I'm happy with Megasaur being removed, but I don't think the change to Primalfin is going to be enough to make up for it. I hope that if murlocs end up being too weak that they find a way to add an interesting tier 6 option that isn't as polarising as Megasaur, but is still impactful enough to make a murloc build worth the effort.
Thank god for cannon being removed. I'm pretty sure almost everyone hated that card being in the game.
The change to Pagle is really interesting. By himself he is really weak, but buffing him up can give you some nice value and this could make him an interesting option in a menagerie build.
The beast changes are interesting as well. The Pack leader and Mama bear buffs seem a bit scary, but rat being moved to tier 3 is a pretty big deal as well (and a change about which I'm glad it finally happened).
All the hero changes seem great to me. Lady Vashj just wasn't very interesting or fun to play. Captain Eudora was in basically every game and was killing people way too fast. Adding more digs to the hero power seems like a good way to nerf her and I hope its enough. I didn't expect them to buff Reno again, but I like playing him so I'm totally okay with it. The buff to the Lich King is deserved and even a little scary, but he was just way too weak compared to a lot of other heroes before. And finally the Galakrond change is one I'm really happy with as well. Before it would feel so bad to have to freeze every turn for one minion while not being able to remove the other shitty low-tier minions, and getting a bad high tier minion from your hero power would straight up lose you the game.
The followers here seem all right to me, nothing too crazy but not too weak either. Passage unearned seems a bit too situational, but it can obviously be very strong in the right situation. Encroaching shadows is by far my favorite card out of these. I don't think it will be good but I will definitely have fun trying to make it work, probably in a deck with a lot of last breath and ephemeral synergies.
And since Nocturne is very likely to be the next champion, I am very curious and excited to see what he does. One thing we can probably safely assume is that he either has nightfall himself or synergises with other nightfall cards (maybe both). I also believe Nocturne will be the first champion added to Runeterra that is not currently assigned to a specific region in Runeterra (at least according to universe.leagueoflegends.com).
I actually think tokens from any source should not do any damage. They're saying tokens feel okay aside from Pagle and Tide Razor, but taking 7 damage because you killed the opponent's buffed up Rat Pack always feels bad and it always will until it is addressed. Changing token damage to 1 will certainly be a step in the right direction though, and I still think they should swap Rat Pack and Infested Wolf (in addition to adding or buffing some beast (synergy) cards).
Two other (imo obvious) things to change:
1. Nerf or preferably remove Arcane Cannon.
2. Reduce damage taken in some way. Ever since the pirates patch the damage you take even from small losses is absurd.
A possible solution I think they should experiment with is to change damage dealt to be equal to the current turn count. This way damage is still small in the early game and it ramps up more gradually, but lategame losses will always deal significant but not too large amounts of damage regardless of your build. A potential problem I could with this is that tavern 1 or 2 builds become more popular (probably mainly with Dancing Daryll or Pogos) because they don't have to worry about dealing too little damage and allowing their opponents to outscale them. However, I think it does at the same time solve another problem which is that losing too much hp because too many of your opponent's high tavern tier minions survived with small amounts of hp feels really bad.
"We will one day see champions original to Legends of Runeterra"
I was wondering whether they were planning to do this, because with their planned pace of introducing new cards they are going to eventually run out of champions they can use from League of Legends (even though there are a lot of them). I like that they're willing to do this, and it also makes me wonder whether some of those 'original to LoR champs' will eventually be introduced to League of Legends as well.
And just like Yipp I am also very excited to see some Void champion cards!
I'm pretty sure that's a crayfish, although I'm not sure what species exactly. I would guess it's the eastern Asian/Eastern North American variant.
I have actually encountered a whole bunch of these in a lake that we had to sample to assess the chemical and ecological water quality. It's an invasive species here in the Netherlands and these crayfish almost entirely wiped out the fish population in the lake, so we had ourselves a nice barbeque with all of the crayfish that we sampled. Unfortunately I also got pinched quite a bunch of times.
