2*->3* casual transition play tip (buying covers)

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

In Polarity’s guide you’ll learn that in the beginning of the game you should spend HP on roster slots only. And I would agree with that, but it has limits (I would say 15 slots +/-). I learned it is wise not to do this anymore if you wish to enter the 3* land quickly, I am sure that you need to stockpile HP for buying specific 3* covers instead. And here’s why:

The amount of new characters released is now just incredible, it’s not really worth anymore to collect all 3* characters and block slots with them being constantly under-covered. I believe you have to make a decision pretty early. That key question would be - "which five to seven 3 characters I wish to keep and focus on in the long term?"* The immediate counter would be why not to keep only 3? Well, you never know how nerfs and buffs will affect your characters, it’s good to keep your roster slightly wider, to enable a quick replacement. But why not more than 7? Just because even if it is tempting keep in mind that when each new slot will cost you 500HP (later in game) for those 3 slots you can guarantee-buy 1 specific new cover, that you need! And buying specific needed covers gives you an incredible edge and advantage in your transition.

My real life example - I had Hood residing for nearly 150 days in build 5-3-4 - which is not making him good at all… I bought 1 blue cover, making him 5-4-4 and suddenly he become a bit more useful. Within next 2 weeks I stockpiled additional 1250 HP and bought additional blue cover, respeced him to 5-5-3 and that guy is a monster, helping me significantly in achieving further HP and ISO for building other characters even if combined ‘only’ with 2* Thor or Wolvie. In this example, the same would apply even if he was only 1-5-1 because his strength lies within his blue ability.

In order to stockpile HP I recommend following:

  • Do NOT invest in shields at all (unless you need to climb over 600pts per PvP, which is not really easy in case you don’t have few 3* maxed anyway)
  • Do NOT invest in more than 15 slots (trust me, I have over 25 slots occupied by characters I don’t use regularly either because they’re weak or significantly under-covered, return on such investment is low)
  • Do NOT buy health packs (just don’t)
  • Do NOT buy tokens (the odds of getting your needed cover are so low, that it doesn’t make sense)
  • Do NOT spend HP on other things like returning a char from patrol…
  • Go for HP progression rewards (at least up to 400 pts in PVP)
  • Participate in PVE to extend which allows you to get at least the lowest possible rank granting HP (subs are very generous often)
  • Check your prologue missions - didn’t you miss some nodes rewarding HP?
  • Play at least once a day a mission (even if you don’t have time, play 1 easiest/quickest prologue mission) to get daily rewards - occasional 50HP from daily random reward is just worth it
  • Join alliance if you don’t have one yet

Example of covers worth investing HP:

  • Hood - blueflag.png

  • Patch - yellowflag.png

  • LThor - yellowflag.png

  • LCap - redflag.png

  • Punisher - redflag.png

  • Deadpool - redflag.png

  • Luke Cage - redflag.png

  • Blade - greenflag.png

  • Black Panther - blackflag.png

  • Doom - blueflag.png

even if those characters are on lower level (understand less than 166), those key skills make a real difference as often they are not dependent on characters level and still have powerful attributes! And I am sure there’s more to that list than I just mentioned.

People will tell you: “wait before buying specific cover until you have already 4 of them”… but you could also wait for ages (given the token odds, top PVP/PVE ranks competition, vaulting characters etc.), it’s just not worth it.

Mods - before moving this into tips and guides, keep it here to see if there’s general agreement or not.

2

I think most people would need additional information, to assess whether this is fit for them.

What kind of PVP placing were you achieving with hood at 4 blue and 2*thor/wolv? T100, without shields? T25?
How much did that change with 5 blue hood? And at what hood level? Around level 94 to keep pve scaling in check?

I’m contemplating buying hood blues since I just got my 3rd, but I’m not sure how big of a difference it will make in PVP score, without a second top tier 3*.
If so, will I need to max their levels out and risk pve scaling?

