This guide is not meant to be complete, it is based on my experience for having played 1 year 9 months and looking up lots of information on reddit and experimenting. I will gladly add other useful tidbits as I see and missing pieces of information if good advice is given in the comments.
Your two six star selectors:
Use your initial 6 star selectors on Loki/Sharon Rogers
Your first three days of bio selectors:
Use them on Carnage, Hyperion, and Enchantress, as it is the only way you can unlock these characters for free.
Don't do hero's journey:
After you farm all the characters that are options in hero's journey or reach shield level 11, you can do journey of growth instead which allows you to pick almost any character and is much better than being limited to hero's journey.
Don't pour resources into epic quest:
Dr. Strange is amazing, but I don't think you can get far enough early enough to pour your early resources into here. Getting other characters first will increase your resources more and actually get you a faster completion IMO.
Get in as high level alliance as you can:
Use the recruitment link on the side here and get into as high level of an alliance as you can. You can't do alliance battle (good source of resources) until you do, and you get a pretty hefty alliance bonus for being in an alliance. Also, you can run any rift opened by your alliance mates, and if you have any luck you land in an alliance with some VIP 10 or VIP 15+ people to open great rifts for you.
Characters and why you want them:
Face Tank chars - These are characters that you can play with a relatively low skill threshold to help you defeat world boss and shadowlands stages. They are particularly valuable for new players. These are also frequently the characters you should T2 first, as they will be able to sustain in long difficult fights:
Sharon Rogers (iframes + 3 second invuln)
Enchantress (shield, and can permanently charm world bosses)
Carnage (at T2 if you are willing to use bio selector, you can use rank up tickets to get him up to 6 star then use his bios from selector to T2 with a ticket
Loki (shield)
Ancient One (immunity)
Elsa (needs to be T2, but then immunity)
Silk (shield)
Hellstrom (immunity)
Captain Marvel (Immunity)
Blackbolt (needs to be T2, but then immunity)
Moon Knight (needs T2 and Recovery/Invincible obelisk)
Black Panther (immunity + iframes)
Iron Fist (needs to be T2 then has enough dodge to face tank + uni with invincibility)
Yellow Jacket (need to use skill rotation to stay in iframes)
Thor (shield)
Songbird (shield)
Leadership characters - These characters are good just for the bonuses they apply, you don't need to rank their skills, buy their uniforms, or give them obelisks/iso sets unless you will use them outside of leadership as well those I've marked with an ++
48% Damage to Male: She Hulk
45% Energy Attack: Hela, Ebony Maw
45% Energy Attack for Blast: Starlord, Ancient One++
24% All Attack: Sin, Punisher, Ultron, Shang-Chi++, Hyperion++, Wiccan++, Hogan
30% Energy Attack: Singularity, Lash, Captain Marvel++, Modok, Blackbolt++
30% Physical Attack: Elsa++, Deathlok, War Machine, Crossbones, Winter Soldier, Ulik, Hulk
36% All Attack/Def for Universal: Ronan
60% Lightning Damage: Lincoln
60% Fire Damage: Satana, Red Hulk
60% Cold Damage: Misty Knight
Support characters - Characters that are valuable for other reasons: Warwolf - You can transfer his 6* skill to massively increase damage
Daisy - You can transfer her skill to massively increase damage (her uniform helps too for this)
Groot - Can be used to heal the whole team.
Wasp - Her T2 is the anti-Dr. Strange for your team
The daily grind:
Story missions - One of the first things you want to do is complete story mode as soon as you can. You can then level characters more quickly with end story mode levels to get experience much faster. After you have done such, here's a list of story mode characters that you might want to get:
Black Panther - He now is strong even at T1 once he is 6 stars and possibly the best combat character outside of Carnage (and probably the best T1 combat char)
Blackbolt - only 10 bios a day, so slow to farm, but one of the elite T2s now.
Iron Fist - He can kill WBs at T2 pretty easily, though you need to buy his uniform.
