Yeah, no dice at Ambling Mesa. I think it’s bugged.
Ah, I found the zone where you get the boat. Problem is I’d already crossed over and then come back because it was too difficult, so I guess the quest got completed and the zone wasn’t marked specially in any way after that. I was beginning to wonder if I’d hallucinated that whole bit.
Well, yeah, if you’ve already BEEN to zone 2, then you’ve already expended the breadcrumb trail. ;)
It probably wouldn’t hurt for them to identify the transition node a little more distinctly.
A couple useful sources of decklists:
The Frost Ring Arena is no longer the number one gold farming spot, but it’s still the source of a bunch of PvE cards and equipment and you’ll still rack up plenty of gold in the process.
Here’s a few decks I particularly recommend:
Ethereal Aggro
This deck is crazy fast and consistent and can win against virtually any encounter in the Arena. The Ethereal Healers and their boots are vital - with the boots they interact to semi-regularly enter play before the match even starts and their lifedrain can then proc the others into play. Over and over, if necessary. Combine that with the Skittering Skarns providing +1 attack and speed to random troops and I’ve seen starting turns with 5/3 Speed Healers. Real nice. The Kindling Skarns and Quash Ridge Tuskers that are the biggest expenses in the deck are handy and can provide explosive growth but aren’t absolutely required for the engine to work - there’s a budget build that swaps in Savage Raiders and Gem Snatchers and is reputed to be comparable (I have the cards for the non-budget version, so I’ve never tried the budget build).
Unskilled’s Dwarf/Robot ship deck:
For the shipboard section of the Alachian Sea. You want to allocate ship talents to the crew section until it’s full, then whatever you like subsequently. These talents combine to create a deck where almost everything is free, you probably don’t even need resource draws, and you can play most of your hand turn 1 and have at least one 6/6 and possibly a heck of a lot more by turn 2. The Dread Technomancer and Technical Genius are absolutely required for the combo (the crew talents fish them into play at start of game). The Dreadling generation combos extremely well with things like War Machinist and equipped Warpsteel Widget, and make Assault cost lowering on Tanker Trunk and Siege Engine Gemini extremely fast. All of the rares in this deck except the Limestone are low value for Constructed play and so pretty cheap, but you don’t absolutely have to have the Siege Engine (I only had one going in) and since it’s a mono-color deck with extremely low resource needs you can easily substitute Ruby Shards for Limestones. (They just let you summon a Worker Bot if you already have the one ruby threshold you need.) This deck can defeat almost every encounter in the Sea although the Storm King can be an issue (very doable with a bit of luck, though) and The Old Man of the Sea is probably a no go.
Tarquin’s Count Davian deck:
This is a mercenary deck for the Count Davian vampire mercenary. He pretty much destroys most AZ1 encounters (there are a few that can stall him and he doesn’t stall well - like the hag and the human blockade) and seems notably useful into AZ2. Ethereal Healers and Hunger of the Mountain God are established power cards, but the rest of the list is substantially about being able to trade well: Death Cap can kill 2+ enemy blockers on its own, Minion and Disciple of Yazukan can come back from the grave, Sepulchra Maggot is lethal (with equip) and clones itself based on other deaths on the turn it’s played, Tezozo pops back into your deck and kills enemies when redrawn, the Poltergeist kills enemies from the beyond, and the Scroll of Yazukan generates beefy friends based on deaths. Why is this important? Two reasons: Count Davian’s charge power is to force one of his troops to battle a random enemy troop. Secondly, whenever an enemy troop dies against Davian, he has a 50% shot at turning them into a 2/2 Vampire (w/ lifedrain and flight), or, when upgraded, a Vampire Princess. Otherwise, he voids them and gets health. This is extremely powerful, if you can leverage it. The downside, of course, is that he loses 2 health a turn. So if you can’t keep him topped up with lifedrain or troop deaths, you’re hosed. But you almost always can! Rares in this deck aren’t too bad either, but there’s a budget version in the first link if you’d rather.
These have all worked wonders for me and been hilarious to play, so I thought I’d share.
For those who may not be paying attention to the main site, several big announcements today. Here’s an open letter from Cory Jones (head of Hex) about the lot:
Highlights include:
- As of the patch tomorrow Hex and Gameforge will be going their separate ways and Hex Entertainment will be self-publishing Hex. No details about why, but a bunch of players sure seem unhappy with Gameforge so I’m optimistic that this will be a good thing.
- Apparently Hex has cost over 25 million to develop so far (it raised roughly 2.3 million on Kickstarter, for some perspective).
- They will be doing a regular Sunday sealed tournament called the Clash with cash prizes as well as boosters, AAs, sleeves, and battle boards. And even if you don’t place you might get one of the latter three items as a door prize. (8 of each will be given out to random non-placing players.)
- They will now be selling cosmetics, the main example so far being PvE battle boards for use in PvP games.
- They will be selling a new Collector’s Deck with a few exclusive AA cards, an animated sleeve, and a gorgeous animated Sunsoul Phoenix AA card for $20.
- They will be adding a store tab called Chark Mart which will contain the cosmetics and also a Kismet’s Reserve pack for 30k gold a pop that drops various things including a unique sleeve, AA PvP cards, a couple of exclusive PvE cards and a Silver Talon mercenary. (As an aside, they keep introducing new gold sinks like I need them. I still have literally hundreds of chests to spin and 20-odd mercs to upgrade and now there’s going to be a 30k gold random pack? Goddamn it.)
