6 Game-Changing Battlecry Cards that Pair with Brann Bronzebeard

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My annual post-BlizzCon thoughts will come a little later this week.

For now, Brann Bronzebeard joins the latest set of legendaries that come with Hearthstone’s League of Explorers adventure. While I have high hopes for the card, I’m not sure if he slots into any pre-existing deck types.

But who cares? He’s a fun card that can amplify existing cards with Battlecry! Which ones? Here’s my personal list:

Dr. Boom

Huge no brainer. What’s better than two Bomb Bots? Four Bomb Bots! You’re guaranteed a minimum of four damage that could explode on different targets. More bombs leads to more damage. I can hear that resigned sigh from my opponent now…

Iron Juggernaut

All of a sudden, Iron Juggernaut turns from a giant recyclable heap of scrap into a curiously playable card. Originally adding a 10 damage bomb, now it places your opponent on the clock with a potential 20 damage just ticking away within their deck. Those bombs are one way to get around Ice Blocks!

Quartermaster

Initially, your Silver Hand Recruits would simply get +2/+2 and turn from Silver Hand Recruits into Gold Hand Recruits. But now they’re getting an additional +2/+2 on top of that. Does that mean they become Platinum Hand Recruits? Nothing like a board full of 5/5s that give your opponent pause and just out of Flamestrike reach.

Dragon Consort

If I’m reading it right, your next dragon becomes much more affordable. In fact, cards like Nefarian or Alexstrasza cost 5 mana instead of 9 giving you more card playing options to go with it. Protect a dragon with a Sludge Belcher on turn 10. Or, turn one of those beasts into a formidable minion that your opponent needs to deal with by playing a Defender of Argus.

Loatheb

If you really want insurance, Loatheb’s a great follow up since your opponent’s spells should now cost 10 mana more. It locks them out of every spell. Free turn where they can’t respond or affect your board with spells? Yeah, I’ll take that!

Goblin Blastmage

This is one of my favourite pairings. It turns into Avenging Wrath on a stick. Instead of 4 damage, 8 damage goes flying out in any direction towards your opponent or their board.

There’s a few more excellent combinations (like Shieldmaiden and Antique Healbot), but the ones above are my personal picks. It does have a downside though. Make sure you don’t place Brann with cards like Flame Imp (ouch!), Injured Blademaster (oof!), or Doomguard (yikes!)

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Will You be Capping Valor Again?

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We all saw the news bombshell yesterday.

Valor is back with a vengeance. Points are only obtainable in Mythic dungeons or in the raid finder difficulty. We can’t double dip and snag them from normal mode bosses are higher. I’m waiting for reforging to come back in a future patch.

Couldn’t believe the announcement.

On this week’s episode of The Edge, the crew and I discussed merits of nerfs to Hellfire and when they’d be needed. I made an off-hand remark that item upgrades should be brought back because it was a much better way of nerfing content compared to flat percentage nerfs to abilities, attacks, or health. It gave players a sense of progression even though they weren’t visibly progressing. You might’ve gotten stonewalled on Gorefiend on week 1, but the raid collectively received a 5% buff due to item upgrades heading into week 2, for example.

So what’s the difference between valor points in Warlords and valor points in Mists?

In Mists, they compensated for “bad luck” whereby you could purchase items in case you weren’t getting drops from raids. With Warlords, you have Apexis crystals that already fulfill role. Furthermore, the bonus roll system and the personal loot system help tip and equalize the “bad luck” factor in your favor (At least, in theory, because I’m still missing that Intuition’s Gift trinket from Kilrogg).

I don’t know if these changes are going to be enough of a subscription reactivator on their own.

Between this and the enabling of mythic cross-realm raiding, the pool of available raiders for mythic should go up due to the reduced restrictions and to players who might now be equipped for it.

And mythic dungeons? If you weren’t running these before, are you going to run them now? The shortest path to valor points for a solo player without the backing of a reliable group is going to be in the raid finder. You can try to get lucky with a mythic dungeon group but you can work your way through the forgiving trials of raid finder to cap out. We don’t know what the valor cap is or how many points each of the activities offer.

Not expecting to see Valor stick around with Legion, though.

I’m beginning to wonder if the perceived boredom in Warlords about the lack of activities to partake in is actually a lack of meaningful (or forced) activities. Players were running ragged throughout Siege because every week was a constant re-clear of the same content just to upgrade one or two items every week. We were sick of it then but we had to do it in order to buff our characters in order to reach and defeat a boss that actually mattered.

