FYI, here's a version M0gwai has been tinkering with. I admit on paper it looks like it's weaker than the other 3 versions listed on this page, but he's also a very serious player who's been actively experimenting so I can't dismiss his conclusions out-of-hand:
The +3/+3 from Jeweled Protector is also slow: you need to have the target in hand when you play him, and you probably aren't playing that target on the same turn so its a delayed effect. Contrast with Avarosan Hearthguard, who conceivably can give ~20/~20 worth of stats for that same 5 mana but because most of those stats trickle out he goes from auto-include 3x to worthy consideration.
You and me both. I think the ship has sailed on casuals v hardcores having relatively comparable collection sizes--but you already got way further ahead if you were exhausting your wildcard buys every week anyways, so I'm not sure it really matters in the big picture.
The big question now is: can you still be competitive with a smaller collection? Signs so far point to yes--they're extremely generous with the common and rare wildcards, and most competitive decks so far are ~70-90% commons and rares--but we won't know for sure until the meta matures.
I think Riot is woefully accepting that some players are just going to zealously devote themselves to lapping up every single XP point they can regardless of how they try to discourage them via diminishing the returns.
How long did it take for HS between official launch and first set?
Four months. Open beta started January 21, 2014; launched March 11, 2014; launched "Curse of Naxxramas" July 22, 2014.
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dont you think the game will become stagnant if they take 3 months after launch to make a new expac? maybe a month after the launch but 3?
the players will be bored if they take all that time.
I'm guessing OGs like us might be getting a little stir-crazy by then, but keep in mind that ostensibly right now is just a beta period and that the player base could potentially grow at launch, especially if they are successful at introducing mobile at launch. This report claims that >70% of digital card game players play on smartphones.
HUGE patch notes today; so I didn't even notice this little nugget until I was rereading for the 2nd time:
Quote From Author
Additionally, we plan to approach balance with a seasonal mindset, adjusting our methods as the meta goes through different stages between sets of new cards. Once we’re out of beta and get into our regular cadence of releasing new sets, it should look something like this:
New set of cards released.
First balance patch: mostly “medium”-sized number changes based on our early sense of outliers.
Second balance patch: Significant updates to underutilized cards, and the main patch where you can expect any major champion updates.
Third balance patch: Limited number changes to stabilize any meta issues.
Next set of cards released.
Since they've previously announced that they want to do balance patches exactly every 4th Tuesday, I believe we can make some reasonable inferences:
New cards will be released in batches called "seasons", comparable to expansions in HS and MtG
Each season will last 16 weeks (i.e., every ~4 months or ~3 per year)
Additionally, if we look a few patch notes prior to when they announced ranked mode, we can see they put that in context of "Seasons" too, so we can also hypothesize:
Each Ranked Season will be exactly aligned with new card set releases. (Contrast with HS, where each season is a calendar month its completely asynchronous to when card sets are released.)
There will be some type of recognition / reward at the end of each 16 week period based on how high of tier you have on ladder. So far they only thing they have officially announced is a cosmetic (a "beta-exclusive icon"), but I'd be really surprised if this didn't also include some form of in-game resources.
Once the new season starts (i.e., when the next batch of new cards is released), there will be some type of ladder reset / loss of rank--again: I haven't seen any official announcements, but it makes sense that just because you hit Master once you wouldn't be guaranteed for life. You'll then have 16 weeks with the new base of cards to re-climb and earn your rank for that season.
And finally, if you REALLY want to go out on limb, you could look at how they've been describing this open beta as a "Beta Season" and wildly speculate:
The beta will have just 2 more rounds of balance patches, March 17th & April 14
Riot's unofficial / internal / soft-target for closing beta and formally launching Legends of Runeterra is Tuesday, May 12
The first expansion / new set of cards will release 16 weeks afterwards--i.e., Tuesday, September 1st
Obviously I've made a lot of assumptions in all of these points and even if I'm right that this is their unannounced plan of record its still subject to change (e.g., they find some critical bug they need to solve before releasing, or they get delayed releasing the mobile version to iTunes and decide its worth it to postpone just to have a consolidated launch, or they decide they want more overlap between their season schedule and HS's expansion schedule). Regardless, its got me very excited so I thought I'd share.
Yasuo requiring 5 stuns/recalls instead of 6: Maybe I've been unlucky so far but my opponents have generally had (too) little difficulties leveling up Yasuo so I personally didn't see this as necessary.
