Paladins: Completing the Dragon's Call Rewards

I only recently started playing Paladins after the release of the 1.4 patch update, but along with that update came an event called Dragon's Call. It's pretty great. You can read the full information about it here, but to sum it up, it's a capture the flag type of event where you capture a ball (or "the key") from the center of the arena and run it / throw it into your enemies goal. The first team to 4 goals (or the most goals in 15 minutes . . . or the first team to touch the ball if you're tied) wins!

Gotta get them goals, kids!

Along with this event comes a reward track where for every goal your team scores (win or lose) you gain a point along the reward track, so you're winning cool stuff all along the way.

Gotta get that loot, kids!

As you can see from all the check marks and blue boxes above the rewards in the above picture, this morning was my morning to finish this event up and get all my dragon's call loot! Well . . . I say all the loot, BUT WAIT . . . THERE'S MORE!  Well, I should say there's more if you'd like to lay down 1,200 crystals (around 25 bucks) to buy the entire dragon's call bundle. I have to admit that this "Raeve" "Maeve" skin is super tempting. I'm really loving the Deadmau5 vibes they're dropping here with this skin.

Gotta get that cool skin, kids! 

 To make their bundle extra sexy, you get double goal points on your reward track if you buy it . . . and even if you don't play the event, when the event is over, they're going to give you all those reward track items for free anyway.

So, it's not all cash grab. It's actually a fun event regardless if you get the rare skins or not, and it was a fun way for me to finish up my quests for the day in Paladins.  Here's a video from one of my winning Dragon's Call matches where I was playing Grohk.

Woot best in class!

Rumor has it that the event will end when the 1.6 patch goes live in what is anticipated to be October, so you still have some time to play. Also, you'll notice a few weird bugs when you play the event, like these:

• If you score two goals and then the opposing team scores one goal, it says, "your team has taken the lead" even though you already have th elead.
• You have to play one extra game to collect your rewards even though you've made your goal.
• The reward screen will be blank if you win that next match, but it will show your reward if you lose your next match.
• FX from how you were killed (like fire) will still be displayed on your character when you are revived.
• Sometimes you pass right through the ball.
• etc.

It's not "perfect," but it's nothing super game breaking and still a lot of fun. I'm sure it's hard to ship an event like this bug free (believe you me, it's next to impossible from my previous CM experience with how updates go).

Happy Dueling!

Overwatch vs. Paladins Updates

Both Paladins and Overwatch had updates over the past week, so let's take a moment to give you TFN's condensed and quick thoughts!

Paladins
You can read the full update notes list here, but TLDR:

• Adding more lootbox stuff.
• Made it so you can control Grohk better during his ult (it was crazy before -- but this is also a nerf since he could move incredibly fast.)
• Console players can report bad behavior now (didn't know they couldn't)
• Queuing and re-queuing has been improved (yep, I'm really digging this change)
• Other hero bug fixes.
• There's stuff they know are issues, but . . . THEY'RE WORKIN' ON IT! GET USED TO IT KID! .

There's a new robot Grover skin, which makes no sense, but that's cool

Overwatch
You can read the full update notes list here, but TLDR:

• NEW MAP -- Busan -- and you can check it out in the Arcade currently!
• Hero gallery filters added.
• See your team mates through walls more easily.
• Weapons with spread now will have their damage calculated more correctly.
• Bridgette will now also get knocked down if she charges charging at a Rein or a Doom during their charge powers.
• Rein's shatter covers the payload better and other areas as well. (Can't tell you how upset I've been when I've shattered and the stupid Bastion player on the payload didn't get knocked down by my ultimate -- this is a good change.)
• . . . and other hero balance changes. (I ain't listing them out.)
• GM comp players can group up with lesser folks
• Rialto's payload goes a bit faster. (woot for the attacking team!)
• (And although not mentioned on the notes, Demon Hunter Sombra skin for Blizzcon!!)

There's more there, but I figure if you really want to give it a read, you already have.

Busan Screenshot courtesy of IGN.

~~

It's interesting to compare and contrast the notes. It's not surprising that Paladins is going to patch in more lootbox stuff and be straightforward about it -- that's how they make their money. Overwatch is also in a different spot for updates as they monetize differently and are in a different stage of development for the game. (That said, I really hope the rumor is true that the Demon Hunter skin coincides with a Diablo 4 announcement??)

Busan is a collection of relatively cool maps. They are a bit hard to defend from my past couple of days playing there, but I'm sure as time goes on, I'll have more insights. Here's a quick video of four highlights from playing last night.  Nothing amazing here, but it does give you a glimpse at where some of the action happens on these maps.