Thor - With upgraded skill set and lightning lead, he's now very strong
Deathlok - Leadership / Ignore dodge striker for Corvas Glaive in World Boss
Daisy - Support char mentioned above
Black Widow - Very strong speed char for non spenders and ignore dodge striker for CG
Ghost Rider - With Uni can gain invulnerability to be a face tank like character, T2 allows him to beat all the WBs with some practice
Other leadership chars listed above (Ultron, Modok, Winter Soldier, War Machine, Punisher, Lincoln etc based on what you need)
Somewhat lesser values:
Agent 13 - Ignore dodge striker for CG
Red skull - for team up bonus with loki/ronan
Special missions:
Always run special missions during hot time (reduced energy) for the full 30 minutes on auto repeat to max your collection of gear equipment and to farm characters. I would do them in this order, though getting Songbird and Wiccan is most important and you could swap those 2.
1: Songbird
2: Wiccan
3: White Tiger
4: Squirrel Girl
5: Hulkling
Rifts:
Rifts are good to collect comic cards and to get bios for rift characters. If you can coordinate running rifts in hot time with your alliance then you can also get big gold/energy bonuses.
1: Farm out a good Loki card. It's probably the single best card in the game the rest vary.
2: Rifts have tons of good chars, Loki, Wasp, Yellow Jacket, Antman, Ronan, Groot, etc... Of these, I'd say Loki/Ronan are most important followed by Wasp/Groot.
Being able to kill Villain Siege, Daily, and Special missions at highest difficulty is probably the first order of business for a new player, as it will get you the most resources early on.
Comic Cards:
I wrote a second card guide here
However, here is the excerpt for beginners:
Next when building cards, equip your first good card, then build a replacement in inventory of the same type, and then reroll it. If you are working on Loki, make sure every 6 star card you build is Loki, so that you get two shots with every build to get what you want, the initial build and the reroll of a 6 star loki in inventory. Never reroll equipped cards. Also, it is my thought that stats change less when upgrading then rerolling, this may be confirmation bias, but if I'm working on Loki and I have 6 5 star Lokis in inventory I will always upgrade the one closest to the stats I want.
Now on to the cards you should get.
For beginners, I'd recommend not focusing on getting mythical (rank 6 cards) right away, but instead focus on getting really good rank 4 cards. This will be a lot faster and get you better stats before you get into the crazy reroll game of rank 6 cards as it can take a week or more to build a rank 6 card but typically you can build multiple rank 4s in a day if you run rifts hard. Assuming you go with four star cards of the below and keep collecting versions of the below until you get the variable stats you want, then you will be in good shape. Note with Marvel Zombies that you need to have a heroic+ rift where you get additional card rewards to get this one.
Loki: Def pen in 3, attack speed in 4 is optional, if you get a 3 star with def pen equip it, then work on the 4 star with def pen and attack speed
Zombies: Def pen or energy attack in 4, since you can't as easily farm zombies, you might just equip the first one you get, and then work on getting def pen/energy attack afterwards.
Starlord: Physical attack in 3, Skill cool down in 4
Groot: Energy attack in 3, skill cool down in 4
Nebula: Physical attack in 3, skill cool down in 4
This yields something like:
Your two six star selectors:
Use your initial 6 star selectors on Loki/Sharon Rogers
Your first three days of bio selectors:
Use them on Carnage, Hyperion, and Enchantress, as it is the only way you can unlock these characters for free.
Don't do hero's journey:
After you farm all the characters that are options in hero's journey or reach shield level 11, you can do journey of growth instead which allows you to pick almost any character and is much better than being limited to hero's journey.
Don't pour resources into epic quest:
Dr. Strange is amazing, but I don't think you can get far enough early enough to pour your early resources into here. Getting other characters first will increase your resources more and actually get you a faster completion IMO.
Get in as high level alliance as you can:
Use the recruitment link on the side here and get into as high level of an alliance as you can. You can't do alliance battle (good source of resources) until you do, and you get a pretty hefty alliance bonus for being in an alliance. Also, you can run any rift opened by your alliance mates, and if you have any luck you land in an alliance with some VIP 10 or VIP 15+ people to open great rifts for you.
