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RF Sphere Analysis: From the Dark It Comes (Divine Diabolos)
The content of this thread can also be read at Dissidia Info
Hello everyone. It's almost time for a new Refined Sphere shop to appear on Global, so it's also time for me to make a new guide on the new shop. This time, I will analyze the batch that will arrive in global DFFOO January 27th for Divine Diabolos. This batch will have RF spheres of Freya, Machina, Maria, Paine, Ramza and Yda. This is mostly a guide about RF spheres that are powerful as a placeholder options for your characters that you do not plan to equip spheres. Thus, it may be on your best interest to craft enough to slot on everyone that fit the description. I'm here to list which units fulfill their requirements, and to whom they may be best RF option to slot there as placeholders until you decide to slot a proper sphere. However, no matter how strong, a refined sphere is never as good as a proper sphere. So, if any of the characters I list below already have proper spheres slotted for them, please, don't overwrite your sphere with a refined one. The numbers I list are a cap, not a minimum. As in, if you craft more than that, probably you will run out of units that can even activate the sphere regularly. Probably you will not be able to craft spheres for everyone, and need to pick and choose who will receive them. That's ok. Especially as the shops start having spheres that are good for a large amount of characters. Only you have knowledge of your own roster, and are in a better position to pick and choose who are the best picks when you need to choose.
Machina (A-sphere, Black crystal):
Raises INT BRV, ATK by 4% for 3 turns when inflicting Break or attacking target afflicted with Break
Reoccurrence in shop: N/A at least for 8 months
How good is it?4% ATK/IBRV is a decent boost, which I think rivalizes with 6% ATK spheres. It's an amazing sphere for the characters that benefit from high IBRV. A is the most common slot in the game, and by giving straight stat buffs to two prime stats, it's useful for any character. Alongside Jecht (and the unreleased Yang) sphere, this is the best all-around generic placeholder sphere in the game. On top of that, Machina RF sphere requires black crystals, which will have zero usage for good spheres in the foreseeable future. My advice is for you to go all in and craft as many Machina RF spheres as you can. Remember to keep just enough High Crystals to raise Machina, Caius and Palom to level 80. Everything else you can spend as if there is no tomorrow.
Maria (C-sphere, Blue crystal):
After recovering HP, raises party's INT BRV, ATK by 2% for 3 turns
Reoccurrence in shop: N/A at least for 8 months
How good is it?Alongside Alphinaud, this is the most powerful party-wide RF C-sphere in the game. Pretty much everyone with a C slot have some kind of healing or buff, and they have the same effect, just with a different conditional. This is a repeat from the Act 2 Finale Pt. 1 RF shop, so it's possible you already crafted all Maria spheres you needed then. C slots are spread around a vast array of character types. That makes "generic usage" kinda hard to analyze. So, basically, I checked all C slot units that can heal themselves often. My advice is for you to craft 16 Maria RF spheres, and use them for those characters: Agrias, Cait Sith, Caius, Cecil (Paladin), Eiko, Firion, Freya, Ignis, Lenna, Leo, Nine, Penelo, Porom, Rinoa, Rosa and Sherlotta. All of them have some kind of HP regen aura/buff, or can heal often enough using skills, EX, and HP++ actions. Basically, they will be healing themselves consistently during the fight, and thus, will trigger Maria RF sphere all the time. Basch, Rude and Yuri can make use of both Maria and Alphinaud RF spheres for the same result. They buff and heal themselves very often, thus the conditional for both spheres are easily fulfilled. It's your call which sphere you want to slot on them. Lenna, Penelo, Rosa, Sherlotta and Yuri have two C slots, and this sphere stack with itself. The info above assumes you'll be using a single RF sphere on them. If you want to slot both of their C slots with the recommended sphere, remember to craft the extras.
Paine (E-sphere, Blue crystal):
Raises party's ATK by 2%, lowers all enemies' ATK by 4% for 3 turns when attacking target's weakness
Reoccurrence in shop: N/A at least for 8 months
How good is it?This is the only E-sphere that provides a party-wide ATK bonus, and the ATK debuff is an aura that don't fight for debuff slots. In general, if you are able to hit for weakness damage consistently, this sphere is really interesting. You might prefer to prioritize the own unit ATK with Seymour, Kefka or Irvine, but if you prefer to spread the love, this is a perfectly valid sphere to use. The main issue here is that Maria is a really good RF sphere, and they share the same crystal color. My advice is to invest more on Maria RF spheres than Paine, but it's your decision in the end, and you might even have some spare blue to invest here if you want. There is a total of 15 E-slot units that can consistently hit weakness because they imperil their own element or attack type: Auron, Cater, Cecil (Dark Knight), Desch, Fran, Fujin, Gau, Golbez, Irvine, Kurasame, Palom, Raijin, Reno, Shantotto and Vincent There is another list of 15 characters that can hit for weakness damage on some more specific conditionals. I think those characters are better served with another E sphere, but I present the list just so you can judge for yourself: Amidatelion, Arciela, Edgar, Fang, Faris, Kefka, Layle, Lion, Paine, Relm, Seifer, Seymour, Thancred, Vanille, and Zidane. Regardless of how you decide to spend your blue crystals, remember to craft at least one Paine RF sphere, to fulfill the event mission and get the blue nuggets.
Freya (D-sphere, Red crystal):
Raises party's MAX HP by 4%
Reoccurrence in shop: Kaiser Behemoth Raid (May)
How good is it?That's a unique bonus that is not found in any other sphere in the game. It can't be compared with other spheres because of that, requiring a more fine analysis. Extra HP is usually a good thing. Most characters average around 15k~21k HP with all summon boards and max level. That means this sphere provides around 600~850 HP to each party member. While this value is mostly irrelevant, I've survived a fair number of fights because an HP attack left me with less than 1k HP and allowed me to heal back. But more often than not, we get a dead party member when we get broken during a big attack, or we get overwhelmed by an attack that deal more HP damage than we have MBRV. I would not sacrifice 2% party ATK for 4% party MAX HP, and the sphere says that it do not stack with itself, which may imply that even if multiple party members have this RF sphere slotted, the party would only benefit from one sphere effect. It's a unique effect, but preventing a death at a narrow HP value is too niche to be a generically useful sphere. There is a reason why HP passives are what we unequip when we need 5 CP for something else. My advice is to craft one single Freya RF sphere, to fulfill the event mission and get the blue nuggets.
Ramza (D-sphere, Yellow crystal):
With 3 or more buffs, raises party's INT BRV, MAX BRV by 2%
Reoccurrence in shop: N/A at least for 8 months
How good is it?This sphere do not provide an ATK bonus, and thus is not a good placeholder sphere. My advice is for you to craft one single Ramza RF sphere, to fulfill the event mission and get the blue nuggets. Don't bother crafting more.
Yda (A-sphere, Green crystal):
Increases BRV damage dealt by 4% when attacking enemy not targetting self
Reoccurrence in shop: Kaiser Behemoth Raid (May)
How good is it?Straight buff to BRV damage, which counters BRV damage reduction from Chaos/Lufenia bosses, is a rare buff. Said that, it's roughly equivalent to a similar ATK bonus, which places this sphere on average tier. 4% ATK is baseline for a RF A sphere, with the good spheres providing something else on top of that bonus, or providing a better bonus. However, this sphere will be useless against bosses that have many ALL attacks, and have reduced effectiveness when playing without a lock tank on your team. Considering all that, it's a decent sphere, but being of average power alongside the inconsistent trigger make it not a good investment. My advice is for you to craft one single Yda RF sphere, to fulfill the event mission and get the blue nuggets. Next batch preview: Next batch will come with Operation Airbone Interception at February 9th, and will feature the RF spheres of Cyan(A sphere, Blue), Palom(A sphere, Black), Papalymo(A sphere, Red), Penelo(C sphere, White), Thancred(E sphere, White), and Ultimecia(E sphere, Green). Previous threads:
Jesus Take The Wheel - Hitting Legend with Burgle Rogue
Hey all! I’m Kay and I’ve been a burgle rogue aficionado since Witchwood. Being home for the holidays this month has finally given me the time to push to legend for the first time ever with this Wild homebrew Cutlass deck. I think this deck has the chops to hit high legend if a better player with more time was able to pilot it. I had a lot of fun playing this list and got to learn it fairly well. I would love to see more Burgle Rogues in Hearthstone, and am writing this guide to hopefully inspire some of you to give it a whirl. While I play on mobile without a deck tracker, here is my proof of Legend. The Deck: Margaret Thatcher Class: Rogue Format: Wild # 2x (1) Deadly Poison # 2x (1) Dragon's Hoard # 1x (1) Patches the Pirate # 2x (1) Secret Passage # 2x (1) Swashburglar # 2x (1) Wand Thief # 2x (2) Cavern Shinyfinder # 2x (2) Clever Disguise # 2x (2) Sap # 1x (2) Swindle # 2x (2) Underbelly Fence # 1x (3) Beneath the Grounds # 2x (4) Spectral Cutlass # 2x (4) Tinker's Sharpsword Oil # 2x (4) Vendetta # 2x (5) Cutting Class # 1x (6) Vanish AAEBAYO6AgTEAZsUkbwC590DDcsDzQOvEJK2AuXRAurzAvuaA/6aA62oA7euA6rLA6TRA/fUAwA= Why is a burgle rogue deck called Margret Thatcher? My first Burgle Rogue deck ever was named “I will steal your shit.” Then I listened to Robin WIlliams last standup album, and it included this bit about the Falklands War. “I will sink your shit” sounded similar to “I will steal your shit” and thus Margret Thatcher has been the name of all of my burgle rogue decks since. It makes sense in my head, I promise. Why Cutlass Rogue? I love playing Burgle Rogue and finally decided to put my time towards making a truly viable list and hitting legend. Playing Burgle Rogue gives you three paths. You can play it with the quest, which simply delays your demise against aggro decks (Rogue lacks both taunts and ways to heal) and doesn’t put combo or control decks on any kind of timer. If there were a hardcore midrange meta for some reason, the quest might be worth a look. But until then it’s on the back burner. Another tack you can take is a deck I affectionately refer to as Cheese Rogue. Put your normal burgles, Academic Espionage, Tess Graymane, both Yoggs, and anything that helps you not die, and you have a deck that will either pull out glorious wins out of nothing or draw three Totemic Mights in a row and sputter. The other problem is that when you run an Tesspionage based list, you’re totally punting aggro matchups. While a phenomenally fun deck, Tesspionage Rogue suffers from the simple problem of being very bad (it’s hovering around a 30% winrate on HSReplay) which makes it a poor choice to actually win games with. Cutlass Rogue instead plays more like Kingsbane Rogue on mushrooms. You’re still trying to build an enormous weapon with lifesteal that lets you outheal aggro and chip decks as well as put slow decks on a clock with heavy damage every turn, but instead of doing it with normal cards, we do it by thieving random things from other classes. How We Win: By getting a Spectral Cutlass with 6+ Attack and using burgled cards to disrupt our opponent’s gameplan and pump up our weapon’s durability. Occasionally, we also pull off wins with hilariously bullshit burgle synergies. Our ideal line of early play is something along the lines of: T1: Swashburglar (and Patches) T2: Cavern Shinyfinder or Underbelly Fence T3: Shinyfinder or Fence with a 1 mana burgle card, or just coin Cutlass T4: Cutlass or a barrage of burgling T5: Deadly Poison and Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil T6+: Imagination and RNG! Strengths and Weaknesses of This List: This deck outputs ridiculous amounts of healing. Once your weapon is at ten plus attack, you will eventually escape the range of any deck trying to burn you down. The weapon also gives us decent single-target board control, essentially allowing us to take out any must-kill minion while still gaining health. Fence and Vendetta give us efficient small removal. Value is easy to find despite the low curve of the deck, with burgles adding lots of stuff to your hand and Secret Passage and Cutting Class allowing you to find more cards whenever you’d like. Sap is a phenomenal card against the meta right now and will singlehandedly win you games. This deck heavily struggles to clear wide boards. Occasionally your burgles will help you out a bit here, but the Odd Paladins and Even Shamans of the world will simply build another one and another one and another one until you can’t clear it. Weapon hate cards also give us fits, including Zephyrs the Great who is the single biggest reason that you’ll rage at your screen. It’s also a fairly draw-dependant deck. You need your weapon, your buffs, and your burgles. If you don’t find one of these, you will lose the game. I found myself doing okay on this front (thank God for Secret Passage) but sometimes both Shinyfinders and both Cutlasses will be the bottom four cards of your deck and you will lose. Card Choices: Weapon