Tempest Hype

Lots of hype this week, not the least of which involves the fact that GenCon is only a week away.  I'm hoping to grab the Five Tribes expansion, and spend hours in the Paizo room and at the Hex Booth.  Speaking of Hex, Armies of Myth Officially Launches today (barring any last minute bugs).  All the information on this patch, which includes extended art and chest opening, is on the link above.  With the chests, we're going to get a new surge of equipment to try out in the Arena, so between the new set and equipment combos I'll have some more frequent articles coming up with my thoughts on that.  Prophecy and Shift look very fun, and getting a new array of champions is also exciting.  

The other big news was Guild Wars 2 finally started up their Elite Specialization teasers this week again with what looks like the Tempest... and oh does it look awesome.  

It looks from the picture like they'll be getting a Warhorn, which I'm perfectly fine with thematically.  Main hand swords would be awesome for people with the time to craft Bolt, but since I'm not one of those people, I'll just try to save up for the Tempest Warhorn skin instead.  Full information on this specialization, including skills and play-style, should be coming out later this week.

The last of the Big 3 games that I play, League of Legends, is also not-so-gently nudging me with the Gangplank rework, pirate skins, and the Burning Tides event, which will feature the Bilgewater Map reskin of the Howling Abyss.  ARAM is basically all I play anymore (I haven't even done my ranked matches yet this season), so any excuse to break out a specific champion makes me happy.  CLG is also doing well in the last half of the split, winning an incredibly close game against Cloud 9, while TSM seems to have inherited their second-half slump.  The last week before playoffs is this weekend, and I plan on celebrating the end of my night audit job watching CLG dismantle Dignitas and Team 8.  Don't let me down (they'll let me down).

Last little plug for an indie game I picked up last week: Guild of Dungeoneering on Steam.  It's a dungeon-explorer RPG with a card-based battle system and neat little stick-figure aesthetic.  I'm about two-thirds of the way through, having just unlocked the last tier of champions.  I rushed to the Troubador, which is really fun to play.  My personal problem with roguelikes and games with perma-death is I always grow a bit too attached to the characters, so now I'm stuck with either using my Troubador and risking him dying or sending my mid-level guys instead, which probably can't handle these stupid dwarves.

I'll have a full wrap-up of the Armies of Myth patch for Hex later in the week, along with some screens of all the awesomeness I find in my chests.  Hopefully they'll have some people data-mining the chest data for equipment and alternate art cards.  

Respected Achiever

Some quick GW2 news: After a few years of on-and-off playing, I finally got enough achievement points to unlock the Respected Achiever title and the Massive Achievement Chest, along with 15 gold, 10 laurels, 400 gems, and a sexy Zenith Recurve Bow Skin.

I also snagged a Total Makeover Kit out of a Black Lion Chest and used it on my Ranger.  I didn't put too much time into him when I made him, but since I've been playing PvP more often I wanted a cooler look.  Sylvari have some interesting "hair" options.  They're also going to be a big focus in Heart of Thorns, so I might play him more in PvE, though the stigma against Rangers it strong.  Anyways, here he is Sophino Dawnstrider in all his pink flowery glory:

Aside from my dailies I probably won't play too much GW2 in favor of Hex drafts since you get Concubunnies .  I'm still slowly making Mawdry progress too.  I'm also working on a series of articles called Stacks from the Past, where I look at some of the decks I've played in Magic, Pokémon, and other CCGs.

Mawdrey's Quest

There was pretty awesome news this week regarding precursors in the Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2.  For those not up to speed, the new system of post-80 progression (80 being the level cap) is Mastery points, which give you various perks to gameplay without ostensibly making your character more powerful.  These Masteries include things like hang-gliding, learning native languages to talk with certain NPCs, and interacting with mushrooms to gain buffs.  One of the big ones was a Mastery Line that allows players to craft precursor items, extremely rare exotic weapons that are required to craft a Legendary Weapon.

Legendaries are on the same power level as Ascended Weapons, but provide some cool effects to your character when you have them equipped.  The longbow Kudzu will generate a arc of flowers whenever you fire it, and the scepter Meteorlogicus will cause your character to leave a trail of clouds and lightning in their wake as they tromp across Tyria.  In addition to footfall and attack animations, they each have a unique look.   Getting them is a grind, but the reward is worth it.  The most frustrating requirement has always been the precursor item, which is a random and extremely rare drop unless you fork over hundreds of gold, often over one thousand, in the auction house.

