Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
If I can deliver your dinner, in my underpants and half drunk while watching sports, I will sign up for doordash tomorrow and use the profits to buy more beer.
Just because we can do a thing, doesn’t mean we should do a thing. And I’m not just talking about DoorDash, I’m talking about placing this image into my brain.
A lot of people believe that gambling addiction means losing real world money in classical gambling games like a casino , spiders betting and so on but it’s not . Gambling is about unhealthy obsession that consumes your life and mobile games absolutely count . Games are meant to be enjoyed casually . If you bosses to this degree daily you have a problem and you need to seek help . Yes I know this will be an unpopular post and trigger a lot of people but it’s true
A lot of people believe that gambling addiction means losing real world money in classical gambling games like a casino , spiders betting and so on but it’s not . Gambling is about unhealthy obsession that consumes your life and mobile games absolutely count . Games are meant to be enjoyed casually . If you bosses to this degree daily you have a problem and you need to seek help . Yes I know this will be an unpopular post and trigger a lot of people but it’s true
1. Dr. Jessie, you appear to have conflated gambling with addiction.
2. “Games are meant to be enjoyed casually” is less of a statement of fact, and more of a well, actually that’s completely false. Whether any particular game is enjoyed casually or in a more involved manner is a personal choice for which you should not be pronouncing a medical judgment, or they might pull your license.
A lot of people believe that gambling addiction means losing real world money in classical gambling games like a casino , spiders betting and so on but it’s not . Gambling is about unhealthy obsession that consumes your life and mobile games absolutely count . Games are meant to be enjoyed casually . If you bosses to this degree daily you have a problem and you need to seek help . Yes I know this will be an unpopular post and trigger a lot of people but it’s true
1. Dr. Jessie, you appear to have conflated gambling with addiction.
2. “Games are meant to be enjoyed casually” is less of a statement of fact, and more of a well, actually that’s completely false. Whether any particular game is enjoyed casually or in a more involved manner is a personal choice for which you should not be pronouncing a medical judgment, or they might pull your license.
3. I’m not the one with a spider-boss problem.
1. Hence the phrase gambling addiction
2. It’s a fact . Just like the fact that corporation are trying to twist them into addictions by encouraging obsessive and unhealthy behavior all to squeeze out more profits
3. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean but anyway back to my actual point . Obsessively playing games is not healthy for anyone no matter how many people try to normalise it . I strongly encourage people who have this problem to seek help
Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
If I can deliver your dinner, in my underpants and half drunk while watching sports, I will sign up for doordash tomorrow and use the profits to buy more beer.
Just because we can do a thing, doesn’t mean we should do a thing. And I’m not just talking about DoorDash, I’m talking about placing this image into my brain.
Hey man, I did the best I could to make it PG13 by pretending to wear underpants.
Real SMS sent to me yesterday:
Her: "Hey, my mum is coming over when the kids get home from school"
Me: "Thats cool, but we are going to football training at 4:30"
Her: "I know that, I just wanted to make sure you're wearing pants"
And to try to lift my posts from very low brow to regular level brow (for me anyway)
I really only do 12m in the featured and still stay unit positive. Explored necropolis in Jan, explored 8.4 a couple of weeks after it dropped and explore TB/paragon EQ every month.
Unit requirements reduce as a roster gets bigger. I remember needing to grind 100 rounds for a couple of T4B, now that was a chore that made pants almost palatable*
1 hour 40.mins is a lot of time for me, I'm not going to be able to invest that.
There’s a joke where someone is riding in a car their friend is driving, and he notices his friend is speeding at over 90 miles per hour. He tells his friend “isn’t 90 miles per hour a bit fast?” And his friend says “not really, I don’t plan on driving for that long.”
No one says you have to grind the arena for two hours a day, or one hour a day, or even every day at all. The numbers tell you what you can get for how much time. It’s up to you to decide if, and if so how much time to spend. But at least it will be an informed decision, and not based on the complaints floating around about how it takes “non-stop” grinding to get any reasonable rewards from the arena.