Package: (2x) Deadly Poison (2x) Cavern Shinyfinder (2x) Spectral Cutlass (2x) Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil (2x) Cutting Class The two Shinyfinders (and to a lesser extent Secret Passage) help us hit our win condition of Cutlass as soon as possible. Once we have a cutlass equipped, Deadly Poison and Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil give the weapon enough attack to kill any threat, put our opponent on a clock, and restore massive amounts of health at the same time. Because we’re aiming to equip a big weapon every game, Cutting Class is nearly always a 0 mana draw 2 in the mid to late game which is obviously phenomenal. Burgle Package: (2x) Dragon’s Hoard (1x) Patches the Pirate (2x) Swashburglar (2x) Wand Thief (2x) Clever Disguise (2x) Underbelly Fence (2x) Vendetta Swashburglar is the only one mana burgle card with a body in the game. It thus gives us a free card that activates our synergies while also contesting the board on turn one. The inclusion of Patches thins the deck and allows us to play on even footing early with even board-centric aggro decks. An important note is if you’re against another rogue (I saw very few during my climb) Swashburglar will take a random rogue card, which won’t activate your Underbelly Fence or Vendetta, nor will it add durability to your cutlass. I originally included only one Wand Thief but it turns out Mage has some very good tools for our purposes. The wide variety of AOE effects, card draw, and freezes were nice, but the strongest part of Wand Thief is that Mage has so much shit that costs 0, 1, or 2 mana. While burgling Flamestrike is fun and can be the correct choice in some matchups, most of the time I’ll find that I’d much rather have a Freezing Potion that I can squeeze on top of other cards than a big spell that will take up my whole turn. While Mage does have some dud spells (Glacial Mysteries anyone?), the discover aspect means that you can almost always find something that will serve your purposes. This deck generally wants spells over minions because spells tend to have initiative and we rarely need to build a board to win the game. All of these aspects raised Wand Thief from a fringe inclusion to one of the strongest cards in the deck. Beware of picking Brain Freeze or Potion of Illusion as dual-class cards will NOT activate your burgle synergies or add durability to your Cutlass. Dragon’s Hoard was another card that I didn’t originally include two of. In fact, I didn’t have it at all in the deck’s first iteration. On the surface, it doesn’t make much sense. Hoard doesn’t help fight for board and gives us a minion not a spell. And not only a minion which might not have initiative, but legendary minions tend to be more expensive than average. So what was I thinking? Turns out legendary minions are powerful enough to justify the card. From Inara Stormcrash to Archmage Antonidas to Lucentbark, Dragon’s Hoard can simply win you the game off of one highroll. Just like with Wand Thief, there are plenty of terrible legendaries, but the discover aspect tends to offer at least one decent choice. Also, the card is damn fun and slamming down a King Krush for lethal as a rogue will never get old. Clever Disguise is simply a volume burgle. You need enough cards from other classes to pump your Cutlass up with enough durability to kill your opponent, and Disguise gets you two of them for two mana. I don’t love this card but it’s sheer efficiency makes it impossible to drop. Along with Cutlass, we use shockingly efficient removal tools Vendetta and Underbelly Fence as our burgle payoffs. Against board-centric decks like aggro druid, and decks with must-remove threats like Big Priest, these cards make a load of difference. Vendetta being zero mana nearly always gives it more flexibility as a combo activator for Wand Thief and Tinker’s. Fence is also a phenomenal play with Tinker’s - the six attack Rush minion will clear midgame threats while allowing your buffed weapon to swing face. Other Stuff: (2x) Secret Passage (2x) Sap (1x) Swindle (1x) Beneath The Grounds (1x) Vanish Secret Passage is broken and should be in every rogue deck ever. In a draw-centric deck like this, it’s even better. Can't find Cutlass? Secret Passage got you. Don’t have weapon buffs? Secret Passage got you. Don’t have enough burgles? Secret Passage got you. Need Vanish immediately? Secret Passage has motherfucking got you. Sap is our carry against Big Priest and any other deck that cheats out massive threats. Not killing the Blood of Ghuun, Walking Fountain, or Voidlord means that it can’t be rezzed and your opponent has to play it when they reach the appropriate turn. By which point, we hope that they’re dead. Sap also makes us one of the few classes that can deal with an early Edwin. Swindle is a true 30th card. When I cut Fan of Knives (More on that below) I needed one more card to fill the deck, and Swindle felt like a generic good rogue card that would make my draws marginally more consistent. Beneath The Grounds is my middle finger to highlander decks, especially Zephyrs the Great who gets his own section later. If you’re against a Reno Warlock or Machine Gun Priest, having this card will likely win you the game. If you aren’t, it’s probably a dead card unless you’re floating three mana for some reason. It says something about the Wild meta that I felt like this was a very worthy tradeoff and seriously considering putting two in. Vanish is a last hail mary against a deck that does manage to build a board against you. It pulls its weight especially against Big Priest, Evolve Shaman, and any kind of Deathrattle deck that tries to build an impenetrable board. But it also costs six mana, which makes it a very expensive and very dead card a lot of the time. I’ve had one copy since the beginning and it feels like the perfect number. A thing to note is that Vanish can bounce your own cards too - make sure to play your Swashburglars and Wand Thieves before Vanishing if you have hand space and mana to do so. Another point to remember is that if your opponent has more minions than they have hand space, Vanish will return the cards to your opponent’s hand in the order they were played. When your opponent hits ten cards, any remaining minions will be destroyed and their deathrattles WILL be activated. This is especially important for Scrapyard Colossus and Voidlord, who deathrattle into more taunts which block your weapon swing into the face of your opponent. Either destroy the original bodies so Vanish kills the deathrattle spawns or kill enough minions played before that the deathrattle taunts are safely returned to your opponent’s hand. Didn’t Make The Cut: I included two copies of Fan of Knives once I realized how terribly I was doing against Aggro Druid and Odd Paladin. For a while, they felt decent. A boardwide ping is nice, and Fan also cycles itself so it doesn’t even take up a valuable card slot. But then I realized two things about these decks. Odd Paladin has infinite minion generation potential with their hero power. Killing a board of 1/1’s might delay their buffs a turn, but doesn’t run them out of board refills because they can generate dudes without using cards. And aggro druid would either have a board buffed out of Fan range by turn three (and I would be dead) or they would run out of steam and awkwardly flop. In neither case was Fan drastically changing the game, even if it felt nice to kill a board of dudes. So out the door they went. Replaced with BTG because I was facing Reno Priest every game and Swindle because it just seemed good. It really hurt to cut Tess Graymane. She’s one of the most fun cards ever printed and slamming down waves of burgled shit never gets old. But as I transitioned to a spell-centric burgle deck, her random nature became more and more annoying. When Tess is slamming 8/8’s and 12/12’s, she’s phenomenal. When she Ice Lances your face, Fireballs herself, and gives your opponent’s minion a Blessing of Authority, she’s much less useful. Her cost of 8 mana simply made her far too expensive for the minimal number of times she was remotely useful. One thing I was consistently wanting in this deck was more weapon buffs. I experimented with Goblin Auto-Barber and Vulpera Toxinblade but neither ended up making the cut. Auto-Barber was too minimal a buff to feel particularly useful, and Toxinblade’s temporary status made her not worth the slot. This deck doesn’t exactly run minion threats, so Toxinblade was always eating my opponent’s removal and never really surviving more than a turn, which she needed to in order to be a strong inclusion. Of the other Burgle options, Hallucination and Blink Fox are the other ones that are even vaguely worth running. Hallucination would be a reasonable choice to experiment more with (potentially two over the Dragon’s Hoards) but I found them underwhelming due to the sheer number of dud or synergy-dependant cards in many classes. Oftentimes, I would have only one decent pick off a Hallucination with an expensive spell and an understated minion taking up the other two discover options. Blink Fox was too expensive for a Swashburglar effect and a 3/3 on turn 3 doesn’t cut it as a body in Wild. Both also suffer from the Swashburglar problem of being utterly cucked against Rogues. I also briefly considered replacing Beneath the Grounds with Bad Luck Albatross in order to mess Big Priest up. However, I wasn’t having a huge Big Priest problem, and the only way to kill Albatross in the deck is with Vendetta, which is often better used to kill the minions the priest is cheating. The Zeph Rules Zephyrs The Great is a phenomenally powerful card and a staple in two of the best decks in Wild - Reno Priest and Renolock. It also utterly destroys this deck by generating an Acidic Swamp Ooze on command to send your weapon to an ignominious and oozy demise. While there’s no denying that Zeph really sucks for this deck, there’s a couple of things we can try. Tactic 1: The Great Zeph Bait. If you’re able to draw into both cutlasses fairly early (not an uncommon occurrence), you can go for this strategy. Play a cutlass, drop a Tinker’s or a Deadly Poison, and potentially play a Burgled card or two. If I’m trying to force Zeph specifically, I will usually follow this by skipping my next swing. Essentially, you’re trying to make your weapon look as threatening as possible without committing many resources to it. When your opponent plays Zeph and subsequently Ooze, you can play your second Cutlass and fearlessly toss all of your buffs on it. If you go for the Great Zeph Bait, make sure to kill both minions before developing your second weapon, as a fair number of Reno decks run either bounce or copy effects. If they’re simply able to add another ooze to their hand and save it for your second weapon, you will be sad. Tactic 2: Make Zeph Whiff. Zephyrs is a phenomenal card, but his inability to understand card text can be his downfall. While he understands that Spectral Cutlass is a big weapon, he doesn’t realize that it can gain infinite durability. He doesn’t generally seem to value Lifesteal as highly as he should either. He also can’t look at decks, so he doesn’t realize that our only win condition is to buff the weapon. My point is that while Zeph is strong, he doesn’t value killing Spectral Cutlass nearly as highly as he should (a priority above all else except avoiding direct lethal). But because Zeph is still a discover and offers three cards, it isn’t easy to get him to not offer weapon hate at all. Essentially, you have get Zeph to value three other things more highly than destroying your weapon. If you can do this, he will not offer Ooze, even when a cutlass is active on your side. Many opponents don’t recognize these whiff factors, and won’t take measures to maximize their likelihood of hitting an Ooze (like playing Zeph with exactly two mana remaining). There are a few things you can do to maximize your chances of Zeph whiffing. These tips are roughly in order of effectiveness.
Keep your weapon as small as possible, both in Attack and Durability. Decreases the likelihood that Zeph will value weapon removal.
Build a board of minions. Increases the likelihood that Zeph will value AoE spells.
Play a Secret or two. Increases the likelihood that Zeph will offer Flare.
Play one large/must-kill minion. Increases the likelihood that Zeph will value removal.
Lower your opponent’s health. Increases the likelihood that Zeph will value healing.
Keep your opponent low on cards. Increases the likelihood that Zeph will offer draw. Careful about doing this if your weapon durability is more than one at 7+ mana as Zeph is more likely to offer Harrison Jones.
Niche cases. Keep an eye out for any conditions in the game that synergize perfectly with a basic/classic card that Zeph can offer. For example, if your opponent has a 1/10 minion, keep it alive as Zeph is more likely to offer Inner Fire. If they have three murlocs, Zeph is more likely to offer Coldlight Seer.
If you can create a game state where Zeph simply doesn’t offer ooze, you will be treated to a beautiful sight. Sex is great and all but a baffled opponent slowly mousing over each discover option before emoting and conceding is arguably the best feeling in the world. Tactic 3: Fuck it. Go balls to the wall and play like they don’t have Zeph. Throw all of your buffs on the weapon and come to terms with the fact that if they have him, you will lose. I will sometimes opt for this strategy if any of the following conditions are met.
At least two Beneath the Grounds Ambushes are still in the deck.
I have tried to bait Zeph and my opponent didn’t play him.
My opponent has played Lorekeeper Polkelt.
My opponent has very few cards or is topdecking.
If I don’t commit to the weapon now, I will definitely lose.