I'd like to share a hilarious battlegrounds game where the top 3 was me playing pirates against two murloc players. I had two Cap'n Hoggarrs which allowed me to buy any pirate for free (if I also sold them afterwards) while also buffing my golden Salty Looter to astronomic proportions. Both of my opponents had a lot of health left so the game kept going for quite a while, and for some reason neither of them seemed to be getting any Gentle Megasaurs. When I got to tavern six however, I decided that it should stay that way when I immediately found myself some megasaurs:
Show Spoiler
And lo and behold, the last remaining opponent did not get a megasaur and my big fat pirates were able to carry me to victory!
Frankly, after tuning in to the Progress Day podcast on YouTube, I have just about zero respect for Swim's point of view. The episode in question was discussing the Twitch Rivals tournament and Patch 1.2, and Swim was really childish about the results. Specifically, he complains about losing to Kripp's Burn Aggro list and describes it as though it was some random list even though it was about as cut-and-dry a Burn Aggro netdeck as you could get. He then went on to complain about how tournaments are better when you can predict your opponent's line-ups, and that his opponents were just "bringing random stuff" instead of "outgaming [him]." He came off as a petulant child who felt entitled to first place simply because he plays more Legends of Runeterra on Twitch than the various Hearthstone streamers who joined the tournament.
I have not seen the Twitch Rivals tournament so what I'm about to say could be wrong, but I don't think you should be too hard on Swim because of what he said on the podcast. If you're participating in a tournament where people expect you to be the expert who stomps all the inexperienced people, and the opposite happens followed by twitch chat endlessly making fun of you for it, it makes sense that you're going to be frustrated by it. In addition his loss(es?) was(/were) apparently to Noxus/P&Z burn aggro, on which I think we can all agree that it is not the type of deck you want to see being played in tournaments because it is incredibly easy to pilot and losing against it feels like losing a coinflip.
I'm not saying everything Swim is saying is completely correct or justified, but I don't think you should abandon all your respect for him just because of what he said here. Everyone says something dumb every once in a while, especially when they're frustrated about something.
I haven't played enough with or against all epic cards to know exactly which ones are underperforming, but based on my personal experiences I would take a look at the following epics:
Jagged Taskmaster: I've only tried this in one deck with a pretty high amount of 1 cost units but I quickly ended up cutting it because the 1 attack just did not make enough of a difference to justify running this card.
Aurora Porealis: I think this one is pretty obvious. The cost is too high for the value it generates. I think Riot could play around with some immediate effects like letting the card summon one or two poros directly on the board, or making it activate a poro snax effect immediately.
Overgrown Snapvine: I have actually almost won an otherwise unwinnable game because of this card while playing a spider deck (sadly I lost to an Unyielding Spirited Radiant Guardian). However, I still think at the very least this card deserves a +1 health buff, probably even more.
Ren Shadowblade: I have never seen this card being succesful. On some very few occasions my opponent would play this and I would be a little worried because I did not have a good answer for it, but every time I still ended up winning because I was still able to remove Ren or because Ren's effect did not matter enough.
Shadow Flare: I'm actually a bit hesitant to include this one because I have seen it being used effectively, but almost every time I have had this in my hand I wasn't able to find a good moment to use it. Could just be me though.
Spectral Matron: I think this one also has quite some potential but I haven't seen it used to great effect yet. Maybe a small buff could give it the push it needs to be viable.
If I missed some obvious ones it's either because I haven't had enough experiences with the card to say anything useful about it, or because I'm afraid that buffing said card could easily lead to it becoming a problem card.
1. You also get experience from your expedition games, which results in more rewards. You also continue to get experience for any expeditions after you've completed your first three.
2. You also get cards or wild cards depending on the amount of wins you got, plus additional shards from the guaranteed epic capsule.
3. You already mentioned it yourself, but reaching the maximum rewards is a lot easier in Legends of Runeterra compared to other card games (at least as far as I know).
4. It's really easy to get a free expedition token each week, meaning that if you get max wins in all three expeditions you can get 2000 shards for free in a week in addition to all of the additional rewards. Of course you shouldn't count on being able to do this every week, but the way you're complaining about expeditions makes it seem like you expect to consistently get to 7 wins.
Could it be possible that the opponent had units with either fearsome or elusive and you were not able the opponent's units because of it? If that is the case and you also happen to not have any spells that are playable during the attack phase of your opponent, then the game automatically skips your 'defensive turn'.
