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So I still haven't 100% beaten the campaign (Wiktor is giving me trouble, and grinding out the gnome quest is tedious) but I wanted to write out a couple of particular appreciations and un-appreciations. The Good: I'm really impressed with how they've managed to translate the feel of a dungeon-crawling RPG into the card format. I'm sure it's been done already, but this is my first experience with this sort of thing. The challenges are varied enough that you may have to tweak your deck for a particular dungeon in order to have a good shot against everything inside, but it seems like there's always a potential approach that lies within the appropriate shards and flavor for a given race/class. I'm playing a Coyotle Mage, which I gather may make it more of an uphill battle for me than most, so maybe this doesn't apply to people who can ram through most encounters with Righteous Paladin cheese. But for me, it's mostly a fair challenge. Beyond that, some of the ways they've translated particular concepts, scenarios, etc. into the Hex rules are pretty cool--I'm thinking of things like the soldiers who start out behind a barricade, or the zombies who will be distracted as long as they have something to feast on (and the battle starts in a room full of bodies, i.e. a pre-stocked crypt for the AI, so it's a little while before you have to worry about them). It's cool when they manage to set up the interaction of cards, powers, etc. to create an emergent situation that is clearly connected to the fluff for an encounter, but also an appropriate mechanical challenge. The zenith of this for me so far is probably the Inferno Goliath fight. It's a case where the game breaks its own rules a little bit more than I'd like by not giving you any indication whether or when the phase change is going to happen--compare to that one spirit in Devonshire Keep, I think, where her charge power clearly lets you know that you better be ready for some sort of form shift, even if you don't know exactly what it's going to be. A little bit of text in the passive about the 25-or-less condition would be more fair in terms of the sort of information the player normally has access to. But overall, that's how you do the classic MMO multiple-phase fight by the rules of Hex. The Not So Good: RNG. Now, I realize that there's going to be some variance in terms of draws, playing first, etc., and you can't really get away from that without radically changing the concept of the game. I'm not talking about that sort of variance. I'm talking about poo poo where there's straight up a dice roll. I don't know what other races or classes have, but as I said, I play a Coyotle mage, so I have at least two: the charge power, which can give you (before talents) 3-5 magic points at random, and one of my spells, which is a sweeper that deals 0-3 damage at random. The charge power is annoying, and I'd like to see it changed, but it's not really absolutely infuriating. There are other ways to gain magic points, and the way it ends up working is that you just press the button as often as possible and you at least get something each time. You might occasionally lose a game that you could have stayed in had you rolled a bit more on one (or more!) charge activations, and that doesn't really seem like good game design to me, but you'll never feel like the game took your money (figuratively speaking) and then laughed in your face. The damage spell (tornado or something), on the other hand, has brought me about as close to a ragequit as anything in the PVE campaign. It costs you seven magic points, which isn't trivial since it's the most of any spell so far, and you pay that all upfront (and get the cost increase for subsequent castings of the spell!) before you find out if it's going to do literally anything whatsoever. Making things worse is that if you need it to work, you usually really need it to work since you're facing down a horde of X/1s or X/2s. It really just needs to be a flat 2 damage, which is obviously good but not overpowered given how much investment goes into 7+ magic points--certainly much harder than just casting a Heat Wave in the appropriate deck. You'd lose the 25% hail mary chance against X/3s that you have no other answer to, but on the other hand you'd actually be able to make an informed decision about using it, which seems like a desirable thing for a mechanic in a game of (mostly) skill. If they didn't want to make this change, then it should at least give you something even on a "miss." Things like giving you an elemental troop if it doesn't kill a certain number of enemies, or refunding you a magic point for each enemy troop that's still alive after it resolves, etc. Oh, I thought of another way in which the magic system uses RNG, this one with magic points again. There's a talent that gives you a 50%(?) chance, per spell you know, that you'll start the game with an extra magic point. Now, this is certainly better than not having this talent at all; however, the difference between starting a game with 1 magic point and 4 magic points is really swingy in terms of whether I have a fighting chance against a particular boss or whether I just suck. Just make it a 100% chance. Or, if that's too powerful, give me a 100% +1 magic point for every two spells I know, plus a 50% chance for any odd spell. That at least lets me consistently bank on some amount of bonus.
