I'm asking this because obviously part of the game designers intent was to have decks be built around champions stronger effects. As of now, I am seeing plenty of decks do extremely well with absolutely no champions in them - and it's more than I'd honestly even like to see. What's everyone's thoughts on this?
As an example, here is a video I made of a very common Ionia/Demacia deck running around right now with zero champs: Ionia/Demacia Deck.
In general, I think they're fine--I personally think they taste bland, but I don't have anything inherently against them. Specifically regarding the elusive-buff deck from your video: I suspect your success is most attributed to elusive being more powerful than the developers intended to the point where any of the existing Ionia or Demacia champions would be a downgrade right now. It's very easy to envision a world where sneaking in nexus damage from elusives isn't as reliable (e.g., maybe they make a new rule where all the attack damage from elusives is halved, or maybe they add in allies that can block elusives but don't attack as elusive), and all of a sudden you are considering adding either Zed and Lucian for additional early pressure or Garen and Lux to give you some late-game value.
The other champion-less deck I read about pre-launch but haven't actually seen in-game was Swim's Frejlord / Shadow Isles control deck. Looking online, it looks like he's updated it to include Braum, so I'm guessing even he is now thinking its better to squeeze in some champions if you can make them fit.
First off, I think you can divorce your comments regarding random upgrades from your feelings concerning the rewards' statistical distribution. If tomorrow Riot declared "FortyDust is right; from now on, Level 14 Vaults will always give exactly 1 random epic, 10 rares, and 25 commons with no more chances of upgrades", I don't think you'd be any happier next Tuesday than you were this Tuesday. Reading between the lines: I think you're really just looking for taller quality and less quantity--e.g., if they tripled all their percentages but quartered the total number of cards, I think you'd like that. "Upgrade" is really just the flashy name they gave to the same RNG mechanic present in all other CCGs.
Personally, I have mixed feelings. I actually really like the way weekly vaults are effectively vomiting commons with a few rares and the occasional greater: it means that casual and F2P players are going to have a mechanism for easily growing their collection and to support any random champions they open, which right now is kinda a problem. I've lost count of how many Elise, Jinx, Darius, and Zed I'm seeing at low ladder just because its so much better for new players to recycle the starter packages than to branch out. And I like how the vault rewards taper out past Level 10: that prevents hardcore players from just using it to get that much further ahead. That said, I too and starting to feel my enthusiasm wane with regards to my return on investment re: how hard I work towards a particular goal with what rewards I actually receive. Filling out the collection is nice, but at the same time they are meaningless without a few tent poles to build new decks around. In particular, I am especially disenchanted with the region-dedicated tracks right now: their quality is extremely uneven, and they give way too many wildcards for my taste. Yes, I realize how that contradicts what I wrote just 4 sentences ago--I did say I have mixed feelings.
This is actually not true. There are several ways to get duplicate Champions on the board at the same time.
So you're only forbidden from playing duplicates from your hand (as they turn into signature spells), but you can create copies of ones that are already on the field?
I think the token is much better than a random champion since expanditions are fun and you get the random champion in the end but they said in the level 10 vaults.. wonder if they are in the level 13 vaults... looking forward to tomorrow to actually get a nice amount of cards to try new decks
Regarding champions from vaults: from what I can tell, you're never guaranteed a champion, but everything has a random chance at upgrades and higher levels give more stuff so statistically you improve your odds. That said, I'm staring at these numbers and I don't see how anyone actually gets a champion vault in practice, since even the diamond chests only have basic capsules which start with 4 commons and 1 rare. E.g., the odds of hitting a basic capsule -> epic capsule upgrade are 10% and then hitting the single epic from the capsule for a -> Rarity + 1 is 10% for 1% total chance of a random champion per module? If that's true, then the difference of getting at least 1 champion at Level 13 versus Level 10 is 8.6% versus 5.9%--hardly anything to write home about.
I'm starting to think more and more that the only viable way to get 3 champions of a kind is to buy champion wildcards with real world cash, which is kinda a bummer.
A quick question. Today we can open the vault chest but I haven't managed to get to level 10 yet. I should be able to grind out some exp today and then open it at level 10?