The new system of precursor crafting changes a lot of this.  In addition to making them all account bound, the Precursor Crafting mastery will require players to go around Tyria and perform various tasks.  It's a grind, but it something that will uproot people from high level zones (even more so than dailies, map completion, and other events in GW2 already do) and get them back into those mid level zones which are often more sparsely populated.

A good example (perhaps itself a precursor) of this type of lengthy quest is one I'm completing right now, the Quest for Mawdrey.  Mawdrey is an item that was implemented with the Living World storylines in Season 2.  Playing through the roughly ninety minute long story chapter rewards you with, among other things, a Mysterious Seed, which you can cultivate in crafted Clay Pots with Magically Infused Plant Food to grow a malicious vine back-piece.  In addition to the backpiece, you get another unique item that will eat Bloodstone Dust (an item that quickly accumulates from completing world events) a few times each day and turn it into a bag of good quality loot.

Running through the Living World Story and getting the Seed is the easy part.  After that, you have to farm Geodes in an area of Dry Top to buy the recipes for your Clay Pot and Plant Food, which then requires a Master Crafter to use.  You'll need several piles of Plant Food, of varying varieties, and each serving can only be crafted once per day.  Growing Mawdrey also requires some steps that force players back into mid-level zones in often overlooked areas of the map.  These steps include purifying a vial of Glacial Water with a shard of ice found in frozen ruins, and infusing Leyline Dust at an Asuran Labratory located inside of a volcano.  Even though I have full map completion on Sebastian, my main, the Volcano Lab was a new experience for me that I didn't find when I was leveling, so getting to return and run through it made me feel like a zone I technically had 100% on still had some new things for me to discover.  And it's that sort of experience that really makes a game immersive.

It's going to take me a while before I complete Mawdrey, and with the Feast of Abundance coming to Hex, I'm going to have to take some time out from the Silverwastes to hop into a few drafts and snag a playset of alternate art Concubunnies.  I'm also going to try to run a Shin'hare deck through the Arena now that I have a few copies of Nori and some Roshi equipment.  Even if you don't plan on drafting, make sure you log in to Hex for the promotional sleeves, and try your hand at the Frost Arena if you haven't.   

Potential Intensifies

This weekend is shaping up to be a perfect storm of gaming for me, so this is going to be a more sporadic update from me as opposed to the general Hex strategy article.  Hex is certainly headlining the weekend though.  If you haven't read the official news, you can find it here, but I am proud to announce that I can finally add the PvE tag to the blog.  The short of it is Cryptozoic is opening a Test Server that players currently in the Beta will have access to for the weekend.  The Test Server will be available from Thursday, February 5th to Saturday, February 7th with mirrored accounts that feature your current collections, but with the added bonus of 20,000 platinum and some PvE cards.

If you haven't played Hex since Alpha and want to try out some of the new cards in Shattered Destiny without having to cough up the cash, that 20,000 platinum will easily buy 100 boosters (and maybe a few Primal Packs) for you to tear through.  You won't get to keep the cards you buy during the Test Weekend, but on Saturday at 3:00pm Eastern Time there will be a Free Sealed tournament for those in the Test Server.  Participants will get a Free Constructed Queue Entry Ticket and up to 10 Shattered Destiny Boosters based on the number of wins you manage to get in the tournament.  This is another massive stress test for the Tournament Servers as they look to expand the maximum tournament entry beyond its current 128 players.  

The main reason people will be (and should be) playing is that PvE content will finally be available to test.  Players will be able to build PvE decks and equip gear to their champions.  Gear gives bonuses to certain cards in your deck while they are equipped to your champion.  Each card has between one and three pieces of equipment specifically tied to it, but each champion can only hold six pieces of gear, which adds another strategic wrinkle to deck building in a similar way that gems and socketed cards do.