Edit: Like Sinti mentioned below, the game only auto-skips your turn if you have that setting enabled (and you have no available plays).
I'd like to give a big shoutout to the pieces of shit who are still playing Noxus + P&Z burn aggro in fucking normal mode even after the nerfs. I also really love that I always draw all three copies of Make it Rain in my deck when they happen to have multiple Crimson Disciples!
While not all cards I would have liked to see changed are included here, I am very happy with the buffs and nerfs that we did get. I always thought Vlad was a pretty solid champion already (the problem is that the archetype he fits in isn't very strong), but I really like how flavourful his buff is.
It seems to me that runeterra is going the hearthstone route, bit by bit. It's like they can't come up with something balanced and always need to push certain OP things.
I'm glad i didn't play much because i'd probably get mad for the wasted time. I'm also sad that no one is able to come up with some truly balanced game and realize that you can't ever please everyone.
I disagree, I think they (Riot) are just not afraid to try different things, whether they're going to be op or not. Because they're willing to make balance changes every month this is also relatively safe for them to do. When releasing new cards you can't always play it safe because then there's the chance that very little of the new cards will be played, like what happened when TGT was released for Hearthstone.
Thematically, I love SI. They have a feel that is unique and intuitive. It reminds me of M:tG Sultai / Golgari without the clunkiness of dealing with a discard pile. I also really like how it has a glass cannon feel thanks to Ephemeral, Can't Block, and Fearsome tags.
Balance-wise, I would concur with the general consensus that the region is overly popular at-large but I would argue that this is due to other regions being under-tuned moreso than SI being over-tuned. Specifically: there are certain packages (P&Z discard, Frejlord poros, Frejlord battlescars, and P&Z purrsuit to name a few) that are virtually unplayed, and that has big ripple effects in deck construction.
Mao'kai might be my favorite champion in the game right now. I'm not convinced he's any good, but between the saplings and deep bonuses and his deck attack he has so many interesting possibilities.
The Ruination is an especially interesting card. Honestly, it and Corina are the only effective counters to big boards right now, so I like that it is in the game. However it creates this condition that SI is one of the most effective splashes for control as well as aggro, and that just feels odd.
The only card that I earnestly hate is Commander Ledros--I hate losing to him, and I hate winning with him. Specifically: I hate that he has the combination of his Play skill, Fearsome tag, 9 attack, and that damned last whisper that returns him to hand. I'm not even saying that he's overpowered, I'm just saying that that much value and tempo coming from a single card with no other synergies or situational dependencies makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.
These are pretty much my thoughts as well. I'd add to it that I especially hate ledros because he punishes the opponent for trying to not lose (which is basically the win condition of control decks). Anything from blocking attackers to healing your nexus is punished by him and that feels really bad to play against in my opinion.
Yeah I experienced this as well. I think I would change it so that "everywhere" buffs persist through recalls and similar effects, since decks that currently make use of these types of buffs aren't that strong anyway.
I'm happy with Megasaur being removed, but I don't think the change to Primalfin is going to be enough to make up for it. I hope that if murlocs end up being too weak that they find a way to add an interesting tier 6 option that isn't as polarising as Megasaur, but is still impactful enough to make a murloc build worth the effort.
Thank god for cannon being removed. I'm pretty sure almost everyone hated that card being in the game.
The change to Pagle is really interesting. By himself he is really weak, but buffing him up can give you some nice value and this could make him an interesting option in a menagerie build.
The beast changes are interesting as well. The Pack leader and Mama bear buffs seem a bit scary, but rat being moved to tier 3 is a pretty big deal as well (and a change about which I'm glad it finally happened).
All the hero changes seem great to me. Lady Vashj just wasn't very interesting or fun to play. Captain Eudora was in basically every game and was killing people way too fast. Adding more digs to the hero power seems like a good way to nerf her and I hope its enough. I didn't expect them to buff Reno again, but I like playing him so I'm totally okay with it. The buff to the Lich King is deserved and even a little scary, but he was just way too weak compared to a lot of other heroes before. And finally the Galakrond change is one I'm really happy with as well. Before it would feel so bad to have to freeze every turn for one minion while not being able to remove the other shitty low-tier minions, and getting a bad high tier minion from your hero power would straight up lose you the game.