I think last week is done--there was a timer on it, implying everyone rolls over at the same second. But look on the bright side: now you can get a jump towards level 10 for next Tuesday!
I also don't get the 3 expedition thing, I used my token and completed my first expedition but I didn't get any other run
Yeah that was my bad--I thought I saw an in-game message when I popped my token about getting 3 runs but its 1 token for 1 run / 2 trials. 3 is coincidentally also the soft-limit for number of expedition per week (i.e., if you're buying extra tokens with gold or shards); for your 4th and on they dramatically reduce the rewards.
Thanks for posting this. FYI, I don't think that last tally screen is accurate. It shows a total of 27 common, 12 rare, 4 epic, and 0 champions. I'm not sure exactly how its trying to count; here are my tallies excluding extras & shards:
I can't count how many times I've played smarter than my opponent resulting in having a massive lead on field with close to equal cards in hand, then they play The Ruination, and suddenly we're only equal playing field, 6+ rounds of work to best the opponent successfully and its demolished entirely by a single card, it ruins the skill in every match that card is had, the opponent will often times win from the RNG of pulling that card, despite being bested every round up to him being able to play that card. .
I would respectfully argue that from your opponents' point of view, they were the ones that played smarter. They feinted out the minimum amount of minions to get you to commit to the board and reserved true threats until after the board reset. Had you either reserved some of your big threats too or attacked more aggressively such that they weren't able to wait for the perfect time to play Ruination, then this strategy would not have worked as well.
I do agree that I find Shadow Isles a little awkward in that it has a great combination of aggro + control. Flavor-wise I get it--they're the creepy death guys so they grow hordes of spiders and kill things and are empowered when things die--I'm just not comfortable with their overall power level relative to the other regions.
Your rise through the ranks starts with the Beta Season, which will last until launch. At the end of the season, you’ll earn an icon reward based on your highest tier reached to commemorate your first climb in Ranked LoR.
...But yeah, hopefully there are some cards at the end of this too.
I dunno didn't pay attention to that it might be but I didn't notice, another bug is that wild cards usage take a long time to update on screen.
Definitely try to look for it when you open your vault today; I'm curious to see how widespread it is. I was in the same boat as you until I started questioning why I was so deep into Shadow Isles progression yet still missing so many common cards.
Nah, that sounds pretty normal to me! Expeditions are great fun that isn't the usual constructed netdeck hell, so getting in for free at least once a week is awesome.
If you or Neonangel are ever at a lull where you're trying to brainstorm topics for new articles: I could really appreciate something about Expedition drafting strategies.
I really don't enjoy draft formats, so I would happily trade the token 😄
Try giving it a few shots. I'm kinda with you--I'd rather play the same refined deck repeatedly which I can learn and tweak--but after I realized what I did wrong on my first trial I enjoyed my second a lot more. (Hint: you really want cards that are going to give value, so cards like Avarosan Hearthguard and Avarosan Trapper are crazy.) It's definitely much better than Hearthstone, Artifact, or MtG's drafts. Still not my favorite format, but I could see myself doing the 2 trials a week to convert the token into random champion + more.
@Oldmansanns - If I were designing Kog he'd probably be a low-cost, low-stats champion (I'm thinking 3 mana 3/1 right now, with the 1 health symbolising the typical League strategy of dogpiling the Kog every fight), with Last Breath: I strike anything (symbolising his passive). He'd have a secondary effect which embodies the Living Artillery - specifically something which triggers while he's on the bench, to symbolise the range advantage. Maybe whenever an ally strikes an enemy follower, I deal 1 damage to it. The level up effect would make him a 4/2 and give him +1 damage on the Living Artillery effect. Having written that and reflected, however, I suspect I'm cramming too much into that package...
LOL yes his value needs to have some type of awesome Last Breath--how did I miss that!
At the moment the only counters to Battering Ram are Noxian Guillotine (if damaged), Vengeance or Ruination. Two of which are... also Noxus based.
