So, like, the pre-patch for Wrath of the Lich King is out. They put in the new talents, new achievement system, and you can convert your mounts and noncombat pets to spells now. Huge news for me. This afternoon right as servers were coming up, Tyler started converting his mounts, and right when he clicked his fiery warhorse from karazhan, the server crashed. When it came back up, turns out it had rolled back, so it wasn’t in his spellbook… but it was still gone from his inventory. He was a sad panda. Hopefully a GM has given it back to him by now.
–I’m stuck on "retrieving character list."
So, like, the WoW minis game is REALLY A LOT OF FUN. I’m going to make another post about it with pictures, but really, it’s a lot of fun. I would play this over the WoW TCG any second. It’s much easier to just pick up and go; you don’t have to have a lot of cards to make a deck out of… you just grab three minis and their cards and start fighting. It’s accessible and yet has good depth. Also there are six epic sculpts out for set 1, and they are: High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind (who I MUST HAVE, she was my favorite warcraft III character by far, and my favorite hero is priestess of the moon, and she comes on this huge tiger mount and it’s done so well and I MUST HAVE HER), High Lord Bolvar Fordragon, Warchief Thrall, Varimathras (who is TOTALLY FUCKING BADASS, I mean really, when you take him out of the box you have to attach his wings to his back and they are HUGE, they take up like half the fucking map, oh my god he’s so awesome)
–oh, ass! it just disconnected me from the server. retrieving character list round 2…
anyway the rest of the epic sculpts are… let’s see… I’ve listed the 2 alliance ones, and the 2 horde ones… yeah the two Monster ones are: Archmage Arugal (who totally beat my ass, he only has 8 health but he can teleport (fucker) and he has a spell called "You, too, shall serve!" that mindcontrols one of your guys for a while… made me really really sad) and Ras Frostwhisper, the frost lich guy in the alchemy room in Scholomance. Man… this game rocks so hard.
So the point of the game is to get victory points to win. The number of victory points you have to get depends on the "honor" sum of your army. Powerful minis have more honor, so the tradeoff is that you can have a bunch of hard-hitting minis but it’s harder for you to win, or weaker minis but it’s easier for you to win. When you kill an enemy mini, you get 4 victory points no matter their honor cost. The exception is legendary (aka epic) minis, for now only the 6 I named above, because
–haha, tich must be down. it asked me to get assigned to a server. now i’m retrieving character list for dragonmaw…
anyway what I was going to say was that if you kill a legendary, you get 8 victory points. So if you play a legendary in your army, you get great power, but at great cost if you let it die, because your opponent is that much closer to her victory point goal.
The other way to score VPs is by standing near VP points on the map at the end of every 5th turn.
So when you’re playing, what happens is this: you pick a mini, it spawns at the graveyard, and you move it 2 spaces. Then you can choose 1 action for it to do; if you choose to do nothing, you advance their tick timer by 1. If you choose to do something, you advance it by however much tick that spell or ability costs. Then you do it and then that mini’s turn is over and then it’s your opponent’s turn to play one of their minis.
When you use a spell, say it costs 3 ticks, you have to advance that mini’s tick counter by 3. Say it’s turn 6 now… that’ll turn its tick up to 9. So he won’t be able to activate again until turn 9. He’ll just be a sitting duck. Can’t move, can’t cast spells… etc. He can still deflect (with armor) or resist (with magical resist) incoming attacks, and his passive abilities still are there, but he just can’t do stuff again until his tick is up.
Anyway the game is really fun. I got a harvest golem from westfall, some raptors, a bunch of voidwalkers, 5 shamans (one ogre, one frostmane troll from dun morogh, one male draenei, one female orc, and one troll mage I think wearing tier 0 hahah), 2 warriors, 3 mages, 2 hunters, 2 paladins, 2 rogues… no druids or warlocks, which was disappointing…
You can play voidwalkers by themselves as their own mini, or you can play it as a summoned beast from a warlock. If it’s a sumoned beast then it doesn’t count for victory points, and it goes away if the controlling warlock dies. So yeah pet classes are cool cuz it’s like you have 4 minis on the board. Hunters are the same way; there are hunter spells in the game that call raptors and cats. I have the raptor mini (which you can also play as its own mini, as a mob, in the monster faction)
When you’re playing the game, you’re supposed to have your whole army be all Alliance, all Horde, or all Monster. But at Blizzcon, all the tournaments were sealed pack format, so they just discarded the
–omg just got into dragonmaw! i guess i’ll log onto astix… i wonder if i should transfer arala off of lightbringer, to dmaw or to tich… or not… =( MURKY!!!
…anyway they just discarded the whole "obey factions" rule, because the format was that we all got 2 boosters each and had to make an army of 3 out of the 6 minis we got. And it would just be too hard with a pool of only 6 minis to force it to all be the same faction.
I had to correct the judges a lot because having played 2 games, I knew way more about it than they did, having played none. That was fun. The biggest problem they had was with line of sight–some judges kept ruling incorrectly that line of sight was blocked if one of the ways to see them was blocked, but actually, if there are two equivalent shortest paths and one is clear and one is blocked, then you still have line of sight. Etc.
I’m liek totally gonna become a level 3 wow minis judge and I’m gonna hold tournaments for UDE and we’re gonna turn Berkeley into an awesome center for WoW minis gaming. Like totally man.
–sigh, loading screen… sigh. mmos are dumb. i should go play warhammer. hahahahaha