Zephyrs The Great is going to lose you a fair amount of games. But if you can pull off any of these strategies, you might sneak by him with some wins. Matchups: Odd Demon Hunter: This deck is weird. The best builds seem to be made up of a glut of the best-statted one-cost minions, Stiltsteppers, Acrobatics, Leeroy, and Baku. Our early game generally lines up well against these minions, and Odd DH generally lacks the burst to power through our healing once Cutlass gets to a threatening size. However, if we don’t draw into our early answers or fail to burgle fairly well, Odd DH is a phenomenally consistent deck and will always run us over if they get any room to do so. Even matchup. Soul DH: This deck seemed to be mostly piloted by standard players trying to climb in Wild. The burst of a Soul DH that hits all of its pieces can be impressive. But these combos often come online late enough that our cutlass is healing us for 8+ health every turn. Find something to deal with a full Soulciologist board, look to burgle taunts and freezes to stop the huge attacks from going face, and you’re cruising. Favored matchup. Aggro Druid: By cutting Fan of Knives I was essentially conceding the matchup if the Druid drew well. This has held true - if Aggro Druid has an explosive opener, you will lose the game. If they don’t, the deck is fairly easy to run out of resources. Voracious Readers can refill once or twice, but if I’m not dead by turn four I can frequently use removals efficiently and prevent them from ever building a threatening board. A card that deserves special mention is Bloodsail Corsair. If you’re careless against Aggro Druid and leave your weapon at one durability, a well-timed Corsair can snipe it and lose you the game on the spot. Unfavored matchup. Combo/Maly Druid: They can’t really do anything about us loading our weapon up and killing them. I only faced a couple of druids that weren’t aggressive and none of them put up much of a fight. Favored matchup, not much to say here. Hunter: I think I faced fewer than five hunters my entire climb, and they were all hyper aggro or janky deathrattle decks. We can generally prevent aggro Hunter from building a board, and their hero powers, Kill Commands, and such generally aren’t enough burst to beat through our healing. Deathrattle Hunter with plenty of taunts could potentially be a problem but it’s rezzes are much slower than Big Priest and it gets arguably even more destroyed by a well-timed Sap or Vanish. It’s a good idea to play around Zephyrs in this matchup until you know you’re not facing a Reno Hunter. I honestly didn’t find enough hunters to even say what might be favorable or not. Poor Rexxar. Quest Mage: Quest Mage is an annoying matchup for one reason and one reason only. They can generate a lot of freezes, which keep us from swinging our weapon for a turn. The amount of Freezing Potions, Ice Lances, and Frostbolts that seem to come out of Evocation, Magic Trick, and Mana Cyclone makes me want to tear my hair out. Our healing is rarely relevant against the OTK potential this deck brings. Otherwise, save Vendetta or another removal for your opponent’s Flamewankers and bring them down to low health as quickly as possible. Quick note on this matchup - Hitting your opponent in the face for lethal damage while they have Ice Block active will NOT heal you for any health. This interaction is consistent with other Lifesteal effects but still annoying and you will sometimes have to choose between setting off Ice Block and healing for 12. Even matchup. Secret Mage: I think before this expansion, Secret Mage would’ve been a much worse matchup for us. The switch to Rigged Faire Game as a main draw engine has a serious downside against a deck that is able to hit your face with an infinite weapon every turn. I won a significant amount of games by chipping away at my opponent every turn and denying them the all-important three cards. Play around Counterspell and Explosive Runes whenever possible as most decks run two copies and cheat them early. If we can get our weapon big enough, or run them out of face damage, we can safely heal out of the deck’s damage range. However, a Secret Mage firing on all cylinders is one of the best decks in the game and will win with a combination of well-statted minions, free secrets, and burn. Slightly unfavorable matchup. Odd Paladin: We struggle the most against decks that can build wide boards without committing many resources. Odd Pally is the unquestioned king of this strategy and thus tailor-made to bork us. I was able to win against this deck a couple of times when they filled up their board with 1/1’s and had no way to buff them, which was funny but not a particularly consistent win-con. Play around Oh My Yogg and Never Surrender, try to burgle AoEs, and accept that this is probably a 20-80 matchup or worse for us. Very heavily unfavored, and the bogeyman of climbing ladder with this deck. Not Odd Paladin: I ran into a couple of Even Paladins here and there which seemed like Odd Pally but slightly worse, a few Pure Paladins which got defeated by timely saps, and a single Mech Paladin who blew me out on turn four. They were so drowned out by the sea of Odd Pally however that I can’t write about them in extreme detail. Reno Priest: Beneath The Grounds carries another matchup. If they are able to get Raza and Anduin online, your main priority becomes keeping Anduin’s health below half to ward off Spawn of Shadows burst turns. As long as you can do that, we can mostly heal through their turns of chip damage with the hero power and eventually beat them down. Developing any minions we can will help with this plan because the low-health Anduin will be forced to waste hero powers clearing the minions, buying us more time. Favored matchup. Big Priest: Sometimes when you’re playing against Big Priest, they cheat out a Vargoth and a Blood of Ghuun on turn 4 and you just lose. Sometimes, they do nothing for nine turns and you win. It’s the matches in between these extremes that we focus on. Keep your Saps and plan your Vanish turn wisely. Most Big Priests nowadays don’t run Obsidian Statue, but place the highest priority on sapping it if they do. The combination of lifesteal and taunt means that we essentially lose the game if it ends up in the rez pool. Even or slightly favored matchup. Rogues: I faced a hodgepodge of Rogue decks, none of which really felt like a complete list. Combo-style rogues lack taunts and healing and get subsequently demolished by our weapon before they can do anything interesting. Kingsbane Rogue does what we do, but slower and without Lifesteal on every turn. VS says Odd Rogue is a decent deck, but I only saw one on my climb which wasn’t able to do enough damage to burst through the Cutlass healing. Mill Rogue is cute but terrible. I also ran into another Burgle Rogue but he was playing a version with Blink Foxes and Hallucinations which performs very poorly against other rogues. Favored matchup against the entire class I suppose? Even Shaman: I barely faced any of these on my climb, but I think I lost every time I did. We can’t really clean up their wide and efficient boards, and Sea Giant and Thing From Below aren’t bothered by Sap. Unfavored matchup. Big Shaman: Sap is phenomenal in this matchup. Like any Big deck, there will be some games where you don’t draw what you need and get blown out on turn four. But much more often, you’ll find games where the deck puts out a big threat, it gets sapped, and they sputter for a couple turns while you make a giant weapon and start whacking them. Try to avoid playing minions in the mid-late game while pushing for lethal because Walking Fountain or Tidal Wave will allow them to find critical heals. Favored matchup. Aggro Warlock (Pain/Zoo/Discolock): We like this matchup because if your opponents lower their health total quickly enough, we can often start to threaten lethal with our weapon as soon as turn six. Our cheap and flexible removal generally lets us get priority targets like Darkglare, Malchezar’s Imp and Tiny Knight of Evil off the field before they kill us. Discolock doesn’t have the consistent board floods of the decks that really fuck us and Fence and Vendetta line up well against their threats. But at the end of the day, they are an aggro deck and will win if we whiff our draws at all. I faced few Pain and Zoolocks, but Discolock was one of my favorite matchups to play with this list and I felt like it was at worst even and potentially even slightly us-favored. Cubelock: A problem matchup. We simply aren’t able to kill waves of big demons. Vanish and Sap let us delay the threats but once we run out of stalling power Voidlord very effectively prevents us from swinging our weapon to face. Fortunately, Cubelock has an abysmal matchup against Priest and has thus fallen a bit out of the meta. I only saw a few on my climb, but if they start cheating Voidlords before we have them to sub-15 health, we are in huge trouble. Slightly unfavored matchup. Renolock: We stan Beneath The Grounds. Renolocks will generally play defensively and take damage fairly freely in the early game. Generally don’t play BTG on turn three because renolocks draw so much that they’re fairly likely to hit at least two ambushes if you give them enough time. If I have it in hand, I’ll hold it until I start buffing my weapon or until they’re sub fifteen health and might be feeling pressured enough to use Reno. If you don’t find BTG, follow the Zeph Rules and pray to God that you draw it quickly. Tickatus is rarely particularly relevant because if they find the time to corrupt and play it multiple times the game was lost a long time ago. Renolock will often have big taunt Demons also, but they come in more manageable waves than Cubelock. With BTG, this is a favored matchup. Odd/Control Warrior: This matchup is pretty simple. Make your weapon as big as possible as quickly as possible in order to chip through their armor. If they run weapon hate and are able to draw it, you will lose. If they don’t, you will eventually win - they don’t have much to stop you smacking them for 10+ damage every turn. I only ran into three of these decks on my climb and got Stickyfingered twice, so my gut says that it’s unfavorable. Pirate Warrior: Oh how the mighty have fallen. Pirate Warrior simply feels weaker than other aggro decks and its lack of boardwide buffs makes its minions much less threatening. Their highrolls are as scary as ever, but kill Ship’s Cannon and Skybarge on sight and be wary of burst coming in the form of Leeroy or Kragg, and the healing from your built-up weapon will generally outpace their damage. Their biggest strength (efficient trading with minion boards) isn’t particularly relevant against us. Slightly favored - one of our best aggro matchups. Beware of Bloodsail Corsair! My Favorite Wins: Playing a deck that runs on adding random cards to your hand will occasionally lead to hilarious victories with cards your opponent never expected to need to play around. There were too many to write about, but here were some highlights.
I played a Hunter and hit a terrible Dragon’s Hoard on turn one where my best option was a Knuckles. I reluctantly picked it and it sat in my hand until later in the game, where I pulled Houndmasters off both of my Swashburglars. Three houndmaster buffs (one got returned to my hand via Freezing Trap) and a Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil later, I beat my opponent into submission with an unkillable 12/13 Knuckles. I find it possible that it’s the only time Knuckles has actually won someone a game.
I found a Cloning Device off of a Clever Disguise and yoinked my Shaman opponent’s Shudderwock, followed by two Dragon’s Hoards that gave me Dinotamer Brann and a second Shudderwock. I waited until my deck was low enough that no duplicates remained, and played Brann, Shudderwock, second Shudderwock, and thwacked him with four large stompy dinos over three turns.
I burgled a Totem Goliath off Swashburglar, Totemic Might off Clever Disguise, and a Grand Totem Eys’or from Dragon’s Hoard. My poor Shaman opponent was beaten to death by a rogue’s board of basic totems.
While playing a Big Priest I got a Lucentbark off Dragon’s Hoard and a Seance and Power Word: Replicate off Clever Disguise. Turns out three 4/8 taunts that resurrect every turn will win you the game, even against Big Priest with a full rez pool.
A Pirate Warrior wrested board from me, beat me to two health with two cards in hand and one durability on my weapon, and began emoting aggressively. Fortunately, one of those two cards was an Inara Stormcrash which allowed me to deal 26 damage (and kill him) on turn 8.
This deck is by far the most fun I’ve ever had playing Hearthstone, and this list is viable at Legend ranks. I encourage everyone to give it a try. Thanks for making it to the end and please comment with questions! Happy thieving!
So, with the recent NicoNico livestream we have a lot of information about everything with the coming fest. This Megathread will be listing out all the events and other things going on during fest and I'll try my best to capture everything I see put up about it, including rewards for stuff if I can get them. I'll do another separate post for the banners and put a link here so if you're looking for what's on the banners the link is here and I'll also link it below. There's a lot here (mostly copied and pasted from S0litair3d on various GF Threads with additional inputs from the translations of onthefaultline and Leyrouxhere) so if I messed anything up please let me know. Also if you have any updates (like what specifically is given out each day in the login bonuses, Spiralling Floors (boss event), etc.) let me know and I'll add it. Anything I could find a solid date for I haven't added though I'm sure there will be some things like Gem draws that's dates always come late. As I find dates or solid info I'll add it. Thanks to onthefaultline and Leyroux for the translation work, dataminers like ElNinoFr (and other I'm sure), and S0litair3d as always for the posts on GameFaqs that allows me to do these and also thanks to Pyrotios for always checking my work and helping make sure these things are accurate.
A sub-menu will be brought up when you press and hold the icons for equipment, abilities, Magicite and Historia Crystals, allowing you quick access to their upgrading menu pages.
Miscellaneous updates (16 Dec)
The Overdrive function will be added to the 6* Magicites and Dreambreaker dungeons.
The limit of 6* Ruby abilities transmutable from the Royal Crucible have been raised to two.
Similar to party templates, you can now register a template of equipment, ability, SB & Materias for every character
Maximum slots will be increased from 60 to 99
A filtering function will be added to Kite's Treasure Trove to ease the searching of actual items the players are currently looking for
Hero Artifacts will also be added to Kite's Treasure Trove for a limited time.
A new "Labyrinth" label will also be added
The Home Screen will be renewed and their existing icons rearranged to the following order:
Record Dungeons
Mote Dungeons
Power-up Dungeons
Realm Dungeons
Event Dungeons
Labyrinth Dungeons
Nightmare/Magicite Dungeons
Cardia Dungeons
The initial position of the active party will be reset to be in front of the Realm Dungeons.
We’ve examined the game balance and made the following changes.
Changes to the power granted by Elarra and Dr Mog
We have made changes to the duration of the buff provided by Elarra's Fabula Guardian and Dr Mog's Sentinel's Tome found available in certain dungeons.
Before Change: 30 seconds
After Change: 45 seconds
As compensation for this maintenance, all players will be sent 1 Mythril.
Mythril will be sent to the Item Chest.
Items in the Item Chest are deleted after 30 days. Please be sure to claim them before the claim period ends.
An entire new maze like dungeon inspired by Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy will be implemented into the game.
Face enemies of various difficulties from downright easy to many more times harder than those offered in the Magicites or Cardia Dungeons.
Accessible from the Home menu, the Labyrinth Dungeon has its own Labyrinth Party menu & Item Vault. As well as a link to Kite's Shop and Labyrinth related announcements.
You have to create 3 parties before challenging the Labyrinth Dungeon. Between the 3 parties, you cannot have a repeated character, Magicite & Historia Crystal.
When making the 3 parties for the first time, nothing can be shared. Characters, Magicite, Historia Crystal, equipment, abilities & even Record Materias.
However once you have properly entered the Labyrinth, you can interchange all of the above. But nothing else from your inventory.
In other words you can only play around with 15 characters/equipment/RM, 1-3 Historia Crystals, 1-15 Magicites, and 30 abilities.
While you only need 5 Wodin accessories this way, the fatigue system will force you to change your party setup very frequently. So hoard vs convenience. Either way you will very likely need to redo your RMs before every single fight.
On the bottom right of each character sprite, there is a number.
This refers to that character's "Record Fatigue".
This value will increase if you bring that character into battle. And decrease if you did not choose that character for the fight, or enter a Recovery Painting with him.
If the Record Fatigue exceeds 7, that character will enter Fatigue Mode and his stats will decrease.
If the Record Fatigue reaches 2 and below, he will enter Vigor Mode and gain additional stats.
Vigor Mode can also be triggered through special events in certain Paintings, as well as the item "Lethe's Drop".
Entering the actual Labyrinth Dungeon will bring you to a map with various tiles and you can only move to an adjacent tile one at a time.
The types of tiles are "Labyrinth Cloister", "Cloister Dimensional Gap", "Start of Cloister", "Teleportation Crystal" & "Locked".
If you reach a Teleportation Crystal, you can teleport back to that tile later on.
Labyrinth Cloister
The number of steps in the Cloister's icon will tell you how lengthy it is.
Once you have decided on your Cloister, confirm your parties and enter.
Each cloister has multiple floors.
Each floor has multiple sets of 3 paintings for you to choose 1.
Behind the painting can be a battle or special event.
Choices of paintings are random so repeated attempts of the same Cloister may not give you the same options.
Battle Painting
Contains a battle with a random enemy.
Select your party and challenge it.
There will be a guaranteed item drop, but randomly from a list.
Advancement Painting
Provides certain buffs to your characters.
Click the magnifying glass icon to select the buff you want.
Recovery Painting
Resets the Record Fatigue to your characters.
Exploration Painting
Can contain an item, a battle, or a mysterious door that you can choose to open or not to.
For the latter, either options will give you a positive or negative effect.
Treasury Painting
Contains 3 treasure chests for you to pick 1.