I grind quite a bit myself and to me, spending time here means I am not spending money on real life stuff. Sure, I buy some stuff every now and then but this is more trying to pay for the enjoyment I had from this game. I noticed the arena gig is getting harder as I face more difficult defenders even after the 25 streak threshold. I think I broke my streak twice this year already which is not great. On the other hand, I get to practice with Kindred, Onslaught, Bullseye, Serpent and all the wonderful new champs in arena as well. As for average time per fight, I also notice this has gone up in recent months since we get more annoying defenders like red skull, IMIW and abs man which take more like a minute to clear. One final note, arena is only taking time and can be addictive but it is nowhere near the devastating gambling addiction where you can bet your house away in one click.
Hi guys, I'm that dude that actually enjoys arena... Nice to meetcha. Is it cold 🍺, hot 🍕, or fast car enjoyable? Nah, but it's a fun lil, stress-free, time waster. I play early morn before gym while I drink my coffee and watch YouTube and on my lunch break while I read or chat with my bud.
I'll do another ten mins here or there on a break sometimes, but it's already basically enough time to hit most of the milestones. I like watching the units pile up and have 26k units and 8.5m BC after spending 5,700 units on Omega event.
If I don't feel like playing, I skip it, but I'm not doing DoorDash as a second job on my lunch break from my first job 😂 If I had to find time to play in the evening or at some other point, I'd be much less likely to do it regularly.
I'm not poor, also not rich, and I have bought my share of units in the past, and could continue to do so, but don't see the point when my casual play gets me plenty. Where I could see myself spending again in the future is holiday sales where lots of goodies are included with the units, but I'll be paying for the goodies with units as a lil bonus.
Hi guys, I'm that dude that actually enjoys arena... Nice to meetcha. Is it cold 🍺, hot 🍕, or fast car enjoyable? Nah, but it's a fun lil, stress-free, time waster. I play early morn before gym while I drink my coffee and watch YouTube and on my lunch break while I read or chat with my bud.
This is probably the most sustainable way to grind arena for most people.
Interesting question: how many people are actually grinding out all the milestones in the arenas?
I went back and looked at every time I hit the top milestone, without going ignificantly farther than necessary, for the past few months and calculated the average solo rank for that arena, which is an indication of how many players did at least that much.
Feaatured: 6852 Basic: 6255 Trials: 1731
There is no way to tell how many players are doing all three, because it is possible some players are doing one while others are doing a different one, and also because there's always a little bit of overshoot more people hit the top milestone than place higher than me (it is possible to place lower than me and still hit them all if I finish, say, at 12,273,803 points in the featured). But we can say that thousands of players are doing this to at least some degree, and maybe a thousand people plus or minus are doing all of them.
It is not a *huge* number of players; 7000 players out of the entire player population is not a big number (for reference, about 20,000 players plus or minus make it to the Gladiator Circuit in Battlegrounds) but it is not a marginal number either. Moreover, we can also estimate the number of players who are participating to at least enough to make it to rank rewards (it takes a minimum number of points to show up on the leaderboards at all). There are large margins for error with such an estimation because of a number of variables, but it ends up being somewhere around 35k-40k players for each arena individually.
Arena grinders are probably on the order of 10% of the playerbase, with more dedicated grinders about 1% of the playerbase. For comparison, the percentage of players who spend cash on mobile games is in the realm of 3-5%, and MCOC is probably not atypical in that regard.
Grinding for units in MCOC is probably within the same general ballpark of spending for units (of course, there is likely some overlap between the two: it isn't mutually exclusive.
Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
That is so narrow-minded, considering there are kids that play the game, as well as countries that probably pay about 100 bucks a week for a full time job.
Would the speed of the “kamikaze style” reduce the amount of time needed to grind in arena for those units?