Currently I have 33 slots, and I’ve found that having space, for essential characters for pve’s, have been a pretty good return on investment, in HP.
Without essentials, I would have had a lot harder time hitting decent scores to reach sub HP rewards.

As for covers worth investing in, I have major suspicions about Doom blueflag.png

3

I am agrement with Kreigerbot more than the OP in that you are better off keeping all 3* covers as essential characters for PVE. The realy trick is knowing when in your transition to start dumping 2* to fill your team out. If you are getting close to having a good 3* team and you get a new character. Once you are close and you are not really using your 2* in PVP anymore if you dump a 2* for a 3* you can jump ahead in HP. Eventually you might decided to buy some covers to help your cause. As the game is now I would not buy any covers until I had saved around 3500 HP and then I would buy only a select few 3* character covers.
Hood Blue is one
LThor yeloow or Green to complete the build
Possibly Patch or Daken for true healing

The reason I would not dump 3* is they are going back and buffing them. I had sold Loki a long time ago and when he got his 3rd power I now have to rebuild him. With Doom I kept him and now already have him at level 153 with 12 covers and he is ready to go. I have a fully covered Rags who will be getting a 3rd power probably next season, and Beast sounds like he will get buffed as well. If I had sold these covers becuase they are not very good anymore I would be missing essential characters and would have to completly grind the PVE to get placements. Keeping all 3* is much better long term strategy. The only over powered characters in the game are 4* and they cost 2500 HP per cover so make sure you have enough stockpiled before you buy a 4*.

4

People spend way too much HP on roster slots that almost never amounted to anything. If you’re going to hang on to a random character at an arbitary cover configuration and hope that later that character will be buffed such that your arbitary configuration is now the best way to build that character, you might as well just start buying daily tokens and that’d likely to have a better return on your investment since there’s a very good chance the character you’re counting on is never going to be buffed. There’s a rather consistent pattern of awarding the needed 3* before the event that requires him, and if you can’t consistently do top 150 for the 1 cover for the essential node then you weren’t ever going to make a deep run to begin with so it wouldn’t matter if Dr. Doom was essential on a ‘top 50 gets Thor 4*’ event because even if you had him, if you were struggling to get top 150 before you’ll never come close to top 50 now.

I do keep a slot for every 3* just because I like to collect things but it’s certainly not because all those random benchwarmers stepped up when it counts.

5

I agree with you. I was just thinking the other day about players saying characters being vaulted hurt their progress. I was thinking if they are spending HP in PVP on shields for better placement for characters (which by their admission are not aiding their transition process) wouldn’t they be better served conserving HP to get the few covers they are missing.

6

This depends way too much on a case to case basis. I think there are very few covers that exist which will actively make a big impact in helping you transition and hold their value post transitioning. For example, half the covers you’ve listed do not really fit this criteria (Patch yellow, Punisher red, Deadpool red, Doom blue, Cage red), and would probably be a waste of HP once you complete the transition. If your ultimate goal in this game is the fastest path to collecting all the covers, then this decision simply amounts to “Will the character that I invest in now give me enough extra rewards to justify throwing away all of these random 3*s that I could have had sitting in my roster otherwise”, and that’s a pretty damn hard decision to make. I guess some factors to consider would include:

  1. How will these covers affect my overall PvP rewards? As an example, if those Hood covers allowed you to go from top 100 to top 50 in PvP, then your return on investment would be an extra 25HP a pvp, which for two covers, equates to 100 PvPs before you make your 2500 HP back. If those Hood covers allowed you to go from top 100 to top 25 on the other hand, this means you’re earning an extra, potentially useful cover and 75HP every PvP, which becomes far more worth it.
  2. When will realistically be my next chance to earn these covers? If you have a LazyThor at 3/3/5, then you should spend the HP on yellow, as 3->5 is a huge upgrade and you won’t be able to earn covers for him for another month or two at the earliest. If you have Doom at 3/3/5, then you probably don’t want to invest since he’s currently in rotation and staying there for a while.