- Oh yeah, set 6 (Scars of War) drops next Tuesday, 2/28.
Not anymore. I couldn’t figure out why I was only winning like half the time in the Arena with Ethereal Aggro…Ethereal Healers got nerfed into uselessness, sadly.
Still looking for a replacement deck. Dwarf-Robot Affinity is ok, but not nearly as sure a thing.
Oh, they finally gave it a threshold requirement. Booooooo.
That said, it doesn’t make them useless - they’re still fucking awesome in a diamond deck with any regular source of lifegain (e.g. a coyotle/human cleric deck or Aethynia or whatnot). Just can’t randomly splash them into decks that can’t actually play them from hand anymore.
As far as other decks, unfortunately I don’t think there’s anything else that marries budget and effectiveness quite as well (although I think the Ethereal Aggro bones could probably be tweaked into something pretty solid with some of the new cards in set 6), but I’ve had good results with http://hex.tcgbrowser.com/#!/deck=71999 and I don’t think anything in it was individually too horribly expensive. Then again, I had a ton of set 1 and 2 cards already, so that probably helped.
And of course, if you’re crazy like me and willing to drop $25-50 per card for the key bits, Slaughtergear decks still absolutely crush pretty much anything.
FRA’s not the sweet spot for cash anymore, though, apparently. Farming Great Machine Graveyard is. And there’s a pretty cheap Vennen Ranger Big Spider build that works wonders. (I can personally attest to this.) A couple of the equip pieces are a bit pricey though.
There’s been a bunch of new stuff lately - new sets, a Frost Ring Arena reboot, Slaughtergears being nerfed, etc, but the reason I’m bumping the thread is to let anyone who hasn’t already seen know:
Hex went independent and aren’t working with Gameforge anymore, as previously discussed. Gameforge has kindly been letting them continue accessing info on Gameforge servers up until now, but that will end…tomorrow, I think? If you haven’t logged into the game since that change, you need to do it by then or your account info will be lost.
Edit: details here: https://www.hextcg.com/important-gf-account-transfer/
The slow pace of PvE development has really turned me off of this game. With Eternal sating my cheap PVP needs and MTG:Arena coming, my interest in Hex is pretty much non-existent. If there were an easy way to cash out, I would.
Uh, if you figure anything out, a friend of mine would be interested.
I have no interest in PvP and nobody but Hex are really giving PvE much attention, slow pace or not. so between that and my KS investment being a huge leg up over where I would be in other games, I am still fully on board. I play a bit less than I have at times but I still play every week.
The problem, I think, is that no-one is playing so there’s very little market. The easiest way seems to be selling out to Hexprimal.com, which is only going to pay 40% or so of retail. I may do it anyway just to buy my way into MTG:A (which looks pretty awesome), but I’m gonna wait until the PS4 client launches and see if it helps value any. I just want my $100 back.
Like most of the Kickstarted CCGs of the time, as soon as they got to a stage where they could charge for more cards they forgot all about the other stuff they promised.
Plenty of stuff they promised during the Kickstarter has arrived. It took longer than scheduled, but what Kickstarted videogame hasn’t had that issue. And there’s more coming. Slowly, but coming.
I do feel like there’s more emphasis on the PvP game than is warranted because PvP digital card games are a dime a dozen whereas it’s the PvE that makes Hex stand out, but on the other hand, new PvP card sets do make for new toys to use in PvE (and face, too), so it’s a mixed bag.
They apparently switched servers and deleted my account and now I’m being told I never had an account despite being an early backer and spending hundreds on the game. more than a tad pissed.
I hadn’t seen the switchover mentioned upthread. I don’t understand why or how a company can do something like that without at least sending out emails that it’s going to happen. Pangyu golf game or whatever did a similar thing a few years back. If you aren’t checking forums for a game you aren’t playing, you lose all your stuff and may as well never come back. Odd business practice.
I received at least four emails about it, so I think you experienced some unusual issue. Personally don’t think any amount of warning should allow them to basically delete money, but unfortunately it continues to be the case that legally everything in games has no legal value and companies are free to do whatever they want to you for any reason with no consequence.
Yeah, there were a bunch of warnings, across multiple instances. And it’s definitely been posted about in this thread more than once.
It’s also not something they did arbitrarily. They were not legally allowed to receive the account info from Gameforge without your explicit permission due to German privacy law. You could ask if there’s still any way they could fix things - I think a few people managed in the immediate wake of the change - but I suspect it’s too late at this point.
I can definitely feel your pain, though. :/
I checked and I had zero emails from them in the last 12 months, I also don’t check threads on games I’m not currently playing :(
I still really love this game, but I think the writing’s on the wall. I spent over an hour yesterday trying to get into a draft to use up my free weekly and there were never more than 3 people in the queue (out of the needed 8). They’re not launching the next set (which is supposedly all designed at this point) for a couple months minimum because their cashflow isn’t currently in a position where they’re comfortable buying the art for it. There hasn’t been a PvE campaign release in the better part of two years now, which is what I personally actually play for. The Frost Ring Arena revamp is something, but just like FRA wasn’t a substitute for the campaign originally, a revamp isn’t now. And siege mode…even with a special currency I don’t see the appeal.
But even if the lack of PvE progress weren’t draining enthusiasm from a significant subset of the population, I think not having the money to put out a new PvP set to get more money is not a great sign! Supposedly there’s some other revenue stream being worked on that they can’t talk about at the moment and I hope that pans out for them, but I feel like a lot of momentum has already been lost. :(