Characters and why you want them:
Face Tank chars - These are characters that you can play with a relatively low skill threshold to help you defeat world boss and shadowlands stages. They are particularly valuable for new players. These are also frequently the characters you should T2 first, as they will be able to sustain in long difficult fights:
Sharon Rogers (iframes + 3 second invuln)
Enchantress (shield, and can permanently charm world bosses)
Carnage (at T2 if you are willing to use bio selector, you can use rank up tickets to get him up to 6 star then use his bios from selector to T2 with a ticket
Loki (shield)
Ancient One (immunity)
Elsa (needs to be T2, but then immunity)
Silk (shield)
Hellstrom (immunity)
Captain Marvel (Immunity)
Blackbolt (needs to be T2, but then immunity)
Moon Knight (needs T2 and Recovery/Invincible obelisk)
Black Panther (immunity + iframes)
Iron Fist (needs to be T2 then has enough dodge to face tank + uni with invincibility)
Yellow Jacket (need to use skill rotation to stay in iframes)
Thor (shield)
Songbird (shield)
Leadership characters - These characters are good just for the bonuses they apply, you don't need to rank their skills, buy their uniforms, or give them obelisks/iso sets unless you will use them outside of leadership as well those I've marked with an ++
48% Damage to Male: She Hulk
45% Energy Attack: Hela, Ebony Maw
45% Energy Attack for Blast: Starlord, Ancient One++
24% All Attack: Sin, Punisher, Ultron, Shang-Chi++, Hyperion++, Wiccan++, Hogan
30% Energy Attack: Singularity, Lash, Captain Marvel++, Modok, Blackbolt++
30% Physical Attack: Elsa++, Deathlok, War Machine, Crossbones, Winter Soldier, Ulik, Hulk
36% All Attack/Def for Universal: Ronan
60% Lightning Damage: Lincoln
60% Fire Damage: Satana, Red Hulk
60% Cold Damage: Misty Knight
Support characters - Characters that are valuable for other reasons: Warwolf - You can transfer his 6* skill to massively increase damage
Daisy - You can transfer her skill to massively increase damage (her uniform helps too for this)
Groot - Can be used to heal the whole team.
Wasp - Her T2 is the anti-Dr. Strange for your team
The daily grind:
Story missions - One of the first things you want to do is complete story mode as soon as you can. You can then level characters more quickly with end story mode levels to get experience much faster. After you have done such, here's a list of story mode characters that you might want to get:
Black Panther - He now is strong even at T1 once he is 6 stars and possibly the best combat character outside of Carnage (and probably the best T1 combat char)
Blackbolt - only 10 bios a day, so slow to farm, but one of the elite T2s now.
Iron Fist - He can kill WBs at T2 pretty easily, though you need to buy his uniform.
Thor - With upgraded skill set and lightning lead, he's now very strong
Deathlok - Leadership / Ignore dodge striker for Corvas Glaive in World Boss
Daisy - Support char mentioned above
Black Widow - Very strong speed char for non spenders and ignore dodge striker for CG
Ghost Rider - With Uni can gain invulnerability to be a face tank like character, T2 allows him to beat all the WBs with some practice
Other leadership chars listed above (Ultron, Modok, Winter Soldier, War Machine, Punisher, Lincoln etc based on what you need)
Somewhat lesser values:
Agent 13 - Ignore dodge striker for CG
Red skull - for team up bonus with loki/ronan
Special missions:
Always run special missions during hot time (reduced energy) for the full 30 minutes on auto repeat to max your collection of gear equipment and to farm characters. I would do them in this order, though getting Songbird and Wiccan is most important and you could swap those 2.
1: Songbird
2: Wiccan
3: White Tiger
4: Squirrel Girl
5: Hulkling
Rifts:
Rifts are good to collect comic cards and to get bios for rift characters. If you can coordinate running rifts in hot time with your alliance then you can also get big gold/energy bonuses.
1: Farm out a good Loki card. It's probably the single best card in the game the rest vary.
2: Rifts have tons of good chars, Loki, Wasp, Yellow Jacket, Antman, Ronan, Groot, etc... Of these, I'd say Loki/Ronan are most important followed by Wasp/Groot.
Being able to kill Villain Siege, Daily, and Special missions at highest difficulty is probably the first order of business for a new player, as it will get you the most resources early on.
Comic Cards:
I wrote a second card guide here
However, here is the excerpt for beginners:
Next when building cards, equip your first good card, then build a replacement in inventory of the same type, and then reroll it. If you are working on Loki, make sure every 6 star card you build is Loki, so that you get two shots with every build to get what you want, the initial build and the reroll of a 6 star loki in inventory. Never reroll equipped cards. Also, it is my thought that stats change less when upgrading then rerolling, this may be confirmation bias, but if I'm working on Loki and I have 6 5 star Lokis in inventory I will always upgrade the one closest to the stats I want.
Now on to the cards you should get.