The only covers I really see fitting this criteria are BP Black / Thor Yellow/Green for this season, and Hood Blue, MQ Black, Cap Red, if the PvP tournament for them just passed. Everything else is probably not worth the investment. After all, once you’ve made the transition and can constantly earn covers, roster slots becomes the bottleneck, not characters. Anything you invest into characters now is ultimately going to go to waste since you can eventually earn them for free, so to invest in characters must give significant benefit to be worth it. I should definitely add this logic to my guide though: I think it makes a ton of sense if you’re a guy with a 3/3/5 Thor and no other characters close to his power level, and you’re skirting around the edges of top 25 in PvP, but its probably not worth it in the general case, especially if its an average character like Deadpool or something.

7

Even if your characters suck, you still got to start somewhere. Let’s say Punisher is your best character and you’re one cover short. Well, Punisher isn’t all that powerful when maxed, but if he’s the best you got, are you really expecting to go deep in an event that offers a stronger character without even having a lesser character maxed? Sure if you can do that then you don’t have to spend the HP but most people likely cannot. Given covers are handed out in a fairly random pattern, you don’t always get to be picky on who you can get. Thor is currently in vault, for example, and I think so is Black Panther? So unless you were only a cover or two short on completing them, maxing either of them out is no longer an option.

8

Okay, I see your point and made a mistake in that list of “worth” covers: You can add critical covers on strong transition characters such as Punisher 5 green, 5 black/yellow Cage, etc to that list as well. I still maintain that covers on weaker characters something like Colossus red isn’t worth the investment. Even if thats your only option, you’re probably screwing yourself with PvE scaling if you go all in and max that guy out for PvP, not to mention that its highly unlikely that having a 166 Colossus will even allow you to get higher rewards. We need some more transitioner input in here: it’s hard to quantify whether or not actually buying the extra cover will result in noticeably higher PvP placements.

9

I hate to disagree with the legendary polarity, but I have to disagree with one aspect of his advice: I think patch’s yellow
yellow might be worth the investment. Patch is clearly outclassed by xforce in the 4* endgame, but the gap between 2*-3* transition and 4* play is massive. Patch’s 5 yellow power is absolutely unique in the game. No one else is guaranteed healing with no contingencies or other requirements, even xforce. Patch is never more then 30 or so minutes away from full health, even if he is downed. Its hard to overstate this value in a game that so aggressively gates playtime behind the health/healthpack monetization. Having a solid true healing team will completely change the way you play the game, and will allow simultaneous competition In both pve and PvP without much trouble. I think that’s enough to move patch yellow up into the lazy Thor green/yellow, BP black and hood blue level of value.

10

Let’s say you never finish better than T250 and your best character is Moonstone. Unless you think 90% of the players better than you is going to quit over say shield cooldowns tomorrow so that your previous T250 finish is now good for a T25, things aren’t going to get better on their own. You might not have anyone that’d be considered worth spending but the status quo isn’t going to work either.

Now I think what people gets tripped up is that even if you had the roster, a lot of the time a poor finish is a result of lack of playing time and/or understanding fairly unintuitive game concepts. If you play the game only half an hour a day you’re not finishing T100 unless you’ve an exceptionally strong roster. If you’re doing Simulator Basic and you still can’t beat the hard nodes after spending some HP on your best characters then you’re not going to be able to move up in placement. These factors are usually dominant so that it’s better to figure this stuff out first before spending HP. The hardest nodes in PvE usually require a fairly specialized team to defeat until you get into the X Force rolls over everyone range (and even he usually needs some help) so it’s not a matter of just throwing money at the problem. But if you can be sure that you’re not running into these issues, then every bit does help especially if you’re starting in a position outside of the T100 PvP/T150 PvE, because things aren’t going to get better on their own if you start out in that position.

