3 star token of that support, you wasted shards.

I only favorite one support that is at level 4 and focus on that one, one at a time. Only when I have a 3 star support with 1600 saved shards do I level it to 4, to avoid any waste if I happen to pull a rare 5 star.

You seem to be a player who is comfortable with the long game (see: this whole thread!). Support shards are the rarest commodity currently in the game. I think there are better strategies than what you propose.

(*again, this all is with the disclaimer that if you _really_ want a specific support leveled, because you will use it a lot, this trumps the long game and you should focus on short term gains)

@BriMan2222 said:

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
I mean taking one to 3, then another to 3, and so on, always focusing on just one at a time. But there are a lot of older supports that don’t give out free AP till they hit 4* that I also have my eye on, so it’s really just trying to decide on an order of operations for them.

I honestly still don’t know what most of them do, the text is truly too small to read on an iPhone.

When you get a support to 5 star, every time you get shards for that support they convert to shards for your favorite. So the more 5 star supports you have, the more often you will start getting favorite shards.

I have been focusing on getting supports to 5 star, and the more supports I get to 5 star the faster I am getting new supports to 5 star. The favorite shards start to snowball.

Yes but at half rate. So if you get 50 shards for the 5* you only get 25 for your favorite.

KGB

@KGB said:

@Zarqa said:
I only favorite one support that is at level 4 and focus on that one, one at a time. Only when I have a 3 star support with 1600 saved shards do I level it to 4, to avoid any waste if I happen to pull a rare 5 star.

This makes no sense.

If you have 1600 shards saved for a 3 star support and you pull the R5 version of that support (or obtain it in a Heroic boss event) then those 1600 shards are utterly wasted.

Also at R3 you'd need 2400 shards (900 to get to R4 and 1600 to get to R5). If you simply go to R4 at 1600 shards you'll then have a R4 + 700 shards. You still then run the risk of pulling an R5 and wasting 700 shards.

Unfortunately wasting shards is something that happens very often on supports because once you hit R4 + 1200 shards there exists a non-zero chance you'll get 400 bonus shards on any pull which will put you over the 1600 you need (I hit a 400 bonus once when I was at 1580 of 1600).

KGB

Maybe I didn’t explain myself properly. Sorry if it wasn’t clear. But yes, there is a high risk of wasting support shards at the final stretch of getting any to 5. I agree there.

What I was trying to say is that for those supports that I don’t favorite , I will not level a 2 to 3 from shards.

Instead l, I keep collecting shards because I will likely pull a rank 3 support before I get them to 5 by shards alone. Similarly, I also don’t rank up a 3 star with 900 shards, because there is a small chance of getting a rank 4, and then those shards work towards getting to 5 faster.

However, when a rank 3 support reaches 1600 shards, that is when I bite the bullet. Because pulling a 4 rank would waste shards. In that case I just prefer to have the 4 star support.

Despite my **** explanation, I still believe in a strategy to not immediately rank up 2 and 3 star supports when you get the shards to do so.

@entrailbucket said:
The non purple infinity stones are about 95% worthless, honestly.

The soul stone (the current season one) is really good for wave nodes. Gain 5 ap in your teams strongest color every time you down someone.