Legends of Runeterra - Riot Games' Hearthstone

Games
#88

I’ll be happy for Path of Champions to receive more developments. When I started, I thought the AI was playing at 90%, a very strong showing. Perhaps it’s the complexity of later adventures, but I see many more sub-optimal plays now. It’s good at trading units on the board; bad at spell targets. I don’t know that the AI needs to be better. I expect they tune the enemy decks to compensate.

Champions only need to collect 100 fragments total, as far as I can tell. So it does it make it I’m still getting fragment drops for three-star champions. That feels like a bug, or certainly a place for improvement. I think I have four champions that haven’t unlocked yet. Ergo, I welcome the changes promised from Reddit.

I think I’ve played this more than the 80-100 hours I had played Slay the Spire. That makes this next feeling an odd one. I feel a hankering for some extra difficulty tuning. StS had that through the Ascension modes. Notably, a character could tackle tougher challenges without becoming more powerful itself. In The Path of Champions, every adventure brings more XP. The character can’t help but level, making tougher adventures get easier with repeated play. That’s sort of the opposite direction I want them to go. Knowing the combat nodes already makes the adventure easier. But, uh, the difficulty combined with variety has served plenty well to keep me engaged longer than StS. Riot’s doing plenty right.

#89

Lux says “the superior tactic is to never give up”. I feel like she’s not looking at the bigger picture. The most important tactic is to have 9 mana gems on round 4.

What the heck is this craziness? I couldn’t click hard enough.

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#90

Just found my first one of those:
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Trivializes most games, but as long as these legendaries don’t pop up too often, they’re a fun change of pace.

#91

Ha, do you play around the bonus, luring in the hits to hit zero each game, or keep it in your back pocket in case a match goes wrong? It certainly makes sense now why their drop rate is so low.

#92

The shard overflow is a bug of sorts, apparently. It’s not that you can receive duplicate/overflow stars, but rather that players are getting overflow/duplicates much sooner than intended. One of the devs has posted on Reddit a couple times that they’re working on a fix. Here’s one: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/vc84uu/patch_390_notes/iccy0zt/

That resurrection relic is crazy!

I’ve unlocked 7 heroes. I do the daily every day but I’m not grinding otherwise. I want to pace myself so that I don’t outrun the existing content. More is coming, they say, but slower than we’d hoped.

#93

The latest patch adds wild fragments to The Path of Champions. They can apply to unlocking or increasing the star power of any champion, if one is short the necessary champion fragments. I had 30, which maybe came from converting all the extra fragments on my fully-powered champions. It allowed me to unlock Jhin. He’s necessary to my plan of completing the last mission I have unlocked, which needs either Jhin or Bard to complete it. Anyway, Jhin’s great fun. I love watching effects keep adding to the board. Highly recommended.

#94

I really enjoy this still! Its a great game with a lot of fun gameplay in the solo campaign. But…I cannot fault them for focusing on something that actually builds them some revenue - I’d love for a full game, where they just charged me 30 bucks or something for the full game. Great game!

#95

Yep, I’d pay money for a standalone Path of Champions game. Heck, I bought the Gwent Thronebreaker standalone PvE game, and i like Runeterra a lot more than Gwent.

I still play the Path of Champions every day. I’ve now unlocked 10 of the 12 heroes, and I’m enjoying jumping from one hero to the next just to keep things fresh. I’m trying not to progress too fast, because the devs have made clear new content will take a while.

#96

So I still think that Jinx power is crazy good, but I’ve since discovered that it’s not just her. Been working on Lux, and this thing is also craziness:
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Lux already gets extra starting mana and refills spell mana once a turn, so casting 6 mana worth of spells is pretty easy. Getting a second attack in a turn, especially with one shielded guy, usually just wins games outright - and gives you a big advantage when it doesn’t. The fact that you don’t even need Lux in play for this means I’m winning most of my games without even seeing her. Should be interesting to see how she holds up in the higher level adventures, but up through 2-star, it’s a real breeze.

#97

This game is not as good as MTG in my opinion, but since the MTGA phone app runs like absolute dogshit and the LoR app runs like a dream, I’ve been playing a bunch of this in bed instead of MTGA. It’s not bad!