Jeweled Protector buffed to 4/4 from 3/3: I felt the stat/effect ratio was already fair so another one I can't understand. Not to mention that I see the card enabling the fun and interactive Elusive strategies (although probably not the most aggressive ones), which definitely didn't need further help.
For both these: I believe the intention is to make them both more rewarding so they see more play. Currently Yasou decks have a terrible winrate as they are very fragile / combo-reliant, so the idea is that if Yasou L2 comes online ~1 turn earlier his decks will be ~10% more competitive against the current meta (totally making those stats up). For Protector, the stat/effect would be overpowered if they applied immediate like Laurent Bladekeeper but since you still need to play the target from hand it's a huge tempo loss. All the value in the world doesn't mean squat if you can't keep your nexus above zero. Nobody plays him: straight elusive decks don't want to play faster, and control decks usually can't afford to play a turn 5 3/3 against aggro/tempo matchups. Bringing his stats up slightly is interesting; it's still an immediate tempo loss, but now he survives an attack from most early game units and you still have the big value from the effect so he might be worth the tradeoff.
I'm playing on a Win10 laptop, and even then I've crash out of the client maybe once a week. Usually it's at that first full size splash screen after login, but it did happen once in match which was especially annoying. It seems worse when the laptop is trying to do other things--e.g., antivirus is prompting me to resubscribe.
I assume you've already tried obvious things like dialing back the display quality and quitting all other nonessential processes?
There are two things affecting braum, one gives him -1 attack, and the other gives +1 attack. Therefore, he has 0 attack. I don't see what the problem is.
The problem was entirely user error. I assumed since the skitterer hit first and Braum showed a "0" in the bottom left corner that his effect had run its course with no net effect--e.g., how it would have worked if he'd played an Icevale Archer to my Braum and then I buffed it later in my turn. The difference there is that frostbite is always a -X buff where X is the attack at the instant the effect is applied (i.e., can never go net negative) so you're never "in the hole" whereas skitterer's effect obviously can.
No, I imagine it was as expected. Like: if I had taken the time to mouse-over my Braum, I expect I would have seen a "-1/-0 until end of turn" listed under his buffs, so when I add "+1/+1 until end of turn" the net result was +0/+1. I made the mistake of thinking the numbers in the bottom corners of Braum's card were the totality of his stats, but in actuality buffs act like auras that are attached to the card and those stats are just the live result of base stats + buffs.
Rimetusk Shaman in generally is pretty gross right now. I kinda wish they either made its target random or dropped it to 4 mana but it instead targets "weakest" enemy. It's getting a TON of play right now, especially contrasting it to Minotaur Reckoner which has a better body and stuns which is strictly better than frostbite but because its effect is constrained to "smallest" it usually ends up getting chumped.
In general, you want more third copies of the better cards instead of so many doubles.
I know. Extreme loss aversion: I HATE opening 4th copies from vaults/rewards when I'm still missing so much, which makes me really anxious about crafting a third copy of anything. And it doesn't help that, as you said, this isn't the best meta for a knockoff/budget Jinx deck to begin with. :-P
I'll probably take a more serious look at my options after this week's vault. And probably something around Braum, since he's been performing a lot better for me lately--either buffing my Braum/Garen control deck or taking a leap and experimenting with Braum/Vlad.
So I was playing a Braum deck against a SI/Noxus aggro spiders and falling behind fast. They played a Frenzied Skitterer, I figure: OK, sure they got buffed but my Braum went from 0/5 to 0/5 so no big deal. I want to take some power off the board so on my turn I challenge the weakest spider, a 3/1, and I play Radiant Strike--except Braum only becomes a 0/6, so the spider lives. :-( Apparently, even though it said 0 attack, it appreciated that it should have been at -1 from the Skitterer so the attack portion of my buff cancelled out. Quickly got overrun by fearsomes a few rounds later.
Just thought I would share that bit of experience.
In general: for spells and effects that do multiple things, the game tends to err on the side of doing what it can and NOT fizzling--e.g., if I play an Augmented Experimenter to deal 3, discard, and draw, but then my opponent interrupts with a Glimpse Beyond on the damage target, I still discard and draw.
The exceptions I know about are Vile Feast (no healing or spiderling if target dies first) and Glimpse Beyond (no cards if target dies first), and I think that's because the concept is that the target is specifically fueling the other results.
