My fastest combo is 5* Thor, JJ and a under-leveled Valkyrie (mine is at level 120). Under-leveled gives you 4 Green AP every match since 5* match damage is so high and you then can fire off Thor’s green every couple of turns. You can also get some bonus green AP from JJ match tiles too. This all assumes that Thor’s green is your strongest AP color. Of course if Thor is at half health or less, he collects green (and red) AP even faster. JJ tanks nicely for black/blue/red/purple matches with this combo. I don’t use Valkyrie though in the 5* required node, under-leveled Valkyrie is too squishy. I use 5* Thor and Valkyrie for 2*, 3* and 4* required nodes.
My go to is Kitty Grocket and Medusa. You essentially get an extra turn every round with medusa’s entanglement countdown, plus extra attack tiles anytime you match it. You don’t need to use health packs like you would with 5* Thanos.
I don’t have Kitty so I can say about her. For PvE I use 50%Thor, Okoye and America. It clears all the nodes pretty fast. For easy ones it’s Thanos and Thor (to get Thor to 50%).
I plan to give Okoye-3Thanos a shot as well but not sure if it will be with Medusa (health pack drain). But maybe with 50%Daredevil or a rotation of 5* for high match damage.
When I had them at max-champ, I’d run Okoye/Strang3/3* Thanos (i sold them for the HP at last anniversary chasing howard and Devil d, so I’m back to baby champs) on nodes that had a goon of some kind. I’d swap out Strang3 for Medusa any time that wasn’t the case for more reliable damage. Now I like to run Medusa/Okoye/Chavez with +2 AP stacks on all three slots. It costs me iso to keep that up, but Chavez, when working, is ridiculous at lvl 300+
Still run Grocket/Medusa/Gamora for PVE. (I play Level 8) With only 2 matches I clear the easy node. It takes me longer to click “ok/next/etc” then it does to do the 4 clears of an easy node.
Then I can clear the next 3 nodes with about 10 matches, with the first 2 enemies down within ~5 matches. I can usually do 4 clears on all the non-required nodes without touching a Health Pack.
I personally go with 1/2 health Thor, championed essential 5* and America. Might not be the fastest abut saves massively on health packs. I have found it faster than gritty kitty since I don’t have to sit through the buff animations and the CD cover up.
for trivial nodes 3* Thanos 5* essential and cannon fodder to one shot
Turn animations off (in settings, scroll all the way down) Then it is all instant, no waiting. The only downside is at times it is hard to tell when the enemy fires something.
I do this ALL the time. For me, it’s more than worth the iso to save time; it’s spending an in-game resource to improve QofL — and I just enjoy the game much more that way.