#98

Lux is also funny for making me shiver at seeing anything reduce the cost of spells.

I agree it’s not as good as MtG, in a comparison of them in their best environment. I don’t get to play MtG that way, though. I find LoR’s single-player mode to be way better than MtG’s fights against bots. I had a good time with the single-player MtG games from 2014/2015. Too bad those didn’t seem to lead to anything.

I don’t expect LoR to remain something I keep returning to, though it’s been a few quite-enjoyable months. Once I finish all of the goals in The Path of Champions, I’ll quit, uninstall, and wait for someone to tell me to come back of a great new expansion.

#99

I don’t think I can ever deal with mana screw/flood again in the way it happens in mtg. most games since then have found ways to not ever have you feel quite as starved and helpless.

#100

I don’t consider myself a stupid person - but I cannot for the life of me understand half the things that happens in MTG - its the most complex thing ever, and I REALLY dont want to have to “Study” to play a cardgame, but it seems to be required. I don’t even understand what half the different ways to play do.

LOR on the other hand, is easy to understand, but still have interesting and complex interactions, and a lot of ways to do things. I’d say this is by far the superior game.

#101

Yeah, building a deck is often 90% of the game in MTG and watching it go off the remaining 10. No other game has ever been able to capture the same feeling you get from stumbling on a card with a weird effect and thinking, “hmmm…” (“Clock of Omens feels abusable…what about pairing it with Myr Turbine…?”)

Competitive Magic decks I think tend to be rather boring in this regard, but non-competitive Magic is totally where it’s at for me. Feels something like playing BattleBots with a grabbag of wacky parts designed by someone else. I mean look at this weird shit: Enter the Infinite · Gatecrash (GTC) #34 · Scryfall Magic: The Gathering Search

And yeah, @Harkonis the mana problems are real and a source of frustration, although it is pretty integral to the game at this point and I believe exerts a strong influence on card design.

#102

I like Magic, and mana-flood or mana-screw don’t bother me as much as some players. But then I’ve never played all that seriously. I also like that Magic is a physical card game; face-to-face play is great.

For a virtual card game, though, I think LOR is better. I prefer its UI to that of MTGA, and the single-player Path of Champions is brilliant.

Heck, I think LOR is better than Hearthstone. Hearthstone’s single-player modes aren’t nearly as interesting, and its ranked play is tedious, to me. There’s some randomness in LOR, but it’s not as crazy as in Hearthstone. The only thing I like better about Hearthstone is the Arena. LOR’s first shot at limited play, Expeditions, wasn’t as good. LOR has withdrawn Expeditions while it works on something better.

#103

Oh, 100%. It’s the second best of these sorts of games I’ve played (after magic) and far and away the best app.

#104

I don’t really think of Magic (and Eternal, and other deckbuild-for-resources games) and LOR (and Hearthstone, and other resources-granted-per-turn games) as the same genre. Sure, they share a lot of things, but there are fundamental differences that make them very different experiences. I happen to enjoy both, but I know plenty of folks who only like one or the other.

#105

To me they are card games where you build a deck of cards that interact with each other outside the game and play other people. That’s a pretty fundamental similarity. I would classify games like Slay the Spire, etc. differently, as Dominionlikes, but there’s unquestionably a straight line between MTG and LoR to me, whereas the line between MTG and StS is decidedly curved (although still a line, more or less).

#106

Another thing I love about both Magic and LOR is the artwork. Magic cards are a thing of beauty, and the foil system is a delight. LOR also prioritizes art. Every day I maximize a card or two just to look at the beautiful artwork in full-screen mode. I do wish LOR’s “prismatic style” fancy-cards were more dazzling, though I do like the special champion cards I got from the latest event. The mastery frames are nice but not fantastic. .

Gwent’s artwork doesn’t appeal to me as much, but I did like the animated “foil” cards. Hearthstone’s “gold” effect is nice, but the underlying art is stylized Blizzard stuff, which is very nice, but not quite my cup of tea.

#107

LoR’s art is a bit too cartoony for me, mostly, but it is very well done. I don’t find it offensive or anything, I just vastly prefer Magic’s style.