Seriously.

A typical raid week was 3 hours of farming for valor on bosses, 4 hours to clear the 11 mythic bosses to get to Blackfuse, and then 2 hours of meaningful progression on Blackfuse which involved learning how to run away from fire beams and avoiding saw blades.

We have optional content in the game at our disposal but we think there’s nothing to do because we don’t want to do it.

I suppose the argument could be made where one could say “Players don’t have to run mythic dungeons or raid finder for valor”. That argument holds true for players largely well within entrenched in mythic raids though. For them, the barrier isn’t going to be the gear. It’s going to be the skill cap of their fellow players in the group. To the rest of the mortal heroic raiders though, the gear upgrades will lead to confirmed kills versus near-death wipes and is going to be sorely needed to give players a foot in the fabled mythic doorway.

I’m getting too old for this.

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Gorefiend: Warlords’ Guild Killer?

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I first caught wind of this when I was scrolling through the recruiting forums. With around 20 players, we’re finally poised to enter mythic Hellfire. Hellfire Assault was infinitely more engaging and dynamic compared to the normal and heroic counterparts. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to put that notch up there yet. We’re getting past the intermission phase but end up getting overrun. Our margin of error is razor thin. A little more DPS, and it’ll help us secure that kill.

Anyway, let’s get back to my original observation about Gorefiend. That dude is tough. On the forums, I’m seeing guilds that are 5/13 recruiting or players who are 5/13 looking for new guilds because their raid group folded. The game is no stranger to guild killers. Some of my personal favourites included Kael’thas, Mu’ru, and ol’ Yogg (0 light). To be fair, I don’t think for a second that Gorefiend even comes close to any of those bosses up there.

I’m not sure what it is. There’s something about this current generation of raiders that seem to want more instant gratification. The mere instant that a difficult problem shows itself, many are quick to abandon ship and look for a new guild instead of working through it. Compare that to players in classic Warcraft, Burning Crusade, or even Wrath though where players frequently stuck it out and when they did get those kills, it felt extremely gratifying. For me, no encounter post-Cataclysm has captured the same satisfying feeling of a boss kill akin to Kil’Jaeden, Archimonde (from Hyjal), or even Illidan. But maybe that’s because it often took weeks or months just to get there, learn it, and beat it.

With the availability of group finder, raid finder, and the other convenience tools, it’s simply too easy to look around for options. You don’t see those kinds of “grinders” anymore among the player population. Could be a by product of the player base getting older and not having the time to invest anymore, I’m not sure.

With the start of the new school year, I’ve had to re-think our schedule. Demographically speaking, it seems many players are concentrated on the east coast. I can’t ask people to stay up until 1 AM anymore. I made a snap call to restore our original raid times.

  • Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 6 – 9 PM Pacific

I’m keeping the days though. I do like the idea of getting all raids done in a quick burst through the middle of the week. With the Warcraft population down to 5.5 million, I have to appeal to as many players as possible (at least, from a scheduling perspective).

Right now, we’re looking for more ranged DPS and healers. Interested? Check us out!

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We are Legion

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My name is Legion: For we are many.

Couldn’t help but think back to that Mass Effect 2 quote. Where do I start here? A quick guild update is in order. Archimonde on normal is now cleared. On the heroic front, we bypassed Iskar and gunned straight to Socrethar and Xhul knocking both of them out this week and placing the guild at 8/13 heroic. Unfortunately, I lost a Resto Druid last week and our resident Mistweaver Monk has gone missing in action. Our auxiliary and off-spec healers have done an admirable job filling in the for them. It’s only going to get harder for them and I didn’t bring them on board to heal full time despite their insistence that they’re willing to do whatever’s needed. I brought them in to deal copious amounts of damage and we’ve invested the damage gear into their characters. Resto Druids continue to be the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for my guild, it seems.

Okay, let’s talk about Legion.

That was much more information than I expected from a non-BlizzCon presentation. I assume this means that Diablo 3 is going to headline BlizzCon this year.

The classes

Demon hunters. Straight up 2 specs: Damage and tank.

I’m mentally grimacing because it’s another tank class and another melee class. Is there any point to bring in rogues now (other than Smoke Bomb?). Yeah, too early to tell since there wasn’t much in the way of class information. From the few highlights and abilities, they certainly appear to be a fun and high-mobility class especially with their double jumps. Can’t imagine significant raid combat bonuses though other than being able to traverse slightly larger than normal void zones.

