I've never before been a Power Leveler, but I hear talk about the process from time to time. I play solo, as a general rule. It seems very hard to find a League for Villains that accepts players of all CR tiers and all skill levels, where the other members would be online at the same time I am. But right now, I need to power level one of my villain characters from CR 210 up to the current End Game level of CR 276 or above. And I need to be able to do it solo if at all possible. Can anyone give me some advice as to the best and fastest method by which a solo player can power level a character to current End Game? Thanks in advance.
Dailies, Solos, Duos - your current range + event will always give you something useful every day, always choose gear in any reward box that has a variable CR range, save current currency until you have enough to purchase 1-2 pieces of current level vendor gear - I recommend weapon because weapon legs and chest have (had?) the largest actual affect on your CR, and Weapon directly increases your Weapon DPS. The DOS / Krypton Solo is 1 free piece of gear a day, the Dailies usually reward with a Gear box, after you get to Atlantis there are 3 a day with Gear rewards in every current content from there forward. You can go from 170 to 270 in a month that way, so you can probably go from 210 to 290 in a similar amount of time.
If you have money and quarks it's fairly easy. Run your dailies like Kimone said, but you can supplement with stabilizer gear since it auto attunes too. Current gear is pretty inexpensive on the broker so it will more than double your ability to gear up fast. Save your quarks (unless you have $$$ to burn) for Avatar Bombadier gear. It will attune at end game where as the stabilizer gear will not
Yea..I usually run all that I can for the day.. equip whatever gear I get then buy gear from tc on broker or open tc if I have stabilizers.
The Mechanical Vendor is also useful for acquiring gear pieces that you need to level and the RNG Spirits are hindering your progress, especially in the lower levels. My luck used to be to have to wear that CR 52 utility belt until I was close to being CR 100; the mechanical vendor solved that problem.
Ah yes..the mechanical vendor. At 210..the gear should still be source marks and at reduced cost iirc...I may be wrong.
From what I read you have been given just about all the ways possible.. You are Cr 210 so your gear is in the CR 180+ range and you have access to Earth 3 as YOUR sort of End game at the moment. Okay 1. Run the event version of Metal 2 daily and weekly mission. Every solo daily mission in that zone hand out Source Marks, Thanagarian coin and on piece of unattuned armor. That's three a day plus added pieces for doing the weekly stuff.... Now the BOUNTY requires a team BUT you don't actually have to join the team to get credit.. Just join in the battle and when the Golem goes down you get your 8 marks, 8 Thanagarian coin and 1 piece of armor. So run the dailies every day and you get 21 pieces of armor PLUS another two for the weekly stuff or 23 new pieces of armor a week Oh and don't forget as those Thanagarian coins add up you can hit the vender in Thanagar and buy more unattuned armor. 2. Run the vault daily.... takes a whole ??? 60 second s and you earn a mark alonmg with yet anopther piece of unattunned armor that can go as high as CR240. Run that daily and you have another 7 pieces of new gear 3. As mentioned do the death of Superman solo challenge and you get another unattuned armor drop By doing that every day you just grabbed another 7 pieces of armor along with more source marks 4. Run the daily and weekly stuff in Earth 3... Been a while but as i recall only Cyborg hands out armor but you have three daily missions and two weekly ..three if you find anyone doing the bounties and you can use that cash to buy even more higher CR gear. 5. Now this part is up to you but it does allow you another way to get more feats. The Death of Superman zone "Doomed Metropolis' will allow you to grab 4 or 5 source marks a day.. You also earn the Tributes but those only buy you styles not higher CR armor... But hey you can grab 4 source marks a day and only have to actually defeat 9 mob members. the fifth daily requires a team to take out Doomsday. No unattunned armor drops but another means to solo and grab 4-5 marks a day plus 16 more by doing the weekly missions. NOW.. as your CR increases and you gain access to higher zones run the daily missions there.. Justice League Dark and Metal Part 1 both are set up to each daily mission hand s out a piece of unattuned gear. With more coming from the weekly stuff in the zones. Keep pluggiung away and you can get your CR higher fairly fast depending on how much time you can play a day.
