I was already thinking about this while still in 4* Land, and now that I've crossed the threshold it's a little more relevant.

How do I prioritize champing 4* characters?

I've already champed 27, including all the ones it seems I'll regularly use. I've got a couple dozen others ready to go. Thankfully, I did the math before diving in... 8 million ISO sounded like a lot until then! (Besides, I'm also growing my 3* farm.)

So right now I'm thinking...

1) When I have enough covers/shards to get to 280, do it.

2) When a character comes up for DDQ Crash and I can Champ them, do it.

It's a conservative approach, I know, but I don't see a reason to rush. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

-J

Shang-Chi advice....

If the opening board has lots of Red and/or Purple, then you can start almost right away. If it does not, then you should be using your other characters for board shaking and tile changing (e.g., I like to use Onslaught as his Blue power lets me change things up and any match-4 destroys team up tiles, shaking the board a bit). You've got Thor, she's good for board shaking, too.

I want to start my Combo Point climb once I know with relative confidence I can get to 7 purple. That might mean making a purple match before I can start the climb and then climbing once I have that next purple match on the horizon.

The goal is to be able to lay a critical tile and make a 4 or 5 purple match. Second best is a red match. If combo points are at 3 or more, making that match on an edge will usually result in purple match feeding itself. If combo points are 5 or more, any such purple match will be self-feeding (meaning I get enough purple to generate 7 more purple). I can usually get one or two of those and then I move to red. That'll give me board shake, more match-4/5s, and so on.

I won't deny it - there are some matches where the Color RNJesus is not making it easy.

In PVE I play Melinda May with Shang-chi with the third being Onslaught. Quantum Realm boosts pink on SC so a heavy hit will produce more purple, if not then it will produce more red. Thoress is also good if you don't have Onslaught because of the board shake up and a place to use yellow and blue. With Thoress, you can always go for the purple/red matches but sometimes making the best match with the most charged tiles can kick a ton of butt even in the "wrong" colors.

In PVP it is still Melinda May with Shang-chi with the third being the required character. MM produces more red with powerful enough hits so SC will keep on hitting/making matches and healing.

Melinda May works best if you go after the character with the lowest life to ensure a better chance to gain AP in your strongest color.

SC is a finesse piece in a sense where you need to get a feel for what you need to match to keep the combo going. Take into consideration what is the best match to make when using your purple power to maximize the potential of the random charged tile placement.

There are some boards that just plain suck to get combo points going.

I know we bemoan RNGesus so I want to make a point because it really sets up how we view the 1:7 of pulling a 5* in LTs.

I realized that I have close to 400 pulls in LTs/CP. I figure I need 3 more She Hulk covers and she can be champed. While that is the dream it doesn't always happen that way but I figure I can make about 100 pulls and I will be safe no matter what for the next 5*s coming through.

I was able to pull only 3 She-Hulk covers in 29 pulls it was a win win but where does RNGesus fall in to this? When you look at the odds I pulled a 5* at a rate of 1:10 for the whole splurge, which is not great.

However, when I first opened LTs it took the 20th pull to get my first 5*, or a rate of 1:20. If I just focused on that then I would have been pissed off, but what if I just focused on pulls 20-29? I pulled three 5*s in those ten pulls or a rate of 1:3.33, which are awesome odds. The BEST part of this is that over those last ten pulls I got 550 bonus shards for Onslaught. If you want to count those odd then I guess my rate of pulling a 5 was 1:2.5 That was from a rather small splurge but it really shows how we focus on certain things when we pull from LTs.

Personally it was a silly risk from me because the odds of me pulling 3 of the same character in a row like that are rather slim, but I had an itch and knew I could scratch it without too much of a set back.

For those who may need it: There's a 100% bonus HP sale going right now.

-J

FYI:
There is a good bit of credible speculation going around at the moment that the next LL rotation is going to be happening on January 12th.
More importantly, it sounds likely that the devs are going to fix the rotation problem that they created back at the anniversary when they delayed rotation.
Their fix is going to be rotating out both Emma and She-Hulk at the same time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvelPuzzl...ix_frost_both/

Usual grain of salt warnings here, of course, but this one seems very plausible to me since it is something that should be done to get the schedule straight.

Anyway, there always seems to be people on here taken by surprise when the store flips and a character is no longer available. I wanted to toss this out, especially because there looks to be two rotating out this time.

Also in that same story is that Emma would also likely get a new character LT store, so that folks who are taken by surprise still have opportunity to get her.

As for me, I'm glad for it as I'm waiting for Arcade to roll out before I start on pulls again, so waiting 5 weeks instead of 8 is A-OK with me.

I have been doing the math on Arcade to see if I need to pull for him or not. I think I do.
At this point in time he is 3/3/3 with 1400 shards.
I figure on 325 shards each time a guy appears in PVE…75 for placement in event 1 and 250 for progression in event 2.
I don’t remember when we saw him last. Will we see him once or twice before he rolls out?
If it is twice, I think I am good to go. 1400+650 = 2050, or four covers to get from my current 9 to 13.
Also, there is about a 50/50 chance of pulling him from the current daily vault. Doing that would let me get by with just one more appearance.
Also, there is always the MODOK route. Mine is at 348 now, so in two more levels I will get 250 shards for Arcade. That is not quite enough, but it would put me just 25 shards shy of completion. I could talk myself into 9 random classics with Arcade favorited.
Last but not least, I still have two covers of wildcard shards waiting to be claimed in my milestones, so I could go there.
Riri is already champed for me, so I don’t want to dip into my pulls if I don’t have to. I could keep saving until the store is Hit Monkey and whatever two are after him.

OK, so I hit a milestone and now I'm wondering if I should splurge. I am currently sitting on 10,230 CP With my 151 LTs, that means I am holding on to 560 pulls from the LT Store.

Add in that the new approach lately has been that 2 covers are typically available in a Boss event and the "300 pulls" thinking is out of date. This would not only improve my roster, but build up my favorites significantly.

What would you do? Would you open Classics? How many?

I'm thinking that between Boss Battles and Progression rewards (about 4 times per new release over time), that accounts for 4 covers per 5* character. That means I really only ever need 9 covers for a given toon from the LT Store. So if I go into a store where that's all I have, I should only need 27 covers from there, which I think (conservatively) that 225 pulls is plenty for.

So I'm thinking I can splurge in the Classic Tokens store.

A good classics splurge is fun.
That said, they run special stores from time to time, so your surplus could be used on one of those where you like the selection.

I feel like I have enough to do both.

The next special store will have an Emma focus, which doesn't excite me. But I can wait, for sure

Next question..... in PVP, if you get down to Chasm v Chasm, how do you get through that? Feels like it never ends.

I am at almost 7500 CP and 70 LTs. When the daily achievement is open 4 tokens, sometimes I splurge and open classics until I get a 5*. You can definitely get away with that and then some.

Special stores happen when we get a new 5*. Lately it seems like they give us the new 5*, a 5* that rotated out a few months ago, and some old 5* that no one is sure about how it fits the theme. Then there are the special stores that are themed and those are a completely random thing.

You haven't seen the new store.

Wong. Gargantos. Scarlet Witch.

Since my Gargantos is only 1/1/1 and SWitch is 1/0/1, it may be time to spend some of those 11072 CP...

-J

That's not a bad store. When is this store supposed to open? It's not in the game at the moment.

Gargantos is 3/4/3 for me so going in for those 3 covers to champ will only pay off no matter what I pull since SW has 13+ covers already.