Nice word search. Is it a problem with the code to have a word like "OMU"? The chances of those 3 letters being together are high
I do recall that on one of the previous scrambles (I want to say it was "Lux"), there was a case where my puzzle had two possible options but only one counted
They didn't mention this in the patch notes, but apparently the reason why these patches are pushing out is because Riot is declaring a week-long company holiday for the week of August 10th off to “disconnect, recharge, and reboot."
As much as I dislike the delay of get new toys, I have to say I really appreciate them caring about their employees' mental health--especially now during the pandemic when there's so much additional home stress and fear about losing / seeking alternative employment.
So it's safe to say we'll be getting the next expansion in three weeks, which will be the biggest one yet. A full new region with 6 champions and one new champion for each existing region, along with a bunch of followers and spells to go along with them.
I am anticipating 1.8 / Aug 28 to be ONLY the new region, its 5 new champions, and maybe 50-60 followers + spells just for that region. I don't think we're going to get new cards for the current 7 regions until 1.10 / Sept 16, and that they are going to start trickling out at a staggered rate rather than release a full set of +1 champion to every region immediately.
We all know by this point that playing a Quest on turn 1 is a huge downside, so no tempo based quest deck ever succeeded. This is especially damning when your deck is made up of mostly 1-cost minions which drop in efficiency for every turn beyond the first.
This might be outside your definition of tempo, but I considered odd quest warrior to be both tempo-based and disgustingly successful. Fire Plume's Heart had everything Marsh Queen didn't: the flexibility to build a competent deck and to incorporate other non-quest packages (odd & control in this case); single cards which could progress multiple ticks (militia, direhill, and stonehill defender); immediate impact on the board when completed (sulferas), and then the payout also has immediate impact every time you use it (new HP). It's only "limitation" was that the meta was dominated by other even more disgusting decks (odd big spell mage; prince k zoolock, deathstalker Rexxar, etc), so it wasn't as prominent as it would be in the current meta.
The big thing about The Marsh Queen is that she could have been a very neat yet balanced card if Team 5 had been bothered to tweak her at all--e.g.,
If it required playing fewer 1-drops to activate (or even just changing from played to summoned), then you could either spend less deck slots or keep all the 1 drops and be more aggro
If the raptors had rush, then they could at least do something the turn you play them
If Queen Carnassa had taunt, she could be more of a stabilizing element
As-was, she is essentially a mediocre value generator for a deck that by design will have the lowest value in the game to activate the quest. It was a cool concept which they fumbled in execution and then just abandoned to be unplayable.
When you play dozens of matches a day it happens pretty often. And who cares if hecarim dies if you won the match? I fail to see any logic to your last few posts other than writing "Nuh uh" in longer sentences. 4 mana for a 9/6 onslaught that generates 2 more 5/2s is the highest value card in the entire game. And that is not even counting your sharks that just spawned and became 6/1s or your very likely 1-2 soul shepherds that are out if you have no sharks which also buff hecarim and his adds. I very often have my opponent at 10-12 health by turn 4 just from them not wanting to block ephemeral attackers.
You should post your decklist, Cheeky. I just unlocked my 3rd Hecarim from the Spirit Blossom rewards and have been looking for some fun new decks for him.
The point of Ruination is to wipe their board on the defense round when your opponent is low on hand sizebecause you can then vomit an entire hand of cheap and giant sea monsters for your attack turn and its basically an automatic win... I do this quite often with my Hecarim deck.
I agree that Ruination works great in some decks, but those decks are all able to generate multiple attackers by playing a single card (e.g., Hecarim, Kalista, Rekindler, Harrowing, sharks, undying, etc). It's a little harder to be effective in this particular deck because most late rounds you are playing a single sea monster which--unless they really over-committed to the board--they probably can answer by at least playing a chump blocker. That will still work under certain situations, but statistically I think the conventional strategy of just playing deep units and whittling down the board through advantageous attacks and blocks will win more often.
I haven't face a single Nox aggro deck since. And I admit I stopped playing mine. You think they overnerfed it?
I assume you're talking about the champion-less Noxus + P&Z deck which had been dominating the meta for months. Yes, I would say this patch finally pushed that specific deck below 50% winrate. I don't know that that qualifies as "overnerfing"--decks rise and fall below that waterline all the time, and the fact that particular decklist is largely unchanged since 1.0 is a big red flag. Really, I think this is just giving some other aggro decks like MF + Elusives and Discard some time to shine.