Oh crap I left one out LOL 6. No it is not a solo but I can not recall a single time I ever blind qued and was not inside the Stabilizer duo in no time at all. Depending on if you are a Legendary or Premium will affect how many fragments you can grab a week / day but for me I join the mission and in under 90 seconds walk out with 6 a day. Then I just keep buying the FREE time capsules and those too will hand you free unattuned armor.
The best way to power level to end game(Elites) is to either have 120+ artifacts or plan to get as many easy feats as possible. Doing end game with low SPs and artifacts will not be enjoyable with the way end game is today. From low support or damage output to people checking how many SPs you have.
Not to be a naysayer, but if you restrict yourself exclusively to solo'ing, then you prevent yourself from taking advantage of the majority of available content, and you intentionally choose to take what will be the slowest path. Consider this. At any given point in a character's progression, only the CR relevant content is going to drop any gear that has the potential to be an upgrade, and only the CR relevant content is going to grant Marks to use towards the purchase of further upgrade of gear. Once you outlevel it, the attunable gear that drops has a hard cap of lower than what you are wearing, and Marks of Victory stop dropping while Episode Specific currency is only good for that singular episode which you have already outleveled. The options that you can solo are the Episode Specific open world dailies, the Event Mode dailies, and any CR relevant solo challenge modes. All of these modes require you to fight things that are CR relevant, so they will be slower and more challenging situations that take a little bit more time. In contrast, if you blind queue for all CR relevant non-Elite content, particularly at lower levels, 99 times out of 100, you're going to have at least one high level player blasting all through it on easy mode while chasing some feat or style, basically carrying you to guaranteed victory. If you're truly wanting the fastest way to level up, taking advantage of higher level players speed-running content that is trivial to them but CR relevant to you is going to be far more quick than trying to solo everything. This doesn't require you to join a League, make your own groups, or even talk to another human being (though those choices can speed things up further). Simply using the blind queue and hopping into group content. The Event versions of Alerts and Raids are basically failure-proof. The gates do not lock players out if they die, so you can run back in and rejoin no matter how many times you die. Citing back to their origins, the term "Power-Leveling" was coined in early MUDDS (the text-based precursors to the early MMOs like Ultima Online and Everquest). "Power-Leveling" was used to describe the act where a high level (or "powerful") character would group with a low level player and then run content that would normally have been far too hard for the low level player, carrying them through to victory. Older MMOs relied on actual XP levels, with higher level enemies granting more experience, and experience being split throughout the group, so by grouping with you, they let you fly through the lower levels by filtering to you a portion of the neglible XP they were earning. While DCUO does not rely on XP for the bulk of it's leveling, and instead focusing on a gear treadmill and CR driven progression, the prospect remains the same. Power-leveling will occur when a more powerful character helps to speed you through content at a faster rate than you could normally level. If you're talking about solo'ing appropriate challenge content, it will never be faster than "regular speed."
Hmm.. This is something I went through, but I have successfully done it with many of my chars. I have every powerset leveled from character creation to 230 at least and 9 of those 15 in the last three DLCs. I lean heavily on a few things that have been mentioned.. and some I didn't see (but TL: DR every word). Vaults are so handy for a gearbox. Source marks for cheaper gear is a must, I achieve the feat on Sigma then unlock with RBs on all my alts, drops the price significantly.. your situation might be different if you are playing Vil side, no idea, I'm Hero EUPC. I know you said solo, but you are making life too hard for yourself, imho you need to do duos to make up for hard cr stops.. if you have a cr drag of say.. a weapon, imho it's worth going into a duo for. You need to judge it right but try to choose rings and necks when you get them in a loot picker.. why? because you can always get the other pieces from the quark vendor or from other content.. as a kind of guideline.. if you have 4 of something.. time to choose something else. Also neck and rings don't have reduced cost, you will be paying full price for them, so if you have lots of those gearboxes in your inventory, the source marks can go on something better/cheaper. I don't raid often at all, except with friends or a friend in the group.. when I do, I'm doing it for source marks so I can buy vendor gear, that vendor gear will be a straight CR without scaling, which means as you'll know I'll be able to bump my cr up and all the gearboxes once opened. Don't waste