The Rest of Blizzcon. And a Realization

Welcome back friends!

I'm sorry for the delay in writing this post, but I realized a few things last week when I tried to sit down to write a true "Part 2". I was really struggling to find motivation to go through all of the Heroes and Hearthstone news bit by bit. There are plenty of places where you can get that information in a far better format than I can give you. And if I'm struggling to write it then chances are it's not an enjoyable experience for the people trying to read it. With those things in mind, what I want to do going forward is focus on giving my opinions and talk about the things I found most interesting. With that in mind, lets jump into the Heroes and Hearthstone stuff that got me excited.

Heroes of the Storm got the kind of news you would expect from a game with frequent updates. Lunara and Genn Greymane were announce for future release, and Cho'gall and the Towers of Doom map have, as of now, been released to the masses. I've only had a chance to play a few games on Towers of Doom and so far the map feels really strange. I like that the ultimate goal is different than that of any of the other maps since you don't push for the core in that way, but I still haven't figured it out. You're meant to fight over towers to make your altars fire more shots, but it's VERY easy for the other team to quickly retake a tower. My concern is that the struggle to take the towers isn't worth the effort most of the time, and teams will be better off focusing solely on team fighting over alters. I'm sure there will be situations where you can win a team fight at an alter and then hold off on capping while you take an extra tower or two, but time will tell. I'm really interested in what the competitive scene does with Towers of Doom and what heroes end up shining on it.

Now for one of my favorite parts of Blizzcon! Cho'gall was one of the heroes I predicted we would have announced at the con, but I don't think anyone had any idea that this would be what we ended up with. 2 players on 1 hero is something no other MOBA has done before and continues Blizzard's trend of trying to break the mold of heroes in interesting ways. Abathur is one of my favorite heroes to see in the hands of strong players. Other than the familiarity of the characters, the removal of items and last hitting as mechanics were the things that really drew me into heroes. In my opinion it's the things that Blizzard is doing differently with Heroes of the Storm that are the best parts of the game. Cho'gall follows that trend in a magnificent fashion. I don't remember the last time I laughed out loud this much in a multiplayer game. I had gotten to the point where I would check out the new heroes that came out and if they clicked with me I would get a bunch of games in, but if they didn't I would find myself getting easily distracted by Hearthstone or WoW. Cho'gall has made me want to play Heroes almost exclusively every time I open Battle.net. He's not the most competitive hero in the game but he is absolutely one of the most fun. I have had multiple moments of greatness where both heads were in sync and we managed to kill 3-4 enemy heroes almost single handedly. On top of all that, he was free. I got him because I ordered the Blizzcon Virtual Ticket (which I would have done anyway), but I can also give him to anyone who doesn't have him simply by playing 2 games together. So not only is he an absolute blast to play, he's free to anyone who wants him basically. Both Lunara and Greymane look interesting and I'm sure I'll have more to say about them once they release.

Hearthstone in a way had the exact opposite effect at Blizzcon. People predicted Ulduar, Icecrown, and Karazhan. Every single person was wrong. League of Explorers took everyone by surprise and continued to give Hearthstone an identity independent from Warcraft. We are getting brand new characters like Reno Jackson, Elise Starseeker, and Sir Finley Mrrgglton in addition to a more narrative experience throughout the Adventure. I think Blizzard does a great job when it comes to designing the encounters. League of Explorers is no exception with the Temple Escape and Mine Cart encounters. They are by no means difficult to complete but the flavor make them a fun change of pace. Originally I thought the cards were a little underwhelming. However, cards like Reno Jackson and Tunnel Trogg are having a big impact on the ladder. I'm not sure if I like what Reno Jackson decks are doing to aggressive decks and deck building going forward, but I can't argue with the strength of the card considering I have yet to lose a game at rank 7+ with Reno Warlock. Time will tell how much of a long term impact League of Explorers will have on competitive Hearthstone. What we have so far seems promising.

There are a couple other things I want to touch on quickly. First, I am a bit concerned that Overwatch is losing a lot of steam that it gained with the initial beta launch. Outside of a couple dedicated streamers the viewership numbers have plummeted and even an expanded beta weekend seemed to do little to keep the hype train fueled. With Blizzard unsure as to whether or not there will even be more heroes to announce eventually, I'm not sure what will help besides the release of the game and that is still a way off. Secondly, a ton of Legion information is being data mined from the alpha game files. Tons of item models and quest line information are coming out as a result. Be careful where you click if you are looking to avoid major spoilers. We are also getting hints at the Artifact weapon acquisition scenarios as well as every model and color for each weapon. These scenarios are very exciting and as a result I feel like I want to have each class leveled to 100 for the Legion launch for no other reason than to experience each one of these scenarios and story lines first hand. Each one looks like its very own version of the Warlock green fire quest and if that is the case players should be really excited.