11

Haha, No worries on disagreements: discussion is good and healthy. My reasoning for 5 yellow not being worth it was that you can prologue heal with Patch at lower yellow covers and it’s probably almost as good. The only time where 5 yellow is essential is if it actually keeps Patch alive in a game that he would otherwise die in without healing every single turn. Transitioners can afford to spend the extra time in prologue as well if it comes down to that. If your team isn’t actively prioritizing yellow, I’m guessing that lower levels of Patch yellow should be good enough to keep him up without dying. Maybe 5 green or something would be more important for that team to actually be able to take out higher teams, but that’s all theorycrafting on my end.

Yeah… the first part of this post has absolutely nothing to do with OP. The original poster’s scenario was “Given that I am a mostly f2p player in the 2->3* transition, and I have the HP to buy a couple of covers for my mostly completed 3* guy vs roster slots, what should I do?” Your scenario is “Given that I am not even done with the 2* transition and want to jump suddenly to top 25, what should I do?” In that case, the obvious thing to do is clearly to not spend 10k buying covers for the 1 3 cover 3* you have, and instead build a competent 2* roster so that you can push to top 100, incrementally accumulate 3* covers, and eventually buy some covers if you’re close to completing the transition. I’m assuming that a full 2* roster guy (which is clearly doable as f2p and without buying any covers) has the capability to get at least top 100 in PvP and 2 covers in PvE, which means that they’re going to eventually start accumulating covers. I’m pretty sure this “can’t even begin the process of transitioning wall of below top 100” you speak of doesn’t exist for players that actually want to make the transition.

12

The general advice on only spending HP on covers for heroes you are essentially maxing comes from the fact that the spending needs to achieve something meaningful. Since PvE is scaled and relies more on grinding (recent simulator hard sub aside) it is pretty much down to achieving something meaningful in PvP. That means increasing your score.

If you are transitioning from a 2* to 3* team the important thing to bear in mind is being able to just about beat 2x166 + loaner does NOTHING for your score. As counter-intuitive as it sounds transitioning from 2* to 3* (successfully) isn’t about what you can beat… it’s about what CANNOT beat you (or stops trying to). That’s right, the first big boost in PvP score comes when 2* teams start skipping you and/or losing to you.

So… what covers are worth buying? Simple… only those covers which lead to you having a sufficiently levelled, covered and SCARY hero to ward off C.Storm/Mags and other 2* pairings. That rules out taking a 1-5-1 hood and buying a blue cover, for example. You won’t gain anything from that purchase really. SO IMO, wait til a hero is getting close enough to finished that a cover or 2 makes for a viable spec AND a high enough level (with enough health) to start warding off those 2* teams.

13

Allow me to offer some limited transitioner input. I am late in my 3* transition with 4 or 5 3*s cover maxed, but nothing leveled above a patch 153 and a lazy cap 140 (both cover maxed). I have not bought any covers, so its all luck of the draw and playing hard in desirable pves and the odd pvps where I can compete (e.g., bop).

As I mentioned above, I think that getting a 5 yellow patch was incredibly valuable for me. (i had him 0/1/5 when he was vaulted, and spent most of the fall with him at 1/1/5 after a super lucky anniversary token pull after he was vaulted). Having a true healing team instantly changed the way I played the game (I could grind lightning rounds to build iso and 2* covers with patch and daken; i could mop up all the easy pve nodes with no health loss, etc). And polarity is correct that a 3-yellow patch could be prologue-healed as necessary, but I think that not having to do that sort of tedious babysitting (especially when I was already doing it for 2*daken) was a big enough time/hassle saver that I would recommend it for for a transitioner who has 3 or 4 patch yellows now (and isn’t likely to get more for a month or more when he comes back into the prize rotation).

After a true healer (and maybe cage who is almost as good as true healing with his damage mitigation), I’m not sure what other covers I have that I really I wish I had bought earlier. Lazy cap red 5 is great for pve and pvp offense, but doesn’t hold up on pvp defense. Don’t know that I would pay for it in retrospect. Maybe blade because he is so much fun to play and recovers health at the higher rate, but its hard to see how he would be essential or even particularly useful in the end-game phase. I haven’t played rocket and groot, but they would also be potentially useful with true healing.