We're not going to see any substantial buffs or reworks yet, just because most people are still missing A LOT so many archetypes and power combos just haven't been discovered yet. Like you mention not seeing Lux: well, she needs spells to work and most players only have the single free copy of her anyways so they aren't going to play her. I think Heimer would be in the same boat except some streamer popularized that "400 IQ" deck that countered the elusive decks really well so people crafted towards that.
Mark of the Isles is totally getting hit: either increasing mana from 1 to 2 or decreasing effect from +3 to +2. It probably also shouldn't give any HP at all--that's only to relevant when combo'ing with Mark, and that's way too high-rolly to properly balance. EDIT: I forgot about cases where you want your opponent plays a damage effect to kill it before dealing damage and you play mark to get it to live long enough to get a single attack off, so perhaps there's merit in leaving the HP so long as mana/attack ratio is balanced.
Kinkou Lifeblade from a 2/3 to a 2/2 or maybe even a 2/1. Having an elusive lifesteal is fine, but you HAVE to give opponents a chance to remove it and there's a huge difference between 2 HP and 3 HP.
The one thing no one's mentioned: showing how many shards & wildcards you own in all the HUDs, not just the Store. Or at least in the deckbuilding / card viewing screens. I saw a mockup of this somewhere--I think reddit?--and it looked really slick, but I searched for it just now and couldn't find it.
Having considered that point now, I do agree that the Fearsome keyword is kind of problematic. Though I stand by my disagreement on the burn rounding up/down, because again, if you're losing to this card purely from the burn alone, you were probably dead anyway.
I could see either dropping the Fearsome tag or (even better) lowering his attack from 8 to ~4 so that his OTK potential circa Frank's example is reduced from 15 HP to 9 HP--you're getting tons of value from his Played and Last Whisper effects; you shouldn't need vanilla stats as well.
FYI, here's a version M0gwai has been tinkering with. I admit on paper it looks like it's weaker than the other 3 versions listed on this page, but he's also a very serious player who's been actively experimenting so I can't dismiss his conclusions out-of-hand:
Decklist image
Youtube video
The +3/+3 from Jeweled Protector is also slow: you need to have the target in hand when you play him, and you probably aren't playing that target on the same turn so its a delayed effect. Contrast with Avarosan Hearthguard, who conceivably can give ~20/~20 worth of stats for that same 5 mana but because most of those stats trickle out he goes from auto-include 3x to worthy consideration.
You and me both. I think the ship has sailed on casuals v hardcores having relatively comparable collection sizes--but you already got way further ahead if you were exhausting your wildcard buys every week anyways, so I'm not sure it really matters in the big picture.
The big question now is: can you still be competitive with a smaller collection? Signs so far point to yes--they're extremely generous with the common and rare wildcards, and most competitive decks so far are ~70-90% commons and rares--but we won't know for sure until the meta matures.
I think Riot is woefully accepting that some players are just going to zealously devote themselves to lapping up every single XP point they can regardless of how they try to discourage them via diminishing the returns.
Four months. Open beta started January 21, 2014; launched March 11, 2014; launched "Curse of Naxxramas" July 22, 2014.
I'm guessing OGs like us might be getting a little stir-crazy by then, but keep in mind that ostensibly right now is just a beta period and that the player base could potentially grow at launch, especially if they are successful at introducing mobile at launch. This report claims that >70% of digital card game players play on smartphones.
HUGE patch notes today; so I didn't even notice this little nugget until I was rereading for the 2nd time:
Since they've previously announced that they want to do balance patches exactly every 4th Tuesday, I believe we can make some reasonable inferences:
Additionally, if we look a few patch notes prior to when they announced ranked mode, we can see they put that in context of "Seasons" too, so we can also hypothesize:
And finally, if you REALLY want to go out on limb, you could look at how they've been describing this open beta as a "Beta Season" and wildly speculate:
Obviously I've made a lot of assumptions in all of these points and even if I'm right that this is their unannounced plan of record its still subject to change (e.g., they find some critical bug they need to solve before releasing, or they get delayed releasing the mobile version to iTunes and decide its worth it to postpone just to have a consolidated launch, or they decide they want more overlap between their season schedule and HS's expansion schedule). Regardless, its got me very excited so I thought I'd share.
