I finished #2 overall in my bracket (148k pts) and there’s certainly nothing film worthy about it. I can give you a breakdown of how much I played and what my techniques were if you’re interested.
To start with I played it pretty loosely, I didn’t have a perfect rotation and left a few gaps inbetween clears (I didn’t wake up at crazy times to make sure I cleared as soon as the refresh came up on the first 2-3 days.) I have a very developed roster at this point level 200 4thor and xf, about 15 or so 166s and an underleveled falcon and second hood I use for pve.
On the essential nodes I almost always used Groot(3/4/5) and Luke Cage(4/5/4) (he was an all star, complimented colors great and his protect tile meant I didn’t have to waste hp on gsbw(5/3/5). I subbed in Falcon (3/5/2) for Luke cage on Goon only essentials.
On the easy nodes I used patch/ldaken/blade for everything that would allow me, and subbed groot for ldaken on the nodes that wouldn’t. On the hard nodes I rotated between using patch/daken/loki early to using xf/4thor/loki later.
As for boosts and HP, I never purchased any HPs during the course of the event. I did get low a few times and it affected the amount of PVP I was able to do, but it never came down to me needing to buy a pack (I have a deep roster which helped a lot with this.)
I boosted a lot though (never +all ap) but predominately +blue/purple on the hard essentials and +g/b on the hard non essentials when I was using xf. I think the last day I spent about 3k ISO on boosts to avoid having to spend HP on health packs and speed up my clear times.
I picked shard 1 which is 9am/9pm for me and allowed me to do the final grinds before work and during primetime tv watching. any given clear only took about 20-40 minutes (the 40 minute clears were towards the end of the event during the weekend when the nodes really started to scale up. Early on I would only do an hour to an hour and a half worth of final grinds. Towards the end when I was in contention for the top slot I extended out my final clears to 3 hours (to bring all the nodes down to sub 50 points).
The last two days were really the worst of it, I was 500 points or so behind the bracket leader (Kung Phu Panda) and was hoping that he would be scaled out on the Bullseye III node which would let me catch back up. We both played the last two days nearly perfectly, and cleared everything on the dot, and did exhaustive final clears, not leaving any points on the board. He staved off my challenge and secured 1st place.
Only Saturday and Sunday were really exhausting, for most of the event I was able to maintain a healthy schedule but the end of the even required an unhealthy amount of time and I’m certainly glad it’s over.