Please check my math. If we buy out every possible token from these vaults⁺ and offers, we have 2 Master tokens, 10 Advanced tokens, and 12 Beginner tokens, for a total of 24 tokens. 38/42 of the possible draws in the Support Store are not Vanessa fisk, so we expect (38/42)^24 = ~9% of players who throw every resource they have (including cash) at the Vanessa Fisk store will still not get Vanessa Fisk, even at rank one. Even if she is included in future Support stores, the current offer is the best chance anyone has of earning this particular support, since the odds of not drawing her in future stores will become 42/43.
Additionally, the only way to get a rank-five support is apparently to spend a Master token. I think some people may care a bit too much about the rank-five powers of support tokens; with a handful of notable exceptions they’re rarely the game-changing piece of the support, and the low distribution means it’s unlikely the particular person you’re competing against for placement is using the rank-five version of a support you want anyway. That being said, this is an astonishingly low distribution rate. A maximum of two Master tokens are available when these offers come around, and then each one has a 1/27 chance of producing a rank-five support? So someone who goes all-in on these things (why.) has a 92.73% chance of not getting a rank-five support for their efforts. Neat.
I assume y’all have some internal stats showing that there’s still some interest in these doohickeys, or else you have some kind of plan to generate said interest in the future, and I’m hoping for the latter. Otherwise, it’s just taking advantage of people’s dopaminergic reward systems, and kind of wasting the time and talents of good artists, designers, and QA in order to do so, and to me that is not a good look.
⁺Correction: Infinitely many tokens (Master or otherwise) are possible since the vault can be reset; the amount of HP necessary to raise the probability of unlocking Vanessa Fisk at a certain rank to 99% is left as an exercise for the reader.
@Tensuun The vault can be reset. Now I don’t think it is a good value to chase supports that way (and saying that as someone who likes supports more than he dislikes them), but it is possible to get more than 2 Master tokens per Support Release.
Oh, I actually did miss that fact. Thanks for pointing it out!
It still looks like a horrible money-pit since 40-pack + reset + 40-pack is so expensive and is only 56% likely to actually earn you two Master tokens, but I appreciate the correction all the same. I’d been operating under the assumption that the support is literally out of reach for nearly a tenth of players no matter what they do.
So the quality of supports is kind of going down, along with the continually dwindling chances to get them? Yay?
Tensuun - welcome to the world of supports and their unlikely chances of getting them. Meanwhile, in other threads and eventually this one, someone will come in and defend their existence.
This honestly gets more triggering with the release of every new support.
I count a total of 46 supports so far
Of these 46, only 18 of them can be obtained with the beginner support tokens that are awarded in event vaults
Only Beginner level tokens are awarded in these vaults, where a Rank 3 support is the highest you can get if you’re lucky
Therefore, the only way to obtain a Rank 4+ ANYTHING, is if you buy a HFH deal, or get lucky in these special vaults/buy them out and get Advanced/Master Tokens
It’s still possible to pull a Rank 2 or 3 support with an Advanced Token
Even after the luck/money required to get an Advanced/Master token in the first place, the store contains the same 18 supports that are available in the normal store. I count a total of 40 supports in this Vanessa store, so if you’ve gotten most of the of the original 18 at some point, odds are still pretty high you’re pulling a dupe
After all this time of Supports being out now, why is this still the status quo? Why are beginner support tokens placed in vaults like they’re on the same level as LTs/4-star covers, but Advanced/Master tokens are still stuck behind the exclusivity of a paywall? Why has nothing been added to the normal supports store since the Children of Thanos supports were released? Why throw all this extra red iso at us, but change nothing about the availability of actual supports themselves?
I have almost 400K red iso just chilling because I’ve given all that I care to, to the supports I got lucky enough to get to Rank 3, and the one I was fortunately enough to get to Rank 4. I have yet to obtain any of these newer supports since they changed the format to 3 ranks, with the exception of Wasp Gauntlets, because they of course gave that to us for free. Despite managing to pull a beginner support token from the vaults somewhat regularly, my stable of supports stalled out long ago, with the only one I don’t have of the 18 in the store being Ebony Maw.
The 18 “standard” Supports are sufficiently obtainable right now, and a handful of them are even worth using. The earlier specialized support stores were…not great, but gave us a reasonable chance of acquiring useful supports. I lucked into a Royal Talon Fighter at rank 3 at some point, so that’s been nice for me… but after more than 6 months, the chances that someone who doesn’t already have one will be able to get one are lower than they’ve ever been since Black Panther’s release, and the odds were already not that great to begin with.
I’m happy to defend the existence of supports when I feel the criticism is unreasonable. For example, I think Vanessa is…yeah, not amazing, but a pretty good support since lots of “Villain” characters have spammy features that can take advantage of both of her triggers; Kingpin can be especially oppressive with her, but Prowler, Sandman, Vulture, Ragnarok, and Green Goblin also come to mind as candidates.
Recent supports have generally been reasonably well-designed; while they’re often best used with whatever character is canonically dating, equipping, or marrying the support, they can help a variety of characters. I complained as loudly as I could about supports like Ancestral Plane (can only be equipped to a Black Panther, and then useless unless your Black Panther is dealing significant match damage with black and red, which means it’s impossible to use the support with anyone but five-star Panther), but they don’t seem to be making those anymore, and I am glad.
The remaining problem is primarily the distribution model, which gets worse over time instead of better. Players on the forum, Discord, and Reddit have already made many suggestions. Several of them are difficult to justify in terms of monetization, but it’d be nice to see some kind of sign that the problems have been acknowledged and some kind of solution is in the works.
The devs are already working on how to improve Support distribution.
The options are there for you to get those newer supports. If you limit yourself to use HP for only roster slots/packs/non-support HfH deals/non-support vaults and CP for pulling only LT or Classics, then it’s a choice you have to live with.
@Moon_Roach Based on in game description, 4* King pin should be able to benefit from that Kingpin perk. If it applies to only 5* Kingpin, it will state Kingpin (Spider-Verse) specifically. You can look at Carol Corps and Dora Milaje supports for references.
The first two perks is meh.
The third perk gives the highest damage increase in power without any other criteria such as going invisible, besides limiting it to Villians. The next one is Taskmaster’s Sword (1792).
Kingpin’s perk while unique, is meh.
Overall, this support is a meh except for the third perk.
Took a daily deal on a single token, got an Advanced Token, landed a 4* Lockheed. Now I have 3 4* Supports - Corvus Glaive, Sharon Carter, and Lockheed. Second attempt at a daily deal in there was good for 1k iso, so I may not keep after it.