Well that will do it for this week. Let me know what you think of a possible format change for the blog and if there is anything specific you want me to talk about.

Thanks as always for reading! Until next time,
Chris

Blizzcon in review part 1

Welcome back friends!

The most magical time of the Blizzard year has come and gone. The hand sanitizer bottles have been emptied, the food trucks have dispersed, and nerds from across the planet have returned to their homes. And what I thought would be an underwhelming Blizzcon, ended up really hyping me up for the next year. It would be silly of me to try and cram two days worth of reveals and information into a single blog post, and if I tried you guys would end up with less information and opinion than this kind of event deserves. So instead I'm going to break it up into two posts over the next few weeks. This week I want to dive into the World of Warcraft: Legion info as well as the Overwatch reveals. Next week I'll do a quick review of the League of Explorers Hearthstone adventure (which caught literally everyone who doesn't work for Blizzard off guard), and the new heroes and battleground in Heroes of the Storm. After that I'll do an early review of patch 2.4 in Diablo once the PTR, which launched last night, has helped get a more complete picture of how those features will work. With so little Diablo coverage at Blizzcon it will be easier to analyze the changes once players have had a chance to see how they work in-game. Alright, with this week's disclaimer out of the way, lets dive into Legion.

In order of appearance, the first thing we got regarding Legion was the opening cinematic at the Blizzcon opening ceremony. We shouldn't be surprised at this point. Every time Blizzard releases a cinematic they set a new standard. This time around we got some story beats mixed in with the usual action scenes similar to Warlords of Draenor. However, for Warlords we knew that Grom was going to turn down Gul'dan's offer of power so that wasn't anything new. This time we are finding out that Varian has come to strive for peace as Anduin does. And while the cinematics team had us thinking Varian might not make it through it alive, there are also some questions that we will hopefully find answers for in the pre-launch event. What made Sylvanas and Varian suddenly cool with working together. The "sup bro" head nod in there didn't have the feel of working together despite our factional disputes. Instead it just feels like a quarterback looking at his receiver before the play. They both know what they have to do and they are almost going to enjoy doing it. In addition to that, when we last left Jaina she was advocating destroying the Horde entirely at the end of Siege of Orgrimmar. If Varian has opted to work with the Horde toward peace, then where does that leave Jaina. The emo white streak of hair is growing by the second I imagine.

The first panel up was the World and Content Overview panel. Here we got a deeper look at the zones of the Broken Isles as well as the first two raids of the expansion. The zones are absolutely gorgeous. I think the environmental design in World of Warcraft has been outstanding since Cataclysm and sometimes it seems like it goes unnoticed. Legion has a ton of zone variety and that goes a long way when we are going to be in these zones for 18 months or more.

Outside of the visuals, we also learned that the leveling experience in Legion will be non-linear. You can start in any zone you want other than Suramar and the content in that zone will scale to your level. This is a nice touch in effort to preserve the freshness of the leveling experience throughout the expansion, but I worry that we won't be able to take advantage of it as much given the Artifact system and how it may push people away from playing alts. I'll get into that a little more later.  Team 2 took a page out of Diablo 3's playbook and the new CMs look a lot like Greater Rifts. Rather than scaling the player down to a certain item level and using a time limit to set the difficulty, they have decided to scale the difficulty of the dungeon up. Where the Diablo comparison comes in is there is a keystone used to begin a Challenge Mode dungeon and the you complete that level of dungeon you are rewarded not only with a loot chest as a reward, but also a higher rank keystone. As you climb in ranks within a dungeon the health, damage, and in some cases number of trash mobs will increase in order to make things for difficult and require new levels of coordination and skill. If that wasn't enough of a challenge, there are also different effects active each week that add a unique variable that will require different answers week by week. 

Giving all enemies an enrage or giving the entire dungeon a passive damage aura add a nice twist that allows for different classes, specs, and talents to shine in different weeks. At the end of the week the team with the highest rank clear will be given additional rewards. I can see these new CMs being a very interesting secondary end game with teams battling for the top spot every week. This also keeps dungeons relevant throughout the expansion since new tiers of raid gear and higher item levels will allow players to clear higher ranks. 