Inside all 3 will definitely be a Hero Artifact. (Need to verify if all three are artifacts or just 1 is guaranteed).
If you have a "Magic Key" or spend Mythril/Gem, you can open more than 1 chest.
It serves as a shortcut for clearing the cloister faster.
Warden Painting
Lies at the end of the cloister.
Behind it is a boss battle, clear it to win and exit the cloister.
Dungeon Information & Rewards
The information menu of each floor has a list of paintings, enemy encounters, items, as well as the boss behind the Warden Painting.
Under Drop Reward, you can also see the list of Hero Artifacts that are available in that cloister.
So you can explore certain cloisters more thoroughly if it contains the Artifact that you want.
You have the option to escape in the middle of the cloister. However without the item "Teleport Stone", you will lose all items earned inside this cloister. So in order to retrieve all items in the cloister, you have to either defeat the Warden Painting, or exit with the Teleport Stone.
Quick Exploration
If you have the item "Record Bookmark", you can simply spend stamina to instantly complete a cloister that you have already cleared. EXP will not be earned, but this allows you to quickly gain items & Labyrinth Points.
Cloister Dimensional Gap (CDG)
In the Labyrinth Map, you can also find a Cloister Dimensional Gap. Inside contains a high difficulty battle. No exploration, just the fight. Cloister Dimensional Gap can contain either elemental or realm based battles.
In the first release of Labyrinth Dungeon, you can find [Labyrinth] Kalavinka Striker.
This boss favors Earth characters and there will be a physical and magic allowed variant.
Grade rewards of this boss contains a Hero Artifact with a rare passive.
Note that these Artifacts can also be obtained through normal cloister exploration.
Seasons
Labyrinth Dungeon is season-based.
New dungeons are periodically added and this addition will be treated as a Season. The title of each dungeon will contains the season it arrives in, eg. S1 for Season 1.
Cloister Dimensional Gaps are also added periodically, this is called a Group. At the start of Labyrinth Dungeon we will be in Season 1 Group A. When the second Dimensional Gap is added, we will move onto Season 1 Group B. If a new wave of dungeons are added (together with a new Dimensional Gap), we are at Season 2 Group C.
Each Group determines what Hero Artifacts will be dropped. They will belong to characters that are useful against the newest Dimensional Gap. First boss is Earth-weak, so Group A's list of Hero Artifact drops will belong to Earth characters.
Relics from expired groups will not be available until that season ends. * For example, let's say that Season 1 has 4 Groups (A-D).
Group A relics are gone when Group B starts, which are available until Group C.
But once Season 1 has ended, Group A-D will go on rotation within S1 dungeons.
Season refers to an addition of a bunch of dungeons.
They will be marked with S1, S2, S3, etc so that you can find them easily in the future when there is many.
Cloister Dimensional Gap is just a single boss fight.
If it is inserted into Season 1's batch of dungeons, then it belongs to Season 1.
The period between each CDG is called a Group.
From the debut of Labyrinth, it is Group A, which changes to Group B once the second CDG arrives.
Based on DeNA's initial schedule, it seems like there will be 4 Groups in each Season. (Season 1 Group A-D, Season 2 Group E-H, etc.).
The list of possible Hero Artifact drops is dependent on the Group.
Group A is Earth because the CDG is Earth-weak. If for example CDG2 is VII-weak, then Group B's relics will be for VII.
But once Group B starts, you can no longer grind for Group A relics until the season ends.
Season 2 will add another batch of dungeons, and Group E will start in there. At the same time, Season 1's dungeons will go back to Group A. Which goes onto Group B after a few days. And so on.
Example Season (Season 1) - 16th December 2020 to 23rd April 2021
3x Tutorial Dungeon (D60~80)
4x Low Difficulty Dungeon (D80~180)
4x Mid Difficulty Dungeon (D220~350)
3x High Difficulty Dungeon (D400~500)
4x Cloister Dimensional Gap
Cloister Dimensional Gap S1-2, S1-3 & S1-4 will arrive on a later date
Overdrive is only available in Cloister Dimensional Gap S1-1
Group A - 16th December 2020 to 15th January 2021
Low Difficulty Dungeon
Cloister of Caves S1 (Rinoa, Emperor, Guy)
Cloister of Sorceress S1 (Red XIII, Tellah, Rude)
Cloister of Breeding S1 (Red XIII, Cinque, Guy)
Cloister of Escape S1 (Tifa, Cinque, Cid XIV)
Mid Difficulty Dungeon
Cloister of Trials (Rinoa, Emperor, Guy)
Cloister of Floating Castle S1 (Red XIII, Tellah, Rude)
Cloister of Waterfall Lake S1 (Red XIII, Cinque, Guy)
Cloister of Sunken Depths S1 (Tifa, Cinque, Cid XIV)
High Difficulty Dungeon
Cloister of Temple (Rinoa, Emperor, Guy)
Cloister of Electromagnetic Tower (Tifa, Cinque, Cid XIV)
Cloister of Volcano (Red XIII, Tellah, Rude)
Meanwhile in Kite's Shop.
When Group A starts, all relics inside are added to his shop.
Once Group B starts, his shop will also get these new additions on top of Group A's.
So near the end of Season 1, his shop will have relics from Group A-D, while the dungeons will only drop D.
But once Season 1 ends, all relics will be removed and his shop will only contain E.
These are powerful Relics obtained from within the Labyrinth Dungeons or from trading them as limited time exclusive items from Kite's Treasure Trove.
Hero Artifacts can only be exclusively equipped by a particular hero (like Hero abilities) that the Artifact resonates with, and they come in three different categories, namely Weapon, Armor and Accessory.
Hero Artifacts have their own inventory.
Levels
A basic Hero Artifact will start from level 1/50.
At level 50, physical weapons have 266 ATK, magic has 258 MAG, ranged physical has 253 ATK, hybrid has 258 in both stats,
All weapon & armors have minor omni-elemental boost, all accessories have Wodin's effect.
Like regular Relics, Hero Artifacts can also be leveled up, and it is possible to level them up till lv99 by breaking its level cap by fusing copies of the same Hero Artifact.
Levels can be increased by spending Rainbow Crystals as usual. In addition you can feed them spare Hero Artifacts.
Hero Accessories has no levels.
Once a Hero Artifact has reached level 99, you can then raise its Augment level up to +99.
You can do so by fusing more copies of the same Hero Artifact, or use "Intellect Rosetta Stone" that can be obtained in the Labyrinth Dungeon.
Passives
Hero Artifacts can hold two special passive abilities, an Unique passive ability and an Inherited passive ability.
Unique passive abilities are always given to and shared across all similar Hero Artifacts.
Inherited passive abilities are random and can differ even for identical Hero Artifacts; they can be obtained by methods such as Reforging, Break their Level Cap, etc.
Higher difficulty dungeons will drop Hero Artifacts with better inherited passives.
Similar to Magicites, the Inherited passive can be replaced when you fuse the same equipment.
Unique passive is fixed and cannot be changed.
Inherited passive for Artifacts purchased from Kite's Shop is average, while Artifacts dropped by defeating Cloister Dimensional Gap are guaranteed to be strong.
An example of a Unique passive is Critical Damage +5% (Fist), and Inherited passive is Earth Damage +3%.
A set bonus effect can be unlocked when two or three Hero Artifacts are equipped together for a hero.
For example, Tifa gains 50% SB Booster for 1 turn if she equips her Hero Weapon & Hero Armor (any 2 of the 3 hero artifacts).
Instant Cast 1 if she equips her Hero Weapon & Hero Accessory or Hero Armor & Hero Accessory (all 3 hero artifacts).
She gets both Set Bonuses if all 3 are equipped.
Hero Artifact accessories are not eligible for Reforge, Breaking Level Caps or receive Inherited passive abilities.
In commemoration of the release of Labyrinth Dungeon Season 1, Overdrive is made available for free for the first Cloister Dimensional Gap, [Labyrinth] Kalavinka Striker.
However, an "Overdrive" marker will be shown in your time score if you utilize it.
Just for the first boss.
There are no determined date on when Overdrive will be unlocked for future bosses.
In-game campaign
Gives reward based on the total Labyrinth Points the entire player base earned by 23rd December.
Tier 1: 5 Stamina Potions
Tier 2: 50 Rainbow Crystals
Tier 3: Red XIII Hero Weapon, Armor & Accessory
Tier 4: 3x Fest 10-pull tickets
Magicite Support Campaign (25 Dec)
There will be limited missions from 25th December 2020 to 15th January 2021
Rewards include Realm (I've seen these can't be used on realms...?)/Elemental Relic Draw Ticket & New Year Relic Draw Ticket
January Twitter Campaign
Achieving the milestones will earn another month-long campaign of 10-pull daily draws in Feb 2021.
Fantasy Fest 2020
Schedule as follows:
30/11: Banners release after this will have Stamp Sheets
?: Fest Dream Selection (None - Next select is with the XIII event.)
Magicite Support Campaign (4 Dec-18 Dec)
From 4th to 18th December there will be limited missions involving various Magicite dungeons (except Lord of Knights)
Rewards include Elemental Relic Draw Ticket, note that these can't be used in the realm banners
End of Year Free Relic Draw x10 tickets can also be gotten here.
Stamina cost for all Magicite dungeon except Lord of Knights will be halved
Series Happy Relic Draws (RoP/LoTR) (8 Dec-11 Jan)
17 banners total (one for each realm).
One-time draw only. Each draw costs 5 Mythrils or 291 Gems.
This is a triple pull that guarantees you at least one 5*+.
Relic pool contains all BSB+ & LMRs in the game for the respective realms.
Trancendent Ruins (9 Dec-8 Jan)
All previous Transcendent bosses will return.
No New Transcendent boss
New Year Banquet (Orbfest) (16 Dec)
5 tickets per day over 10 days
Earn Festival Coins that can be spent in a limited trade shop
Christmas Login Bonus (18 Dec)
Rewards include Mythril, Crystal & Realm/Series Relic Draw Ticket
Fest Countdown Luckies (23, 24, 25 Dec)
One lucky banner a day for 3 days, each half-priced for the first 11-pull.
LMGlint/Glint+/LBG (2G5)
Physical AASB
Magical AASB
New Year Relic Draw (25 Dec)
Can only be pulled with New Year Relic Draw Tickets
Each ticket grants a 10-pull with 1G5
Receive up too 100 Relics by spending the End of Year Free Relic Draw x10 tickets in this special Relic Draw.
Log into the game during the holiday period to get the chance to receive up to ten End of Year Free Relic Draw x10 tickets.
These tickets can be obtained as part of the New Year Party 2021 Login bonus and also from the New Year's Gift Login bonus.
Additional tickets can also be obtained as part of the Magicites and Cardia Dungeon Events that are held simultaneously alongside these New Year Events.
Rates
7* - 1.042%
6* - 8.977%
5* - 4.019%
New Year Gift Dungeon (25 Dec)
14 dungeons in total
Dungeon on 1st January will reward 30 Mythrils
Spiralling Floors (Boss Event) (25 Dec)
Boss event of this fest.
The central Royal Archives event of the fest.
A mysterious spatial distortion has been uncovered by Tyro and co beyond the wall of the Royal Archives.
A neverending flight of winding stairs have seemed to appeared in its stead.
Test the limits of your party by forcing your way across the spiraling levels.
End/Start of Year Painting (25 Dec)
Fight against a boss to commemorate the Year of the Rat
Who will be swapped out on 1st January with another boss to celebrate the Year of the Cow
Rewards include Job Motes
(A silhouette of Giant Rat (III) representing the mascot of the Eastern Zodiac for the Year of the Rat (2020) and another pair of silhouettes of The Brothers - Sacred and Minotaur (VIII) representing the mascot of the Eastern Zodiac for the Year of the Ox (2021) are shown in the event banner).
Log into the game during the beginning of the year holiday period to receive rewards such as Mythrils and the exclusive Elarra's Battledore 6* accessory.
(Other than the rewards mentioned above, up to ten End of Year Free Relic Draw x10 tickets can also be obtained as part of the two login bonus events described above)
Fortune Bag Relic Draw (1 Jan - 15 Jan) Fest Dream Selection (None) *Next Dream selection was with the XIII event. If you spot any mistakes or have suggestions on how to improve the quality of my guides, feel free to comment here and I'll do my best to address them ASAP!