But aside from true healers and the standard pvp powerhouses like 3* thor and BP (most of whom are in the vault), I don’t know that it’s worth investing heavily in any 3* cover. And in my relatively limited experience, I haven’t found any single covers that did more to change how I played the game than patch’s 5th yellow and OBW’s 4th black.

And for the OP, I don’t think it’s a good idea to cap a roster at 15 slots. I don’t think roster space becomes seriously expensive until the 30s or 40s. and rotating through pves with the most recent one cover 3* works in a pinch, but is also (1) wasteful as you will eventually get more covers for every character, and (2) potentially a serious handicap when you start leveling the few 3s you keep. Having a one cover 3 in tough essential nodes is basically carrying dead weight, even with the maximum boost. If you can afford it, having one of every 3* is clearly the ideal roster model.

14

I was pretty much in that exact position, Polarity. I’ve just completed my transition (having 3Thor, BP, 3Cap, Patch at 166). My initial transition team was Punisher (at 3/5/1), Colossus (at 2/3/3), and OBW. Good team for PvE for the most part, and Punisher/OBW were a good team for beating maxed 2s, and some transition 3 teams. Chalking up any wins against a pair of 166s was pretty much impossible with that team, however. I was occasionally managing a T100 placement in PvP using this team.

I managed to do pretty in the PvE handing out LazyThor covers, and had started to get BP covered, via a combination of lucky token drops, plus the Gauntlet that awarded him (and the follow up PvE). I ended up buying Thor’s last yellow cover, and BP’s last black cover, and subsequently pretty much manage a T25 in most PvPs, and very occasionally a T5.

It was definitely worth buying out those last two covers, from my perspective, since it shifted me from struggling to get enough covers to max out my initial 166s, to now being short of ISO to cover the other 3*s that I have. Having said that, if it hadn’t been Thor or BP, I’m not sure that buying out their covers would have been worthwhile.

I can see the value in Patch yellow, however, having only recently finished covering and levelling Patch, since my Health Pack consumption in PvP has dropped significantly, since he became a viable team member for me.

15

I thought a lot of the common problems are the guys trying to break into T100. Assuming you didn’t miss anything really obvious and you’re still on the fence on T100, putting HP into covers is pretty much the only way you can meaningfully improve your position.

Going from T100 to T25 is considerably trickier to narrow down to any particular factor. There can’t be any obvious solutions because T25 is top 5% and if it was that easy to get there then everyone else can do the same thing and then it would no longer work because top 5% still can only be 5% of the total. I’d say in this position it’s better to save HP and burn some on shields on the events that do matter, but you could end up waiting for a very long time too given how randomly the prizes are rotated, and of course vaulted characters probably are never going to be selected as prize I think.

16

As someone who is trying to jump from top 100 to top 25, I don’t know that just burning HP on shields for shields for desirable rewards is sufficient (or at least sufficient to speed up my progress appreciably). With my old 2* roster, it was a bit of a chore to get top 100 (usually right around 600 points give or take). I could definitely do it if I had enough time HP, but it could be nailbiting in competitive events. Leveling some 3*s into the 140-150s range alleviated that problem. I can now climb to 600 without many (any) attacks, and can focus on hunting for higher value targets to climb faster, rather than holding out for weaker teams to avoid the risk of loss.

But top 25 is a whole different world. I haven’t been able to get top 25 yet outside of a bop event (though I am becoming infuriatingly good at making the top 28. . . three times in a row now!). As far as I can tell, a less than ideal 3* team can get 650-700 points reliably, but going much higher is rather difficult/expensive now with the shield timers. And top 25 can be anywhere from 675-750 depending on the bracket/slice. So its a real crapshoot. I am sure that I could do it sporadically with my current roster. But I don’t think I will be able to reliably do better until I can get a better pvp team.

So the idea of buying the right covers to skip that grind is somewhat attractive to me. If I could reliably double my pvp prize rewards, then dropping even 3-5k HP on the right covers would be worthwhile fairly quickly. sadly its not clear what covers I could buy as I don’t yet have my first lazy thor yellow or BP black (thanks vaulting!), and a playable xforce would cost me about 10k HP.

