What is the true value of vaulted characters?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I ask myself this question since I struggle to find a good answer. Sure, there are a few vaulted characters that everyone would like champed on their roster -Rhulk, Iceman, Peggy and maybe a handful of others. Other than that small number, what is the true value to having vaulted characters on your roster under this new environment? Here are my observations, but I would like to get the forum community take as well:

Pros:
1.) Boosted heroes - the biggest advantage that I can still put my thumb on is boosts for PvE/PvP. It can help having a boosted 4* (or 3*) and the more you have covered on the roster, the more boosted 4* you will get per event

2.) Team combos - You still get some advantage by being able to create more team combinations

3.) Variety - a small bonus, certainly little for actual game play, but it certainly is beneficial for some players to not use the same characters over and over

Cons:
1.) Power creep - so as new characters come out, they are, generally, more and more powerful/useful than the older vaulted characters - this is an issue since it basically reduces the value of 1&2 above significantly - while it may be good to have more boosted choices, does it matter if you are always going to pick the newest boosted characters who are the best anyways? I think this may be coming more and more the case.

2.) Champ rewards - vaulting seems to really have reduced the value of this feature since it is now very difficult to effectively champ and gain additional covers for 50% or more of the vaulted characters. This feature has certainly made vaulted characters less valuable than they were before.

3.) Frustration - more so for veteran players with vaulted characters but I imagine for newer players as well. If you are a veteran with a roster full of these characters who are not quite champed or barely champed, the frustration of knowing you will have a difficult time champing them or getting any decent champ rewards for them. If you are a new player, the frustration of knowing you will probably never get a champed Iceman or Rhulk etc.

4.) Required characters - whereas before in PvE, having a larger diversified roster gave you the advantage that you would have more of the required characters and perhaps have them covered better. Now it appears that only current token characters will be required characters for the most part in this new environment.

2

Since the boost from 270 to 370 means a 100% increase in HP and damage, boosted 4* will always be relevant, whether vaulted or not.

However, when unboosted they’ll be quickly relegated to the bottom of the pack since you can expect them to stay in the low 270s for the rest of their existence (it’s been 4 months since vaulting and 2 months since “we’re looking at it”) while newer characters are probably going to end up around 290 for a non-casual player

This combined with the general power-creep means that apart from the strongest few vaulted 4* and some characters filling a very specific niche (think Carnage + Medusa), there’s very little value in having champed vaulted characters when they’re not boosted.

3

The fact that they’re scarce and not everyone will have them makes em possibly attractive when boosted for PvP…

You can pretty much count on all the teams in 4* land having a baseline of championed token 12 heroes, having the option to combine those with the occasional boosted iceman, rulk , imhb, etc… can set your team slightly ahead, which is all you need to hit 900 more comfortably.

4

Agreed @MissChinch…I’ve already seen this happen. Newer players with a strong list of newer characters suffer when the oldies pop up…not having a strong boosted 3* vaulted character like Blade, when mine is 100 levels ahead, makes a difference. Especially, when I’ve got all their newer characters too. It’s a slight advantage but an important one.

5

It makes me cry when I have to play teams with boosted Iceman when champing him seems ages away despite him being 10 covered and on my ‘soon’ list before vaulting. I’m generally getting through and championing my vaulted characters more efficiently than I expected, this is mostly due to:

  1. Most of my top teir 4*s were at least 10 covered.

  2. I’m anal about tracking and planning.
    However iceman has been one I’ve had so little luck with. He was 0/5/5 when vaulting came to be. I bought 1 green when he was featured in the early H4H (before they dialed it down to -11). Now he’s still at 1/5/5 and the only covers I know of on the horizon for him are:

  3. Mystique L265 (only 65 vaulted Mystiques away and have to pass on a purple Iceman at 223).

  4. Whenever they decide to feature him again.
    That’s pretty much it, Iceman green is never featured in SHIELD Dailies and nothing else rewards him. I can (and likely will) make him a BH when I pull 200+ Latest in December for entry into 5* territory, but it seems too risky to do it unless I’m pulling mass because 66% chance it would be unusable if I got it.

