elite tauren chieftain

All posts tagged elite tauren chieftain

My second week in Heroes of the Storm

Posted by Peter (Devee) on June 11, 2014
Posted in: Heroes of the Storm. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

TychusFive new heroes to play this week (because one of the six was Raynor, who is always free).

First I played Tychus, an assassin. As someone who doesn’t play Starcraft, I’m pretty sure Tychus is just Raynor II. Okay, he doesn’t really play the same in Heroes of the Storm, but he  certainly looks the same. He has to rev up his gun, making him a fairly slow hero. I wasn’t too fond of him.

elite tauren chieftain

The Elite Tauren Chieftain, the warrior, is an awesome hero. Just look at him. I’m pretty glad Blizzard chose to include him, because it’s definitely a fun idea. As for playing him, I wasn’t great at first. He has some good crowd control abilities, but he also appears to be tankier than he really is. I was pretty bad at him when I selected him, but I got better at him through Abathur (more on that later).

tyrael

I was excited to play Tyrael, a warrior. He’s good at protecting other heroes, which I suppose makes sense given his role in the Diablo franchise. One of his abilities has him throw his sword, dealing damage where it lands. Tyrael can then teleport to the store. He wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I liked him nonetheless.

Uther

I liked Uther, a support hero, much more than I expected. Once again I find myself playing the healer. It’s really my role, isn’t it? He heals allies, has an ability that damages enemies and heals allies, stuns, and more. He might be a hero I need to purchase in the future.

Abathur

Abathur, a specialist, is the strangest hero I’ve played. He can send Locust down lanes and place Toxic Nests that explode when enemies contact them and help reveal the map. However, what makes him interesting is that he can place a symbiote in other heroes. Once this is done, the camera follows that hero, and you’re given new abilities. From the hero with the symbiote, you can stab a target with a spike, shoot spikes out around the hero, or shield the hero. Most interestingly of all, Abathur is able to create a duplicate of an allied hero temporarily and controls it. Of course, that means that to be good at Abathur, you have to be good at every hero, but it’s really quite fun. I did really well with him (despite not being great at every hero), and I plan on practicing with him more.

 

Adventuring in Hearthstone

Posted by Peter (Devee) on November 15, 2013
Posted in: BlizzCon, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Hearthstone

The Hearthstone panel at BlizzCon really reinvigorated my interest in the game. I really enjoyed it when I first got into the beta, but I hadn’t even played it since the reset. Without having friends playing it, and with all the PVE content finished, I just lost interest.  After seeing all the thought that went into the design and hearing about some new features coming, I started playing it again almost immediately. I can’t wait for some of that content, too!

Hearthstone ETC

BlizzCon attendees and virtual ticket holders get a Golden Elite Tauren Chieftain card. The coolest part of the card is what it looks like when you play it. Of course, it plays some cool music too! It looks like a fun card. In addition, it wasn’t the only card shown that made a big entrance.

Drafting

I really enjoyed hearing about the evolution of some of the aspects of the game. For example, they discussed how standard drafting became the arena mode that’s currently in the game. My summary here misses a few intermediate versions, but here’s the idea. At first, they had normal drafting. You take one card from a pack of how ever many cards. (Let’s say eight.) You pass the remaining seven to the next player and get seven from another. You keep doing that until you’re down to just one card, and then you keep it. This works in physical games, but it would mean possibly waiting for a long time in a computer game.

They came up with an asynchronous way of doing something similar. You get seven cards and choose one to keep. You swap your six cards with the cards in the envelope with the “6” label. You keep doing this until you have just one card, and you keep it. After trying this, they realized that it was still most fun when you had a few cards from which to choose that were all applicable to your deck. However, sometimes you’d have only a couple choices and none would be right. They eventually decided that three choices was the most fun. They gave players three cards that were all applicable to that player’s deck, and that’s the version that made it into Hearthstone.

Because it was so different from the idea of a draft, they renamed it “Arena.” They felt it was no longer recognizable as drafting. Honestly, when I first tried that mode, I immediately saw it as a type of draft. Yes, the way you did it was different, but it very clearly accomplished the goals of drafting. I really like it.

Hearthstone Adventures

I particularly liked the ideas of adventures. These are single-player, PVE matches. They could be a single boss or a series of bosses, and they’ll unlock cards as you play through them. It seems like a similar idea as raid decks from the World of Warcraft: Trading Card Game possibly (although single-player). I suppose the current tutorial series of matches is basically an adventure. I wish they would have teased some ideas for the adventures will be, but it might be too early for that. Regardless, I’m excited.

There were two people on the Hearthstone panel – Lead Designer Eric Dodds and Technical Designer Ben Brode. As soon as Ben Brodes began presenting, it was immediately apparent that he was excited for the game and truly loved it. He had so much enthusiasm and energy and was a great presenter. I decided to talk to him on Twitter.

And then I realized something about his name and the fact that I currently live in Irvine, I went to school in Irvine, and Blizzard is in Irvine.

It’s a small world.