I don't know what a chain is. I think as long as you're never letting your VP touch 100%, you're having the greatest impact you can. Any other nuance is up to you. I can tell you that I use my slider thusly:

100% upvote to any valid pun on my Punday post.
No upvote to any comment I think is spam
5-10% upvote (> $0.01) to comments I think are worth responding to.
1% upvote to comments that don't add much value, but that are not spam, I don't think.
25-100% upvote to comments and posts from accounts that are much smaller than me that I think are being run by real people who are assets to the community
100% upvote to the freewrite prompt

Sometimes, if it's getting close to Monday, when I know I'll be soliciting new puns, I move my slider down considerably, so that I'll be in the 90s when I'm voting on punsters.

But also, I don't worry about it much. That, above, is just how I think I naturally behave. I sometimes act outside those parameters, and I don't really worry.

$3 is great, but still isn't the place where I think one needs to worry so much about what one does with it. I guess you're starting to get to the point where you can boost a young post into the Hot feed if it's already got some action behind it.

But my true hot take is, if every minnow and dolphin just voted their heart (and whales did, too, but weren't as strong... perhaps they could delegate all but 20k SP to increase the influence of minnows they admired), rather than voting for profit, we'd have a healthier ecosystem.