For beginners, I'd recommend not focusing on getting mythical (rank 6 cards) right away, but instead focus on getting really good rank 4 cards. This will be a lot faster and get you better stats before you get into the crazy reroll game of rank 6 cards as it can take a week or more to build a rank 6 card but typically you can build multiple rank 4s in a day if you run rifts hard. Assuming you go with four star cards of the below and keep collecting versions of the below until you get the variable stats you want, then you will be in good shape. Note with Marvel Zombies that you need to have a heroic+ rift where you get additional card rewards to get this one.
Loki: Def pen in 3, attack speed in 4 is optional, if you get a 3 star with def pen equip it, then work on the 4 star with def pen and attack speed
Zombies: Def pen or energy attack in 4, since you can't as easily farm zombies, you might just equip the first one you get, and then work on getting def pen/energy attack afterwards.
Starlord: Physical attack in 3, Skill cool down in 4
Groot: Energy attack in 3, skill cool down in 4
Nebula: Physical attack in 3, skill cool down in 4
This yields something like:
| Card | Skill Cool Down | Defense Penetration | All Attack | Energy Attack | Attack Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loki | 7 | 5.1 | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| Zombies #2 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 5.4 | 0 |
| Starlord | 5.4 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 5.1 |
| Groot | 5.4 | 7 | 0 | 5.1 | 0 |
| Nebula | 5.4 | 7 | 0 | 5.1 | |
| Total | 30.2 | 26.1 | 7 | 10.5 | 10.2 |
This should give you close to max cool down with alliance bonus, good def pen for world bosses and some attack. You can then work on upgrading, but check out the full guide at the link.
Obelisks:
Initially rolling recovery obelisks (only rank up 1* obelisks with 30%+ recovery rate) seems to be a good strategy. Invincibility and single hit damage proc are the two best second and third stats generally. Immune to guard break (which actually stops people from breaking your attack, not your guard) is probably the best end game first stat presently. Defense penetration is also very strong until you get enough def pen from cards that you don't need it from obelisks, but for many that never happens. Recovery obelisks need to be paired with a healing iso set unless the character has a natural heal to them already. Save your ITGB obelisks and Defense Penetration obelisks for building rather than using them as materials for when you outgrow recovery and heal iso sets.
Iso Sets:
Initially healing iso sets will help you the most as you round out your skills (I am also groot or stark backing). However, heal sets aren't great in shadowlands, and in the long run, I find I want attack sets on virtually everyone (Power of Angry Hulk, OverDrive seem like the best, with Hawk's eye being okay but in the long run you don't need the skill cool down). It is probably best to put heal sets on your characters doing a lot of work initially as it will help you clear alliance battle and world bosses because the heal may trigger 4x in the fight. After your skills and cards and everything else improve, your fights are shorter and the attack sets help more. Heal sets are most valuable early on when fights are longer. When you get into more advanced game modes where DPS is most important and the times are shorter, your heal doesn't have enough time to proc, and the value you get from an attack set is much more helpful.
Iso-8:
Most important, don't equip any fully awakened 6 star ISO 8 until you really, really know what you are doing. You get a bunch of these from various rewards early on, and at some point, you will want to equip 8 of them on one super meta character, but even if you equip them on your best character now, that might not be the best character when you are ready to do really hard content.
This is generally a waste to upgrade early, so I don't bother. Higher ISO gives your iso set a better response, but you need 6 star awakened iso which is way too difficult and costly to get to really move the meter, so don't spend money upgrading isos just use 4-6 star isos you get from other events. Also, if you do upgrade, don't use 1 or 2 star isos as upgrade fodder. The cost (at least using the red growth isos) is the same whether you use 1, 2, 3, 4, etc star iso, so you will spend way more money upgrading if you use these low ISOs.
Note for Cards, Obelisks, and ISO:
It is very expensive to swap out and keep the original item. For this reason, you want to build your obelisks or cards in your inventory and only equip them after you have something really good. An alternative can be to equip something temporarily that you know you will replace and don't mind throwing away all together (which is free), but rerolling obelisks or cards that are on a character or in your equipped list already is generally not preferable.
Uniform notes: One important uniform note, never buy uniforms unless they are on sale. Also, only buy uniforms of characters you will use as primary attack uniforms. I bought uniforms for Red Skull, Starlord, and Ronin (and many others), but never use them as primary attack characters, so the uniforms are largely wasted. It's fine if you are putting a lot of money into the game, but if you aren't these crystals can be better spent elsewhere. The characters listed above as tank characters will benefit most.