The last and biggest addition is that participants will get to test out the Frost Ring Arena.  We've been getting bits and pieces of the arena sprinkled in Friday Updates for the past few months, but this will be the first time we actually get to try it out for ourselves.  Hex has warned that this is very much an unfinished version of the Arena, and the new UI and improved AI won't be incorporated.  For those that haven't faced the AI in its current state, it will do random things like play Suppressive Fire with no targets or Bombsmith their own Troop.  It has improved somewhat since Alpha, but it is far from where it needs to be to make PvE an enjoyable experience.

This sort of launch is the best thing Hex could have done for me personally.  I've wanted to test out the Equipment and PvE Cards in Hex for ages, since that is what really drew me into the game, and where I think the game really stands out from other CCGs.  While the MMO part of this MMOTCG has seemed to ebb further and further away, the full deck building experience was cut short with the exclusion of equipment.  Getting to have access to equipment for a weekend of hands on testing will help innovators to find combos that don't exist in PvP, and with the community compiling lists of equipment we see, it will give players something to talk about long after the Test has ended.  I want Hex to take their time with the Dungeons and Raids, particularly the AI, because I want a good degree of polish when this content is officially launched so I can enjoy it without having to worry about getting bogged down by bugs.  But I also want to try this stuff out while it's still broken and tinker with it, so the Test Server option is the best of both worlds for me.

If you don't feel like playing but still want a peek at what's going on with this Frost Arena Test, there's a day long stream from some of the personalities in the Hex community on Wednesday (today) on the HexTCG Twitch Channel.  I will also try to stream the Arena during the weekend if/when I have time on my Twitch Channel.

Guild Wars 2

This past weekend was also a big one for Guild Wars 2.  At PAX they announced the first official expansion Heart of Thorns to be released later this year.  I played this game quite a bit the first year it was out, but gradually phased out of it do to school and lack of people to play with.  My friend recently picked up the game when it was on sale for $10 during the announcement of the expansion, and I've been teaming up to carry his little Asura through the leveling process (which isn't long, and is actually very enjoyable).  I have some Season 2 Living World stuff to catch up on and three more characters to get to 80 (My Elementalist, Mesmer, and Guardian are already there).  It's been a while since I've played, and in September they overhauled the daily system.  You get rewards just for logging in, and only have to do three relatively easy to complete daily quests, so despite the Arena I'll probably be peeking my head in there during the weekend as well.

LCS

While I'm playing in the Hex Sealed Tournament on Saturday I will have the NA LCS on Twitch in the second monitor.  This split is shaping up very well and I'm 2-0 in my Fantasy League, thanks in part to focusing on CLG (3-1) and SK Gaming (4-0) during the draft (first pick Aphromoo baby).  I started following it pretty heavily at the tail end of Season 3, and since I always cheer for the eternal underdog, I'm hoping CLG finishes well.  They have a lot of strong players on their team with the addition of Zionspartan in Top Lane and XSmithie in the Jungle.  CLG fans are wary of being disappointed by a team with unlimited potential but that always finds a way to fall short, though (and it's been said before) this might just be the year.  

The two newest teams to the NA LCS, Team 8 (2-2) and Gravity (3-1), have also been doing surprisingly well, stealing games off TSM (3-1) and Cloud 9 (1-3) respectively in the first week.  Cloud 9 has been performing very poorly this split, though they are facing Team 8 and Coast (1-3) this week, so if they are still the caliber of team from Worlds they should be able to even up their record after this weekend.  Dignitas is another veteran team that has been performing poorly, and it's unlikely to turn around soon.  Their jungler Crumbz stepped down from the team earlier this week, and they face TSM and Liquid (2-2), two very strong teams looking to cement their place among the top teams.  

Matches to watch this week:

Thursday 2/5 Match 4: Roccat (1-3) vs Giants (2-2)

Friday 2/6, Match 5: Elements (3-1) vs SK Gaming (4-0)

Saturday 2/7, Match 2: Cloud9 (1-3) vs Team8 (2-2)

Sunday 2/8, Match 2: CLG (3-1) vs Gravity (3-1)

Full Schedule

I didn't even get into the new chapter of Telltale's Game of Thrones that launched yesterday, which I probably won't get to play until after the weekend.  I also haven't mentioned a few board games I had the opportunity to play recently (Kanban, Archipelago, Fields of Arle), but that requires its own article.  Next week I'll probably have an a reaction to the Frost Arena Test Server.  

Card Images from Hex TCG Browser