17

I think choosing the right time slice has made Top 25 a reality for me. I have got it a couple times, and that is with scores between 600 and 700. Once I feel like I get as high as I can, I usually throw a 3 hr til the end. If I have to choose slice 4 or 5, to allow myself time to play, then I kiss placement goodbye.

18

I agree that slice makes a big difference. I haven’t had a chance to try slice 1 yet, which I think may be the best bet. I have tried slice 3 and slice 5 (when it was 4AM EST, so a far less than ideal time for the majority of players), and got similar results both times: tantalizingly close but just outside the top 25. But the last two PVPs have had very desirable rewards: Cage and Hood (blue), which I think has increased scores. So I have some hopes of getting top 25 yet, but making top 25 sporadically isn’t a big improvement if I can’t get the most desirable rewards.

19

I only have bought 1 cover, that being for patch. He was covered 4/4/3 for the longest time, and while his healing factor could help, he was tough to run in any match he didn’t just totally dominate anyway, because so much time is spent building TBTI and NOT casting zerker rage until it’d let you win in another 1-2 turns tops.

The purchase was hasty though. I won enemy of the state, and tried out the 4/5/4 build that allowed, but felt it made such a small difference, and I always said if I were to buy a cover it’d be patch yellow or hood blue. I shrugged, bought it, and then a day later realized patch would have a pvp soon. What if yellow was the t150 reward? Reality ended up being worse, as the cover I just dropped all that coin on was the next pve progression.

I just wish it had dawned on me before I pulled the trigger.

The best use of patch with less than 3 yellow covers during the transition phase was grinding lightning rounds till opponents got tough, or doing easier nodes without h.pack usage. He just wasn’t reliable in any fight that required speed or had a decent degree of difficulty.

However, that may have all been different if I’d had access to loki, doom or daredevil in their current forms. All 3 make excellent dance partners now, as they in some way have methods to actually let you use berserker rage before it’s time to end the match.

On the premise given by the OP, I think having a deep roster that leveled fairly even as I saved all the 3*'s to it helped in many events. Sure my shulkie sucks even at 3/5/3… until she’s buffed in a pvp and then becomes a viable tank option with a decent aoe that can snag a bunch of cd tiles. Spidey stinks by popular opinion but he finds a nice place now in a group with patch and doom. I’d be missing so many choices and options if I’d built the way suggested that have carried me through a wide variety of niche uses. At least for me, getting everyone collected and saved was part of the fun… now on to finishing each one.

Playing through the transition at a time when true-healing hit just as I got into a decently fledged 2* roster, I have to say that the thing that was most annoying about it was having to use the same characters over and over and over. Pve at least let you mix it up, but after the initial climb in pvp, it was always the obw/ares show, all the time, everytime.

If someone wants to win a card just to use in the next pve essential, only to trash it for the next in line for the next event, I guess that’s their choice. still, if that’s the way you go, you still get locked out of a lot of things unexpectedly. Didn’t save punisher? Tough, he’s a surprise required character with no way of predicting it. Character x is rewarded here, but you need one to get another. Fyi, the character that sucked the worst hands down got a buff, is now impossible to build, but is now the best character there is. (I don’t think I’ll ever not be bitter about selling all those XF covers, as he’d be 1-2 covers short of complete right now)

There are a lot of characters, it’s true. But if someone makes the goal to save every new essential toon as they come through pve events, they will eventually catch up on saving them all. Either method seems like it would work, but for my experience I think it would have been a lot less vibrant if I’d done things as the OP suggested.

20

I’ve bought 2 black XF covers - have to say it was worth it. The only covers I really need now are 3 blue hood covers, but that’s only frustrating during a PVP featuring hood like the one running now. Otherwise I just avoid teams with him in it.

Getting a good XF i feel is really important right now considering the game - even more important than a good 4hor.