Uniforms which are game changers:
If you have these characters or look to get them, these uniforms are complete game changers for them and should be viewed as must have. There are many other great uniforms that help considerably by adding crowd control, a stun, extra webs, etc... Any character you use a lot will always at least benefit from the 10% bonuses. However, these are uniforms that are far more game changing in their impact IMO:
Loki (Lady Loki): This one isn't purely game changing in terms of power like all the others, just that Loki is so amazing at T1 and able to help new players so much that the uniform makes sense. It lets you enter 1 additional day of alliance battle and likely get one additional clear as well. Early on, that's a lot of extra resources.
Ghost Rider (Attilan Rising): Uniform adds invincibility to one of his skills which allows you to start face tanking with Ghost rider making him one of the elite characters against Villains (virtually all hard content is villains). This uniform makes ghost rider an elite character.
Elsa: Uniform is the equivalent of a T2 in terms of upgrade. IMO, Elsa still needs to be T2 to be truly viable as a character, but she needs her uniform to be a damage beast. Elsa with uni at T2 is the top speed character presently.
Dr. Strange: It adds a heal to his two star skill which is also a high dps skill which you can spam to death to always stay at full health if you get hit.
Iron Fist (All New All Different): Either uniform will work, but the black one is slightly better. Uniform adds invincibility and heal which makes Iron Fist a straight up face tank on a lot of World Bosses.
Winter Soldier (Captain America): I'm not sure Winter Soldier is good enough to use anyway as I haven't ranked mine, but other people swear by this. This adds an invincibility to his 3 star skill which is presently bugged in that if you are quick and time it well you can cancel the 3 star skill, still get invincibility and then use other skills, then use 3 star again in order to more or less permanently stay invincible. Silk: It adds an extra second to web, and in Shadowlands, it turns Silk into an automatic win for virtually any stage she qualifies for if you have an attack set on with a little skill, you can permanently web everyone.
Other modes not mentioned yet, and what they're good for:
World Boss:
Gives black anti mater and chaos norns and bios for the black order (BO) characters. One of your primary goals of the game should be to beat world bosses as soon as possible. The quicker you beat world bosses, the quicker you can work on getting the BAM based characters (Strange, Odin, Thanos, Proxima Midnight, Ebony Maw, Corbus Glaive, Supergiant, and Black Dwarf).
Villain Siege:
Gives a variety of awards, good money, clear tickets, bios
Daily Missions:
Gives ISO8 and good gold.
Arena Modes
Timeline:
Gives crystals at the end of the week and honor tokens.
Alliance Battle:
Gives good gold, bios, clear tickets
Co-Op Battle:
Varies depending what VIP level you are. If you are VIP3+ then the rewards are pretty good, if you are complete free to play then much less so. Gives gold, gears, debris, norn stones, iso growths.
Battleworld:
Rewards vary per week, starts on thursday and usually ends sunday with a couple rounds. Rewards are bios, cards, obelisks, or isos. It is usually gold to max your participation if you can just for the gold participation rewards though which scale up with number of entries.
Shadowlands:
Rewards vary by stage, you should get as far as you can, which may not be past stage 1 for quite awhile.
World Boss Invasion:
WBI prorates up your characters, so you can do some damage. Make sure to read carefully the requirements on the left side to figure out which characters to bring so everyone can get a reward. The limitations apply to all 9 characters (your 3 and the 6 of the two people who play with you), so don't be an idiot with what you bring. Also remember to hit the purple button whenever it shows up. The rewards from WBI are pretty good, but much better if you are able to be the top damage producing character. Ghost Rider (if you have uni use 2 when available then 4 and 5), Miles Morales (don't know a good rotation), Dr. Strange (hit 5 whenever available then hit 3 immediately hit 2 repeat), Enchantress (hit 2 whenever available, 3 when available then alternate 4 and 5 in between), Proxima Midnight (I use everything but 2 which brings you close to the enemy), and Supergiant (don't know a good rotation just jam buttons) are some good characters which scale up well to give you good damage.
In general, many modes in WBI require that you not take damage, so it is a good idea to use face tank characters listed above as well and make sure to use their immunity skills. You may look like a boss with hulk smashing buttons and attacking the boss, but you're actually doing almost no damage and you are destroying the odds of the group winning.