It’s pretty demoralizing.

6

As an big X-men fan I find it especially depressing that I don’t even have iceman rostered and probably never will because of the BS. Wish the devs could realize how customers don’t like be treated so poorly. Guess still enough spend money for them to not give a crap about us.

7

It’s also worth noting that shifting meta and new events will sometimes bring old characters back to usefulness. Medusa pulled Carnage and Mr Fantastic out of obscurity and into pvp simulator. Sinister Six bosses had a lot of people dusting off Cho and Quake.

8

Honestly, I’m not sure how it will play out. I am in a position where I have everyone rostered except for a couple of 5*, so I have a slow but reliable method of getting them covered and champed via Bonus Heroes strategies if I really want to.

And I admit that even with only opening classic tokens, I am getting 4*s closer to useable condition (and even some champed) much sooner than I otherwise would be.

But I also feel like that because vaulted characters are used for weekly buffs and sometimes PVE essential nodes, and definitely for DDQ essential nodes, not having those characters is a serious disadvantage and the road to rostering them is so slow that it creates a sort of permanent elite among people who were able to roster all or most characters before vaulting was instituted. There are days I only beat the burrito behemoth because my 2* and 3* are champed and able to support a really weak 4* and they take a lot of damage on those days.

9

I am the epitome of a 4* transitioner. I have 26 of 52 4s champed. I max progression in PvE and dabble in PvP. Since vaulting started I have championed 3 vaulted 4s (Iceman, Starlord and Nova). But I have four more at 13 covers with Punisher getting cover 13 from a resupply soon.

So I am getting covers still faster than I get the Iso-8 to champ characters. I want to champ all the 4s. I’m trying to focus on the latest 12 because that’s where the vast majority of covers come from but if I get cover 14 for a vaulted 4 they take priority.

The reality of the situation is that as I grow my roster and days played in get more 4* covers than ever. I hoard latest and CPs to slow down my 4* draw rate because it’s always Iso that is holding my roster back.

10

I don’t have quite as many as you championed, but I’m at the point where I don’t really pull much because the 4* covers that are coming in are the 14th for retired heroes in some cases. They’re very slowly outpacing my ISO (but I had a good coverage base as most of the 4*s were in or approaching double digits when vaulting began, though none championed)

My short term issue is finding a good ratio of retired heroes to token 12 to champion… I was trying to do it in a 1:1 ratio, but due to the covers I’ve been getting I’ve needed to champion lots of retired heroes. My fear is that if this keeps up I’ll be behind enough on the token 12 that I’ll hit unfavorable races and not be able to use all the covers I actually pull…

My longer term goal is figuring out how to break this cycle of championing 4s and retiring them at or below level 300. I need to figure out a way to hoard until I get enough pulls to make a couple really formidable 4s, while not slowing down enough to miss a token retiring with less than 13 covers…

11

I think this estimate may be a bit on the low end. I finished covering and champed Carol and Bl4de basically right as the vaulting system got implemented. Both are now within a couple covers of 300. I’m not one who typically plays to a placement 4* in any non-release events, so this is almost entirely from token pulls in the span of vaulting. (With the 3 Carol covers from Sinister 6 in there as well.)

Hobofist will probably be the first real test case, since he released within the vaulting system, so he’ll have a whole 7-8ish months to accumulate champ levels. Mine is at 280 now, with X amount of months to go. (Under the old system, my Hobofist would most likely be closer to 9-10 covers and around level 200, given typical draw rates.) Once we get toward the end of the year I guess we’ll start to see how the new system compares for champ rewards.