It basically means the unit needs to enter the board in a different way than by being played from hand.
The followers here seem all right to me, nothing too crazy but not too weak either. Passage unearned seems a bit too situational, but it can obviously be very strong in the right situation. Encroaching shadows is by far my favorite card out of these. I don't think it will be good but I will definitely have fun trying to make it work, probably in a deck with a lot of last breath and ephemeral synergies.
And since Nocturne is very likely to be the next champion, I am very curious and excited to see what he does. One thing we can probably safely assume is that he either has nightfall himself or synergises with other nightfall cards (maybe both). I also believe Nocturne will be the first champion added to Runeterra that is not currently assigned to a specific region in Runeterra (at least according to universe.leagueoflegends.com).
I mean, in what universe can this not be leading up to a Trundle reveal?
I actually think tokens from any source should not do any damage. They're saying tokens feel okay aside from Pagle and Tide Razor, but taking 7 damage because you killed the opponent's buffed up Rat Pack always feels bad and it always will until it is addressed. Changing token damage to 1 will certainly be a step in the right direction though, and I still think they should swap Rat Pack and Infested Wolf (in addition to adding or buffing some beast (synergy) cards).
Two other (imo obvious) things to change:
1. Nerf or preferably remove Arcane Cannon.
2. Reduce damage taken in some way. Ever since the pirates patch the damage you take even from small losses is absurd.
A possible solution I think they should experiment with is to change damage dealt to be equal to the current turn count. This way damage is still small in the early game and it ramps up more gradually, but lategame losses will always deal significant but not too large amounts of damage regardless of your build. A potential problem I could with this is that tavern 1 or 2 builds become more popular (probably mainly with Dancing Daryll or Pogos) because they don't have to worry about dealing too little damage and allowing their opponents to outscale them. However, I think it does at the same time solve another problem which is that losing too much hp because too many of your opponent's high tavern tier minions survived with small amounts of hp feels really bad.
Damnit I didn't play yesterday :(
"We will one day see champions original to Legends of Runeterra"
I was wondering whether they were planning to do this, because with their planned pace of introducing new cards they are going to eventually run out of champions they can use from League of Legends (even though there are a lot of them). I like that they're willing to do this, and it also makes me wonder whether some of those 'original to LoR champs' will eventually be introduced to League of Legends as well.
And just like Yipp I am also very excited to see some Void champion cards!
I really like Battlegrounds but dying because of <5% lethals right when your build is coming together is so fucking frustrating.
I'm pretty sure that's a crayfish, although I'm not sure what species exactly. I would guess it's the eastern Asian/Eastern North American variant.
I have actually encountered a whole bunch of these in a lake that we had to sample to assess the chemical and ecological water quality. It's an invasive species here in the Netherlands and these crayfish almost entirely wiped out the fish population in the lake, so we had ourselves a nice barbeque with all of the crayfish that we sampled. Unfortunately I also got pinched quite a bunch of times.
I'd like to share a hilarious battlegrounds game where the top 3 was me playing pirates against two murloc players. I had two Cap'n Hoggarrs which allowed me to buy any pirate for free (if I also sold them afterwards) while also buffing my golden Salty Looter to astronomic proportions. Both of my opponents had a lot of health left so the game kept going for quite a while, and for some reason neither of them seemed to be getting any Gentle Megasaurs. When I got to tavern six however, I decided that it should stay that way when I immediately found myself some megasaurs:
And lo and behold, the last remaining opponent did not get a megasaur and my big fat pirates were able to carry me to victory!
I have not seen the Twitch Rivals tournament so what I'm about to say could be wrong, but I don't think you should be too hard on Swim because of what he said on the podcast. If you're participating in a tournament where people expect you to be the expert who stomps all the inexperienced people, and the opposite happens followed by twitch chat endlessly making fun of you for it, it makes sense that you're going to be frustrated by it. In addition his loss(es?) was(/were) apparently to Noxus/P&Z burn aggro, on which I think we can all agree that it is not the type of deck you want to see being played in tournaments because it is incredibly easy to pilot and losing against it feels like losing a coinflip.