Yeah, the champions have been leaked for a while. However, it is possible that they might make this expansion smaller to add cards to the two mini-expansions, so they might not release a champion for each region (or maybe they’ll release fewer champions for Targon). It would also make sense if the mini-expansions just gave us more support cards for the new champions without introducing any new champions.
The video says "New Region" in August and "New Cards" in October and December. I could see it being something like Targon, 5 Targon champs, 60 Targon non-champ cards in August (in other words, few/0 cards for other regions); then Tahm Kench + Bilgewater support in October and Lulu + Ionia support in December (or vice-versa). I don't think they would release a champion without any corresponding support cards; that's just going to give the community a sour impression of said champion.
For Rising Tides, the tease season started April 7th with Demacia artwork on Twitter and lasted until the MF YouTube announcement on April 27th--the day before RT released on April 28th. If they follow that same cadence, that will mean teases should start 3 weeks before expansion: July 28th aka this coming Tuesday. However between Scholomance Academy coming out in the dead middle of that schedule and the fact less cards will be immediately released in this set than RT, I could also see them pushing the start out and just doing a shorter tease season. (For context: Ashes of Outland was released on April 7th, so there was just a tiny overlap with the start of RT tease season)
As you've probably noticed, July 28th has come and gone without any new teases or reveals. Looking a little deeper: if we consider the champion showcase videos and region highlight videos to be part of the RT reveal season, then it actually started on April 5 and quickly settles into a 3-day pattern of Champion Showcase, region video and/or animation, then teases and same-day champion reveal. This continues for all 6 eternal regions until:
Thurs April 23rd: reveal Lee Sin / Ionia as final new champion for an eternal region
Fri April 24th: announce "Rising Tides", Bilgewater region, Loot mechanic
Sat April 25th: announce Fizz, Nautilus, and associated followers
Sun April 26th: announce GP, TF, and associated followers
Mon April 27: 1.0 patch notes; announce MF and associated followers
Tues April 28th: release
In other words, it kinda drug out at the start as they covered all 6 eternal regions and then all of Bilgewater was crammed into the final 4 days of the campaign. This was probably special circumstances tough as Rising Tides coincided with their official release. So the question becomes: what exactly is in this next release, and how will this want to reveal it? If it just the new region + 5 new champions / support, I could see them doing 1 day region announcement + 1 day per champion = 6 days total.
Ephemeral deck is like waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too strong. The stats are way over the top, Zed is such a huge power card, Dawn and Dusk gives a lot of value, the deck also has a lot of really good finishers such as Hecarim, Kinkou Lifeblade.
Overall, I think it's fine. The other decks actually do still have a good chance, some are just harder to play than the others. For example, the Poros deck is hard to beat because of the Frostbites and could potentially slam the Nexus with a 60/60 Heart of the Fluft with Overwhelm and Elusive. The VladBADCARDNAME one sucks tho lol. I take that back, that deck has quite a bit of Overwhelm.
Glad to see so many folks digging the new Spirit Blossom Lab. Also noticed that the Certain Death deck is a little *too* certain. We've patched out some tweaks to it which should put its winrate in a healthier / less crushing spot. Help us experiment by giving it a shot!
I don't think I will ever stop being impressed with how dedicated Riot is against negative player experience in this game.
Yep, that's what I had for patch 1.5 as well, look back at my post on that.
But I will sum up, Noxious had the best 2 drops, Ionia had elusives, Frej had the best champs.
These things were all gutted in patch 1.6 or tweaked at the very least, which was for the best
Now we see Ezreal in everything, and a whole lot of Bilge. Demacia is also a whole lot better
I hadn't realized 1.6 had changed the meta that much (to be frank, my playtime has been very brief these past weeks and I've abandoned ladder entirely, so I've been mostly ignoring the state of the meta). Regardless: I was mostly interested to know if you were are of / using ImpetuousPanda's work when you do your research for these posts.
Granted, this particular dataset was entirely collected pre-1.6 so it doesn't reflect those changes, but it had P&Z and Bilgewater both as markedly less powerful than Noxus / Ionia / SI / Frejlord.
With Hec / Sej / Ashe I play against her like I play against Nat / Maokia which is put everything into finishing the game as fast as possible. I’ll try to start ignoring her and see what the results are however her giving the other player cards while she sits on the broad is also part of it if she didn’t grant cards for being alive then I wouldn’t think she needs to be changed at all. My deck is slow it stalls most aggro / burn decks until they run out of resources then I cut them apart
I guess my hard counter is decks that are even slower. I didn’t notice the mediation nerf or even the Karma cost increase because I didn’t really notice her before. When my nexus got nuked from 20 to zero with burst spells in one turn Itook notice.
