A question for the 4-star transitioners

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

How are you handling your transition? How far along are you?

No offense whales, but I’m looking for the common players to respond here.

I’m treating the 4-star (and now 5-star) transition similar to how I made it through the 3-star phase.

There were a lot of 2-stars on my roster who got the boot as I added 3-stars to my team. I’d rather use the HP on shields to speed up my card collecting through PvP. With the addition of DDQ, the only way I’ll be opening roster spots is if I get the 1K HP taco. I have 52 slots and 700HP for a slot is not a price I’m willing to pay.

I tried keeping anyone who was in the Top 50 on the forum poll, but that list is clearly skewed toward PvP if you ask me. There are more than a couple 3-stars whom I have fully carded that I could easily let go. Some of them will be cut from the roster as soon as I need that space, best believe it. What sucks is that the Iso from selling the 3-star only gets you a few levels for a 4-star. Tough decisions to be made.

So far I’ve got 241 X-Force 5/5/3 - 225 Fury 4/4/4 - 133 Invisible Woman 3/5/5 - 100 Lady Thor 2/4/2 - 90 Prof. X 1/0/2 - 86 IMHB 0/3/0 - 78 Ant-Man 2/1/1 - 78 Devil Dino 1/1/1 - 78 Jean Grey 1/1/1 -74 Carnage 2/0/1 - 74 Kingpin 1/1/0

  • 70 X-Pool 1/0/0 - 70 Elektra 0/1/0 - 70 Cap Falcon 0/1/0 - 70 Star-Lord 0/0/1 - 70 Thing 0/0/1

Mr. Fantastic is a shoo-in as I’ve been very fortunate with his current PVE (I sat the last 3 PVE out, and it’s nothing to rank high in my bracket. I’ll take it.)

Oh…and I can’t wait to run 1-star Spidey in Balance of Power. Can you imagine something like Murderous Aim and Spectacular Strategy in tandem? Has anyone stayed alive long enough to pull it off?

Imagine the fireworks.

2

I’m close to literally halfway through, more or less. Have a bunch fully covered, everything else in varying stages between 5-12 covers.

Given the vault and legendary tokens, plus the iso needs for 3-4-5s, it makes no sense to sell any 3. You can get by with a few essential 2s in ddq, but each missing 3 is an opportunity cost of 1 taco and nearly 3k iso from ddq including the “extra” 3* cover that will be sold.

Right now you need slots for 1×1*, 3-4×2*, 40×3*, 15×4*. Seems reasonable to me.

Tacos dispense legendary tokens, 4s, hp and iso. Why not grab every chance you have? By the time you are in 3-4 transition, the roster slot cost is relatively unimportant unless they decide to release another 4 new characters in a row like last anniversary.

(Already done bullseye/spidey a few times in ddq, the easy wave node. Was fun. icon_e_smile.gif
)

3

I am a bit behind the good Dr. in my 4* transition.

My general strategy has been to do exactly what I did with 3s. Roster everyone, even if it’s just a 1/0/0 waste of space. Wait until I had two or three quite good 4s ready to go (either fully covered, or with 5 covers in their key powers) before taking anyone above the previous level cap. Then, once I had a core team of 4*s established, add more and more to the mix as I got more covers for them.

The last step has taken a lot longer than it did for 3S, since there are no alliance rewards and no way to get more than one cover for any 4 after release. But like the early 3* transition, I have found that patiently building everyone was slow at the beginning, but meant that several characters were at or approaching usability all at once. Overall, I would say this strategy has been fairly successful.

Brief narrative of my transition state (TL;DR: a handful of 4*s at 11-13 covers, next wave at 2-7 covers and many weeks away):

I bought some covers for xforce back when he was awesome, but always kept him underleveled (he was good enough that it didn’t matter). I think I bought covers 7-11 for him and then finished building his green power with PVP prog rewards, so maybe that makes me a whale. They are the only covers I have ever bought, and although he was nerfed about 1.5 months later, I don’t regret it too much. He was a pleasure to run “back in the day.” And it polishes my “cranky old vet” credentials nicely.

My other 4s all remained at lvl 70 through June. I had a some good token luck with IMHB during his ultron release event: so I started out with 3 red covers (1 from the ultron event and two from perhaps the most important lucky token pulls in all my time playing the game). Red was a 1k reward in his first PVP, and also a season reward in June. So within 6 or 7 weeks of his release I had 5 red covers. I figured that was too good an opportunity to pass up, so I decided to start leveling my 4s and running imhb/if in PVP, even though I didn’t yet have 5 black covers for imhb.

I brought IMHB up first, to 188, and eventually to 202 where he is now. I also bumped up my xforce from 166 to ~200. I had a mostly usable elektra from lucky token pulls and 1k rewards. And my Nick Fury was functional (though not great at 4/1/4). those two went up to the 170s. With those 4 4*s, I figured that I had a decent mix of offense, defense, and support, as well as rainbow actives. I later added Kingpin and Prof. X (when I got 10 covers for KP and 5 blue covers for prof X).

My fury will be at 13 covers soon from daily resupplies. and my IW has 10 covers and I will probably be leveling her up fairly soon. After that the next wave of 4s are all at 7 covers or less so it will take a fair bit of luck/time to get anyone else up to snuff. Probably another month or two (since we are getting legendary tokens and higher 4 pull rates quite soon).

4

X-force and Fury are level 270 and properly covered.
Thor, Elektra and Professor X have 11 covers and are softcapped at 229.
Ant-man, Hulkbuster and Kingpin have 8 covers and are at level 172, so they will be usable soon I hope.
The rest are brought out when essential.

5

The caveat to my story is that I’m on day 556, so I’ve been around a very long time. By the time fury was slowly released into the wild, my xf and IW were basically totally complete (with no levels cause yeah they were awful). I was always in a top 100 alliance and usually placing top 5/10 and getting max covers from each event. That’s just to say I too had sentry within a reasonable amount of time and yes of course I used him to shield hop my way to many a 4* cover. The rotation was so much quicker with just 4 4* that you could cover a 4* in a short amount of time.

So, I currently have a 240 xf, 240 4hor, 230 fury all fully covered. IW and star lord are both fully covered level 70s. Elektra and kingpin each have 12 covers (although 5/3/4 for elektra is quite far from optimal), imhb has 11 but 2/5/4 so not the best there either. Both kingpin and HB i took to 200. Px is 5/2/0 and soft capped at 168, and quite good with gsbw/SW. Antman 3/3/3, xpool 4/1/2, falcap 2/3/1, carnage 5/1/3, JG 2/0/3, and thing 2/1/2.

I hit 1k basically without fail, and don’t always but will typically hop to 1300 for a cover/char I really want.