I really hope Paladins keeps growing and adding more stuff. I'm pretty close to throwing down the $40 for a full character unlock. Of course, I'll let you know when that happens. In the meantime, really happy that queuing up now has less roadblocks. That's a plus.

As for last night's Overwatch session at Busan . . . I had a lot more fun playing Mei than I did Reinhardt, but I still played him when needed. Maybe I'm not quite as burnt out as I thought I was in that previous post of mine. Time will tell, but I'm still here playing!

Happy Dueling

An Hour with Grohk

I continue to log on to Paladins daily to complete my quests and claim my log in bonus! This weekend the healer Grohk was back in rotation, so I gave him some play time. Not only did I give him some play time, but I also went to the training range and gave several of the healers a shot to see how they played versus him.  There's a pretty great spot in the Paladins' training range where they have a target continually getting hit by another NPC so you can test out your healing powers. The one I grokked the best was Grohk. (see what I did there?)

I even have a skin for him! He's typically blue colored.

My one complaint about this dude is how "dumb" they made him sound with his voice over. I wish they would have went more, I don't know, "mean"orc with him?  Either way, his lighting staff is about the most amazing thing ever and especially after getting his Spirit's Domain ability.

I'm not sure why I'd want to use anything BUT Spirit's Domain TBH

So let it be known . . . I hearby choose Grohk as my healer of choice in Paladins! I now have my DPS choice (Drogos), my tank choice (Terminus), and now my healer choice. All I need now is to choose a flanker, and I'll at least have four characters I can concentrate on for learning. But, as per usual, "favorite characters" are sure to change over time for me. ;)

I went ahead and quickly recorded some Team Deathmatch play with Grohk today, which was a little frantic. The thing about Team Deathmatch is that you typically run all over the map "hunting" for the other team. Our team was together, but spread out a lot and that makes healing as Grohk a little interesting, but we won the fight and my healing was double what the other team's healer put out.  I'll take that as a success.

Happy Dueling!

An Hour with Terminus

I'm still playing a bit of Paladins here and there -- I've been trying to remember to at least log on, collect my daily reward, and play through the quests.

Gotta get that extra gold and xp!

The other day I faced off against a team with a really good tank character that just controlled the game. I immediately knew this was going to be the next character I needed to give a shot.  I have to say he's my favorite tank character in Paladins so far.

. . . And since all I have to refer back to for comparisons is Overwatch (never played Team Fortress 2), he's like playing:

• Reinhardt (for the "Massacre Axe" swing -- SWOOSH)
• DVA (for the "Reanimate" ultimate -- he can resurrect with an exposion)
• Zarya (for the "Power Siphon" shield that powers you up and you absorb damage)
• Hammond (for the "Shatterfall" ground slam).

. . . all in one character!

Looking forward to unlocking those other abilities!

Outside of this . . . he just looks cool and has one of those overly tragic backstories: he's a soulless golem guy full of evil crystals whose only purpose is to be a war machine. Awwww!

 He's begging to be nerfed.

I grabbed footage of a win from last night to kind of show you how he plays. Obviously, I don't know these maps incredibly well, and I've only played him about the number of times as the number of fingers on one hand, but check me out!

BTW, if you're interested in trying out the game, please feel free to use my referral link so we can get both get the good stuff: http://www.paladins.com/play-for-free?ref=stingite

Happy Dueling!

An Hour with Dragoz

Last night, four of the Potato League members were actually in a group together in Paladins. Gotta give it up to Eboni, Beau, and Lemonz for joining me last night. Thank you, team!

There were some general lessons learned from the exercize of playing a different game -- there are some matchmaking "issues" with this game, there are some definite differences with its mechanics (like not being able to switch heroes mid-combat), we had an AFK thrower, etc. . . . but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I was able to play Dragoz a few times and get a better feel for the character.

Fight or Flight
My first thought was that this character seemed to be a Pharah clone, but what I found out after being easily shot out of the sky a few times was that . . . no . . . this is not a Pharah clone. It's basically putting giant wings on Reinhardt and sending him into the air -- you're going to get shot down, and just from practicing in the shooting gallery, it's easy to see that the hit-boxes on these characters are already exaggerated. The other difference with the flight is that you can't really hover high up like you can with Pharah. The gravity pulls you down with greater force so pulsing flight to regenerate fuel isn't really something you can do. You *will* run out of juice.