Conditions for raiding as a Demon Hunter

  • Player must make a generous donation to the guild bank
  • Player must find someone to replace their role (if they’re not melee)
  • Player’s Demon Hunter performance must exceed their previous role

If those conditions are met, their request to go Demon Hunter will be considered.

Speaking of classes, Icy Veins with their fantastic interview out this morning, confirmed that Survival Hunters will be switching to a melee class. There was speculation since their artifact shows them wielding a spear instead of a traditional bow or a gun.

Great.

More melee.

I’m glad that hunters get more of a diversity among their 3 specs. But the GM in me is visibly annoyed at this, because this means yet more melee. More players that’ll get struck by cleaves or other close range boss attacks and so forth. Conquest has traditionally been a melee heavy raid and we’re trying to move away from that so we get a little more wiggle room. This doesn’t help us much. Unless Survival Hunters are clearly superior or offer an irresistable utility that’s needed, I don’t plan on actively snagging any for the roster. Could change though.

But ugh, another healer or a ranged class would’ve been nice.

Artifacts

Hey look at that, no weapon drops for this expansion. Once we receive our class weapon, we get to grow with it as we adventure onward. Paladins get to utilize Ashbringer, Death Knights get Frostmourne, Hunters get a random bow and a spear, and what about us Priests?

We have no idea yet. Blast. There’s some speculation that it would be Benediction or Anathema, and I confess, I thought similarly. After further thought, I realized it wouldn’t make sense. Veteran Priests already have those. While they’re certainly iconic Priest weapons, I can’t fathom from a lore or gameplay sense that they’d be “rebooted” and awarded to us.

Gathering the shards of Benediction somewhere in Stormwind Cathedral? Why not use the one that’s just sitting in my void storage?

Now, I were a betting man (which I am), I’d put my gold on Fearbreaker. Anduin is going to pass his iconic mace to us, the “leader” of the Priest class order as his prince duties tie him up elsewhere.

Speaking of Anduin, anyone else amazed at how much he’s aged?

Or maybe they just conjure up a new staff from out of no where and apply some lore magic to it. Maybe it was one of Alonsus Faol’s old staves that was buried with him in his grave somewhere that we need to retrieve.

Class Orders

It’s being billed as similar to garrisons but on a much smaller scale. Instead of raising an army, we’re building a smaller strike team. They should’ve sold it as the class version of the Avengers or something. Actually, if they gave our followers here a talent tree like the Diablo 3 followers, I’d be greatly interested. I suspect it’s a much more developed version of the level 3 Barracks where we can activate select followers to escort and assist us around the world.

Going to be odd though to be the leader of the class order when there’s going to be other priests in the same area with the same title.

Good thing we’re not paladins and watching everyone around us with Judgment gear.

More stuff coming down the pipeline, to be sure. Can’t wait for beta!

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Archimonde 2.0

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I remember the first time my old guild breached the Mount Hyjal raid back in Burning Crusade. It was breathtaking to play that iconic mission finale of Warcraft 3 from an MMO perspective. Instead of being the base commander, I was in a position where I had to repel the attacks as a character. We faced hundreds of wipes during the period working on Archimonde. Every time, we started our initial position on that little rocky outcropping facing west where Archie was. We lost a ridiculous amount of time because players would sometimes forget to get their tears. I’m glad that tears aren’t a thing this time around.

We ran into an issue last week with Archimonde that had nothing to do with the encounter itself. Last week was the first time players could kill Gorefiend and complete the quest to jump the instance. I joined a pug earlier in the day just to get the quest completed so that when raid time rolled around, we could skip ahead and start on Iskar. That part worked and we secured our first Mannoroth kill that night. We made a fun pull on Archimonde since we only had but a few minutes left.

The problem occurred the next night. We were hyped to enter the instance and put in some serious work on him again but there was no portal to Archimonde. There was a portal to Mannoroth but nothing leading us there. A ticket was opened to Blizzard’s support teams but no resolution was made until the next day (which meant spending Wednesday night on heroic content instead). Thankfully, whatever they did worked and we were able to pull Archimonde on Thursday night. Managed to see phase 3 a few times though (under 40%) so it was quite a productive night. If only we weren’t locked out earlier in the week, we might’ve even seen a kill. Our primary strategy involves stacking and slowly working our way around the room to control the fires.

Never thought I’d ever have to contend with Doomfires again.

Now the next question is to figure out how many players to send in those portals on that last phase there.

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