Then we have the first pair of raids! The Emerald Nightmare will serve as this expansions Highmaul. Personally, I'm not a fan of the lower item level introductory raid, but it seems to be a system Blizzard is comfortable with since they have gone back to it every expansion since Mists of Pandaria.  In the Emerald Nightmare we will climb a corrupted World Tree to enter the Emerald Dream in order to cleanse it from it's corruption. The zone looks beautiful since the Dream mirrors our Azeroth and we see corrupted versions of Mulgore and Felwood. We will work our way through the Nightmare in order to stop Xavius, who helped orchestrate the corruption of the Emerald Dream, and to rescue or defeat a corrupted Cenaruis who was tainted by his ties to the Dream. Hopefully the interesting story aspects of the Emerald Nightmare will make up for the fact that it quickly be dismissed once Suramar Palace is released and we have a true tier raid. Suramar Palace is our tier 19 raid and for a reason yet to be explained is Gul'dan's new base of operations. As we venture into the home of the Nightborne elves we will take on 10 bosses of the Demon and Night Elf varieties before we finally take down Gul'dan the green skinned hunchback of Draenor. The only visual depiction we have or the Palace is concept art, but if Legion follows in the footsteps of Draenor raiding I will not be disappointed. 

On Saturday the developers got on stage to tackle the true meat of the expansion and talked about the game systems. Garrisons were very much at the core of Warlords of Draenor and had their hand in a majority of the game systems. Unfortunately this came at the detriment of the expansion and the content suffered as a result. I think the opposite will be true for Legion. Artifact weapons and Class Order Halls seemed to be tied into a majority of the expansion in what seem to be all the best ways. Blizzard has a great page on the WoW site with the story behind each spec's Artifact. Players will get their Artifact weapon through a unique experience for each spec and it will be the only weapon they'll have for the entire expansion. Once they have it they will be able to level it up with Artifact Power earned through questing, dungeons, rare spawns, raids, world bosses, battlegrounds, and arenas......so......everything! As you level up the weapon you unlock new levels of your Artifact's skill tree. 

The weapon tree starts with an active ability fitting thematically with the weapon then expands into a series of choices like ability buffs or passives. Eventually, if you want to, you will be able to get enough artifact power to completely fill out the tree, but they have said it will take months to do so. This is where my comment from earlier comes in. If an Artifact takes that much time and effort to fill out and maintain then it makes alts a lot of work to keep up to par. It's obviously not necessary to fully level a weapon for a second or third character, but it may be enough of a turn off despite Blizzard's efforts to keep the leveling experience fresh. It's a mild concern but I don't want to take away from how awesome Artifact weapons are. In addition to Artifact Power, players will be able to add Relics to their weapon. 

Relics will be acquired in the same ways as artifact power, but rather than unlocking damage buffs or new abilities they increase the item level of your weapon and allow additional ranks of certain weapon ranks. This allows you to specifically target certain traits that you want more of an effect from and eventually add ranks to traits that don't have them at launch. This adds an additional sense of progression throughout the expansion. Subsequent raids can drop Relics that have higher item level increases and stronger effects. Each weapon has two Relic slots with different elemental types associated with them. In the case of the Affliction Warlock weapon above, they have a Shadow slot and a Fel slot. This creates competition between different specs and classes when it comes to looting Relics in a dungeon or raid scenario. For example Destruction Warlocks will also want Fel Relics as well as Fire Relics, and Demon Hunters will likely want Shadow Relics and Fel Relics for one of their specs. More competition for drops increases the shelf time of raid tiers and that can't hurt especially later in the expansion. Artifact Weapons along with Demon Hunters seem to be the major features of this expansion and the weapons are really impressive from what I've seen so far. I can't wait to spend hours of my life leveling different alts just to experience the Artifact quests.

Class Order Halls seem poised to take the place of Garrisons as a directory of sorts guiding players to what they should be doing in Legion. The idea is to have a strong class themed location where all the best heroes of that class can go to team up against the Legion. We'll get class quests, a place to upgrade our Artifacts, and special perks that fit the theme of the class. There are plenty of ways for Blizzard to lead players in gameplay but I think the Order Halls also help to reinforce the thematic class changes that have been touted since Gamescom. Judging by the class previews this week, there is a huge amount of detail put into the class reworks and I expect the Class Halls to showcase that. It's hard to get a real opinion about them without seeing them, but I'm optimistic they have learned from Garrisons how much is too much of a good thing.