This seems to make his flight powers very situational . . . easier to get to high ground, easier to spring up in the air and get behind someone, easier to gain vantage on a situation -- use it sparingly, the other team will shoot you down.

(It was pretty handy for jumping up and grabbing the ball out of the air for the capture the flag matches.)

Mishaps with Missiles
Dragoz has an interesting ability called "Salvo" that allows him to load several missiles in his cannon and fire them in a cone in front of him with auto-aim precision. It's possibly his most powerful attack . . . but you have to load them . . . which takes time. I'm used to being able to spam an attack when its cool-down is done. It seems you can't do that with Dragoz's missiles. You have to stop firing completely, pause, press the missile button, then attack. It's not horrible, but it is "different." And different takes time to get used to.

Need to level him up to get those WYRM Jets and Reign of Terror abilities. Fun!

Ultimate Charging or Charging Ultimate
The ultimate ability is basically a charge forward that autokills a person upon impact. A very valuable lesson from last night was, you aren't invincible while it does the power up animation. I was looking down on a very skilled Viktor player last night and ult'ed on him . . . he just shot me down. So the pro-tip here is that you need to be hidden when you activate this ult. It takes about 2 seconds to fully charge up, which is 2 seconds where you're very vulnerable and unable to do anything else, but when you unleash it . . . somebody is going to die!

A Dash of Splash
Dragoz can spit out a big ball of Magma that does a pretty good bit of splash damage. It is slow moving, however, so it can be easily avoided if you're paying attention. Saving it for up-close encounters may be your best bet . . . but I don't think I'm fully understanding all of its power yet. I think that, while in my time at the practice range, eventually Fire Spit gained a larger AOE. And that's part of the difference with this game. It's more MOBA-like in that you level your powers. Lemonz was mentioning that it felt more like Smite than he had anticipated. I can see that since it's the same company that makes that game.

So there you have it . . . my big beautiful scaley boy is a flying pinata full of missiles.  I'll have to let you know if I can discover more out about him in the future.

Also something to explore in the future are loadouts beyond "default."

Happy Dueling!

An Hour of Paladins

A few days ago I logged on to Steam and downloaded a new game to play called Paladins. To be honest, until I read their wiki page this morning, I thought this was an old game and could have sworn I watched someone play it years ago, which is kind of freaking me out. I don't know why I thought that?

Anyway, the gist of it is that it's Overwatch / Team Fortress 2 with a different skin and a different monetization system. Blizzard asks you for money up front and quite frequently holds "free weekends" so that players can give it a shot.  Vice Versa, Hi-Rez gives you five free heroes to play always and asks for money to unlock them all -- alternatively you can micro-transaction purchase heroes one-by-one and apparently for in-game currency as well? I did that with this guy . . .

Yup . . . that looks like something I'd love to play.

When you go to purchase, they put all the options in front of you.

Basically 200 gems is five bucks -- with 39 heroes you can see it clearly makes sense to purchase the pack unless they give you enough cash throughout gameplay to unlock all the heroes, which I'm unsure of yet. What I did see was that if you log in daily, they have a reward system available to you.

Aesthetically I can't help but feel like I'm playing Overwatch with Skylander toys in a way. You remember Skylanders don't you?  My kids had us buy tons of those and hardly played with them at all.  What I didn't know is that they have a cartoon now?

I may actually have to watch that! . . . I digress.

Anyway, I'm a total of 10 games in (with one scaley dragonborn character unlocked), so I can't give much of a fair review yet, and that's not typically what I do anyway here on the Friendly Necromancer. What I do is play games, tell you about it, and get your thoughts. Why? Why not?!  Amirite? So if you have experience beyond an hour in the game, let me know.

Here's how my hour went. I played a tank character named Ruckus to start. He's a little goblin dude that pilots a suit of armor.  

Notice that player in the back with Drogos? That's when I was like . . . mine!

I think the first few matches might have been us paired against bots because there's no way regular people are just going to run to point like that.  After a few matches with Ruckus, the game shifted to a 5v5 deathmatch.  I was still playing Ruckus, but then I came into a match where a dude auto-locked Ruckus and I had to go with a second option, which was Viktor (a straight DPS character who plays a bit like soldier 76).

(Sorry for the poor quality on the video btw . . . I'm a bit time crunched or I'd record it again)

I faced my first defeat after 10 matches or so when my group didn't have a support character playing with us and the other team did -- it makes a big difference. 

So there you have it . . . I'm going to be playing a bit of Drogos in this game since my motto with lizardfolk-esque characters in any game is basically "if it has scales, it's MY BABY!" I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Happy Dueling!