If I understand what you mean - i.e. take every fight as fast as possible, even if it means you might lose a few by not playing carefully - the answer is it depends. Mathematically, there is a point at which it is better to lose a fight quickly than win it slowly, but in practice this is difficult to predict with certainty, and there are other concerns. If you lose a fight, it becomes more important to win the other two or you’ll lose streak, which takes even longer to catch up for.
Although it is worth noting that losing streak is not as bad as some people might think it is. Consider the sum of the multiples you get while ramping up. The first match is at 1x, then it is at 1.25x, then 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, then finally 3x. The first five of those matches add up to 1+1.25+1.5+2+2.5 = 8.25. If you were getting the max 3x multiplier during that period your multiplier sum would be 3x5=15. That means if you lose streak and reset to 1x, you’ve lost 15-8.75 = 6.25 multiplier across your next five rounds. That is slightly more points than you’d earn in two rounds of max multiplier.
In other words, every time you lose streak, it costs you about three extra rounds (a little more than two for the multiplier reset, and a fraction of one for the match you just lost because you must have lost at least two fights to lose streak).
Now, its a little more complicated than that because you also have to reestablish streak, and there’s some champ availability issues to deal with that, but basically the difference between never losing streak and losing streak once in, say, the featured arena would be for someone like me the difference between taking 44 rounds and 47. You don’t want to do those extra three rounds, but it is also not the end of the world.
Would the speed of the “kamikaze style” reduce the amount of time needed to grind in arena for those units?
If I understand what you mean - i.e. take every fight as fast as possible, even if it means you might lose a few by not playing carefully - the answer is it depends. Mathematically, there is a point at which it is better to lose a fight quickly than win it slowly, but in practice this is difficult to predict with certainty, and there are other concerns. If you lose a fight, it becomes more important to win the other two or you’ll lose streak, which takes even longer to catch up for.
Although it is worth noting that losing streak is not as bad as some people might think it is. Consider the sum of the multiples you get while ramping up. The first match is at 1x, then it is at 1.25x, then 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, then finally 3x. The first five of those matches add up to 1+1.25+1.5+2+2.5 = 8.25. If you were getting the max 3x multiplier during that period your multiplier sum would be 3x5=15. That means if you lose streak and reset to 1x, you’ve lost 15-8.75 = 6.25 multiplier across your next five rounds. That is slightly more points than you’d earn in two rounds of max multiplier.
In other words, every time you lose streak, it costs you about three extra rounds (a little more than two for the multiplier reset, and a fraction of one for the match you just lost because you must have lost at least two fights to lose streak).
Now, its a little more complicated than that because you also have to reestablish streak, and there’s some champ availability issues to deal with that, but basically the difference between never losing streak and losing streak once in, say, the featured arena would be for someone like me the difference between taking 44 rounds and 47. You don’t want to do those extra three rounds, but it is also not the end of the world.
Hi. Then i can assume it can be “countered” if one would have sigil subscription to increase the fightings using the auto-fill slot and victory screen?
Would the speed of the “kamikaze style” reduce the amount of time needed to grind in arena for those units?
If I understand what you mean - i.e. take every fight as fast as possible, even if it means you might lose a few by not playing carefully - the answer is it depends. Mathematically, there is a point at which it is better to lose a fight quickly than win it slowly, but in practice this is difficult to predict with certainty, and there are other concerns. If you lose a fight, it becomes more important to win the other two or you’ll lose streak, which takes even longer to catch up for.
Although it is worth noting that losing streak is not as bad as some people might think it is. Consider the sum of the multiples you get while ramping up. The first match is at 1x, then it is at 1.25x, then 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, then finally 3x. The first five of those matches add up to 1+1.25+1.5+2+2.5 = 8.25. If you were getting the max 3x multiplier during that period your multiplier sum would be 3x5=15. That means if you lose streak and reset to 1x, you’ve lost 15-8.75 = 6.25 multiplier across your next five rounds. That is slightly more points than you’d earn in two rounds of max multiplier.