Merry Christmas! It has been a long month on the ladder. Most months, I start my climb with a Shudderwock deck, and when my bonus stars run out at D5, I switch to a more serious meta deck to try to climb. Often, that means a deck like CubeLock, Odd Warrior, or Reno Priest. Most months I try to complete the climb in the first few weeks, but this month I was pretty busy with work and also really struggling in a Meta that was mostly Big Priest, Reno Priest, Aggro Druid, Reno Warlock, and Odd Paladin. Then the nerfs happened, and the Meta constricted a little into mostly Secret Mage, Big Priest, Odd Paladin, Darkglare, and Reno Warlock. I saw a few Gal and Pirate Warriors, but mostly it was those decks. It really felt like a particularly acute Rock Paper Scissors, where each deck has good matchups, but also terrible matchups. I spent most of the month trying to get Big/Res Priest to work. Big/Res Priest can feel really powerful, but you have two very key spells and very expensive minions, and so draw is really important. Too important, maybe, and I found some ways to curve the deck lower because I was losing to Aggro. Of course your Aggro tools are mostly useless in the mirror and so the right tech package felt like a Catch-22 from game to game. I took Big/Res Priest all the way to D2 several times, but kept sliding back to D5 between misplays, bad draw, and poor matchups. So I decided to double down on RenoWock and see if I could eke out a legend climb. I know other people have done it before, but I always felt it was impossible in terms of the monthly ladder meta and my own play style and abilities. Something changed post nerf this month, and there was less faceblasting, high roll, aggro and more control decks. An important note is that the nerfs hit one of the top performing (and most busted) cards in this deck, Polkelt. He had been a must keep in the mulligan, always play T4 style card (a pivotal turn I describe as "the flip". The nerf to Polkelt was directed at Aggro, but it really hurt decks like this one which rely on tempo plays to keep up with faster decks. Anyway, a week or so after the nerfs as the mettle settled, it seemed like if I could queue into the right sort of decks - Big Priest, Reno Priest, Reno Mage, OTK Druid, etc, then maybe I had a shot, crippled Polkelt or not. What is RenoWock? RenoWock is a Highlander deck which features Shudderwock. You are attempting to capitalize on powerful healing via Reno, timely answers via Zephyr, and the ability to set up a powerful late game win condition in the form of multiple Shudderwock turns which, by replaying the battlecries of disruption cards like Loatheb and Boompistol Bully, limit the opponents ability to effectively respond. It is basically a slower, more cumbersome, Quest Mage, where instead of merely mashing the easy button each turn, you have to deliberately assemble a series of battlecries, respond to your opponent's board, keep your win condition from being disrupted, and try to deny your own opponent's win condition. It is fun, and frustrating, and runs a relatively low curve and decent draw as this deck really can't come back from behind, deal with a wide/tall board, and so depends on efficient trades and decently stetted minions. To Grumble or Not to Grumble? This deck doesn't play Grumble, and so it really isn't a bounce deck. Grumble is an incredibly powerful card, but it also completely destroys your board, by bouncing all minions back to your hand. Earlier in the game, Grumble can be fantastic since replaying a strong battlecry for (1) mana is amazing. I think he is a liability later in the game as, against many decks, 3 6/6 Shudderwocks is a pretty huge threat. So, no Grumble here. Quest? Yes. The argument against the Quest is the loss of a card and not playing a minion. This deck already has a lot of trouble keeping up on the board, but the Quest also gives you a ready T1 play and, upon completion, can give you a powerful mid game. Double Loatheb can be crushing. Double Sky General Krag is a lot of stats for (6) mana. The Quest can also help with your endgame, although, honestly, it was a pretty rare I was able to combine it with a Shudderwock card, either because I'd already spent the coin or because, after "the flip", Lightning Bloom was buried. Mulligan. The general mulligan for this deck is low curve and draw. You are foregoing AOE, and hoping to establish an early board and complete your quest vs other control decks. Against Aggro, you are trying to get some trades in. So standouts are Sludge Slurper and Questing Explorer, your two best T2 plays. Sandstorm Elemental is really only a keep against Paladin or deck where you expect tokens. Polkelt is an always keep, but at 5, the card is a bit of an albatross early in the game. Zephyr is always a keep, but not usually a T2 play. Prize Vendor is a decent keep as well, although it is worth considering if you want your opponent to draw. Lightning Bloom can be a keep if you already have low curve or draw, or if you are holding something like Reno or the Lurker against aggro, and want the ability to cheat them out on T4. Finally, Ice Fishing can be a good keep as it gets your draw engine going. This deck is brutal if you don't know the meta. The meta is brutal when there are different, effective, decks for the same class (Priest!?!). For example, your mulligan against Res Priest is Loatheb and transform spells. Lacking that, you are looking for the same general, low curve cards listed above. But your mulligan against Reno Priest is totally different. Your best card, always keep, is The Darkness, one of the most criminally underused cards in the Wild meta. The Darkness generally throws off their game entirely from T4 to about T8 as they try to figure out whether or not they want to draw their candles. Reno Priest's control tools are geared toward buying them a few turns until the Anduin Gatling gun can start firing. So the Darkness checks that for a bit while you start piecing together your game plan. Strategy. This deck is both a combo (vs. Control and Combo) and control (vs Aggro) deck. Control. Against Aggro, you are trying to trade effectively, heal, and bounce. You have three bounce tools in this deck, Bog Slosher, Zola, and Barista. All are powerful and all have their place. None are usually a keep in the mulligan. Your transform spells are a form of AOE, but struggle to keep up with Odd Paladin's new 1 cost Counterspell. Your standout cards are Kragg, Reno, and The Lurker Below. Which raises the question - what happens if you can't get to T6? Well, you die, and that was the problem with the proliferation of hyper aggro. I would estimate I had a 40% win condition against Aggro, and the games I won were usually games I top decked Reno, my opponent then ignored him and started smashing face again, and I bounced him, and they realized the game was now out of reach. You can try to tech more AOE, but Shaman doesn't have access to cheap, reliable AOE, and the more expensive spells fill your hands when you are hoping to draw the disruptive cards that enable you to deal with Control and Combo decks. The secret to Aggro is to trade effectively and try to limit their draw. If Aggro is a huge part of the meta, pick a different deck. Against Aggro you are often ultimately playing Shudderwock simply to heal again, or generate some AOE, or otherwise buy time. Generally, against Aggro, you don't want to use Coldlight, until it is time to really use Coldlight, meaning T8 or T9 where you are ready to draw a bunch of answers and their board is empty. Mill can also be a win condition against certain aggro decks that draw fast. Combo. When facing a slower deck, either combo, control, or midrange, you are looking to quickly complete your quest. That is the main goal T2-T5 - play cards they have to respond to, or play cards that delay their game by a turn or two. What you aren't able to do is build a very threatening board. With the nerf to Polkelt, your T5 is a little contested. Polkelt drives "the flip", where you know, each turn, almost exactly what you are drawing. Polkelt makes the deck very consistent, but it also means you need to trim any high cost cards that are not absolutely necessary. Even the Lurker Below has lost me games where I needed to draw Reno for healing. This deck runs (5) five drops - Polkelt, Barista, Loatheb, Boompistol, and Doppelgangster. All are essential to the gameplay, the way the deck is constructed. In order of importance, I would rank them 1) Polkelt, 2) Doppelgangster, 3) Loatheb, 4) Barista, 5) Boompistol. They can be very complementary. For example, against some control decks, you might be able to begin a bounce chain. T5 Loatheb, T6 Barista. T7 Hero Power + Loatheb (Double Loatheb). T8, Loatheb + Zola (bouncing Loatheb). T9 could then be another Double Loatheb, followed up a Boompistol and Doppelgangster on T10. Against many of the OTK druids you can win this game, even with 30+ armor down, because they simply can't respond. But all things equal, one of the most important cards to play is Doppelgangster, partially because there is almost never a good time to play this spectacularly bad card. My general advice is to get it out early because otherwise it can clog your hand and without it there is not consistent way to bounce Shudderwock, or threaten lethal. Against most control decks, I try to bounce Loatheb back into my hand at least once, so that on my Shudderwock turn, spells cost 10 more This is because a number of decks have access to AOE that can clear the board for 5 mana or less. Usually, one Boompistol is sufficient to block any battlecries that would turn the game around, such as an Old God or Bloodreaver Guldan. The other technique when facing Control is draw, and, particularly, overdraw. Many Control decks have very fat hands T6 on. Generally, you will be able to play out your low curve battlecries (even in non optimal scenarios - Mind Control Tech when your opponent has an empty board? Sure, if you need to empty your hand or get your quest completed). If you can overdraw them by two or three with a doubled Coldlight, that can sometime win you the game on the spot. Most of the time though, you'll burn a few non-key cards but the next turn they will start trying to clear out their hand). Your overall strategy against Control is to identify the deck they are playing, figure out if you have the tools in hand to disrupt it, and, if not, start looking for those tools. Dirty Rat can be game winning against certain decks, but you usually want to double it to get maximum value, as well as having an answer for whatever it pulls out. Dirty Rat is particularly effective against Reno Priest where pulling and killing certain cards makes their strategy slower or less consistent. Against most decks, Dirty Rat is an effective late game tool. This deck has a 60-70% WR against Reno Priest and Big Priest, 50-60% against Reno Warlock and 40% or less against Odd Paladin, Secret Mage, and Darkglare. It is a lot of fun to play. You easily have 3-4 slots for tech. I think that the evolve versions are probably better decks since I would expect them to fair better vs. Aggro, but against Aggro, there are better decks, such as Odd Warrior. I don't think a ladder full of Shudderwock decks is good for the meta, but luckily, Blizzard doesn't care what any of us think and so Priest has a 0 cost hero power, Mage gets a free turn, and Rogue can shuffle a million versions of whatever they want back into their deck. I think that this deck is a great contender for fun-to-play dumpster Legend, but hopefully this guide is useful if you want to try to take a spin on regular ladder, which, at least for me, worked this month. But probably not next month, or ever again. AAEBAZnDAx7eBf4Fsgb4B/oOwxbdugL2vQL5vwLfxAKLzgLD6gL26gLv9wKLhQO9mQPGmQP8owO7pQPPpQPhpQPhqAPDtgPztwOTwgPgzAOVzQPw1AP21gO24QMAAA==
[Table] r/buildapc — I'm the owner/founder of PCPartPicker. Celebrating 10 years of PCPP + /r/buildapc. AMA (pt 1/2)
Source Note: other employees' answers were occasionally included, but are by no means complete.
Questions
Answers
PC Part Picker. Where do I start. First of all, thank you so much for all of the help you guys have given me. If not for your team and your website I might not have built the PC I have now. I am very grateful to you guys for making such straightforward software with so many options. You guys are on top of everything, and I’d just like to thank you for all that you’ve done for the PC building community. That being said, onto the questions! 1. What are your favorite PC Parts? What’s your ideal/dream PC part list? 2. I’ve been having this problem recently because things are out of stock. When I make a parts list I often have to go into the page for the part to determine the actual cost for the part when it comes back in stock from the major retailers. When displaying the price, could you also add in parentheses something like: Price: $265 (Lowest: $200)
Thanks for the kind words! I'll defer to Alex/Ryan on their favorite parts. For me I'd just like to get hold of a 3080 one day but I'm not in a rush. I'm still happily running this build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/c99djX
On the stock / pricing issue, we might be able to look into something like that, but I can't make any guarantees.
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Downmented: It's a bad time to be GPU shopping when the founde owner of PCPP can't even score a 30 series GPU BDsBiggest: This was my thought, how does he not have one?
I honestly don't really need one and there are people who play way more intensive stuff than I do. I'm ok to wait.
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On that note, what do you play?!!
I still really enjoy Minecraft of all things. My oldest son started playing Skyblock and so that became a bit of a time sink. Used to play a decent bit of Civ and other Sid Meier stuff a long time ago. I'm just not that much of a gamer though. I'm legitimately terrible at FPS games, so I don't really enjoy them all that much. Minecraft lets me just piddle around and experiment with different creations, architectures, etc. And it's something I can play with my kids which is great until they trash my island.
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As a fellow Minecraft buff, what are your thoughts on the best CPU for Minecraft at the moment? I know it depends more on CPU performance than GPU, at least in Java edition.
I'll have to defer to the other guys on staff or the community because I honestly don't know. I'm playing on an i5-6600k/980 ti which has been more than enough.
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Thanks for the response! How long have you had that build for?
Roughly four years. I need to upgrade the GPU though because where I work in my house it's getting cold and ThoughtA is outpacing me on Folding at Home.
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Do you have a rebuild planned for when the 3080 is back? Or just upgrading the current rig?
It'll probably be a new build, but I'm not sure what it'll be. If 3080s come back in stock where I can get one, then I may start with that and plan the rest around it. Especially if it's something with a particular aesthetic or color scheme that I want to match.
Thank you for your site and all the countless hassle it saved me from. What do you guys and gals think is a thing our community could help you with ? Is there something like a roadmap for pcpp and what are you personally most excited about ? How should people give feedback to you and the other team members? Which channels are you preferring ? On which channels can I send my monthly thank you very much for your service messages ?
Re: what buildapc can help with - this community has helped us so much over the years that I have no asks whatsoever. Just thanks. Thanks for letting us be a part of the community.
We don't have an official roadmap - I run the dev timeline like a software engineer who is terrible at time estimates. Things I promised eight years ago are still undone while other stuff jumps ahead. I'm most excited for benchmarking. I love performance analysis, and what we're building should be super cool. Lots, lots, lots of data, all in tightly controlled environments. The hard part is how to present relevant bits without overwhelming people with data.
For feedback, feel free to ping us on our site forums, our contact page, or on our discord channel. Discord is probably the least formal if it's something small, though I'm not on discord all that often these days (Ryan and Alex are though).
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Ah, "agile" development.
Nope! None of that. No agile practices here thanks. Just software development structured along my capricious demands...
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IMHO, "we don't have a project management philosophy" is the best project management philosophy. As long as progress is being made and people are happy, management theory would just get in the way.
For a while I was working on a codebase of several million lines of C++ in an org with 100+ other really smart engineers. I participated in an effort to modularize part of it, and I failed pretty badly. One of the most important things I learned was from an old Windows NT dev presentation that talked about Conway's Law. That really reshaped how I viewed architecture, teams, responsibilities, and communication patterns.
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Did you consider licensing/sharing benchmarks from other hardware review sites, rather than developing a (presumably not-profit-generating) benchmarking competency? Alternatively, if you do want to generate benchmarks, have you considered monetizing them via a blog?
We're planning on benching at a scale that most review sites don't do. Like an order of magnitude more pairings, runs, etc, with a bit more detail on each as well in terms of current consumption, temps, etc. All that all recorded on identical software setups for comparability. No one right now is doing that at the scale we want.
