Grand Experiment 2: Treading Water in the SCL 10 Post-Shardpocalypse

I've been trying to think what the most amusing character to ascend to 5* would be.

Bag Man is an obvious candidate but others will already be planning that.

Talos is good (ish) now so no one is getting a giggle out of him appearing in their list of opponents.

Squirrel Girl? Vision?

@KGB said:

@entrailbucket said:
That's absolutely wild.

Everyone else: this is what happens when you're in Classics full-time. Go back like 10 or 20 pages on here and look at the state of roadwarrior's roster when he made the move to Classics, and where it's at now.

Wow, it was 3 1/2 years ago that he started this thread. Time is flying by as I would have sworn it wasn't more than 2 years old.

It's the 3 1/2 years part than Classics that explains the difference in roster. I say that because even if he earned 30 cp a day that's only 10950 a year. The difference between spending that in latest vs classics is only 109 covers per year. That's not even 1 extra level on every 4* a year. In 3 years that's maybe 3 extra levels. That would be an imperceptible difference in roster level.

Most of the gain has come from LTs + earning shards/covers in PvP/PvE + 3* farming etc. Yes, Classics helps a bit but an extra 100 covers a year didn't account for this roster change.

KGB
P.S. Note - I am speculating on his CP / day earnings since he never really listed his daily / weekly / monthly earnings anywhere that I saw. 30 CP a day seems reasonable.

But it's not just the extra 4* covers themselves. It's also the champ rewards those covers generate, especially in the level 340+ range where the champ rewards get really really good. So going classics equals more covers, which equals more champ rewards which generates more classics.

KGB - don't forget about bonus shards. Those end up being pretty significant over that many pulls.

For whatever reason the math has just never captured what's actually going on when we do this.

I cannot count the number of times I've had a version of this discussion/argument, and the only answer I ever had was "it works for me in practice, I don't know why." Mostly that ended up with them giving reasons why it worked for me but could never work for anyone else (tenure, competitiveness, spend, etc).

Now it works for roadwarrior too, he doesn't fit the same tenure/competitiveness/spend levels as me, and he potentially got to a better place faster than I did. I always suspected it was the additional 4* this method generated, but like me, he appears to have stopped tracking, so we'll probably never know!

@KGB said:
How much do bonus shards really matter here? I think you get 1% chance of 500 5* shards per pull so 140+ extra pulls is 1.4 extra covers (and roughly 1.4 more 4* covers too). Are you really going to notice 4-5 extra covers per 10000 CP when we are talking about earning thousands of covers a year (across classics, LTs, shards, earned covers from events, vaults etc). They are a rounding error.

Entrailbucket, I'm definitely not saying this doesn't work. In fact I'd say what you and Roadwarrior are doing works very well indeed. Once you can ride the 'latest train' (covering new 5s just from LTs, feeders, shards, boss events etc before they leave latest), then you should definitely switch to using this system (spending CP in classics). The only reason not to do so is if you want to attempt to 550 a meta trio via a special store in which case you need to save massive amounts of CP. But if you want a well rounded roster where all your top characters are close in level so you have a wide variety of teams to use, this is the way to go because even if you only get +3 extra levels a year on your characters it's worth it. The only point I was trying to make is that classics alone doesn't explain his roster improvement, it's simply a product of hard work (a lot of playing and earning rewards/farming etc).

KGB

I think +9 levels on average across all 4* s is pretty significant, given the size of the 4* tier. It doesn't need to explain the entirety of roadwarrior's roster to be a significant factor.

As for shards, I think that's a bit harder to calculate for a couple of reasons (1) because they shards system has changed during the past 3 years, and (2) because classics and LTs offer different rates of bonus shards. Has anyone done the math on bonus covers with the new(ish) pity system?

@entrailbucket said:
Didn't they just make a big change to the bonus rate from Classics? Or was that awhile ago? There was something but I can't remember now.

9 levels across all 4* sounds pretty lame, but you're right -- that's a ton of covers.

And they aren't evenly distributed. So it will be +3-5 for some characters, but +20 for others. And of course the number of 4* s has only gone up over 3 years, so the older 4* s will get more benefit compared to the newer ones. And looking at the batch of 4* s that roadwarrior was able to ascend the list is heavy on (i) old characters (is Shuri the newest?) and (ii) I think a lot of the first group of latest 12s from back in the day when that was a thing. Those characters got a decent level boost relative to their contemporaries and have always been a bit inflated on my own roster.