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Disclaimers: I am not a game designer or a professional player. Odds are some of my takes are plain wrong. I am a Spike (not purely, but largely). I’m personally motivated by challenge and mastery. This has unmitigable influence on how I subjectively view and enjoy games. I understand that this mode is likely primarily being developed for a different type of player, since Ranked is 100% a Spike’s playground already. Related, I am fairly good at the game, currently in masters (although there are skills in each that are non-transferable between the modes). I will optimize the fun out of a game. This influences how I perceive difficulty. These are early impressions. I’ve done four runs, two each with TF and MF. I come burdened with genre expectations. Never played the elephant in the room, Spire, but have played FTL, Dead Cells, Binding of Isaac, Hades, Risk of Rain 2, and SNKRX (brilliant indie Snake meets autochess roguelike). All of these are my personal opinion. Despite all the following suggestions, I love this game mode and am having an absolute blast.

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Things that I think could be improved:

Map move speed-Moving between chains of nodes is annoyingly slow

View previous nodes-A quicker way to view previously visited nodes, mainly shops and unresolved events, would be a nice QoL change. Need mitigated by solving above

Deck tab close-I have confused the “exit mode” arrow for the “minimize deck tab” arrow repeatedly. Could just be a me thing, but it seems an easy enough mistake with the layout.

Pointless fight generation-Lots of fight encounters are being generated without anything behind them. There are still rewards for fighting them, but it feels weird to basically be farming.

Go fast incentive-the ability to visit all nodes at leisure, without any incentive to do otherwise other than a time badge (which I feel is somewhat out of place in a turn-based strategy game), creates a solved part of the strategy. There’s no strategic reason to not visit all of the nodes, despite being optional. I feel like this is something that could be made to be more involved, either by limiting movement or providing in-run rewards for reaching a benchmark in a certain amount of time or with less than a certain number of nodes visited (I personally prefer this). Related, a toggleable in game timer would be nice for monitoring speed badge.

High risk/high reward-A staple of the roguelike genre, I think this would be a fun aspect to add. I noticed there was one node where I could take a little bit of nexus damage and one with negative items on discount cards, but I only saw then once in the four runs and they weren’t very high impact when they did show. Whether it’s rewards for cutting high item cards or champions, a temporary or permanent detrimental power, or something else, I really think this could add to both the tension, mastery, and power fantasy of the mode.

Gangplank difficulty spike-While having a brutal final boss is definitely fun and memorable, it did feel a bit jarring after how easy the immediately previous fights were.

Overall difficulty-I would love a higher difficulty mode or modifiers. Even with the self-imposed challenge of S rank skill badge (no deaths or heal nodes), I think more difficult fights would be fun, especially early. Starting them off with zero mana is a little too much, imo, and I would prefer more challenge.

In deck healing-I feel like this leads to boring gameplay patterns. If you’ve got in-deck healing, you’re incentivized to not finish matches, but rather just draw, remove threat, go, until you heal back up. This is especially bad with a level 2 Zoe, where the optimal strategy is to just roll invokes until you hit a golden sister. This is somewhat mitigated by way stronger out of game healing compared to 1.0, but that contests with both improving deck quality and S skill badge.

Noxus chip damage-When I had Swain as the first boss, a lot of my encounters had lots of unavoidable damage from just stuff like playing units or striking. This made it impossible to leave a lot of encounters without having less health than I went in with, which felt unfair, especially when going for S skill. I’ll note that I have no issue having this as part of boss fights, like GP and Swain’s actual fight, since it makes them more distinct and gives inevitability.

Lurden’s Echo (?)-Whatever the item with a 50% chance to create a 0 cost copy in hand is. The ability to chain this, since the copy still has the item, feels both way overpowered and too RNG heavy. I get that RNG is a heavy part of roguelikes and deck based games. However, for the former, I feel like that should just affect the build and challenges, not the result of your actions to overcome the challenges. For the former, it feels like rather than trying mitigate and plan around probabilities, you just roll the dice and sometimes get super lucky with 3 wins in a row. I think reworking this to just always make a 0 cost copy in hand *without the item* would be an improvement.

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Now onto the things I think should be kept and/or expanded!

Low cost starter decks-All of the starter decks are very low to the ground, which is really important for this. I like that and think it should be kept for almost all starter decks in the future. Something with heavy low to the ground control having powerful finishers would be fine, but a curve out to 6 or 7 deck isn’t going to feel great.

Themed Part 1 Fights-I really liked that a lot of the encounters you faced in the first half of the map were based on the first boss. Made runs feel distinctive and increased anticipation of the boss.

Consistently strong deck potential-The approach of going for a lot more low impact decision points rather than a few high impact decision points really felt like it improved the consistency of run potential. In 1.0, it felt like sometimes your run was just over by Thresh on high difficulty if you couldn’t get a strong second power and champion. This iteration feels like has really reduced that.

Less all-in champ builds-With the new champ item system and overall way more offers of card items, just making a 5/5 Zoe isn’t a consistent strategy anymore (although even without doing that she’s still kind of nutty). I think this makes each round less polarizing around whether you drew your all-in unit and if it got removed.

Strong out of match healing-I somewhat mentioned this above, but I really do like the stronger out of match healing, and that you can save it. It makes it so one bad fight doesn’t just take you out of the run completely, like a certain landmark based deck could in 1.0.

Ability to cut cards-This really helps with letting you shape your deck and make it more consistent. This might be controversial here, but I really don’t feel like a whole more is needed, but maybe a wider selection of what cards to cut.

Emphasis on items over powers-This ties into the consistent strength, but I feel like the items have a way bigger impact than powers in this version, which makes runs way less polarizing.

Less build sculpting-Without guaranteed first powers and lots of rerolls, you’re forced to adapt a lot more and work with what you’re provided. This is also tied into consistency in that there’s a lot more build decision points, so you don’t need to just maximize all of them. This also means that if difficulty is increased, players won’t be confined to meta builds for success and will get to meaningfully experience more variety.

Limited, but non-zero, path intel-I really liked the amount of vision that we’re given over future nodes. It allows for some rough planning, but it isn’t so much that you spend a lot of time on it.

Gangplank fight difficulty-I really appreciated the absolute explosiveness (pun fully intended) and difficulty of this match. It felt that it could threaten even very powerful decks while not being unfair.

Yordle Grifter-I just really liked this fight, on multiple difficulty variations. It’s really unique and forces you to think about the game in a new way, even in the context of this mode. It’s almost like trying to play through stax. It also winds up having somewhat self-scaling difficulty with using your own items against you.

Everything else-There’s no way that I’ve managed to think of everything that appealed to me about this mode. There’s just so much going on and so much of it is just awesome. Big thanks to the team, you all did awesome work here.

External link →
over 2 years ago - /u/RiotRaptorr - Direct link

Thank you so much for this feedback! Glad you're enjoying the mode, and we appreciate getting feedback posts like this laying out what works and what doesn't for you. We're eager to incorporate y'alls feedback and continue to improve the experience.