It's definitely not a profit center, and that's ok for me. I love benchmarking. Before PCPP I was part of a team working on optimizing compiler stuff. I loved writing compiler optimizations and testing the performance changes. So that whole side of things - determinism, accurate measurements, etc, I just really enjoy it. So PCPP in a way helps fund my desire to do that work whether it is profitable or not.
That being said, I do think it's a complementary feature set to add. While it may not monetize directly, I think the value it adds to the site will (hopefully) result in an incremental change in traffic/revenue.
So how does it feel to have a side project or yours become as popular in the computer world as google? You've become the only place I recommend newbies to go (other than reddit) for pc building help, and your site has become the most useful tool I've ever used outside of my daily IT work. You've created something not only powerfully useful, but well designed, smoothly operated, and pleasing to the eye. I don't really have much of question more just taking the opportunity to say thank you for creating a fantastic tool for the community. If a bigger company offers you millions to sell it I'd understand if you did, but please don't, I can't imagine the site being run any better than by it's original team!
Thanks for the kind words. I gave my mom a shirt. A couple years ago someone recognized the shirt in rural east Texas. Like, she lives 30 minutes from the nearest town of 5,000 people. That was pretty wild. My mom was pretty excited lol.
I love having something that I helped build be a useful thing for people. That's immensely satisfying. (And it's a team effort, not just me by any stretch at all. The whole team helps every bit of what you see on the site).
On the other hand, I don't want or like to be out front. I'd rather be behind the scenes working on something and not really be noticed. I think that gets reflected, probably negatively from a business-first standpoint, in how I run things. I don't really push branding hard, don't push social media (Twitter, Instagram, etc), because I personally don't want to be out front there. I can engage here on reddit because I feel like I'm a part of the community here rather than some corporate/redditor relationship. From a business standpoint, I think there's a lot of growth possibility that PCPP hasn't tapped into because I want to avoid various social anxieties and whatnot.
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Just know that if a company offers big bucks (and they probably will eventually) it is because they see an opportunity to leverage the base you built to make money and it most likely will be by selling the customers who trust you. They will probably do something like partner with large manufacturers or sellers and push their own products while if ignoring what is best for the people looking to create their own best build.
Yeah that makes sense. We've made some decisions that probably wouldn't last long - not running ads, not selling user data. So really there seems to be two options: either we run this out until it dies on its own and we get to keep our ideals/positions, or we run out of energy and sell. I don't want to sell. I don't plan to sell. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't days where I feel so tired and just want a break for a bit. It's trying to find the balance of doing a job I love maintaining principles I value and also not destroying myself physically/emotionally/etc in the process.
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Oh cool! If you don’t mind me asking, what area of East Texas? Did you grow up out here? I’m from out in Van, approx 30 min from Tyler. My close friends and I love PCPartPicker. I just used it to build my upgraded rig a couple of weeks ago.
Nice! I grew up in Tyler (edit: but my mom currently lives 30 minutes east of Center, TX - basically on Toledo Bend reservoir and the TX/LA border). My electronics teacher in high school (Mr. Ray) was from Van. He was formative for me in pursuing electronics seriously by introducing me to VICA and electronics competitions.
Benchmark integration timeline when 🍿
Probably mid-2021. We're almost done with a building renovation where they bumped our building service from a 400A service to a 1200A service. Added AC capacity. That 800A is going toward bench... it's going to be fun. This is what I'm talking about https://imgur.com/a/rffuVin. Can't wait to get this all up and running.
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I have a massive transformer that’s the size of a fridge I can’t seem to sell if you guys want it. It was meant for a Bitcoin farm but was never used. Cost $5000 I just want it gone it’s so heavy lol
LOL thanks but we're good. They actually delivered the 1200A from pole mounted transformers. MEP guys were surprised, but the power company said they could do it. Sure enough they did. Old vs new pre-hookup: https://imgur.com/a/ODQlACV
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Dude, you do AWS, dev, hiring, project direction, and building management? Your operation must be crazy efficient.
Oh no I offloaded all the building management stuff to Jack. He's handled almost all the renovation work, which has been an absolute life saver for me. I just come in and throw wrenches in things by adding last minute requests for extra conduit runs from here to there, replace those windows, change that paint color, etc. Jack handles all communication and followups with the GC, subs, etc.
The other stuff I do do though. AWS (our infrastructure isn't that big really, a couple dozen EC2 instances, RDS, Redis, CloudSearch, Cloudfront, etc). Daniel handles the bits of Lambda that we use. I kinda enjoy the deployment / devops side of things, and I think it's important to have my fingers on the pulse of that whenever I'm designing new features. Helps me have a better feel for what kind of query impact different code or modeling decisions will have.
The hiring isn't much - we've averaged about one person a year and that's usually someone in our existing network of relationships. And project direction is pretty small right now since we shut down our cycling site. Back down to just one website makes it a lot simpler. We talk about what we want to do as a group a lot, so (I think) everyone has a pretty decent picture of where we're headed despite timelines not being nailed down strict.
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What kind of benchmarks would you be running? Have you considered pulling data from places like passmark?
Anything we can run deterministically and automated and that has license terms that allow unfettered publication of result data. We won't be pulling data from anywhere, passmark included. All the data will be from runs we do in-house.
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May I ask why the focus on internal metrics vs just pulling them?
Mainly because we can control all the variables and make them consistent across all our result pairs. We have some absolutely phenomenal performance analysis engineering expertise in house.
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Unfettered publication of result data. Wow. Nice. As someone who likes playing with freely available datasets, I really appreciate this. Hard to learn data science without freely available data sets that regular people can have some level of subject matter expertise over to start to learn how to put data-driven stories together.
Sorry, what I meant was that the license terms of the benchmark software have to allow us to publish the benchmark results without restriction. There is a popular benchmarks out today that requires the benchmark results be vetted by them first before publication. We'd have to manually send over bench results if we weren't using their bench platform (we're not, we have our own). Then wait for them to approve, and then we could publish. That's not viable when we're testing at the scale we plan to - it'd need to be automated at least but they couldn't offer that. And for benchmarking prerelease hardware under embargo, it'd mean that we would have no ability to publish data right when the embargo lifted. We'd have to wait however long for their manual review.
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How will you be able to benchmark hard-to-get hardware? e.g. RTX 3090, Radeon 6800xt, and Ryzen 5000? Will the manufacturers send them to you? Or do you have to buy them?
I think it's a mixture of both. On new release hardware it's helpful to have bench data when embargoes lift. But I also want to have store-purchased hardware as the main part of our hardware pool, however long it takes to acquire that. We can flag the benchmarks that come from manufacturer review samples - that way people know the source and can factor in review sample binning.
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So once upon a time, I was gonna write a program that would pull benchmark and pricing data to build a list of best value parts, such that no part in the list had a better performing part at a lower price. A sort of definitive do-buy list to make it easier to pick parts. Once benchmarks are done, pcp would have all the infrastructure in place to make that happen in some form on the site, perhaps as a filter for picking parts or as a warning on the part/build pages?
Yep.
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sorry, I'm not sure what you're saying that to, I should have actually posed a proper question: Will you be implementing that?
That's our intent, yeah. It may take us a bit to get there though.
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There is...a lot... of metal shavings in that box. Ah I’m sure it’s fine it’s only 1200A.
Oh at that point it was still all being hooked up. It's cleaner for sure.
Check this out - relative size difference between old and new...
But how do we know how big Barry is if he's not holding a banana?
Barry is approximately the same height as one marinelli.
A lot of people seem to think that you only host sellers that provide you affiliate kickbacks. Is there any truth to that? Have you ever allowed or disallowed a seller on the basis of affiliate money? How do you decide whether to host a seller or not?
That's not true. We list several retailers without affiliate agreements. Affiliate relationships are often much much easier because they almost always already have price data access. That's the main thing we need.
Our choice on hosting a retailer largely depends on whether we feel they are good for users or not. If a retailer is being abusive to users or doing highly manipulative stuff, we'll remove them even if they're profitable. We've done that several times in the past. If a retailer also has highly inaccurate pricing, we'll delist for that too.
Yaaatttttt: Not sure if you are allowed to reveal this but what retailers have you delisted in the past? LightningProd12: They delisted MicroCenter in the US because they had too many in-store only deals and no way to tell the difference on PCPP's end. And not everyone can go to one, if you live in the Northwest the closest one can be 800-1000 miles away. Edit: This is mostly false, look at the comments below.
ThoughtA: This isn't true at all. We want to have them on the site. We had some discussions with them, but they stopped responding.
We did actually list their in-store deals. I put in a decent bit of code for that so that they only showed up if you were within a configurable radius of one of their locations.
It's a long story, but the gist of it is that we were waiting on some stuff that never came and things went silent. We reach out from periodically but nothing. It stinks - we'd be happy to list them.
You never know what you reception you'll get from retailers. Some are beating down the door to get on board - that's awesome. Others we have to prove that we're worth their time - that's not unusual. A few will say they want to work together, we get 80% of the way there, and then... silence. Or the key person you were working with takes a job somewhere else. And then some retailers basically say not just no, but h*** no. I'll never forget that one. For some retailers there's a strong aversion to something we do, whether it be price comparison or something else. But just know that if there's a retailer that is reputable and treats customers well, we're more than happy to work with them and get them listed.
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Ohh ok, that sucks. On a side note, is there a story behind the "h*** no" retailer?
They're, eh, no longer in business. Honestly probably dodged a bullet there.
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Maybe this was asked already but still: are there any timeline/plan to add more countries to the country list? I am leaving in Austria and I have to use Germany to see the prices and availability of the parts. Moreover, I see German retailers and prices but not Austrian ones.
We're continually adding new countries and retailers. Adding a country is just a few lines of code on our end - we do that when we have a retailer to add in a country we don't currently support. So really it's a matter of finding and adding retailers. If you have any you'd like to see, send us a note on our contact page and we'll take a look at it. Jenny reaches out to the retailers to see if we can get them on board. It usually takes a while to get in contact and get good data access.
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I already raised this issue to him several years ago - because it was blatantly in the open for users in Germany. You would get amazon affiliate links as "lowest" price, even though there are several other stores that are cheaper... He got angry quickly and gave me the same bs excuse. The top sellers with the top user ratings were never listed as cheapest even though they were.
We list the buy box winner for Amazon. If you're saying we prune results for various marketplace sellers, well, you're wrong.
How's the team handling COVID? Is everyone working from home? What kind of challenges are arising?
I sent everyone home in March. We haven't met as a group since. It's been ok - we just meet on video conferencing when we need to. Jack and Barry are up at the office overseeing the renovation which should be done mid-January. I'll probably be up there from January to April to do the benchmark network cabling and office rewiring (from cat5 to 6a+fiber) because I kinda enjoy cable crimping and punch downs. :)
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The transition from cat5 to cat6 is worth?
Yeah. We're not running 5e, just 5. It's what was in there from when we bought it. So that's not where I'd like it to be for good 1Gb.
Any chance we'll ever see some more filtering options for SSDs? It would be really handy to have the following * Filter by the primary storage type SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC/Optane/etc * Filter by whether the drive has a DRAM cache or supports Host Memory Buffer (HMB)
I'd love to, but I think it'd cause a fissure I'm not sure how to fix. Right now we have SSDs and platter drives in the same category, but the specific filtering for each is different. To apply the really detailed SSD filters, I think they need to be their own category. Same with the HDD types. I don't know if splitting them up is the right path though, so I've been continually punting the issue down the road until we're forced to decide one way or the other.
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Tsk tsk, don’t accumulate technical debt there
Oh, no, it's quite the opposite really. Parametric part additions record the type and filter selections. Those added to a part list stay there forever - we never throw them away. So any filters we add never get removed even if we don't show them. Because of that, I try to be very deliberate in what we add and what we don't. Once I add a new part category or filter type, if I decide later it was a bad idea then it means I get to write lots of migration code. That's no fun.
Super excited for the an app version. Are you guys considering price tracking so that users can set alerts for when hardware drops to a desired price?
Yeah. We have that on the site already with email alerts. But the PWA provides them via browser push notifications (on platforms that support that). I have that all working in a beta test mode (for staff only) right now and it's feeling pretty solid.
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As a front-end engineer, what's your stack look like for the PWA?
Basically built on top of our existing responsive site (Python, Django). I didn't want to spend a lot of time migrating to another framework, so instead spent the time kind of standardizing our own API-ish setup and then handling the caching or offline modes for that as needed. We went responsive with PWA to avoid maintaining three separate codebases (web, iOS, Android), but it's looking like we may go native in the end anyway. This buys us some time at least.
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So not iOS?
Right. :(. I understand there are some workarounds to get push notifications through wallets and whatnot, but that feels pretty hackish to me. We might end up going native on iOS at some point to get good notification support there.
How hard is it keeping up with and adding new item releases (not only the new 3000 series graphics cards from nvidia but also possibly unknown stuff like network cards, etc)? Are there any items you decide not to add or do you try to list everything you can?
New GPUs are pretty easy. CPUs are ok, sometimes a pain depending on the chipset/bios situations. Motherboards are terrible, especially the last few years. Cataloging all the M.2 ports, their constraints (PCIe in this slot disables that SATA, etc) is a major pain.
There's some stuff, particularly on cases, where there are compatibility constraints that are not economically viable to model. We know what the constraints are, but to model them all across 30k+ parts would make data entry so slow that we'd never finish.
We try to hit the main product categories, but we'd love to expand that. It's really an issue of how time consuming and costly it is to do the data entry for it versus how often it's used.