For both these: I believe the intention is to make them both more rewarding so they see more play. Currently Yasou decks have a terrible winrate as they are very fragile / combo-reliant, so the idea is that if Yasou L2 comes online ~1 turn earlier his decks will be ~10% more competitive against the current meta (totally making those stats up). For Protector, the stat/effect would be overpowered if they applied immediate like Laurent Bladekeeper but since you still need to play the target from hand it's a huge tempo loss. All the value in the world doesn't mean squat if you can't keep your nexus above zero. Nobody plays him: straight elusive decks don't want to play faster, and control decks usually can't afford to play a turn 5 3/3 against aggro/tempo matchups. Bringing his stats up slightly is interesting; it's still an immediate tempo loss, but now he survives an attack from most early game units and you still have the big value from the effect so he might be worth the tradeoff.
I'm playing on a Win10 laptop, and even then I've crash out of the client maybe once a week. Usually it's at that first full size splash screen after login, but it did happen once in match which was especially annoying. It seems worse when the laptop is trying to do other things--e.g., antivirus is prompting me to resubscribe.
I assume you've already tried obvious things like dialing back the display quality and quitting all other nonessential processes?
I believe we're less than 30 minutes from finding out--so excited!
The problem was entirely user error. I assumed since the skitterer hit first and Braum showed a "0" in the bottom left corner that his effect had run its course with no net effect--e.g., how it would have worked if he'd played an Icevale Archer to my Braum and then I buffed it later in my turn. The difference there is that frostbite is always a -X buff where X is the attack at the instant the effect is applied (i.e., can never go net negative) so you're never "in the hole" whereas skitterer's effect obviously can.
No, I imagine it was as expected. Like: if I had taken the time to mouse-over my Braum, I expect I would have seen a "-1/-0 until end of turn" listed under his buffs, so when I add "+1/+1 until end of turn" the net result was +0/+1. I made the mistake of thinking the numbers in the bottom corners of Braum's card were the totality of his stats, but in actuality buffs act like auras that are attached to the card and those stats are just the live result of base stats + buffs.
Aww. Poor kitty. :-(
Rimetusk Shaman in generally is pretty gross right now. I kinda wish they either made its target random or dropped it to 4 mana but it instead targets "weakest" enemy. It's getting a TON of play right now, especially contrasting it to Minotaur Reckoner which has a better body and stuns which is strictly better than frostbite but because its effect is constrained to "smallest" it usually ends up getting chumped.
I know. Extreme loss aversion: I HATE opening 4th copies from vaults/rewards when I'm still missing so much, which makes me really anxious about crafting a third copy of anything. And it doesn't help that, as you said, this isn't the best meta for a knockoff/budget Jinx deck to begin with. :-P
I'll probably take a more serious look at my options after this week's vault. And probably something around Braum, since he's been performing a lot better for me lately--either buffing my Braum/Garen control deck or taking a leap and experimenting with Braum/Vlad.
So I was playing a Braum deck against a SI/Noxus aggro spiders and falling behind fast. They played a Frenzied Skitterer, I figure: OK, sure they got buffed but my Braum went from 0/5 to 0/5 so no big deal. I want to take some power off the board so on my turn I challenge the weakest spider, a 3/1, and I play Radiant Strike--except Braum only becomes a 0/6, so the spider lives. :-( Apparently, even though it said 0 attack, it appreciated that it should have been at -1 from the Skitterer so the attack portion of my buff cancelled out. Quickly got overrun by fearsomes a few rounds later.
Just thought I would share that bit of experience.
In general: for spells and effects that do multiple things, the game tends to err on the side of doing what it can and NOT fizzling--e.g., if I play an Augmented Experimenter to deal 3, discard, and draw, but then my opponent interrupts with a Glimpse Beyond on the damage target, I still discard and draw.
The exceptions I know about are Vile Feast (no healing or spiderling if target dies first) and Glimpse Beyond (no cards if target dies first), and I think that's because the concept is that the target is specifically fueling the other results.
My thoughts:
I agree with everything everyone has said.
The one thing no one's mentioned: showing how many shards & wildcards you own in all the HUDs, not just the Store. Or at least in the deckbuilding / card viewing screens. I saw a mockup of this somewhere--I think reddit?--and it looked really slick, but I searched for it just now and couldn't find it.
This. I am going to miss this guy SOOO freaking much. :-
Nice to see someone making elites work. Those had a lot of buzz and theorycrafting pre-beta, but I haven't seen much of them since.
I could see either dropping the Fearsome tag or (even better) lowering his attack from 8 to ~4 so that his OTK potential circa Frank's example is reduced from 15 HP to 9 HP--you're getting tons of value from his Played and Last Whisper effects; you shouldn't need vanilla stats as well.