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Feb 5, 2016 19:03
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Vilgan posted:If RNG bugs you, Coyotl Mage seems like a terrible choice
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Feb 5, 2016 20:42
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Blazing Zero posted:when you play a card game, there are specific random elements you agree to. games adding more rng on top of that, later, isnt what everyone enjoys From a design perspective, I like the fact that the spider thing at least doesn't penalize you beyond giving your opponent dudes. It's easy to imagine a dumber version of the mechanic that didn't let you still draw a "real" card, for example. Also, there's at least some counterplay possible (if only having plans to sweep/outrace a swarm of 1/1s, which one could argue is a good baseline plan anyway). Not trying to tell you your feelings are wrong, by the way. The spiders are a good example of another case where people may be getting more RNG than they signed up for, so it's definitely relevant. It's just that even the spider mechanic is better in my mind than a mechanic that holds the potential for the game to outright say "lol you get nothing." Also not trying to give the impression that I don't love the PVE overall, because I do. I just have some pet peeves on bad design.
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Feb 5, 2016 23:10
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Lots of people are raredrafting and then dropping at deck construction, which means I get to rare draft and get at least a couple of extra packs just by leaving Hex open in the background until at least the second round.  Must still be frustrating for those people who want to play in a proper draft tournament, though 
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Feb 7, 2016 04:39
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Afgad posted:Maybe by stompy you mean huge mean creatures with ridiculous attack/defense? Stompy in Magic usually refers, specifically, to green decks that play low-cost creatures with efficient stats and then use pump spells and creature enhancements on them. Like a turn-1 2/1, turn-2 enchant it for +2/+0 is a pretty classic Stompy opening. To answer the original question, that's a sort of deck you can absolutely make in Hex, and I think it will probably be pretty okay in PvE even. I don't get the sense that it's a tier 1 deck in PvP, but then, it hasn't been a tier 1 deck in Magic for a long time either. 
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Feb 7, 2016 18:52
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goldjas posted:I tried rerolling as a Dwarf Cleric but I actually had an even harder time then I was having as my Necrotic Mage (couldn't get past the Ambling Mound or whatever that battle was called that I got stuck on as a Necrotic Mage for a while, but it stonewalled my Cleric even harder it felt like). Yeah, it seems like one of the major problems is that the best way to tackle the PvE campaign without it being unduly frustrating is to have a broad collection of cards from drafting for months. I know this was the case with my Coyotle Mage. I chalked a bit of that up to having unknowingly picked a "hard mode" character (which is dumb that such a trap exists, but that's a point I've already belabored) but if you're having trouble even with a Cleric, that's probably a bad sign for the balance. On the other hand, I sort of sympathize with the difficulty of designing encounters to be reasonably challenging for a well-stocked player but still accessible for a newbie. I think for my next PvE character I'll try a "no-twink" run, see how far I get before wanting to break something. I've pretty much defeated all the existing campaign content at this point... beat Devonshire, now just gotta save 11 more gnomes and tame a bubblebee. Oh, and beat Armies of Myth 6, but I'm sure I'll need a specially cheesed setup to do that no matter what. (Which isn't a bad thing for a game to have one or two encounters like that.)
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Feb 8, 2016 07:28
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nightwisher posted:Spent 5bux on some plat to nab some cards for my PvE deck, had 200 left over so I thought, gently caress it, lets get a booster and see what my luck is like. FYI, you probably know this but just for anyone to whom it isn't intuitively obvious: you can buy lots of stuff on the AH with gold (free for playing, including playing PvE) in addition to plat. The top-dollar PvP mythics might not be available for gold but you don't need those to beat the PvE content. You can sort the AH listings by currency so you see only stuff that's posted for gold, too.
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Feb 8, 2016 07:46
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Also, I'm not sure what the exact Expected Value of a booster is in Hex, but in Magic it's a pretty terrible idea to just buy and open boosters if you're after specific sorts of cards to improve your deck and I would tend to assume the same is true here. The calculus is probably friendlier to opening boosters if you have no collection whatsoever and need a massive infusion of commons, but still. e: for people who have played both Hearthstone and Hex, how do they compare re: the potential frustration of having to grind up from nothing using PvE? JerryLee fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 18:47
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I agree that it's really odd, all else equal, to advise selling all your pve packs just to buy a pvp pack, but maybe say so in so many words rather that just starting in calling people retards
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Feb 8, 2016 20:44
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Valatar posted:All else is not equal. PvP cards are more valuable on a card by card basis than the PvE cards, by far. Eventually the market for the cards in the adventure packs will be totally saturated and the prices will tank. And you're trading something that you're getting for free on the side for playing for something that can only be had for real cashola. katkillad2 is giving good advice. You seem to be assuming that whatever you get out of the PvP pack will definitely be more valuable than the gold you spent to buy it, which isn't a sure thing at all given the fact that things like vampire kings, angels, etc. are relatively rare and a lot of packs will just have jank. Keep in mind also that, unless I've missed a shift in the conversation, the question we're asking is not "what's the best way to get into #hexfinance" but "what is the best way for a brand-new PvE player to get their struggling PvE deck off the ground?" and it may be absolutely true that trading 45 random cards into 15 random cards is not the answer, at least if we assume you can't rely on winning the lottery. If anything, I'd be more likely to recommend selling the pve packs for 20,000 gold, or whatever it was that you could get for all of them, but then buying cheap singles rather than one Shards pack or whatever. Zurai posted:The campaign doesn't reward just PvE cards because the PvP cards it does reward are basic staple commons that they didn't need to reprint in PvE form. You get 3-4 cards per every other fight or so on average in the campaign. You're not supposed to be able to clear the Piranhas when you first encounter them with a newbie deck. It's intended as a challenge for you to come back to later once you've gotten more cards and a better grasp on the game and what your deck is capable of. They don't focus on race/class centric packs because not everyone wants to play tribal, there isn't that much tribal support to start with, and only giving cards which fit a single theme both accelerates that theme too quickly and makes it so you aren't as tempted to play other themed decks. It also takes more development time. I would love to have at least had the option of picking a "Coyotle pack" every time so I didn't have the completely unhelpful outcome of getting blood orc cards and equipment while playing through the campaign (for example), but at the same time it's not something that really chaps my rear end, it's just "meh, this could be better implemented."