In other words, every time you lose streak, it costs you about three extra rounds (a little more than two for the multiplier reset, and a fraction of one for the match you just lost because you must have lost at least two fights to lose streak).
Now, its a little more complicated than that because you also have to reestablish streak, and there’s some champ availability issues to deal with that, but basically the difference between never losing streak and losing streak once in, say, the featured arena would be for someone like me the difference between taking 44 rounds and 47. You don’t want to do those extra three rounds, but it is also not the end of the world.
Hi. Then i can assume it can be “countered” if one would have sigil subscription to increase the fightings using the auto-fill slot and victory screen?
The arena express mode, which the Sigil provides, accelerates arena by some amount. Different people have observed different accelerations, and there’s the extra complicating factor that express mode always auto-selects the first match up, which is the lowest one. So the degree to which arena express accelerates arena performance can be counter balanced by a player not using arena express and instead always picking (and always winning) the last match up which generally has a higher PI for the opponent team.
If you can consistently beat the top match up and do it quickly, the points you get per minute could be comparable to the points you get using arena express. It depends on the player. For me, I prefer using arena express because the lower PI match ups it picks are easier, and thus allow me to grind arena without paying close attention most of the time, leaving me free to do other things simultaneously.
Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
Adding on to this too.
My blud has obviously never been in multi-hour long work meetings multiple times a week where 95% of the things being discussed do not apply to you. Perfect grind time
Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
Adding on to this too.
My blud has obviously never been in multi-hour long work meetings multiple times a week where 95% of the things being discussed do not apply to you. Perfect grind time
Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
Adding on to this too.
My blud has obviously never been in multi-hour long work meetings multiple times a week where 95% of the things being discussed do not apply to you. Perfect grind time
won't they see you fiddling with your phone?
Not really. It does vary, though and is dependent on if you need to go to a conference room for a meeting ( I wouldn't do it there and am not to be held liable for any result you get should you attempt this) or hop in from your desk because even if your camera is on, you really don't need to look at your phone screen to play arena.
I kind of just hold my phone and swipe and tab mindlessly, only sometimes using what little I see of it in my peripheral vision to navigate any next button if I'm not doing it by reflex so that I can still pay attention. Sometimes, you just don't need to really lock in on a meeting until something that applies to you is being brought up.
Grinding arena for units is always puzzling to me. I’m glad that it’s an option for those who are willing to make the grind but mathematically it just a waste of time.
If you’re grinding 2hrs everyday 6 times a week that = 624 hrs a year. If you had a side hustle idk maybe you doordash or something and make $15 per hr profit. That’s $9360 you made instead of doing arena. 85,280 units is roughly 12 Namor = $2880 with tax estimate. You still have $6480 still left over to do as you wish.
I will never understand people who grind arena religiously.
Adding on to this too.
My blud has obviously never been in multi-hour long work meetings multiple times a week where 95% of the things being discussed do not apply to you. Perfect grind time
That’s some of the best grind. Also, focus time = arena time.
Using attack, health and power boosts along with arena boosts really helps get the scores up. But even with the boosts I typically tap out around milestone 6 in the featured arenas because my champs aren't that high. It gets tedious grinding 1.5 mil points.
In the Summoner trial arena I found that when you get to the 3x multiplier using 3* champs with 3x arena boosts can score higher than 4* champs.
Using attack, health and power boosts along with arena boosts really helps get the scores up. But even with the boosts I typically tap out around milestone 6 in the featured arenas because my champs aren't that high. It gets tedious grinding 1.5 mil points.
In the Summoner trial arena I found that when you get to the 3x multiplier using 3* champs with 3x arena boosts can score higher than 4* champs.
Yes, that is an excellent point. Boosts, and arena scoring boosts, can be very helpful and are especially helpful for players with smaller rosters.