12

I tend to agree, I’ve been stingy with pulling my CP/LTs, trying to hoard to break a few 4s out into the much more interesting 330+ areas (that’s a LOT of hoarding) and I see my 4s exiting likely north of 290 south of 310…

Very interested in finding a good path to 350+ 4s, because I’m thinking level 300 4s is going to be the norm for all heroes that have percolated for the full time on the token 12 list.

13

I think that there are definitely levels of non casual play. Right now my highest 4*s are Gwenpool and C4rol both at 280 with a C4rol progression cover to soon make her tops. I guess we’ll eventually see how high some of the newer latest get when they eventually become vaulted.

14

I used non-casual as in “someone who plays enough to actually be able to champ a 4* every 2-3 weeks”
I think you’d qualify as a step above “non-casual”

Anyway, the more someone plays, the bigger the gap between pre-vaulting and post-vaulting characters.

15

I fought nothing but IceMan/Hulkbuster last PVP, I would have a had a very difficult time scoring higher if I didn’t have them myself. As a collector that wants everyone champed, pros #2 & #3 mean absolutely everything to me. Being able to use a variety of teams in whatever ways and combos I want is what creates a nice chunk of my enjoyment this game. With 3 slots for your team in any match, every character having 3 abilities, and there being hundreds of characters, I bet I haven’t even scratched the surface of discovering all the amazing teams out there.

While I definitely understand power creep, and know that the token 12 are some damn nice characters, it is highly annoying to see nothing but C4rol, Medusa, and Bl4de with just about every skip. Fighting these characters often times require you to mirror them, which takes away from my enjoyment needing to constantly heal and use the same characters. The game has given us hundreds of characters to work with, I can’t stand that being really successful at the game generally means just working with a select few. Makes me miss Heroics with the limited rosters. I hated them before when my roster wasn’t up to snuff, but now I’d really enjoy the challenge of seeing what new characters work well together.

16

Boosted vaulted 4’s are great, and almost always better than a non-boosted latest. In the boss event I found myself using IMHB and Cho in almost every fight, even though I have 11/12 latest champed. Basically it’s just about having more options, and ensuring you can take any node no matter what characters are essential.

17

The value appears to be entirely based on where your personal “end game” falls. When vaulting started, I only had two 4* champed, but a half dozen or so characters in the 10-12 cover range and an equal number in the 7-9 cover range. I’ve used HfH to champ a couple vaulted characters, but otherwise, my other vaulted 4*'s are just hovering until the 3* champ rewards roll in (my 3*'s are all in the 190-215 range), they are featured in an event or I decide to bite the bullet and spend the CP (or more rarely HP in HfH) to champ them.

I’m far more casual than most people on the forum, so my end game is likely to get a series of 4* champs in the 270-280 range and eventually get my 3*'s to 266. This will probably keep me locked out of the highest tiers of play, but that’s the cost of being causal, so I’m okay with that.

18

I miss heroics too because I am really bored with playing the same PvE’s over and over. Plus they were always easier to place in as well due to their nature of limited rosters.

19

For me, it’s made many maxed covered 4s a non-priority : falcap, eddie, xavier, spiderwoman, thoress, even my next finished moon knight are really meaningless.

Even if boosted, current champed 4s take me much further in both pve and pvp than those 4s if boosted.

Example: carnage, medusa, and x are unstoppable even when unboosted and I need not really on vaulted boosted but not champed characters.

Edit: This isn’t to say that champing a vault 4 isn’t worth it. Top tier 4s are always valuable champed such as peggy, nova, and punisher even at just 271. Likewise certain 4s like carnage and reed have become essential if you have a champed medusa. Nevertheless, a lot of the vaulted supporting tier 4s some mentioned above but including fury, Elektra, sue storm just aren’t worth the focus anymore.

For instance, when my 3 star falcon hit 223, rather champing 4 falcon, I just respected him to have 5 red since mine only had 4 red despite being being maxed covered.

20

Is this accurate? I’m not saying it is or isn’t, I’m just curious because I hadn’t noticed if this is how it works now.