TLDR in last post, this forum seems to have a post size limit. Pre-face information: I purchased the $25.00 basic edition for Card Hunter, and my job is PC game content development. One month ago, someone introduced me to Card Hunter. Normally I instantly hate on a game that is browser based, free to play, and a collectable card game, but I decided to give Card Hunter an honest chance. Even though it has all these aspects I deemed to be negative, just playing the game for a few minutes showed me a lot of features that I have really been looking for in a game lately. To name them, I had been looking for a game that involves dungeon crawling, loot hunting, party mechanics, leveling up and character advancement, and none of the tedious and dull scouring a vast 'open world' looking for things to do. I wanted to just jump into dungeons, kill lots of stuff, and get lots of loot. Card Hunter turned out to be exactly what I had been craving! So after those first few minutes to test the waters (can't ever fault a free to play game for this feature), I signed up for the basic edition and began to seriously play. Oh, and being a turn based game was a huge plus. I adore turn based strategy games, in fact making them is my paying job! PVE Where to begin? In the beginning, when I didn't really understand every mechanic and what made a item good or bad, I just had a ton of fun learning and playing the game. I remember one of the biggest draws for me was opening up those special Treasure Hunt Adventures. Though I was disappointed that I couldn't go back to farm them for epics on every daily reset, heh. The more I played, the more I was amazed at the depth this game has to offer. When you start collecting enough loot, you can really see builds take shape. In fact, there is so much variety, I'm infinitely thankful that the party store and retrieve feature exists. I certainly put that to good use! Fire mage is an obvious, and personal favorite PVE build. Plenty of fire orientated items like flame glob, ember burst, and so on. Having the arcane slot with something like focused pyromancy really ties the build together too. Frost mage is another possibility, even without the arcane slots to buff this. Lightning mages are great, plenty of items packed with lightning cards. Control mages are hilarious. Funny to throw path of knives on an enemy, and then winds of war them into a fire wall square.
And that's just a few mage examples. Never mind the many different warriors and priest builds you can create, once you collected enough loot. This area of the game is absolutely fantastic, and creates immense replay value. Not only to hunt for items to create these builds, but taking these builds into scenarios you've played before and seeing how they fair. The first time I played against geomancers in the campaign, it was a nightmare of trying to run characters through fire, acid, and cave in tiles. When I came back with three level 1 mages armed with http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Items/Balsa_Boltstaff and http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Items/Staff_of_the_Misanthrope It's amazing to see how easy those scenarios become. Unfortunately, this replay value is seriously hampered by another aspect of the content, which I will cover later. While I did struggle quite a bit in the beginning, I stuck with the game long enough to understand that for every annoyance in this game, there is a good solution. Unfortunately, that solution usually hinges on having awesome gear with the associated cards. Not necessarily a problem when you are a club member (doubling those epics is HUGE!) but this does take a good time investment. Like any free to play game though, you can always just crack open the wallet and buy pizza to get the epic and magnificent chests from the Chest and Barrel shop. I never bought extra pizza past what I got automatically for playing and from the $25.00 starter edition, but I spent at least a few of my pizza on these chests. The first rare I got from a magnificent chest was a St. Ulrich's Bones... little did I know back then as a newbie how long it would actually be before I got my first yellow power token though! But it was something nice to look forward to. In fact this happened quite a bit while I was playing. I'd often get loot requiring power tokens before I even had any power tokens on my characters. While this was mildly annoying at times, it was a great thing to look forward to. As opposed to always getting loot far under my level and thus totally useless. Though I will say, and this is something I didn't learn until many days of serious playing, the best loot in this game is actually the low level loot. What does that mean exactly? The content is almost totally directed towards having low level gear. This is probably what bothers me the most about the single player campaign. The more awesome loot I got, the more it makes me sad that I can't really use it. The lowest scenario you can re-play and bring a 2 gold power token weapon into is a level 14 scenario. So I've got a Dragonslayer Sword, a Masters BattleAxe, and multiple bejeweled shortswords? Too bad, you can only bring 1 on your warrior. The