Legends of Runeterra - Riot Games' Hearthstone

The rumor I’ve heard is that somebody higher up at Riot started asking why they’re making a PvE roguelike mode in an otherwise PvP game that will be almost impossible to monetize when they could be making a separate roguelike game that will be trivial to monetize in whatever way they think makes the most cash.

I’m less hopeful.
Redditors speculate a lot about that “they got moved to redo PoC as a separate game” but this might very well just be wishful thinking. Riot has a bunch of games in production already.

Another aspect, which I mentioned before in this thread I think, is that being part of Legends of Runeterra was a huge advantage. Having direct access to the well designed turn based combat, all the cards, all the mechanic and interaction design work and all the art is a gigantic boon. The focus was able to be put on mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, and some flavour on top. A standalone game will undoubtedly have lots of baggage and drag from other additions even -IF- they manage to create anew a mechanical base that is half as expansive and well designed as the Runeterra card battler.

When I hear standalone game I think of the Riot Forge game Ruined King, and that’s not a big plus. Decently well rated and liked but it’s just chock full of timewasters (such much time wasting) and asinine distractions on top of a mediocre battling system.

It just hit me why building for early game feels so dominant. The items are a fixed amount of power. Adding an item to cheap card gives a much bigger relative boost to than to an expensive card. Now I wish they would tier the items. A basic scheme would give more expensive cards better odds of rarer items. A six-cost with double my stats or a three-cost with +2/+0. That gets more interesting to choose between.

There’s also enough card draw, most of the time, that I don’t leave mana on the table. That also pushes me to pick cheap and dense cards. If a run lacks card draw or creation, then highly-aggressive cheap cards throw everything down early and run out of steam. So many items give more–draw, invoke, manifest, summon creature of cost–along with a few common nexus powers.

I agree with all the stuff you said, and I’d also add that low cost cards are key because the AI gets such a quick start once you’re past the starter and 1-star adventures. If you’re not playing something good on turn 1 or 2 because your good cards cost too much, you’ll lose a bunch of Nexus health (assuming you win at all). Then you’ll get run over in later fights because you don’t have the starting Nexus health to survive until you can play your big cards. Occasionally you can get lucky with a deck that has a bunch of lifegain, but that’s been the exception in my experience.

Agreed, some of those matches have explosive starts for the AI. Legends of Runeterra, at least in its The Path of Champion decks I’ve seen so far, is missing any with a focus on bounce, counterspell, defender, or board wipe (like I remember from slow MtG decks). There doesn’t seem to be an available option to delay past the ramped-up AI starts.

After completing the 2.5 star Zed adventure, I started up the 3.5 star Galio one. This was with a 3-star level 11 Yasuo. Immediately, I picked a champion upgrade to strike the strongest enemy when summoned, and regretted every fight afterwards. Yasuo always was looking to be summoned too late to survive.

I took Yasuo on a different adventure for some XP, then returned. At level 13 and without a very poor upgrade choice, Yasuo cruised to the end. He was bodying folks, including everything that gave me trouble the first time. However, at the end I was crushed. Galio’s strengths offset Yasuo’s incredibly well for him. I had thought Viego was the tough fight, and maybe by other champions’ play styles it is. Stunning the strongest enemy didn’t help against Galio’s 0-attack large-health followers that bludgeon purely with their bodies.

A while later, I got curious and brought in Jinx. She was level 20, because I wanted someone who played fast to finish one of the quests to reach level 20. Those seven additional levels bring a lot of nice benefits on their own, but it was still wild how much easier she was. In part because she had all the luck. The starting power was “have an extra mana gem, you beautiful person”. Her support champion was a Swain that got further great upgrades. Taking any damage felt like an affront and maybe I had misplayed. Galio put up a fight, meaning it took seven rounds if I recall.

Yeah, that’s what they mean when they rate a champion “easy”.

I don’t know I can ever play the PvP game. What is the actual balance without upgraded cards and extra powers? I expect Michael Bay productions from round one at this point.

I’ve just started doing 2.5-star adventures, so you’re ahead of me. I agree, Jinx is powerful – and fun – to play. I just got her third star, and it really gives her a lot more punch. I tend to switch from one champion to the next, just to keep things fresh, and to advance the various chapter quests. So I’ve also been playing Lilaoi, Yasuo, Lux, others.

I was heartened to see a Path of Champions developer posting a couple times on Reddit in the past couple days. He said there’s a bug that accounts for some people getting many shards for one character and not enough for others. They’re fixing it, and supposedly making other improvements to the mode. He stressed it’s still in Labs, so still a work in progress. It made me glad to see there’s still a team at work on Path.

Supposedly the PvP meta is the best it’s ever been, or at least it’s in relatively good shape. I wouldn’t know. I played a few Expeditions, but I still have not played a single ranked PvP match. In Expeditions, I’d get annoyed that human players would take a long time over simple decisions, and more generally I’d get stressed playing a human. And yeah, I missed having all my hexagonal items and groovy powers!

Sooner or later I will play a bit of ranked, just to try it, but I think Path of Champions is a brilliant mode and I don’t feel a big need to stray from the Path right now.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.