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

@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.

Going back to the confusion of Supports I lucked into a rank 5 Hellfire Club Support yesterday after winning tokens in Puzzle Quest and well, this thing does the most random stuff yet. Give the enemy team 2 AP in their 4th strongest colour?!?!? The robot that invented that one is one short circuit away from deleting the game...

@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.

I focused on bonusing the few most important ones, getting those to 5* first, then just picked whichever one I had the closest to 5*.

Now it's really fast -- almost everything I pull gives me shards for the bonused support.

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
blackbird doesn’t do anything super great, it just happened to be highest shard 4; the point of this fav strategy is just to start maximizing my chances of bonus shards per pull.

Something to think about (if you haven't already considered it). Having a R5 Blackbird only helps your chances of bonus shards per pull once every 4 months (the month it is featured). The rest of the months it doesn't help at all. So if you really wanted to maximize your chances of bonus shards you'd figure out which month you have the most 5 star supports in (for example one month I have 4, the other 3 months I have 1) and work on getting that month up to all 5s so that once every 4 months you could open your support tokens hoping for bonus shards on the R5s.

KGB

FYI, the support rotation is 3 months, not 4. So a rank 5 gives spillover wildcard shards at that frequency.

Also, I had Blackbird at R5 early. It’s nothing great now, but for me it was pretty good because of the extra ap chance for strongest ap, since it applies to the team’s strongest color.

But the straight-up ap at start ones are much more helpful.

One thing I do with supports I don’t use much is put them on ascended 2s who, who end up being used in ddq pretty often and even a mid support can help speed the match along.