I agree that a growing 4/12 with no handicaps is probably overstated for 6 mana (its more than double Darius' health for the same mana cost!), but I'll disagree with this "only counters" bit. Demacia has Detain and Purify. Freljord has She Who Wanders and frostbite into either Winter's BreadthBADCARDNAME or Rimfang WolfBADCARDNAME. Ionia has stuns, recalls, and Death Mark. Shadow Isles has Vengeance, RuinationBADCARDNAME, and Rhasa the Sunderer (not sure which of those you thought were Noxus). Noxus has damage + Noxian Guillotine that you mentioned plus Culling Strike if you get it off the same turn and Reckoning if you get it before the next attack. P/Z is really the only region that doesn't have a viable answer unless you count Thermogenic Beam (I don't); they have small burst damage like Get ExcitedBADCARDNAME and Mystic Shot but its not great against a fat body.
I will grant that Shadow Isle's control tools feel was more powerful than any of the other regions right now, but they are trying to make each region feel like it has unique solutions to solve problems and I really respect that.
I think this has been to me for a while now, but I definitely noticed it this evening. I'd been seeing that "you already have this card, converting into shards" message a fair amount after opening my regional chests/capsules, which I chalked up to conventional bad luck / "kettle never boils" phenomenon. However I saw it this evening with one of the commons from my Shadow Isles Champions Chest, and I thought that was really odd because I'm still missing so many that I'm trying to make my ephemeral deck for, and when I went to look for which darned SI common card I was overdrawing I saw I had 2x, 1x, and 0x for lots of my SI cards but no 3x.
I put in a ticket; I was just wondering if anyone else had noticed anything similar.
I dunno, man--looks pretty OK to me. Only things I can think of:
I really hate Crimson Aristocrat. I know it fits with your theme on paper, but in practice I don't think she's going to line up well. Paying 2 mana to take 1 health off an ally at slow speed really hurts. I kinda think she's unplayable unless you're hitting a regen, overwhelm, fearsome, and/or elusive target, and while you have a few I think most of the time you play her she's just going to chipping health off something you want to stay alive a little longer.
Conversely, Transfusion is a REALLY good fit, because you can burst it in as a combat trick, and many times you'll be effectively buffing BOTH targets.
Those Feral Mystics are a little awkward (you shouldn't need help with end game; you've either scaled or you haven't) except I don't know what you replace them with. I was thinking maybe Starlit Seer, based on all the buff spells you're already running? Or House Spider, because its good early chump blocking with the mid game ability to level Vlad? Or Avarosan Sentry, because it also cycles a draw? Omen Hawk, because its already a solid early game play but it also helps with your gameplan?
Consider adding a single copy of Battle Fury--it's surprisingly easy to turn that +8 attack into nexus damage, especially with all the overwhelms you have.
Hmm... so I can spend ~$600 to "upgrade" my opponents' churlish behavior from spamming emotes and rage-quitting to virtually slamming cards down and virtually flipping the table in my face? You will perhaps understand if I am not more excited.
Unless I'm crazy, "Rally" seems to be an absolutely broken keyword and that's what I've designed my deck around with Demacia/Iona regions. It's working great so far.
Rally is very good, but I don't know if I'd call it broken. It's only useful if you've found a way to get ahead on board (or have lots of elusive), and it's priced fairly high and (as I recall) only ever available at slow speed. I would draw comparisons to Savage Roar, Leeroy Jenkins, and Zilliax in HS: they are great cards which will swing games if you already have a wide / 6 off lethal / big mech unit on board, respectively, but smart opponents will know to play around them and deny this to you.
I am not an active LoL player by any conceivable definition of the word, but I'd love to see any and/or all the following, with my thoughts on an appropriate mechanic:
Kog-maw (something with Living Artillery dealing damage; maybe a fleeting copy on strike except that sounds too much like Ezreal)
Vi (gains Excessive Force cards which give Vi +damage and overwhelm)
Dr. Mondo (regeneration; deal damage to self + all battling enemies)
Cho'Gath (self-buffs after every kill),
Gnar (deal X damage to level up to mega form; mega form is a 10/10 tough overwhelm but reverts back after striking)
EDIT: no, I got it: Shaco, and he summons a shadow clone like Zed except to the opponent they look identical and they don't deal ANY damage so the opponent has to guess/block the real one. After the real Shaco scores 2 successful Nexus Strikes, he levels up to gain double strike and now summons 2 fake clones.