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Feb 8, 2016 22:43
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Zurai posted:Yes, and I would love to have the option of picking an "Angel of Dawn pack" too. Jesus, dude, I know I've made a few iffy comparisons in my time, but in what way is this a logical or helpful comparison to make? "It would be nice if my rewards in the PvE campaign weren't effectively useless for the character I am playing at the time" "Yeah, well, why don't you just ask for free copies of one of the game's most busted legendaries, while you're at it"
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Feb 8, 2016 22:55
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Mages just seem really weak right now. The charitable hypothesis is that they just have a different power curve and everything will be all balanced out once we have access to more areas and can level up to 30 or whatever the level cap is.
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Feb 23, 2016 04:51
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God of Evil Cows posted:Mages in general are actually a very strong class overall, they just struggle a bit in Devonshire keep compared to Clerics. I won't deny that mages have a lot of good stuff on paper, but playing against the AI specifically, I find that I'd rather be a cleric practically every time if it just came down to quality of life. The benefits you mentioned like the extra card and -2 cost are great but it feels like rather than making me stronger, they're just helping me a bit in the struggle to stay alive against the AI's bullshit, if you see the subjective distinction. It's quite possible that I'm playing far from the optimal mage deck, though, so there's that.
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Feb 24, 2016 06:21
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Maybe I'll get more frustrated as I try to go deeper, but after 3? ship combats, it's really not bugging me at all. Hopefully any technical problems with the ship deck or whatever will be fixed, but the basic idea seems sound to me. What ship talents are you taking? I took the entire hull tree at first so that probably helps me get less frustrated with the hull mechanic.
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Dec 7, 2016 20:37
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Maybe I'm missing something, but how do you get back to the first adventure zone after going to the AZ2 map? Or can't you? e: Never mind, you get there by going all the way back to the very first spot on the AZ2 map and exploring. Could have been more intuitive, but 
JerryLee fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Dec 11, 2016 |
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Dec 11, 2016 07:24
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Your pet losing all its previous buffs when you resummon it is something that's very counterintuitive, given that basically nothing else in Hex works that way, and that buffs persisting through death/bounce is in fact one of the game's major interesting points of mechanical distinction from Magic. Yes, I realize that on a technical level it's because the game is creating a new object rather than returning the former instance of your pet to the battlefield from wherever it went, but the point is that it should have been possible to implement it in a way that didn't poop on the flavor fantasy.
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Dec 13, 2016 09:27
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Years of improvement to the client and you still can't do two things at once, like play the campaign or browse the AH while you're in a queue for a draft game. 
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Dec 21, 2016 21:01
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Additionally, if you're looking for ways to 'mill' your opponent to death without stocking their graveyard (in this fight or in general) then Relentless Corruption takes a little while to get going but will do the job. I ended up actually playing Comet Strike against a few of the more annoying graveyard-based AI opponents. If they've spent a long time already jerking themselves off setting up, then it's a great way to ensure that all their bullshit goes away forever regardless of what zone it's currently in.
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Jan 7, 2017 19:51
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Spectral Werewolf posted:I guess put me on the list of people who lost their collections, but now that i'm going through old emails, did I actually lose it May 2016 when they first switched servers? Funny you say that, because I've really enjoyed the PvE so far. Problem is the content doesn't come out very rapidly, but it's not like I'm spending money in the lulls between.
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Sep 15, 2017 17:19
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