remaining 6 blue power tokens, you have to split between item slots that require 10 power tokens to utilize. The end result? No and low power weapons and armor become vastly superior to high level and high power token requirement gear. The blazing shortsword is probably the best epic weapon I have simply because it doesn't eat power tokens, leaving these precious few power tokens available for other items in other slots. This is not helped by the absence of high level content in the single player. Only three level 17 scenarios exist where you can really bring your A team is all their best loot that you've found. The rest of the game requires a constant degrading and downgrading of your gear, including the challenge scenarios that force you to even lower levels. Now that Blazing Shortsword and St. Portia's Maul is even more valuable simply because there is more content that exists where you can use these items. Not having enough high level content really hurts the desire to acquire the best loot in this game. What good is a two gold token legendary if there is only a very few scenarios where I can use it, compared to the Blazing Shortsword which can be used in 100% of the content. Because of this problem, I rarely re-play the high level content anymore. It's not fun to get loot I can't use, but getting low level epics and legendaries really opens up new potentials and builds a lot more than getting something like a Masters BattleAxe does. If I didn't have the job already, I would try to get in touch with your development team to help create content. This problem is solved by simply having more high level content to play. Not just 3 level 17 scenarios, but a dozen, and maybe even some 18s available too. More endgame content that uses the endgame loot. Endgame content such as the challenges that reduce your level, or force you to take black cards(BTW it's generally better to just leave a slot empty than take many black card items, with the exception of your weapons of course) is just not content where you can bring your best characters in their best loot. There's so much more going on in the campaign and more to talk about, but that's enough for now, heh. Also, I enjoyed the little banter between Gary, Karen, and Melvin while playing the campaign. It makes me sad that I can't reset all their dialogue, so at least I can have the option to experience everything they said like they did the first time I played through the entire campaign mode. PVP I don't want to dive too much into PVP. All I'll say is sometimes you get the right cards, sometimes you don't, sometimes you get the good rolls, sometimes you miss three 2+ parries in a row, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. I only PVP to get the daily chest bonuses, I don't take it seriously, and it's not the kind of community I look to be involved with. Suffice to say, if there was an option to only allow GM opponents, such as the Gary, Amy, and Mom bots, I would only play this way. Please make this an option someday! TLDR: In closing, I just wanted to say this has been a fantastic game to play. I'm happy to support this game and it's developers, and I highly encourage anyone reading this to do the same. Once there is new content available, I greatly look forward to renewing my club membership. I'd say got my money's worth many dozens of times over, and I look forward to new content and expanding leveling in the months and perhaps even years ahead. It has some faults, but in my eyes these are easily fixed by adding more content, which I hope to see in the future. (Why else is there that big huge map of empty space in the campaign mode!?) The unofficial wiki has leveling information that covers all the way to level 50, and includes two power token levels that do not exist in the game as it stands now. http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Power_Tokens Here's a screenshot of my legendary haul (way too many epics and rares to even begin to try to display). Most of them I never use, but some of them I really adore. http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Items/Forrtescue's_Feathered_Cap is amazing for multiplayer (useless in single player PVE) The double http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Items/St._Portia's_Maul and http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Items/Staff_of_Embers are nifty PVE items And a hilarious moment from my single player experience. I pretty much run tri-human for all single player content I do now, because leadership is just so damn important to have when you don't get the right card draws. I mean come on, in a situation like this, who needs to move? lol Lastly, if anyone is interested in the game I work on, it's called Panzer Corps. It's available through our online shop for PC and iOS, and coming soon to Steam. http://slitherine.com/series/panzercorps_ipad http://slitherine.com/games/panzercorps_ipad http://slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=121&t=41972
Great points, and very well written. I play SP, and this is exactly why I farm for tokenless and minor token items. When BM puts out more L-17+ content I'll be more interested in the gold token items.
