Random Musings

Hello Team and welcome back!

Sorry for the week delay on this post. My original plan was to wait and do a Diablo patch 2.3 review and quick breakdown, but the as I started playing through the patch I decided the post would be better saved until I had more time to dive in. There are a lot of changes for Season 4 and I want to have a chance to try everything out before I give an opinion on them. This week I want to just touch on a few things across the scope of Blizzard games that have gotten my attention as of late.

World of Warcraft:
6.2.2 is FINALLY here and with it flying in Draenor. I have said in the past that I really like the compromise Blizzard made in allowing flying after a reasonable group of achievements are completed. I have no problem with them wanting us to experience the content they spent a lot of time and effort creating before simply flying over it. Unfortunately, I feel like it took entirely too long after  the 6.2 launch for flying to be unlocked. I spent weeks completing all of my Tanaan Jungle dailies, farming rares, and taking in the zone. But as time went on I got frustrated with running across the map every day, only to not make it to Terrorfist or Vengeance in time to loot them. As a result I simply stopped logging in until flying was released. If flying came within the first 3-4 weeks it would have served to prolong the enjoyment of a new zone and content. Instead we ended up with flying after a new expansion announcement that undoubtably pushed a number of players away until it's release. This left flying as a less exciting last hurrah of an underwhelming expansion.

Starcraft:
In typical Blizzard fashion we got an announcement of an announcement this week. They announced that we will find out the street date for Legacy of the Void, as well as get our first look at the intro cinematic, on September 13th. The cinematics are my favorite part of a new release from Blizzard and they knock it out of the park every time. And with Legacy of the Void being the finale of Starcraft 2 there are a ton of story threads for them to bring to life. The release date is nice, especially for the players worried that we may not see the game before Blizzcon. We don't know for sure that we will get it before then but I think this announcement date makes it more likely.

Hearthstone:
The Grand Tournament is in full swing and things have definitely been shaken up on the ladder. Paladin of many varieties have taken over. The most surprising of all has been the Secret Paladin (or Riddler Paladin, or Christmas Tree Paladin, or whatever you want to call it). That list is just one of many that people have been having success with, but eventually there will become a stock list and in return people will learn how to play around that stock list. But for the time being this deck is everywhere and there are a ton of first time legend posts all over the Hearthstone reddit praising Uther with a bunch of ?s around his head. Other decks taking advantage of the new set are a Dragon Priest that just plays above budget minions on every turn of the game and never loses control of the board, and a resurrection of the Token Druid decks of seasons past. Overall it seems like TGT has had a less drastic effect on the metagame than GvG had, but it is still making things feel somewhat fresh. I've been having a ton of fun with Tempo Mage with the only additions being Effigy and Rhonin, but the Secret Paladin deck has brought back some of the Secret hate so it's becoming a riskier play at higher ranks. All in all I'm pretty happy with how things are shaping up.

Everything Else:
I want to group the other games together and just touch on them briefly for different reasons. Diablo 3 season 4 has begun and so far I am loving the changes and the new items. Like I said before, I want to commit a full post to that so I won't go into it here. A seemingly large portion of the Heroes of the Storm player base seems to have a huge problem with the new ranked play system. It feels like every stream I watch features the streamer on his high horse about how broken the matchmaking is and how the people he is paired with are so much worse than he is. This has rendered Heroes unwatchable for me for a couple reasons: 1) Stop fucking complaining about it. We all know the matchmaking isn't where it needs to be and Blizzard has said as much. And even if you are in fact better than EVERYONE you are playing with, people don't want to hear you cry about it. If you want to make sure everyone on your team is at your level, build a 5 stack. 2) Matchmaking is broken for everyone. If you have someone still going through their placement matches in your games, then chances are the other team is going through the same thing. Your team doesn't exist in a vacuum so communicate with your team and play better than the other one. I'm sure people will disagree with me but I felt the need to rant on this a bit. Finally. there has been zero Overwatch news to report on since the Gamescom reveals. Blizzard has joked a few times that the beta will start on "Fall 10th" so lets just hope that thats sooner than "Soon TM".

Well that's gonna do it for this week. Sorry again for the delay and thanks as always for reading,
Chris