Thanks for the replies, all!
Looking at it all more carefully, my concern is that the rewards you get aren’t really worth the investment over time. For a 2*, getting it fully champed gives you:
- 17,500 ISO
- 5 2* tokens
- 3 3* covers
- 250 HP
- 5 CP
If you instead just sell the 50 covers for 250 ISO each, you get: 12,500 ISO
So you come out 5,000 ISO ahead, plus 2,750 ISO more (worst case on the 2* tokens and 3* covers), plus 250 HP and 5 CP.
BUT you have to spend 75,000 ISO to get that. (Specifically: 69,530 to max a 2* in the first place, + 5k to champ.) That means you have a net loss of 66,780 ISO for a gain of 250 HP and 5 CP. Even worse, that gain is gotten back extremely slowly over time - and possibly never (if you just never get those covers).
Now if I sell the fully-champed character for 65k and start over, the total net loss is just 1,780 ISO (technically +3250 ISO since that’s the sell cost of the 13 covers you’d need to rebuild the character). And most of us would trade 5030 ISO (at this point, that’s about 1 day’s log in + DDQ) for 250 HP + 5 CP. But that is still a seriously long-term investment for such a mediocre payoff, especially given you’re tying up 75k ISO in the meantime that you could be using to advance other characters.
If the 3* covers are something you really need, or the 2* character is something that really helps, that can all be worth it. (Or if ISO isn’t the resource you are scarce on, and you don’t mind investing to get the long-term gain.) But otherwise that’s a tough choice, especially where I am in the game where ISO is the most valuable commodity.
The same is more or less true with 3s (the ISO you get is exactly the same as what you would have gotten for selling the covers + the cost of champ’ing), except the rewards are better. But the up-front cost of maxing a character is 120k. So you’re trading 120k ISO for 10 4s (well, 7 or 7.5 LTs and 3 non-random 4s) and one roster slot (1000 HP). After selling the fully champed 3 you end up only ~15k ISO in the hole. All that seems much more worth it - although people are saying it takes about a year to do this (or much, much longer for someone more casual, like me), so once again you are tying up 127.5k ISO for a super-long term payoff. (That’s nearly half a 4*.)
Anyway, thanks for all the advice. I think at this point I’d rather sink the ~150k ISO it would cost to champ those two characters into ~1 and 1/6 3*s instead. And honestly, I know I won’t be missing much by waiting until later if I do decide to do it down the road. Each max/sell cycle only gains you 250 HP and 5 CP and costs ~5k ISO. Or you can just skip it and use that ISO somewhere else.
How in the world are you getting Bagman covers? I’ve gotten 2 as random PVP rewards since I started playing (other than the 3 from the prologue).