In general, I think they're fine--I personally think they taste bland, but I don't have anything inherently against them. Specifically regarding the elusive-buff deck from your video: I suspect your success is most attributed to elusive being more powerful than the developers intended to the point where any of the existing Ionia or Demacia champions would be a downgrade right now. It's very easy to envision a world where sneaking in nexus damage from elusives isn't as reliable (e.g., maybe they make a new rule where all the attack damage from elusives is halved, or maybe they add in allies that can block elusives but don't attack as elusive), and all of a sudden you are considering adding either Zed and Lucian for additional early pressure or Garen and Lux to give you some late-game value.
The other champion-less deck I read about pre-launch but haven't actually seen in-game was Swim's Frejlord / Shadow Isles control deck. Looking online, it looks like he's updated it to include Braum, so I'm guessing even he is now thinking its better to squeeze in some champions if you can make them fit.
First off, I think you can divorce your comments regarding random upgrades from your feelings concerning the rewards' statistical distribution. If tomorrow Riot declared "FortyDust is right; from now on, Level 14 Vaults will always give exactly 1 random epic, 10 rares, and 25 commons with no more chances of upgrades", I don't think you'd be any happier next Tuesday than you were this Tuesday. Reading between the lines: I think you're really just looking for taller quality and less quantity--e.g., if they tripled all their percentages but quartered the total number of cards, I think you'd like that. "Upgrade" is really just the flashy name they gave to the same RNG mechanic present in all other CCGs.
Personally, I have mixed feelings. I actually really like the way weekly vaults are effectively vomiting commons with a few rares and the occasional greater: it means that casual and F2P players are going to have a mechanism for easily growing their collection and to support any random champions they open, which right now is kinda a problem. I've lost count of how many Elise, Jinx, Darius, and Zed I'm seeing at low ladder just because its so much better for new players to recycle the starter packages than to branch out. And I like how the vault rewards taper out past Level 10: that prevents hardcore players from just using it to get that much further ahead. That said, I too and starting to feel my enthusiasm wane with regards to my return on investment re: how hard I work towards a particular goal with what rewards I actually receive. Filling out the collection is nice, but at the same time they are meaningless without a few tent poles to build new decks around. In particular, I am especially disenchanted with the region-dedicated tracks right now: their quality is extremely uneven, and they give way too many wildcards for my taste. Yes, I realize how that contradicts what I wrote just 4 sentences ago--I did say I have mixed feelings.
Correct.
Regarding champions from vaults: from what I can tell, you're never guaranteed a champion, but everything has a random chance at upgrades and higher levels give more stuff so statistically you improve your odds. That said, I'm staring at these numbers and I don't see how anyone actually gets a champion vault in practice, since even the diamond chests only have basic capsules which start with 4 commons and 1 rare. E.g., the odds of hitting a basic capsule -> epic capsule upgrade are 10% and then hitting the single epic from the capsule for a -> Rarity + 1 is 10% for 1% total chance of a random champion per module? If that's true, then the difference of getting at least 1 champion at Level 13 versus Level 10 is 8.6% versus 5.9%--hardly anything to write home about.
https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/741-what-rewards-drop-from-vault-chests-in-legends-of-runeterra
I'm starting to think more and more that the only viable way to get 3 champions of a kind is to buy champion wildcards with real world cash, which is kinda a bummer.
I think last week is done--there was a timer on it, implying everyone rolls over at the same second. But look on the bright side: now you can get a jump towards level 10 for next Tuesday!
Yeah that was my bad--I thought I saw an in-game message when I popped my token about getting 3 runs but its 1 token for 1 run / 2 trials. 3 is coincidentally also the soft-limit for number of expedition per week (i.e., if you're buying extra tokens with gold or shards); for your 4th and on they dramatically reduce the rewards.
Thanks for posting this. FYI, I don't think that last tally screen is accurate. It shows a total of 27 common, 12 rare, 4 epic, and 0 champions. I'm not sure exactly how its trying to count; here are my tallies excluding extras & shards:
I would respectfully argue that from your opponents' point of view, they were the ones that played smarter. They feinted out the minimum amount of minions to get you to commit to the board and reserved true threats until after the board reset. Had you either reserved some of your big threats too or attacked more aggressively such that they weren't able to wait for the perfect time to play Ruination, then this strategy would not have worked as well.