Honestly I'm not seeing much synergy at all between Hecarim/Ephemerals and Sej/Ashe/Frostbite. If you like Frejlord, you might want to consider going to an allegiance deck more dedicated towards Frejlord with perhaps Noxus splash (Trifarian Assessor is super good with both champs). Or alternatively: there are some "zombie Ashe" decks which focus more on control and look to finish with a big Ashe + The Harrowing finish. Regardless: I'll try to advise for your existing archetype as-is.
I'm guessing you want to abandon your control strategy and play more like a tempo deck--adding more and more stats to the board each turn, punishing the fact the Karma player is trying to stall. You didn't explicitly say it, but I'm guessing you're facing mostly about Karma + Ezreal decks--these decks rely hard on using their burn spells to remove your midgame threats while simultaneously leveling their Ezreal. This makes it extremely valuable when you can counter with protection of your own--namely Elixir of Iron and Fury of the North. Also always keep in the back of your mind that those decks will always run 3x Thermogenic Beam and to play it for maximum effect, so try to deny them good targets by either waiting until they don't have enough mana to target your significant threats or they need to spend more mana then they want.
The good news is that these decks don't usually run Deny, so if you can get a Hecarim in your rez pool and then Harrowing that is very likely GG.
...Or perhaps more appropriately, "new region + new champions and a bunch of supporting cards", since they have decided to release cards in waves and seem to be downplaying the term "expansion".
Re: timestamp 4:11 @
The full schedule should be:
Wed, July 22: Patch 1.6 = 3rd & final RT "big" balance patch; start of Spirit Blossom event
Wed, Aug 5: Patch 1.7 = 4th & final RT "small" patch; last 2 epic Spirit Blossom quests added
Thur, Aug 6: HS Scholomance Academy released
Wed, Aug 19: Patch 1.8 = new region + new cards ("expansion-lite"?); end of Spirit Blossom event
For Rising Tides, the tease season started April 7th with Demacia artwork on Twitter and lasted until the MF YouTube announcement on April 27th--the day before RT released on April 28th. If they follow that same cadence, that will mean teases should start 3 weeks before expansion: July 28th aka this coming Tuesday. However between Scholomance Academy coming out in the dead middle of that schedule and the fact less cards will be immediately released in this set than RT, I could also see them pushing the start out and just doing a shorter tease season. (For context: Ashes of Outland was released on April 7th, so there was just a tiny overlap with the start of RT tease season)
I would like to see something like MtG slivers, where cross-regions units synergize in interesting ways.
More specifically: I would like to see them take the Elite tag, dilute some of the population out of Demacia and add it to a few of the ubiquitous / underutilized cards in other regions, and then add new cards into the rotation that do interesting things to allied elites, e.g.:
Noxus: Elite Veteran; whenever an allied elite survives damage give it +1/+1
Demacia: Elite Armorsmith; give all allied elite Tough
Ionia: Elite Priest; whenever an allied elite is summoned give it Barrier
Frejlord: Elite Warchief; give all elite overwhelm
SI: Elite Horror; when an all allied elite dies, obliterate the top 3 cards of your opponent's deck
P&Z: Elite Scientist; when played summon a copy of target elite
Bilgewater: Elite Mercenary, whenever an allied elite is summoned, give the strongest enemy vulnerable
Don't get caught in the specifics or balance, that's just a rough sketch. The idea would be that it would actually be interesting to homebrew / tinker with unusual region combinations because you'd be inventing new synergies. And unlike the original slivers in MtG, you're hard-limited to just 2 regions so you can't just splash everything to build an invincible army.
“well kill her before she levels and end the game”
tired that I push everything to end the game but Ionia is very adapt to easily stall.
I hate to pile on, but yes--you ought to close the game pre-enlightenment. There's even a case to be made for just ignoring Karma: you know the opposing player is probably holding some protection, so spending your mana & cards just so they can counter means you're just losing value. It's a similar argument to why it's usually better to ignore Fizz rather than hope you're opponent is bluffing.
What decks specifically are you using when you're having these troubles? You mention drains and vengeance with implies either a Nautilus deep deck or Warmother's Control. For the former, you want to just keep on piling up the pressure and usually ignore Karma unless it's advantageous (e.g., opponent is too low on mana, or you've got a Jaull Hunter or Sapling which even if they protect is probably a fair trade). For the latter: I think you have to accept its an unfavorable matchup which you're going to lose most of the time.