Also worth noting: both the basic and featured arenas have 3* and 4* versions of champs as rewards. If you have a small roster and don’t have them, it can be worth getting them from there to build up your lower roster for use in the Summoner Trials arena, when you get to the point where you’re doing that a lot.
Using attack, health and power boosts along with arena boosts really helps get the scores up. But even with the boosts I typically tap out around milestone 6 in the featured arenas because my champs aren't that high. It gets tedious grinding 1.5 mil points.
In the Summoner trial arena I found that when you get to the 3x multiplier using 3* champs with 3x arena boosts can score higher than 4* champs.
I get the counter argument of people saying "i've not got time for that" but they don't factor in that arena for some of us is literally why we play the game. TV on, feet up, ipad in hand after a long day its the ultimate unwind. No nodes, timers or stresses just chillding and having fun - as a bonus, units! I broke the bank and have 7 more 7* to show for it, more r3 champs and some defenders that make people quit in battlegrounds. I've just passed 2k units again.
Comments
2. “Games are meant to be enjoyed casually” is less of a statement of fact, and more of a well, actually that’s completely false. Whether any particular game is enjoyed casually or in a more involved manner is a personal choice for which you should not be pronouncing a medical judgment, or they might pull your license.
3. I’m not the one with a spider-boss problem.
2. It’s a fact . Just like the fact that corporation are trying to twist them into addictions by encouraging obsessive and unhealthy behavior all to squeeze out more profits
3. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean but anyway back to my actual point . Obsessively playing games is not healthy for anyone no matter how many people try to normalise it . I strongly encourage people who have this problem to seek help
Real SMS sent to me yesterday:
Her: "Hey, my mum is coming over when the kids get home from school"
Me: "Thats cool, but we are going to football training at 4:30"
Her: "I know that, I just wanted to make sure you're wearing pants"
Apparently, underpants are not actual pants...
I really only do 12m in the featured and still stay unit positive. Explored necropolis in Jan, explored 8.4 a couple of weeks after it dropped and explore TB/paragon EQ every month.
Unit requirements reduce as a roster gets bigger. I remember needing to grind 100 rounds for a couple of T4B, now that was a chore that made pants almost palatable*
*I tried to be good, I really did.
No one says you have to grind the arena for two hours a day, or one hour a day, or even every day at all. The numbers tell you what you can get for how much time. It’s up to you to decide if, and if so how much time to spend. But at least it will be an informed decision, and not based on the complaints floating around about how it takes “non-stop” grinding to get any reasonable rewards from the arena.
I noticed the arena gig is getting harder as I face more difficult defenders even after the 25 streak threshold. I think I broke my streak twice this year already which is not great. On the other hand, I get to practice with Kindred, Onslaught, Bullseye, Serpent and all the wonderful new champs in arena as well.
As for average time per fight, I also notice this has gone up in recent months since we get more annoying defenders like red skull, IMIW and abs man which take more like a minute to clear.
One final note, arena is only taking time and can be addictive but it is nowhere near the devastating gambling addiction where you can bet your house away in one click.
I'll do another ten mins here or there on a break sometimes, but it's already basically enough time to hit most of the milestones. I like watching the units pile up and have 26k units and 8.5m BC after spending 5,700 units on Omega event.
If I don't feel like playing, I skip it, but I'm not doing DoorDash as a second job on my lunch break from my first job 😂 If I had to find time to play in the evening or at some other point, I'd be much less likely to do it regularly.
I'm not poor, also not rich, and I have bought my share of units in the past, and could continue to do so, but don't see the point when my casual play gets me plenty. Where I could see myself spending again in the future is holiday sales where lots of goodies are included with the units, but I'll be paying for the goodies with units as a lil bonus.
Interesting question: how many people are actually grinding out all the milestones in the arenas?
I went back and looked at every time I hit the top milestone, without going ignificantly farther than necessary, for the past few months and calculated the average solo rank for that arena, which is an indication of how many players did at least that much.
