Best Of

Never Had HT even as 4* still now, yet became valiant.So I don't knows what I'm missing, But i do have Iceman @ 7* from valentine's day crystal. So I'm havin same Dilemma 🥲

wish they would’ve added dark phoenix 🥲

I used mine on the Green Goblin relic, but cards on the table, that was entirely for Doctor Octopus, who is not exactly a priority target to build for for most people.

Most Battlecasts are pretty good on a suitable champ, which yours are, just rank the one attached to the champ you care about most.

I’m gonna use mine on black widow since I love bwdo and she will be one of my first r5s

What if we took it from 150 to 120?

To be honest, I kinda wish someone would actually list them. For the most part, the reasons I've been hearing have tended to be vague (it sucks), indeterminate (everyone says it sucks so it sucks), highly subjective (its too complicated), or like this complaint qualitatively dubious.

7* Ascension is not the same thing as 6* Ascension. 6* Ascension is a kind of special rank up intended to increase the power of 6* champs to make them competitive with 7* champs up to a certain point. 7* Ascension is not intended to do any of that. 7* Ascension is intended to replace 8* rarity (at least temporarily) by taking all the things that a new rarity adds to the game economy and retrofitting them onto 7* scaffolding. It is intended to reset the champion chase as new rarities do without immediately replacing 7* rosters that have had a lot of awakening and sig level investment put into them.

When people say its more complicated than it needs to be compared to rank ups, and it offers insufificent additional power compared to rank ups, they are asking Ascension to do things it is not intended to do, and in fact the devs explicitly do not want it to do. It is not intended to offer a dramatic increase in power: if that was the intent they would not have set the numbers so low. It is actually the reverse: it is intended to offer only a moderate amount of power increase, because the explicit problem with new rarities in the past was dealing with the fact that new rarities must roll out slowly in general (that's a foundational element of the monetization systems of the game) but then there's the problem of bridging the otherwise enormous power gap between the old and new rarities. 5* and 6* champs tried to deal with that with weird rank overlaps that actually served to radically reduce the lifetime of new rarities and force earlier resets, and Ascension was the stop gap mechanic to try to better smooth that out. 7* Ascension is the extension of that, reversing Ascension from being the bridge from 7s to 8s, to being a replacement for 8s, or at least a wedge between 7s and 8s.

While I don't think Ascension is perfect, most of the things people seem to be complaining about are things I think not only aren't bad, they are things that absolutely have to be there for it to function properly. In many cases most of the alternatives I can think of would be much worse. And as I am actually perfectly willing to continue to state, it was the players who asked for a "more creative alternative" to releasing new rarities, and it was me saying for years, going all the way back to the 5* launch, be careful what you wish for, because if you don't understand why new rarities exist, you'll probably be less than thrilled about any alternative to them.

I have yet to hear anyone suggest a significant modification to Ascension that a) doesn't make things worse and b) doesn't break a feature that is mandatory, and thus would never happen. Small tweaks, sure, Major structural ones? I'm all ears.

Ascension is being treated like an overly complex rank up, but it is not. It is a new rarity release in a different shape. New rarities are all about resetting the chase, and players have never had the ability to acquire new rarity champs particularly fast (in general), or target them particularly well, or build up new roster especially quickly. It is, for most players, a much slower paced thing unless you choose to accelerate that pace with spending, as new rarities are one of the more important monetization paths the game has traditionally had.

Ascension is basically rarity 7.5 and 8.0 (L1 and L2). Instead of completely resetting rosters again, which players have traditionally complained about, it builds upon existing 7* rosters. But it still has to reset the chase and make things difficult to acquire initially. Traditionally new rarities had a linear conveyer path to acquisition. You could get the champ in things like featured crystals paywall crystals, then in things like featured shard crystals or the Titan crystal, then eventually in the basic pool. The basic pool is pretty big at this point, so when a champ exits the paywalls and the featured early (or earlier) release crystals it becomes very difficult to target. The devs seem to be experimenting with a different idea with Ascension: instead of there being an early Ascension pool and then a giant Ascension basic pool, chanmpion Ascension is being spread out among different pools and sources. The Empowered Crystals are a source. The Super Duper box is a source. The idea seems to be to, in effect, create a bunch of smaller pools that players can work through separately. Each one might look slow, but players can be earning progress in multiple pools simultaneously. The Grace crystal is not the only source of Ascension.

It is still early days, but conceptually speaking I like it. To oversimplify a bit, imagine if instead of one Titan crystal we had like a dozen of them, each one with its own set of shards, and each one having a fixed pool of champs in it. A champ would never get "lost" in the basic pool once it left the Titan pool, because it would never leave the Titan pool. No matter when you start playing the game, no matter if you missed a champ or not, you'd always have a way to target those champs in a crystal that has only a limited number of champs, and thus a much higher probability of getting what you want.

Ascension isn't exactly like that: rather than having a dozen different crystals, there's multiple sources with different mechanics. But it still gives the devs more ways to give us better chances at specific things we want, without making it too easy to just automatically get what we want and have the chase be instantly over, forcing them to reset the chase again and force players to start over sooner than later. Right at this moment I have nine Ascended 7* champions. The Empowered crystal is not a bottleneck to Ascension. It is just one source of it. Considering Ascension has only been out for a month, that doesn't seem all that bad to me.

Again, if Ascension was just another rank up, that would be terribly slow. But it is not, and it is not intended to be. Rarities were not just an extra way to give champs more attack and health. They were a way to reset the champion chase. Rank ups don't do that, new rarities do, and Ascension is a way to add what new rarities did without completely forcing players to start from scratch.

For years, players have been making what I considered to be a ridiculous complaint. They would say "oh, another rarity: how unoriginal. We had four stars and then five stars and then six stars. Why force us to start over? Why can't they think of anything more interesting?." And I would always say: be careful what you wish for. If you think all the problems with new rarities was an accident Kabam was too stupid to avoid, you don't understand what new rarities are intended to do. Most of the properties Ascension has that players don't like were put there deliberately not accidentally, because they have to be there. Ascension softens the blow of new rarities. It cannot eliminate all of them completely, because that would defeat the purpose of it existing at all.

One Ascension every 15 Empowered crystals would be ridiculously fast. If you think that is a normal rate of acquiring Ascension tokens, I don't think you understand what Ascension is supposed to be doing. That would be like saying you wish they had just released 8* rarity instead of Ascension, except 7* dups should award 2000 8* shards instead of 275.

Well, I guess you’re doing better than the other guy.

Would love to connect on LinkedIn for Merc recommendations, I mean recommendations.