I'm not saying everything Swim is saying is completely correct or justified, but I don't think you should abandon all your respect for him just because of what he said here. Everyone says something dumb every once in a while, especially when they're frustrated about something.
I haven't played enough with or against all epic cards to know exactly which ones are underperforming, but based on my personal experiences I would take a look at the following epics:
Jagged Taskmaster: I've only tried this in one deck with a pretty high amount of 1 cost units but I quickly ended up cutting it because the 1 attack just did not make enough of a difference to justify running this card.
Aurora Porealis: I think this one is pretty obvious. The cost is too high for the value it generates. I think Riot could play around with some immediate effects like letting the card summon one or two poros directly on the board, or making it activate a poro snax effect immediately.
Overgrown Snapvine: I have actually almost won an otherwise unwinnable game because of this card while playing a spider deck (sadly I lost to an Unyielding Spirited Radiant Guardian). However, I still think at the very least this card deserves a +1 health buff, probably even more.
Ren Shadowblade: I have never seen this card being succesful. On some very few occasions my opponent would play this and I would be a little worried because I did not have a good answer for it, but every time I still ended up winning because I was still able to remove Ren or because Ren's effect did not matter enough.
Shadow Flare: I'm actually a bit hesitant to include this one because I have seen it being used effectively, but almost every time I have had this in my hand I wasn't able to find a good moment to use it. Could just be me though.
Spectral Matron: I think this one also has quite some potential but I haven't seen it used to great effect yet. Maybe a small buff could give it the push it needs to be viable.
If I missed some obvious ones it's either because I haven't had enough experiences with the card to say anything useful about it, or because I'm afraid that buffing said card could easily lead to it becoming a problem card.
I disagree because of the following reasons:
1. You also get experience from your expedition games, which results in more rewards. You also continue to get experience for any expeditions after you've completed your first three.
2. You also get cards or wild cards depending on the amount of wins you got, plus additional shards from the guaranteed epic capsule.
3. You already mentioned it yourself, but reaching the maximum rewards is a lot easier in Legends of Runeterra compared to other card games (at least as far as I know).
4. It's really easy to get a free expedition token each week, meaning that if you get max wins in all three expeditions you can get 2000 shards for free in a week in addition to all of the additional rewards. Of course you shouldn't count on being able to do this every week, but the way you're complaining about expeditions makes it seem like you expect to consistently get to 7 wins.
Could it be possible that the opponent had units with either fearsome or elusive and you were not able the opponent's units because of it? If that is the case and you also happen to not have any spells that are playable during the attack phase of your opponent, then the game automatically skips your 'defensive turn'.
Edit: Like Sinti mentioned below, the game only auto-skips your turn if you have that setting enabled (and you have no available plays).
I'd like to give a big shoutout to the pieces of shit who are still playing Noxus + P&Z burn aggro in fucking normal mode even after the nerfs. I also really love that I always draw all three copies of Make it Rain in my deck when they happen to have multiple Crimson Disciples!
Happy Birthday! Can't believe it's already been a year. I visit this website almost every day and you guys have been doing a great job so far!
While not all cards I would have liked to see changed are included here, I am very happy with the buffs and nerfs that we did get. I always thought Vlad was a pretty solid champion already (the problem is that the archetype he fits in isn't very strong), but I really like how flavourful his buff is.
I disagree, I think they (Riot) are just not afraid to try different things, whether they're going to be op or not. Because they're willing to make balance changes every month this is also relatively safe for them to do. When releasing new cards you can't always play it safe because then there's the chance that very little of the new cards will be played, like what happened when TGT was released for Hearthstone.
These are pretty much my thoughts as well. I'd add to it that I especially hate ledros because he punishes the opponent for trying to not lose (which is basically the win condition of control decks). Anything from blocking attackers to healing your nexus is punished by him and that feels really bad to play against in my opinion.
Yeah I experienced this as well. I think I would change it so that "everywhere" buffs persist through recalls and similar effects, since decks that currently make use of these types of buffs aren't that strong anyway.