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So Wikipedia seems to be crowd sourced, and works pretty well. Maybe some of the more laborious data entry parts could have a crowd source entry option, but be flagged as such when people bring up anything containing those results (a disclaimer)..
It's just not reliable enough. It has to be super accurate, and it's not something I'd ever feel comfortable outsourcing.
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Have you tried asking the manufacturers to get involved? You might just be big enough.
When new releases are coming out we sometimes get data ahead of time. Cases are pretty common. Motherboards are a lot harder, because of embargoes and even BIOSes and manuals not finished days before release. Some of the constraints we see are pretty one-off situations that make it hard to provide some sort of standardized input form for though.
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what if you let companies input their own data for their products.
I don't trust that to be accurate enough. We routinely find bad spec data even on manufacturer sites.
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I imagine that PCPP is large enough now to direct traffic to or away from various retailers in volumes they will care about. Like how Google went from small to large. Given that, probably PCPP should begin leaning on retailers to provide product data in an ingestable format, making data entry moot.
We work with retailers to provide the right data in feeds for sure. But the hard part is that not all retailers have the technical expertise on hand to do it (or for smaller retailers, the margin and profitability to pay for that expertise). The back-and-forth to get updated feed frequency, proper part numbers, stock status, etc - it's non-stop. Brent and Jenny bear the brunt of that.
I know you've been vocal about not opening up a merch store for personal profit, but would you ever consider a merch store where all proceeds go towards your well building charity?
We did this once. My accountant was like, "please don't."
Basically if we buy a thousand shirts and give them away it's super easy - they just get marked as a marketing expense and we give them out however we see fit. But as soon as any of them are sold, you have to track inventory, cost basis, etc. It's a lot more tedious and last time it was maybe a couple shirts a week - enough to invoke packaging and transport overhead but not enough to be efficient. So we instead just give them away at various bapc milestones and donate from our affiliate income instead.
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Kinda funny reading this while wearing the hoodie! It’s easily the comfiest hoodie in my closet.
Oh, major props to Phil for that. He picked it out. I love mine too. We printed some smaller ones for kid sizes and my oldest son tries to sleep in his.
transam617: Philip, Thank you for 10 years of your indispensable help. Over that time, there were probably millions of visitors to your website who have had their PC building experience improved or made possible through the use of your wonderful tool. But specifically: Since 2014, our little corner of reddit (now 10K subs) cabalofthebuildsmiths, has been more effective, and has helped more people as a direct result of your website tool, than from any other tool we have available. We pride ourselves on giving builds to customers where they can reliably buy every part we pick, and be sure they will work as expected. This process takes research and a lot of effort, but the highly accurate, effective communication of pcpartpicker (for all the countries you cover) is the foundation of our process. Thank you for making the messy world of PC parts a little more bearable, thank you for making it all possible, and a big thanks from us, cabalofthebuildsmiths. transam617 kokolordas15 dmz_dragon danyulz bramblexd
Thanks for your kind words, and thanks for all the work you all do to help builders!
What happened to the youtube channel? Loved the build videos and interviews you had while it was still running.
We moved buildings a couple years ago, and decided to pause on them while we renovated the new space for filming and benchmarking. The renovation is finishing up likely mid-January - it took waaaay longer than we originally thought. If we had known it'd be that long we probably would have figured out some interim plan. So once that reno is done, we'll probably start ramping up content again. I'd guess mid-2021 or so.
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My first computer was a an AMD K5-133. That was late 1996 I think and I was in college. My friend and I ordered our mobo+CPU off an ad on a magazine page. I bought his old case and an 80MB HDD off of him. Ran Windows 3.1. We played Warcraft 2 across a null modem cable - that was probably the most fun I've ever had with PC gaming. Floating point on that thing was terrible though. Playing a 64kbps MP3 chewed up like 60% of the CPU.
My roommate introduced me to Quake 2, specifically Action Quake 2. Loved that game. I started running a website on the dorm network on it that got pretty popular. But queries on the db would tank my Q2 framerate so I put in code to disable queries while I was playing.
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tiger direct?
No, it was some small place out of the northeast. I mean, that was pre-internet-shopping days. Wrote a check, hand wrote what we wanted on the order form, mailed it, and waited weeks. No phone calls, no email confirmations, nothing. My kids have no idea what that was like.
Fun fact, I got banned from PCPartPicker for adding a purple dildo from Amazon to my build.
Yeah that'll do it. User code of conduct / ToS and all.
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Boooo. Thats kinda weird, especially for private/personal builds.
Most of the retailers we partner with have as a part of their terms that our site not contain NSFW material. I get some people think it's funny but it can get us shut down, and I'm really not ok with that.
I've used your site so many times and I even met some of the team in Austin outside Dreamhack. Thanks for all you do! Who has the most powerful computer on the staff and what are they running?
I think most powerful computer probably goes to manirelli right now.
Do you have any career opportunities at the company? I have a couple years of marketing experience, but I can’t find a job in these tough times. At least I’ve been learning python so I can get better at data management.
Unfortunately we're not hiring right now. :(
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Mind if I ask where you typically post jobs when you are hiring? Greenhouse.io, LinkedIn, Indeed, all of the above?
Usually it's someone we have an established relationship with. We haven't ever posted a job listing to date.
Are you going to work on an official PCPartPicker API so people don't have to break ToS by scraping?
No. I'd prefer to offer sufficient service that people don't need to scrape.
Most scrapers use up a lot of resources or don't even do cursory things like follow robots.txt crawl delay specs. It's really frustrating. I'd like to spend my time focusing on user benefitting features than blocking abusive crawlers.
gordonv: A cached CLI/SDK that draws from a CDN (not your web server) would be cool. You'd provide sufficient service, reduce processing cost, and get usage stats. The best way to defeat crawlers is to defeat their purpose. Make scraping look idiotic. Heck, mock scrapers in your HTML with an URL to your API. Add a little wit to that wisdom. Add AWS Cloudfront and now you have 200+ servers in the USA distributing your CLI with authentication to 3 million calls for $20 a month. Some leet stuff. Just noticed a sprinkle of posts calling for an app. If you spec CLI/SDK along with app development, killing 2 birds with 1 budget stone.
We're rolling out a PWA (hopefully) before the end of the year.
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invisi1407: Perhaps a better question is, why is there a need for scraping? Could that need be satisfied by new/improving features on PCPP? MLG_G0D: Because integrations with PCPartPicker would greatly benefit the PC building community. Constantly navigating to websites can get tiresome, especially on low spec machines. Automation is great. invisi1407: I understand, but exactly which integrations are people looking for? I get it, but I also understand why PCPP isn't interested in having a public, free API. MLG_G0D: I was thinking about integrating PCPP functions into a reddit/discord bot. invisi1407: Not unresonable, but you do understand how it takes away any earnings from advertisements and what have we on their website, yeah? It seems like they are a small company spending an enormous amount of time on the data they are presenting, so I don't think you'll ever see a free public API anyway. Perhaps a paid one, but I don't suppose many would be interested in that anyway. MLG_G0D: Seems reasonable. I'm just a massive fan of companies being open to their userbase, but I guess PCPartPicker hasnt quite grown to the point where thats economically feasible.
There's more to the picture. On pricing data: We're not the source of pricing data as that comes from the retailers. We have various agreements in place where they give us that data to display on our site or to market their products in ways they allow us to. We don't have permission to then hand that data to a third party to do whatever they want to. If we make it available to someone else via an API, we're breaching terms of our agreement, which in turn makes us lose our affiliate deal and price access. Boom, business is dead. Basically if you need that data, go to the source (the retailers) and negotiate with them.
For product data: We've invested a lot of man years to build our data set, and some of that data helps us maintain a competitive advantage over copycat sites. Making it easier to retrieve that data isn't something I'm keen on. There are other sources of product data available that are more expansive than what we have anyway. I'd suggest pursuing that if you want to build your own hardware related site stuff.
On API stuff for partlists and markdown: If you just want a discord bot, I'd be happy to chat through what it is you're looking for to see if that's something we could support officially on our end. We have our own discord server bot that uses an internal API to do partlist embeds.
Last bit - publishing an API adds an additional thing for us to maintain. It's a maintenance and support burden. Even an unofficial API is. It becomes something that I have to test and not break any time I refactor code around it. We're a small company, and that's not really an area I want to allocate resources around if it's not a revenue generating thing.
Thanks a lot to you guys! With your site, I managed to make 3 separate lists, and now my dream of building a PC is coming true. Maybe you could add recommendations based on what the person has on their list, such as a cheaper but better graphics card, etc
I think recommendations are a possibility once we have our in-house benchmark data in place. But that'd be a ways down the road.
Thanks for your work, and since this is an AMA, simple question: Which is the best flavor of ice cream and why?
Amy's Ice Cream here in Austin. Belgian Chocolate. It's just wonderful but I haven't been there in almost a year now.
manirelliPCPartPicker: I will second Amy's but I'm partial to the Mexican Vanilla flavor.
Wow. What a cool thing to see on Reddit. This is the first AMA I’ve ever replied in/commented on. I’m brand new to PC (3 year macbook user here, and besides a brief stint with a windows Hp laptop on which I played Rollercoaster tycoon and club penguin with “back in the day” I have never had need for the site. Until last month). I’m grateful the site exists, and it’s quite intriguing to me how you manage to create and maintain (emphasis on maintain) such an EXTENSIVE database of parts. I know it’s part of your life, however it astounds me to see these parts that seem so very minuscule, always appear. Have you considered, or maybe there already is and I simply am blind or don’t know about it. Have you considered adding any sort of personal or user based rating system regarding parts? Or a warning system for parts with known issues out of the box?
Our ratings are from users, but we only allow ratings/reviews from completed builds. That way we know that the review is from someone who actually built with it (versus say a 1 star review from someone mad they couldn't buy it).
We do offer some warnings on known issues, but it's something we may expand in the future.