Feaatured: 6852
Basic: 6255
Trials: 1731
There is no way to tell how many players are doing all three, because it is possible some players are doing one while others are doing a different one, and also because there's always a little bit of overshoot more people hit the top milestone than place higher than me (it is possible to place lower than me and still hit them all if I finish, say, at 12,273,803 points in the featured). But we can say that thousands of players are doing this to at least some degree, and maybe a thousand people plus or minus are doing all of them.
It is not a *huge* number of players; 7000 players out of the entire player population is not a big number (for reference, about 20,000 players plus or minus make it to the Gladiator Circuit in Battlegrounds) but it is not a marginal number either. Moreover, we can also estimate the number of players who are participating to at least enough to make it to rank rewards (it takes a minimum number of points to show up on the leaderboards at all). There are large margins for error with such an estimation because of a number of variables, but it ends up being somewhere around 35k-40k players for each arena individually.
Arena grinders are probably on the order of 10% of the playerbase, with more dedicated grinders about 1% of the playerbase. For comparison, the percentage of players who spend cash on mobile games is in the realm of 3-5%, and MCOC is probably not atypical in that regard.
Grinding for units in MCOC is probably within the same general ballpark of spending for units (of course, there is likely some overlap between the two: it isn't mutually exclusive.
Pthhhthhhhh.
Typical arena round, will end up at 4 + 22 + 8 million. 1500-2000 units per week is the norm.
Recently explored act 8, 1 necro run, poollies and omega event, as well as spent 3k units on magica R4>R5 gem, so I'm somewhat low on units atm.
But there is enough time to scrape together 15k before the July offers drop in.
Although it is worth noting that losing streak is not as bad as some people might think it is. Consider the sum of the multiples you get while ramping up. The first match is at 1x, then it is at 1.25x, then 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, then finally 3x. The first five of those matches add up to 1+1.25+1.5+2+2.5 = 8.25. If you were getting the max 3x multiplier during that period your multiplier sum would be 3x5=15. That means if you lose streak and reset to 1x, you’ve lost 15-8.75 = 6.25 multiplier across your next five rounds. That is slightly more points than you’d earn in two rounds of max multiplier.
In other words, every time you lose streak, it costs you about three extra rounds (a little more than two for the multiplier reset, and a fraction of one for the match you just lost because you must have lost at least two fights to lose streak).
Now, its a little more complicated than that because you also have to reestablish streak, and there’s some champ availability issues to deal with that, but basically the difference between never losing streak and losing streak once in, say, the featured arena would be for someone like me the difference between taking 44 rounds and 47. You don’t want to do those extra three rounds, but it is also not the end of the world.
If you can consistently beat the top match up and do it quickly, the points you get per minute could be comparable to the points you get using arena express. It depends on the player. For me, I prefer using arena express because the lower PI match ups it picks are easier, and thus allow me to grind arena without paying close attention most of the time, leaving me free to do other things simultaneously.
My blud has obviously never been in multi-hour long work meetings multiple times a week where 95% of the things being discussed do not apply to you. Perfect grind time
I kind of just hold my phone and swipe and tab mindlessly, only sometimes using what little I see of it in my peripheral vision to navigate any next button if I'm not doing it by reflex so that I can still pay attention. Sometimes, you just don't need to really lock in on a meeting until something that applies to you is being brought up.
In the Summoner trial arena I found that when you get to the 3x multiplier using 3* champs with 3x arena boosts can score higher than 4* champs.
Also worth noting: both the basic and featured arenas have 3* and 4* versions of champs as rewards. If you have a small roster and don’t have them, it can be worth getting them from there to build up your lower roster for use in the Summoner Trials arena, when you get to the point where you’re doing that a lot.
I broke the bank and have 7 more 7* to show for it, more r3 champs and some defenders that make people quit in battlegrounds. I've just passed 2k units again.