marks on any generator boosts. If you have it to the second tier, that's fine, you'll not need to spend on it again.. you can still use 5 of the 7 white mods, but on the lower tier. It gives you weapon, head, neck (I use guardian angel) back, chest and legs, you miss out on the stronger damage bonus and... and pretty underwhelming feet bonus.. but those 7 marks are a back piece.. not just a back piece, but a bump in CR to every box you open after it! I used to be able to buy loads of gear boxes off broker, but prices on my server have gone nuts.. so middle of last year I started doing what Kimone suggest to you, and yes this is good advice. we hover around 700k to 1 mill for starting gearbox.. when 18 months ago it was 100-200k per box. You will burn through your quarks pretty quick if you are at the quark vendor trying to get rid of a cr drag while you have instances/dailies/etc sitting there that you can do.. before using the quark vendor as a very last resort. If you've friends whom you've helped out in the past and still speak to, ask around if they would be willing to sell you a few boxes cheap.. my friends often just offer me boxes which I try to refuse, but they insist, and I appreciate. They are aware of how many alts I have.. and the work put in. OW Raid bosses.. yeah.. I know you said solo, but again.. if you don't consider it, you may be throwing away good marks that could get you vendor gear. If I have the mission.. I just go and hang around where the boss is.. and if anyone shows up I wait n see whats happening.. flip loads of times I have been doing solo stuff and I passed by a OW Boss and the fight had already started and I just joined in.. thats 8 source marks and its 9 for a head or a chest. I hope this helps.
I understand all that, the problem that I have is that I play VERY late at night (usually after Midnight East Coast Time) and in the afternoon during the weekdays that I'm off, but when most people are at work. So queues can take literally HOURS of waiting just to get in at the times I play, and then anymore, I seem to get matchmaking pairing me up with stupid bastiches that exit the instance within the first minute, leaving me on my own, anyway. So, I've looked into joining a League. Do you realize how hard it is today to find a League that will accept characters of ALL CR Levels, and players of all skill levels? And then how much harder it is to find one like that which is a VILLAIN League?
Fair points, but speaking as someone who HAS gone that route pretty much from the start, the process is a lot faster these days than before. In fact if I hadn't spent a decent amount of time camping in a couple of "sweet spots" (where solo Mark returns are good) to get some styles off the Rare Style vendor, I probably wouldn't be too far behind the curve. Plus I've got a bunch of characters I'm taking through the tiers, so that's slowing me down a bit as well. I won't ever deny that the solo route is the slow way to go. But depending on how you play it, like only concentrating on one character or not spending more time in a tier/content location than is necessary, it might not be all that terribly slow. And as long as the person involved knows what they are getting themselves into and are okay with it, then I say more power to them.
Do you use Discord for voice chat? I'm in a PC only villain league. We were on until about 2am last night Eastern time
I haven't been using Discord, just the game's built-in voice chat.... on the very rare occasions when I've had someone to chat with, that is.
Run all your recent stuff, use quarks for the bombardier gear, buy capsule gear. Keep doing that til your 276cr+ a buddy of mine leveled a alt to cr289 or cr289 in a month no replays. Just quarks, ran everything, and capsule gear when he hit a wall in gear.
You can add me if you need folks to play with, CR291 heal that will run anything, for most part I have every DLC except 1 or 2 of the monthly episodes that were released way back. Ign is Offending habits USPS4 villain
The character I need to level up is TheKillerII (Roman Numeral 2 on the end.) I'll add you and Offending habits tonight.
So I haven’t read through all the responses here so if someone said this I do apologize. But this is how I took my 210 cr to 261 in 1 day. First I did the open world dailies in order to get the box rewards. Than I bought the owl style feat. This gave me a discounted price of the owl set in that dlc. Since that dlc is now old it has been changed to cost source marks to buy that gear. With the discount the total for none accessories items is 52 source marks. I used the boxes to hopefully get my accessories IE neck rings weapons face utility belt trinket. I was able to get 1 ring from all the boxes. So I bought the face for an additional 4 marks. I than repeated the process for following dlc. I bought the feats for that dlcs main gear style, did dailies for boxes and opened the boxes to get accessories. If I didn’t have enough cr for the next dlc than I would replace my lowest cr accessories with vendor accessories. This method works up until the JLD vendor. That vendor stops selling gear for source marks. At this point I ran my vault about 8 times (I always choose vault tickets from the loot box that drops randomly when ever it’s available) and did my thanagar dailies.