Controversial Opinion: I am not a fan of Planescape: Torment [SPOILERS] & (Critique warning)
Let me say this preemptively: Disco Elysium is one of my favorite games ever created, I absolutely respect opinions of loving Planescape: Torment, and I enjoy a lot of things in Planescape: Torment. I love amazing writing and dialogue, and I love RPG’s of all sub-genres. But forewarning, this will be critical, and there will be spoilers for the entire game. So if you don’t want to read this, it won’t hurt my feelings to skip it. There’s a TL:DR at the bottom if you want to skip the large talking section. Let’s begin. As a whole, Planescape: Torment (which I will be referring to as P:T) does a lot of things right. It has a complete and overarching general main theme of regret, the cause-and-effect of peoples actions, and the inescapable cycle of torment of which the game shares a spot in it’s title next to the unique, one-of-kind setting the game takes place in. Planescape. It has quite a bit of good, memorable characters. It has a good soundtrack. It has an interesting story. So why am I not a fan? Well, read on and you shall find out. But if you wish to know now, I find that the game is grossly weighed down by inconsistency in pacing, incompetence in one half of it’s gameplay design (that being combat), and baffling choices in area and world design. All things essential to games that choose to have those aspects, but most important in RPG’s that choose to have those aspects. Especially those that focus almost entirely on stories, and experiencing stories. Whether your own character’s story, or another character’s story. Whilst these aspects in P:T can be/are often quality in theory, the surrounding driving force to push you into enjoying these aspects is lacking. And so as a whole, I find the game to be limited in what it provides to the player in an engagement standpoint a large amount of the time. Simultaneously, it seems to have to a hard time finding the solid ground and consistent quality that it shows in it’s midpoint that it drastically loses afterwards and even didn’t grasp fully in it’s opening moments. But I will continue by just giving bullet points on what I liked, and didn’t like. These aren’t expansive by any means, and are far from the only points I could put in each section. These are just the notable, and less nit-picky ones. Let’s get on with it. I will give you some things I like: The writing is detailed, and vivid all around. You are easily able to picture things in your head as you read it. Both physical scenes, and what characters could be thinking and feeling without it being too on the nose. A sign of good writing. Most of the NO’s progression as a character. His growth from being unaware, to finally conquering his numerous pasts and deciding his fate instead of falling back into the endless loop of both internal and external torture. I found it satisfying and well enough in way of character progression. His past transgressions were also interesting, and memorable. Morte’s story (which is probably my favorite part of the game). One of the darkest and most human stories I’ve seen in the whole medium of video games. A realistic portrayal of fear, loyalty, and the darkness within us all. I’d imagine that at the time, like many examples in this game, this was the best that it had ever been in way of writing. It’s still to this day one of the best, though far from the absolute best in my opinion. Most of the Companions personalities and general uniqueness. I enjoy the interactions between them and NPC’s, though they are too few and far between for my tastes, and are not memorable enough to warrant the lack of such interactions. That aside, the interactions are good and serviceable. I also enjoy the general dialogue’s qualities in expansiveness, and general feeling of “conversation” that can be difficult to get in isometric RPG’s without feeling like an explanation dump. It is very well done in P:T, and is most importantly consistent. Many of Sigil’s qualities including the general atmosphere, a good amount of the quests (even if the general actions you were doing were pretty standard for quests which I don’t mind at all, i.e. move here, kill that, look for this, talk to them, etc. Though there are of course exceptions), The Smoldering Corpse Bar, many of the Cleric’s Ward quests, many aspects of Brothel and it’s quests, The Dead Nations which I partially enjoyed, some of the memory experience ideas (particularly the one with Deionarra), and some of the aspects of The Lower Ward. The smaller and conciser amount of factions in Sigil compared to the actual Planescape setting. They feel distinct and understandable in ideals. (They definitely played favoritism in the setting, and rarely did I feel that there was quality over quantity). Though faction involvement felt generally meaningless in the grand scheme, the factions themselves outweigh the small negativity due to their interesting qualities. The music as a whole save for the Sigil exploration theme. Alongside other things as well. I don’t want to make this post too long. But I do enjoy a lot of things about P:T. I will now give you some of my points I wish to talk about: I sincerely think that most everything outside of Sigil lacks that essential character and design that it has. Save for maybe the talk with Ravel, Morte’s Tower of Skulls in Baator (can you tell I like Morte?), and the final interaction with the Transcendent One, including the Fortress of Regrets. Everything else feels barren, lacking in content, and oddly out of place in my opinion. Intentional or not, it’s a bore to play through. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (look at Pathologic) but here? The barrenness is contrasted with the breadth of content of Sigil, which creates baffling inconsistency, not an “A-Ha!” moment of philosophical understanding. I understand that Baator, and The Outlands are not meant to be bustling. But their designs are overtly disappointing. Nothing to explore, nothing to dive into. Just simple, flat areas with a single large event at it’s center. A single event in areas that are foreshadowed to be vast expanses that make up portions of the multiverse that is the Planes. Curst feels to me like a rudimentary Fallout 1 town, though far more intriguing than either Baator or The Outlands, it barely even touches the complexity of an area like The Clerics Ward, or New Reno from Fallout 2, on a design, theme, and quest design standpoint in my opinion. (Keep in mind with the mention of New Reno, they are different games, but their concept is mildly similar in my eyes which warrants the comparison). Curst sliding into Carceri was incredibly unsatisfying and shoddily done in my opinion. There was absolutely no feeling of danger, or any real feeling of desperation. No time limit or urgency. Just you resting and healing in the barracks and going outside to apparent chaos, over and over again. I didn’t care about Curst, because at the least, no one cared about Curst. And at the most, it didn’t feel like they cared enough. And awkwardly moving around the area and helping very specific groups of people as demons just walked around their zones didn’t help, and is off-putting. The required fight against Trias (whose name I had to look up since he was so forgettable) desperately felt like it needed more dialogue options than it provided akin to The Transcendent One conversation to really strike that memorability through the act of player influence and choice. A way to convince and battle him by use of his misdeeds against him, whether by logic or emotion. But no, you get a required fight. In P:T. The least effective or satisfying way to go about anything in this game. THEN, you can explain to him his misdeeds. An non-passable gate, and restriction of freedom and choice latched onto the player in a game that often revels in such things is hard to get right, and this is an example of a game doing it wrong. For such a large portion of the last section of the game, it felt like a complete detour and waste of my time. I’d much rather have just skipped the section entirely and returned to Sigil. Vhailor is also a missed opportunity as a companion, and could’ve been expanded upon immensely. His inclusion at the very end of the game is simply baffling, and a spit in the face to his writing and character. If I could choose without repercussion, I would much rather switch Ignus’s placement in the game with Vhailors. He is the more interesting character, and the tension both characters bring to the party would be a less animalistic and bizarrely occasionally awkward one on the part of Ignus, and more of a direct and investigative one on the part of Vhailor. (Though this would leave the Smoldering Corpse in an awkward slot to slide into the games pacing, which I am doubtful I could accept as a reasonable condition. The point still stands however, on Vhailors awful placement.) I dislike the entirety of the beginning section of the game in the Hive, save for the Smoldering Corpse Bar and partially, The Dead Nations. I feel as if it’s pacing is off, and generally the many combat sections hinder the feeling of exploration to the point where I despised playing it. The side quests are meh, and feel very uninteresting in comparison to the later side quests. Though some of the NPC’s were memorable, so were a lot of the NPC’s in Cleric’s Ward or in The Dead Nations, and in both cases, I found the NPC’s in both areas to be far more engaging and more numerous in their engaging numbers than The Hive. (Preamble: I understand the main gameplay of P:T is conversation and exploration. But that is not an excuse for what I’m about to say) In general, the combat is bad. There’s far, far too much of it, it’s badly thought out, and pales in comparison to the majority of even the most basic RPG gameplay, let alone any of the Black Isle games. I feel that removing the concept of combat entirely would have greatly benefitted the games pacing, and would have lead to far more time being spent to benefitting the outside Sigil areas in content, and furthering the options allowed in companion interaction. One could argue that this would essentially dismantle companions entirely due to their differences in class types, weapons, etc. I wholly disagree. Their personalities are their strengths, not their basic, ham-fisted, and tacked on classes. I don’t care that Morte is a fighter, or that Fall-From-Grace is a Cleric, or that Ignus is a mage, or that any of them have good or bad AC. You could interchange these classes between them and I would not care one bit. I care about them because they are unique, and interesting characters. The game never explores the concept, or dichotomy of the companions classes in depth, and is only really barely touched on for a small few (Ignus, Fall-From-Grace, and Vhailor but the link to their classes are so small and barely mentioned save for maybe Fall-From-Grace who at least has some minor exploration. However it is still far from in depth.), so why have them? Look at Jack (Mass Effect 2), Mordin (Mass Effect 2), Alistair (DA:O), Jaheira (BG1&2), Minsc (BG1&2), Haer-Dalis (BG2), Viconia(BG1&2), and Keldorn (BG2) to name a few. Their classes are important to their characters and development. That is not something that is explored even remotely as deeply in P:T. Their removal, at least for me, would greatly benefit the focus on the characters, and less on a watered down AD&D system that feels barren and thrown to the side in favor of a system that is far more interesting and compelling instead of just going all in with the one half they obviously prioritized. I could list off more, but they would be pettier, and I don’t want to go more in-depth in a reddit post. TL:DR I respect the game deeply for what it did, and also for it’s influence on the industry. I think it does many things very well. And other things I feel are badly aged, and baffling. I also respect your opinion, and am more than open to criticism of my critique. If I said anything factually incorrect please correct me by either down-voting or commenting. I don’t want to spread misinformation about the factual contents of the game. Also if you disagree, I would like to know your points so please do comment. But if you don’t want to, I won’t mind downvoting to get your point across either so don’t worry about hurting my feelings. If I could give the game a score on a good day, it would be a 7/10, and maybe a 6.5 or even a 6/10 on average, and a 5/10 on a bad day. I feel the game is overrated, and is surpassed on specific fronts by games that came after it and explored what it brought to the table. It isn’t bad in the slightest. It is a unique and one of a kind game, which also doesn’t automatically make it a masterpiece. Complete execution, a certain respect for the player, and a full exploration of what a game provides in a satisfying way on all fronts arguably does. At least for me. Thank you for reading this.
Hello CompetitiveHS Community, this is another story of a lurker who has been benefitting from the advice here and feeling it's time to contribute back. I'm hardly a celebrity by any measure, but my 12 karma and 4 comments on hearthstone has spurred me to share some of my thoughts when crafting the most degenerate deck I could. I understand that meme decks are not usually encouraged here, but I believe there is something to be said with pulling off clutch plays and learning to work with what we have, to make a deck work. Nevertheless, do feel free to remove this if it isn't appropriate (although I humbly ask to point me where you think this might be more suited). I'll also preface this by saying that I play exclusively on mobile, so I have no stats. As with all advice you receive here (and in real life), do take everything mentioned with a grain of salt. ----- ### Shudder at my wock # Class: Shaman # Format: Wild # # 1x (1) Corrupt the Waters # 1x (1) Devolving Missiles # 1x (1) Glacial Shard # 1x (1) Tour Guide # 1x (2) Ancestral Knowledge # 1x (2) Bloodmage Thalnos # 1x (2) Devolve # 1x (2) Dirty Rat # 1x (2) Elementary Reaction # 1x (2) Maelstrom Portal # 1x (2) Sandstorm Elemental # 1x (2) Zephrys the Great # 1x (3) Acolyte of Pain # 1x (3) Coldlight Oracle # 1x (3) Electra Stormsurge # 1x (3) Far Sight # 1x (3) Mana Tide Totem # 1x (3) Mind Control Tech # 1x (4) Hecklebot # 1x (4) Rumbling Elemental # 1x (4) Sandbinder # 1x (4) Storm Chaser # 1x (5) Doppelgangster # 1x (5) Hagatha's Scheme # 1x (5) Seaforium Bomber # 1x (5) Volcano # 1x (6) Grumble, Worldshaker # 1x (6) Reno Jackson # 1x (7) Siamat # 1x (9) Shudderwock # AAEBAZnDAx6BBN4F7QWyBvgH+wzSE8MWyBagtgL2vQL5vwKXwQLHwQLfxAKr5wKe8AKz9wLv9wLq+gKZ+wLx/AKtkQOVlAP8owPPpQOEpwPhqAPgzAObzQMAAA== # # To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone ----- Here's how the degenerate cycle works:
Shuffle bombs into your opponent's deck with Seaforium Bomber
Force them to draw bombs using Coldlight Oracle
Play Dirty Rat to open up hand space to "cast" the bombs
Use Mind Control Tech to steal minions you force onto the board
Add on Hecklebot to mill/mind control even faster
Freeze the minions you can't steal
And return to full health every cycle with Reno
On average, you should be able to deal around 20+ damage to your opponent every time you execute a cycle of 2x Shudderwocks. Even if this does not kill them, their hand, deck, and board states are often so wrangled up that they have no counterplay left and you can torment them to defeat on your next turn. ----- And hence, our game plan is to survive to about turn 12 (on average), when all of our battlecries are set up and ready to 'Wock. As with most Shudderwock decks, the beauty lies in being able to load up the essential battlecries for Shuddewock at all points in the game, hence not needing to hold on to any cards longer than you need. Here's what you need to do, at a minimum:
Play your Quest, Heart of Vir'naal
Play Dopplegangster for its cloning effect
Play Grumble for its bounce effect
Play Seaforium Bomber to shuffle in a bomb
Play Tour Guide so that your next Heart of Vir'naal costs (0) — allowing you to play a Shudderwock at (9) mana, and letting it bounce a copy back at (1) mana for use on the same turn.
The other battlecries aren't as essential to the combo, but can help greatly in your degenerate chains. ----- Theoretically, this deck could be piloted to legend. But I have not done so simply because it's not optimal. I'm at the stage where I play casually, and I'm more often in it just to execute the cycle. That said, I am able to achieve a rough 50% winrate in around Wild Gold and Platinum. Therefore, I won't be going through specific matchups, but thoughts to run through when using the deck. 1. You do not need to get the most out of every battlecry. Playing an Electra Stormsurge with no spell to follow-up is fine, as is playing a Mind Control Tech with no minions to steal. Remember, the goal is to load up as many battlecries as you can till about turn 12, and if a 3-mana 3/3 can help stablise the board till then, it's as good a resource as any. 2. Not even Reno. You'll have to practice your judgement here. Is your opponent running a burn deck? Would you need to clutch heal more than 10 health in the near future? If no, drop Reno. While everyone loves an amazing clutch 25+ heal from the brink, we often forget that if an opponent fireballs your Reno, he basically saved you 6 health, which is as good as healing 6. A 6 mana 4/6 isn't as good as a lot of things, but it's still a decent body that most opponents will instinctively try to answer. 3. Doppelgangster without evolve? As we're playing a highlander deck, you will rarely find yourself with at least (6) mana to play your Doppelgangsters and then evolve them. Remember, the goal of the deck is to cast your battlecries, and then survive till you can play Shudderwock. You could try slotting in some of the various ways to evolve if you can't sit with this, but I've found success in just seeing Doppelgangster as a 5 mana 6/6. 4. You do not need to always trigger Elementary Reaction. This was added into the deck at a late time, when I figured it could use more draw. However, many good draws like Azure Drake are out of the question as we run the risk of milling ourselves to death. Since a third of the deck is Elementals, I thought it could work and it did. However, again — remember the game plan — we need to only play our battlecries once and then let Shudder do the wocking. You don't need an extra copy of anything, so feel free to play this on turn two after quest. 5. The worst part of this deck is bricking. Because you'll need to play Seaforium Bomber, Doppelgangster, and Grumble, you will find your hand pretty clunky a lot of the time. Sometimes, you'll just have to drop them even if you have a better counterplay. Activate their battlecries sooner rather than later. A 6 mana 7/7 is still a big body your opponent usually wants to answer. When you're pushed into a clutch Shudderwock, you have more to work with. 6. Coin + Acolyte of Pain/Mana Tide Totem is ok. The game plan. Draw your deck. Play essential battlecries. Shudderwock. 7. Storm Chaser is a silent MVP. This deck doesn't have too much in the name of control. Many times you'll find yourself allowing your opponent to build up a board, and the best answer is usually Hagatha's Scheme. However, you'll want it in your hand as early as possible and Storm Chaser helps you tutor. 8. You didn't include XXX! Yes, I didn't. In fact, I didn't need Seaforium Bomber. Or Coldlight. Why didn't I go with Lifedrinker when this is much more convoluted? I saw value in bombing my opponent to death, and that spurred me to work with my constraints and see cards for more than battlecries. Feel free to add whatever you think works. I've tried the following to some degrees of success: - Sandbinder as a Grumble Tutor - Murmuring Elemental in place of Heart of Vir'naal, but it isn't as consistent - Antique Healbot to avoid Reno/highlander, but a 5 mana 3/3 is worse than a 6 mana 4/6 - Evolve, Unstable Evolution, Explosive Evolution: nice, but unpredictable - Taurissan seems good on paper, but sometimes you just don't hit discounts on the right cards - Swampqueen Hagatha, but that felt like an additional brick most of the time That's it. This is by no means a competitive deck, but it definitely can teach you many things. Have more degenerate ideas? Hit me up.
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