They are completely different pets. You do not need to own the normal Silverwing to use the Sharpsteel Silverwing after unlocking it with the pass.
This. Everything that you see in the event rewards tab will be given to you without any other requirements than buying the pass itself and reaching the correct amount of...petals, is that what they were called?
Yes, they are called petals. And there are some rewards on the event path that you get even regardless of whether or not you bought the pass including a few emotes but none of those freebees are pets.
I do recall that on one of the previous scrambles (I want to say it was "Lux"), there was a case where my puzzle had two possible options but only one counted
They didn't mention this in the patch notes, but apparently the reason why these patches are pushing out is because Riot is declaring a week-long company holiday for the week of August 10th off to “disconnect, recharge, and reboot."
https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/riots-taking-a-week-off
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354553/riot-games-burnout-crunch-employees-week-time-off
As much as I dislike the delay of get new toys, I have to say I really appreciate them caring about their employees' mental health--especially now during the pandemic when there's so much additional home stress and fear about losing / seeking alternative employment.
You mean in wild, or did they finally come to their senses and make him evergree?
I am anticipating 1.8 / Aug 28 to be ONLY the new region, its 5 new champions, and maybe 50-60 followers + spells just for that region. I don't think we're going to get new cards for the current 7 regions until 1.10 / Sept 16, and that they are going to start trickling out at a staggered rate rather than release a full set of +1 champion to every region immediately.
This might be outside your definition of tempo, but I considered odd quest warrior to be both tempo-based and disgustingly successful. Fire Plume's Heart had everything Marsh Queen didn't: the flexibility to build a competent deck and to incorporate other non-quest packages (odd & control in this case); single cards which could progress multiple ticks (militia, direhill, and stonehill defender); immediate impact on the board when completed (sulferas), and then the payout also has immediate impact every time you use it (new HP). It's only "limitation" was that the meta was dominated by other even more disgusting decks (odd big spell mage; prince k zoolock, deathstalker Rexxar, etc), so it wasn't as prominent as it would be in the current meta.
The big thing about The Marsh Queen is that she could have been a very neat yet balanced card if Team 5 had been bothered to tweak her at all--e.g.,
As-was, she is essentially a mediocre value generator for a deck that by design will have the lowest value in the game to activate the quest. It was a cool concept which they fumbled in execution and then just abandoned to be unplayable.
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/4141-how-to-embed-a-deck-list-into-a-outofcards-forum-post
You should post your decklist, Cheeky. I just unlocked my 3rd Hecarim from the Spirit Blossom rewards and have been looking for some fun new decks for him.
I agree that Ruination works great in some decks, but those decks are all able to generate multiple attackers by playing a single card (e.g., Hecarim, Kalista, Rekindler, Harrowing, sharks, undying, etc). It's a little harder to be effective in this particular deck because most late rounds you are playing a single sea monster which--unless they really over-committed to the board--they probably can answer by at least playing a chump blocker. That will still work under certain situations, but statistically I think the conventional strategy of just playing deep units and whittling down the board through advantageous attacks and blocks will win more often.
I assume you're talking about the champion-less Noxus + P&Z deck which had been dominating the meta for months. Yes, I would say this patch finally pushed that specific deck below 50% winrate. I don't know that that qualifies as "overnerfing"--decks rise and fall below that waterline all the time, and the fact that particular decklist is largely unchanged since 1.0 is a big red flag. Really, I think this is just giving some other aggro decks like MF + Elusives and Discard some time to shine.
The video says "New Region" in August and "New Cards" in October and December. I could see it being something like Targon, 5 Targon champs, 60 Targon non-champ cards in August (in other words, few/0 cards for other regions); then Tahm Kench + Bilgewater support in October and Lulu + Ionia support in December (or vice-versa). I don't think they would release a champion without any corresponding support cards; that's just going to give the community a sour impression of said champion.
As you've probably noticed, July 28th has come and gone without any new teases or reveals. Looking a little deeper: if we consider the champion showcase videos and region highlight videos to be part of the RT reveal season, then it actually started on April 5 and quickly settles into a 3-day pattern of Champion Showcase, region video and/or animation, then teases and same-day champion reveal. This continues for all 6 eternal regions until:
In other words, it kinda drug out at the start as they covered all 6 eternal regions and then all of Bilgewater was crammed into the final 4 days of the campaign. This was probably special circumstances tough as Rising Tides coincided with their official release. So the question becomes: what exactly is in this next release, and how will this want to reveal it? If it just the new region + 5 new champions / support, I could see them doing 1 day region announcement + 1 day per champion = 6 days total.