Overwatch also had some news! Blizzard announced a simultaneous release on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 in Spring 2016. The pricing breakdown is this; PC version for $40 which includes all 21 heroes and a Widowmaker skin for preorder, Origins Edition on all 3 platforms for $60 which adds 5 hero skins referencing their past along with the usual goodies for other Blizzard games, then there is the Collectors Edition for a whopping $130 which adds a Soldier 76 statue and the other things we've grown to expect from a CE like the soundtrack and art book. I think this pricing model hits the mark with the exception of the Collector's Edition that seems like a ton of money to add a statue. I love that Overwatch will no be free to play and I don't have to worry about grinding out heroes in a game that asks me to be open to swapping between them. The 5 skins and bonuses for other games are enough for me to warrant a $60 price tag on a game with only one game mode, but I would understand if people felt differently. I've also seen a lot of complaining across the internet that we don't have any information on how we will unlock future heroes. It seems ridiculous to complain about pricing for heroes you don't actually know are even going to come. If we get DLC a month after the game releases that asks for $20 or more for additional characters and maps then I'll be right there complaining with you, but for know it feels like people are crying over milk they might spill in a year.

Three new heroes were announced along with a new map. Mei and D.Va we're both teased in the weeks leading up to Blizzcon, and Genji has been on our minds since the game was announced. I've added links to their character pages to save from spelling out every ability. Mei seems like a remarkably strong character in the right hands. The ability to freeze enemy characters is unlike we've seen in Overwatch outside of Zarya's ultimate, and her Ice Wall will make for some very interesting plays and new vantage points. D.Va is the hardest to judge for me at this point. Her auto attacks while in her mech deal a ton of damage and her ultimate creates a sort of mini-game of timing your Self-Destructs and trying to quickly recharge your mech. The problem for me is that both her Boosters and Defense Matrix seem really underwhelming but that may be because I haven't had a chance to use them myself. And Genji marks the long waited arrival of green robot ninja guy! The developers made an interesting comment during one of the panels in regards to how difficult it was to balance a melee character. They ended up reworking his entire kit to make it more ranged focused with his ultimate causing him to draw his sword and go stab crazy for a few seconds. His mobility is better than most and I think he will truly shine in the hands of really skilled players. I would love to dive into these heroes a bit further but it doesn't make much sense since I haven't had the chance to play the game yet. 

Metzen also announced a few things during the World of Overwatch panel on Saturday. He reiterated on the graphic novel they announced at San Diego Comic Con that details the beginnings of Overwatch. We also saw a preview of a series of cinematic shorts, each independent of each other, that give some insight into the characters and the world. These are so exciting! People have been asking for Blizzard's cinematics department to expand and create more free standing content. I believe this is their first steps and eventually we will see longer and more in depths pieces coming out of that department. However they choose to deliver the story of this world I will be there eating it up. 

Well...

This has by far been my longest post ever,

and it's only covering 2 of the now 6! games in Blizzard's stable.

I'm sure there is more I could say but I don't think anyone wants to read anymore rambling this week. Thanks as always for taking the time to stop by! We've got a bunch more Blizzcon to talk about next week!

Until next time,

Chris

PSA

Hello team!!

With Blizzcon starting tomorrow it seems silly to write a full post now when all the news and excitement is slated to take place over the next two days. I look forward to breaking down all the news here over the next week or two. There are a couple of things I didn't mention in last week's post;

As the rest of the internet is speculating, I think Overwatch will be announced as a Xbox One exclusive given Microsoft's presence at Blizzcon this year and the controller support already built into the early beta builds of the game.

Deckard Cain will be announced as one of the new heroes in HotS. This would follow the trend set last year with Lost Vikings. Blizzard said they felt like they had to get TLV out because of the number of requests they got at Blizzcon 2013. Everyone's favorite deceased Horadrim has been one of the most requested heroes since last years event. I'm sure some of those requests were in jest, but I don't think that will stop Blizzard.

That's all I can think of for now. Enjoy Blizzcon! I'll be watching right along with you.

Until next time,
Chris

CORRECTION: stupid ass GameStop let the cat out of the bag early and opened preorders for Overwatch on Xbox One, PS4, and PC for $59.99. Good news for all console players. I for one am happy to see a price tag as opposed to a free-to-play model. I get nickeled and dimed enough with Hearthstone and HotS. I expect some kind of season pass model eventually unlocking maps and heroes, but I hope they can manage to do it better than Evolve did. GG!