I do agree that I find Shadow Isles a little awkward in that it has a great combination of aggro + control. Flavor-wise I get it--they're the creepy death guys so they grow hordes of spiders and kill things and are empowered when things die--I'm just not comfortable with their overall power level relative to the other regions.
...must...resist...the urge to crunch probabilities for champions at each vault level...
They did say this at https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/open-beta-faq
...But yeah, hopefully there are some cards at the end of this too.
Definitely try to look for it when you open your vault today; I'm curious to see how widespread it is. I was in the same boat as you until I started questioning why I was so deep into Shadow Isles progression yet still missing so many common cards.
If you or Neonangel are ever at a lull where you're trying to brainstorm topics for new articles: I could really appreciate something about Expedition drafting strategies.
Try giving it a few shots. I'm kinda with you--I'd rather play the same refined deck repeatedly which I can learn and tweak--but after I realized what I did wrong on my first trial I enjoyed my second a lot more. (Hint: you really want cards that are going to give value, so cards like Avarosan Hearthguard and Avarosan Trapper are crazy.) It's definitely much better than Hearthstone, Artifact, or MtG's drafts. Still not my favorite format, but I could see myself doing the 2 trials a week to convert the token into random champion + more.
LOL yes his value needs to have some type of awesome Last Breath--how did I miss that!
I agree that a growing 4/12 with no handicaps is probably overstated for 6 mana (its more than double Darius' health for the same mana cost!), but I'll disagree with this "only counters" bit. Demacia has Detain and Purify. Freljord has She Who Wanders and frostbite into either Winter's BreadthBADCARDNAME or Rimfang WolfBADCARDNAME. Ionia has stuns, recalls, and Death Mark. Shadow Isles has Vengeance, RuinationBADCARDNAME, and Rhasa the Sunderer (not sure which of those you thought were Noxus). Noxus has damage + Noxian Guillotine that you mentioned plus Culling Strike if you get it off the same turn and Reckoning if you get it before the next attack. P/Z is really the only region that doesn't have a viable answer unless you count Thermogenic Beam (I don't); they have small burst damage like Get ExcitedBADCARDNAME and Mystic Shot but its not great against a fat body.
I will grant that Shadow Isle's control tools feel was more powerful than any of the other regions right now, but they are trying to make each region feel like it has unique solutions to solve problems and I really respect that.
I think this has been to me for a while now, but I definitely noticed it this evening. I'd been seeing that "you already have this card, converting into shards" message a fair amount after opening my regional chests/capsules, which I chalked up to conventional bad luck / "kettle never boils" phenomenon. However I saw it this evening with one of the commons from my Shadow Isles Champions Chest, and I thought that was really odd because I'm still missing so many that I'm trying to make my ephemeral deck for, and when I went to look for which darned SI common card I was overdrawing I saw I had 2x, 1x, and 0x for lots of my SI cards but no 3x.
I put in a ticket; I was just wondering if anyone else had noticed anything similar.
I dunno, man--looks pretty OK to me. Only things I can think of:
Hmm... so I can spend ~$600 to "upgrade" my opponents' churlish behavior from spamming emotes and rage-quitting to virtually slamming cards down and virtually flipping the table in my face? You will perhaps understand if I am not more excited.
Rally is very good, but I don't know if I'd call it broken. It's only useful if you've found a way to get ahead on board (or have lots of elusive), and it's priced fairly high and (as I recall) only ever available at slow speed. I would draw comparisons to Savage Roar, Leeroy Jenkins, and Zilliax in HS: they are great cards which will swing games if you already have a wide / 6 off lethal / big mech unit on board, respectively, but smart opponents will know to play around them and deny this to you.
I am not an active LoL player by any conceivable definition of the word, but I'd love to see any and/or all the following, with my thoughts on an appropriate mechanic:
EDIT: no, I got it: Shaco, and he summons a shadow clone like Zed except to the opponent they look identical and they don't deal ANY damage so the opponent has to guess/block the real one. After the real Shaco scores 2 successful Nexus Strikes, he levels up to gain double strike and now summons 2 fake clones.