In case you missed it: https://twitter.com/RiotExis/status/1286105943755776000
Glad to see so many folks digging the new Spirit Blossom Lab. Also noticed that the Certain Death deck is a little *too* certain. We've patched out some tweaks to it which should put its winrate in a healthier / less crushing spot. Help us experiment by giving it a shot!
I don't think I will ever stop being impressed with how dedicated Riot is against negative player experience in this game.
I hadn't realized 1.6 had changed the meta that much (to be frank, my playtime has been very brief these past weeks and I've abandoned ladder entirely, so I've been mostly ignoring the state of the meta). Regardless: I was mostly interested to know if you were are of / using ImpetuousPanda's work when you do your research for these posts.
Nifty, I'm curious: do you follow ImpetuousPanda's reddit surveys?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/hu4bbq/reddits_perception_of_balance_prev16_balance/
Granted, this particular dataset was entirely collected pre-1.6 so it doesn't reflect those changes, but it had P&Z and Bilgewater both as markedly less powerful than Noxus / Ionia / SI / Frejlord.
Honestly I'm not seeing much synergy at all between Hecarim/Ephemerals and Sej/Ashe/Frostbite. If you like Frejlord, you might want to consider going to an allegiance deck more dedicated towards Frejlord with perhaps Noxus splash (Trifarian Assessor is super good with both champs). Or alternatively: there are some "zombie Ashe" decks which focus more on control and look to finish with a big Ashe + The Harrowing finish. Regardless: I'll try to advise for your existing archetype as-is.
I'm guessing you want to abandon your control strategy and play more like a tempo deck--adding more and more stats to the board each turn, punishing the fact the Karma player is trying to stall. You didn't explicitly say it, but I'm guessing you're facing mostly about Karma + Ezreal decks--these decks rely hard on using their burn spells to remove your midgame threats while simultaneously leveling their Ezreal. This makes it extremely valuable when you can counter with protection of your own--namely Elixir of Iron and Fury of the North. Also always keep in the back of your mind that those decks will always run 3x Thermogenic Beam and to play it for maximum effect, so try to deny them good targets by either waiting until they don't have enough mana to target your significant threats or they need to spend more mana then they want.
The good news is that these decks don't usually run Deny, so if you can get a Hecarim in your rez pool and then Harrowing that is very likely GG.
Good luck!
...Or perhaps more appropriately, "new region + new champions and a bunch of supporting cards", since they have decided to release cards in waves and seem to be downplaying the term "expansion".
Re: timestamp 4:11 @
The full schedule should be:
For Rising Tides, the tease season started April 7th with Demacia artwork on Twitter and lasted until the MF YouTube announcement on April 27th--the day before RT released on April 28th. If they follow that same cadence, that will mean teases should start 3 weeks before expansion: July 28th aka this coming Tuesday. However between Scholomance Academy coming out in the dead middle of that schedule and the fact less cards will be immediately released in this set than RT, I could also see them pushing the start out and just doing a shorter tease season. (For context: Ashes of Outland was released on April 7th, so there was just a tiny overlap with the start of RT tease season)
I would like to see something like MtG slivers, where cross-regions units synergize in interesting ways.
More specifically: I would like to see them take the Elite tag, dilute some of the population out of Demacia and add it to a few of the ubiquitous / underutilized cards in other regions, and then add new cards into the rotation that do interesting things to allied elites, e.g.:
Don't get caught in the specifics or balance, that's just a rough sketch. The idea would be that it would actually be interesting to homebrew / tinker with unusual region combinations because you'd be inventing new synergies. And unlike the original slivers in MtG, you're hard-limited to just 2 regions so you can't just splash everything to build an invincible army.
I hate to pile on, but yes--you ought to close the game pre-enlightenment. There's even a case to be made for just ignoring Karma: you know the opposing player is probably holding some protection, so spending your mana & cards just so they can counter means you're just losing value. It's a similar argument to why it's usually better to ignore Fizz rather than hope you're opponent is bluffing.
What decks specifically are you using when you're having these troubles? You mention drains and vengeance with implies either a Nautilus deep deck or Warmother's Control. For the former, you want to just keep on piling up the pressure and usually ignore Karma unless it's advantageous (e.g., opponent is too low on mana, or you've got a Jaull Hunter or Sapling which even if they protect is probably a fair trade). For the latter: I think you have to accept its an unfavorable matchup which you're going to lose most of the time.
Yes, they are called petals. And there are some rewards on the event path that you get even regardless of whether or not you bought the pass including a few emotes but none of those freebees are pets.